Protest being organised outside the UK Green Party Conference from 6th-8th September at Manchester Central.
It’s being organised by Supporters of the Green Women’s Declaration for Women’s Sex-Based Rights (GWD), many of whom have been suspended or expelled from the Party.
Dr. Hilary Cass has published an article in the The British Journal of Psychiatry, called “Gender identity services for children and young people: navigating uncertainty through communication, collaboration and care.”
Thank you, Mostly Cloudy, at comment 2, for the link to the piece by Dr. Cass. It made for very interesting, and sobering, reading. How many thousands of young women have been turned prematurely, by the ideological and unprecedented rush to treatment (a treatment without any evidence of efficacy, and with dangerous effects), into old women? Old women with atrophied and/or surgically removed reproductive organs, damaged hearts, fragile bones? Destroyed forearms and severely damaged urinary tracts? Ugly mastectomy scars? It’s heartbreaking when any one of those things happen to a woman unavoidably, due to injury or cancer; but all of them, without any indication of a life-threatening illness, to one previously healthy teenager? How did the medical profession fall so easily into routine horror?
Trump doesn’t understand gender ideology issues, but once again I find a Republican making more sense on the issue than the left-wing publication reporting on it.
“The transgender thing is an incredible thing,” said a slouching, low-energy Trump. “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child, and you know many of these childs [sic] 15 years later say ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’”
But schools in the US are allowing children to pretend to be the opposite sex and adopt new names, and some places have laws that the schools are forbidden to tell the parents. And there are many detransitioners who have expressed anger at how they were pushed into the transition process; there are lawsuits in progress.
A piece in the Guardian about the BMA rejecting the Cass report has a quote from Dr. Jacky Davis about the lack of rational reasoning behind the rejection.
[Davis] also claims in her piece that those driving the union’s “anti-Cass” policy “are sincere in their beliefs [but] have no hard evidence for their opposition”
Belief without evidence pretty much sums up the entire trans stance: it’s a matter of faith; you just have to believe. The BMA council responded to Davis by taking a leaf straight from the TRA playbook.
We are not aware of any bullying complaints from Dr Davis or supporters of her position through BMA channels or processes.
“This is in contrast to the frankly abhorrent transphobic and homophobic abuse directed at BMA members and staff on social media in response to our work on the Cass review.
“I cleaned up their container because it was choked with silk. They seemed kind of sulky afterwards, but look, clean soil, and I propped up a clam shell to give them a nice shelter. What did they do? They coated everything with silk! I can’t even see into their hiding space because the silk is nearly opaque!”
If ever there was doubt over whether virtue signalling was a thing… Mustn’t offend the gender feels of a spider!
I came across this review in Inverse magazine about a Netflix movie called Uglies. The focus of the review is how this is a 2014-style movie that came out ten years too late, for reasons I don’t understand. Apparently there was a YA (“young adult fiction”) dystopian craze ten years ago?
The movie features a dystopian society in which all citizens are required at 16 to undergo cosmetic surgery to become “Pretty”, after which they move to City, an idyllic community where nothing goes wrong and everyone is happy. The central teen character starts questioning the merits of being Pretty, and the motivations of Dr Cable, the person in charge of the project. She flees and joins a resistance group that has discovered the surgery is more than cosmetic: it affects the brain, making people more docile and less able to think for themselves.
The reviewer thinks the story line is ambiguous enough that people can make of it what they wish, but it screams “transgender ideology” to me. This is enhanced by the fact that Dr Cable is portrayed by Laverne Cox, a well-known trans-identified male actor. The review notes as much:
It’s a great villainous scheme within the story, but from the outside looking in, it’s hard for it not to feel icky: Laverne Cox, a trans woman, is playing the role of an evil mastermind brainwashing children into getting life-changing surgeries without them knowing the true side effects. It doesn’t take that much of a leap to turn this beautiful supervillain into a right-wing talking point.
Perhaps it could be a right-wing talking point, but surely it’s a point for anyone opposed to unnecessary cosmetic surgery done to meet societal demands rather than medical needs, and that’s not unique to one side of the political spectrum.
How did the medical profession fall so easily into routine horror?
I think the better question is how we forgot that the medical profession has always been horrific. Its history is an endless litany of horrors inflicted on patients by clinicians both benevolent and malevolent. Technological advancement by applied atrocity has been the rule and also the reason for the field’s rapid progress.
Here’s a piece at The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel, Elon Musk has Reached a New Low, about Musk “using Twitter as a political tool to promote extreme right-wing agendas and to punish what he calls brain-poisoned liberals.” I agree with Warzel on the premise.
