This is an interesting essay by Will Lloyd on the writer and early “transgender pioneer” Jan Morris.
It’s interesting to see how Morris went from a stereotypical “man” to an equally stereotypical “woman.”
It also points out that back in the 1970s, women who disagreed with gender self-identification were free to do so openly (look at those Rebecca West and Nora Ephron quotes):
The issue of BBC neutrality reaches Australia’s equivalent, the ABC. The ABC’s own program Media Watch discusses the issue with great clarity. I discovered Australia has its own ‘Stonewall champions’ program, or something very similar… and that ABC is very much in bed with it.
The commentary is generally quite good, pointing out that the organisation offers ‘diversity points’ or whatever for editorial choices made in favour of trans people; unfortunately it also contains a stumble by calling an organisation critical of this arrangement ‘anti-trans’; I saw no such animosity when I went looking.
A gyne/ob writes a letter in response to a Russ Douthat column, telling us that People denied an abortion suffer financially and health wise. I’m sure if I asked for an abortion I’d be denied, even here in Minnesota. But I’m not one of the generic people she’s referring to.
Holms beat me to the Media Watch item which was excellent and calmly presented.
Here is another very good panel discussion from our other National broadcaster, SBS, featuring some excellent contributions, including Sall Grover of Giggle (@sallwrites).
While the only women to be Prime Minister of the UK have been conservatives, the last two ascended to impossible situations, and were shot down rather quickly. I can’t help but think that members would be circling the wagons around Boris Johnson after similar bad judgment calls early in his term, or any other man. Truss is resigning before she even figured our her job.
I’m not defending Truss, I’m just observing that the Tories are not necessarily the Land of Opportunity for women in England disaffected by the Labour enthralldom into gender-slavery. May didn’t get much of a chance to do what Boris ended up pooching, a decent post-Brexit accord with Europe.
It’s interesting that so many trans activists seem to believe that women couldn’t possibly be interested in defending their own rights and interests when they attempt to retain or regain single sex services, facilities, and positions for exclusively female use. This supposed concern is just a smokescreen to disguise hatred of trans folk. Women who point out the harms to women and girls arising from implementing policies that allow trans identified males into spaces previously reserved for women and girls only, don’t really care about women or girls at all, they just want to attack trans people. So, according to this view, women must have no stake at all in things that would benefit them. As women. What an odd thing to say. This is particularly strange when such accusations of dishonesty and insincerity come from trans activists who are not themselves trans. Maybe this is a pre-emptive deflection designed to divert attention from their blatant misogyny, which is thinly veiled by an opportunistic concern for trans “rights.” What better way to get away with being abusive (and be rewarded for it!), all in the name of “the most marginalized and oppressed group ever.” Ever accusation is a confession, right?
“The NHS has published its new service specifications for kids with gender dysphoria. They state its primary purpose is psychosocial/psychological interventions. This is huge. Mermaids/Maugham/Webberley are furious. I can’t understand why more people aren’t talking about it.”
Sandra Boynton, in August, published a 45th anniversary edition of her first book, Hippos Go Berserk. She posted on Facebook today that she mostly updated the art work without changes, but she did add a few things. She showed one changed image from the book, a scene including a hippo with a scarf, and she noted that the Gryffindor scarf is new.
The first comment was complaining about the scarf, couldn’t she have called it something else, because the Harry Potter author has become so hateful.
I don’t know if Boynton has waded into the gender ideology issue, but I was thinking of getting a copy of the book anyway, and the Gryffindor scarf sold one today.
She’s working on a sequel, titled Hippos Remain Calm.
The brilliant Dr Em and someone I didn’t previously know called Bradders (on Twitter) were detained by police after the FILA conference in Cardiff after Bradders asked a man to leave a women’s toilet. The man complained to police that Bradders had threatened to punch him and that she’d been taking cocaine.
The police arrested Bradders and Dr Em went along with her to the police station. They tried to persuade Bradders to apologise (to whom and for what I don’t know) under the Restorative Justice scheme. They said they’d let her go if she did. Admirably, she refused on the grounds that she’d done nothing wrong. She told police that she had video of the encounter which proved her innocence.
They released her at 4am.
I’m not sure yet whether they’ve charged her with anything.
The punchline:
The complaint (by the man in the woman’s toilet) was recorded as being by a woman.
Update: I’ve spoken to Bradders. She wasn’t charged, thankfully. She’s trying to get the police to explain in writing why they arrested her and on the basis of what evidence.
Update on the Sandra Boynton situation. That picture has prompted over 900 comments, with many additional comments deleted. None of the other recent posts on her page have received nearly that many comments. Lots of people have expressed their “disappointment”, in varying degrees, that Boynton chose to mention that the scarf on one hippo is a Gryffindor scarf. In a reply to a comment, she wrote:
I steadfastly believe that every person should live their life the way they want to, and should be respected.
Which to me sounds perfectly consistent with:
Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security.
from Rowling.
I think Boynton was completely blindsided by the level of controversy. I doubt she’s looked at the issue at all, and she doesn’t indicate any interest in doing so. She just wanted to post a picture from her book, and it uses iconography from the extremely popular Harry Potter books. I’m pleased that she hasn’t thus far disavowed the use of the name “Gryffindor” to describe the scarf, even as myriad comments express glee that the colors match those of some other entity.
I was reading the memoir of retired FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood. This passage caught my attention:
Finally, ritualistic offenders sometimes act out using themselves as props or “co-stars”, if you will. Some years ago, Dr. Park Dietz, Prof. Ann Wobert Burgess of the University of Pennsylvania, and I researched and wrote the first textbook ever devoted to fatal autoeroticism. We found that such deaths were basically masochistic. That is, most of the 150 victims we studied were acting out masochistic fantasies at the times of their accidental deaths.
Yet masochism wasn’t the only feature we detected. A large percentage of the victims also were cross-dressed when they were discovered, a provocative finding that opened a new avenue of speculation. While I still believe the great majority of deaths due to dangerous autoeroticism are grounded in the victims’ masochistic fantasies, the males who cross-dress may not be fantasizing only masochistic plots. They may also be acting out sadistic fantasies using themselves as replacements for women who are unsatisfactory, unavailable, or unwilling. [p. 60]
[He then cites some specific examples, which I’ll spare the B&W readership.]
It should go without saying that I am not asserting that all, or even most cross-dressers are acting out their misogynistic fantasies. But some of them appear to be doing so. As we have so often noted on these pages, it’s clear that some trans-identified males are dangerous, which means that taken as a group, they’re all less than trustworthy.
Picture shared by Abortion Access Front (used to be Lady Parts Justice League):
Just a reminder… All gender identities get abortions! (And have since the dawn of time)
I beg to differ.
A reminder? No, a claim, and a false one at that.
All gender identities get abortions? No. Women get abortions. Women may or may not claim to have gender identities, these gender identities don’t’ get abortions, the women do. Men don’t get abortions. Men may also claim gender identities. The idea that the set of gender identities claimed by men (for example, “cis male”) is a subset of the set claimed by women strains credulity. So this fails in multiple ways.
Since the dawn of time? Not before the Earth existed. Not before humans existed. Not before language existed. Not before some people decided that how you feel inside was more important for classification than your actual sex. And that wasn’t until a small number of years ago. So, very far from “the dawn of time”.
Two years ago, at the age of twelve, she began delving into the rabbit hole of gender woo. I believe this was partly driven by her closest friend, a girl treated as a boy by his family and the school, and partly as a response to her being sexually assaulted two years earlier.
She had spiralled so low that she was making accusations of sexual assault against one of her mothers (not the birth one and later found to be lies), refused to go home, and ended up living with me and her grandmother for 6 months while we worked to reconcile her with her parents. We attended counselling with her where she said she was trans, didn’t think I would accept her for that, and I was given the gender fairy bread person. I gave the counsellor a reading list!
She returned home and not long after we moved a 2 hours drive away. She went from being a Harry Potter fan (devoured the books as an 8 year old) to hating JKR because of her anti trans views. She could not be dissuaded. She cut her hair short and wanted to be called Liam.
She stayed in contact with her grandmother but rarely spoke with me. I accepted it but was sure the phase would pass. I was happy to give her time and space to work it out.
Three weeks ago she stayed 4 nights during the school holidays. On the drive, she again raised the subject of pronouns, telling me there were hundreds of them, and that I should respect people’s pronouns. Driving at 120 km/hr isn’t the best time for a discussion, so just let it lie. She also told us she had decided to grow her hair long again. She was as talkative as she used to be, no longer the sullen teenager we had to face.
On the second day of the visit, she asked if I still had all the Harry Potter videos and if we could watch some. Strike me PINK! Something’s afoot here. We had a good visit, just like the old times and I was sad to take her home.
Last night she was on the phone with her grandmother and asked to speak to me. She was upset that she’d been dumped from a friendship circle at school, something that happens all too often with teen girls. I had always been the one she turned to for advice on these matters in the past. I made supportive noises and told her a joke.
Then, she told me of an old woman that she helped out when she was lost. She told me the old woman said she is pretty. I asked her how that made her feel “Good, really good”, she answered. And so did I.
“Never before have family relationships been seen as so interwoven with the search for personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need to confront and overcome psychological obstacles,” the historian Stephanie Coontz, the director of education and research for the Council on Contemporary Families, told me in an email. “For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”
We have all seen countless lists outlining the various features of pseudoscience such as Bob Park’s “The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”. Some of us have even written such lists ourselves. I thought it might be interesting to attempt something similar for Bogus Social Justice Movements (henceforth referred to as BSJMs). Examples of BSJMs include MRAs, incels, the dominant strand of trans rights activism, NAMBLA, the pro porn/pro “sex work” lobby etc*. Attempts to portray legitimate criticisms of Islamism as “Islamophobia” or portray legitimate criticisms of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “antisemitism” can be understood in the same terms**. As with pseudoscience, there is no non-arbitrary place to “draw a line”, such that everything on one side is 100% legitimate social justice activism and everything on the other side is 100% bogus social justice activism. Rather than a sharp definition we must make do with a set of criteria. Most BSJMs will probably meet most of these criteria to some degree, but none has to meet all of them 100%. So, without further ado, I give you
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Social Justice Movements
1. People vs. Ideas
• The goal of every legitimate social justice movement is to protect real live human beings from injustice and harm.
• BSJMs are usually more concerned with protecting ideas, behaviors, belief systems, ideologies, cultures, traditions, policies, or ways of life. Criticism of what people think, say, or do is re-interpreted as an attack on who they are.
2. Unstated Premises
• BSJMs make frequent appeals to non-specific “rights” that their opponents are accused of denying or violating. Even the most basic tenets of their cause are based on premises and definitions that are best left unspecified.
3. Dubious Connection to Harm
• Every legitimate social justice movement can provide endless examples of obvious, demonstrable injustice and harm.
• BSJMs make exaggerated claims of “harm”, as well as “oppression”, “hate”, “persecution”, “violence” etc. based on a Danish cartoon or the proper use of pronouns (!). The alleged “harm” only shows up at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations and stretching of word-meanings beyond the breaking point. Quite frequently the apocalyptic rhetoric boils down to the implicit threat that the alleged “victims” themselves will hurt themselves or others if they don’t get their way.
4. No Debate
• Every legitimate social justice movement is actively seeking to change hearts and minds through open debate. If anything, their opponents are the ones who are trying to shut down debate because their position is indefensible.
• BSJMs are more concerned with silencing dissent and forcing their views down people’s throats unexamined through intimidation and bullying. Anything other than blind, unconditional agreement in advance is spun as debating their “right to exist” (#2) etc.
5. Conflicts with Real Social Justice Movements
• No real social justice movement is attempting to make other oppressed or marginalized groups less safe from injustice or harm.
• What BSJMs call “oppression” usually boils down to other groups having rights on their own (the right to free speech, the right to leave the dominant religion, the right of lesbians to be uninterested in your “lady cock” etc.).
6. Appropriation/Forced Teaming
• BSJMs appropriate real social justice movements and claim monopoly on speaking in their name while being actively hostile to their goals (#5). Every right and protection gained by other marginalized groups is re-interpreted as belonging to the usurpers instead of the people for whom they were originally intended (and the people who did all the actual work fighting for them).
7. Institutional Capture
• Real social justice movement usually play with open cards.
• BSJMs are more inclined to work by stealth to capture institutions from the inside and change legislation with little or no meaningful debate or accountability (#4). One favorite strategy is sneaking weasel words into bills that were introduced to protect other groups (#6) and use them as a trojan horse for the BSJM’s own agenda.
* As I recently commented there was a time, not too long ago, when the same applied to smokers.
** This remains true even if we concede that bigotry and hate against Muslims and Jews is a real and very serious problem.
(Plagiarizing my Facebook page in reference to this article.) This is a very cool find in itself, and it provides evidence that Basque was being written before the Romans came to the area. But there are a couple of things about the article that bug me. First, the headline: this doesn’t shed any light on the “origins” of Basque (whatever that means); instead, it provides some evidence for what scholars of Basque already knew–that Basque was spoken in the region before the Romans came. The more interesting aspect is that this seems to show that Basque was written before the Romans came along. Before this discovery, the earliest direct evidence of Basque came from Roman transcriptions of Basque names (both place names and person names).
The other thing that bugs me is calling Basque “mysterious”. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about Basque. True, it’s a language isolate, meaning that it has no known linguistic relatives, but the most likely reason for that is that it’s the last remnant of the languages that were spoken in Europe before the Indo-Europeans moved in and established (or imposed) their languages on most of the continent. For whatever reason (probably because no one thought it was worth trying to conquer a bunch of sheep herders in the Pyrenees) Basque survived while the others died out. Not mysterious, just fortuitous.
Basque does have a lot of features that don’t exist in Indo-European languages, such as ergativity, but that’s not terribly uncommon in other world languages. There’s really no need to exoticize the language.
But anyway, read the article. It’s really cool. (And the one word they’ve deciphered so far is related to the modern word “zorionak”, which means roughly “congratulations” but is also used for “Happy Birthday”, “Happy New Year”, and so on.)
Civil servants are warned in an introduction to the glossary: “It is important to recognise these words and phrases, understand their context and educate those you hear using them about the reasons why their use can be deemed offensive or upsetting, as people may have unknowingly used a term without being familiar with its meaning.
“Whilst passing uses of these phrases might not be considered misconduct, the importance of challenging their use cannot be overstated.
“Doing so reduces hostility, intimidation and degradation within the workplace, and encourages all whom we work with such as colleagues and service users, to treat others with decency and respect.”
The glossary was shared from the official justice.gov.uk email address of the “HMPPS pride in prisons and probation LGBTI+ staff support network”, which has 5,764 members, under the watch of a diversity lead who is paid £37,166.
The movement is not about rights, it is about subjgation. Subjugation not only of women and LGB, but all of us who speak English, or want to discuss a serious topic.
Ministry officials declare that this not official policy and was not authorized to be released.
A Prison Service spokesman said: “This guidebook was published by a staff network, its content was not approved prior to being communicated and it is a network rather than a corporate HMPPS view.
“Following its publication, HMPPS is reviewing the rules around internal communications to staff from network groups.”
The prison population that identifies as transgender stood at 197 in England and Wales last year, a 21 per cent jump from 163 in 2019. These did not hold a gender recognition certificate, meaning their lived gender was not legally recognised, and the vast majority were men identifying as women.
This has sparked calls for women’s prisons to be open only to those born female to ensure safety, although the MoJ says trans prisoners are managed with a robust risk assessment.
I was reading a recent New York Times article about how gambling interests have infiltrated American college sports, now that sports betting is legal. It’s a fine article about an appalling situation, and I don’t wish to get into the weeds here about it, but there is one aspect I thought I’d mention.
The gambling interests have provided financial incentives to the schools to promote and publicize their particular gambling sites or apps. Much of the outside money that goes to colleges for major sports goes directly to the athletic department, for good reasons, and as required by NCAA “regulations”. These gambling financial incentives are mostly expected to go to athletic departments as well. But these gambling contracts were a clandestine maneuver, and many people involved in financial and athletic oversight are upset about them; some are calling for the funds to go somewhere other than the athletic departments.
College athletes are disproportionately from marginalized communities. Given that, one official suggested that the financial incentive money should go toward: promoting Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. Huh. This was likely an off-the-cuff response, but it strikes me as the wrong thing to do. I don’t have a high opinion of such programs, either for their results or their aims. But why not suggest that the money goes toward education, the core mission of the school? Is this college now, a bunch of sports teams and diversity programs, with education no higher than third place in the priority list?
As in men, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women, accounting for 89 percent of cases, according to the case series, published on Thursday in the journal Lancet. But among cisgender women and nonbinary individuals who were assigned female at birth, only 61 percent of cases could be connected to sexual contact.
Oh. So men caught the disease one way, and women another. Not a darn thing to do with gender. It would have been so much simpler to just say “men” and “women”, but no, the researchers and reporters needed to go through all these verbal contortions.
And note, there are “men”, but they don’t go through verbal contortions to leave out “nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth” or “transgender men”. They know what a “man” is, but not a “woman”.
Funny that it’s “As in men, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women” when surely it should be “As in men and nonbinary people, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women.”
Journalist E J Rosetta has had a change of mind (“peaked”, she calls it) after researching what was intended to be a critical piece on J. K. Rowling:
“3 months of dedicated research & I cannot find a single truly transphobic JK Rowling quote that stands up against the scrutiny of journalistic integrity.
The abuse JK has endured is beyond forgiveness. Every death threat, r*pe threat & torrent of abuse, she has born w/ grace. ”
Cringeworthy pablum in a Facebook post image/meme from a group called “Gender Inclusive Schools”:
What if parenting became less about telling our children who they should be and more about asking them again and again forever who they already are? Then, when they tell us, we would celebrate instead of concede. It’s not: I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don’t meet. It’s: my only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.
– GLENNON DOYLE
I can see the superficial point of not turning kids into personal projects and trying to force-fit them into molds. But the wording and implications of the actual text are troubling. It might not be so troubling if this kind of wording was not so often used to obscure important issues, but that’s what we have.
