I will admit that I never gave much thought to trans issues until I started reading articles and comments here at B&W. That would be about four years. Since that time, I’ve viewed hours of talks on YouTube by Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater, Helen Joyce, J. Michael Bailey, Debbie Hayton, and others. If I could get a couple of good books on the subject–books that are factual, not polemical–what would you recommend?
The single best book on the topic I’ve read is Helen Joyce’s “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”. It is thorough and fair. If you like good philosophical investigation, Kathleen Stock’s “Material Girls” is excellent.
I also liked Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage”, which is less general and perhaps more polemic.
I wish there was one single all-encompassing, factual, non-polemical book about this. So far, there isn’t one. (But I’ll be honest: I’d love to write one myself.)
Joyce’s book “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” is fantastic — analogous to Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the sense that it’s a broad overview of the definition of trans and how the concept is not backed by science — just like Dawkins did with the concept of God.
But Joyce’s (excellent) book sticks to the facts, and lacks a broader analysis of the social and political context, which has so much to do with why this nonsense idea has become so popular so quickly.
Here, Stock steps in and takes a feminist-philosophical view in her book Material Girls. (Which — I know, I’m a horrible monster, kill me now — I have only started and haven’t finished. So I can’t really speak to this one too much.)
For a pre-social-media perspective on specifically male transsexualism, transgender identity, and homosexuality, and the connection between them, Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen is very good. (And it’s available as a free PDF now, with the author’s blessing.)
And then there’s Bailey’s spiritual sequel of sorts, Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, which mostly focuses on the controversy surrounding Bailey’s book, and which launches from there into the subject of ideology and activism and how those forces interact with the pursuit of science, for better or for worse. (Very interesting, enlightening and engaging stuff.)
In “Tough Crowd,” Graham Linehan writes movingly about trans from the perspective of the social media landscape and what it’s like to be a celebrity who dissents from the liberal consensus and who dares to blaspheme about the topic. (I’m biased towards this book because I had a hand in its creation, and because Graham is one of my closest and dearest friends. We’re colleagues, too: we host a long-running, popular YouTube podcast together. But all bias aside, the book has been a runaway bestseller because the consensus is that it’s a brilliant, hilarious, and moving read.)
Dr. Az Hakeem has written two books from the perspective of a therapist who has seen first-hand that there’s a way for virtually all (98%) young people who are convinced that they need trans identities and sexchange surgeries that they can climb down from that belief and reconcile their minds with their bodies. His latest is the newest of the bunch of high profile trans books, and I haven’t read it yet, but I hear it’s very good.
I myself have taken a stab at a broad-overview essay, which imagines its reader as an otherwise uninformed liberal progressive looking to get a foothold into this subject. A Cliff’s Notes primer. My essay tries to pare this incredibly complex topic down to a few basic, digestible concepts to a reader who is otherwise hostile to gender-critical ideas. Here it is.
There’s no one way into this mess of a topic, and there’s no single, universal story that comes close to capturing it — yet. But I puzzle every night and day over whether such a solution is possible, in the way mathematicians and chessmasters probably puzzle over abstract theorems. I want so badly for there to be some kind of elegant, simple solution: an easily deployed explanation I can use to break my erstwhile friends free of the spell of gender madness. It’s a cult, and it’s stolen my life away because it’s stolen virtually all of my friends and colleages, and I keep wishing for some kind of science-fiction code word that will break them all out of the spell, like Angela Lansbury’s Queen of Diamonds playing card in the Manchurian Candidate — only in reverse: to break someone OUT of a mind-control trance, instead of inducing one.
There’s gotta be a solution out there somewhere that will solve this problem! Something to stop the madness!
Until we find one, I hope the recommendations come in handy for you.
Another book I can recommend that deals with, among other things, transgender issues is Prof. Holly Lawford-Smith’s Gender-Critical Feminism (2022) from Oxford University Press. You can find it here:
Arty, my hat off to you! I’ve heard of most of those books and will start digging in soon.
One reservation, though: I saw an interview with Az Hakeem that alarmed me. There is something about him I do not trust, especially as he raised the spectre of kids dressing as furries and demanding litter boxes at school, which sounds like urban legend bullshit to me.
It’s clear to me that Novella is mentioning the elephant in the room, but is doing it sotto voce with his argument that categorizations aren’t merely a way to distinguish between the characteristics of things but are imbued with the observer’s values and biases and therefore can’t be relied upon, period. So while Novella might agree that there are only two gametes, that doesn’t mean they are the best way to categorize sex.
And yet Novella’s arguments fall flat in the attempt to undermine the use of gametes as a classification criterion, as we can see from every text book and encyclopedia.
I recall, lo these many years ago and almost certainly under a different pseudonym, Ophelia and some others discussing the phenomenon of an R sound cropping up in British-esque accents where it’s not expected by North Americans. I’ve just happened upon a fascinating video on the subject, called ‘linking’ or ‘intrusive’ R (though Dr. Lindsey really dislikes the latter term).
You know, just in case anyone else remembers random comments from who knows how long ago. (Also I hope to bloody Thor the link works because coding it in by hand on a phone is nobody’s idear of a good time.)
I’m now finishing Bailey’s book “Man who be queen” and find the following remark to be fucking stupid:
the causes of homosexual transsexualism are largely the causes
of homosexuality. To be sure, only a small minority of gay men become transsexual, but homosexual transsexuals are a type of gay man.
Bullshit. Many more “cross-dressers,” “transvestites” and “transsexuals” are heterosexual men, so why don’t we see him talking about the corollary:
the cause of autogynephilic [heterosexual] transsexualism are largely the causes of heterosexuality. To be sure only a minority of straight men become transexual, but heterosexual transexuals are a type of straight man.
Other than this, I am really liking Bailey’s book.
The example that sticks in my memory is ‘Indier and China’. American varieties of English have the same kind of phenomenon, just with a glottal stop instead of an R.
And yes, Artymorty’s collection of book recommendations is epic. I am curious if he plans, or knows of any plans, to rebut Freddie de Boer’s recent essays on ‘being kind’. (I keep meaning to, but other things keep needing more attention.)
I think the difference in part between homosexual transsexualism and autogynephilia is that the cause of homosexuality is also the cause of an innate inclination towards opposite-sex typical behaviours and interests from birth. (A book called Gay, Straight, and the Reasons Why goes into detail about this from a neurological perspective). Basically, in early gestation it’s the same single variance in the development of a region of the brain (hypothalamus and amygdala) which has two effects — both gender nonconformity at birth (which may continue into adulthoot or may disappear by adolescence), and same-sex attraction (which doesn’t appear until adolescence). Because these two effects express themselves at different points in a person’s journey into adulthood — and they don’t always overlap, in the case of boys with very feminine traits in early childhood who adapt into more sex-typical behavours and interests — it’s taken us a while to realize that they correspond to the same phenomenon. These two effects come from the same cause.
The tricky thing to remember is that childhood brains are extremely neuroplastic. Children instinctively detect from their environments what sorts of interests and behaviours are and aren’t acceptable, and they automatically mold themselves accordingly (to varying degrees of success). Boys with that specific hypothalamus/amygdala variance (the one that makes them more resemble the opposite sex in terms of social behaviour from birth and then in terms of sexual behaviour from adolescence) who are raised in, say, Thailand or Samoa or indigenous Zapotec Mexican culture or parts of Columbia and northern Brazil, aren’t exposed to the same kinds of subtle childhood cultural cues that nudge them towards more “masculine” behaviours, and so therefore virtually all gay males in these regions have grown up to have extremely feminine behaviours, interests, and presentations right into adulthood and for their whole lives — and they’re given their own social “categories” (more like castes, really) apart from “masculine” men as a result. There are virtually no “masculine” gay men in Samoa (in fact, “masculine” men caught engaging in homosexual acts can face up to 8 years imprisonment), and in Thailand and other parts of the world the “masculine presenting” (as opposed to dress-wearing “ladyboy” type) gay man is a relatively new phenomenon. (“Egalitarian homosexuality” emerges as individualism overtakes collectivism in the social landscape, because along with individualism comes a more universalist egalitarian moral framework, which is more amenable to the rights of gender nonconforming people. I know! It’s tricky stuff!!)
Autogynephilia’s a bit different, because it isn’t (or doesn’t appear to be) inherent in heterosexual men the way the potential to be more feminine-typical is in homosexuals. Only about 2 to 5 percent of males appear to be born with whatever still unknown neurological attribute it is that causes them to become sexually attracted to their own selves (and thus, in some such men, if given the opportunity, to attempt to mimic females in their presentation and to try to convince others that they are female).
I dunno, I think most/all males have at least one weird paraphilia (seems built in), it’s just that the AGP stuff screams “look at me look at me look at me!” in a way many of the others don’t. That whole line of “well now that society is more accepting is why there are more gender goblins” is true to an extent; used to be you kept your paraphilias fairly private but now that it’s glamorized, well, there you go. I don’t know to what degree you should keep that stuff in the closet, which is to say, what is prudery vs. what is just being polite, but that’s the question that should be asked. If your paraphilia requires that unwilling participants must accede to your demands, then tough, can’t be having with that.
I’m afraid I do not follow, and it’s probably not your fault but is the effect of the whole incoherent, asinine taxonomy of the trans system. He never calls “autogynephiles” what they are, that is, heterosexual transvestites, but he’s real keen on using the term “homosexual transexuals,” which is better seen as a form of internalized homophobia. Maddeningly, he even uses the term “non-homosexual transexuals” for HETEROSEXUAL perverts. Yet it’s gays and lesbian who are being smeared with the whole alphabet soup communniny phenomenon. It’s STRAIGHT men who are entering women’s sports and spaces, not gay men, yet you never hear of some HETEROTQAI+ communniny. “Autogynephilia” is just a verbal ten-foot-pole that keeps clinicians like Bailey from having to say what it is–heterosexual perversion.
Yet it’s gays and lesbian who are being smeared with the whole alphabet soup communniny phenomenon. It’s STRAIGHT men who are entering women’s sports and spaces, not gay men, yet you never hear of some HETEROTQAI+ communniny.
Excellent point. That’s why they’re so keen on enforcing “TWAW” and demanding the acceptance of transbians. They think it hides the paraphilia the same way they think they pass.
…the whole incoherent, asinine taxonomy of the trans system.
There’s forced teaming within the chimeric “trans community” itself, not just between the T and the LGB. What’s the common ground between AGP males forcing their way into women’s locker rooms for their own sexual gratification and teenage girls desperate enough to escape the strictures of femininity that they’re undergoing radical mastectomies and Itaking T? Which group is most likely to be driving the trans “movement” as a whole, and to whose benefit?
I wonder how much of the beligerence and bullying would disappear from the discussions around gender identity if you could remove the AGPs, and the trans “allies” who are only in it for the “righteous” misogyny? And if you could subtract those who would desist, the social contagion bandwagoneers, duped autistic kids, and trendy, spicy-straight “queers,” would that leave behind only a small(?) core of genuinely dysphoric people, for whom watchful waiting will not be enough? Likely a very small group, whose needs are poorly served by the current configuration of gender identitarianism? We’ll never know.
YNNB, you help bring a lot into focus for me: Looked at long enough, the trans movement reveals itself as a farrago that is hurting that very “core of genuinely dysphoric people.” In other words, the current trans craze is hurting trans people.
Make lives better for girls and women, and there would be a mass exodus of young women from the clinics.
Address internalized homophobia, and many sissyboys would ditch their dresses.
Call out the bandwagoners, and suddenly the “non-binary” dissolve in embarrassment.
I have a terrible feeling that the final step — prohibiting those (sometimes) rich, white, straight, heterosexual AGPs from marching into women’s spaces — is going to be horribly difficult.
What’s left is that “small core” of transexuals who deserve help but whose needs are swamped by the ongoing social clusterfuck called “transgenerism.”
Re the intrusive /r/–that happens in Boston English as well. It’s really a fascinating window into how children construct their language. Kids are natural pattern detectors (really, the human brain is), and so if they hear enough examples like “this cah goes fast” but “this car is nice”, they conclude that words that when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by a word that begins in a vowel sound, you add an /r/ to connect them. It’s similar to the phenomenon that has kids producing past tense forms like “goed”. They may eventually learn when not to apply such patterns if the examples are frequent or salient enough (e.g., they’ll hear people around them saying “went”, and eventually pick that up themselves), but if not, well, that’s one way languages change.
Professor Jo Phoenix who took her former employer the Open University to an employment tribunal has won her case. The tribunal found that she was discriminated against and harassed because of her gender-critical beliefs and that she was constructively dismissed. This is very good news, not only for Jo but for every rational person in Britain. Jo on nitter.net here (I don’t have a twitter account). Multi-page judgement here.
There is an article in the Guardian, which reports that the OU is considering an appeal, and a good piece on Unherd by Joan Smith.
Mike, remember that, while Bailey’s book is about men, homosexual transsexualism is a phenomenon among females as well as males. Autogynephilia is an exclusively male paraphilia.
Maddeningly, he even uses the term “non-homosexual transexuals” for HETEROSEXUAL perverts
I think that’s Bailey trying to be precise. Some autogynephiles are, or claim to be, bisexual, and others, asexual.
(The bisexuality is likely part of the paraphilia; they’re not really attracted to men, but they want to be desired by men. For some, men are props in their fantasy.)
Anyway, as Artymorty says, homosexual transexualism is more like an extreme form of homosexuality. Autogynephilia is…well, whatever it is, it’s something else. An AGPs is straight in the sense that the opposite sex turns him on, but his desire is really centered on his own fantasy persona.
” homosexual transexualism is more like an extreme form of homosexuality.
LM, forgive me, but where did you get such a poisonous idea? The very notion is despicable to me (I am an “extreme” form of both “homo” and “sexual.”) If that is the current theory of transexualism (probably from Bailey), then the whole trans thing is more deranged than I thought.
Young “sissified” gay men who eschew other gay men as partners, and who wish to “become” women and partner with heterosexual males, are NOT exhibiting “extreme homosexuality.”
They are exhibiting EXTREME INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA.
Mike B, yes it is Blanchard’s theory (Bailey is following Blanchard here.)
As Artymorty put it–
Autogynephilia’s a bit different, because it isn’t (or doesn’t appear to be) inherent in heterosexual men the way the potential to be more feminine-typical is in homosexuals
The point is simply that homosexual transsexuals tend to be more “feminine-typical”–or, in the case of women and girls, more masculine-typical.
The behavior exhibited by the gay men who choose to identify as women may indeed be a mix of internalized AND societal homophobia, with a hefty dose of misogyny mixed in. I think so. But Bailey’s point–which is based on Blanchard’s research–is about etiology. Gay people who transition have personalities more typical (or stereotypical) of the sex they’re not. Transsexualism is one way of expressing that. Is that a poisonous idea?
a Pakistani teacher named Sher Ali has been forced to recant his heretical views (under “Da Nooz”):
According to MEMRI, a biology teacher in Pakistan was forced to publicly renounce evolution and Darwin. After being badly injured by a bomb earlier, the teacher continued to teach the prohibited material, and so clerics demanded an long public recantation. The teacher, Sher Ali, is a brave man. There is an audio at the link above that tells you exactly what Ali said in his renunciation, including an affirmation that women’s intellects are inferior to those of men. (I’m sure he doesn’t accept that.)
I saw a reference to the old saw “if they can put a man* on the moon, why can’t they…”. The footnote said “* or other human person”.
No. It should be “or woman”. That’s the only choice. Unless you are implying that children might go to the moon, in which case you could say “or woman or child”. Avoiding saying “woman”, turning women into “non-men”, erases women as a category.
There are no non-human people, so “human person” seems redundant, but I’ll ignore that one.
The patient asked whether using a testosterone gel “to encourage a slow, gradual transformation of the body” would be an option. Brière responded by noting that females can utilize a pump to apply testosterone gels.
His patient insisted that this procedure wouldn’t apply since she now considered herself to be male.
“You were a woman, dear lady,” Brière responded, apparently greatly offending the patient who did not recognize her biological sex.
Daily Kos: a GOP super-PAC opinion survey includes the question “What is your gender?”, with the following choices:
• Male
• Female, Homemaker
• Female, Working Woman
One wonders if the creators of the questionnaire honestly think of “homemaker” and “working woman” as separate genders, or if they were stupidly unable to figure out how to correlate the gender question and one about employment (I didn’t see any such question, they only asked whether you or anyone in your household worked for a media company).
It was first recorded a few years ago before ‘trans’ really blew up on us & doesn’t mention trans.
I would recommend listening to it, especially for the part about how the psychology behind it can be used both to fight a norm or *to impose one*. It’s almost like the TRAs listened to it and used it to push their BS.
It’s part of the Australian Government’s official Style Guide. The Ideological capture isn’t surprising, but some of the errors of fact are. Sex is a legal status not a biological category, a gender identity is now apparently given to us at birth … and on it goes.
Another curiosity is that the entire reference list used to compile this ‘information’ was accessed on the same day. It’s as if an intern cobbled it together one morning between arriving and having their first coffee!
I always find it interesting how strong certain cognitive biases are, especially the primacy effect. Just listen to how wedded this kid is to a conclusion that he came to secondhand.
Inspired by a comment on a recent thread I obviously had to read In the Beginning by Simon Edge, a sequel to his satirical novel The End of the World Is Flat from 2021. In the latter Edge tells the story of how the highly respected and trusted Orange Peel Foundation is captured by flat-earthers working by stealth and manipulating public opinion through social media to make “globularism”* a hate-crime, an obvious allegory for the capture of Stonewall by gender identity ideologues.
The plot of In the Beginning takes place in the same fictional universe, and involves many of the same characters as The End of the World Is Flat. The “True Earth” (i.e. Flat Earth) craze has died down, but it has become unacceptable to acknowledge that the Earth is more than 10,000 years old. No, the Woke have not suddenly decided to side with Right-wing Christian Fundamentalists (that would break the analogy!). Instead the new public enemies, the “YERFs” (Young Earth Rejecting Fascists), are accused of disrespecting the cultural sensitivities of apocryphal Native American tribes who worship the equally apocryphal godess Ctatpeshirahi. The protagonist takes her former employer to court after loosing her job for violating the new taboo, an obious allegory for the Maya Forstater case.
While I recommend both books for their satirical wit and insight (The Twitter comments are priceless!), one of the main things I got out of reading In the Beginning was the concept of “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (Fibs) which goes back to this blog post by Gurwinder Bhogal:
…an intelligent agent can’t just be intelligent; it must be intelligent at something, because intelligence is nothing more than the effectiveness with which an agent pursues a goal. Rationality is intelligence in pursuit of objective truth, but intelligence can be used to pursue any number of other goals. And since the means by which the goal is selected is distinct from the means by which the goal is pursued, the intelligence with which the agent pursues its goal is no guarantee that the goal itself is intelligent.
As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex, and this often required the adoption of what I call “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (FIBs), which the brain has come to excel at […] An absurd ideological belief is a form of tribal signalling. It signifies that one considers their ideology more important than truth, reason, sanity. To one’s allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty. To one’s enemies, it is a threat display.
This touches on something I have previously commented on: Having the intellectual tools to see through a false belief system doesn’t get you very far if you’re not motivated to use them that way. It’s the motivation that’s lacking, not the brainpower. Highly educated and intelligent people are often more rather than less inclined to believe absurdities because their intelligence makes them even better at rationalization. The last sentence in particular strikes me as insightful. “I will believe (or pretend to believe) whatever I have to believe to make my own side right and the other side wrong, and I can not be talked out of it. If this means taking a sledgehammer to other people’s rights and interests, that’s their problem. Fuck’em! If you try to get in our way, I will destroy you, and the fact that evidence and sound arguments are not on my side is not going to stop me!”