As we lurch closer to Election Day, it’s easy to feel as if we’ve all entered the Great Clenching—a national moment of assuming the crash-landing position and bracing for impact.
And it’s with clenched teeth that I read articles such as these, bracing for the moment when the author inevitably cites “transphobia” among the charges of right-wing extremism. I’m so used to seeing otherwise good articles like these ruined by the inclusion, like a loud, stinky belch in the middle of a hymn, that I was very suprised when my eyes reached the bottom of the page, no belch of “transphobia” within it. I had to double-check that I hadn’t missed anything by searching the page for “trans” and “gender” — zero matches found.
I like to think this is a sign of change, that a journalist can write an entire piece about Musk’s unhinged, right wing Twitter behaviour, and not once mention the most public change he’s made to Twitter’s policy, its permission of gender critical speech.
Good interview with Katie Herzog with journalist Hadley Freeman. They discuss eating disorders and the trans issue.
Some highlights:
“Yes, [trans/non-binary] is the new way for girls to express fear of womanhood and it’s being socially validated and the parents are going along with it, which is a big difference from anorexia.”
“There’s a lot of parents at those organisations who have what they call a ‘trans kid’ and therefore no one at the organisation is allowed to critique child gender stuff,” Freeman says.
“Again this is different from anorexia. It’s not like if there’d been a whole load of journalists at The Guardian in the 90s who had anorexic teenage girls, then the paper would have to run loads of articles praising anorexia.”
More normalization by making things “inclusive”: upcoming video game includes top surgery scars in character creator along with specialty pronouns, body type A/B (rather than female/male), gender separate from sexbody type, and all the other nonsense. And this isn’t some indie studio making a little product for a niche audience. This is one of the biggest names in the business.
He had to give notice now, because the statute of limitations on federal lawsuits is 2 years. However, the odds are that he’s hoping the DoJ will not respond immediately, letting it become a denial by default in six months. Why? Because if they reject it immediately, it has to go to a judge before the statute runs out, and Donnie doesn’t do well in front of real judges. But if the DoJ just ignores it and hopes it goes away, then if he wins the election, he then would be in a position to tell the DoJ to settle the suit. I’m sure that if the statute of limitations hadn’t forced his hand, he would’ve waited until the period between the election and the inauguration, so as to be sure it would work. As it is, he’s trying to run out the clock to when he hopes to be back in office, and can literally order the DoJ to give him the money he wants.
I don’t know if that was intended as a Lovecraft reference, but I’m now chuckling at the image of Trump-as-Cthulhu. I can just picture him rising from the depths of his sunken city, Mar-a-R’lyeh, the non-Euclidean geometries of his form defying all known physics. He should be falling forward, and yet he stands. And atop it all, seething and writhing like eels, his mass of tantacular appendages give the illusion of a bad hair-piece.
Ah, now I’m gonna have to go cajole a diffusion model into generating some appropriate images.
One interesting thing about it is that the language is quite technical. When I worked for TPM there was a strict rule against academicspeak: it’s a magazine, not a journal. One of my jobs when subbing was to change all technical jargon to ordinary language. For this one I would have had to request a complete redo. Maybe that rule is no longer in effect, I don’t know, but if it is still a rule, I wonder if they made an exception in this case. Sort of “Ok cowboy, trying yelling ‘terf’ at this.”
It wasn’t just about having to look up, it was about coming across as technical, insidery, professional, etc. A style thing. The worry wasn’t so much about being incomprehensible as about being for philosophers only.
Take the first four sentences:
By normal scientific standards, the hypothesis that a woman is an adult human female is the natural default answer to the question “what is a woman?”. Call that the sex-based account of woman, since it explains being a woman in terms of being female. The sex-based account of woman is simple and informative. It is stated in perspicuous and independently well-understood terms.
It’s recognizably academic philosophy-speak. That’s what the editors wanted to avoid.
Following the open letter signed by more than 1000 senior doctors the BMA council has announced that it will now be reviewing the Cass report from a ‘neutral’ position. Nice bit of backtracking, considering their initial response was to reject the report’s conclusions. This bit caught my eye.
On the BMA’s website, BMA council chair Professor Phil Banfield said the Association’s evaluation of the Cass Review would be “evidence-led, starting from a position of neutrality. I cannot predict the outcome of our evaluation,” he said.
Which makes one wonder what criteria was used for the initial rejection of the report.
Here is the insignificant feather in my cap: while I was certainly not the first, tenth, or twentieth person to see and describe what was happening, when I sent the phrasebook in February 2023, mentioning the growing wave of scientific reviews of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors in Europe and the unanimous verdict that the evidence did not support these treatments, no major American news outlet left of center had yet reported on these developments.