Once again, the confused use of “who you are” causes problems. I’m sure most of what they are talking about here are physical characteristics or aspects of character and mental state. “Who you are” is a particular individual, regardless of what you look like or how you act. “That’s not who I am” is more accurately “That’s not the way I wish to act” or “wish to be perceived” or “would like to be treated” or “prefer to look”. Yes, of course parents provide guidance on behavior and expectations; no, parents generally don’t wonder if their child is really a different person, perhaps a 13th century monk.
I don’t think it is at all appropriate to intend to celebrate everything children think or feel about themselves. Children sometimes feel pretty crappy about themselves; there is no reason to celebrate that. But even more positive things may be strongly at odds with the views of the parents, and I think advocating “celebration” is asking the parents to lie. I have great respect for people who can accept that other people, including their own children, might pursue something that the parents find awful, and the parents might support them in this endeavor, but I think demanding that the parents stop thinking this endeavor is awful, and even celebrate it, is too much. I see a lot that kind of sentiment in this meme. No, we parents don’t need to celebrate everything, nor even allow it.
It seems obvious to me that a hidden aspect of “who they are” in this meme has to do with gender identity and sexuality. As before, I don’t think parents are obliged to celebrate a child’s declaration, nor even to agree. I hope sensible parents can push back against gender identity declarations, and assert that people are not born in the wrong body, it isn’t possible to change sex, sex is a biological characteristic. I do hope that all parents, whether they agree or not with these declarations, can express love for their children.
The absurdity of that proposition should be self-evident (“Serial murderer is what he is, and I love him for that”), but I wonder how they would feel if their child came out as a gender critical feminist.
You really wonder if the person who wrote this made the slightest attempt to imagine how it would play out in real life, with real kids.
“Who you are is a drug user.”
“Who you are is a girl being groomed by the creepy dude next door.”
“Who you are is a kid who gets drunk at parties and drives too fast.”
“Who you are is a gun fetishist with a grudge.”
“The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.” Parent of the year, that one! Even “good kids” need guidance, and boundaries!
Even if this were only intended to apply in the narrow field of a kid’s sense of gender identity, I would think that if “who you are” includes being deeply unhappy with one’s body, it would be more compassionate to try to alleviate the root of the problem than to play along with a child’s delusion.
The 11th Circuit just released its decision reversing Judge Cannon’s order appointing a special master. That case is remanded with instructions to dismiss.
No doubt Trump will request review by the Supreme Court, but I don’t like his chances. The SCOTUS majority may consist largely of conservative hacks, but none of them seem to be willing to go to bat for Trump’s personal interests as opposed to those of the GOP generally.
So I was reading this article on how the Effective Altruism movement is grappling with the exposure of Bankman-Fried as a crook, and came across this odd but familiar reference:
“E.A. leadership” is a nebulous term, but there is a small annual invitation-only gathering of senior figures, and they have conducted detailed conversations about potential public-relations liabilities in a private Slack group. In public, MacAskill was particularly preoccupied with the idea of a “PR disaster, esp among some of the leadership” that might undermine the movement, as “Elevatorgate,” a sexual scandal, had for the New Atheists.
I don’t really have a point to make, just thought it was amusing.
I just found this unpleasant article, “How To Start A Fire” by someone called Ben Miller.
In this piece, Miller blames gender-critical activists for the terrible shooting at Club Q. He lumps people who object to the use of puberty blockers to treat young people with gender dysphoria in with conservatives and fascists. it’s quite a rant:
As reported elsewhere here on B&W I was granted a Substack blog account and I think it’s a shame to let it go to waste. I did get around to writing my first post, a brief essay on the notion that transgender rejection is a RW thing:
Letter to the New York Times from Professor Marc B. Garnick about the use of Lupron as a “puberty blocker”.
Professor Garnick has studied the effects of Lupron for the FDA. He says we are still learning about the effects of the drug on older people, and “woefully little safety data” are available for Lupron’s effects on children and adolescents.
The 12-year-old girl in question, Jenny, is, in fact. a girl. She got a short haircut. Some dad with a daughter on the opposing soccer team referred to Jenny using masculine pronouns. Jenny’s teammates corrected him by saying “You need to check your pronouns, buddy”. Jenny’s father gets tied up in knots about how Jenny has “identified with her birth gender for her entire life”, and wonders if the other man was concerned about an unfair advantage or was making a political statement about trans people. Jenny’s father also offers to discuss “why you’re so concerned with the body parts below our daughter’s beautiful head of hair”.
In the current climate, I can’t fault the man for wondering, nor can I fault him using masculine pronouns for someone who he thought was male. The correction is not about pronouns, but rather that Jenny is a girl with short hair. If Jenny were actually a trans-identified male, I would assume that well-meaning “trans allies” would similarly say that Jenny is a girl with short hair, and not turn it into a question of not knowing the bespoke pronouns of everyone in the world, including those you’ve never spoken a word to. If the man were in fact told that Jenny is a girl, then maybe he was being rude by continuing to use them, but if it was about “checking pronouns”, that’s just nonsense.
The man may indeed have been concerned about the unfair advantage of having a boy on the team, and that’s a legitimate concern, although perhaps less so at 12 than a few years later. I’m sure the “body parts” Jenny’s father was talking about were primary and secondary sex characteristics; he was missing things like height, bone density, musculature, body shape, and other characteristics that do provide sports advantages to males.
There do appear to be other instances, mentioned but not described in detail, where Jenny was presumed to be a boy. In the current climate,entirely too many girls are influenced to pretend to be boys, and one thing they might do is cut their hair short. I don’t know how Jenny’s father expects people to tell the difference. He seems accepting of the idea that girls pretending to be boys shall be referred to as boys, but dammit he wants his daughter to be seen as a girl. even by strangers. People have been mistaking short-haired girls for boys, and long-haired boys for girls, for many years, since well before the current “gender ideology” craze, but it’s worse now, and he doesn’t see that.
And those two men are in there as “first trans woman to do x”, whereas there are women on the list who have won the Fields medal, Olympic medals, risked their lives in numerous ways…
“First bloke to do X while pretending to be a woman” does not exactly compare to those achievements.
In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. Based on the chemical isotope signatures and bone growth patterns found in fossilized fish collected at Tanis, a renowned fossil site in North Dakota, During had concluded the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era 65 million years ago struck Earth when it was spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
But During, a Ph.D. candidate at Uppsala University (UU), received a shock of her own in December 2021, while her paper was still under review. Her former collaborator Robert DePalma, whom she had listed as second author on the study, published a paper of his own in Scientific Reports reaching essentially the same conclusion, based on an entirely separate data set. During, whose paper was accepted by Nature shortly afterward and published in February, suspects that DePalma, eager to claim credit for the finding, wanted to scoop her—and made up the data to stake his claim.
DePalma failed to include the raw data from the isotope studies his findings were based on, did not include on the sampling techniques and protocols, or the name of lab that was used for the analysis. Also, in an extreme version of “the dog ate my homework,” the technician who is said to have performed the isotope work has since died, and is unavailable for comment.
Along with this, During noted some oddities in the data that was presented. Her critique makes interesting reading. Much of it is far too technical for me to fully grasp, but from what I do get, it sure seems that DePalm’s paper sounds pretty dodgy.
PZ praises the students of his university, and shows what petty shits they are (students and PZ both):
To celebrate the end of classes, we have two big events this weekend at UMM. […]
And then, top off Saturday night with the Yule Ball. This is a photo of a decorative pile of tchotchkes that were on a table. I like the sentiment on the button.
What follows is a photo of some decorative crap, including a badge with the message “JK Rowling fucking sucks”.
In Scotland women who complain about trans ID males in their women only hospital wards may be removed, and the administrators equate such complaints with racism.
A passage in the Ayrshire and Arran policy likens its given scenario to racism. It says: “If a white woman complained to a nurse about sharing a ward with a black patient or a heterosexual male complained about being in a ward with a gay man, we would expect our staff to act in a manner that deals with the expressed behaviour immediately.”
…
However, MBM said: “The Equality Act specifically allows for the recognition of sex in the provision of services. In the context of hospital accommodation, sex is relevant to patient privacy, dignity, modesty, and safety.”
The firm added: “The equivalence between a female patient expressing unease at the presence of another male patient on a nominally single-sex ward and racism is not only offensive, but fails to understand the law.”
It said its research had found that “boards are either failing to guarantee single-sex accommodation (in clinical areas where this is feasible), or do not have policies in place”.
American Girl dolls jumps on the trans bandwagon. It’s all about promoting body positivity through drugs.
Critics were especially bothered by the book’s mention of what a doctor might suggest: choosing gender-affirming clothes (sic) and pronouns or taking puberty blockers.
I delved into the comments, and came across this unintentionally comical exchange:
Commenter 1:
Stop getting in our spaces and we will leave you alone. Stop demanding to be put in women’s prisons, play in women’s sports, go into women’s rape crisis centers and dressing rooms. Leave our children alone. Stop bullying us, and we will leave you alone to live your lives. We will be your allies and supporters. But not now, not yet, not while we have to fight to protect our hard-won rights.
Commenter 2 responds:
Which “spaces” are being invaded? Your lunch counters perhaps?
You are crying about your rights while getting angry about someone exercising theirs. A little self-awareness would not be amiss here.
This ad, and the glowing uncritical article, seem backwards to me. For those who don’t wish to view the video: a grandfather buys makeup and secretly learns to apply makeup to his face. When his grandson, who has decided he is female, comes to visit, the grandfather helps him with makeup before introducing him as a “granddaughter”, and as such he is accepted and welcomed by the family.
If the young man were simply effeminate and gender nonconforming, it would make perfect sense for the grandfather to experiment with makeup and women’s clothing to show the grandson acceptance. The grandfather’s acts of helping the young man with the makeup also fits perfectly well with this variant of the story.
But the young man is claiming to be a young woman. The grandfather is not claiming to be a grandmother. It is possible to learn to apply makeup to someone else without applying it to yourself, and I suspect those are somewhat distinct skills. I would think that a man performing femininity, while making no claims whatsoever of being female, might be perceived as mocking the “trans” youth.
Imagine if a Christian youth converted to Judaism, so the grandfather tried wearing a kippah and growing payos and wearing tallit, as if the appearance, rather than the religious practice and the actual claim of being Jewish, were the most important thing.
It’s a collection of people’s peaking stories. I have the Kindle version, but I’d recommend the paperback, it’s one of those books that’s good to flick through. Some of the stories are heartbreaking.
I went to the book launch event, which was some high quality TERFing. As you might have heard, Sarah advertised it on EventBrite who pulled the event for “Hateful, Dangerous, or Violent Content.” Then the venue contacted her to ask her not to mention the venue online because they were afraid of violence. In the end, there was no ‘protest’ at all, which was almost an anti-climax.
Sarah is suing EventBrite and has a crowdfunder here:
Now I’ll confess I’ve never seen an Adam Sandler movie–the most I’ve seen is a few previews, plus some of his SNL routines, and frankly life is too short to sit through an Adam Sandler movie–so I’m probably in no position to criticize the award. But there’s something more basic that’s bugging me. Mark Twain was a writer. He gave some public performances of his material, of course, but he earned his fame through his writing.
Here is a list of the winners of the award over the years. Some of them are (or were) very funny (Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin); others, not so much (Will Ferrell? Really?). But with the exception of Neil Simon, none of them are famous for their writing. They’re entertainers, not writers (and even Simon’s writing is meant to be performed, not read). So why do they get an award named for a writer and not, say, Dave Barry or Alexandra Petri?
They should rename it the Groucho Marx award. Then at least it wouldn’t be a category error, even when it’s a travesty.
A twitter thread by my friend Henrietta who, as you will see, is a total badass.
This is happening to disabled women who need care. I can only barely begin to understand the anxiety she and other women must feel if their care can’t be guaranteed to be provided by an old-fashioned woman of the female sex.
I do know that whenever my chair is out of commission, I am frantic. I know I’m usually angry enough that the Hulk would take a few steps back, but I’m fairly stoic about myself and what’s happened to me. But here’s me saying I am frantic if I don’t have use of my wheelchair, even if I’m not planning to go anywhere. Stands to reason, it hits me in my voonrables.
And here’s Henrietta, describing her daily routine and saying why she needs care from a woman. She’s been abused for days by men and women who say that she should not be allowed to put her safety, dignity, autonomy and anxiety above the feelings of men who want to abuse vulnerable women.
There are a few people who’ve made me feel humble over the last fifty years. H is one. She’s such a delightful. funny woman who cares about everybody before she cares for herself.
Read her stuff, if you can bear Twitter.
And Ophelia: you could do worse than ask if she’ll expand on her thread here, if you think it fits.
I think he was very good in The Wedding Singer. His stand-up rap about “phone, wallet, keys” is hilarious. I don’t think I’ve seen the entirety of any of his other movies, because they are usually in a “goofy comedy” genre I don’t usually bother to watch, but the portions I’ve seen are not impressive.
Excellent point that so many of the winners have produced no well-known literary humor.
I think I disagree a little about the Mark Twain award and the idea that Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin are not writers but entertainers. They all write/wrote their own material, don’t/didn’t they? Aren’t they writer/performers? The thing about Twain is that he started out as a humorist. I know nothing about the award but I’m guessing it’s for people who do both? Write their own material and perform it?
Futrelle posted about Rowling’s crisis shelter. Guess what? Apparently the whole thing is just a cynical move to make something the poor men that want to be women can’t have.
The exclusion of trans women from Beira’s Place isn’t a bug; it seems to be a, if not the, primary motivation behind the service.
It’s true that some of the past winners of the award wrote their own material, or at least much of it, but I don’t think it’s true of all of them (Lorne Michaels? Julia Louis-Dreyfus? Jay Leno?). And I’m not disparaging performers or comedy writers as a group–clearly it takes talent to do it well, and many of the winners of the prize are (or were) brilliant. But writing to perform is a different talent than writing to be read–unless you have the talent of Shakespeare, the full impact doesn’t come across on the page. It’s like giving Dylan the Nobel for literature–whatever you think of his songwriting, I’d argue that it’s a different category than literature.
Also, Wikipedia says this about the award (I tried accessing the Kennedy Center site, but it won’t let me in):
…it is presented to individuals who have “had an impact on American society in ways similar to” Twain. The JFK Center chose Twain due to his status as a controversial social commentator and his “uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly.”
I can sort of see how that applies to some of the winners, but does anyone think that Will Ferrell has an “uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly”?
I wasn’t talking about the whole list, which I haven’t looked at. Just those three specific examples got my attention because of the writing their own material aspect.
But hey, it’s the Kennedy Center. What even is that? Kennedy himself was one of those inflated figures so maybe it’s sort of appropriate that it pretends Jay Leno is a Great Writer.
Good point. (The Kennedy Center is sort of a quasi-official performing arts center in DC. It puts on Important Performances in a venue that probably seemed modern when it was designed in the sixties. We’ve seen some good shows there over the years, but it’s not cutting edge.)
The usual lie is packaged in the article heading – the issue is male athletes in girls’ sports. Par for the course.
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged a Connecticut policy allowing transgender students to compete in girls’ high school sports.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims by four cisgender female students that the policy deprived them of wins and athletic opportunities by requiring them to compete with two transgender sprinters.
They had sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), which oversees scholastic sports in Connecticut, saying its policy violated Title IX, a law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics.
I’ll take correction from a lawyer, but the argument that a right has been breached seems strange to me. As we’ve said in response to Veronica Ivy’s claim ‘access to sports is a right’, no, at least not as an individually stated thing. This seems to me more like a breach of promise undertaken by the athletics association of that (and other) states, as they fail to provide a fair competition despite claiming so.
I suspect this different framing makes the burden on the moving party lighter, as breach of rights often requires stringent judicial tests.
I also take issue with the reasoning supplied in the verdict:
But U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, writing for a three-judge panel, said that far from being deprived of a “chance to be champions,” the four plaintiffs all regularly competed in state track championships and on numerous occasions came in first.
This is an argument with diminishing returns. It is only true so long as there are other competitions in which female participants can find a fair field, meaning the argument cannot be applied to every competition available – once the last competition succumbs, the premise of the argument – that there are other avenues available to women – is no longer true. And if an argument cannot be applied generally, then it seems it is not generally valid but relies on externalities to mitigate the impact its own successes.
Absolutely dreadful article by someone called Naomi Gordon-Loebl in the Nation magazine. It’s called “Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in the Age of Ron DeSantis.”
“These attacks, from the legislative to the interpersonal, have called upon trans people to prove our identities. Even mainstream news outlets regularly question our legitimacy: In October 2022, The New York Times ran a piece noting, and at times tut-tutting, an increase in top surgery among young people.”
2002: “If you don’t support George W. Bush and Tony Blair, then you support Osama Bin Laden.””
2022: “If you don’t support mastectomies for lesbian and autistic teenage girls, then you support Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.”
Sex Matters posted this blog entry and they include an analysis in three parts of the weakness in the science that claims to support an affirmation model for transgender children:
In the gender-affirming care literature, reports of mental-health benefits tend to get recycled. Few papers look at the original studies through a critical lens. Instead, findings are inflated and limitations overlooked. A fresh analysis of the evidence base is urgently needed, in which the studies are reviewed and re-interpreted to remove unjustified claims of benefit. This should be a priority for clinics, universities, funders and journals.
The supposed benefits of social transition also give way under scrutiny. Using a different name and pronouns for a gender-questioning child is linked to gender dysphoria persisting. We don’t know if the link is causal – but the possibility should not be ignored by schools and other institutions that are supposed to put child safeguarding ahead of all other considerations. Schools that accommodate social transition, for example new names, “preferred pronouns” and perhaps even allowing children to use facilities for the opposite sex if that is how they identify, should rethink. It is anything but kind to act in ways that prolong children’s distress.
And, yes, I know that this will not be persuasive to the people it really needs to reach (affirmation therapists,) because they will look at the source and decide that it’s transphobic hatred. I plan to read the articles today since I am on PTO for the week, and make notes for my substack.
The House Select Committee has announced its criminal referrals, including four against Il Douchebag of Sea-to-Lake. But one thing that caught my attention:
Those who have cast doubt on whether the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was truly an “insurrection” have argued that, if it were, there would have been more weapons.
The committee’s report reveals that plenty were seized at the magnetometers outside where Trump gave his speech on the Ellipse before the riot.