This, once again, is why the “good intentions” excuse can only get you so far. There are no brownie-points for doing the right thing “as one sees it” if one’s reason for seeing it that way in the first place is based on self-serving motives and motivated reasoning. Speaking of which:
Despite being irrational, wokeism is nevertheless an intelligent worldview. It’s intelligent but not rational because its goal is not objective truth, or even social justice, but social signaling […] Their words often end up hurting rather than helping the marginalized, but they make some people feel good for a while, and they increase their own social status, which explains why wokeism is most prevalent in industries where status games and image are most important: politics, media, academia, entertainment, and advertising.
Makes sense to me. And as I keep saying, just because a person’s motives for embracing a cause or belief system in the first place were both noble and worthy (or, more likely, some combination of misguided “good intentions”, intellectual laziness, sloppy thinking, tribal loyalty, group conformity, peer-pressure etc.) doesn’t mean there is anything particularly “noble” or “worthy” about their motives for sticking to their guns long after the harmful effects should have been obvious to everyone.
*The people opposing flat-eartherism are referred to as “TERGs” (True Earth Rejecting Globularists).
Well, it looks as though PZ is aware that people in certain quarters are laughing at him for his ability to know the sex of spiders from physical clues alone while denying the possibility of doing so with humans. He’s now pretending that he can’t do that after all and has adjusted his language accordingly, while taking care not to commit the crime of misgendering (emph. mine).
This big skinny beast is living right over an electrical outlet in my dining room, and I needed to plug something in…I decided not to. I didn’t think it worthwhile to disturb them right away, I’ll give them a chance to move later. It’s [whoops! You missed that one, PZ, better wear the hair shirt and self-flaggelate for a week] Pholcus, either phalangioides or manueli but they didn’t turn to look at me so I could tell. Maybe I’ll get a look at their face later.
Just encountered a “Did you just call me ‘sir’?” at Taco Bell. I’d hope that I would have intervened in contrast to my generally nonconfrontational nature.
Most of the above measures seem to be aimed at keeping minors from irrevocable changes. Prime Minister Trudeau has done the forced teaming work for Team Trans, calling the proposed policies “most anti-LGBT policies anywhere in this country.”
It spends most of its space discussing the Semenya case and testosterone levels. It downplays the irreversible musculoskeletal and cardio-pulmonary advantages that male puberty confers on trans identified male athletes, and quotes a study that cocluded that
The CCES study also noted that social factors have a greater impact on athletic performance than hormones.
“Researchers in the sociocultural field of study argue that social factors contribute to performance advantages to a far greater extent than does testosterone and that assessing testosterone levels is another way to perpetuate the long history of policing women’s bodies in sport,” the report reads.
“Researchers highlight the many social factors that contribute to differences in athletic performance, including, for example: discriminations, disparate resource allocations, inequities, and violence against women in sport in the forms of sexism and sexual violence in sport contexts, arbitrary differences in rules and equipment between men’s and women’s sport, as well as histories of barring women from certain sports.”
One of its conclusions is that ‘the CCES strategy is a continuity with the history of the exclusion and oppression of female athletes in sexist, misogynist, patriarchal sport structures whilst, at the same time, masquerading as inclusive, anti-sexist and anti-misogynist.”
Also, as a basic fact, humans can’t change sex. Trans identified males remain male, however they dress, whatever name they give themselves, and whatever “gender” they claim to have. “Gender identities” don’t play sports, human bodies do. Sports are segregated by sex so that women can have their own level playing field. Letting men cheat their way into women’s sports under the guise of “trans inclusion” destroys fairness for women in favour of men, obviating the reason that women’s sports were established in the first place. But sure, you go ahead and keep saying that men in women’s sports have no advantage: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3JhSIQXwAgEJV6?format=jpg&name=small
It probably won’t do a goddamn thing, but still worth it.
Cardona later in April of 2023 released a rule to bolster transgender students’ rights to play on sports teams but with limitations. The proposal was met with more than 150,000 comments. It aims to bar schools from adopting or enforcing policies that categorically ban transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity. At least 24 states have laws or regulations banning transgender students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project.
“The Department is still reviewing a second rule related to athletics, which was first proposed nine months after the first rule, and which received 150,000 public comments which by law must be carefully considered,” the department spokesperson said.
The Education Department emphasized that under its proposed rule, “elementary school students would generally be able to participate on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity where considerations may be different for competitive high school and college teams.”
Department officials, however, included the caveat that “in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation.”
Of course the issue isn’t about “transgender students … participating in sports consistent with their gender identity”, but about male students playing on teams reserved for female students.
If Swift attends the Super Bowl, she will be traveling from Tokyo, where she is on tour. That will mean more than 19,400 miles (30,500 kilometers) by private jet in just under two weeks. Just how much carbon dioxide will that be?
While exact carbon emissions depend on many factors, such as flight paths and number of passengers, a rough estimate is possible, said Gregory Keoleian, co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. Traveling 19,400 miles on a Dassault Falcon 900LX, one of Swift’s jets, could release more than 200,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, he said.
That would be about 14 times as much as the average American household emits in a year, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Can’t she just watch it on TV, and Zoom him afterwards?
Re Swift, my understanding of the situation is that some people are upset that she’s getting some amount of publicity and thus diminishing her football star boyfriend, because girlfriends aren’t supposed to do that or something. And “some publicity” means a few minutes total over the course of several weeks. That she is an extremely successful and well-regarded musician, rather than a mediocre performer whose reputation is elevated by association with a football star, may also play into it. There was a very good teardown of the whole nonsense controversy by a pundit on, of all places, Fox News, that was being shared around social media recently. People were calling her “middle-aged” (she’s 34), wondering why a hunk like her boyfriend would possibly be interested in someone who was too old and too busy to give birth to and stay home with the children, all that kind of crap and more.
I do not fault her for returning to the US to see her boyfriend play in the Super Bowl. That’s the single most important game of the season. Being there in person is significant. The right-wing complainers are choosing this one flight to criticize, but not other flights she or anyone else (football teams, for example) might have taken? Hypocrites.
Oh, the Swift thing gets much crazier than that, and Fox News has been helping with the spread of the latest MAGA conspiracy theory.
The claims by Fox News and far-right influencers that pop star Taylor Swift is part of a Pentagon “psychological operation” to get President Joe Biden reelected, and somehow rig the Super Bowl to benefit Kansas City Chiefs tight end (and Swift’s boyfriend) Travis Kelce, has been met with forehead slaps in the national security world.
Doing a Google search of “West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights” yields results that all seem to highlight the view of critics that it is an”effort to supress transgender people.”
Here’s a link to HB5243 or the “West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights” or “The West Virginia Act to Define Sex-Based Terms Used in State Law, Help Protect Single Sex Spaces, and Ensure the Accuracy of Public Data Collection.”; it’s five pages long:
A BILL to amend the Code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, by adding thereto a new article,
designated §16-67-1, §16-67-2, §16-67-3, §16-67-4, §16-67-5, and §16-67-6, all relating to the Women’s Bill of Rights; providing short title; setting forth purpose; establishing application of act; defining terms; allowing for language substitution; establishing certain single sex environments are not discriminatory; creating parameters for certain data collection; and allowing severability.
Be it enacted by the Legislature of West Virginia:
ARTICLE 67. WEST VIRGINIA WOMEN’S BILL OF RIGHTS ACT.
§16-67-1. Name, Purpose, and General Application.
(a) This act shall be known and may be cited as the “West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights” or “The West Virginia Act to Define Sex-Based Terms Used in State Law, Help Protect Single Sex Spaces, and Ensure the Accuracy of Public Data Collection.”
(b) The purpose of the West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights is to bring clarity, certainty, and uniformity to the laws of West Virginia regarding sex discrimination, equality of the sexes, and benefits or services specifically provided to males/men and to females/women.
(c) The West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights applies wherever West Virginia, or an instrumentality of the state, classifies people on the basis of sex or otherwise defines people as being female or male, women or men, girls or boys; the definitions contained in §16-67-2 of this code apply.
§16-67-2. Definitions of Terms Used in State Statutes and Administrative Rules.
(a) As used in West Virginia statutes, administrative rules, regulations, and/or official public
policies:
(1) A “woman” is an adult human of the female sex, and a “man” is an adult human of the male sex;
(2) A “girl” is a human female who has not yet reached adulthood, and a “boy” is a human male who has not yet reached adulthood;
(3) A “mother” is a female parent of a child or children as defined in West Virginia law; a “father” is a male parent of a child or children as defined in West Virginia law;
(4) A “female”, when used in reference to a natural person, is an individual who has, had, will have, or would have (but for a developmental anomaly, genetic anomaly, or accident) the reproductive system that at some point produces ova;
(5) A “male”, when used in reference to a natural person, means an individual who has, had, will have, or would have (but for a developmental anomaly, genetic anomaly, or accident) the reproductive system that at some point produces sperm for fertilization of female ova;
(6) “Equal” does not mean “same” or “identical” with respect to equality of the sexes;
(7) A person’s “sex” is his or her biological sex (either male or female) at birth.
(A) There are only two sexes, and every individual is either male or female; (B) “Sex” is objective and fixed; and (C) “Sex” does not include “gender identity” or any other terms intended to convey a person’s subjective sense of self; “gender identity” and other subjective terms may not be used as synonyms or substitutes for “sex.”
(b) Individuals with “differences in sex development” (also known as “DSD” or “intersex conditions”) are not a third sex. Individuals with a congenital and medically verifiable DSD diagnosis must be accommodated consistent with state and federal law.
§16-67-3. Language Substitution.
Wherever used in West Virginia law, the word “gender” standing alone (as opposed to the phrase “gender identity”) is hereby deleted and replaced with the word “sex”, as defined herein.
§16-67-4. Sex Discrimination and Single-Sex Environments.
(a) Any policy, program, or statute that prohibits sex discrimination shall be construed to forbid unfair treatment of females or males in relation to similarly-situated members of the opposite sex.
(b) Because the State of West Virginia has an important interest in preventing unjust discrimination and in maintaining safety, privacy, and fairness, West Virginia and its political subdivisions and instrumentalities may provide separate single-sex environments for males and females where the sexes are not similarly situated, particularly with respect to biology. As illustrative, non-exhaustive examples, public entities in West Virginia may distinguish between the sexes with respect to athletics, living facilities, locker rooms, bathrooms, domestic violence shelters, and rape crisis centers without running afoul of anti-discrimination mandates. (c) Wherever West Virginia or its political subdivisions or instrumentalities, in fact, provide separate single-sex environments for males and females, the definitions established in §16-67-2 of this code must apply.
§16-67-5. Data Collection.
(a) Any West Virginia public school, public school district, agency, department, or instrumentality of the state that collects vital statistics related to sex for the purpose of complying with state or federal anti-discrimination laws or for the purpose of gathering accurate public health, crime, economic, or other data shall identify each natural person who is part of the collected data set as either male or female as defined in this Act.
(b) Compliance with this section shall not require the collection of data regarding sex unless otherwise required by law, and it shall not prevent the collection of additional data points other than biological sex.
§16-67-6. Severability.
If any provision of this Act, an amendment made by this Act, or the application of such provision or amendment to any person or circumstance is held to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this Act, the amendments made by this Act, and the application of the provisions of such to any person or circumstance shall not be affected thereby.
NOTE: The purpose of this bill is to establish the West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights. Strike-throughs indicate language that would be stricken from a heading or the present law and underscoring indicates new language that would be added.
Even though the word or prefix “trans” appears nowhere in the bill, I can see why genderists are upset by it; it preserves clarity and truthfulness in language as used in law, preventing the substitution of “gender identity” for sex, or including it alongside sex. It prevents the muddying confusion of genderspeak, and enshrines in law the primacy of biological sex, with a definition of each. This bill would make an excellent basis for media style guides.
Critics claiming that it “targets” trans people should be asked exactly which parts of it do that, and how exactly that “targeting” happens. They should be made to explain where exactly the bill goes “wrong” and, if its definitions are incorrect, exactly how they are wrong. But they can’t really do that, because they’re the ones who have imposed novel counterintuitive “definitions”on the rest of us. Most of the world follows those very same definitions, not because of any sort of narrow-minded bigotry, but because they’re correct. If defining the sexes and clarifying terms “targets” trans people, then it only shows that their “rights” are dependent on poor definitions and vague language. And if protecting women’s rights interferes with trans “rights,” then those alleged “rights” must have impinged on those of women. There goes the tenet of “no conflict.” If your cause evaporates with the use of honest language, then it couldn’t have had much of substance behind it to start with. If your “rights” are dependent upon everyone else being bullied into playing along with your stupid word games, and the enforcement of the legal fictions that have been spun out of them, then yes, clear definitions are going to be a threat to your continued demands. They are right to be afraid, but not for the reasons they claim. They’re afraid of being found out and exposed as hucksters and charlatans.
We’re still getting plenty of transperbole though. Here’s one of those critics:
Marshall University student Max Varney said the bill uses women’s rights as a cover for transphobia.
“I stand before you as a transgender person in West Virginia. I am not a threat to the public, nor is my existence offensive,” Varney said. “This bill is dehumanizing. It is unjust. And it is disgusting.
“Why am I not supposed to be considered a person too?” Varney continued. “I am here today to show you that trans people in West Virginia are real. I am real. I exist. And I deserve to be treated with humanity.”
Which women’s rights are the “cover?” Where’s the “transphobia?” Where in this bill are you “dehumanized?” Why is the bill “unjust?” Why is it “disgusting?” Point to the specific subsections. Or are we supposed to take your word for it that this bill is all of those thingsyou say iy is without looking at it ourselves? Well, I’ve looked, and I don’t see it, just as I can’t see the “transphobia” in JK Rowling’s tweets, which mask, according to trans activists, a vitriolic hatred capable of helping to plot trans genocide.
We know you don’t like the legislation, but that doesn’t make it a bad bill. You’re a man. Nothing you do will change that. There is no shame in being a man. or being called a man, but as a man, you are, statistically, a threat to women in women’s single-sex spaces, places to which you should have never had access in the first place. To the extent that your demand to access open the doors to opportunistic predators, then yes, you are a threat to women, whether you yourself are a predator or not. Letting some men in because of a claimed “identity” allows any man claiming that identity the same access. Your supposedly self-evident, self-proclaimed harmlessness gives cover to those who are not harmless., and there’s no way to tell the difference, so it’s a good idea to keep all men out, period. If you cannot admit or see that, that is not women’s problem; they have ever right to keep all men out of their spaces. That includes you. Because you are a man. It’s the way things had always been, until recently; your having been given any access at all to those spaces on the basis of your so-called “gender identity” was an abberation and a mistake. This bill corrects that mistake. Barring you from those spaces from now on is not a diminishment of your “rights” or your “humanity.” If your “humanity” was based on everyone else pretending, along with you, that you are a woman, then you need new standards.
Nothing in this bill removes your “personhood.” There is no doubt cast upon your “reality” or “existence.” Of course you’re real, of course you exist. The only thing being doubted is your claim to be the sex you are not. It’s no different than disagreeing with an anorexic person’s mistaken self-image of being obese. That’s it. You’re not a woman. You can’t be a woman, but not because anyone is preventing you out of malice or bigotry. On the contrary, all the goodwill and validation in the world will never turn you into a woman because it simply isn’t possible, it isn’t any more possible than it would be for you to become invisible. It shouldn’t be necessary to legislate the terms of reality, but this is where we are. Men can’t become women but men are bullying their way into female spaces nonetheless. Laws like this are a welcome and overdue corrective to this unjust, dangerous, misogynistic trend. Your petulant whining stands in the way of that, but your, others like you, and your enablers and “allies” are too righteously self-important to see this. If you could take a moment to step away from having everyone else “centrer” your precious, impossible identity (which, because it is built entirely on frivolous word games, can be completely swept away by the simple refusal to play along), you might glimpse the fact that there are other issues at stake that don’t involve your desires. Harsh? Yes. But women and girls have suffered real harm, and continue to do so, as a result of gender identitarians. If this is the start of the roleback of this gender Lysenkoism, then this is a great step forward.
If the media were to actually do their job, they would not simply repeat the genderists’ charges against this bill, they would investigate the merits of their concern. But no, we just hear that it’s “disgusting,” without any argument as to why they think that. We’ve seen that it’s more than just this bill too. They repeat the forced-teaming lie that characterizes proposed legislation intended to protect the rights of women and girls against gender-ideology’s encroachment. By turning the concept of “conversion therapy” on its head, transing away the gay becomes “Life-saving, gender-affirming care.” Attempts to ban surgical interventions on minors are branded as banning allhealthcare for “trans kids.” Any such legislative remedies are deemed “transphobic” or “anti-LGBTQI bills.” The media follows along, taking its lead from trans activists. Attempts to keep boys and men out of female sports are dutifully reported as “trans bans” rather than male bans. By regurgitating the accusations, and using obfuscatory, genderist language in their reporting, the media become part of the trans activists’ campaign of emotional blackmail. Because of media complicity and repetition, the “Anti-LGBTQI” nature of these bills becomes taken as a given, the same as JKR’s presumptive “transphobia.” Add to this the continued use of “preferred pronouns” (even by ostensibly “right wing” outlets) that mask the the true sex of persons being reported on, and you get some idea of the thoroughness of much of the media’s capture. Being this far entangled and complicit in this mess, it will be hard for them to drop their implicit partisanship in favour of actual neutrality.
I can already see the potential loophole in items 4 and 5 that the usual suspects will no doubt try to exploit.
(4) A “female”, when used in reference to a natural person, is an individual who has, had, will have, or would have (but for a developmental anomaly, genetic anomaly, or accident) the reproductive system that at some point produces ova;
How long will it be before they claim that being a female born in a male body is a developmental abnormality and that therefore TWAW under the wording of the law?
It might also have been better to include within the bill a specific rejection of the idea that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth, but other than that, the bill is pretty much the touch of sanity that is needed right now.
But not nearly as cruel as telling someone they can change sex, or as dangerous as telling them that they can force everyone around them to act as if they had.
PZ has a new post crowing about ’empirical data’ proving something we already know – people are happier when they get what they want. He quotes this:
The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.
Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.
“Weighted the survey to try to account for biases” means the surveyors weighted the survey and thus risk influencing the results with their own biases.
The report found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who “transitioned” – were either “a lot” (79%) or “a little more satisfied” (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them “a lot” (84%) or “a little” (14%) more satisfied with their lives.
The first figure seems to refer to people socially transitioning, crossdressing as opposed to body modification. At no point does it establish that their satisfaction with life should come at the expense of that of women who suddenly find themselves bumped out of sports teams, lesbian bars, workplace quotas, their own change rooms and so on. I also do not see that it justifies making medicalising a minor’s healthy body just because they yearn for it to be different. The protections they chafe against are stringent for good reason.
The post expresses no deeper reasoning than that it makes trans people happy to indulge them, therefore we should. I could almost thank him for making the narcissism at the heart of the trans movement so visible. Also, I’m sure religious people would love PZ’s rationale being applied to them.
The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.
Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.
PZ has a new post crowing about ’empirical data’ proving something we already know – people are happier when they get what they want.