The Atlantic broke this long and curious silence in April 2023, three years after France imposed restrictions.15 The New York Times followed in August 2023. Apart from a tiny syndicated A.P. or Reuters item that was promptly buried, the Washington Post suppressed coverage for another year, until April 2024, when the long-awaited Cass Review was released in the U.K. (Like the rest, the Cass Review concluded that there is no good evidence for these treatments. Puberty blockers for gender dysphoric minors are now banned in England and Scotland, a decision made by the Tories and upheld by Labour.) NPR affiliate WBUR interviewed Dr. Cass in May 2024, but otherwise NPR was entirely silent. Anyone who relied on major left-of-center publications for coverage of this issue over the past several years would have known less than nothing prior to these very recent reversals
Several people on Twitter have attacked Yu as a result.
Well note that distinction there… *several* Elon turning Twitter into a white nationalist-adjacent hellsite instead of a Wokie hellsite has made that much less of a problem.
(Amusing how one of de Bodard’s replies says that Yu “references the Cass Review, which is an immediate red flag”. They love spotting and snitching on suspected “transphobes” in these circles).
Amusing how one of de Bodard’s replies says that Yu “references the Cass Review, which is an immediate red flag”.
As if “believing that humans can change sex” isn’t a red flag. In this version of Overton, reality has become an extremist position, while delusion is passed off as the default, centerist one.
Speaking of modern sf/fantasy … I’ve been trying to find a fun read, but every single time I open a new book, sub-amateur grammar gets in the way. These comma splices, are pissing, me off. Don’t get me started on using commas where periods belong, it really kicks me out of the immersive mindset. And do editors ever suggest not starting every sentence with a conjunction? Or do editors not exist anymore?
Having read Yu’s piece, I may have to give her books a chance, as there were no egregious linguistic sins to be found. If she manages the same command of English in her fiction, then that’s a better starting point than most of what people keep recommending to me.
Can’t comment as it’s all audiobooks on my end but James A. Corey’s “”The Mercy of Gods” is just as solid as The Expanse novels… Probably a bit of Enby shit but since I haven’t retaining I’m sure it’s fine.
Nullius in Verba: Oh, that was absolutely a deliberate Lovecraft riff. In addition to his grotesque manner, it also references, for me, Trump’s cult-like worshippers, insanely spouting devotion to a malevolent entity who will absolutely bring them to ruin if he’s allowed back into power.
A post by Mano Singham took a look at Will Ferrell’s comments on the creation of the Netflix movie, Will and Harper (the same work Ophelia discusses in Flawed but vital self-obsession). Mano describes a scene at a restaurant in Texas: “Ferrell decides to ham it up and takes up the [72 ounce steak] challenge while dressed as Sherlock Holmes. In the film, that scene ends abruptly, switching to the two of them talking next day in the car where Ferrell says that he felt that he had let Steele down”. He quotes a a Fox News (!) article at length, and I was struck by the obliviousness of the twits.
They received what they described as an unexpected and uncomfortable response from diners at a Texas restaurant after Steele mentioned the state hadn’t done enough for trans rights, the New York Times reported.
“I’m from Iowa, but I will raise a glass to your great state of Texas,” Steele said to a receptive audience of diners at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, where Ferrell and Steele planned to attempt the restaurant’s famous 72-ounce steak challenge.
“I wish you guys would do more for trans rights in this state,” Steele added, which silenced the cheers and was met with a few groans from the audience, Chron reported.
“Cheers to Texas and trans rights, right?” Ferrell added. The toast didn’t make it into the documentary, but Steele and Ferrell shared their responses to the moment afterward.
“The room started to feel very wrong to me,” Steele said in the film. “I was feeling a little like my transness was on display, I guess, and suddenly that sort of made me feel not great.”
The airheads toured USA specifically to get a feel of the public perception of Harper’s transness – or transness in general – and to that end, put Harper’s transness on display. The person (or duo, in this case) taking the 72 ounce steak challenge is seated on a stage in full view of the diner with a big timer next to them, plus they brought a film crew with them, plus they engaged the room.
“I was feeling a little like my transness was on display” – no shit you goddamn fool! You put it on a stage, lit it, framed it in camera, and shouted it to the room full of people trying to have a nice dinner! Gahdamn, the obliviousness of the pair is amazing.
Sentence fragments are getting more common, too. I don’t mind them from time to time, for emphasis, or in conversation where you expect them, but some authors do it so frequently you struggle to find the last complete sentence. The book I’m reading now does it practically every paragraph at least once.