Specifically, the report cites a November 2021 document produced by the U.S. Capitol Police that says: “Secret Service confiscated a haul of weapons from the 28,000 spectators who did pass through the magnetometers: 242 canisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments, and 17 miscellaneous items like scissors, needles, or screwdrivers.”
I don’t think the Secret Service blocked off the whole Mall; if not, you can imagine all the weapons that weren’t confiscated.
Apparently NASA is considering an all-female crew for a mission to Mars. The reason, according to a NASA article from 2014, is that women are smaller, less resource-intensive, and better able to withstand the rigors of such a flight. An inflammatory, undated headline recently lampooned by a friend of mine (no article link, just a screen shot) claimed it was to prevent the astronauts from having sex; the ensuing discussion (after they got off the topic of lesbian sex) assumed it was all about pregnancy prevention.
I might have expected this friend and others of his friends to say, “No, they can still get pregnant, because some of the women might be trans”. They are generally consistent trans advocates. But no. They tacitly recognize that NASA saying “all-female” really means all-female, not all-people-who-claim-to-be-women. They know what women are. They know there are differences. They just refuse to acknowledge them when inconvenient.
Yeah, it’s both as hilarious and infuriating as it sounds. It lists phrases deemed offensive, alternatives to use instead and the reason for the phrases being offensive in the first place.
Enjoy. But I think it’s worth pointing out their explanation of why “Karen” is offensive and the alternatives:
Word: Karen
Alternative: demanding or entitled White woman [capitalisation theirs]
Reason: This term is used to ridicule or demean a certain group of people based on their behaviors [crazy American spelling theirs*].
It’s… interesting that what I assume is a bloated committee of language police so completely failed to understand that the problem with “Karen” is the misogyny. Interesting but unsurprising.
* Oops, I mean surprising/wild US Citizen spelling
I’m extremely worried about the disastrous vote in Scotland about GRA ‘reform’. I still hold out some hope that there’s a legal avenue; Scotland must still abide by the Equality Act and this seems in flagrant defiance of it.
But I’m worried in particular about disabled women in Scotland, for a very particular reason. I explained it here.
This year’s defense budget means 61 F-35s… As much as they’ve annoyed me as an over engineered waste of resources over the years it does mean I needn’t worry about employment for a while. Wouldn’t mind seeing them escort humanitarian flights in Ukraine.
How many ways can the patriarchy tell women and girls that they must express feminity, or they will be shoved back into a gender cage. Not content with Joan of Arc, now the writer of a novel about women and girls must have been trans because she chafed against the gender roles of her time.
Siiiiiiiiiiigh. That’s always been right on the surface with Alcott – everyone already knows it. See also: Willa Cather. Cue the headlines: there have always been women who didn’t embrace “femininity,” and they were still women. The Times must be desperate for filler.
Sack @78 I think I interpreted the beginning of the ad as the grandfather being a cross dresser in private, and not wanting the grandson to share in his shame, and nowadays it’s more acceptable, so he goes all out with his grandson? Maybe I was looking at a different aspect of it. I like your take on it better.
Ray already knew the get-me-the-manager “Karen” stereotype — privileged, entitled and demanding — when she saw a TikTok video about a company called Karens for Hire (“We Karen so you don’t have to”), which promised to harness the power of accomplished complainers in the service of beaten-down customers, abused tenants and anyone else with a dispute that outstripped their own capacity to carp.
I do note that they have both men and women working for them.
They knew latching onto “Karens” — the aggressively coifed, White matriarchs of meme menace — would be catchy marketing, but also provocative. Not everyone is amused.
They were profiled last summer by the local CBS affiliate morning show, “Pittsburgh Today Live,” only to find the segment disappear online. Someone had apparently objected to the Karen concept. The station, KDKA, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“We’re not talking about screaming at the barista,” said Zecca. “We want to harness the power of Karens for good.”
Indeed, some who tried to join their team have been too Karen.
“How stupid are you? This is not that hard to figure out,” one applicant said in a test call before Zecca could lunge for the mute button and take over.
Yeah, so rather than push back against the “Karen” stereotype, they go with it and “harness” it. I’m not convinced.
An article by Ceri Black that you might like. Ceri knows what she’s talking about. She did a PhD in queer theory and was fully mired in it for years. And now she’s being sued by Aiden Comorford, quite a journey.
Anyway, there are some interesting points in there from a queer theorist’s position.
Well, ain’t this a kick in the pants. Here’s a compilation of failed concepts in psychology, for example, the oft-mentioned Stanford Prison Experiment is a badly done botch, the Pygmalion effect is small and inconsistent, the Milgram experiment is full of experimental errors, etc., etc., etc. It’s rather depressing.
…
The impression I get is that a lot of the popular ideas that have emerged out of psychology arise not because the experimenter is rigorous and cautious, but because they either conform to conventional wisdom or are surprisingly contrary. There’s also something analogous to the TED Talk effect, where people are convinced more by the certainty of the presentation of the story than by the data.
Huh. I wonder if this is applicable to anything popular today?
Alabama is involved in a legal fight over whether the state can criminalize certain aspects of “gender-affirming care”. It has subpoenaed WPATH, the AAP, and the Endocrine Society. The three organizations have filed a motion to quash the state subpoenas, claiming that the scope is overly broad and violates their First Amendment rights. I don’t know if they are justified, I don’t know if what the state is trying to do is reasonable, but I do get the distinct impression that the organizations have a lot to hide and are trying to do so.
That’s it! Just the title, no content. Three authors.
The contents are in fact identical to that of a paper in Annals of Improbable Research many years ago. The title of that paper was “Recent advances in artificial intelligence”. Plagiarism?
The brilliant Nina Paley was crowdfunding a comic book. Indiegogo cancelled it after it had met and exceeded the goal. No explanation, no chance for appeal, the money has already been returned to the donors.
Further evidence that the trans movement is about reinforcing gender stereotypes. One of Angelina Jolie’s daughters has decided she doesn’t want to be a boy after all. But this manifests itself in changing from comfortable, baggy clothes to a hand-me-down designer dress from her mother, along with putting her hair up in a bun and putting on makeup. At least she’s not wearing heels. And of course the narrative is all about how beautiful she looks now.
She’s 15 years old.
Why can’t the narrative be that girls are allowed to wear baggy pants and jackets? (Or for that matter that boys can wear dresses and makeup?)
Prince Harry claims to have ended the lives of 25 “chess pieces” (aka human beings) and also claims to be neither satisfied or embarrassed by it. Callous much?
A man in Ecuador has declared himself a woman in order to take advantage of Ecuadorian laws that favor the mother in child custody cases. Trans activists have said that his actions are “not in the spirit of the law”. No shit, Sherlock.
But a man who suddenly decides he’s a woman in order to be moved from men’s prison to women’s prison, or to use the women’s locker room, or to compete on the women’s team, that’s perfectly fine.
Terry Gross interviews Lauren Fleshman, an elite runner and the author of a new book, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World. Fleshman makes many excellent points about the physical differences between men and women, and how so many things in women’s sports either fail to take those differences into account or are there for pleasing the male gaze. But somehow, when it comes to trans ideology, she suddenly loses the plot, and thinks it is possible both to be aware of sex differences and have women compete alongside men.
I’m guessing Fleshman knows that directly stating that males claiming to be women should not compete against females would cause her a lot of trouble. So she says inclusion of trans athletes is important, even though males have physical advantages of females when it comes to sport. But she doesn’t try to explain how that could be done. The trouble is that it really can’t be done but we mustn’t say that because it would hurt trans people. Or, rather, trans people would throw a fit. I can understand Fleshman not wanting to be a target herself.
I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today (https://twitter.com/SFWnortheast/status/1613794277183852546). There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.
If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.
I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera and I’ll be in a crowd. And The mic isn’t great.
Ok, I usually don’t comment directly on what goes on over at Pharyngula but I am going to say something about what’s apparently not going on: any mention of the Minnesota art professor fired for showing some paintings of Mohammed.
Maybe I missed it. Or maybe PZ has some personal or professional relationships with people involved and has prudently declined to comment. But this is exactly the sort of topic which would have once provided much material for posts and discussion. Despite all reasonable efforts, Muslim sensibilities are performatively “offended” by the mere presence of once-revered depictions of their prophet. It’s a perfect opportunity to rail about separation of church & state, as well as the way fundamentalist religion both infantilizes the believers and induces them to control others. It’s even local. But … nothing.
One possibility: religious identities have become included with marginalized racial & gender identities and to attack one is to implicitly attack them all. If it’s wrong for a Muslim to be psychologically scarred by Islamic art in an academic setting, it’s now arguably wrong for a trans-identified student to be psychologically scarred by gender critical views in an academic setting. Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Plus, being on the same side as religious Christian conservatives may no longer be considered an occasional and incidental byproduct of a consistent liberal commitment to integrity. It’s a red flag for being on the wrong side.
A no-brainer became a choice, and then the opposite choice became obviously better. I still find it surprising.
Ah well the more conformist of PZ’s commenters decided I was “Islamophobic” around the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, so it’s possible that he’s avoiding the Hamline issue lest they accuse him of “Islamophobia.” He’s captive to them at this point.
Scottsdale is one of the more conservative suburbs in Phoenix, but even that city’s government is too much government for a roque development out in the foothills. The people who built there, (in the desert) to escape government are now pissed that the governmet is not catering to their water needs. I used to hike near there, occasionally. Yes, it’s an idyllic location for living away from the hustle-and-bustle and the desert hills are beautiful. But this is a water issue in a dry state, and they’ve known this was coming for years and should not have built out there. The wells are dry.
The Washington Post had an excellent, disturbing series recently on abuse in the bodybuilding world, including of course sexual exploitation of female bodybuilders. Karen Attiah followed up with a mostly excellent opinion piece, pointing out that even female bodybuilders are vulnerable to the male gaze and male abuse. I say “mostly excellent” because this is the final paragraph:
There has been a ton of fuss about transgender athletes in women’s sports, with some claiming that allowing trans women to compete is a form of “abuse.” No. The abuse of women in bodybuilding is a reminder that the biggest threats to women and girls in sports are — and always have been — men.
Transwomen are indeed biological men. As such, trans identifying men who enter women’s sports cause terrible distress to women on many levels: forced shared private space, inevitable loss in sports to XY humans, girls/women’s compelled speech to use trans identifying man/boy’s preferred pronouns when one’s eyes sees the lie, terror of speaking truth to power because of financial consequences. So trans identifying male forcing himself into domain of women/girls’ sports is as vile as the male body builders you rightly vilify in this article.
It speaks volumes that whenever woman intersects with a protected group, woman ALWAYS loses. We are devalued everywhere. In the East, we are erased from public view by hijab, niqab, and chador. In West, woman is erased from language to now include men in skirts. That change in language affects policy and law. Trans identifying men are able to transfer to women’s prisons where they terrorize, beat, rape and impregnate female prisoners. But it seems nothing beats support for trans, not even lesbian, Black women in prison.
And you, Karen, are part of the devaluation of Woman when you do not stand up for our rights to privacy, our own spaces, in sports, women in prison having to share space with rapists, and protection of girls from out- sourced self-harm by medical community which performers mutilating surgeries, hormone suppressants and cross hormones on vulnerable people. All to further the delusion of those vulnerable people that they are born in wrong body. No one is born in the wrong body. We are our bodies.
A 17 year old girl is showering at the YMCA when a naked man walks in.
Here’s a video of her talking about how terrified she was. She is visibly upset thinking about her five year old sister and her friends being in that same locker room.
She spoke to the YMCA who confirmed that it’s just fine for grown men to shower with teenagers in their facilities and was made to feel as though she was at fault for simply asking
Here are some of the comments this seventeen year old woman received on Twitter.
There’s another Standing for Women event (similar to the one in Newcastle last week) in Glasgow on 5th February. I think I will probably go. It’s the same drill but there are lots of people going who I Twitter-know and would like to meet in person. Plus, who wouldn’t want to take that train journey along the north east coast?
But, more importantly, I found out yesterday that Scotland’s largest Furry convention will also be in town! It also includes the adult baby men!
How could I not go? The train up there will be like a mobile zoo!
I don’t expect much aggro between the feminists and the furries unless someone leaves the gate open and the furries escape *whistles innocently*. It’s OK, though, the women are all going to be armed with bottles of Febreze, which should ward the furries off. I’m not sure what to do about the adult baby men, though. It’s not as though punishment is going to work, is it? They’d just be back for more.
Anyway, noon on the 5th, at a TBA location near Queen St Station (the SFW thing, not the furry thing). The one after that is in Hyde Park on 26th, if anyone’s in London.
Got this as a reply to my recruiting for a D&D game in my local FB social group: “However, I’m very into heavy role playing and am very queer so a queer friendly role playing group is something I am desiring.” It’s good for me to belong to the FB group, so I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, but fuck my life…
I think it’s a bloody TIF, but this I think is why we should’ve kept gatekeeping nerd shit… “Yes you can play, but you’re going to play *our* game; if you want something different do it somewhere else.”
This is a scoldy tweet from a writer. I am not familiar with her, but apparently she thinks she is brilliant. I don’t know if your comment section will allow this sort of embedding, but I’ll give it a go. If it doesn’t work, I’ll add a new comment and just post a link to it.
Cis men don’t need to pretend to be trans women to assault women. Trans women have been using women’s spaces by self-ID for years. The equality act covers this. You’re arguing the lie that something is changing when it’s already the status quo without issue.— Sara Gibbs (@Sara_Rose_G) January 19, 2023
This is the “men have already been invading women’s spaces for years, and the GRR doesn’t really change things, so just accept this new piece of paper” argument. And what we take out of this is the very tone-deaf repetition that there is only one demographic whose needs are important, and everyone else needs to accommodate them. Much like the guy in BC who only feels “comfortable in women’s spaces because men are muscular and I’m a slob,” it doesn’t really matter how the women in the restrooms, gyms, prisons, and other spaces where they are vulnerable to sexual assault, battery, or even just the leering that men do, as long as the men get access.
And, yes, it’s only really a problem for men in women’s spaces. Trans ID women do not bother men in private spaces because we are very rarely subject to such assaults by women, and are often flattered by women or men checking us out in the gym. We take it as admiration, not as intrusion.
What she conveniently ignores, or has decided doesn’t matter, is that this is a men’s movement to break away what few barriers have been propped up to give women space away from men. One wonders what trans ID males did to pee back when public office buildings only provided restrooms for men. Did they have to “hold it” until they got home, as women did? Did they have the urinary leash?
And another thing that is completely illogical about this GRR fracas: if it really changes nothing, then why is it so important to steamroll it through and to create a crisis in Scottish Devolution? It’s either absolutely vital or no big deal, it can’t be both.
And another thing that is completely illogical about this GRR fracas: if it really changes nothing, then why is it so important to steamroll it through and to create a crisis in Scottish Devolution? It’s either absolutely vital or no big deal, it can’t be both.
Just like TERFs are a tiny minority of cranks who should be, and deserve to be marginalized and ignored, and an all-powerful cabal just moments away from unleashing trans genocide. Same tune, different lyrics.
I saw a notice that Women’s Declaration International would be at Artifacts Gallery in Athens OH. Why? I searched. AG is a clothing store. They posted some signage in favor of women and disagreeing with gender identity ideology. So of course there’s a boycott and a protest.
I found this article about the planned protest, and it’s the usual nonsense. The sign saying LGB with a rainbow and a heart? Not allowed without the T, it’s just part of the word or something. Can’t say people can’t change sex. Can’t say no to men in women’s sports. For these horrible statements, the store had to close temporarily.
“Oh, and that’s not even the full video. Apparently the proper one goes on for 25 minutes of the same.”
Jones has a *monomaniacal* obsession with his imagined “anti-trans activists,” who are “frothing about trans people”, who have “allowed [their] humanity to rot away” and whose “anger and fury and bile” are a fixation for him. I’m not a psychologist, but the aggressive tone suggests a real insecurity about the issue for Jones.
I wonder is there any truth in the rumour that Jones was frustrated about not getting a position in a Corbyn Labour government, and decided to lash out at anyone he suspected of having gender-critical views as a response. He made them the scapegoat for his own disappointment.
Certainly, while Jones supported gender ideology before the December 2019 election defeat, I don’t remember it being the all-consuming obsession for Jones that it is now.
Jones has a *monomaniacal* obsession with his imagined “anti-trans activists,” who are “frothing about trans people”, who have “allowed [their] humanity to rot away” and whose “anger and fury and bile” are a fixation for him. I’m not a psychologist, but the aggressive tone suggests a real insecurity about the issue for Jones.
Seems to me Jones was on the naughty step a little while ago for something or other, so maybe he has to be even more furiously pro-trans in order to demonstrate loyalty, and to deflect further suspicion, running as fast as he can to stay in one place and not lose ground?
“At this point, not noting that many anti-trans parent groups work with the far-right is not just enabling transphobia, it’s enabling fascism. The anti-trans movement is intertwined with the global far-right movement. The NYT is laundering fascism when it launders transphobia.”
Just like TERFs are a tiny minority of cranks who should be, and deserve to be marginalized and ignored, and an all-powerful cabal just moments away from unleashing trans genocide.
So group X is simultaneously weak and cowering, not deserving of our respect or even consideration as humans, and yet a dangerous, devious, all-powerful threat to the superior group’s existence that needs to be eradicated. Where have I heard that before?
A bit of local Alabama news that may be of interest here. This is about the internecine battles within the Alabama Democratic Party. The party has been largely ineffectual for a good few years. Part of the reason has been too much internal fighting about representation, and too little effort at developing and promoting candidates for office.
First, an article about the arguments over proposed by-laws changes. A few years ago, the “old guard” was pushed out, new by-laws written, and life seemed to be coming back to the party. Last year, some of the “old guard” returned to power, life was essentially snuffed out, and fights over the by-laws resumed.
Second, an excellent opinion column by Josh Moon about all this. He pulls no punches. He talks about the continuing fights over the minutiae of representation in a party that is all but irrelevant in the power structures of the state. The party is an extreme state of dysfunction, they promoted almost no candidates this election, they haven’t updated their web site or their Facebook page since August, and this is what they are worrying about.