Is there any control group, the “happiness” of which the trans group’s “happiness” is being compared to or measured with? Does the survey, apart from self report, actually define the difference between “binary or nonbinary transgender?” After all, in the usual boilerplate formulation, we are told that “TWAW, TMAM, and nonbinary identities are valid,” which suggests that, for some purposes at least, the two categories of “trans” and NB are considered distinct, so how can someon be both? What “biases” are being “accounted for?” Do the questions include one on whether or not the correspondents believe they are no longer the sex they were “asigned at birth?” Is there any attempt to account for the placebo effect, or that correspondents might be saying they are happier because their “treatments” are expected and supposed to make them happier? Is someone who has sacrificed their body to their “gender journey” going to readiliy admit to buyer’s remorse? This is the flip side of the threat of suicide that dysphoric people are expected and supposed to use when they are denied to “gender affirming care?”
At no point does it establish that their satisfaction with life should come at the expense of that of women who suddenly find themselves bumped out of sports teams, lesbian bars, workplace quotas, their own change rooms and so on.
Does their level of happiness or satisfaction go down if other people fail to acknowledge or accept them as the sex they are not, whether that involves others’ refusal to use “preferred” pronouns, or if they are refused access to spaces and facilities designated as having been set aside for the sex they are not?
I wonder if there’s a similar survey of detransitioners or desisters? That would be a useful comparison would it not?
A Utah school board member complained about a high school student athlete she assumed was trans, using this student as a reason to protest boys competing on girls teams, and other related topics. I didn’t see any links to exact quotes, which would be helpful. It turns out the athlete is a girl, not a trans-identified boy. The board member apologized and removed her post.
The girl was subject to attacks of some sort, possibly online, possibly in person, so the school arranged for police protection for the girl. The board member was criticized, notably by a state representative, who now may face charges of revealing protected information (no idea what kind of protected information) in her criticism.
There is a lot of information missing in this story. I would agree with the goal of keeping boys off of girls teams, but personalizing the problem, especially without evidence, seems off base, and I don’t know what else was said.
Bookshop.org supports independent booksellers. It provides maps showing locations of bookstores, and you can apply filters to the map. The filters available are:
Black owned;
Asian American & Pacific Islander owned;
Latinx owned;
LGBTQIA+ owned;
Indigenous owned.
No “women owned”. No “lesbian owned”, although I suspect they’d claim that’s a part of the fourth category. Maybe there’s a less trendy resource that shows women-owned bookstores.
“Carries books I actually wish to purchase” probably should feature… It’s as bad as those pricks that encrust their roof repair truck logos with crosses and Christianese puns…
This morning Jerry Coyne posted a signpost to this new paper from the American College of Pediatricians, “Mental Health in Adolescents with Incongruence of Gender Identity and Biological Sex”. From the Conclusions section:
However, from this review of the literature, there is strong evidence that children and adolescents who identify as transgender have experienced significant psychological trauma leading to their gender dysphoria. Also, there is no long-term evidence that current “gender affirming” medication and surgical protocols benefit their mental well-being. High rates of suicide attempts and/or completions in those who have received “gender affirming” interventions indicate that at minimum, long term controlled trials should be conducted if these interventions are to be continued. More attention and support should be afforded to individuals seeking help in detransitioning after having made a decision during their formative adolescent years with life-long consequences, including possible sterility and loss of sexual function. Therefore, the ACPeds cannot condone the social affirmation, medical intervention, or surgical mutilation of children and adolescents identifying as transgender or gender nonconforming. Rather, intensive psychotherapy for the individual and family to determine and hopefully treat the underlying etiology of their gender incongruence should be pursued.
The American College of Pediatricians is a right-wing organization that has already been accused of misusing or mischaracterizing scientific papers to foster its own agenda.
Personally, I eschew the genetic fallacy, and even confirmation bias, and will read that paper closely, consider its methods and limitations, and make up my own mind.
Peter N, since TAs call everyone who disagrees with them right-wing, making up your own mind definitely sounds like the most prudent path. Being accused of misusing or mischaracterizing scientific papers is not necessarily to actually be guilty of misusing or mischaracterizing scientific papers in today’s climate, where anything certain people don’t like is accused of something.\
Even if it’s true, being right-wing doesn’t mean they must always be wrong about everything, even if sometimes they are right for the wrong reason.
That piece Jerry Coyne posted about appeared in The Washington Monthly, which isn’t a conservative magazine. I find that interesting, and an indication that it’s something to consider on its merits, not its politics.
The Metro Vancouver Transit Police say they “don’t know” if the primary suspect in a skytrain sexual assault is male or female despite having recovered semen during the investigation.
On February 8, the Transit Police issued a press release pleading for help to identify the suspect. While photos and videos showed what appeared to be a male with long hair, some basic information on the suspect was curiously omitted from the release. No pronouns were used, and no information on the suspect’s sex was included.
In a recorded phone call with journalist Amy Hamm, Constable Amanda Steed said the information had been intentionally left out because the Transit Police were unsure of how to refer to the suspect. “We’ve left it out for a reason; it’s because we don’t know. The video evidence shows someone who… would appear female, who is female presenting, but the physical evidence is that of a genetic male,” Steed said. She later confirmed in an email to Reduxx that the physical evidence is in fact the suspect’s semen. …
“The suspect we believe does have a penis,” said Steed, when asked if the victim was raped. “But the video shows someone who appears to be female presenting, so that’s why we left the gender out. Because we weren’t really sure how this person identifies—we didn’t want to get it wrong.”
Once again, men can pretend to be women, but a woman can’t pretend to be black – that will follow you for all time.
I don’t approve of what Doleful did, but she’s gone from being an academic and suspected activist, to looking after kids after school and running an only fans page. That’s sad.
Yeah, I now lack any interest in the cancelling of Dolezal what with the gobbos running around everywhere (and think Blackness as a concept probably should be jettisoned entirely).
Anyone else read “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky? Great stuff…
Helen Clarke has been challenged on twitter over her truly abysmal article on the LGB Alliance. Maya Forstater has pointed out that neither of the articles Helen cites in relation to her claim that the LGB Alliance ‘has connections to the US religious right’ do anything at all to back it up. Clarke hurriedly cites an article in Pink News (!) and a post on some trans propaganda site. A chap called Philip Swallow points out that neither of these actually support what he calls, rightly, her ‘attempted smear’:
The first simply records that Jackson wrote an article drawing attention to why someone else out of desperation turned to the HF. She then said she personally found this problematic. … The second merely says that an American with with conservative proclivities went to the first LGBA meeting, a meeting which as far as I know was open to anyone. … This is far below normal academic evidentiary standards.
Maya then challenges Helen to ‘withdraw the claim and make a correction’. Fat chance, of course, as Philip Swallow observes:
More chance of the Pope becoming a Mormon. I do think LGBA should write to the editors & publishers & ask them why they are publishing scurrilous bloviating disguised as an academic article.
The Philip Swallow name is a joke: he’s the protagonist of David Lodge’s academic trilogy Changing Places & something & something. His profile is all in-jokes about academic in-jokes.
Philip Swallow [is] the protagonist of David Lodge’s academic trilogy Changing Places & something & something.
Thanks for that. I read Changing Places and the follow-up books decades ago, when they first came out, but I’d forgotten the name of the protagonist.
I did notice that ‘Philip Swallow”s twitter bio is a collage mainly of allusions to titles from campus novels: The History Man (Bradbury), and Changing Places, The British Museum Is Falling Down (both Lodge). I presume ‘Waiting for the Barbarian’ is an allusion to J. M. Coetze’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, which I’ve never read, and also Constantine’s Cavafy’s poem from which Coetze borrowed the title (translation here). I am not sure whether the mention of Hazlitt is a hint at ‘Swallow’s’ academic research interests or homage to a notably acerbic nineteenth-century essayist and journalist.
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron on Friday ordered former president Donald Trump to pay more than $350 million in penalties, handing down a hefty penalty following a months-long civil trial in which Trump and others were accused of financial fraud by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Engoron also said Trump could not serve as an officer or a director for any New York company for three years.
Eric and Junior were also fined and barred for two years from serving as officer or director of any NY corporation.
Of course he’ll appeal, but hopefully this will eat up his time and money.
There’s *another* horror novel written by a transwoman, that’s getting aggressively promoted by the publishing industry, which takes gratuitous swipes at gender-critical feminists, This time it’s “Brainwyrms” by Alison Rumfitt.
“When a TERF bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it.
” Rumfitt’s second novel tugs on the current mess of anti-trans bigotry in the United Kingdom (and beyond), depicting transphobia as a ravenous brainworm that causes its hosts to go violently mad….The book tracks Frankie and Vanya’s increasingly fraught relationship against the backdrop of rising fascism and anti-trans violence, at the heart of which is a conspiracy involving trans-exclusionary feminists, a J.K. Rowling stand-in and the titular helminths”.
Why are these writers (Gretchen Felker-Martin, and others) so *obsessed* with Rowling? Is it jealousy of her success? Anger that they can’t shut Rowling up with their “accountability culture”? A feeling of betrayal that their favourite childhood author might have different political views to their ones?
Why are these writers… so *obsessed* with Rowling? Is it jealousy of her success? Anger that they can’t shut Rowling up with their “accountability culture”? A feeling of betrayal that their favourite childhood author might have different political views to their ones?
Probably all of the above, but it could also be a matter of stirring things up and keeping the pot boiling. In some quarters, particularly large portions of the media, it is now taken as read that Rowling is “transphobic.” It doesn’t matter that the charges are false and baseless, the existence of the charges is sufficient to make her “controversial.” These assholes don’t want anyone to forget how “evil” she is, so she continues to be used by trans activists as their very own Emmanuel Goldstein (though the hate has been pretty much continuous, and not limited to daily installments of two minutes each. It must get tiring.) Any outsider would think she ate trans kids for breakfast, lunch, and supper. But no, all she said was that sex is real. For this she can never be forgiven. Moreso because she never backed down or knuckled under. One wonders, if genderists had known this in advance, whether they might have sought out a less determined and more compliant victim to spotlight and shame. Choosing Rowling as their prey certainly seems to have failed in the rest of the world outside the trans-o-sphere.
“Probably all of the above, but it could also be a matter of stirring things up and keeping the pot boiling. In some quarters, particularly large portions of the media, it is now taken as read that Rowling is “transphobic.” It doesn’t matter that the charges are false and baseless, the existence of the charges is sufficient to make her “controversial.” ”
Of course. Repeat it again and again.
There’s a pro-trans forum (that I *won’t* name here because they have a history of going after people who publicly criticise them (doxxing, etc.) and they know all about B&W).
This website had a thread praising Alison Rumfitt’s first novel, “Tell Me I’m Worthless”. TMIW has fictionalized versions of real-life GCs activists (or what the forum called “Bigoted, anti-Semitic TERF scum”) as its villains. Hence the praise from the forum posters.
[MYERS WROTE:] Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily.
[COLIN WRIGHT REPLIES WITH WHAT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS]Myers could not be any more confused here. How does he recognize that it is typically males who form leks, or that males often display more elaborate mating behaviors and exhibit less sexual fidelity? This knowledge comes from studying these species and correlating these behaviors with the type of gametes an individual produces. Once we discover that males of the Vogelkop superb bird-of-paradise (Lophorina niedda) possess highly decorative plumage and engage in elaborate sexual displays, we no longer need to continuously verify this. We know it’s the males because we learned that only those with decorative plumage and elaborate sexual displays in this species produce sperm.
Wright winds up:
The core and critical flaw in Myers’ argument for using other traits to determine the sex of an individual is that these traits are only reliable indicators of sex in species where we already know which individuals are males and females, based on their gametes. In humans, we associate breasts with females and facial hair with males because adult human females typically develop breasts and adult human males tend to grow facial hair. But how would Myers propose to identify males and females in a newly discovered species without any prior knowledge of their secondary sexual characteristics?
Consider a hypothetical new mammal species with some individuals small and blue and others large and brown. Since we know mammals are anisogamous (i.e., reproduce via fusion of a sperm and an egg), we can be as certain as possible that this species also exhibits males and females. But how do we determine which is which? Should we assume the blue ones are males and the brown ones females, as is the case with blue groper fish? But in blue gropers the males are large and the females are small. Should we therefore consider the blue individuals of our new mammal species female because they are small? But in spiders the males are smaller than the females, suggesting perhaps the small individuals should be considered males?
Do you see the absurdity of the approach? We know human males tend to be hairier, male blue gropers are blue, and male spiders are usually smaller, because being male is a trait independent of hair, color, or size. What unites these males is the type of gamete they have the function to produce. That is what makes them male.
Thus, the only way we can know which individuals of our new species are the males and which are the females is to find out which individuals produce sperm and which produce eggs. The. End.
A young woman has died, possibly (unclear at the moment) as the result of a fight at school. At a meeting, people blamed the death on the school district’s policy that there are two sexes (“genders”), and (apparently) that students should use the bathroom appropriate for their sex. “You brought it on”, said a vice-mayor of an adjoining town. The girl claimed to be “nonbinary”.
It isn’t clear what happened in this case.
Officers have conducted interviews with students and staff at Owasso High School. The school district has said that the altercation lasted less than two minutes and that the students involved were able to walk to a nurse’s office afterward.
No report to the police was made until after Nex was taken to a hospital by a family member, the police have said. They went home that day. The following day, Nex was rushed back to the hospital by local medics and was pronounced dead. The state medical examiner’s office declined to comment on the autopsy or any toxicology results but said its final report would eventually be made public.
Sure, having sensible policies means it’s perfectly acceptable for people to bully or attack those who are different. This makes as much sense as saying that boys having their own bathroom makes it OK to attack girls. Or perhaps that criticizing a political position makes it OK to assault those students who disagree.
I wonder which bathroom non-binary would use? If they are neither male nor female, how do they know where to go for relief?
Most of the non-binary people I’ve known seem to be expressing as the opposite sex; if not, they are simply changing nothing, but putting up ridiculous pronouns on their profile.
Non-binary is as meaningless as queer, and as dishonest as trans.
She looks older, taller, and stronger in this video than the press has so far pictured her. She also responds to her birth name, Dagney, and female pronouns.
At no point in the above video does Dagney Benedict seem the least bit upset to be identified as herself.
She never once demands to be “Nex Benedict,” the “nonbinary” name that has been used to promote the story that she was beaten to death in a school bathroom.
As can be seen in the video, Dagney was quite alive some time after the fight, which did take place in a school bathroom, but which she admits that she started. She died sometime after the school resource officer met and interviewed her.
No cause of death has been confirmed yet. Preliminary autopsy results have ruled out trauma.
The SPLC has a new method for submitting anonymous tips to expose “activities of hate groups and other extremists in the U.S.” It is a convoluted method involving the use of Tor and onion routing. I am slightly tempted to use it to report the SPLC itself for the misinformation in the CAPTAIN report and the suppression of women’s rights in favor of men.
Huh, I always thought those photos looked you for a 16 year old. I had wondered if she was experiencing an eating disorder, but it turns out the people of gender simply used photos from a few years ago instead of anything current. Those younger photos were much more… cute and harmless? Not that she looks menacing or anything, but cynical ol’ me can’t help but think thy were chosen specifically to advance the storyline of Most Vulnerable.
Speaking of people being completely dishonest about gender, does anybody know why the FTB network has been down for at least the last 3 days? All I’m getting is:
The Florida legislature is a mess, but (as we’ve discussed often here) they are sometimes on the sane side of the transgender ideology battle, and right-wing legislatures often enough field trans-related bills that are carefully worded (perhaps deliberately aiming to be divisive among those on the left side of the political spectrum). That appears to be the case here.
The Guardian article is full of claims about “LGBTQ” and “conversion therapy”, which is a “scientifically discredited practice”. They are misrepresenting the bill quite badly. You can read the text (PDF) of the bill here. What it does:
– Use a sensible biological definition of “sex”;
– Require that people list their sex on identification cards;
– Require that insurance companies that cover sex-reassignment also cover detransition;
– Require that insurance companies make available policies that do not cover sex-reassignment;
– Prevent insurance companies from prohibiting mental health coverage for people questioning their gender.
That last one was a bit convoluted, but my understanding is that some companies provided coverage for mental health services, but prohibited that coverage from being used if the therapy was to counsel people who thought they were trans, because people who think they are trans are trans and should therefore just go see a medical doctor about transition. So this bill allows mental health care providers to talk to patients about their thoughts of being the opposite sex, and requires insurance companies to pay for such services.
The shouting about “conversion therapy” is probably about both this psychological counseling portion and the detransition portion.
So, nothing about LGB, or Q+ for that matter, and nothing about what might be properly referred to as “conversion therapy”.
The protest for some reason also featured images of Dagney “Nex” Benedict, as if her death was somehow relevant to this bill.
It does seem to be an arbitrary and capricious decision on Bluehost’s part to take FTB down. I know I shouldn’t be feeling this, but the schadenfreude I’m feeling given Myers’ horrible treatment of his critics for years on his blog is I suppose to be expected.
Well, to be fair, and possibly even charitable, it looks like Freethought Blogs was taken down in response to someone who has adopted the name of an Egyptian terrorist leader killed by a U.S. drone attack in 2022. So I would guess it’s FtB’s general irreligious tenor, not their attitude toward the gender-critical, that inspired the complaint. And one might infer that the takedown (and the web host’s cheerful email outlining how to get a “quick resolution”) was auto-generated. Or maybe it’s really a human being who happen to be sympathetic to the religionist. So really, it could happen to any of us, and it’s wrong and unfair no matter who’s affected.
From PZ’s notes (replies 107 and 104 here), I would assume the complaint is spurred by the anti-Islamist tenor and the criticism of Islam, not about the general irreligious tenor.
So really, it could happen to any of us, and it’s wrong and unfair no matter who’s affected.
True enough, but if we apply the same standards of evidence to this that PZ and his baying mob use when deciding whether somebody is ‘transphobic’, then the accusation is proof enough. I doubt that PZ would see the irony in his situation, though.
I saw something horrifying, and I feel the need to share it. I was going through a new cookbook, marking the recipes I want to try, and I came to the section on sandwiches. This section was titled ‘Wiches, Bitches. Seriously? There is way too much wrong with that to unpack, but of course there are obvious lines crossed, not just the use of bitches, but the concept of sandwiches…make me a sandwich, bitch.
The cookbook is edited by a team of young men and women, most of them Millennials. I fear they believe that they need to reclaim the word ‘bitches’, and that all us old feminists are just too stodgy to have fun. I’m sorry, I have a sense of humor, but that is not funny.
I should probably send the editors a letter of disapproval, but I’m struggling because I know I could well be subjected to a torrent of abuse. I’m not in the best of places emotionally right now, and I’m afraid I couldn’t handle it. I feel like a coward.
Well game out what the likely results of complaining would be; would they be likely to change the title? Would it actually make you feel better? Would you be dismissed as a fringe demographic? A torrent of abuse is certainly possible but not the most likely outcome.
Nothing cowardly about not putting in wasted effort.
I think you should do it. I became aware of the prevalence of subtle gendered slurs by reading B&W — these cookbook people probably haven’t had that privilege. So someone should tell them.
Since my doctorate is in Applied Linguistics, and in fact I’ll be going to a large Applied Linguistics conference in a couple of weeks, I decided to take a look at the article that Kathleen Stock mentioned in the Unherd post Ophelia discussed the other day. I didn’t read the whole thing (one reason I’m not in academia is that I really don’t want to read or write articles with words like “problematize”), so I won’t offer a full critique, but I think the authors have some valid points about how framing research in terms of previous literature* can lock in, and more importantly lock out, certain viewpoints; this is especially true I think in the social sciences, where it’s easy to let your prejudices color your work.