Came across this Substack post by way of a newsletter. It is about an initiative from the Tucker Center and Nike, called “Coaching HER”, that is nominally aimed at keeping girls from dropping out of sports, but is clearly about imposing gender ideology and the acceptance of boys-who-claim-to-be-girls in girls’ sports. Very good article, by Sarah Barker at TheFemaleCategory, from a few days ago.
I came across a link to an article regarding the recent post here about college women’s volleyball teams refusing to play against San Jose State because it fields a male player, Blaire (formerly Brayden) Fleming. (https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2024/no-more-fluffy-bunnies/).
The linked article mentions a lawsuit by a group called ICONS against the NCAA intended to “hold the NCAA accountable for its reckless promulgation of transgender eligibility protocol.”. What caught my eye was that one of Fleming’s teammates, team co-captain Brooke Slusser, has joined the lawsuit, citing the 6’1″ Fleming as a danger not only to opposition players but also to his own teammates. Slusser said that during matches and even in practice sessions Fleming smashes spike shots directly into the faces and bodies of opposing players, and she claims that he hits the ball with enough force to propel it at 80+mph. To put that into context, I looked up the stats for the women’s game: the World Record spike shot speed is 70.02mph, made by a player for the Italian national team in 2022; the average spike shot speed in the women’s game is a mere 44mph., and that’s at International level, not collegiate.
That, however, isn’t the worse claim by Slusser. She also stated that on team trips to away games she was roomed with Fleming without being informed that Fleming is a transgender-identifying male. He kept it a secret from his teammates, and either the college didn’t know (which I would think is unlikely) or it colluded with Fleming to keep it a secret from the team, thereby forcing a young woman to share accommodation with a man against her knowledge and so without her consent. This in a restricted space where she would be alone with him while dressing and undressing, showering and sleeping. How sinister is that?
The San Jose State volleyball controversy really has me scratching my head.
This seems like a really really poor test case or whatever you want to call it.
How can it simultaneously be the case that:
(a) Fleming is obviously out of place on the court and a physical danger to other players; and
(b) nobody knew until this season (which was not Fleming’s first) that this was a trans woman? (It’s Fleming’s third season at SJS)
AoS’s comment, and the Outkick article, mention Fleming being 6’1″, the implication being that this player is towering over the competition.
I checked the roster of Boise State, one of the teams that defaulted rather than play SJS, and it would seem that Fleming would be median height on that roster. Boise State has eight players below 6’1″, one player at 6’1″, and seven who are 6’2″ or 6’3″
SJS itself has two other players who are 6’1″, and one 6’3″ player. So Fleming’s height hardly stands out.
I’m also not seeing what exactly is so “sinister” about Slusser rooming with Fleming. If Fleming was a cis lesbian, would Slusser have the right to know the sexual orientation of the person sleeping and showering in the same hotel room? If the issue is that Fleming is so physically superior to Slusser (who is 5’11”), imagine a 5’6″ player rooming with a 6’3″ closeted lesbian.
I think that women’s sports are one of the areas where there’s been an overreach. But this seems like a really bad example to highlight if that’s the point you’re trying to make.
There are many examples where someone or a few people speaking out inspires other people to speak out. I think the volleyball case is one such example.
Fleming is male. Single-sex hotel rooms for student athletes has been the norm for a long time. They don’t seek to put gay men together, nor lesbians together, nor do they think it’s fine to put gay men in rooms with women. If you’re suggesting that the single-sex hotel room policy should be abolished, then by all means explain, but that’s the policy in the US. Women expect to be in single-sex spaces when they might undress and bathe. It doesn’t need to be established that Fleming is more likely than a lesbian to be predatory; it’s sufficient that he’s male. Women don’t want to undress in front of gay men or nice men, either, nor do they wish to see naked gay men or naked nice men in their hotel rooms in these circumstances. No men. Why should any exception be made for Fleming, and why should Slusser have to put up with that exception?
First, the only evidence we have that Fleming hits 80+ mph is that Slusser says so. How does she know this? Is there a radar gun in team practices or games? If so, then why doesn’t the report say that she’s been recorded doing spikes of that speed?
Second, if Fleming’s spike speed is so extraordinary, why was nobody commenting on it before she was outed as trans? Did she suddenly start increasing her spike speed this season?
Third, are women especially vulnerable to spike speeds of that velocity? Are male volleyball players able to play safely against 80+mph spikes?
Screechy, you are arguing against single-sex spaces for dressing rooms and locker rooms and the like. I do know people who argue against them. If you are indeed arguing against them, fine, make that argument. But the point here is that they do exist, and Fleming should be excluded from women-only spaces because he is male. I do not personally wish to defend the existence of women-only spaces in this thread. I am trying to establish that there is no salient difference between Fleming and the male volleyball team or male team staff that says Fleming should be allowed to room with and dress with female athletes but these other men should not be allowed.