I think this is yet another example where excessive emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion concepts has derailed genuine work, be it government, education, or what have you.
before discovering that you needed to be a paid member to post. Not wanting to pay to do that, I thought I’d post it here instead. Keep in mind this was intended for a different audience, so forgive me if it reiterates arguments ideas I’ve made here already. But with fewer swears. The direct link to the story and its comment thread is here:
Why oppose this definition: Women are adult humans who identify as female. As I said above, is it simply an unflinching desire to defend the truth about the dictionary meaning of a word? Or is there something else you object to?
I object to men who claim to be women being put into women’s prisons. This something that is already happening. I object to men claiming to women demanding access to women-only rape shelters. This is already happening. I object to the crimes of men claiming to be women being attributed to women, thus invalidating statistics used in policing, law enforcement and public policy. This is already happening. Why should “gender identity” (whatever that is) have any bearing on facilities, spaces, and positions allocated on the basis of sex? It shouldn’t; they are two completely different things. Yet trans identified males are demanding, and being given access to, what had once been women’s single sex spaces, all on the coat-tails of this new, non-standard definition of “woman.” This is not simply about defending the dictionary meaning of the word woman. It’s more importantly about the health, safety, and dignity of women. That hijacking and distorting language is one of the avenues through which women’s rights and safety are threatened, that is on those pushing the new definition of “woman” that includes men. “Of course transwomen are women! It’s right in the name!” Well, by such logic, sawhorses and pommel horses are horses, and I look forward with interest to their inevitable racing in the Kentucky Derby.
Language is more than just important in this discussion; it is vital. I will digress here to make a note on usage. In the interests of clarity, I do not use the term “transwoman” or “trans woman,” but “trans identified male” to refer to males who, for whatever reason, believe they are, or claim to be, women. They are not women of any kind. They never will be. If this is “transphobic,” then reality is transphobic. Trans identified males remain males however much or little they alter themselves surgically or hormonally. Keeping this fact clear makes discussion more open and honest. It makes what is at stake and what is being demanded more obvious.
Trans activists will sometimes admonish feminists for supposedly conflating “sex” and “gender,” but at other times use this very conflation to advance their cause, regardless of the cost and danger to women. Humans can’t change sex. So that’s a hard no for access to facilities segregated on the basis of sex. But somehow a male “perfoming femininty” is supposed to be given entrance to these spaces because he “identifies as” a woman. Dressing up as a woman is supposedly enough, but not even necessary. Under self identification, or “Self ID,” (which is a concept being pushed in many jurisdictions), any man, “trans” or not can claim to be a woman and gain entrance to women’s single sex spaces. This makes harder for women to defend these spaces, as it removes the ability to prevent any man from entering, because they might “identify as” a woman. This makes it easier for predatory males to access female only spaces. The best course of action is to bar all males from such spaces, however they might “identify”. Demanding entrance to women’s spaces automatically makes any such man a risk. It’s big red flag that women are being told to ignore.
…the real question is why are people so vexed and insistent about this? If you admit that people can change genders, why fixate on “but not sexes.” I don’t buy that it’s just about defending the truth. People who defend the idea that sex is malleable are not more confused about any of the “facts” that their detractors are.
This question works just as well in the opposite direction. People so keenly interested in breaking down the concept of sex, on redefining “woman’ in such a way that it includes men (while, curiously there is nowhere near the equivalent pressure and insistence on redefining “man” ) seem to have an intense interest in allowing men to have acces to women’s spaces, positions and facilities. That seems to be the whole point behind all of these efforts to redefine “woman.” Women are certainly the ones being asked to stand down, step aside and pay the price by letting men in. If humans can’t change sex, then yes, those who see sex as “malleable” are confused about the facts, and one is left to question why they are so insistant on defending something that isn’t so.
Being female is a condition of material reality, not something you can “identify” into if you are not female to start with. A man can no more become a woman through “identifying” as one any more than I can identify as an inverebrate, or as being made of antimatter. My identification and wishful thinking matters not a bit to the universe. I will remain a vertebrate made of ordinary matter for the rest of my life, however fiercely I may “identify.”
It’s interesting that some of the same people who object to Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be Black furiously deny that her imposture has any parallel with the claims of trans identified males, even though unlike sex, racial identity can be a “spectrum” depending on one’s parentage. Whatever one my think of the utility of the concept of “race,” people of diverse ethnic and geographic origins have children all the time, and they can exhibit a wide range of features that one might attribute to “racial” markers: skin colour, blood types, hair types, eye colour, etc. Without further investigation (and the testimony of her family), it could have been the case that Dolezal was of African American heritage. There is no way that a trans identified male is in any way female. The embarassing thing about the Dolezal/trans comparison is that trans claims are less credible, that is to say impossible. Yet rejecting Dolezal’s claim, while accepting those of men claiming to be women, like swimming cheat Wil(Lia)m Thomas is supposedly “progressive.”
In humans, sex is binary and immutible. The existence of people with disorders of sexual development (or, less accurately “intersex”) does not change this. Sex is not a “spectrum;” there is no third sex, no intermediate between sperm and ova. Certainly there is a small number of individuals with conditions of sexual development that represent edge cases, but those people are still male or female. Most DSDs are specific to one sex or the other. Their existence does not suddenly render the concepts of male and female useless and incoherent, any more than dawn and twilight invalidates the concepts of day and night. The cursory nod to so-called “intersex” conditions is simply a way to justify the appropriation of the DSD concept and terminolgy of “assigned (sex) at birth,” as if doctors and midwives attending births have to guess at a newborn’s sex, decide arbitrarily, or flip a coin and write down M or F based solely on heads or tails.
The only reason I can see is that people want to pretend that it’s just a “natural biological fact” that people can’t do whatever thing they want to do, when what they mean is “don’t do that” or “its wrong to do that.” People want you to call a blastocyst a baby because they want to make abortion illegal. People who call BLM protestors “thugs” do so because they oppose BLM. If that’s not you, then what is your reason? I think you could pick a better fight.
This isn’t the winning argument you think it is.
I’ll accept that those who are so keen to change the definition of “woman” to include men want to use this new, idiosyncratic, and counterintuitive definition to do something that the customary, standard one would prohibit, things that would normally be met with “don’t do that,” or “it’s wrong to do that.” So what is it that men want to do in women’s single-sex spaces? It’s a hell of a lot more than “just go pee.” Male sex offenders aren’t suddenly discovering they’re “trans” just to go pee. Mediocre male athletes aren’t jumping to women’s leagues just to “go pee.” This deliberate trivialization and minimization of trans identified males demand to “just go pee” hides the real, brutal cost that women are already paying for accepting these newly-minted “women” who are men int their spaces. This is not accidental. The issue is much more than “bathroom bills,” but women’s real, legitimate concerns are brushed aside as outdated prudery, or vindictive bigotry. Attemps to fight against opportunistic distortion of language is painted as pettifogging bookishness. It’s just one little word: woman. How does expanding the meaning of one little word hurt anybody? I’ll tell you how. How can women defend their rights in law if the law doesn’t know what a woman is.
I am currently reading Linsey McGoey’s The Unknowers, on the value of “strategic ignorance” to the the wealthy and powerful. It’s mind blowing in a way; I had never thought of ignorance as a weapon in the way described in the book. Think plausible deniability on steroids. Think 2008 financial crisis, the Grenfell fire, global warming and all the other environmental problems we face, think coming resource shortages.
I am only a few chapters in, so won’t attempt a summary. But this being the blog it is, I thought I could mention a couple of examples from the book: Treating women as not being important, to the point that they and their contributions are totally forgotten.
Take Milton Friedman. He won the 1976 Nobel memorial prize in economics (not an actual Nobel prize, mind you), in large part based on his book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. His book? Well, he happened to have a co-author named Anna Schwartz. Never heard of her? Me neither. According to the book, “Friedman himself acknowledged that Schwartz was an equal partner in the writing of their masterpiece.” Oh well – she’s just a woman, so what’s the big deal?
Next up, Adam Smith and On Liberty. Again, Smith acknowledged the contribution of his co-author Harriet Taylor, both in the essay itself and even more so in his autobiography. Still, it was published in his name only, and only his name is now associated with this work. I suppose that is just how things were in those days, but still …
Finally, an anecdote from other sources: When Swedish mathematician Gustav Mittag-Leffler learned that the Nobel prize was going to be awarded to Pierre Curie for their work on radioactivity, he stepped in and informed the committee in clear language that Marie Curie (full name Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie) deserved the prize in equal measure, for this was an equal collaboration between the two of them. Fortunately, the committee listened, and they received the prize jointly. So hiding the women doesn’t always work. But assistance from well connected and highly regarded men is sometimes necessary.
In this thread, JKR says: “I’m reading the transcript of the tribunal of Mermaids v LGB Alliance. It’s a bit mind-blowing, seeing some of the answers set down in black and white. 1/”
Below is a link to a clip from a very nice performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The soprano is Elijah McCormack. She has a lovely voice and is a skilled singer.
She also claims to be a he. The WaPo article where I found the link to the clip says:
The 28-year-old trans male soprano, based in Trumbull, Conn., arrived on my radar the last half of 2022, offering stunning performances of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” with the Washington Bach Consort, Handel’s “Messiah” with Ensemble Altera and “St. John Passion” with the Dallas Bach Society. He premiered the role of Bell* Cohen in Benjamin P. Wenzelberg’s “Nighttown” — an operatic recasting of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In 2023, he’ll make debuts at Seraphic Fire’s Enlightenment Festival (Feb. 23-26) and with Ars Lyrica Houston (May 13), as well as additional engagements singing with Ensemble Altera and the Crossing.
Given the severe effects of testosterone on voices, I suspect she has not gone in for hormone treatments. I wonder if other women-who-claim-to-be-men choose to forgo the (desired) effects of testosterone treatment in order to preserve a singing voice.
There are a small number of adult men with soprano voices. They are sometimes called sopranists, in particular by those who take care to differentiate the voice from that of a countertenor, who is often a falsettist. Wikipedia suggests that they may owe their unusually high voices to endocrinology or to an underdeveloped larynx. Notable male sopranos include Robert Crowe and Michael Maniaci.
It would be perhaps ironic if women started being included in the tiny list of “male sopranos” simply by declaring themselves men.
Video from the Transpositions book launch I went to a while ago. There are some names and faces you will know among the speakers and a live musical performance by Menno!
I haven’t watched it yet. Moley says the sound isn’t great (the venue’s fault, I think, it was a bit echoey.
Hi there, I expect someone here will be able to turn this up–can anyone locate/provide a link to that exchange where PZ Myers claimed there were five (seven?) sexes of horse, and listed various terms for different kinds of horses, and the respondent pointed out that each of these terms described either a male or a female horse?
Colt, filly, mare, broodmare, gelding, stallion…six. There must be six.Oh, wait, I forgot freemartins. So seven. Definitely seven.— PZ Myers (@pzmyers) December 23, 2019
I wonder whether PZ will mention this. I just checked and he’s blogged about 2 American Atheist board members who have sexual allegations against them…
Wow. I’m not surprised, based on what I’ve seen of Dave/Danielle, but this is new information, thanks. I just saw the business about the two American Atheist board members ousted.
“Danielle” and I have (or had) at least one mutual FB friend, and one (female) told him he was more of a woman than she was, in a thread I saw on her page several years ago.
Duh, you’re right. (Egg on my face.) I was mixing up names because the book I was reading also discussed Adam Smith. Apparently, he was not quite the laissez-faire advocate that present day libertarians make him out to be. On the contrary, he argued strongly for government regulation of business, to curb and control the natural consequences of human greed. But that part has largely been excised from many editions of The wealth of nations.
Watch Nicola Sturgeon trying with all her might to avoid calling the rapist either him or her in response to being asked whether he should be considered a woman.
Choirs performing at international rugby matches at the Principality Stadium have been banned from singing the Tom Jones classic, Delilah.
The stadium said it would no longer be performed by choirs after removing it from half-time playlists in 2015.
The song has caused controversy, with lyrics depicting the murder of a woman by her jealous partner.
A stadium spokesman said it was “respectfully aware that it is problematic”.
It has, however, long been popular with supporters of the national team and Jones has previously performed the song ahead of an international match.
The decision follows a week in which the chief executive of the Welsh Rugby Union was forced to resign, following allegations of sexism, misogyny and racism within the organisation.
Without referencing the decision, Wales wing Louis Rees-Zammit wrote on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon: “All the things they need to do and they do that first…”
It’s the lowest-hanging fruit that gets picked first…
Gotta disagree with you on this one. It is about a sexually jealous man murdering a woman. They don’t sing songs about lynching before football matches do they?
Delilah? I had no idea. None. I’ve never paid any attention to the lyrics. It’s got an irritating tune and a catchy refrain, but that’s all the notice I ever took. Wow.
I’ve been listening to Unsafe Space – astonishingly, on the BBC. How long before the cult clamours to have it deleted, I wonder? It is a (mildly amusing, occasionally hilarious) poke at a wide range of ‘woke’ issues. Each episode is around half an hour, and is available online at the above link immediately after the broadcast is finished. The episodes are broadcast on Thursdays at 23:00 UTC.
The latest Mess We’re In (podcast by Arty, Graham Linehan and Helen Staniland) is particularly good. There’s a lot of interesting discussion and the guest is the woman who was assaulted at the Newcastle Let Women Speak event, who is also very good.
Thank you, latsot! I was searching YouTube earlier to see if there was a new one (it feels like months since the last) and got side-tracked watching Arty Morty’s interview of Shape Shifter (very good). I just decided to have a quick look here to see if there are any new comments before renewing my search, to find that you have posted the link!
tigger @ 187 – same. I knew it as an intensely annoying hard-to-ignore song with the repeated “why why whyyyyyyyyyyyyy Deeeliiiiiiilah” and nothing else. I looked it up after reading J.A.’s post. Oh how sweet, yet another extra-popular song that’s about murdering a woman.
Decades ago, if I had claimed that originalist judges would rule that the government can’t convict an abuser who agreed in his restraining order not to own guns and then was found in possession of guns, because dudes in 1789 didn’t think abusive husbands should have their guns taken away, I would have been accused of strawmanning.
They imply, with analogies to the Holocaust, that trans-identified people will be rounded up and killed. Nothing of the sort has been suggested; people have disagreed with gender identity ideology, including saying that people who identify as the opposite sex are not in face the opposite sex, and this view is described as an attempt to “define transgender people out of existence”, therefore genocide. That’s not genocide, that’s disagreement. It’s like disagreeing that Jews are the Chosen People, that there are no Chosen People, therefore Jews are not what they claim they are. It doesn’t kill anyone who claims to be part of the Chosen People, it just says they’re wrong.
Beyond that, I think the article exemplifies some of the kinds of discussion difficulties that have been brought up here. The author and people quoted in it say that doctors, rather than politicians, should decide what constitutes proper medical care for trans-identified people, but the problem is they only talk about doctors who have been swallowed by the ideology; they think their side constitutes the evidence-based, settled science.
The bullet points listed from Trump’s rant (I haven’t listened, but I think everything he says is a rant, so no quibble there) are:
1. Pass a bill that falsely claims there are only two genders, male and female
2. Reverse legislation for life-saving gender affirming healthcare
3. Ban all education of transgender and non-binary issues in schools nationwide
4. Ban transitioning for youth nationwide
5. Sign an executive order to end programs for gender transitioning for all ages nationwide
6. Criminalize and hunt doctors and educators who try to save transgender and non-binary lives
Obviously the framing is incorrect, but the only one I think I’d oppose is number 6. Number 3 might be a problem if the education they were talking about was critical of these issues, focusing instead on how to avoid social contagion and on biological reality, but you know that isn’t what they’re talking about.
It is just awful having to defend proposals from any right-wing demagogue who happened to be correct in one area, but when that demagogue is Trump, it’s worse. I wish the leftist writers at Daily Kos could see, at the very least, that there is legitimate disagreement here, that people on the left also disagree, and that maybe they should examine their own positions a little.
Just a quick note that the Let Women Speak event at noon today in Glasgow (the one with the furries) will be livestreamed on Kelly-Jay Keen’s YouTube channel. Livestreamers will probably be able to see and hear more than those of us who’ll be there.
There’s also an overhead and far away webcam showing the square, which is good because from overhead and far away is my best side.
There are at least three women intending to talk about same-sex care for disabled women, which is especially important and topical in the UK right now. And, of course, there will be much talk of rapists in women’s prisons.
Lots of big gender critical names will be there. It should be a good one.
My apologies, it seems that the Beeb doesn’t like hyperlinks. It won’t work for me, either, although the link has copied and pasted without errors and works when typed in. Try copying this link and pasting it into the address bar:
Ah, it was only an extra quote character at the end of the address. Remove it, and it works. (Ophelia, feel free to fix the link in #188 and delete this post and the previous one. But who am I to tell you to feel free to do what you want on your own blog?)
I’ve been mitigating the boredom of being stuck in bed by listening to Queens Speech podcasts on YouTube again, and I though that you might be interested in this segment which seems to discuss the origins of the plea from the defence of Adam Graham for mitigation because of his sudden claim to womanhood, more than a month before it actually happened. I’m linking to the start of the segment here:
This is an interesting essay by Will Lloyd on the writer and early “transgender pioneer” Jan Morris.
It’s interesting to see how Morris went from a stereotypical “man” to an equally stereotypical “woman.”
It also points out that back in the 1970s, women who disagreed with gender self-identification were free to do so openly (look at those Rebecca West and Nora Ephron quotes):
https://unherd.com/2022/10/the-prophet-of-our-gender-troubles/
The issue of BBC neutrality reaches Australia’s equivalent, the ABC. The ABC’s own program Media Watch discusses the issue with great clarity. I discovered Australia has its own ‘Stonewall champions’ program, or something very similar… and that ABC is very much in bed with it.
The commentary is generally quite good, pointing out that the organisation offers ‘diversity points’ or whatever for editorial choices made in favour of trans people; unfortunately it also contains a stumble by calling an organisation critical of this arrangement ‘anti-trans’; I saw no such animosity when I went looking.
Ephron’s review of Morris’s book is in Crazy Salad. It’s a joy to read.