What I found truly interesting about the article, though, was that it seems to be essentially an extended literature review, with an extensive list of references (I didn’t bother to count). The authors write from a theoretical framework with a pedigree, which can be seen in their use of terms like “symbolic violence”, “epistemic theft”, and “misrecognition”.
I guess the point is not so much that lit reviews are bad, but rather that everyone else is doing them wrong.
*Another reason I dislike academia: calling academic writing “literature”. Jane Austen would take the piss.
I was going to post this in a discussion that touched on “we can’t believe our eyes anymore, we have to question whether any slightly masculine woman we see might actually be a TiM”, but I can’t find it, so here it is.
President Biden made a post on Facebook honoring Women’s History Month. This photo was included. I don’t know who that extremely tall Black woman is in the middle of the photo. I don’t know if she is actually a woman. It would be in keeping with the gender ideology capture to put a trans-identified male literally front and center in a photo that is supposed to show women, but I simply don’t know. It irks me that this is an issue, that I can’t trust my eyes, that there are people who go quite far out of their way to trick me.
Not just tall but massive. It was a very odd decision to put someone who dwarfs everyone else right in the middle like that. As so often, it feels like a taunt.
About that photo, if you look to the right and back a bit you can see another black woman who is as tall as the one in the center, so it would seem to be a case of the shortest women being put up front, as you would expect, with that one exception. So I’m not thinking this is a case of a transwoman putting themselves forward, at least not on the face of it.
A group called Environmental Progress has published “The WPATH Files.” From their press release:
Messages in the files show that patients with severe mental health issues, such as schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, and other vulnerabilities such as homelessness, are being allowed to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions. Members dismiss concerns about these patients and characterize efforts to protect them as unnecessary “gatekeeping.”
The files provide clear evidence that doctors and therapists are aware they are offering minors life-changing treatments they cannot fully understand. WPATH members know that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will cause infertility and other complications, including cancer and pelvic floor dysfunction. Yet they consider life-altering medical interventions for young patients, including vaginoplasty for a 14-year-old and hormones for a developmentally delayed 13-year-old.
It’s one thing to criticize Israel’s conduct during its campaign against Hamas. I genuinely do believe that Netanyahu is motivated by a desire for genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It’s another thing entirely to soft-peddle Hamas’ own crimes in an effort to try to pick a ‘clean’ side in this mess.
On my way to work this morning, I noticed some chalked slogans on the sidewalk in front of our local library branch. It almost got its message right. Alongside the demands to “LEAVE KIDS ALONE”, “NO TRANS FLAG” , and “NO DRAG QUEEN STORY TIME”, they wrote, twice “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS.”
No, only two sexes. (Had I had some chalk in my pocket, I’d have been sorely tempted to edit this for the anonymous scribe.) If you’re going to take the time to scrawl on the sidewalk, keep your message on point. Sex is real “gender” is bullshit. Using trans activists’ terms hides the reality of the situation (which plays into their hands), and by helpfully conflating sex with gender, you’ve done most of their work for them. Gender is a tar baby best avoided altogether; sticking with “sex” gets the true meaning across. The apparent reluctance or squeamishness about using the word “sex” (which is more likely to grab the attention of passersby walking on your message, and, being shorter than “gender,” saves on chalk), leads me to suspect that it was written by a religion-inspired critic of trans ideology. Using chalk rather than paint might just be the force of habit brought about by Canadian politeness.
I expect that it will be washed off the sidewalk by the time I pass by again. Our branch has hosted DQST events, and several female staff members wear name tags sporting “she/her” pronouns redundantly informing me how I’m supposed to refer to them when they are not present, so I expect they will try to clean it off in the spirit of compliant allyship expected of them, if they can’t wait for today’s expected rain to do the job. I also suspect it will be reported as an anti-trans incident (hate crime if they can manage it), but that if it makes any media at all, the actual words of the graffiti will not be quoted.
On the bright side of things, France has enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution by the overwhelming vote of 780:72. That shouldn’t seem as remarkable as it is in this crazy world.
Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the global temperature curve decades ago. Exxon kept that information to itself in favour of spreading doubt about climate science and policies, advocating a ‘watch and wait’ strategy because there’s no point in throwing money at a problem that might not exist. Exxon now accepts that the evidence shows climate change is a real problem, but it’s too late to do anything about it, and anyway it’s the public’s fault because the public aren’t prepared to pay to fix things and Exxon won’t cut into their profits and upset investors by investing in clean energy.
It looks like Exxon has been using vast quantities of gas to gaslight the entire planet.
Not to mention pissing away petroleum we need for plastics, fertilizer, etc… let’s literally light precious natural resources on fire to accumulate money, a substance of no material value that exists only as a shared dream and way of keeping score (I’m pro capitalism but let’s not pretend here).
I’m not sure you understood the implications of your support for the Labour Women’s Declaration, which is using the ‘single sex spaces’ concept as part of an attempt to exclude trans people from all safe participation in public life…You have up until now been a reliable ally to the LGBTQIA community and they to you. As your former colleague on the Liberty EC, I feel entitled to ask you to reconsider this unfortunate and ill-judged decision which has serious potential implications for future support.
…the Labour Women’s Declaration, which is using the ‘single sex spaces’ concept as part of an attempt to exclude trans people from all safe participation in public life…
Again we have the assertion that women have no legitimate reason to defend the integrity of their single sex spaces, and that their sole motivation is to hurt trans people. This claim is essential because it is used to mask the fact that trans “rights” impinge on women’s safe participation in public life.
As your former colleague on the Liberty EC, I feel entitled to ask you to reconsider this unfortunate and ill-judged decision which has serious potential implications for future support.
Talk about inflated sense of self-importance. If you’re going to start playing duelling demographics, you might not want to go up against half the population.
“How the Ministry of Gaza Fakes Casualty Numbers.”
After analyzing the numbers (which you can do for yourself; I can’t, as I’m not trained in statistical analysis,) Abraham Wyner concludes,
Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.
The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.
Oh dear. The awful Andrea “Sissy P**n made me Trans” Long Chu is back again, with a long piece called: “Freedom of Sex : The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.”
To confront the reality of biological sex is not, by definition, to swear fealty to that reality; no one knows this better than a child who wishes to have their biological sex changed. We must be able to defend this desire clearly, directly, and — crucially — without depending on the idea of gender.
Thanks for that. The piece is so long I can’t muster the will to comment on it (because I can’t muster the will to read more than the first 2% of it or so).
Bridget Phetasy pointed out that Autogynephile Long Chu just tweeted this after her NY Magazine article plugging gender surgery:
speaking of which: my sweet friend theo is having painful complications from their surgery last year and urgently needs a revision, pls help out if you can.
Also, there’s some really creepy stuff going on in Chu’s essay.
The TERF does not, after all, fear being assaulted by a Y chromosome in a women’s restroom. Her paranoid fantasy is of a large testosterone-fueled body wielding a penis — an organ to which, as Butler points out, the TERF attributes almost magical powers of violence.
So feminists are obsessed with a certain male body part?
This is all just Andrew Tate-style male supremacy with a thin patina of identity politics on top.
Also, It was once asked of Ayn Rand: Is it is ridiculous to call a woman writer a misogynist?
Well, I certainly think Judith Butler is a misogynist.
Proponents of transgender treatments respond to fears about child transitions by claiming that minors typically don’t undergo cross-sex genital surgery. In addition, they argue that the treatments minors do undergo are generally reversible, and that there are firm guardrails in place preventing children from undergoing said procedures due to a sudden change in gender identity or psychiatric problems. Chu, conversely, argues that the practice “should be happening”. “What does this freedom look like in practice?,” the writer asks. “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again.”
Whatever happened to “first do no harm?”
I am in favour of adults being allowed to have “sex reassignment surgery” if it is the only way to treat gender dysphoria, but I have always regarded the use of srs medication and surgery on children and teenagers as being wrong.
Speaking of infantalizing us–on Twitter, Rudy (@theneonrequiem) shares a thing from Dylan Mulvaney:
I’m just gonna leave these lyrics from #DylanMulvaney’s debut song “Days Of Girlhood” here:
Monday, can’t get out of bed
Tuesday morning, pick up meds
Wednesday, retail therapy
“Cash or credit?” I say, “Yes”
Thursday, had a walk of shame
Didn’t even know his namе
Weekends are for kissin’ friends
Friday night, all ovеr spends
Saturday, we flirt for drinks
Playin’ wingman to our twinks
Sunday, the Twilight soundtrack
Use my breakdown in the bath
This is what being a woman is to men like Dylan. A sexist, infantile performance of “fun” and “flirty” 18 year old girls he envied in the teen rom-coms he grew up watching. Meanwhile Lady Gaga’s on Instagram comparing people criticising his ridiculous misogyny to racism.
Can woke, white-saviour-complexed celebrities just piss off already? That’d be great, thanks.
Hmm, I wonder which particular ‘twinks’ are being referred to here? The affluent ‘twin income, no kids’ twinks of the middle-class or borderline legal-age homosexual boys?
Vapid stereotype laden glurge in pop music? Would you really be paying attention if it didn’t involve that ridiculous goblin? Maybe, it is a “kids these days” kinda complaint, but still I ask the question.
As to the twinks question it’s obvious; Mulvaney used to be one…
Artist Nina Paley refuses to allow the Vagina Museum to show her film “Seder Masochism”, citing the museum’s contemptuous treatment of women (including using women-erasing language, and mocking women who objected to that language as TERFs):
I just came across For Women Scotland’s “Did you know…” page on their website. It’s long, it’s devastating, it’s loaded with links to documentation of their assertions. For example, here are just the first two of about 30 paragraphs:
…that 80-95% of people who say they are trans choose to have no medical treatment at all – no surgery, no drugs, not even therapy? Transwomen are just male people who subjectively believe that they are female. That’s it. That is all that’s required.
Despite some commentators describing an “epidemic of violence against trans people“, transwomen are no more likely to be murdered than anyone else, and the best data available shows it’s half as likely. In Scotland, zero have been killed. In fact, transwomen are almost twice as likely to be the perpetrator of a murder than to be murdered in the UK, which is not surprising since a male pattern of violence is retained regardless of any transition or cross-dressing.
His critics along with experts in rhetoric and nationalist and populist movements and leaders say it helps him turn his opponents into not just enemies but jokes. They say it helps him recast his own liabilities as laughing matters and desensitizes his supporters to his most outrageous comments and proposals — the undermining of institutions, the abandonment of allies, mass deportations and all but outright invitations for Russian invasions and so on. They say the mirth masks the menace.
“He’s always been funny,” Jen Mercieca, the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, told me — “branding” and “framing” his foes in way that “undermines their credibility” and “reaffirms the us-versus-them polarization” all “under the guise of just joking.” Practically every joke is “an in-group and out-group joke,” and “laughing at the joke is a sign of loyalty,” Mercieca explained.
I’m going to need a stronger irony meter before reading anything else written by PZ. In a post about a creationist’s attempt to disprove evolution, PZ asks
Why does Knowland feel the need to put bogus arguments into his critics’ mouths?
For the same reason that you and your mob do it all the fucking time, maybe?
Folks, this monologue is simply amazing. Carol is a former “trans man” who tells it like it is (or “was” for her) in the trans world. You. Will. Not. Believe how fucked up it was. She is a terrific speaker–she lurches through hilarity, absurdity, only to smack you upside the head with horror. The video is a crescendo: she keeps outdoing herself with her stories. I had an epiphany when, towards the end, she says something like, “In the trans world, to be ‘free’ means not having any boundaries whatsoever around your sexuality.” And, “Taking “T” turns young trans identified girls into “holes.”
This falls under “what the heck were they thinking?”.
The award was established by Ginsburg herself in 2019 as the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award”, and was intended to honor “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility”. This year the name of the award was changed to the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Award”, and they decided to include men in the candidate pool, because of Ginsburg’s “teachings about equality”. And instead of honoring people who “exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility”, they picked people “who have made significant contributions to society”.
In other words, let’s just throw out everything this award is about, but keep the name.
And who did they pick this year? Four of the five honorees were men: Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, and Sylvester Stallone. (The fifth was Martha Stewart.) A rogues gallery. Let’s honor RBG by giving an award in her name to people who represent everything she was fighting against? Was that the thought process?
Family and friends are, as one would expect, furious.
Interesting to see the Guardian step so carefully now that we’re talking about a lawsuit. Kelly-Jay is now just an “activist”, without the “ANTI-TRANS” so joyfully trumpeted at the time. By the same journalist in fact.
Instead of discussing the WPATH revelations and their effect on working-class children and teenagers, Jacobin magazine publishes an article on pseudo-intellectual Judith Butler. This article (by a Joanna Wuest) then turns into a rant about “TERFs”, which the article claims are all controlled by right-wing politicians and millionaires:
British TERFs, who are afforded an entire chapter in Butler’s book, are similarly criticized without any reference to the broader right-wing forces that quite literally orchestrate their anti-trans screeds. Kathleen Stock, for instance, is a columnist for UnHerd, an online magazine that touts itself as an unorthodox truth-teller in world saturated with narrowly “defensive liberal or angry reactionary” outlets. Notably, UnHerd owner Paul Marshall is the manager of one of the UK’s largest hedge funds, a Conservative Party donor, and a Brexit funder who contributed over £100,000 to the Vote Leave campaign.
Eh? While I suspect Stock is grateful to Paul Marshall for giving her an outlet, I don’t see any evidence that Marshall “quite literally orchestrates” Stock’s writings. Given that even mildly gender-critical women are driven out of left-wing publications by organised campaigns (ask Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman) people like Stock are compelled to write for right-wing outlets like Unherd instead. Self-righteous pseudo-socialists like Joanna Wuest then cite this as proof of Stock and co. “incipient fascism”, or whatever buzzword the Verso Books crowd are promoting this week.
Part of me wants to point and laugh at that piece but I just can’t summon the will to keep reading it. Apart from anything else the constant dutiful “their” instead of “her” is, of course, confusing, and I got very tired very fast of having to keep resolving the confusion. Plus the writer seems stupid.
(They have no idea how true that is, but not in the way they’re thiking; trans identified people pay with their health and well-being for the misinformation they’re fed. I’d say that’s “bearing the brunt” alright. This story contains some of that very disinformation from these “experts.”)
Dupré Latour, a trans woman who grew up in West Africa and immigrated to Canada five years ago so she could affirm her gender identity, believes that religion, stereotypes and misconceptions help people justify their hate.
Well what about the lies, intimidatio, and denial of reality? I can imagine that one could develop an antipathy towards transgenderism without needing to draw upon religion. There are plenty of “stereotypes” and “misconceptions” within genderism itself, and I wouldn’t trust this man’s definition of “hate.”
She is saddened that many believe that transgender identity is merely a trend.
I don’t care how sad he is, social contagion is a thing, and it preys upon confused youth, many of whom are suffering from other problems, none of which will be solved by transing them. Many, if not most of these children and youth would, if not shunted into the “gender affirming” pathway, desist, and grow up to be gays and lesbians. How real can it be if it’s something you can grow out of? If it looks like a trend, and walks like a trend, and talks like a trend, it can’t very well be fundamental and innate, can it?
“But we’ve always been there,
Nope.
…it’s just that now, we are in an environment, in a favourable era, but it’s not a trend: these are people who make sacrifices, people who don’t love themselves, who look in the mirror and hate themselves and who have no choice to go through this to live their lives in the image of what society expects.”
The sacrifices are no proof that it’s not part of a trend. People will do any number of harmful, deluded things in persuit of something that is not real. And as for self hatred, and problems with self image, see above regarding comorbidities that transing won’t fix.
Advocates have for years said that misinformation clouds much of the debate over transgender rights in Canada, especially when it comes to youth.
Advocates think that puberty blockers are like a pause button; Advocates think that puberty blockers are safe when used off-label. They believe that it’s possible to go through the “wrong” puberty, whereas a human body is primed to go through just one, and that it will happen only once. There is no “choice” in the matter, no Door Number Two, no Plan B. Blockers prevent the natural growth and development programmed into the body. Disrupting that is not hitting “pause.” There is no alternative puberty that can be offered the person denied the one and only puberty they will ever have a chance of experiencing. To suggest otherwise is clouding misinformation.
Not allowing the use of preferred pronouns can heighten levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts among non-binary and transgender youth, said Annie Pullen Sansfaçon, a professor at the Université de Montréal’s department of social work and a gender identity researcher for the past 15 years.
And how much of that is because they’ve been told that’s what they’re “supposed” to be feeling? No discussion of gender identity touching on children fails to claim this; kids doing their own “research” and self-diagnosing as trans are going to see this formula all the time. It’s become part of the script, it’s part of what kids have been told is key to getting their own way. It’s what’s expected of them. It’s a bunch of self-selected subjects and no control group.
GRIS-Montréal, a community organization, has been holding workshops and conferences in schools about sexual orientation for 30 years. Since 2017, the organization has also broached the realities of gender identity.
Great; forced teaming. Though I have to laugh at the oxymoronic idea of “the realities of gender identity.” As if.
Marie Houzeau, the organization’s general manager, said the same prejudices and myths that existed in relation to homosexuality in the past are now transposed to gender identity, ..
Bullshit.
…even though it’s established that one cannot influence the orientation or gender identity of someone else.
More bullshit. If people couldn’t be “influenced” in regards to their “genderidentity” there would be no detransitioners.
She said there is a huge disparity in the amount of reliable information circulating in schools.
“We know that young people receive a lot of information through social media, some follow influencers and that constitutes their main source of information,” Houzeau said.
“We also know the phenomenon of algorithms and echo chambers that ensure that young people only receive information that is in line with what they already think, it can lead to misinformation for some people if they follow people who themselves have opinions based on misinformation.”
Yes, and you’re not doing that at all, are you?
On the other hand, some youth have the right information and can share it with their peers to help debunk transition and treatment myths, she said.
What do you consider to be the “right” information? What myths are you passing off as truth? What’s your take on puberty blockers? Do you think that sex is “assigned” at birth? Is there more than one sex? Can humans change sex?
Pullen Sansfaçon said one common misconception is about puberty blockers — medication prescribed to adolescents who are beginning a gender transition. She stressed these drugs are not given to children before puberty hits.
The medication is not permanent and simply slows down the puberty process, buying time for a young person to weigh their decision more carefully. If a person stops taking it, puberty resumes its course within a few months, Pullen Sansfaçon said.
Hey look, there’s a myth right there, the pause button. The vast majority of children put on blockers end up being given wrong sex hormones.
According to recent studies, gender-affirming care has psychosocial and mental health benefits for youth. During adolescence, hormone blockers reduce the risk of suicidal ideation.
But other studies have caused several countries to stop the use of blockers for children, and that gender affirming care does not result in improvement in mental health issues or suicidality. And let’s not forget the damning revelations of the WPATH papers and what they mean for the entire concept of “best practices” in “gender affirming care.”
“These are medications that can save a person’s life,” Pullen Sansfaçon said.
These are experimental procedures that can permanently fuck up a person’s life.
It’s the same thing for gender-affirming surgeries.
Indeed, these can permanently fuck up a person’s life.
The Canadian Paediatric Society says age cutoffs for funding such surgeries vary by province and territory in Canada, but genital reconstructive surgery is restricted to individuals who are 18 or older.
But the genitals aren’t being “reconstructed,” they’re removed and replaced with a non-functioning resemblance of the other sex’s organs. Just as a glass eye is not actually a functional eye that restores sight when worn, a “neo-vagina” isn’t a vagina at all; a “neo-penis” is not a penis. Sexual function is not restored, it is lost.