Protest being organised outside the UK Green Party Conference from 6th-8th September at Manchester Central.
It’s being organised by Supporters of the Green Women’s Declaration for Women’s Sex-Based Rights (GWD), many of whom have been suspended or expelled from the Party.
https://greenwomensdeclaration.uk/women-to-protest-discrimination-outside-green-party-autumn-conference/
Dr. Hilary Cass has published an article in the The British Journal of Psychiatry, called “Gender identity services for children and young people: navigating uncertainty through communication, collaboration and care.”
Link is here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/gender-identity-services-for-children-and-young-people-navigating-uncertainty-through-communication-collaboration-and-care/D0F6B23F37C3D82B38C2470DF65854C9
Thank you, Mostly Cloudy, at comment 2, for the link to the piece by Dr. Cass. It made for very interesting, and sobering, reading. How many thousands of young women have been turned prematurely, by the ideological and unprecedented rush to treatment (a treatment without any evidence of efficacy, and with dangerous effects), into old women? Old women with atrophied and/or surgically removed reproductive organs, damaged hearts, fragile bones? Destroyed forearms and severely damaged urinary tracts? Ugly mastectomy scars? It’s heartbreaking when any one of those things happen to a woman unavoidably, due to injury or cancer; but all of them, without any indication of a life-threatening illness, to one previously healthy teenager? How did the medical profession fall so easily into routine horror?
Trump doesn’t understand gender ideology issues, but once again I find a Republican making more sense on the issue than the left-wing publication reporting on it.
Daily Kos: Trump’s team can’t defend his it about schools and surgeries
But schools in the US are allowing children to pretend to be the opposite sex and adopt new names, and some places have laws that the schools are forbidden to tell the parents. And there are many detransitioners who have expressed anger at how they were pushed into the transition process; there are lawsuits in progress.
A piece in the Guardian about the BMA rejecting the Cass report has a quote from Dr. Jacky Davis about the lack of rational reasoning behind the rejection.
Belief without evidence pretty much sums up the entire trans stance: it’s a matter of faith; you just have to believe. The BMA council responded to Davis by taking a leaf straight from the TRA playbook.
All criticism is transphobia!
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/sep/07/bma-stance-on-cass-review-of-transgender-care-has-damaged-its-reputation
A post from PZM:
“I cleaned up their container because it was choked with silk. They seemed kind of sulky afterwards, but look, clean soil, and I propped up a clam shell to give them a nice shelter. What did they do? They coated everything with silk! I can’t even see into their hiding space because the silk is nearly opaque!”
If ever there was doubt over whether virtue signalling was a thing… Mustn’t offend the gender feels of a spider!
Blocked and Reported Episode #228: “Tranorexia” (with Hadley Freeman) is out this week… I know Ophelia reposts her frequently, so there you go…
I came across this review in Inverse magazine about a Netflix movie called Uglies. The focus of the review is how this is a 2014-style movie that came out ten years too late, for reasons I don’t understand. Apparently there was a YA (“young adult fiction”) dystopian craze ten years ago?
The movie features a dystopian society in which all citizens are required at 16 to undergo cosmetic surgery to become “Pretty”, after which they move to City, an idyllic community where nothing goes wrong and everyone is happy. The central teen character starts questioning the merits of being Pretty, and the motivations of Dr Cable, the person in charge of the project. She flees and joins a resistance group that has discovered the surgery is more than cosmetic: it affects the brain, making people more docile and less able to think for themselves.
The reviewer thinks the story line is ambiguous enough that people can make of it what they wish, but it screams “transgender ideology” to me. This is enhanced by the fact that Dr Cable is portrayed by Laverne Cox, a well-known trans-identified male actor. The review notes as much:
Perhaps it could be a right-wing talking point, but surely it’s a point for anyone opposed to unnecessary cosmetic surgery done to meet societal demands rather than medical needs, and that’s not unique to one side of the political spectrum.
[…] a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany […]
tigger:
I think the better question is how we forgot that the medical profession has always been horrific. Its history is an endless litany of horrors inflicted on patients by clinicians both benevolent and malevolent. Technological advancement by applied atrocity has been the rule and also the reason for the field’s rapid progress.
Here’s a piece at The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel, Elon Musk has Reached a New Low, about Musk “using Twitter as a political tool to promote extreme right-wing agendas and to punish what he calls brain-poisoned liberals.” I agree with Warzel on the premise.