A gyne/ob writes a letter in response to a Russ Douthat column, telling us that People denied an abortion suffer financially and health wise. I’m sure if I asked for an abortion I’d be denied, even here in Minnesota. But I’m not one of the generic people she’s referring to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/opinion/letters/abortion-women.html
There’s an interesting review of the Jan Morris biography in the Times.
Holms beat me to the Media Watch item which was excellent and calmly presented.
Here is another very good panel discussion from our other National broadcaster, SBS, featuring some excellent contributions, including Sall Grover of Giggle (@sallwrites).
Excuse the mess, I’m building a new house. :-)
Rev David Brindley:
Wonderful! Just don’t get accidentally stuck in Australia.
While the only women to be Prime Minister of the UK have been conservatives, the last two ascended to impossible situations, and were shot down rather quickly. I can’t help but think that members would be circling the wagons around Boris Johnson after similar bad judgment calls early in his term, or any other man. Truss is resigning before she even figured our her job.
I’m not defending Truss, I’m just observing that the Tories are not necessarily the Land of Opportunity for women in England disaffected by the Labour enthralldom into gender-slavery. May didn’t get much of a chance to do what Boris ended up pooching, a decent post-Brexit accord with Europe.
Another asymmetry I’ve noticed.
It’s interesting that so many trans activists seem to believe that women couldn’t possibly be interested in defending their own rights and interests when they attempt to retain or regain single sex services, facilities, and positions for exclusively female use. This supposed concern is just a smokescreen to disguise hatred of trans folk. Women who point out the harms to women and girls arising from implementing policies that allow trans identified males into spaces previously reserved for women and girls only, don’t really care about women or girls at all, they just want to attack trans people. So, according to this view, women must have no stake at all in things that would benefit them. As women. What an odd thing to say. This is particularly strange when such accusations of dishonesty and insincerity come from trans activists who are not themselves trans. Maybe this is a pre-emptive deflection designed to divert attention from their blatant misogyny, which is thinly veiled by an opportunistic concern for trans “rights.” What better way to get away with being abusive (and be rewarded for it!), all in the name of “the most marginalized and oppressed group ever.” Ever accusation is a confession, right?
I found this discussion quite good.
https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/savage-minds-podcast/id1535634480?i=1000582463732 Guest is Michael Biggs
Queer theory at work even in County Durham.
The paper calls it “adult baby community” when what they really mean is “paedophile ring”.
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/23064296.hartlepool-man-adult-baby-fetish-caught-indecent-images-children/
From Twitter:
“The NHS has published its new service specifications for kids with gender dysphoria. They state its primary purpose is psychosocial/psychological interventions. This is huge. Mermaids/Maugham/Webberley are furious. I can’t understand why more people aren’t talking about it.”
https://twitter.com/FeministRoar/status/1583493742895300620?cxt=HHwWmICglezK2fkrAAAA
Draft service specifications have been made, and a public consultation (closing on 4 December) is now open:
https://twitter.com/Transgendertrd/status/1583768356418908160?cxt=HHwWgMDTrbq71vorAAAA
Sandra Boynton, in August, published a 45th anniversary edition of her first book, Hippos Go Berserk. She posted on Facebook today that she mostly updated the art work without changes, but she did add a few things. She showed one changed image from the book, a scene including a hippo with a scarf, and she noted that the Gryffindor scarf is new.
The first comment was complaining about the scarf, couldn’t she have called it something else, because the Harry Potter author has become so hateful.
I don’t know if Boynton has waded into the gender ideology issue, but I was thinking of getting a copy of the book anyway, and the Gryffindor scarf sold one today.
She’s working on a sequel, titled Hippos Remain Calm.
The brilliant Dr Em and someone I didn’t previously know called Bradders (on Twitter) were detained by police after the FILA conference in Cardiff after Bradders asked a man to leave a women’s toilet. The man complained to police that Bradders had threatened to punch him and that she’d been taking cocaine.
The police arrested Bradders and Dr Em went along with her to the police station. They tried to persuade Bradders to apologise (to whom and for what I don’t know) under the Restorative Justice scheme. They said they’d let her go if she did. Admirably, she refused on the grounds that she’d done nothing wrong. She told police that she had video of the encounter which proved her innocence.
They released her at 4am.
I’m not sure yet whether they’ve charged her with anything.
The punchline:
The complaint (by the man in the woman’s toilet) was recorded as being by a woman.
Update: I’ve spoken to Bradders. She wasn’t charged, thankfully. She’s trying to get the police to explain in writing why they arrested her and on the basis of what evidence.
Update on the Sandra Boynton situation. That picture has prompted over 900 comments, with many additional comments deleted. None of the other recent posts on her page have received nearly that many comments. Lots of people have expressed their “disappointment”, in varying degrees, that Boynton chose to mention that the scarf on one hippo is a Gryffindor scarf. In a reply to a comment, she wrote:
Which to me sounds perfectly consistent with:
from Rowling.
I think Boynton was completely blindsided by the level of controversy. I doubt she’s looked at the issue at all, and she doesn’t indicate any interest in doing so. She just wanted to post a picture from her book, and it uses iconography from the extremely popular Harry Potter books. I’m pleased that she hasn’t thus far disavowed the use of the name “Gryffindor” to describe the scarf, even as myriad comments express glee that the colors match those of some other entity.
I shared the post.
Imagine making a fuss about an orange and yellow scarf on a cartoon hippo.
Brilliant piece by Victoria Smith on the Friday Night Penis Pianist
https://thecritic.co.uk/A-dick-move/
I was reading the memoir of retired FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood. This passage caught my attention:
[He then cites some specific examples, which I’ll spare the B&W readership.]
It should go without saying that I am not asserting that all, or even most cross-dressers are acting out their misogynistic fantasies. But some of them appear to be doing so. As we have so often noted on these pages, it’s clear that some trans-identified males are dangerous, which means that taken as a group, they’re all less than trustworthy.
There’s a TERFy event in London on 2nd December at which I will be.
There are plans for lunches/brunches on 2nd and 3rd. If anyone’s around and wants to meet up, let me know. Lots of good people will be there.
The excuse is the launch of the book Transpositions, organised mostly by Sarah Phillimore and moley, I think. It’s people’s accounts of peaking.
Picture shared by Abortion Access Front (used to be Lady Parts Justice League):
I beg to differ.
A reminder? No, a claim, and a false one at that.
All gender identities get abortions? No. Women get abortions. Women may or may not claim to have gender identities, these gender identities don’t’ get abortions, the women do. Men don’t get abortions. Men may also claim gender identities. The idea that the set of gender identities claimed by men (for example, “cis male”) is a subset of the set claimed by women strains credulity. So this fails in multiple ways.
Since the dawn of time? Not before the Earth existed. Not before humans existed. Not before language existed. Not before some people decided that how you feel inside was more important for classification than your actual sex. And that wasn’t until a small number of years ago. So, very far from “the dawn of time”.
[…] a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room […]
These ghouls can’t leave anything alone.
https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1587261274488029185?s=20&t=KmiRC16iWi3iqKOq0HUt6A
Uggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh
My Granddaughter has returned.
Two years ago, at the age of twelve, she began delving into the rabbit hole of gender woo. I believe this was partly driven by her closest friend, a girl treated as a boy by his family and the school, and partly as a response to her being sexually assaulted two years earlier.
She had spiralled so low that she was making accusations of sexual assault against one of her mothers (not the birth one and later found to be lies), refused to go home, and ended up living with me and her grandmother for 6 months while we worked to reconcile her with her parents. We attended counselling with her where she said she was trans, didn’t think I would accept her for that, and I was given the gender
fairybread person. I gave the counsellor a reading list!She returned home and not long after we moved a 2 hours drive away. She went from being a Harry Potter fan (devoured the books as an 8 year old) to hating JKR because of her anti trans views. She could not be dissuaded. She cut her hair short and wanted to be called Liam.
She stayed in contact with her grandmother but rarely spoke with me. I accepted it but was sure the phase would pass. I was happy to give her time and space to work it out.
Three weeks ago she stayed 4 nights during the school holidays. On the drive, she again raised the subject of pronouns, telling me there were hundreds of them, and that I should respect people’s pronouns. Driving at 120 km/hr isn’t the best time for a discussion, so just let it lie. She also told us she had decided to grow her hair long again. She was as talkative as she used to be, no longer the sullen teenager we had to face.
On the second day of the visit, she asked if I still had all the Harry Potter videos and if we could watch some. Strike me PINK! Something’s afoot here. We had a good visit, just like the old times and I was sad to take her home.
Last night she was on the phone with her grandmother and asked to speak to me. She was upset that she’d been dumped from a friendship circle at school, something that happens all too often with teen girls. I had always been the one she turned to for advice on these matters in the past. I made supportive noises and told her a joke.
Then, she told me of an old woman that she helped out when she was lost. She told me the old woman said she is pretty. I asked her how that made her feel “Good, really good”, she answered. And so did I.
My granddaughter is back.
That is brilliant news.
Really pleased to hear that.
@25: I’m so glad to hear that!
O.M.G.
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/195394/pseudoscientific-american-jumps-the-shark-blames-pelosi-attack-on-gc-activism
An article in The Atlantic on parent-child estrangement.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/why-parents-and-kids-get-estranged/617612/
I note this:
We have all seen countless lists outlining the various features of pseudoscience such as Bob Park’s “The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”. Some of us have even written such lists ourselves. I thought it might be interesting to attempt something similar for Bogus Social Justice Movements (henceforth referred to as BSJMs). Examples of BSJMs include MRAs, incels, the dominant strand of trans rights activism, NAMBLA, the pro porn/pro “sex work” lobby etc*. Attempts to portray legitimate criticisms of Islamism as “Islamophobia” or portray legitimate criticisms of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “antisemitism” can be understood in the same terms**. As with pseudoscience, there is no non-arbitrary place to “draw a line”, such that everything on one side is 100% legitimate social justice activism and everything on the other side is 100% bogus social justice activism. Rather than a sharp definition we must make do with a set of criteria. Most BSJMs will probably meet most of these criteria to some degree, but none has to meet all of them 100%. So, without further ado, I give you
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Social Justice Movements
1. People vs. Ideas
• The goal of every legitimate social justice movement is to protect real live human beings from injustice and harm.
• BSJMs are usually more concerned with protecting ideas, behaviors, belief systems, ideologies, cultures, traditions, policies, or ways of life. Criticism of what people think, say, or do is re-interpreted as an attack on who they are.
2. Unstated Premises
• BSJMs make frequent appeals to non-specific “rights” that their opponents are accused of denying or violating. Even the most basic tenets of their cause are based on premises and definitions that are best left unspecified.
3. Dubious Connection to Harm
• Every legitimate social justice movement can provide endless examples of obvious, demonstrable injustice and harm.
• BSJMs make exaggerated claims of “harm”, as well as “oppression”, “hate”, “persecution”, “violence” etc. based on a Danish cartoon or the proper use of pronouns (!). The alleged “harm” only shows up at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations and stretching of word-meanings beyond the breaking point. Quite frequently the apocalyptic rhetoric boils down to the implicit threat that the alleged “victims” themselves will hurt themselves or others if they don’t get their way.
4. No Debate
• Every legitimate social justice movement is actively seeking to change hearts and minds through open debate. If anything, their opponents are the ones who are trying to shut down debate because their position is indefensible.
• BSJMs are more concerned with silencing dissent and forcing their views down people’s throats unexamined through intimidation and bullying. Anything other than blind, unconditional agreement in advance is spun as debating their “right to exist” (#2) etc.
5. Conflicts with Real Social Justice Movements
• No real social justice movement is attempting to make other oppressed or marginalized groups less safe from injustice or harm.
• What BSJMs call “oppression” usually boils down to other groups having rights on their own (the right to free speech, the right to leave the dominant religion, the right of lesbians to be uninterested in your “lady cock” etc.).
6. Appropriation/Forced Teaming
• BSJMs appropriate real social justice movements and claim monopoly on speaking in their name while being actively hostile to their goals (#5). Every right and protection gained by other marginalized groups is re-interpreted as belonging to the usurpers instead of the people for whom they were originally intended (and the people who did all the actual work fighting for them).
7. Institutional Capture
• Real social justice movement usually play with open cards.
• BSJMs are more inclined to work by stealth to capture institutions from the inside and change legislation with little or no meaningful debate or accountability (#4). One favorite strategy is sneaking weasel words into bills that were introduced to protect other groups (#6) and use them as a trojan horse for the BSJM’s own agenda.
* As I recently commented there was a time, not too long ago, when the same applied to smokers.
** This remains true even if we concede that bigotry and hate against Muslims and Jews is a real and very serious problem.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany […]
(Plagiarizing my Facebook page in reference to this article.) This is a very cool find in itself, and it provides evidence that Basque was being written before the Romans came to the area. But there are a couple of things about the article that bug me. First, the headline: this doesn’t shed any light on the “origins” of Basque (whatever that means); instead, it provides some evidence for what scholars of Basque already knew–that Basque was spoken in the region before the Romans came. The more interesting aspect is that this seems to show that Basque was written before the Romans came along. Before this discovery, the earliest direct evidence of Basque came from Roman transcriptions of Basque names (both place names and person names).
The other thing that bugs me is calling Basque “mysterious”. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about Basque. True, it’s a language isolate, meaning that it has no known linguistic relatives, but the most likely reason for that is that it’s the last remnant of the languages that were spoken in Europe before the Indo-Europeans moved in and established (or imposed) their languages on most of the continent. For whatever reason (probably because no one thought it was worth trying to conquer a bunch of sheep herders in the Pyrenees) Basque survived while the others died out. Not mysterious, just fortuitous.
Basque does have a lot of features that don’t exist in Indo-European languages, such as ergativity, but that’s not terribly uncommon in other world languages. There’s really no need to exoticize the language.
But anyway, read the article. It’s really cool. (And the one word they’ve deciphered so far is related to the modern word “zorionak”, which means roughly “congratulations” but is also used for “Happy Birthday”, “Happy New Year”, and so on.)
The Battle for Terf Island is not won
Free from paywall thanks to Web Archive:
The movement is not about rights, it is about subjgation. Subjugation not only of women and LGB, but all of us who speak English, or want to discuss a serious topic.
Ministry officials declare that this not official policy and was not authorized to be released.
*tears hair*
I was reading a recent New York Times article about how gambling interests have infiltrated American college sports, now that sports betting is legal. It’s a fine article about an appalling situation, and I don’t wish to get into the weeds here about it, but there is one aspect I thought I’d mention.
The gambling interests have provided financial incentives to the schools to promote and publicize their particular gambling sites or apps. Much of the outside money that goes to colleges for major sports goes directly to the athletic department, for good reasons, and as required by NCAA “regulations”. These gambling financial incentives are mostly expected to go to athletic departments as well. But these gambling contracts were a clandestine maneuver, and many people involved in financial and athletic oversight are upset about them; some are calling for the funds to go somewhere other than the athletic departments.
College athletes are disproportionately from marginalized communities. Given that, one official suggested that the financial incentive money should go toward: promoting Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. Huh. This was likely an off-the-cuff response, but it strikes me as the wrong thing to do. I don’t have a high opinion of such programs, either for their results or their aims. But why not suggest that the money goes toward education, the core mission of the school? Is this college now, a bunch of sports teams and diversity programs, with education no higher than third place in the priority list?
Yes. Has been for a long time.
Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen just got an…. interesting phone call. So of course she recorded the whole thing and put it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC905EneF0s
I just watched that. Infuriating.
NYT teaser headline, which doesn’t match the actual headline on the page: In Women and Nonbinary People, Monkeypox Cases May Have Been Missed. I wonder what was found? This:
Oh. So men caught the disease one way, and women another. Not a darn thing to do with gender. It would have been so much simpler to just say “men” and “women”, but no, the researchers and reporters needed to go through all these verbal contortions.
And note, there are “men”, but they don’t go through verbal contortions to leave out “nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth” or “transgender men”. They know what a “man” is, but not a “woman”.
Funny that it’s “As in men, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women” when surely it should be “As in men and nonbinary people, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women.”
Interesting thread here.
Journalist E J Rosetta has had a change of mind (“peaked”, she calls it) after researching what was intended to be a critical piece on J. K. Rowling:
“3 months of dedicated research & I cannot find a single truly transphobic JK Rowling quote that stands up against the scrutiny of journalistic integrity.
The abuse JK has endured is beyond forgiveness. Every death threat, r*pe threat & torrent of abuse, she has born w/ grace. ”
https://twitter.com/ejrosetta/status/1595060667446595587
Nice one, but sounds familiar:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/one-groups-rights-are-being-sacrificed-for-the-other/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=one-groups-rights-are-being-sacrificed-for-the-other
:)
Whoops!
No worries! There’s way too much to keep track of, duplicates are inevitable.
Just… Ugh.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/31/1069428211/parents-selling-children-shows-desperation-in-afghanistan (Funny how there’s been no surge of trans women in Afghanistan.)
The link in #46 was broken. Here’s the link without the surrounding HTML.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/31/1069428211/parents-selling-children-shows-desperation-in-afghanistan
Awful story.
Interesting piece in The Spectator by Julie Bindel:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/where-did-it-all-go-wrong-for-trans-charity-mermaids/
And here’s a depressing thought experiment to go with the article.
Imagine two British people, who read UK publications over the last ten years.
Person A reads the Guardian, The New Statesman and Tribune regularly.
Person B reads the Times, the Spectator and the Economist regularly.
Which person is going to be reading the most accurate articles about the Trans controversy?
Sadly, Person B.
Cringeworthy pablum in a Facebook post image/meme from a group called “Gender Inclusive Schools”:
I can see the superficial point of not turning kids into personal projects and trying to force-fit them into molds. But the wording and implications of the actual text are troubling. It might not be so troubling if this kind of wording was not so often used to obscure important issues, but that’s what we have.
Once again, the confused use of “who you are” causes problems. I’m sure most of what they are talking about here are physical characteristics or aspects of character and mental state. “Who you are” is a particular individual, regardless of what you look like or how you act. “That’s not who I am” is more accurately “That’s not the way I wish to act” or “wish to be perceived” or “would like to be treated” or “prefer to look”. Yes, of course parents provide guidance on behavior and expectations; no, parents generally don’t wonder if their child is really a different person, perhaps a 13th century monk.