Top surgery to remove or augment breast tissue is generally limited to those 16 and older.
Using the euphemism “top surgery” to replace the more accurate (and unavoidably more charged) double mastectomy is dishonest and minimalizing. You’re not changing a t-shirt, you’re removing healthy breasts.
A followup with a psychologist is also required. Sam Lajeunesse, a 43-year-old trans man, can attest to its benefits.
What about more psychological consultation beforehand? If gender clinicians were really concerned for their patients’ well-being, the best case scenario that would be that of desistance through watchful waiting. That would be their first, best choice for resolving or dealing with their patients’ issues. A pathway that avoids pharmeceutical and surgical interventions should be considered a course than one that requires more aggressive “treatment.” But watchful waiting is now off the table, thanks to “experts” like these.
Pullen Sansfaçon said that some effects of hormone therapy can be reversed, sometimes through corrective surgery.
So sometimes the diagnoses are incorrect? Sometimes mistakes are made? And the times when “corrective” surgery can’t “reverse” the effects of hormone therapy? Ooops.
Medical and surgical help for young transgender and non-binary people isn’t new; standards of care have been set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health since 1998 and have been updated over the years.
Oh dear.
Lajeunesse and Latour describe discussions about their gender identity as a sort of eternal “coming out.”
That makes sense, in that they will never become the sex they are not, whatever the course of “treatment.”
“Often, people will say, ‘You’re a man,’ but no, I’m not a man, I’m a trans woman,” she said with pride. “And sometimes, it’s heavy to always have to explain that you can’t address me as a man.”
But you are a man, and nothing you do, nothing done to you, changes that. And I can address you a man if I like, because that’s what you are. You might have found doctors willing to cater to your delusions, who in turn encouraged you to force others to do the same, but I will not let you dictate my reality. You are not a woman of any kind, and never will be.
And as for “misinformation,” apart from actual right wing bigots, I doubt you’ll find any amount deception or dishonesty to match the amount and degree employed by genderists on a regular basis. “Gender affirming” clinicians sell promises of the impossible while trivializing, downplaying, and euphemizing the risks and consequences of the regime they are selling. They have joined in the effort to make talk therapy that might lead to desistance illegal, and made the procedures and treatments they are offering sound harmless and reversible, falsely suggesting they offer their patients some kind of “choice” in matters where they can have none, and being able to make changes that cannot be made.
Does anybody know what’s happened to We Hunted The Mammoth? The site has been down for ‘maintanance’ since last August, and although I know next-to-nothing about site development I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take seven months to pretty things up. The ‘page marker’ that appears in place of the site does contain a link to Futrelle’s writing coach course, which I assume would only appeal to those who have never seen his writing. https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/
It couldn’t be that his switch from defending women to joining the ‘womenz-haterz club’ has driven away the cash donors who paid the bills…could it?
these are people who make sacrifices, people who don’t love themselves, who look in the mirror and hate themselves and who have no choice to go through this to live their lives in the image of what society expects.”
Really? Is this any different from what all of us go through at some point in our lives? Women live every day under the image of what society expects, and what we are rarely able to live up to, even if we want to (which many of us don’t).
Doctors’ groups across Canada are urging the provinces not to interfere with “evidence-based” medical treatment of children with gender dysphoria.
But others say what little evidence exists points to using caution and restricting treatments for minors, and that Canada’s medical leaders are ignoring shifting trends in gender-affirming care.
That’s rich, claiming that the genderist approach is “evidence based.”
England’s decision, condemned by LGBT groups, was based on an independent review that found evidence relating to pediatric gender care scant and inconclusive, and that some authors are interpreting their data “from a particular ideological and/or theoretical standpoint.”
One day after the NHS decision was announced, the leaders of 11 medical organizations across Canada posted a statement on X, formerly Twitter, warning that “restricting choices and appropriate care for patients can lead to permanent harm.”
Warnings of “restricting choices” from the same lobby that worked so hard to criminalize “watchful waiting” as “conversion therapy”? Cry me a river. Their ideas of what constitutes “appropriate care” are a horror show worthy of Cronenberg. Never mind that the “treatment” they offer leads to permanent harm (see “Cronenberg”).
“Canadians have the right to make personal choices about their health with the support of their families, the guidance of physicians working with other regulated health professionals and free from ideological intrusion,” they said. [Emphasis mine.]
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Comedy gold, I tell you. Or it would be, if theyweren’t defending the mutilation and sterilization of children.
Several people commented that Canada appears at loggerheads with European counterparts. Norway, Sweden and Finland are also taking more conservative approaches to puberty blockers after conducting their own literature reviews. “So, the NHS in the U.K. is wrong and doesn’t make decisions based on science. Got it,” one commentator remarked.
You’d think said commentator would use the opportunity to explain how the Europeans are wrong, and what science they’re ignoring. When you’re claiming to be “evidence based” it’s important to show up with, you know, evidence.
When contacted for comment, the Canadian Medical Association said no one was available for an interview. A spokesperson said the statement’s timing — one day after England’s announcement — was coincidental.
Oh look, it’s “NO DEBATE” all over again.
It’s the latest skirmish in the highly polarized and politicized debate around gender-affirming care, with extremes on both sides — either “pro-everything transition or shamelessly anti-trans,” National Post contributor Julia Malott said recently. “Neither are very helpful.”
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Interesting that the National Post pulls a “Both sides” play here. I would really be interested in Malott’s take on what counts as “shamelessly anti-trans” “extremism.” Note that the other side is described as “pro-everything transition” rather than “shamelessly anti-reality” or “shamelessly anti-woman.” (Looking at his twitter feed, I’m pretty sure Malott is trans: https://twitter.com/alottamalotta?lang=en Also, he’s a lot more sympathetic to GC ideas than mot other trans identified males I’ve seen on social media. Still, I do wonder about his characterization of “shamlessness.”)
Children identifying as transgender experience more bullying, stigma and harassment, and poorer mental health than cisgender children. Their suffering is real, said Dr. Sam Wong, president of the Alberta Medical Association’s section of pediatrics, and the Canadian Paediatric Society’s medical affairs director.
Nobody has said their suffering isn’t real, but what if it has nothing at all to do with being “born in the wrong body”? It is not possible to be “born in the wrong body.” If you’re so keen on claiming the mantle of “evidence based treatment,” you might do well to drop the unwarranted Cartesian dualism to the problems you’re claiming to treat. It’s about as legitimate and confidence-iunspiring as ascribing mental health problems to demonic possesion.
“Transgender patients are not going away,” Wong said. “Whether you stop using puberty blockers, whether you ban their use…. These patients are still there. They’re still suffering from dysphoria. They’re still suffering from (poor) mental health.”
But maybe your dysphoric patients are not actually “transgender.” If “gender identity” does not exist (and I don’t know of any definition that is not circular, based on sexist, gender stereotypes, or usefully distinguishable from “personality”) then treating your dysphoric patients, or more precisely their alleged “gender identities,” is not going to get at the root cause of their distress. Think about it. Their poor mental health can’t be being caused by a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. Take a step back. Their mental illness is not caused by having been born in the wrong body, but their belief that they were born in the wrong body. However they came to it, that belief is wrong; it is delusional. Agreeing with that delusion does not help them; quite the opposite. It would be like agreeing with an anorexic person’s mistaken body self-image that they were in fact obese, and abetting their continued pursuit of further, life-threatening weight loss.
There are people who suffer from the mistaken belief that one of their arms is an alien or foriegn entity, even that it is some kind of robotic prosthesis that has somehow been grafted onto their body without their consent. The mind can be extremely creative in its rationalizations when it has to be. These people truly, sincerely believe that the arm is not a part of their body, and that it is acting of its own volition rather than theirs. This is not a momentary, transient confusion but a continuing, persisant belief, . I can’t imagine how confusing or terrifying such a delusion would be. I can’t imagine being that disconnected from reality on an ongoing basis. But obviously there are people who are thus cut adrift. They are dependent upon the skill and judgement of people firmly rooted in reality. Would a responsible doctor be right to “affirm” the delusion and comply with such a patient’s demand to amputate their completely normal, healthy arm? If not, why not? How is this impossible belief any different from the impossible belief that someone has been “born into the wrong body”? How is removing the arm of someone suffering from the mistaken belief that the arm is not theirs any different than providing double mastectomies to confused young women who believe they’re actually male? I don’t think it is any different. Yet at this moment in time, while the former would be considered unconscionable mutilation, the latter is deemed an essential part of life-saving, gender-affirming care. Just one of the many horrors hidden by breezy euphemisms like “top surgery.”
Dr. Wong; you’re supposed to be the grounded, anchored one, pulling your patients to the safety of the shore. How can you do that if you jump into the maelstrom of their delusion, joining them in a quest for the impossible? This is not the counsel of reason they so desperately need. This is not an “evidence based” approach. You’re supposed to be a lifeguard, not a swimming buddy. The reality of their suffering is not an indication of the veracity of their self-image. You can’t, and therefore shouldn’t, promise the impossible. Sometimes you have to say “No.” No; humans can’t change sex. No; men can’t become women, and women can’t become men. If your patient believes they can fly, your job is to talk them off the ledge, not leap off it with them. How does agreeing with their mistaken beliefs help them get better? For most useful values of “better”, it doesn’t. Not in the long run, not beyond the brief honeymoon afforded by the combination of the placebo effect and the sunk-cost fallacy.You’re dealing with flesh and blood humans with actual mental illnesses, but the “treatments” you’re offering are informed more by the tropes and theories of literary criticism and gender studies departments, than they are by the study of biology or medicine. How many mental illnesses are treated by surgery on parts of the body other than the brain?
Puberty blockers have been used for years in children with precocious puberty. “Decades of clinical patients have shown that puberty blockers seem to be safe and efficacious for stopping puberty,” Wong said.
They seem to be safe and efficacious? Is that some doubt creeping in? Maybe you should be asking yourself if stopping puberty is really a good idea? Many, if not most dysphoric children desist upon puberty. Why would you want to interfere with that? Desistance and acceptance of really what is, and how things really are should be the outcome you’re aiming for. Shedding delusions is a good thing. You’re supposed to help the anorexic see that they are not obese, not help them starve themselves. Helping someone come to understand that the arm that was frighteningly alien is actually a part of their body is a win. You can’t do that if you amoutate the arm on the patient’s first visit. Assisting someone to feel at home in their own skin is what you’re supposed to be doing. You can’t do that if you’re telling them that their body is “wrong,” and in need of a never-ending, lifelong course of drugs, hormones, and surgery to carve and beat it into a “right” shape it can never have. You’re not there to save your patient’s “transness”, you’re there to save them.
Look up “Carol” on YouTube, “Lesbian of the butch variety.” She is a hilarious butch lesbian who has come out the other side of the trans racket. She has a short vid called “The hidden nullification page.”
I had never heard of “nullification” before and I kinda wish I hadn’t.
not Bruce, another situation I’ve seen with regards to “trans” – people with depression or a similar mental health problem who Google their symptoms. They’ve never had a day of dysphoria in their lives, never imagined themselves the opposite sex, and never cried when referred to by appropriate pronouns. Suddenly, they are hit with sites that convince them they are trans, and it can be very difficult to convince them otherwise, especially in an environment that “affirms” in therapy rather than confronts or guides. They are not gay, they are not autistic, they are not dysphoric…but suddenly, there it is, bold in black and white (or rainbow colors, of course): they are the opposite sex!
Speaking of Rowling, she’s threatening legal action after a website makes false claims about her daughter, and misidentifies a completely different woman as Rowling’s daughter:
Jesse Singal is reporting that trans activists in Canada have smashed the windows of Radio-Canada’s headquarters after the radio station aired a “transphobic” documentary:
New article in Persuasion “When Everything is Eugenics, Nothing Is” by Amy S.F. Lutz, starts off with that “don’t take testosterone while pregnant” non-troversy.
Trans protestors have reportedly thrown smoke bombs and tried to break down doors at a health conference in Euston, London. The conference was the First Do No Harm conference on gender dysphoria and children’s health. Julie Bindel has more info:
Jane Symons, vice-chair of the Medical Journalists’ Association, said: “It’s the first time I have ever attended a medical conference requiring police protection. Healthcare should be driven by evidence not ideology.”
This week will be a very interesting one in Trump world. Lots of news coming up about his criminal charges, and lots of action geared to take place around his finances.
Today’s the deadline for Trump to pony up his $450 million-and-rising New York judgment. AG Letitia James may announce the beginning of the process of seizing his real estate assets as soon as tomorrow.
But even more interestingly, some time this week, Donald Trump’s years-in-the-making stock market scam will enter into its endgame phase. There’s a chance he could pull off a $3 billion coup, but there’s also a chance he could lose it. Here’s my stab at a brief explainer for those trying to catch up. (The stock market is all Greek to me, so this is also my attempt to wrap my head around the scheme for my own sake. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about any of this!)
In a throwback to the tumultuous ’80s in stock market pump-and-dump schemes (think Gordon Gekko), some shady businessmen concocted a scheme that would allow a handful of inside investors to use Trump’s name brand to harvest potentially billions of dollars from naive amateur individual stock market dabblers, a.k.a. retail investors. In 2021, two seemingly unrelated businesses were launched, one being a private company with a phony “product” and the other being a publicly traded company with stocks available for purchase on the Nasdaq. The product was a dubious “social media company” called Truth Social, which in reality was nothing more than a Trump-branded copy of the freeware Twitter knockoff software Mastodon. The share trading vehicle was an empty shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corp, which went public and began trading on the Nasdaq almost immediately after incorporating, despite being an empty shell with no actual business going on (this is called a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC).
Shortly after its IPO in September 2021, this strange little publicly traded empty-shell company announced its intention to eventually merge with Trump’s “media company.” This meant that eventually, shares in the shell company would transform into shares of Trump Media, encouraging the general public (retail investors) to start investing in the stock to get in on the action early. Of course, insiders like Trump and his cronies were the original shareholders, now seeing their own shares go up in value.
All of which is to say, this was a clever way to spin up a publicly traded Trump company with as little regulatory oversight as possible, more-or-less bypassing the hassle of an IPO, while allowing Trump and insiders to get the best financial advantage possible right from the outset, as they would already be the majority shareholders long before any business announcements were made public. It was all a little too clever, though: regulators have been battling with them right from the start, trying unsuccessfully for two years to shut down this obviously shady arrangement.
(It seems until now Trump’s businesses have almost always been private, not publicly traded, the better to keep his crimes in the dark. He did dabble in a publicly traded casino hotel once in the ’90s. He got out with millions while the rest of the investors lost everything. Which is exactly his plan again this time.)
And now, with legal battles out of the way, as well as some internal wrangling among some of the initial shareholders in the shell company, the proposed merger was officially sanctioned in a board meeting on Friday. Any time this week, Nasdaq’s “DWAC” will be re-christened “DJT”, and anyone who owns shares in the empty shell formerly known as Digital World Acquisition Corp will now be an owner of shares in Trump Media and Technology Group.
Right now, those shares have reached a value of $5 billion total, thanks largely to amateur and first-time investors from the MAGA camp, who are treating it as a “meme stock”. Trump himself owns the majority of the company’s shares, and his piece of the pie is now valued at $3 billion, thanks to his loyal fans jacking up the trading price.
So the pump is done. Now we move on to the dump.
Trump Media isn’t really a media company and it doesn’t actually make any money. So it’s only a matter of time before its stocks become worthless as people realize they’ve invested in a worthless company.
Trump and his allies need to keep the value of the stock afloat only long enough until they can cash out their shares, which will almost certainly lead to an immediate crash in the stock price and leave the rest of the shareholders — the MAGA loving laypeople duped into investing — high and dry with worthless stocks in an off-the-shelf freeware copy of a Twitter clone that no one uses.
The media is reporting as though it’s a mystery whether Trump would dare to do something as reckless as cash out his $3 billion given that it would leave the rest of the investors high and dry. Who are they kidding? They also report that there’s a clause that Trump can’t sell his shares until at least 6 months after the merger, but then they report that he controls the board which can override this clause. So, duh. He’ll definitely make that happen as quickly as possible.
Naive reporters: when will they learn that if there’s any way at all for Trump to get money out of something, he has no sense of impropriety which would ever make him reluctant to seize an opportunity. If it’s not going to immediately land him in jail right away, he will commit the crime.
And so, it’s very likely that Trump will pull some wonky stock market business very soon.
It’s not a shoe-in that Trump will successfully pull off the stock dump in time, though. If enough of the other investors clue in that this thing is a pump-and-dump scheme, they could sell off their own shares while they’re still relatively high in value, leaving Trump’s stocks in the rubble.
So it’s something of a face-off between Trump and his own supporters: who will manage to sell off their shares first before this empty bubble collapses? Trump himself, or his dupes?
Already on Friday, the share price went down about 14% on the news that the merger was approved. This was presmumably the initial wave of clever investors pulling out before the run for the money begins.
I can’t help but wonder — why? These judgments could be among our last chances to stop a dangerous dictator from destroying democracy. Why are judges so afraid to simply do their jobs and enforce the punishments the man so clearly deserves?
I read a piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker last night, about Hitler’s rise to power, all the opportunities the establishment had to stop it, and all the reasons they didn’t seize upon them. Mostly it was a strange belief that if they obstinately played nice in the face of Hitler’s naked ambition, that somehow in the long run their rigid adherence to rules and procedures would ensure that democracy prevails. They were stupid to think that, and the whole world paid — none more than the Jews.
I’m sick of judges blowing our chances to stop Trump out of some foolish belief that if they demonstrate an abundance of charity and caution it will pay off in the long run.
We’re running out of time. There’s no more long run to rely on. It’s now or never, people.
So now nothing can be done for several months of appeals, by which time at the very least Trump will have made himself a whole lot richer through continued fraud, or he may well have made himself Emperor of the US and impervious to any judgments basically ever again.
Trump awards himself two trophies for winning both the Club Championship and Senior Club Championship (at his own club, of course), describes his play as ‘amazing’ and thanks himself. Kim Jong-un couldn’t do better.
A better link for the Trump awards: Love this passage:
Many other social media users quoted Rick Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist and author of Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
Reilly, who has played with the former president, has described how Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant”, including “kick[ing] the ball out of the rough so many times, the caddies call him Pele”, taking endless free shots and falsifying scores.
Donald Trump may be on course to once again win the Republican presidential nomination, but he’s also dealing with big legal bills brought on by the four criminal cases against him, along with several civil suits that have won pricey judgments thus far. The Associated Press reports that the former president has come up with a solution: an agreement with the Republican National Committee that will allow him to first funnel donations to organizations that cover his legal bills, before they reach the RNC. He’ll hope to start raking it in – and potentially cover his massive finance gap with Joe Biden – on 6 April, when Trump has invited donors to a fundraiser in Florida.
The Trump appeals court reprieve really bothers me. Here’s a take by David Graham in The Atlantic, which argues that, even though Trump routinely exploits legal procedures to get out of justice, it’s right of the appeals court to lower his bond and grant him yet more extensions. It would be “unjust” for Trump to lose his ill-gotten assets if he succeeds in getting this case dismissed:
But then imagine that a few weeks from now, Trump won his appeal, convincing the court that Engoron’s finding was incorrect, or that the calculated amount of the penalty was unfair. Trump would have no way to recover the assets he’d been forced to unload at fire-sale prices. It doesn’t take any affection for Trump to see why a court would want to avoid such an outcome, and why—even if Trump would still be filthy rich—this would be unjust punishment
In other words, in the face of Trump’s brazen abuse of legal procedures to get out of justice, if we lean into offering him more legal leniency, the very kind which he keeps using to his advantage, it will in the end prove that the legal system works just as it’s supposed to. The idea is, give him every possible chance we can, so we can show the world that when he eventually loses, there can be no question that he lost fair and square.