And it’s with clenched teeth that I read articles such as these, bracing for the moment when the author inevitably cites “transphobia” among the charges of right-wing extremism. I’m so used to seeing otherwise good articles like these ruined by the inclusion, like a loud, stinky belch in the middle of a hymn, that I was very suprised when my eyes reached the bottom of the page, no belch of “transphobia” within it. I had to double-check that I hadn’t missed anything by searching the page for “trans” and “gender” — zero matches found.
I like to think this is a sign of change, that a journalist can write an entire piece about Musk’s unhinged, right wing Twitter behaviour, and not once mention the most public change he’s made to Twitter’s policy, its permission of gender critical speech.
Bravo, Charlie.
Good interview with Katie Herzog with journalist Hadley Freeman. They discuss eating disorders and the trans issue.
Some highlights:
“Yes, [trans/non-binary] is the new way for girls to express fear of womanhood and it’s being socially validated and the parents are going along with it, which is a big difference from anorexia.”
“There’s a lot of parents at those organisations who have what they call a ‘trans kid’ and therefore no one at the organisation is allowed to critique child gender stuff,” Freeman says.
“Again this is different from anorexia. It’s not like if there’d been a whole load of journalists at The Guardian in the 90s who had anorexic teenage girls, then the paper would have to run loads of articles praising anorexia.”
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/episode-229-tranorexia-with-hadley-freeman/id1504298199?i=1000669681855
More normalization by making things “inclusive”: upcoming video game includes top surgery scars in character creator along with specialty pronouns, body type A/B (rather than female/male), gender separate from
sexbody type, and all the other nonsense. And this isn’t some indie studio making a little product for a niche audience. This is one of the biggest names in the business.A speech by French gender-critical feminist Marguerite Stern in Lyon resulted in “anti-TERF” graffiti, protests, and a fire:
https://www-lemonde-fr.translate.goog/societe/article/2024/09/19/a-lyon-tensions-autour-de-la-venue-de-la-militante-marguerite-stern-et-de-sa-conference-sur-les-derives-de-l-ideologie-trans_6324181_3224.html?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
One of the latest strokes of grifting genius from the Great Orange One and his cronies:
Donald is suing the DOJ over the Mar-a-Lago raid. He is, of course, suing for 100 Million Dollars. (That line can only be said in the voice of Dr. Evil.
He had to give notice now, because the statute of limitations on federal lawsuits is 2 years. However, the odds are that he’s hoping the DoJ will not respond immediately, letting it become a denial by default in six months. Why? Because if they reject it immediately, it has to go to a judge before the statute runs out, and Donnie doesn’t do well in front of real judges. But if the DoJ just ignores it and hopes it goes away, then if he wins the election, he then would be in a position to tell the DoJ to settle the suit. I’m sure that if the statute of limitations hadn’t forced his hand, he would’ve waited until the period between the election and the inauguration, so as to be sure it would work. As it is, he’s trying to run out the clock to when he hopes to be back in office, and can literally order the DoJ to give him the money he wants.
Freemage:
I don’t know if that was intended as a Lovecraft reference, but I’m now chuckling at the image of Trump-as-Cthulhu. I can just picture him rising from the depths of his sunken city, Mar-a-R’lyeh, the non-Euclidean geometries of his form defying all known physics. He should be falling forward, and yet he stands. And atop it all, seething and writhing like eels, his mass of tantacular appendages give the illusion of a bad hair-piece.
Ah, now I’m gonna have to go cajole a diffusion model into generating some appropriate images.
Interesting piece from the “Philosophers Magazine”, “Unexceptional Sex”
by Daniel Kodsi.
https://philosophersmag.com/unexceptional-sex/
One interesting thing about it is that the language is quite technical. When I worked for TPM there was a strict rule against academicspeak: it’s a magazine, not a journal. One of my jobs when subbing was to change all technical jargon to ordinary language. For this one I would have had to request a complete redo. Maybe that rule is no longer in effect, I don’t know, but if it is still a rule, I wonder if they made an exception in this case. Sort of “Ok cowboy, trying yelling ‘terf’ at this.”
I just read the article in Philosophers Magazine.
I’m a bit puzzled about Ophelia’s comment about academicspeak.
The only term I had to look up was CAIS to expand the initialism.
It wasn’t just about having to look up, it was about coming across as technical, insidery, professional, etc. A style thing. The worry wasn’t so much about being incomprehensible as about being for philosophers only.
Take the first four sentences:
It’s recognizably academic philosophy-speak. That’s what the editors wanted to avoid.
Following the open letter signed by more than 1000 senior doctors the BMA council has announced that it will now be reviewing the Cass report from a ‘neutral’ position. Nice bit of backtracking, considering their initial response was to reject the report’s conclusions. This bit caught my eye.