I don’t think it is at all appropriate to intend to celebrate everything children think or feel about themselves. Children sometimes feel pretty crappy about themselves; there is no reason to celebrate that. But even more positive things may be strongly at odds with the views of the parents, and I think advocating “celebration” is asking the parents to lie. I have great respect for people who can accept that other people, including their own children, might pursue something that the parents find awful, and the parents might support them in this endeavor, but I think demanding that the parents stop thinking this endeavor is awful, and even celebrate it, is too much. I see a lot that kind of sentiment in this meme. No, we parents don’t need to celebrate everything, nor even allow it.
It seems obvious to me that a hidden aspect of “who they are” in this meme has to do with gender identity and sexuality. As before, I don’t think parents are obliged to celebrate a child’s declaration, nor even to agree. I hope sensible parents can push back against gender identity declarations, and assert that people are not born in the wrong body, it isn’t possible to change sex, sex is a biological characteristic. I do hope that all parents, whether they agree or not with these declarations, can express love for their children.
How are the parents even supposed to know if their teachers are instructed not to consullt them about gender issues
Sackbut,
The absurdity of that proposition should be self-evident (“Serial murderer is what he is, and I love him for that”), but I wonder how they would feel if their child came out as a gender critical feminist.
You really wonder if the person who wrote this made the slightest attempt to imagine how it would play out in real life, with real kids.
“Who you are is a drug user.”
“Who you are is a girl being groomed by the creepy dude next door.”
“Who you are is a kid who gets drunk at parties and drives too fast.”
“Who you are is a gun fetishist with a grudge.”
“The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.” Parent of the year, that one! Even “good kids” need guidance, and boundaries!
Even if this were only intended to apply in the narrow field of a kid’s sense of gender identity, I would think that if “who you are” includes being deeply unhappy with one’s body, it would be more compassionate to try to alleviate the root of the problem than to play along with a child’s delusion.
The 11th Circuit just released its decision reversing Judge Cannon’s order appointing a special master. That case is remanded with instructions to dismiss.
No doubt Trump will request review by the Supreme Court, but I don’t like his chances. The SCOTUS majority may consist largely of conservative hacks, but none of them seem to be willing to go to bat for Trump’s personal interests as opposed to those of the GOP generally.
So I was reading this article on how the Effective Altruism movement is grappling with the exposure of Bankman-Fried as a crook, and came across this odd but familiar reference:
I don’t really have a point to make, just thought it was amusing.
That is amusing! Also wrong – Elevatorgate was a sexism scandal, not a sexual one.
Seems like a thousand years ago now.
I just found this unpleasant article, “How To Start A Fire” by someone called Ben Miller.
In this piece, Miller blames gender-critical activists for the terrible shooting at Club Q. He lumps people who object to the use of puberty blockers to treat young people with gender dysphoria in with conservatives and fascists. it’s quite a rant:
https://archive.ph/43uHF#selection-1095.35-1095.104
As reported elsewhere here on B&W I was granted a Substack blog account and I think it’s a shame to let it go to waste. I did get around to writing my first post, a brief essay on the notion that transgender rejection is a RW thing:
https://mikehaubrich.substack.com/p/hello-world?sd=pf
“People need to tear down their own roadblocks” – excellent quotable. Excellent post.
Thanks, I’m glad you like it!
Letter to the New York Times from Professor Marc B. Garnick about the use of Lupron as a “puberty blocker”.
Professor Garnick has studied the effects of Lupron for the FDA. He says we are still learning about the effects of the drug on older people, and “woefully little safety data” are available for Lupron’s effects on children and adolescents.
https://twitter.com/hpmacd/status/1597600446675570688
https://archive.ph/4pqfc
Mike:
I guess by that determination I am not a man. I have never managed to grow a single bear in my whole life! ;-)
They’re almost as difficult as orchids!
A bit of levity, not intended by the comic but funny anyway. I think I’m going to start calling transactivism “the TiM-first movement”.
https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2022/12/03
I just came across this HuffPo article: My Daughter Got A New Haircut. I’m Shocked By The Things Strangers Now Say To Her.
The 12-year-old girl in question, Jenny, is, in fact. a girl. She got a short haircut. Some dad with a daughter on the opposing soccer team referred to Jenny using masculine pronouns. Jenny’s teammates corrected him by saying “You need to check your pronouns, buddy”. Jenny’s father gets tied up in knots about how Jenny has “identified with her birth gender for her entire life”, and wonders if the other man was concerned about an unfair advantage or was making a political statement about trans people. Jenny’s father also offers to discuss “why you’re so concerned with the body parts below our daughter’s beautiful head of hair”.
In the current climate, I can’t fault the man for wondering, nor can I fault him using masculine pronouns for someone who he thought was male. The correction is not about pronouns, but rather that Jenny is a girl with short hair. If Jenny were actually a trans-identified male, I would assume that well-meaning “trans allies” would similarly say that Jenny is a girl with short hair, and not turn it into a question of not knowing the bespoke pronouns of everyone in the world, including those you’ve never spoken a word to. If the man were in fact told that Jenny is a girl, then maybe he was being rude by continuing to use them, but if it was about “checking pronouns”, that’s just nonsense.
The man may indeed have been concerned about the unfair advantage of having a boy on the team, and that’s a legitimate concern, although perhaps less so at 12 than a few years later. I’m sure the “body parts” Jenny’s father was talking about were primary and secondary sex characteristics; he was missing things like height, bone density, musculature, body shape, and other characteristics that do provide sports advantages to males.
There do appear to be other instances, mentioned but not described in detail, where Jenny was presumed to be a boy. In the current climate,entirely too many girls are influenced to pretend to be boys, and one thing they might do is cut their hair short. I don’t know how Jenny’s father expects people to tell the difference. He seems accepting of the idea that girls pretending to be boys shall be referred to as boys, but dammit he wants his daughter to be seen as a girl. even by strangers. People have been mistaking short-haired girls for boys, and long-haired boys for girls, for many years, since well before the current “gender ideology” craze, but it’s worse now, and he doesn’t see that.
The BBC 100 Women list is out! Let’s play How Many Men Are On It?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-75af095e-21f7-41b0-9c5f-a96a5e0615c1
2, that I know of.
And those two men are in there as “first trans woman to do x”, whereas there are women on the list who have won the Fields medal, Olympic medals, risked their lives in numerous ways…
“First bloke to do X while pretending to be a woman” does not exactly compare to those achievements.
In addition to not belonging on a 100 women list, in addition to knocking women OFF the 100 women list.
Back in July, Ophelia posted about a find that shed light on the dinosaurs’ Very Bad (Last) Day:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/quite-a-find/
It might be the case that one of the researchers committed fraud in a paper written up about the find:
https://www.science.org/content/article/paleontologist-accused-faking-data-dino-killing-asteroid-paper
DePalma failed to include the raw data from the isotope studies his findings were based on, did not include on the sampling techniques and protocols, or the name of lab that was used for the analysis. Also, in an extreme version of “the dog ate my homework,” the technician who is said to have performed the isotope work has since died, and is unavailable for comment.
Along with this, During noted some oddities in the data that was presented. Her critique makes interesting reading. Much of it is far too technical for me to fully grasp, but from what I do get, it sure seems that DePalm’s paper sounds pretty dodgy.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/9B9D041BD4D3633C2D4F99D002DF87
PZ praises the students of his university, and shows what petty shits they are (students and PZ both):
What follows is a photo of some decorative crap, including a badge with the message “JK Rowling fucking sucks”.
Good grief.
In Scotland women who complain about trans ID males in their women only hospital wards may be removed, and the administrators equate such complaints with racism.
I follow Pharyngula so you don’t have to and this is pretty funny:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/12/11/these-are-the-kinds-of-christmas-gifts-popular-with-the-kids-today/
Why haven’t “They” made this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
into a movie?
Re #74
Looks like one was made in Russian in 1981:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232882/
There was a 2017 short film:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8683382/
I saw a reference to possibly another film on the topic, but I couldn’t tell whether it was the 2017 film or a film still in production.
The Russian film is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video under the title “Nights Witches in the Sky”.
Thanks.
American Girl dolls jumps on the trans bandwagon. It’s all about promoting body positivity through drugs.
I delved into the comments, and came across this unintentionally comical exchange:
Commenter 1:
Commenter 2 responds:
I love a dash of irony in the morning.
An article about The J&B ad in which a grandfather learns to put on makeup to receive his trans granddaughter for Christmas.
This ad, and the glowing uncritical article, seem backwards to me. For those who don’t wish to view the video: a grandfather buys makeup and secretly learns to apply makeup to his face. When his grandson, who has decided he is female, comes to visit, the grandfather helps him with makeup before introducing him as a “granddaughter”, and as such he is accepted and welcomed by the family.
If the young man were simply effeminate and gender nonconforming, it would make perfect sense for the grandfather to experiment with makeup and women’s clothing to show the grandson acceptance. The grandfather’s acts of helping the young man with the makeup also fits perfectly well with this variant of the story.
But the young man is claiming to be a young woman. The grandfather is not claiming to be a grandmother. It is possible to learn to apply makeup to someone else without applying it to yourself, and I suspect those are somewhat distinct skills. I would think that a man performing femininity, while making no claims whatsoever of being female, might be perceived as mocking the “trans” youth.
Imagine if a Christian youth converted to Judaism, so the grandfather tried wearing a kippah and growing payos and wearing tallit, as if the appearance, rather than the religious practice and the actual claim of being Jewish, were the most important thing.
I forgot to mention that the book Transpositions, compiled by Sarah Phillimore and Al Peters (moley) is available on Amazon:
https://twitter.com/doodle_bobby/status/1602741539444297729
It’s a collection of people’s peaking stories. I have the Kindle version, but I’d recommend the paperback, it’s one of those books that’s good to flick through. Some of the stories are heartbreaking.
I went to the book launch event, which was some high quality TERFing. As you might have heard, Sarah advertised it on EventBrite who pulled the event for “Hateful, Dangerous, or Violent Content.” Then the venue contacted her to ask her not to mention the venue online because they were afraid of violence. In the end, there was no ‘protest’ at all, which was almost an anti-climax.
Sarah is suing EventBrite and has a crowdfunder here:
https://democracythree.org/campaign/stop-tech-censoring-women-help-me-sue-eventbrite/
Here’s menno reading some of the stories:
https://youtu.be/jYsFxvpeEqI
[…] a comment by latsot at Miscellany […]
The Kennedy Center announced this year’s Mark Twain Award winner. Adam Sandler. Adam fucking Sandler.
Now I’ll confess I’ve never seen an Adam Sandler movie–the most I’ve seen is a few previews, plus some of his SNL routines, and frankly life is too short to sit through an Adam Sandler movie–so I’m probably in no position to criticize the award. But there’s something more basic that’s bugging me. Mark Twain was a writer. He gave some public performances of his material, of course, but he earned his fame through his writing.
Here is a list of the winners of the award over the years. Some of them are (or were) very funny (Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin); others, not so much (Will Ferrell? Really?). But with the exception of Neil Simon, none of them are famous for their writing. They’re entertainers, not writers (and even Simon’s writing is meant to be performed, not read). So why do they get an award named for a writer and not, say, Dave Barry or Alexandra Petri?
They should rename it the Groucho Marx award. Then at least it wouldn’t be a category error, even when it’s a travesty.
A twitter thread by my friend Henrietta who, as you will see, is a total badass.
This is happening to disabled women who need care. I can only barely begin to understand the anxiety she and other women must feel if their care can’t be guaranteed to be provided by an old-fashioned woman of the female sex.
I do know that whenever my chair is out of commission, I am frantic. I know I’m usually angry enough that the Hulk would take a few steps back, but I’m fairly stoic about myself and what’s happened to me. But here’s me saying I am frantic if I don’t have use of my wheelchair, even if I’m not planning to go anywhere. Stands to reason, it hits me in my voonrables.
And here’s Henrietta, describing her daily routine and saying why she needs care from a woman. She’s been abused for days by men and women who say that she should not be allowed to put her safety, dignity, autonomy and anxiety above the feelings of men who want to abuse vulnerable women.
There are a few people who’ve made me feel humble over the last fifty years. H is one. She’s such a delightful. funny woman who cares about everybody before she cares for herself.
Read her stuff, if you can bear Twitter.
And Ophelia: you could do worse than ask if she’ll expand on her thread here, if you think it fits.
https://twitter.com/hen10freeman/status/1603022204467351556
Thank you for the introduction to Henrietta.
Re Adam Sandler
I think he was very good in The Wedding Singer. His stand-up rap about “phone, wallet, keys” is hilarious. I don’t think I’ve seen the entirety of any of his other movies, because they are usually in a “goofy comedy” genre I don’t usually bother to watch, but the portions I’ve seen are not impressive.
Excellent point that so many of the winners have produced no well-known literary humor.
I think I disagree a little about the Mark Twain award and the idea that Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin are not writers but entertainers. They all write/wrote their own material, don’t/didn’t they? Aren’t they writer/performers? The thing about Twain is that he started out as a humorist. I know nothing about the award but I’m guessing it’s for people who do both? Write their own material and perform it?
Futrelle posted about Rowling’s crisis shelter. Guess what? Apparently the whole thing is just a cynical move to make something the poor men that want to be women can’t have.
And other stupidity.
I wonder if Futrelle has ever seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian? He might take exception to Reg’s telling Loretta that they can’t have a baby.
Jeezus.
Ophelia @85,
It’s true that some of the past winners of the award wrote their own material, or at least much of it, but I don’t think it’s true of all of them (Lorne Michaels? Julia Louis-Dreyfus? Jay Leno?). And I’m not disparaging performers or comedy writers as a group–clearly it takes talent to do it well, and many of the winners of the prize are (or were) brilliant. But writing to perform is a different talent than writing to be read–unless you have the talent of Shakespeare, the full impact doesn’t come across on the page. It’s like giving Dylan the Nobel for literature–whatever you think of his songwriting, I’d argue that it’s a different category than literature.
Also, Wikipedia says this about the award (I tried accessing the Kennedy Center site, but it won’t let me in):
I can sort of see how that applies to some of the winners, but does anyone think that Will Ferrell has an “uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly”?
I wasn’t talking about the whole list, which I haven’t looked at. Just those three specific examples got my attention because of the writing their own material aspect.
But hey, it’s the Kennedy Center. What even is that? Kennedy himself was one of those inflated figures so maybe it’s sort of appropriate that it pretends Jay Leno is a Great Writer.
Good point. (The Kennedy Center is sort of a quasi-official performing arts center in DC. It puts on Important Performances in a venue that probably seemed modern when it was designed in the sixties. We’ve seen some good shows there over the years, but it’s not cutting edge.)
Respectable art!
They put the “in” in “institution”!
Meet Stella. Sella has a hobby. No, an obsession.
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmiXX3TVQeY
Ah god I’ve seen Stella before, I love Stella. [mops streaming eyes]
Connecticut rule allowing transgender athletes in girls’ school sports upheld
The usual lie is packaged in the article heading – the issue is male athletes in girls’ sports. Par for the course.
I’ll take correction from a lawyer, but the argument that a right has been breached seems strange to me. As we’ve said in response to Veronica Ivy’s claim ‘access to sports is a right’, no, at least not as an individually stated thing. This seems to me more like a breach of promise undertaken by the athletics association of that (and other) states, as they fail to provide a fair competition despite claiming so.
I suspect this different framing makes the burden on the moving party lighter, as breach of rights often requires stringent judicial tests.
I also take issue with the reasoning supplied in the verdict:
This is an argument with diminishing returns. It is only true so long as there are other competitions in which female participants can find a fair field, meaning the argument cannot be applied to every competition available – once the last competition succumbs, the premise of the argument – that there are other avenues available to women – is no longer true. And if an argument cannot be applied generally, then it seems it is not generally valid but relies on externalities to mitigate the impact its own successes.
Unfuckingbelievable.
[…] a comment by Holms at Miscellany […]
Absolutely dreadful article by someone called Naomi Gordon-Loebl in the Nation magazine. It’s called “Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in the Age of Ron DeSantis.”
And it’s as bad as its title:
https://archive.vn/SjRnu
“These attacks, from the legislative to the interpersonal, have called upon trans people to prove our identities. Even mainstream news outlets regularly question our legitimacy: In October 2022, The New York Times ran a piece noting, and at times tut-tutting, an increase in top surgery among young people.”
2002: “If you don’t support George W. Bush and Tony Blair, then you support Osama Bin Laden.””
2022: “If you don’t support mastectomies for lesbian and autistic teenage girls, then you support Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.”
Sex Matters posted this blog entry and they include an analysis in three parts of the weakness in the science that claims to support an affirmation model for transgender children:
The “gender affirming” care model is built on sand
Here’s an excerpt:
And, yes, I know that this will not be persuasive to the people it really needs to reach (affirmation therapists,) because they will look at the source and decide that it’s transphobic hatred. I plan to read the articles today since I am on PTO for the week, and make notes for my substack.
The House Select Committee has announced its criminal referrals, including four against Il Douchebag of Sea-to-Lake. But one thing that caught my attention:
I don’t think the Secret Service blocked off the whole Mall; if not, you can imagine all the weapons that weren’t confiscated.
Apparently NASA is considering an all-female crew for a mission to Mars. The reason, according to a NASA article from 2014, is that women are smaller, less resource-intensive, and better able to withstand the rigors of such a flight. An inflammatory, undated headline recently lampooned by a friend of mine (no article link, just a screen shot) claimed it was to prevent the astronauts from having sex; the ensuing discussion (after they got off the topic of lesbian sex) assumed it was all about pregnancy prevention.
I might have expected this friend and others of his friends to say, “No, they can still get pregnant, because some of the women might be trans”. They are generally consistent trans advocates. But no. They tacitly recognize that NASA saying “all-female” really means all-female, not all-people-who-claim-to-be-women. They know what women are. They know there are differences. They just refuse to acknowledge them when inconvenient.
Behold, Stanford’s guide to the Elimination of Harmful Language!
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf
Yeah, it’s both as hilarious and infuriating as it sounds. It lists phrases deemed offensive, alternatives to use instead and the reason for the phrases being offensive in the first place.