The problem is, we’re not trying to use Trump as an example to demonstrate how noble the legal system is. That’s a foolish idea. Right now we need to use the legal system to urgently stop a dangerous man from destroying democracy. Trump and his followers don’t care about fair-and-square; they won’t ever be reasonable. The judgment against him is plainly reasonable and the odds of a successful appeal are minimal. That’s grounds to take hard action, now. He will rage about procedure no matter what you do moving forward, so stop trying to appease him. There’s no fucking point in saying please and thank you to an angry bull. It won’t stop him from charging.
This is exactly the kind of cowardice we saw when the Germans were puzzling over how to stop Hitler’s brazen power grab in 1932. In the face of someone recklessly trampling over the institutions that uphold a democratic society, the instinct to lean harder into process, procedure, decorum and restraint is perhaps understandable, but it’s all wrong. That logic ignores the asymmetry at play when you’re dealing with a corrupt narcissist.
Democratic systems keep failing at dealing with raging bulls because too many individuals within “the system” are cowards. What people like the appeals court panel who granted Trump reprieve today and the SEC who greenlit his blatantly illegal stock scam are doing is passing the buck: they’re preemptively ceding to Trump the benefit of the procedural doubt because they’re scared to do their jobs, to uphold the rules, when it’s their turn to step into the ring and face the bullhorns. They tell themselves that the system will eventually work and justice will prevail, because viewing “the system” as an abstract force for good is easier than facing the fact that “the system” is only ever as just as they, the tangible, fallible individuals it’s made of, are willing to act under duress.
Trump has lately taken to comparing himself to Al Capone. That’s an apt comparison. It took Eliot Ness and his Untouchables to bring down Capone. Ness recognized right away that playing strictly by the book was no use after corruption had reached the threshold where it was threatening the survival of the system of law and justice itself. Extreme circumstances sometimes call for extreme measures.
And Trump has shown very clearly that today, more than the justice system is broken — the entire democractic system is ill-equipped to defend against this kind of tyrant.
But don’t worry, says David Graham. There’s plenty of time to play nicey-nice; it’ll all get sorted out down the road:
As for Trump, he may just be delaying that outcome—but that’s another problem for him to try to wriggle, cat-like, out of on another day.
No, David. We don’t have the luxury of time. There may not be any legal system left by the time the credulously pedantic legal idealists are done extending Donald’s rope. The time for passing the buck is over. This is a tyrant and if there are opportunities within the legal system to stop him, we must grab them now while we still can.
We should have brought the Untouchables in to clean this up years ago.
Ok so I’m about to admit to being lazy here… but in my defense (/excuse/cri-de-coeur/whatever), see my latest comment at B&W about dealing with a *touch* too much alcohol in combo with a *touch* too much anxiety and a *touch* too much frustration at this particular moment…
Anyone have any good sources for not-too-obvious, subversive-style “women are women” (let’s be honest: T.E.R.F.), pins or jewelry, or other subtle accessories? Bags/purses, lanyards, hairclips, etc… I’d even be up for necklaces, earrings, or hairpins…but no fists, swords, or other explicitly “aggressive”-coded logos, as yeah I’ve got a mortgage to pay and would like to keep my job (postsecondary instructor in an oversaturated but stupidly-expensive-cost-of-living market :-| ).
Essentially, I want to make it as-clear-as-is-plausibly-deniably-possible that I DON’T CARE if you “Self-ID as a Particularly Special capital-P-Person”, while making it as clear as possible that I am supportive of my female students who are trying to navigate a still-male-dominated world.
The internet searches I’ve come up with so far have yielded a bunch of anti-feminist stuff that I’m SO NOT interested in… Gawds but the capitslism-driven “enshittificatiom” of everything does stink :-/
I’m watching all this, too, incredulous, enraged–impotent. Is it happening? Yes. But what am I? A mere fly speck.
Genus Homo is wondrous, but also very stupid. Especially in groups, Homo is stupid. And the bigger the group entity, the stupider participants in that group.
I just saw the documentary “The Coddling of the American Mind”.
It barely mentions trans, but it talks about the way ‘woke’ encourages the denunciation of anyone who questions any part of the doctrine you are supposed to believe. Trans just applies that to its particular doctrine.
This is off-topic — isn’t everything here in the Miscellany Room? — but a scene right at the beginning of that buzzy new Netflix show 3 Body Problem has been haunting me ever since I watched it last week. I woke up this morning and decided I had to write a little piece to get it out of my system. Anyways, I thought I’d share with you cats.
The piece is about the perils of science denialism. The show itself is pretty good, I guess. I enjoyed it. That first five-minute scene is astonishing.
The one thing that bugged me (heh) about the show is the idea that cicadas destroy crops. All they’re looking to do when they emerge is to get laid and die.
But yeah, good point about science denialism in the name of ideology. Apparently it’s caused a lot of controversy in China, even though they can’t actually watch the series.
I think what bugged me the most was the stars blinking on and off. This is why science fiction is hit-and-miss with me: I get nitpicky with the physics sometimes. They never explained how the alien device, which I understand can otherwise only exert a phyical effect on a single proton at a time, could do that. Otherwise it can only do things like mess with the results of particle accelerators, project rudimentary messages into people’s vision by “scratching” out shapes in the protons in our retinas, or send more elaborate communications by flipping the ones and zeroes inside devices’ computer chips. Though admittedly the turning-off-the-sky scene looked pretty cool. I hear the books are much more faithful to physics and that scene never happened. (Rather, it was a trick pulled off inside the character’s eye or something.)
I know what you’re saying, but I basically just chalk those things up to magic (like the transporters in Star Trek). I’m more bugged by getting basic facts wrong.
Arty, I follow your substack and I enjoyed that post. The video you linked to with the analysis of the opening scene was quite nicely done, although I wish I could have watched the scene itself. But I don’t have Netflix, so I won’t be able to watch the show. I very much enjoyed the books; they are some of my favorite science fiction.
Those books were an introduction to me of Chinese science fiction. Really different style of story. I read several other books by Cixin Liu (some were excellent, some not as compelling to me), a collection of stories (including a “fan work” in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (aka Three Body Problem) universe) by Baoshu, and several books by one of the translators of the trilogy, Ken Liu, who is an American of Chinese origin.
I am enormously pleased to hear that the show is good and respectful of the books. It would be a shame to treat such excellent source material badly.
This is why science fiction is hit-and-miss with me: I get nitpicky with the physics sometimes.
WaM:
I’m more bugged by getting basic facts wrong.
I think that I’m still mentally scarred from the explanation of why the Earth’s interior was suddenly and catastrophically heating up, barely five minutes into the ‘blockbuster’ movie 2012.
I thought they were mutating… honestly, quite a thrill ride but the obviously awesome step-dad getting brutally killed just to restore the “proper” nuclear family was really fucked up.
“Transgenderism” is clearly a “both sides” phenomenon:
The Right pushes and enforces the toxic stereotypes and homophobia that trap gender-nonconforming boys and girls in cycles of self-hatred.
The Left pushes and enforces the conveyor belt of disfiguring “treatments” that seem to provide the way out for these suffering incipient gay children.
Fuck. Them. Both.
Improve the lives of young women and girls, let gay boys be sissies and lesbian girls be tomboys–let them go through fucking adolescence, for chrissakes–and “transgenderism” will all but disappear.
It appears that changes to Title IX to allow transgender male athletes to compete with female athletes are being held up because of election-year politics:
Proposed regulations would outlaw state bans on transgender athletes but allow some targeted restrictions
The Biden administration is preparing to finalize sweeping rules in coming weeks governing how sex discrimination is addressed in schools, including new protections for transgender students. But officials plan to put off a companion regulation outlining the rights of trans athletes, according to people familiar with administration planning.
Athletics is among the thorniest issues confronting supporters of transgender rights, including those in the Biden administration. Polling shows that clear majorities of Americans, including a sizable slice of Democrats, oppose allowing transgender athletes to compete on girls’ and women’s teams. Twenty-five states have statewide bans on their participation, with proponents arguing that trans women have a biological advantage over other participants.
“Arguing”. Right. The truth is that males have an advantage over females when it comes to sport. This is why redefining Title IX to equate gender with sex is going to create a mess and the Biden administration knows this, which is why they’re kicking the can down the road until after Election Day in November. They could do the right thing and rule that discrimination on the basis of one’s sex precludes transgender males from competing in female categories of sport, but that of course would upset the trans activists and result in loss of support among progressive younger voters in some critical swing states like Wisconsin. I suppose the best that can be hoped for is for Biden to win and then do the right thing and not conflate sex with gender when it comes to sport.
Improve the lives of young women and girls, let gay boys be sissies and lesbian girls be tomboys–let them go through fucking adolescence, for chrissakes–and “transgenderism” will all but disappear.
Totally right on, with modification. If straight boys prefer things often considered girly, let them. Don’t assume they must be gay, and don’t assume they are trans. (My husband was considered gay for decades before we married because of his profession and interests). Let girls, straight or lesbian, be tomboys without making assumptions about their sexuality or “gender identity”. See above. I have been considered to be lesbian because I love stomping in wetlands and am a scientist.
We just need to stop categorizing people based on such things; obviously there are men who can match their colors, love art, and work as librarians…they may be gay or straight, but they are still men. There are women who like sports, fishing, hunting (or stomping in wetlands)…they may be gay or straight, but they are still women. Their clothes, their activities, are who they are, not what sex they are. Their sex is biologically determined; their behaviors are determined by a suite of factors including biology and environment.
I frequently use Google image search to help find reference material for future projects (that may or may not see the light of day outside of thinking about doing them). Today, for the first time, I noticed that phony, bullshit AI-generated images had been included in the search results. Fortunately, I’m already well enough versed in what I’m researching (in this case whales), to spot them. While the renderings are photo-like, the images themselves were actually quite grotesque; one image of a breaching “Humpback” sported a surfeit of pectoral fins. https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/c94a27b4b0214d9ab3b6aa30c6e414ff.jpeg (Any real whale with this anatomy would have been front page news in any number of science journals.) Others were bizarre, inept, and impossible mash-ups of features from several species, (https://www.dreamstime.com/fin-whale-balaenoptera-physalus-second-largest-animal-earth-blue-known-its-streamlined-body-distinctive-image289369450) while some must have been generated by computers on bad acid trips:
These are in a different league from the phony, photoshopped, click-bait images used often on Youtube to promote videos in which, like bad sci-fi movie posters of the past, nothing like the sensationalized, phony promotional image ever appears. Though I’m hoping they don’t get any “better” as AI “learns” (since I want them to remain poorly done and easily spotted), I still resent having to wade through crap like this when I’m looking for useful reference material.
Not even a first world problem, or really important, or germane to anything, but I needed to vent.
“The sadness of Sceptical Man” by Victoria Smith, about how rational commentator types like Freddie deBoer, Jon Ronson and Adam Buxton have a blind spot for the extremism and the harm of modern trans ideology.
I mentioned it because deBoer published an unhinged rant on his Substack three days ago. It started out discussing the “Palestinian Plate” controversy, then became a rant about deBoer’s percieved opponents. There’s lots of attacks on gender-critical feminists in the rant:
“Six million TERF Substacks would find a way to turn this into a complaint about how some people with penises wear dresses…What does Joe Rogan Thought amount to? – a relentless fixation on the absolutely minuscule portion of the child population receiving medical intervention for gender transition..”
There’s loads more waffle in that essay, all largely indistinguishable from the the pro-TRA material that deBoer’s frequent targets like Drew Magary and Michael Hobbes used to write.
For deBoer’s former admirers – and I am one of them- the essay is embarrassing, a sign that perhaps deBoer is having psychological problems again.
Oof, that’s a lot of rant. It’s interesting how wholly uninterested he is in women compared to his interest in trans people and Palestinians and workers etc. He uses the word only twice, and not with any solidarity. Lots and lots and lots about our trans comrades, zip about women. So very…like everyone else.
(At the moment, I’m going over the website page devoted to a summary of it. I’m not sure I’m going to play the actual episode. I have my limits).
SPOILER ALERT: They’re not going as far “beyond the binary” as they think and claim, because trans/cis IS ANOTHER BINARY. They’re not so much transcending the binary as replacing one binary with another. Did they not think anyone would notice this?
Things don’t start well. Here’s the caption for the photo at the top of the page describing the set used for parts of the episode.
Martin’s lab scene was built by an all-queer team that borrowed and scrounged to create a set that was ‘kooky and gorgeous,’ says Mama.
Let’s just say that this taste of self-congratulatory, smarmy, infantilization did not give me much confidence in the watchability (or reliability) of the program itself.
I’m not even past the first illustration in the article and I’m already wrestling with problematic, disturbing questions, and not the kind of questions this show is intending to raise, let alone answer.
Does the CBC typically surrender set construction to particular demographic groups? Would an episode on deafness or blindness have sets built by “all-deaf “or “all-blind” teams? Would a segment on evolution screen out anyone with Creationist sympathies from picking up hammers and saws? What did that job call look like, and how did not run afoul of labour code practices? Were “non-queer” set workers barred from participating?How do they screen out those of their workforce who aren’t queer? Is there a questionaire? (that would be particularly intrusive.) Why did the CBC feel the need to a) do this and b) tell us about it? In a word politics. The testing for political purity would be as intrusive as the litmus tests for “queerness.” Who would have guessed that one little performative sentence would raise so many questions about backstage machinations at the CBC? This tells me that this show is going to be at least as much (if not more) about politics as it is going to be about science. Not that this is a bad thing, as often the two are inextricably entwined, and at least this show wears its politics on its sleeve. But it does militate against its honesty and neutrality, and thus its overall value. To put it bluntly, this show cannot and should not be trusted.
Onward.
What follows seems to be a quick tour through the contents of the episode, a sort of TL;DWatch precis. Here are some of the things that jumped out at me.
In Fluid: Life Beyond the Binary, Martin introduces some of the scientists responsible for recent discoveries about gender and sexual fluidity in both the human and non-human world. (Emphasis mine)
The whole show sounds like an excersize in forced teaming between biology and “gender studies.” I’d be willing to bet a large sum that, given the examples in this write-up, there’s going to be a lot of opportunistic conflation of “sex” and “gender” throughout the show, moving from one to the other at the whim of the “arguments,” without warning or warrant. In this first patragraph we have the assertion that “gender fluidity” and “sexual fluidity” occur in both the human and non-human world, when in fact, “gender identity” is not something present outside of human culture, and humans can’t change sex. Immediately we are plunged into dishonesty and bad faith.
Guided by eminent biologists Joan Roughgarden and Justin Rhodes, and famed primatologist Frans de Waal, Martin discovers a hermaphroditic ginger plant, sex-changing clownfish, and mammals — lions, hyenas and chimpanzees — that display surprisingly non-normative sex traits.
What is a “non-normative sex trait”? Maybe I’m just sheltered or poorly read, but I’ve never heard this phrase before. Or is this an attempt to muddy the waters and suggest some kind of connection with “gender non-conformity”?
Neuroscientist Gillian Einstein explains how variations in genes and hormones inform where each of us are on the gender spectrum,
Some questions here. (Perhaps they are answered in the episode itself, but I’m in no mood to confirm or deny this at this time. Maybe someone else here will take a bullet for the team?) Shouldn’t we back up a step or two and demonstrate the existence of the “gender spectrum” and the evidence for it, rather than presenting it to us as a given from the get-go? Some of your audience might be new to this, never having been exposed to the concept; some of your audience might be all-too-familiar with it, and may not be convinced that it even exists. You owe it to both of these groups of viewers to show your work.
Gender norms are quite varied and variable across, between, and within cultures. They have varied over time within our own society. How do they map onto (or how are they mapped from) this supposed “gender spectrum” that you posit and reify offscreen? How is the scale of this “gender spectrum” calibrated? What are the units used to quantify the “masculinity” or “femininity” of any given individua? Could it be the Barbie to G.I. Joe scale? Perhaps the colourful and imaginative Scientific American infographic that plots various DSDs along a non-existent continuum while presenting them as shades of colour along a “spectrum” made up of whole cloth? Where do “non-binary” people fit on the “spectrum”? Are they the gender equivalent of x-rays, ultraviolet, or infrared, showing up outside the “visible” spectrum? Or are they on a third dimension of this supposed “spectrum” turning it into some kind of three-dimensional form? And what of all the other bespoke genders? How do they fit, and what biotic parallels do we see alongside the usual suspects such as clown fish and hyenas? Or is it all just an ad-hoc excuse kludged together for the sake of expediency, but unable to withstand prolonged scrutin of its details?
…and neuroscientist Lise Eliot studies a scan of Martin’s brain and explains why there’s no such thing as a male or female brain.
Hold on. Maybe I missed a memo or two, or nodded off during the relevent struggle session, but isn’t (wasn’t?) gender ideology based on the concept of “being born in the wrong body” on male/female brain differences? Or have we thrown out assertions of neuroanatomical difference altogether in favour of gendered “souls”? Not that I necessariily think that there are such things as “male brains” and “female brains” per se, but I am curious how a science program is going to revivify Cartesian dualism in their absence
Eliot says research into a supposed gay or trans brain is harmful because it pathologizes those who don’t conform to gender norms when there’s really only one kind of human brain.
Here we have some forced teaming with homosexuality shielding the concept of “transness” from further inquiry. So once the spectrum was “discovered” all other research is officially forbidden? Gender ideology itself already posits some kind of “mismatch” or “disalignent” between putative “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth.” That language suggests pathology, a straying from nominally “normal” development or growth. Surely such an incongruity would call for more study, not less. How is it that this potential field of knowledge and information gets to wall itself off from examination? Trans ideology’s use of “cis” vs “trans” is already judgemental and “normative.”
The idea that there’s “really only one kind of human brain” is a lie. There are eight billion human brains on the planet; they can’t all be identical. Somewhere between the numbers one and eight billion, there must be some meaningful differences that are distinguishable between them. Maybe there are no such differences when it comes to sex, but even such things as handedness, colour blindness, synesthesia, etc. are going to be the results of some kind of differences between brains of people with or without the particular functional variance. Even if one isn’t out to somehow “cure” these “conditions”, curiousity about their origins and effects is perfectly normal and legitimate. Is there anyone stygmatizing and shutting down this research?
So where exactly is the “gender spectrum” located? What are those genes and hormones doing/ What tissues and or behaviours are they producing or modifying? How do you get from a gene or hormone to Barbie or G.I. Joe? What’s the process? What’s the pathway? If “transness” doesn’t reside in the brain, then where is it found? Maybe they’re afraid of anyone asking this question in case the answer that comes back is “Nowhere.”
Martin meets with three trans and non-binary scientists who take a gender-diverse approach to their work. [They] hold a roundtable about their research and their experience studying gender research from diverse points of view. They all agree science as a whole needs more perspectives.
“What I would love to see, especially in … biology itself, is this acceptance of the need to have different ways of approaching the same question,” Sun says.
I would be much more sanguin about the prospect of “more perspectives” if I didn’t suspect that it would be combined with the wholesale redefining of basic terminology and relaxing of standards in order to “include” a wider range of “answers” than an unreconstructed science would normally countenance or permit. Do these researchers know what a woman is? I have no confidence that they would agree that they are actually adult human females.