Which makes one wonder what criteria was used for the initial rejection of the report.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20pn0164ypo
The science fiction writer E. Lily Yu has come out and publicly stated that she holds “gender-critical” views.
https://paperairplane.substack.com/p/after-math-1
https://paperairplane.substack.com/p/after-math-2
Several people on Twitter have attacked Yu as a result.
Well note that distinction there… *several* Elon turning Twitter into a white nationalist-adjacent hellsite instead of a Wokie hellsite has made that much less of a problem.
They’re also going after Yu on Bluesky, calling her a TERF, an anti-Black racist, a “white-adjacent Asian”, and an “incel” (wtf?).
The absolutely mediocre SF writer Aliette de Bodard has said Yu has written a ” horribly transphobic diatribe” :
https://bsky.app/profile/aliettedb.bsky.social/post/3l5bwsqkjv52a
(Amusing how one of de Bodard’s replies says that Yu “references the Cass Review, which is an immediate red flag”. They love spotting and snitching on suspected “transphobes” in these circles).
As if “believing that humans can change sex” isn’t a red flag. In this version of Overton, reality has become an extremist position, while delusion is passed off as the default, centerist one.
Good stuff.
Well if course they’re going after her on Bluesky, but that site is a joke. A dedicated hater subreddit would probably be a step up from Bluesky.
Speaking of modern sf/fantasy … I’ve been trying to find a fun read, but every single time I open a new book, sub-amateur grammar gets in the way. These comma splices, are pissing, me off. Don’t get me started on using commas where periods belong, it really kicks me out of the immersive mindset. And do editors ever suggest not starting every sentence with a conjunction? Or do editors not exist anymore?
Are my standards too high?
Having read Yu’s piece, I may have to give her books a chance, as there were no egregious linguistic sins to be found. If she manages the same command of English in her fiction, then that’s a better starting point than most of what people keep recommending to me.
Can’t comment as it’s all audiobooks on my end but James A. Corey’s “”The Mercy of Gods” is just as solid as The Expanse novels… Probably a bit of Enby shit but since I haven’t retaining I’m sure it’s fine.
Nullius in Verba: Oh, that was absolutely a deliberate Lovecraft riff. In addition to his grotesque manner, it also references, for me, Trump’s cult-like worshippers, insanely spouting devotion to a malevolent entity who will absolutely bring them to ruin if he’s allowed back into power.
A post by Mano Singham took a look at Will Ferrell’s comments on the creation of the Netflix movie, Will and Harper (the same work Ophelia discusses in Flawed but vital self-obsession). Mano describes a scene at a restaurant in Texas: “Ferrell decides to ham it up and takes up the [72 ounce steak] challenge while dressed as Sherlock Holmes. In the film, that scene ends abruptly, switching to the two of them talking next day in the car where Ferrell says that he felt that he had let Steele down”. He quotes a a Fox News (!) article at length, and I was struck by the obliviousness of the twits.
The airheads toured USA specifically to get a feel of the public perception of Harper’s transness – or transness in general – and to that end, put Harper’s transness on display. The person (or duo, in this case) taking the 72 ounce steak challenge is seated on a stage in full view of the diner with a big timer next to them, plus they brought a film crew with them, plus they engaged the room.
“I was feeling a little like my transness was on display” – no shit you goddamn fool! You put it on a stage, lit it, framed it in camera, and shouted it to the room full of people trying to have a nice dinner! Gahdamn, the obliviousness of the pair is amazing.
Guilty. (But I’m not a sci fi author.)
Sentence fragments are getting more common, too. I don’t mind them from time to time, for emphasis, or in conversation where you expect them, but some authors do it so frequently you struggle to find the last complete sentence. The book I’m reading now does it practically every paragraph at least once.
Came across this Substack post by way of a newsletter. It is about an initiative from the Tucker Center and Nike, called “Coaching HER”, that is nominally aimed at keeping girls from dropping out of sports, but is clearly about imposing gender ideology and the acceptance of boys-who-claim-to-be-girls in girls’ sports. Very good article, by Sarah Barker at TheFemaleCategory, from a few days ago.
Coaching HER is evil
I came across a link to an article regarding the recent post here about college women’s volleyball teams refusing to play against San Jose State because it fields a male player, Blaire (formerly Brayden) Fleming. (https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2024/no-more-fluffy-bunnies/).