Enjoy. But I think it’s worth pointing out their explanation of why “Karen” is offensive and the alternatives:
Word: Karen
Alternative: demanding or entitled White woman [capitalisation theirs]
Reason: This term is used to ridicule or demean a certain group of people based on their behaviors [crazy American spelling theirs*].
It’s… interesting that what I assume is a bloated committee of language police so completely failed to understand that the problem with “Karen” is the misogyny. Interesting but unsurprising.
* Oops, I mean surprising/wild US Citizen spelling
I’m extremely worried about the disastrous vote in Scotland about GRA ‘reform’. I still hold out some hope that there’s a legal avenue; Scotland must still abide by the Equality Act and this seems in flagrant defiance of it.
But I’m worried in particular about disabled women in Scotland, for a very particular reason. I explained it here.
https://twitter.com/latsot/status/1605962754640072709
This year’s defense budget means 61 F-35s… As much as they’ve annoyed me as an over engineered waste of resources over the years it does mean I needn’t worry about employment for a while. Wouldn’t mind seeing them escort humanitarian flights in Ukraine.
Bad news for the planet: Greenland’s glaciers are melting 100 times faster than estimated.
https://www.livescience.com/greenland-glacier-melt-model
Wo.
Warming denialisms – “More fresh water for the rest of us. About time Greenland stopped hogging it all!”
Tiny Tim’s freaky song The Other Side from 1968 comes to my mind again.
Warning, women, if you have any masculine tendencies at all, don’t die. They will trans you.
Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
How many ways can the patriarchy tell women and girls that they must express feminity, or they will be shoved back into a gender cage. Not content with Joan of Arc, now the writer of a novel about women and girls must have been trans because she chafed against the gender roles of her time.
Saw an article about this advert on CNN.com, then found it on YouTube.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=187&v=LEshVJ1IECw&feature=emb_logo
The sentimentalization is pretty extreme.
Siiiiiiiiiiigh. That’s always been right on the surface with Alcott – everyone already knows it. See also: Willa Cather. Cue the headlines: there have always been women who didn’t embrace “femininity,” and they were still women. The Times must be desperate for filler.
Re #111, extreme indeed. I commented on it in #78 above, in the context of a silly article about the ad. It’s quite a mishmash.
So you did! Thanks for the heads up. I need to get to the misc. room more often.
Sack @78 I think I interpreted the beginning of the ad as the grandfather being a cross dresser in private, and not wanting the grandson to share in his shame, and nowadays it’s more acceptable, so he goes all out with his grandson? Maybe I was looking at a different aspect of it. I like your take on it better.
WaPo: Cutting through customer service doom-loops by calling in a ‘Karen’
https://www.karensforhire.com/
Gobsmacked. What could possibly go wrong?
I do note that they have both men and women working for them.
Yeah, so rather than push back against the “Karen” stereotype, they go with it and “harness” it. I’m not convinced.
Good grief. Imagine the Washington Post doing a story like that about hiring a “Rastus.”
This is interesting…a positive review of the film “Adult Human Female” by Elaine Graham-Leigh.
https://www.counterfire.org/article/adult-human-female-review/
What’s interesting is that “Counterfire” is an explictly Marxist website. Seems left-wing gender critical views might be coming back to UK debate now.
An article by Ceri Black that you might like. Ceri knows what she’s talking about. She did a PhD in queer theory and was fully mired in it for years. And now she’s being sued by Aiden Comorford, quite a journey.
Anyway, there are some interesting points in there from a queer theorist’s position.
https://ceriblack.substack.com/p/queer-praxis
One welcome change emerges from the chaos at Musk’s twitter: Glinner is back.
Grauniad: Transgender woman sues female-only app Giggle for Girls for alleged discrimination
This is an Australian TIM filing the suit. I get the impression that, given how this issue is going in Australia, he’s likely to win. I hope not.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B3m7ckGhnsc
More discussion here of Greta Thunberg and transism. It’s so sad.
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/236744/intelligent-gnc-female-bullied-for-her-looks-on-the-spectrum-showing-signs-sympt
PZ has a fascinating post today.
Huh. I wonder if this is applicable to anything popular today?
Alabama is involved in a legal fight over whether the state can criminalize certain aspects of “gender-affirming care”. It has subpoenaed WPATH, the AAP, and the Endocrine Society. The three organizations have filed a motion to quash the state subpoenas, claiming that the scope is overly broad and violates their First Amendment rights. I don’t know if they are justified, I don’t know if what the state is trying to do is reasonable, but I do get the distinct impression that the organizations have a lot to hide and are trying to do so.
Here is a philosophy paper that anyone – even your dog – can read:
Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?.
That’s it! Just the title, no content. Three authors.
The contents are in fact identical to that of a paper in Annals of Improbable Research many years ago. The title of that paper was “Recent advances in artificial intelligence”. Plagiarism?
The brilliant Nina Paley was crowdfunding a comic book. Indiegogo cancelled it after it had met and exceeded the goal. No explanation, no chance for appeal, the money has already been returned to the donors.
https://twitter.com/ninapaley/status/1611122694304722946
The ‘reason’, of course, is certainly that she’s a TERF.
She’s determined to find another way to fund the book. She’s not a woman who is so easily silenced.
I absolutely love her work, check it out if you’re not familiar with it.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Further evidence that the trans movement is about reinforcing gender stereotypes. One of Angelina Jolie’s daughters has decided she doesn’t want to be a boy after all. But this manifests itself in changing from comfortable, baggy clothes to a hand-me-down designer dress from her mother, along with putting her hair up in a bun and putting on makeup. At least she’s not wearing heels. And of course the narrative is all about how beautiful she looks now.
She’s 15 years old.
Why can’t the narrative be that girls are allowed to wear baggy pants and jackets? (Or for that matter that boys can wear dresses and makeup?)
Prince Harry claims to have ended the lives of 25 “chess pieces” (aka human beings) and also claims to be neither satisfied or embarrassed by it. Callous much?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/uk/prince-harry-taliban-afghanistan-criticism-intl-gbr/index.html
Trouble in paradise…
https://twitter.com/TransActivismUK/status/1611831064166645766?s=20&t=__0EtRTT24bjLw9lVuA9zQ
Brazil is having its own Jan. 6th moment, and by some odd coincidence Bolsonaro happens to be in Florida.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/08/bolsonaro-invade-congress-lula/
This is interesting: “Tim Davie facing revolt over transgender Pride network ‘policing’ the BBC”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/08/tim-davie-facing-revolt-transgender-pride-network-policing-bbc/
Ooh that is interesting. Long overdue & interesting.
Grab your popcorn.
Man legally changed gender to gain custody of his kids. Trans groups are concerned.
A man in Ecuador has declared himself a woman in order to take advantage of Ecuadorian laws that favor the mother in child custody cases. Trans activists have said that his actions are “not in the spirit of the law”. No shit, Sherlock.
But a man who suddenly decides he’s a woman in order to be moved from men’s prison to women’s prison, or to use the women’s locker room, or to compete on the women’s team, that’s perfectly fine.
If I could change my body: https://youtu.be/8LR_w5dOLrU
NPR: The sports world is still built for men. This elite runner wants to change that
Terry Gross interviews Lauren Fleshman, an elite runner and the author of a new book, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World. Fleshman makes many excellent points about the physical differences between men and women, and how so many things in women’s sports either fail to take those differences into account or are there for pleasing the male gaze. But somehow, when it comes to trans ideology, she suddenly loses the plot, and thinks it is possible both to be aware of sex differences and have women compete alongside men.
I’m guessing Fleshman knows that directly stating that males claiming to be women should not compete against females would cause her a lot of trouble. So she says inclusion of trans athletes is important, even though males have physical advantages of females when it comes to sport. But she doesn’t try to explain how that could be done. The trouble is that it really can’t be done but we mustn’t say that because it would hurt trans people. Or, rather, trans people would throw a fit. I can understand Fleshman not wanting to be a target herself.
I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today (https://twitter.com/SFWnortheast/status/1613794277183852546). There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.
If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.
I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera and I’ll be in a crowd. And The mic isn’t great.
If you don’t know what these events are about, here’s KJK talking about the Newcastle one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG2gIR2HVWM
[…] a comment by latsot in Miscellany […]
Ok, I usually don’t comment directly on what goes on over at Pharyngula but I am going to say something about what’s apparently not going on: any mention of the Minnesota art professor fired for showing some paintings of Mohammed.
Maybe I missed it. Or maybe PZ has some personal or professional relationships with people involved and has prudently declined to comment. But this is exactly the sort of topic which would have once provided much material for posts and discussion. Despite all reasonable efforts, Muslim sensibilities are performatively “offended” by the mere presence of once-revered depictions of their prophet. It’s a perfect opportunity to rail about separation of church & state, as well as the way fundamentalist religion both infantilizes the believers and induces them to control others. It’s even local. But … nothing.
One possibility: religious identities have become included with marginalized racial & gender identities and to attack one is to implicitly attack them all. If it’s wrong for a Muslim to be psychologically scarred by Islamic art in an academic setting, it’s now arguably wrong for a trans-identified student to be psychologically scarred by gender critical views in an academic setting. Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Plus, being on the same side as religious Christian conservatives may no longer be considered an occasional and incidental byproduct of a consistent liberal commitment to integrity. It’s a red flag for being on the wrong side.
A no-brainer became a choice, and then the opposite choice became obviously better. I still find it surprising.
Maybe I missed it.
Ah well the more conformist of PZ’s commenters decided I was “Islamophobic” around the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, so it’s possible that he’s avoiding the Hamline issue lest they accuse him of “Islamophobia.” He’s captive to them at this point.
Scottsdale is one of the more conservative suburbs in Phoenix, but even that city’s government is too much government for a roque development out in the foothills. The people who built there, (in the desert) to escape government are now pissed that the governmet is not catering to their water needs. I used to hike near there, occasionally. Yes, it’s an idyllic location for living away from the hustle-and-bustle and the desert hills are beautiful. But this is a water issue in a dry state, and they’ve known this was coming for years and should not have built out there. The wells are dry.
Scottsdale Cuts off Water Supply Amid Drought.
We’ll see more and more of this in the coming years.
Carry on. Global warming is a hoax.
I guess they think water is magic.
The Washington Post had an excellent, disturbing series recently on abuse in the bodybuilding world, including of course sexual exploitation of female bodybuilders. Karen Attiah followed up with a mostly excellent opinion piece, pointing out that even female bodybuilders are vulnerable to the male gaze and male abuse. I say “mostly excellent” because this is the final paragraph:
There is an excellent response to her piece in the comments section.
Sastra, that is interesting.
A jolly little cake a young woman’s little sister made to celebrate the former’s double mastectomy.
https://twitter.com/ratgoku/status/1612262833059676160
This is all so desperately sad.
[…] a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany […]
“Science Museum removes trans-inclusive display after ‘propaganda’ complaints
The Boy or Girl? gallery, featuring a fake penis and chest binders, was removed after objections it was ‘not science’”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/17/science-museum-trans-display-remove-propaganda-complaints/
A 17 year old girl is showering at the YMCA when a naked man walks in.
Here’s a video of her talking about how terrified she was. She is visibly upset thinking about her five year old sister and her friends being in that same locker room.
https://twitter.com/babybeginner/status/1615963611360563202
She spoke to the YMCA who confirmed that it’s just fine for grown men to shower with teenagers in their facilities and was made to feel as though she was at fault for simply asking
Here are some of the comments this seventeen year old woman received on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/babybeginner/status/1615963611360563202
There’s another Standing for Women event (similar to the one in Newcastle last week) in Glasgow on 5th February. I think I will probably go. It’s the same drill but there are lots of people going who I Twitter-know and would like to meet in person. Plus, who wouldn’t want to take that train journey along the north east coast?
But, more importantly, I found out yesterday that Scotland’s largest Furry convention will also be in town! It also includes the adult baby men!
How could I not go? The train up there will be like a mobile zoo!
I don’t expect much aggro between the feminists and the furries unless someone leaves the gate open and the furries escape *whistles innocently*. It’s OK, though, the women are all going to be armed with bottles of Febreze, which should ward the furries off. I’m not sure what to do about the adult baby men, though. It’s not as though punishment is going to work, is it? They’d just be back for more.
Anyway, noon on the 5th, at a TBA location near Queen St Station (the SFW thing, not the furry thing). The one after that is in Hyde Park on 26th, if anyone’s in London.
A stunning contribution from Babycham Socialist Owen Jones:
https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1616008459958231040
I’m sure you won’t let a little thing like being blocked by him get in the way of viewing this extraordinary piece.
Oh, and that’s not even the full video. Apparently the proper one goes on for 25 minutes of the same.
Enjoy.
Got this as a reply to my recruiting for a D&D game in my local FB social group: “However, I’m very into heavy role playing and am very queer so a queer friendly role playing group is something I am desiring.” It’s good for me to belong to the FB group, so I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, but fuck my life…
I think it’s a bloody TIF, but this I think is why we should’ve kept gatekeeping nerd shit… “Yes you can play, but you’re going to play *our* game; if you want something different do it somewhere else.”
Trump and his attorney Alina Habba sanctioned for just under a million dollars for their frivolous suit against Clinton, Comey, and dozens of others.
This is what we in the legal profession call “bad news” if you’re on the receiving end….
This is a scoldy tweet from a writer. I am not familiar with her, but apparently she thinks she is brilliant. I don’t know if your comment section will allow this sort of embedding, but I’ll give it a go. If it doesn’t work, I’ll add a new comment and just post a link to it.
This is the “men have already been invading women’s spaces for years, and the GRR doesn’t really change things, so just accept this new piece of paper” argument. And what we take out of this is the very tone-deaf repetition that there is only one demographic whose needs are important, and everyone else needs to accommodate them. Much like the guy in BC who only feels “comfortable in women’s spaces because men are muscular and I’m a slob,” it doesn’t really matter how the women in the restrooms, gyms, prisons, and other spaces where they are vulnerable to sexual assault, battery, or even just the leering that men do, as long as the men get access.
And, yes, it’s only really a problem for men in women’s spaces. Trans ID women do not bother men in private spaces because we are very rarely subject to such assaults by women, and are often flattered by women or men checking us out in the gym. We take it as admiration, not as intrusion.
What she conveniently ignores, or has decided doesn’t matter, is that this is a men’s movement to break away what few barriers have been propped up to give women space away from men. One wonders what trans ID males did to pee back when public office buildings only provided restrooms for men. Did they have to “hold it” until they got home, as women did? Did they have the urinary leash?
And another thing that is completely illogical about this GRR fracas: if it really changes nothing, then why is it so important to steamroll it through and to create a crisis in Scottish Devolution? It’s either absolutely vital or no big deal, it can’t be both.
Just like TERFs are a tiny minority of cranks who should be, and deserve to be marginalized and ignored, and an all-powerful cabal just moments away from unleashing trans genocide. Same tune, different lyrics.
I saw a notice that Women’s Declaration International would be at Artifacts Gallery in Athens OH. Why? I searched. AG is a clothing store. They posted some signage in favor of women and disagreeing with gender identity ideology. So of course there’s a boycott and a protest.
I found this article about the planned protest, and it’s the usual nonsense. The sign saying LGB with a rainbow and a heart? Not allowed without the T, it’s just part of the word or something. Can’t say people can’t change sex. Can’t say no to men in women’s sports. For these horrible statements, the store had to close temporarily.
https://www.thepostathens.com/article/2023/01/artifacts-gallery-protest-2023-weekender-main-transphobia
“Oh, and that’s not even the full video. Apparently the proper one goes on for 25 minutes of the same.”
Jones has a *monomaniacal* obsession with his imagined “anti-trans activists,” who are “frothing about trans people”, who have “allowed [their] humanity to rot away” and whose “anger and fury and bile” are a fixation for him. I’m not a psychologist, but the aggressive tone suggests a real insecurity about the issue for Jones.
I wonder is there any truth in the rumour that Jones was frustrated about not getting a position in a Corbyn Labour government, and decided to lash out at anyone he suspected of having gender-critical views as a response. He made them the scapegoat for his own disappointment.
Certainly, while Jones supported gender ideology before the December 2019 election defeat, I don’t remember it being the all-consuming obsession for Jones that it is now.
Seems to me Jones was on the naughty step a little while ago for something or other, so maybe he has to be even more furiously pro-trans in order to demonstrate loyalty, and to deflect further suspicion, running as fast as he can to stay in one place and not lose ground?
Dearie Me. Chase Strangio is furious at the recent NYT Times story about parents and trans minors:
“How many Sunday cover stories does the NYTs need that debate trans life?”
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1617170020567506948?cxt=HHwWiICzlZnkq_EsAAAA
As is the extremist trans activist Ky Schevers :
“At this point, not noting that many anti-trans parent groups work with the far-right is not just enabling transphobia, it’s enabling fascism. The anti-trans movement is intertwined with the global far-right movement. The NYT is laundering fascism when it launders transphobia.”
https://twitter.com/reclaimingtrans/status/1617216728320155648
The actual NYT article is here. It seems pretty good:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/us/gender-identity-students-parents.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Aha, thank you.
@YNNB,
So group X is simultaneously weak and cowering, not deserving of our respect or even consideration as humans, and yet a dangerous, devious, all-powerful threat to the superior group’s existence that needs to be eradicated. Where have I heard that before?
A bit of local Alabama news that may be of interest here. This is about the internecine battles within the Alabama Democratic Party. The party has been largely ineffectual for a good few years. Part of the reason has been too much internal fighting about representation, and too little effort at developing and promoting candidates for office.
First, an article about the arguments over proposed by-laws changes. A few years ago, the “old guard” was pushed out, new by-laws written, and life seemed to be coming back to the party. Last year, some of the “old guard” returned to power, life was essentially snuffed out, and fights over the by-laws resumed.
Second, an excellent opinion column by Josh Moon about all this. He pulls no punches. He talks about the continuing fights over the minutiae of representation in a party that is all but irrelevant in the power structures of the state. The party is an extreme state of dysfunction, they promoted almost no candidates this election, they haven’t updated their web site or their Facebook page since August, and this is what they are worrying about.
I think this is yet another example where excessive emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion concepts has derailed genuine work, be it government, education, or what have you.