And to fully understand “transness,” does not one need to understand “cisness”? Figuring out the complexities and novelties of clownfish and other “sexually fluid” species requires knowing the more conventional pathways of sexual development. Without that background, the clownfish story is incomplete. Surely elucidating the nature of “transness” calls for study of its companion state of being. Is anyone looking into this? If not, why not?
I’m guessing that the resulting research under this presumably relaxed regime would have a lot more in common with the “discovery” of N-rays ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-ray ) than the finding that heart disease in women shows different symptoms in women than it does in men, and that failure to recognize and account for this difference can be fatal to women. I also suspect that these “additional perspectives” and the findings arising from them will come, like so much of gender “research” at the expense of women. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but both the CBC and “gender” researchers have form for screwing women over for the sake of trans ideology, so colour me skeptical at the prospect of their sudden and unlikely conversion to honesty and clarity.
Martin also meets a group of trans youth who share their difficult life experiences and hopes for a future that is more inclusive and accepting. They hope the new generation of health-care professionals have a more informed and empathetic view on sex and gender.
Here’s another bet: I suspect that the concepts of “desistence” and “detransition” do not appear anywhere in this show, even though, if “gender identity” actually exists, these phenomena would be vital in delimiting and defining the very boundaries and parameters of gender identity itself. Rather than being ignored or denounced, desistors and detransitioners should be considered vital test cases for the concepts that genderists claim to be investigating.
Do they talk to any girls who share “difficult life experiences” because they have been screwed over by transgender activism? That’s a group whose numbers are less than zero, and perhaps larger than those of “trans youth.” And as for health-care professionals, “more informed” in “trans” terms probably means “more thoroughly indoctrinated.” Given the Tavistock and WPATH revelations (and doubtless more yet to come), it’s more important for them to have an understanding of sex and gender that is honest and accurate, because without that foundation, as we have seen, “empathy” is worth less than nothing.
Do they talk to any girls who share “difficult life experiences” because they have been screwed over by transgender activism?
Good rant, as usual, not Bruce. This sort of stuck out at me. That is an important category, to be sure. But another category is also relevant to this question – what about girls who share ‘difficult life experiences’ because they are female?
Talking to some of those girls might help people understand why trans has become such a fad among young females, when at one point it was mostly a male phenomenon. Why don’t girls want to be girls? Gee, I can’t imagine why! Unless, of course, they really are boys ‘inside’.
No, you twit. As a girl, I shared ‘difficult life experiences’ with a lot of girls…and as a woman, I share ‘difficult life experiences’ with a lot of women. Why? Because of our sex. Because we are the despised sex by too many. Because men have the power…and they carry that power with them into transness…pardon me for not following the narrative (are you listening, Scotland?), but TRANSWOMEN ARE MEN. They act like men, like self-obsessed, overly entitled men.
They never explained how the alien device, which I understand can otherwise only exert a phyical effect on a single proton at a time
That is not my understanding. The sophons can be reduced to the size of protons (because they’re folded up), but they’re not limited to that size if they “unfold” their higher dimensions, and are not limited to affecting one proton at a time.
Man, I so want a like button for Screechy at 225! Arty – fantastic piece on Stack.
I’ll also say I thought 3 Body was compelling. The second and third books were very good, but felt a little mechanical in places. Not sure whether that is due to translation or if it’s the writer or part of the cultural manner of telling stories. Certainly enjoyed the trilogy though.
I haven’t been following the story about music protests in Mazatlán, Mexico, but it appears the gist of it is: it’s a resort area, and the visitors are fond of peace and quiet in the evening. The people who live there, however, are fond of their rousing Banda music at that time of day. The hotel owners, in deference to the complaints from their guests, were seeking passage of a noise ordinance. There were protests, some turned violent, but ultimately there was no noise ordinance.
The battle has been referred to as “gentrification”, a term I usually associate with high-income residents rather than high-income visitors, but OK, maybe it applies to visitors, too, especially with hotel development. And the tourists are largely Americans, as one might expect.
So Daily Kos had a cartoon about the battle. The victorious “cultura!” musicians defeated the American tourist, labeled “gentrification”. The tourist is depicted as a middle-aged male carrying a cocktail.
The cartoon is captioned: “Strike up the banda! Banda music wins the battle against Amerikaren tourist gentrification in Mazatlan, Mexico.”
My, how utterly cute, to take a misogynist slur, embed it in a new word, and imply it is perfectly fine to use because the depicted target is male. I’m not buying it.
Two unrelated articles of interest in the Washington Post today. First, gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Apartheid is considered a crime against humanity, so labeling what the Taliban do “apartheid” could help, though I’m not sure it’s a strong enough word. But why call it “gender” apartheid? I don’t doubt the Taliban treat men who dress up as women badly, but I doubt they would treat a woman who calls herself a man any better than other women. It’s sex, not gender.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said on X and in a statement, “Donald Trump is facing 91 felony charges. If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they find a federal prison.”
Well, yes, but gender is ambiguous as well, and that just underscores the problem of having those two words to describe three different (albeit related) things. I mean, polysemy is fine (hell, if it weren’t for polysemy, I would’ve had to write an honest dissertation:)), but it can also be manipulated for dishonest reasons.
“Gender” is used in a lot of phrases (e.g. “gender pay gap”, “gender-based violence”) where “sex” might be appropriate under current understanding, but it simply wasn’t an issue until this whole gender identity ideology thing came along. For most people, for most uses, “gender” is a (possibly more polite) synonym for “sex”.
I used Google Trends to check the popularity of “gender apartheid” versus “sex apartheid” over the last ten years. They seem to track about the same until about 2020, then “gender apartheid” began trending noticeably higher.
Quite a few articles have popped up in my RSS feed about Korbin Albert, midfielder on the US Women’s National Soccer Team, because of her social media content that apparently includes “anti-LGTBQ+” items. She has been roundly criticized, and she has apologized profusely, groveling in the manner that appears to be required for such grievous offenses.
I can find precious little information about exactly what she did that ignited this storm. Most of the commentary I’ve read seems to assume automatically that she has done something that demands an apology. Even Albert herself is working on that assumption. As best I can tell, she is some variety of conservative Christian, and she liked and/or shared some material that included a Christian man talking about how he used to be gay, and was “feeling transgender”, and thought he might “actually be” a woman, but now Jesus saved him. Garden variety Christian views, totally non-threatening except that they don’t align with certain left-wing views.
I might not agree with the comments from the man in the video about being gay, and I might agree with his comments about “feeling transgender”, I can’t tell without details, but these are just expressions of his views, they aren’t threats or disparagement of anyone. Korbin Albert merely shared the video; she might agree with him, but she in turn did not disparage anyone, did not threaten anyone. None of the other scant view details I can find alter that perception. But no disagreements are allowed, as we here well know.
On the subject of cruise ship hatred, here’s a funny entry in the venerable subgenre of literary magazine editors commissioning writers to document the strangeness of cruise world.
This time it’s Gary Shteyngart for the Atlantic. I have mixed feelings about him as a writer: his schtick is a bit much sometimes, but he’s got many great observations and witty phrases, too. I was won over by the end. Good piece!
Another scandal involving puberty blockers, this time in Italy:
A criminal investigation has been opened following an audit of the gender clinic at Florence’s Careggi hospital, according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Request for help: I’m looking for materials (especially research papers) that show that children and teenagers who don’t take puber.ty block.ers gradually grow out of their gender dys,phoria.
I was wondering if any of the posters on B&W could point me in that direction.
This recent paper looks as though it may be some use to you: Pien Rawee, Judith G. M. Rosmalen, Luuk Kalverdijk, Sarah M. Burke, ‘Development of Gender Non‑Contentedness During Adolescence and Early Adulthood’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, published: 27 February 2024. Available as a pdf download.
Abstract:
Adolescence is an important period for the development of gender identity. We studied the development of gender non-contentedness, i.e., unhappiness with being the gender aligned with one’s sex, from early adolescence to young adulthood, and its association with self-concept, behavioral and emotional problems, and adult sexual orientation. Participants were 2772 adolescents (53% male) from the Tracking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey population and clinical cohort. Data from six waves were included (ages 11–26). Gender non-contentedness was assessed with the item “I wish to be of the opposite sex” from the Youth and Adult Self-Report at all six waves. Behavioral and emotional problems were measured by total scores of these scales at all six waves. Self-concept was assessed at age 11 using the Global Self-Worth and Physical Appearance subscales of the Self-Perception Profile for Children. Sexual orientation was assessed at age 22 by self-report. In early adolescence, 11% of participants reported gender non-contentedness. The prevalence decreased with age and was 4% at the last follow-up (around age 26). Three developmental trajectories of gender non-contentedness were identified: no gender non-contentedness (78%), decreasing gender non-contentedness (19%), and increasing gender non-contentedness (2%). Individuals with an increasing gender non-contentedness more often were female and both an increasing and decreasing trajectory were associated with a lower global self-worth, more behavioral and emotional problems, and a non-heterosexual sexual orientation. Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.
According to the transgender participation policy, all athletes may participate in NAIA-sponsored male sports. In contrast, only athletes whose biological sex is female and have not begun hormone therapy will be allowed participate in women’s sports. A student who has begun hormone therapy may participate in activities such as workouts, practices and team activities, but not in interscholastic competition.
This seems like a reasonable approach. It is explicitly reserving women’s sports for women. The framing in several articles, as expected, focuses on the “unfairness” to “transgender women” or “transgender athletes”, rather than keeping men out of women’s sports. I do note that this article mentions the topic is a hot-button issue for “conservative groups and others”, so maybe somebody got the message that it isn’t just conservative groups.
I like the way they addressed that, since it prevents transmen on testosterone from competing as well. In short, it returns women’s sport not only to women, but to women who are not doping. Others could learn from this.
Eleven studies have been conducted looking at whether gender dysphoria persists throughout childhood. On average 80% of children change their minds and do not continue into adulthood as transgender.
The page is undated but the HTML code shows that it was posted in 2017 and last revised in April 2022.
The Scottish police are not at all happy about the new hate law. The general verdict is that it is completely unworkable. They’re also pretty miffed at the sheer volume of reported hate crimes – 8000 in the first week of April – all of which have to be investigated to some degree. To put that figure into context, for the last 10 years they received between 6000 and 7000 reports of hate crimes per year, so this is more than a year’s worth in one week.
It isn’t just @salltweets (Sall Grover founder of Giggle) who has been in the sights of men who hate women having anything for themselves.
Kirsha Kaechele’s artwork at the museum she curates, which is owned by her husband David Walsh, may have had a point but violated the law, the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal decision said on Tuesday.
“This case involves conflict between an artwork which deliberately and overtly discriminates for artistic purpose and legislation which has the objective of prohibiting discrimination,” tribunal deputy president Richard Grueber said.
The action was brought by NSW man Jason Lau. He paid $35 to visit MONA in April 2023 but was not allowed behind the exhibit’s curtain because he is a man.
“Mr Lau was not happy with being refused entry,” agreed facts in his complaint of discrimination said.
It also notes the refusal to admit him was “part of the art itself” as it was a “participatory installation”.
The author I gather is a trans-identified female, and she notes she’s been immersed in the topic for a decade. She makes a lot of “well, we knew this already, we’ve agreed with this for a long time” kinds of statements. The big take-away regarding puberty blockers is not that there is no evidence for their effectiveness and they should not be given, but rather that there are long waiting lists.
But the big problem in this review is that she accuses Cass of “anti-trans bias”, without being clear what that means. I haven’t read the report myself, only highlights reported in general and gender-critical news media, but I might presume that “anti-trans bias” is similar to typical understandings of “transphobia”: disagreement with the idea that “transgender” has a coherent definition, rejection of the idea of women who have male bodies and men who have female bodies, refusal to state that transwomen are women and transmen are men. I might expect the report to focus on the medical rather than political implications of these treatments for gender dysphoria, but for some readers the lack of explicit acknowledgement in favor of gender ideology constitutes a bias against it.
To wit:
In reality, the problem has never been disagreement about how to care for trans children and young people. Rather, individuals genuinely motivated to create such services have been effectively sidelined by an overwhelmingly more powerful coalition of politicians, journalists and, indeed, healthcare workers who are motivated by an anti-trans ideology – a need to assert and somehow “prove”, to exclusion of all other possibilities, that trans people like me do not, in fact, exist. And, therefore, that we do not spend the first 18 years of ours lives as children.
Nobody is disagreeing that you exist. They are disagreeing that the concept of “trans people” is coherent and reasonable. You are perhaps a person unhappy with your sex, and therefore wish to pretend to be the other sex. Of course there are children who similarly wish to pretend to be the other sex. But neither you nor they are the other sex, regardless of personality or mannerisms or clothing preferences. My admittedly second-hand understanding of the Cass report is that it is looking at the medical risks and effectiveness of typical interventions for gender dysphoria, and not taking the position that claims of being “transgender” are based on misinformation and nonsense, but lack of explicit support for gender ideology is often enough read as “bias” against it.
As pro-TRA arguments go, this piece is more reasonable than usual.
However: “In reality, the problem has never been disagreement about how to care for trans children and young people.”
So why were Stonewall saying:
“Research suggests that children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity. Yet, many nurseries and schools teach a binary understanding of pre-assigned gender.
If it wasn’t already bad enough that Sall Grover has to spend years fighting a misogynist cock in a frock, and that women in Tasmania no longer have the right to anything exclusively female, our old mate Dean Laidly is back up to his tricks.
A former AFL coach has pleaded guilty to stalking, but been spared further time in custody after repeatedly calling a woman and sitting in a car outside her home.
Dani Laidley, formerly known as Dean Laidley, pleaded guilty after making dozens of calls and text messages to the woman between April 25 and May 2, and watching and photographing her from outside her home.
Is anyone at all surprised? This bloke has form, going back years. Stalking. Assaulting. Harassing. But nothing he does warrants a custodial sentence.
Melbourne Magistrates Court heard Laidley’s conduct – which also included taking a photograph of the woman’s car and leaving flowers on it while the woman was at work – had caused the victim fear and apprehension.
But that’s OK, it was only a woman who was in fear. And good old Dean gets credit for “doing the right thing”.
And this man, this misogynistic POS was in the running, down to the last round, to be coach of the women’s team of the football club I’ve supported for over 60 years. Fortunately the club saw sense and found a highly credentialled woman without the baggage as our new women’s coach.
The therapy-based approach encourages patients to consider alternative reasons for their gender-related distress, often eating disorders, neurodivergence, or social acceptance (as if being trans makes you popular at school) – all of which must be carefully worked through before medical transition can be considered.
Yes, Sasha, it’s called “First Do No Harm”. If you actually cared about real children and teenagers, you’d go for the approach that heals children rather than the one in line with your ideology.
(I should mention I found this wretched article retweeted by Richard Seymour – the same guy who ridiculed people worried about the attack on “Charlie Hebdo” as supporters of a ” fetishized, racialized “secularism.” )
Douthat analyzes the current political landscape with respect to the abortion issue. This is a mostly pointless exercise, but it makes him happy and I guess it is better than filling up the op-ed page with Lorem Ipsum.
But then we get to his characterization that Trump is
trying to find a more pragmatic and persuasive abortion stance
and I’m like, no.
Donald Trump has the motivational structure of a rabid raccoon. Writing as if he is a principled politician trying to find a way forward on a contentious issue is either hopelessly naive or cynically disingenuous.
Ross Douthat is an actual grown-up person who should know better than this.
I noticed in the news today that in Trudeau’s budget, he’s introducing some sort of measure to promote “halal mortgages,” which are regular mortgages which use tricks to avoid the word “interest.” It’s one of these things that annoys me because it’s just so silly. As if Allah is too stupid to see through such a flimsy ruse? If God said he didn’t want people paying interest on loans, then he surely meant exactly what he said, and he didn’t want his followers scrounging around for loopholes.
But it’s extra annoying because of course the very idea of the government promoting special mortgages for a religious class is going to stoke more culture war froth. Some people will assume “the libs” are giving Muslims a special financial break; I’m more inclined to suspect Muslim customers will be saddled with extra fees for the real or supposed administrative burden such loans may incur. (You never know which is which with the banks.)
And I’m extra-extra annoyed, because it’s still more nonsense from the government, throwing everything at the wall to try and dig Canada out of its catastrophic real estate bubble and the impending mortgage armageddon we appear to be headed for.
In Maine tonight, there was a piece about “confirmatory adoption” and the way laws affect same sex couples who adopt children.
The piece featured two women — normally referred to as LESBIANS — with an adopted child.
Throughout the piece, over and over, they were referred to as an “LGBTQ” couple and this issue as affecting “LGBTQ” couples. Not once were they referred to as LESBIANS.
I hate this shit. Apparently, same sex couples are now permanently joined at the hip to the host of other ideninnies — real and fake — that are now all the rage.
I had to look that up. Confirmatory adoption appears to be a way to assert parental rights for non-biological parents. Why would they be non-biological? Because both members of the couple are the SAME SEX and cannot procreate. (Also used for step-parents and other situations.) This is needed despite the fact that same-sex couples can both be listed on birth certificates. I know the issue is fraught in other cases, too, such as rape or abandonment, but it bothers me that birth certificates don’t contain the important information about biological parentage and yet is still insufficient to establish parentage. What the heck good are they, then?
But of course none of this has anything to do with how the parents dress or act or identify themselves, only about whether they participated in the biological process that led to the child being born, something that is impossible for both members of a same-sex couple but entirely possible for a mixed-sex couple that “identify” as queer or the sex they aren’t or giraffes.
Interesting message from the former Head of patient services at GenderGP:
An important message to ALL trans folk – no matter your thoughts on the issue
Regardless of which publication or platform they’re from PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE WITH JOURNALISTS (especially if they’re çisgender) ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF DIY GENDER AFFIRMING CARE
Re #278, they are responding apparently to requests from journalists looking to do a story on do-it-yourself “HRT” (that is, cross-sex hormones, possibly puberty blockers). The Guardian is specifically mentioned as seeking to talk to people, especially “under-18s” (that is, minors).
Guess I finally have to get through “Consciousness Explained” though I imagine I’m going to have difficulty tolerating his compatibilism. “Breaking the Spell” was certainly an interesting contrast to “The God Delusion” and “Faith vs. Fact”.
One of the infuriating things about this news story is that insists on talking about stepping out of the competition “to protest the inclusion of the transgender girl at the center of this case. ” I’m sure that the girls would have used the word BOY to explain what they were protesting.
The two uses of it in the following mark the only appearance of the word “boy” in the story. It’s all “transgender girl” or “transgender athlete.
On Tuesday, a United States Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a West Virginia law that bars biological boys from competing on girls’ sports teams cannot be enforced with regard to a 13-year-old who competes on the girls’ track and field team at the athlete’s middle school.
“The defendants cannot expect that [this athlete] will countermand her social transition, her medical treatment, and all the work she has done with her schools, teachers, and coaches for nearly half her life by introducing herself to teammates, coaches, and even opponents as a boy,” Judge Toby Heytens wrote in his decision, according to the Associated Press.
Well duh, he is a boy. For humans, one’s ‘sex at birth” is one’s sex for life. There’s nothing he can do that will stop the student in question from being a boy; nor does of “all the work he has done” turn him into a girl. HUMANS CAN’T CHANGE SEX. This is the basis of the girls’ actions and it is studiously ignored and hidden by the judge and the reporter.