The linked article mentions a lawsuit by a group called ICONS against the NCAA intended to “hold the NCAA accountable for its reckless promulgation of transgender eligibility protocol.”. What caught my eye was that one of Fleming’s teammates, team co-captain Brooke Slusser, has joined the lawsuit, citing the 6’1″ Fleming as a danger not only to opposition players but also to his own teammates. Slusser said that during matches and even in practice sessions Fleming smashes spike shots directly into the faces and bodies of opposing players, and she claims that he hits the ball with enough force to propel it at 80+mph. To put that into context, I looked up the stats for the women’s game: the World Record spike shot speed is 70.02mph, made by a player for the Italian national team in 2022; the average spike shot speed in the women’s game is a mere 44mph., and that’s at International level, not collegiate.
That, however, isn’t the worse claim by Slusser. She also stated that on team trips to away games she was roomed with Fleming without being informed that Fleming is a transgender-identifying male. He kept it a secret from his teammates, and either the college didn’t know (which I would think is unlikely) or it colluded with Fleming to keep it a secret from the team, thereby forcing a young woman to share accommodation with a man against her knowledge and so without her consent. This in a restricted space where she would be alone with him while dressing and undressing, showering and sleeping. How sinister is that?
https://www.outkick.com/sports/boise-state-womens-volleyball-opts-no-contest-rather-than-playing-against-sjsu-trans-volleyball-player
It’s utterly disgusting is what it is.
The 2024 October 9, Dinosaur Comics looks like a jab at the trans nonsense, but with plausible deniability.
https://www.qwantz.com/archive.php
https://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4248
The San Jose State volleyball controversy really has me scratching my head.
This seems like a really really poor test case or whatever you want to call it.
How can it simultaneously be the case that:
(a) Fleming is obviously out of place on the court and a physical danger to other players; and
(b) nobody knew until this season (which was not Fleming’s first) that this was a trans woman? (It’s Fleming’s third season at SJS)
AoS’s comment, and the Outkick article, mention Fleming being 6’1″, the implication being that this player is towering over the competition.
I checked the roster of Boise State, one of the teams that defaulted rather than play SJS, and it would seem that Fleming would be median height on that roster. Boise State has eight players below 6’1″, one player at 6’1″, and seven who are 6’2″ or 6’3″
SJS itself has two other players who are 6’1″, and one 6’3″ player. So Fleming’s height hardly stands out.
I’m also not seeing what exactly is so “sinister” about Slusser rooming with Fleming. If Fleming was a cis lesbian, would Slusser have the right to know the sexual orientation of the person sleeping and showering in the same hotel room? If the issue is that Fleming is so physically superior to Slusser (who is 5’11”), imagine a 5’6″ player rooming with a 6’3″ closeted lesbian.
I think that women’s sports are one of the areas where there’s been an overreach. But this seems like a really bad example to highlight if that’s the point you’re trying to make.
Did you miss the part about spike shots?
There are many examples where someone or a few people speaking out inspires other people to speak out. I think the volleyball case is one such example.
Fleming is male. Single-sex hotel rooms for student athletes has been the norm for a long time. They don’t seek to put gay men together, nor lesbians together, nor do they think it’s fine to put gay men in rooms with women. If you’re suggesting that the single-sex hotel room policy should be abolished, then by all means explain, but that’s the policy in the US. Women expect to be in single-sex spaces when they might undress and bathe. It doesn’t need to be established that Fleming is more likely than a lesbian to be predatory; it’s sufficient that he’s male. Women don’t want to undress in front of gay men or nice men, either, nor do they wish to see naked gay men or naked nice men in their hotel rooms in these circumstances. No men. Why should any exception be made for Fleming, and why should Slusser have to put up with that exception?
OB,
No, I didn’t miss it, but I give it no weight.
First, the only evidence we have that Fleming hits 80+ mph is that Slusser says so. How does she know this? Is there a radar gun in team practices or games? If so, then why doesn’t the report say that she’s been recorded doing spikes of that speed?
Second, if Fleming’s spike speed is so extraordinary, why was nobody commenting on it before she was outed as trans? Did she suddenly start increasing her spike speed this season?
Third, are women especially vulnerable to spike speeds of that velocity? Are male volleyball players able to play safely against 80+mph spikes?
Sackbut,
Some women don’t want to undress in front of lesbians, either.
The argument you’re making is the same one that was used against gay athletes for decades.
Screechy, you are arguing against single-sex spaces for dressing rooms and locker rooms and the like. I do know people who argue against them. If you are indeed arguing against them, fine, make that argument. But the point here is that they do exist, and Fleming should be excluded from women-only spaces because he is male. I do not personally wish to defend the existence of women-only spaces in this thread. I am trying to establish that there is no salient difference between Fleming and the male volleyball team or male team staff that says Fleming should be allowed to room with and dress with female athletes but these other men should not be allowed.