I had originally written this as a contribution to the comment thread responding to the story that Mike B mentioned here
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/making-any-member-feel-awkward/
before discovering that you needed to be a paid member to post. Not wanting to pay to do that, I thought I’d post it here instead. Keep in mind this was intended for a different audience, so forgive me if it reiterates arguments ideas I’ve made here already. But with fewer swears. The direct link to the story and its comment thread is here:
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/01/changing-the-definition-of-woman-patriotism-and-how-dictionaries-work.html#disqus_thread
Why oppose this definition: Women are adult humans who identify as female. As I said above, is it simply an unflinching desire to defend the truth about the dictionary meaning of a word? Or is there something else you object to?
I object to men who claim to be women being put into women’s prisons. This something that is already happening. I object to men claiming to women demanding access to women-only rape shelters. This is already happening. I object to the crimes of men claiming to be women being attributed to women, thus invalidating statistics used in policing, law enforcement and public policy. This is already happening. Why should “gender identity” (whatever that is) have any bearing on facilities, spaces, and positions allocated on the basis of sex? It shouldn’t; they are two completely different things. Yet trans identified males are demanding, and being given access to, what had once been women’s single sex spaces, all on the coat-tails of this new, non-standard definition of “woman.” This is not simply about defending the dictionary meaning of the word woman. It’s more importantly about the health, safety, and dignity of women. That hijacking and distorting language is one of the avenues through which women’s rights and safety are threatened, that is on those pushing the new definition of “woman” that includes men. “Of course transwomen are women! It’s right in the name!” Well, by such logic, sawhorses and pommel horses are horses, and I look forward with interest to their inevitable racing in the Kentucky Derby.
Language is more than just important in this discussion; it is vital. I will digress here to make a note on usage. In the interests of clarity, I do not use the term “transwoman” or “trans woman,” but “trans identified male” to refer to males who, for whatever reason, believe they are, or claim to be, women. They are not women of any kind. They never will be. If this is “transphobic,” then reality is transphobic. Trans identified males remain males however much or little they alter themselves surgically or hormonally. Keeping this fact clear makes discussion more open and honest. It makes what is at stake and what is being demanded more obvious.
Trans activists will sometimes admonish feminists for supposedly conflating “sex” and “gender,” but at other times use this very conflation to advance their cause, regardless of the cost and danger to women. Humans can’t change sex. So that’s a hard no for access to facilities segregated on the basis of sex. But somehow a male “perfoming femininty” is supposed to be given entrance to these spaces because he “identifies as” a woman. Dressing up as a woman is supposedly enough, but not even necessary. Under self identification, or “Self ID,” (which is a concept being pushed in many jurisdictions), any man, “trans” or not can claim to be a woman and gain entrance to women’s single sex spaces. This makes harder for women to defend these spaces, as it removes the ability to prevent any man from entering, because they might “identify as” a woman. This makes it easier for predatory males to access female only spaces. The best course of action is to bar all males from such spaces, however they might “identify”. Demanding entrance to women’s spaces automatically makes any such man a risk. It’s big red flag that women are being told to ignore.
…the real question is why are people so vexed and insistent about this? If you admit that people can change genders, why fixate on “but not sexes.” I don’t buy that it’s just about defending the truth. People who defend the idea that sex is malleable are not more confused about any of the “facts” that their detractors are.
This question works just as well in the opposite direction. People so keenly interested in breaking down the concept of sex, on redefining “woman’ in such a way that it includes men (while, curiously there is nowhere near the equivalent pressure and insistence on redefining “man” ) seem to have an intense interest in allowing men to have acces to women’s spaces, positions and facilities. That seems to be the whole point behind all of these efforts to redefine “woman.” Women are certainly the ones being asked to stand down, step aside and pay the price by letting men in. If humans can’t change sex, then yes, those who see sex as “malleable” are confused about the facts, and one is left to question why they are so insistant on defending something that isn’t so.
Being female is a condition of material reality, not something you can “identify” into if you are not female to start with. A man can no more become a woman through “identifying” as one any more than I can identify as an inverebrate, or as being made of antimatter. My identification and wishful thinking matters not a bit to the universe. I will remain a vertebrate made of ordinary matter for the rest of my life, however fiercely I may “identify.”
It’s interesting that some of the same people who object to Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be Black furiously deny that her imposture has any parallel with the claims of trans identified males, even though unlike sex, racial identity can be a “spectrum” depending on one’s parentage. Whatever one my think of the utility of the concept of “race,” people of diverse ethnic and geographic origins have children all the time, and they can exhibit a wide range of features that one might attribute to “racial” markers: skin colour, blood types, hair types, eye colour, etc. Without further investigation (and the testimony of her family), it could have been the case that Dolezal was of African American heritage. There is no way that a trans identified male is in any way female. The embarassing thing about the Dolezal/trans comparison is that trans claims are less credible, that is to say impossible. Yet rejecting Dolezal’s claim, while accepting those of men claiming to be women, like swimming cheat Wil(Lia)m Thomas is supposedly “progressive.”
In humans, sex is binary and immutible. The existence of people with disorders of sexual development (or, less accurately “intersex”) does not change this. Sex is not a “spectrum;” there is no third sex, no intermediate between sperm and ova. Certainly there is a small number of individuals with conditions of sexual development that represent edge cases, but those people are still male or female. Most DSDs are specific to one sex or the other. Their existence does not suddenly render the concepts of male and female useless and incoherent, any more than dawn and twilight invalidates the concepts of day and night. The cursory nod to so-called “intersex” conditions is simply a way to justify the appropriation of the DSD concept and terminolgy of “assigned (sex) at birth,” as if doctors and midwives attending births have to guess at a newborn’s sex, decide arbitrarily, or flip a coin and write down M or F based solely on heads or tails.
The only reason I can see is that people want to pretend that it’s just a “natural biological fact” that people can’t do whatever thing they want to do, when what they mean is “don’t do that” or “its wrong to do that.” People want you to call a blastocyst a baby because they want to make abortion illegal. People who call BLM protestors “thugs” do so because they oppose BLM. If that’s not you, then what is your reason? I think you could pick a better fight.
This isn’t the winning argument you think it is.
I’ll accept that those who are so keen to change the definition of “woman” to include men want to use this new, idiosyncratic, and counterintuitive definition to do something that the customary, standard one would prohibit, things that would normally be met with “don’t do that,” or “it’s wrong to do that.” So what is it that men want to do in women’s single-sex spaces? It’s a hell of a lot more than “just go pee.” Male sex offenders aren’t suddenly discovering they’re “trans” just to go pee. Mediocre male athletes aren’t jumping to women’s leagues just to “go pee.” This deliberate trivialization and minimization of trans identified males demand to “just go pee” hides the real, brutal cost that women are already paying for accepting these newly-minted “women” who are men int their spaces. This is not accidental. The issue is much more than “bathroom bills,” but women’s real, legitimate concerns are brushed aside as outdated prudery, or vindictive bigotry. Attemps to fight against opportunistic distortion of language is painted as pettifogging bookishness. It’s just one little word: woman. How does expanding the meaning of one little word hurt anybody? I’ll tell you how. How can women defend their rights in law if the law doesn’t know what a woman is.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany […]
I am currently reading Linsey McGoey’s The Unknowers, on the value of “strategic ignorance” to the the wealthy and powerful. It’s mind blowing in a way; I had never thought of ignorance as a weapon in the way described in the book. Think plausible deniability on steroids. Think 2008 financial crisis, the Grenfell fire, global warming and all the other environmental problems we face, think coming resource shortages.
I am only a few chapters in, so won’t attempt a summary. But this being the blog it is, I thought I could mention a couple of examples from the book: Treating women as not being important, to the point that they and their contributions are totally forgotten.
Take Milton Friedman. He won the 1976 Nobel memorial prize in economics (not an actual Nobel prize, mind you), in large part based on his book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. His book? Well, he happened to have a co-author named Anna Schwartz. Never heard of her? Me neither. According to the book, “Friedman himself acknowledged that Schwartz was an equal partner in the writing of their masterpiece.” Oh well – she’s just a woman, so what’s the big deal?
Next up, Adam Smith and On Liberty. Again, Smith acknowledged the contribution of his co-author Harriet Taylor, both in the essay itself and even more so in his autobiography. Still, it was published in his name only, and only his name is now associated with this work. I suppose that is just how things were in those days, but still …
Finally, an anecdote from other sources: When Swedish mathematician Gustav Mittag-Leffler learned that the Nobel prize was going to be awarded to Pierre Curie for their work on radioactivity, he stepped in and informed the committee in clear language that Marie Curie (full name Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie) deserved the prize in equal measure, for this was an equal collaboration between the two of them. Fortunately, the committee listened, and they received the prize jointly. So hiding the women doesn’t always work. But assistance from well connected and highly regarded men is sometimes necessary.
In this thread, JKR says: “I’m reading the transcript of the tribunal of Mermaids v LGB Alliance. It’s a bit mind-blowing, seeing some of the answers set down in black and white. 1/”
and she’s right. She gives examples.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1618916080298381319
Below is a link to a clip from a very nice performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The soprano is Elijah McCormack. She has a lovely voice and is a skilled singer.
https://youtu.be/Zv03N41KNjo
She also claims to be a he. The WaPo article where I found the link to the clip says:
Given the severe effects of testosterone on voices, I suspect she has not gone in for hormone treatments. I wonder if other women-who-claim-to-be-men choose to forgo the (desired) effects of testosterone treatment in order to preserve a singing voice.
There are a small number of adult men with soprano voices. They are sometimes called sopranists, in particular by those who take care to differentiate the voice from that of a countertenor, who is often a falsettist. Wikipedia suggests that they may owe their unusually high voices to endocrinology or to an underdeveloped larynx. Notable male sopranos include Robert Crowe and Michael Maniaci.
It would be perhaps ironic if women started being included in the tiny list of “male sopranos” simply by declaring themselves men.
That is very nice.
Also interesting.
I’ll just leave this here. I expect I’ll be doing this a lot in the future.
https://twitter.com/purleeze/status/1619096230566531073?s=20
Video from the Transpositions book launch I went to a while ago. There are some names and faces you will know among the speakers and a live musical performance by Menno!
I haven’t watched it yet. Moley says the sound isn’t great (the venue’s fault, I think, it was a bit echoey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ll4azjOW4
A thread with stats on “gender diverse” prisoners in the Canadian prison service.
https://twitter.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1619188707298521089
Some “highlights”:
The report is here: https://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/research/005008-r442_E-en.shtml
Harald @166,
I think you mean John Stuart Mill and On Liberty (unless you’re referring to two different books).
Hi there, I expect someone here will be able to turn this up–can anyone locate/provide a link to that exchange where PZ Myers claimed there were five (seven?) sexes of horse, and listed various terms for different kinds of horses, and the respondent pointed out that each of these terms described either a male or a female horse?
Guest (#174), that would be this one…
It would! Thank you.
I see that LGB Alliance has the tribunal transcript.
It’s going to be quite the read, I expect.
Serious allegations against Dan Muscato.
https://twitter.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1620850931389861890
And a reminder of some of his other unsavoury activities:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/danielle-muscato-grifter-supreme
I wonder whether PZ will mention this. I just checked and he’s blogged about 2 American Atheist board members who have sexual allegations against them…
I await developments. Thanks for the alert!
Wow. I’m not surprised, based on what I’ve seen of Dave/Danielle, but this is new information, thanks. I just saw the business about the two American Atheist board members ousted.
“Danielle” and I have (or had) at least one mutual FB friend, and one (female) told him he was more of a woman than she was, in a thread I saw on her page several years ago.
What a Maroon @173,
Duh, you’re right. (Egg on my face.) I was mixing up names because the book I was reading also discussed Adam Smith. Apparently, he was not quite the laissez-faire advocate that present day libertarians make him out to be. On the contrary, he argued strongly for government regulation of business, to curb and control the natural consequences of human greed. But that part has largely been excised from many editions of The wealth of nations.
Watch Nicola Sturgeon trying with all her might to avoid calling the rapist either him or her in response to being asked whether he should be considered a woman.
https://twitter.com/mar2vickers/status/1621139392499965954
Good god.
I’m well aware that Tom Jones has a reputation as a real ladykiller, but come on now.
Tom Jones: Delilah banned for choirs at Principality Stadium – (BBC)
It’s the lowest-hanging fruit that gets picked first…
Gotta disagree with you on this one. It is about a sexually jealous man murdering a woman. They don’t sing songs about lynching before football matches do they?
Delilah? I had no idea. None. I’ve never paid any attention to the lyrics. It’s got an irritating tune and a catchy refrain, but that’s all the notice I ever took. Wow.
I’ve been listening to Unsafe Space – astonishingly, on the BBC. How long before the cult clamours to have it deleted, I wonder? It is a (mildly amusing, occasionally hilarious) poke at a wide range of ‘woke’ issues. Each episode is around half an hour, and is available online at the above link immediately after the broadcast is finished. The episodes are broadcast on Thursdays at 23:00 UTC.
The latest Mess We’re In (podcast by Arty, Graham Linehan and Helen Staniland) is particularly good. There’s a lot of interesting discussion and the guest is the woman who was assaulted at the Newcastle Let Women Speak event, who is also very good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZXSBjmy7NQ
Thank you, latsot! I was searching YouTube earlier to see if there was a new one (it feels like months since the last) and got side-tracked watching Arty Morty’s interview of Shape Shifter (very good). I just decided to have a quick look here to see if there are any new comments before renewing my search, to find that you have posted the link!
tigger @ 187 – same. I knew it as an intensely annoying hard-to-ignore song with the repeated “why why whyyyyyyyyyyyyy Deeeliiiiiiilah” and nothing else. I looked it up after reading J.A.’s post. Oh how sweet, yet another extra-popular song that’s about murdering a woman.
Salman Rushdie has a new book out. Looks intriguing.
Victory City
Decades ago, if I had claimed that originalist judges would rule that the government can’t convict an abuser who agreed in his restraining order not to own guns and then was found in possession of guns, because dudes in 1789 didn’t think abusive husbands should have their guns taken away, I would have been accused of strawmanning.
And yet…. two Trump appointees (and one of Reagan’s shittier ones) just said pretty much that.
I just… Why? Why would any sane person suggest this?
“Gestational Donation”, aka, “Let’s get women to volunteer as baby incubators if they ever end up in a persistent vegetative state.”
I read Daily Kos; it sometimes has good material. It is just awful on gender identity ideology, though, and this article was astoundingly bad.
Trump proposes genocidal national ban on transgender existence if he wins 2024
They imply, with analogies to the Holocaust, that trans-identified people will be rounded up and killed. Nothing of the sort has been suggested; people have disagreed with gender identity ideology, including saying that people who identify as the opposite sex are not in face the opposite sex, and this view is described as an attempt to “define transgender people out of existence”, therefore genocide. That’s not genocide, that’s disagreement. It’s like disagreeing that Jews are the Chosen People, that there are no Chosen People, therefore Jews are not what they claim they are. It doesn’t kill anyone who claims to be part of the Chosen People, it just says they’re wrong.
Beyond that, I think the article exemplifies some of the kinds of discussion difficulties that have been brought up here. The author and people quoted in it say that doctors, rather than politicians, should decide what constitutes proper medical care for trans-identified people, but the problem is they only talk about doctors who have been swallowed by the ideology; they think their side constitutes the evidence-based, settled science.
The bullet points listed from Trump’s rant (I haven’t listened, but I think everything he says is a rant, so no quibble there) are:
1. Pass a bill that falsely claims there are only two genders, male and female
2. Reverse legislation for life-saving gender affirming healthcare
3. Ban all education of transgender and non-binary issues in schools nationwide
4. Ban transitioning for youth nationwide
5. Sign an executive order to end programs for gender transitioning for all ages nationwide
6. Criminalize and hunt doctors and educators who try to save transgender and non-binary lives
Obviously the framing is incorrect, but the only one I think I’d oppose is number 6. Number 3 might be a problem if the education they were talking about was critical of these issues, focusing instead on how to avoid social contagion and on biological reality, but you know that isn’t what they’re talking about.
It is just awful having to defend proposals from any right-wing demagogue who happened to be correct in one area, but when that demagogue is Trump, it’s worse. I wish the leftist writers at Daily Kos could see, at the very least, that there is legitimate disagreement here, that people on the left also disagree, and that maybe they should examine their own positions a little.
Just a quick note that the Let Women Speak event at noon today in Glasgow (the one with the furries) will be livestreamed on Kelly-Jay Keen’s YouTube channel. Livestreamers will probably be able to see and hear more than those of us who’ll be there.
There’s also an overhead and far away webcam showing the square, which is good because from overhead and far away is my best side.
https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/forms/webcam/Webcam.aspx
There are at least three women intending to talk about same-sex care for disabled women, which is especially important and topical in the UK right now. And, of course, there will be much talk of rapists in women’s prisons.
Lots of big gender critical names will be there. It should be a good one.
@tigger_the_wing #188: It appears to be gone, assuming nothing went wrong when you copied and pasted in the link you posted.
My apologies, it seems that the Beeb doesn’t like hyperlinks. It won’t work for me, either, although the link has copied and pasted without errors and works when typed in. Try copying this link and pasting it into the address bar:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gx1z/episodes/player
Ah, it was only an extra quote character at the end of the address. Remove it, and it works. (Ophelia, feel free to fix the link in #188 and delete this post and the previous one. But who am I to tell you to feel free to do what you want on your own blog?)
Heh, no no, I do want to be told when it’s fine to delete something.
Sure enough, fixed.
Maybe I’ll remove all these later. Maybe not. They’re part of history!
Thank you, Ophelia!
Happy to dalling!
Hmm, for some reason I did not see #198 when I posted #199, so the latter post may seem a bit odd. But anyhow, it all works out in the end.
Quote from Facebook: “Spare me your revisionist dogma” (this in response to the use of “CE” in lieu of “AD”).
My question for the peanut gallery: can dogma be revisionist? And can revisionism be dogmatic?
I’ve been mitigating the boredom of being stuck in bed by listening to Queens Speech podcasts on YouTube again, and I though that you might be interested in this segment which seems to discuss the origins of the plea from the defence of Adam Graham for mitigation because of his sudden claim to womanhood, more than a month before it actually happened. I’m linking to the start of the segment here:
https://youtu.be/dGJIDoYZbXU&t=3240