The judge is expecting all of the girls this boy is competing against to accept and validate him as a “girl.” Why are the boy’s needs so much more important than the girls’? It’s not evil or unkind or even rude or inappropriate to call him a boy, because that’s what he is, the complicity of parents, teachers, and coaches notwithstanding. In fact the wrong falls on the other side. I say it is rude, inappropriate, unkind and evil to insist he is a girl.
Even if his current pre-pubescent age doesn’t confirm the physiological advantages that normal, male bodily development would bring, sports teams intended for girls should be off limits to him for the simple fact that he is not a girl. He’s still breaking the rules, and rules are being broken for him if he’s allowed to participate when he fails to meet the most fundamental criterion of eligibility, which is being a girl. Would this court and this reporter be as teary-eyed and supportive if this boy’s parents, teachers, and coaches had been trying to force him into a younger age division? Would they be so contemuously dismissive of the rights and needs of the younger children he would be cheating against? No. They wouldn’t. So why are these girls’ rights and needs so casually sacrificed for this boy? No number of degrees in Gender Studies
Also note here that the boy began transition at age six or seven, likely by homophobic parents who observed their son playing with the “wrong” toys and expressing preference for the “wrong” clothing. How else would this have happened? Children can imagine themselves to be any number of things that parents don’t try to turn them into: robots, giraffes, alligators. But one whiff of effeminacy, or too long with a Barbie, and BANG! it’s off to the gender clinic to turn him into a “her.” At this age transitioning cannot possibly be a “life saving” procedure. No six or seven year old is going to have “suicidal ideation.” The only thing that’s being “saved” here are the egos of the parents who don’t want to have to live with the fact that their son might just be gay. For this, they push him onto a lifelong path of medical and psychological trauma in an attempt to turn him into something he can never be. If he wasn’t suicidal before, just wait a few years.
This story is also an example of the contradictions inherent in trans “thought.” We’re told by genderists that “sex” and “gender” are two different things, at least when it is to their immediate advantage. But they will also readily conflate and confuse the two when it suits them. If sex and gender are two separate things, then changing “gender” should have no impact on sex, and of course it doesn’t because it can’t. Yet this Judge Heytens, who is clearly a genderist, believes that changing “gender identity” also changes sex. Sports (and washroom facilities, change rooms, prisons, hospital wards…) are segregated by sex. In a sane world, changing “gender identity” would have no impact on this discrimination. But genderists want it both ways, and want “gender identity” to be equivalent to sex, or supplant it, and try to redefine the terms and conditions of the original establishment of these facilities to meet their unreasonable demands for “inclusion” on their newly minted gendered terms.
Also again, we see the press abandoning good faith impartiality for partisan advocacy. They’ve taken a side. Obvious if you know the signs, but otherwise cloaked in a phony neutrality that would be overthrown with the inclusion of the one sentence that would turn this court decision into a scandal: Humans can’t change sex.
There are a number of conclusions we can draw when we start from the basic fact that humans can’t change sex, conclusions that have important consequences for the way the above story has been reported.
Anyone who told this boy that he was actually a girl, lied to him.
Anyone who told this boy he could become a girl, lied to him.
Anyone who told him had had become a girl a girl lied to him.
Anyone who told him that he belonged on a team intended soley for girls, lied to him.
I really feel sorry for this boy. Surrounded by parents, doctors, teachers, coaches and probably others, all of whom were telling him he was, could become, or had become a girl? He never stood a chance. All of those adults who should have been looking out for him failed to protect him. Now we can add this judge and this reporter to the crew of liars who should know better. But however much I might sympathize with this child, he must not be given a spot on a girl’s team as any sort of reward or consolation prize foreverything that has been done to him.
The girls he’s been forced upon are considered acceptable collateral damage to gratify and sooth the egos of the adults who created this medical, moral, and now legal, tragedy. What about the hopes and dreams of these girls? What about their fun and excitement? The question answers itself; they’re just girls. ; they’re unimportant. They are to be bit players in the story of someone else’s life, not the stars of their own. Their needs are nothing compared to those of this boy.
Because of the manifest failures of so many adults, they’ve had to take the step to refuse to participate in a corrupted competition, thereby setting themselves up to be portrayed as Karens-in-the-making. And to top it all off, their brave, principled stand against participating in the presence of the intruding, deluded boy forced upon them by dishonest, deluded adults is deliberately hidden behind reporting that only talks about the girls as if their issue is soley with the boy’s supposed “gender identity” rather than his actual sex. If you simply recall that humans can’t change sex, the basic point we started with, the fact that is conveniently hidden, the story collapses into an ugly heap of smug dishonesty and histrionic self-righteousness. Child victims all around, and no adult to take responsibility.
But however much I might sympathize with this child, he must not be given a spot on a girl’s team as any sort of reward or consolation prize for everything that has been done to him.
I wonder if this isn’t the core of the problem with the TRA moral paradigm. Or rather, that their ethics assumes the antithesis of this.
In their view, the advantaged (i.e., “cis”) are apparently obligated to infinitely absorb the misfortunes encountered by the disadvantaged (i.e., “trans”). If someone has the misfortune of experiencing gender dysphoria, it is the moral duty to sacrifice in order to accommodate him. That potentially many women and girls suffer for the benefit of one man isn’t evidence that something is wrong, because their suffering is simply an unremarkable, obvious, implicit necessity. Their act of sacrifice is a moral good, and their refusal to sacrifice would be a moral evil.
It’s an inversion of how we normally think of desert and justice, so there’s no reason to expect that any argument grounded in our normal assumptions would be compelling to them.
If someone has the misfortune of experiencing gender dysphoria, it is the moral duty to sacrifice in order to accommodate him.
And if the society can manage to compartmentalize that “sacrifice” to limit its overall cost, so much the better. This makes it easy for men to give away women’s rights in backroom deals, as it’s not costing them anything. Besides, women have had these rights for such a short time, they’ll barely miss them, right?
That potentially many women and girls suffer for the benefit of one man isn’t evidence that something is wrong, because their suffering is simply an unremarkable, obvious, implicit necessity. Their act of sacrifice is a moral good, and their refusal to sacrifice would be a moral evil.
Yes. This is the essence of “Be kind,” which takes advantage of female socialization that instills self-effacement and seeing to the needs of others before their own. Refusal is painted as monstrous and unnatural, the essence of “Karenhood.” Never mind that men are not expected to give way in this fashion, and, giving the game away, trans identified men are excersizing their male socialization and privilege by being aggressive and assertive, taking what they believe they are owed, whether it is offered or not. (“We’ve been using women’s toilets for years!”) No demur, ladylike bashfulness and self abnegation for them!
Judith Butler was on the humorous NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (start at time stamp 21:30). For those unfamiliar with the show, one of the segments is called Not My Job. It involves a celebrity guest who is given an extremely soft interview, followed by several multiple-choice questions, usually funny, about something that is decidedly not their job. In this case, given the title of her book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender”, they went with a topic of horror movies. The interview is cringeworthy to me, with a discussion about the performative nature of gender and absolutely no pushback , but the ground rules are that they are not supposed to challenge the guest in any way, I’m sure. Apparently she wanted to be a clown when she was young.
We write as clinical psychologists with longstanding concerns about the scandal unfolding at Gender Identity Development Service clinics. Some of us are former Gids clinicians. While welcoming your editorial stance, we would like to point out that it is not just the medical profession that has “much to reflect on” (“The Observer view on the Cass review: children were catastrophically failed by the medical profession”).
These were psychology-led services. Whether intentionally or not, and many were doing their best in an impossible situation, it was clinical psychologists who promoted an ideology that was almost impossible to challenge; who, as the Cass report found, largely failed to carry out proper assessments of troubled young people, and thus put many on an “irreversible medical pathway” that in most cases was inappropriate; and who failed in their most basic duty to keep proper records.
It is also our professional body, the British Psychological Society, that has failed (despite years of pressure) to produce guidelines for clinicians working with young people in this complex area; and that, forced into making an official response for the first time, now minimises its own role in events and calls for “more psychology” as the answer. [More]
Ok, am I in the general minority in that I think the Dems should’ve backed McCarthy and now should back Johnson as long as he’s willing to get mega important things passed?
The problem is with that “as long as he’s willing to get mega important things passed.”
As I understand it, McCarthy offered Democrats nothing. Not a sausage. Not even a commitment to bring things like aid to Ukraine (which roughly half the GOP caucus supports anyway) up for a floor vote. Possibly McCarthy was arrogant, possibly he thought that any attempt to get Dem support would doom him as a GOP leader anyway, who knows. But basically the choice was whether the Dems should break with all precedent to vote for an opposing party speaker just to save the GOP from its own dysfunction, in exchange for nothing at all. I’ve seen arguments that they should have — Bill Scher at the Washington Monthly was a proponent — but I never found them persuasive.
With Johnson, I don’t think things have gotten that far yet. MTG keeps threatening her motion to vacate, but I don’t think it’s moving forward? And the GOP’s majority is so slim that I think they know they can’t afford another round of umpteem failed Speaker votes in a year when they’re trying to tell voters they can be trusted with power.
That’s the other thing — I’m not sure how much more can/will happen in Congress this year. No major legislation is getting passed in a divided Congress in an election year. Absolute “must-pass” stuff like appropriations bills tend to get passed anyway, just with a lot of drama and continuing resolutions first.
So, in theory, should Dems be open to a deal where they get some concessions in exchange for propping up a GOP speaker? Sure. Deals are the essence of politics. But as far as I know, no serious deal has been put on the table.
In McCarthy’s case they should’ve said something like “we will save you but here’s a couple of things you can reasonably give us in exchange”; may well have been he just wasn’t interested in remaining Speaker and didn’t want to jeopardize a future lobbying job. Still consider it a bit of a missed opportunity.
The other problem is that McCarthy became notorious among both parties for not being a man of his word. He broke multiple promises about bringing certain things to a floor vote.
So you have a situation where a guy who chose to put his fate in the hands of the most radical members of the GOP caucus is facing the logical outcome of that decision, he’s not offering any concessions for your support, and he’s proven untrustworthy in the past, and Democrats are supposed to beg him to cut a deal that he’ll probably renege on… for what? To stick it to Matt Gaetz?
I’m not sure that Johnson is any worse than McCarthy from the Dems’ point of view. And the chaos that followed McCarthy’s ouster was I think humiliating enough to the GOP that it actually weakened rather than emboldened the fringe. Sure, they proved they could oust a Speaker, but what did that gain them?
PZ has lost the plot. A post about his pet tarantula and he refers to it as they/them throughout, as if spiders have gender identities. It’s painful to read. I’m guessing it’s his way of answering those critics who have pointed out how he had no problems recognising the sex of his lab spiders; rather than being honest about things and admitting his hypocrisy he’s doubled down and now pretends not to recognise sex at all, regardless of the species.
I’m reading the final nonfiction assignments for my Creative Writing class now and am encountering for the first time “they” used casually as a pronoun for a character in a student’s narrative. The effect is kind of shocking: it obscures the identity of the character, whose name is sexually ambiguous (“Max”). I had to decide how to comment, so I said this:
“The imprecision of this pronoun annuls Max as a character. If this is done at Max’s request, then perhaps it’s best to say so, because it’s rather jarring.”
Christ, I’m glad I’m not teaching Creative Writing any more.
No, I don’t think you sound like a meany at all. You are warning the student that the ambiguity with regard to Max’s sex, and the lack of clarity as to what this is supposed to indicate, are impairing the narrative.
Police responded to the area of Washington and Clinton streets at 9:10pm for a report of a fight during which an individual was stabbed.
Responding officers located one victim with multiple stab wounds; they were taken to the hospital to receive medical treatment for injuries sustained in the fight.
Who was taken to the hospital? The suspect and all the responding cops?
Mike B, I encountered that in my writing group. A young man writing a screenplay very conclusively described a character as a female, the character presented as female, and the writer used “they”.
Today on Doonesbury: Trump has dementia. Not exactly news, of course, and the claim that mental health experts are too scared to tell us is not true of all of them, as witness this piece in the Mirror last month.
A federal appellate court in Richmond became the first in the country to rule that state health-care plans must pay for gender-affirming surgeries, a major win for transgender rights amid a nationwide wave of anti-trans activism and legislation.
The decision came from a set of cases out of North Carolina and West Virginia, where state officials argued that their policies were based on cost concerns rather than bias. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit rejected that argument, saying the plans were discriminating against trans people in need of treatment.
Judge Roger L. Gregory, an appointee of President Clinton, wrote for the majority that the restrictions were “obviously discriminatory” based on both sex and gender.
“In this case, discriminating on the basis of diagnosis is discriminating on the basis of gender identity and sex,” Gregory wrote, because “gender dysphoria is so intimately related to transgender status as to be virtually indistinguishable from it.”
According to the court, this is just like a woman with cervical cancer getting a hysterectomy.
Kevin Drum says we shouldn’t place too much faith in polls. He might have a point, but his example is inadequate, and illustrates something different from what he claims.
The example poll asked young people if they consider themselves transgender or non-binary, and if so, it sought further clarification (in a question not shown unless they had answered “yes”). One of the clarifying options was “No, not transgender or non-binary”, essentially negating the question that prompted the request for clarification. He also noted that around 4% of respondents said “yes” to “transgender or non-binary”, and half of those indicated “Gender non-binary”, so there should be 2% of people choosing “Non-binary” from the three choices in the “Gender” question, but there were 0%.
He is expecting consistency from people who claim one of these special gender identities? Good luck with that. I’m sure there are variety of ways that people might answer inconsistently in surveys, but I suspect gender ideology questions would be answered highly inconsistently. The results Drum highlights I think are more due to the nonsensical nature of gender ideology than any tendency of poll respondents to fail to be consistent.
” a set of cases out of North Carolina and West Virginia, where state officials argued that their policies were based on cost concerns rather than bias.”
Well when you make a disingenuous argument… Not saying that costs weren’t of interest, but it’s all about those icky trannies. Mind you, thinking trannies are icky is fine in my book, but lying about it?
Making an argument on cost is identical to the reasons that most insurance companies failed to adequately fund contraceptives and mental health treatment for a long time…until they were pushed into a corner.
I’m not sympathetic with that argument. Still, most insurance companies have restrictions against experimental therapies, and this would fall much better into that category. That’s what they should have argued, that at this point, the evidence doesn’t support the contention that this is necessary care. Unless they are required to pay for cosmetic surgery done for a non-medical reason, they should not be required to pay for “trans-affirming” surgeries, because they are strictly cosmetic.
Next they’ll be saying insurance companies have to pay to have bunny ears attached, or to change the facial features to more resemble the baby some adults claim to be.
This morning NPR had a long story about Florida’s abortion law. I found it sinister that a story about a law that threatens the reproductive freedom of women does not use the word WOMEN once. I listened, carefully, and every single time, it’s “pregnant people” and “patients.” The WOMAN who narrated the piece had to have been coached. She successfully made a story about women not be about women. I find this horrifying.
This was reported earlier this morning and guess who also gleefully picked up on said spitting claim tweet? (Hint: hand grenade.)
May 1, 9:44 a.m.:
UCUP sent the Maroon a statement regarding an incident yesterday afternoon where a UChicago professor allegedly spat on a protester. The statement said that “an individual affiliated with the encampment was spit on by Jerry Coyne, UChicago Prof. Emeritus in the Department of Ecology, part of a pattern of unprovoked agitation by Coyne which has often targeted especially vulnerable Black and brown students.”
Asked for response, Coyne told the Maroon, “I absolutely did not spit on demonstrators or on anybody else, as I abhor and avoid violence of any kind.”
Peggy Mason, Professor of Neurobiology, told the Maroon that the two were walking together and that Mason “can state categorically that he did not spit.”
– Eva McCord, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Anu Vashist, Managing Editor, and Zachary Leiter, Deputy Managing Editor
Have been ignoring him since October 7th but can’t imagine he’d be spitting on anyone on purpose; spitting at someone while talking, sure, but on? Nope.
Myers now is saying it’s a he said/she said matter, without making an effort to verify the story. It’s obvious that Myers’ intent here is to damage Coyne’s reputation online, or at least excite his horde a bit more. So much for any pretense at skepticism though.
One to lighten the mood a little. A Sumatran orangutan living in the wild in Indonesia has been observed treating a large wound on its cheek by chewing the stem of a medicinal plant and applying the juice to the wound, then chewing the leaves and packing them into the hole. The plant has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties, and the wound was healed with no signs of infection in just five days. It’s the first time an animal in the wild has been seen treating an injury in such a way.
I saw that! And damn near posted about it here but ran out of time. I took care of two orang babies–>toddlers when I worked at the zoo. Yes of course it was as fun as it sounds.
There seems to be an increasing amount of false reports of (strictly US?) actions against gender ideology. Here, for example, is a fact checking article about a report that the US women’s national swimming team would resign if Lia Thomas is allowed to try out for the team:
The writer of the original piece supposedly said it was satire or humor; uh huh. I’ve seen a lot of these, they seem deliberately misleading and provocative, and too easily dismissed with “It was just a joke”. Topics include Lia Thomas being stripped of medals, Lia Thomas’ records being expunged, and Lia Thomas’ medals being given to Riley Gaines. (I am pretty sure I’ve seen some that are not about Lia Thomas, but I don’t recall specifics.)
If course, being The Guardian it insists on using ‘gender’ in place of sex except when directly quoting the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, speaking of single-sex spaces. It also contains a whopping great lie. Part of the new guidelines is the order that all new, non-residential buildings have single-sex toilets with additional unisex facilities only if space allows, so the writer claims that
[c]ampaigners for trans rights have long argued that gender-neutral toilets can be reassuring for some transgender men and women who fear discrimination in binary toilets.
No, they have NOT argued that at all. They have insisted that trans people must be allowed to use facilities that match their gender identity and that ‘gender-neutral’ (or ‘unisex’, as we actually call them) toilets are a transphobic means of excluding the trans. The last word goes to Mermaids, who are bleating about last week’s decision that schools must maintain single-sex toilets and changing facilities for all children over the age of eight.
We want a future whereby every young person can choose a toilet with freedom and autonomy; for some this would be a gender-neutral toilet and for others it would be a gender-specific toilet.
Psychiatrists learned the wrong lesson from the gay rights movement
Advocates for puberty blockers don’t have science on their side.
Apparently the issue is that the Cass report wasn’t stamped “Made in USA”.
In March, I asked APA President Petros Levounis, who like me is a gay man, if the organization was taking into consideration the recent review papers on pediatric gender medicine.
“We do look very closely to international research,” Levounis, a psychiatrist, told me. “But this is something that has to also come through U.S. channels before we finalize our opinion.”
“But this is something that has to also come through U.S. channels before we finalize our opinion.”
I wonder if this would be the approach taken if we were talking about aircraft safety, following a series of fatal accidents with a particular model being flown by European carriers?
At the risk of falling for the sarcasm filter again, that is exactly the approach taken in aviation safety. When a US plane crashes anywhere in the world US authorities want to peer over the shoulder of the investigating country, and same when it’s a European maker of EU authorities. Part of that is because they do tend to be better resourced and more experienced, and a part of it is that they want to protect the reputation of ‘their’ manufacturer against rogue, incompetent, inexperienced, biased investigators.
Medical regulators are particularly prone to this though. It always used to puzzle me when NZ regulators would refuse to follow the findings of huge international studies until they had seen local evidence. After all NZ was/is never going to fund comparable studies. Eventually it dawned on me that even reputable overseas regulators sometimes approve drugs or procedures on the basis of political pressure, flawed studies, or whatever. NZ (and other medical regulators) often want time to closely evaluate the evidence for themselves even if they don’t commission a smaller scale study themselves. Then they’ll wait for as long as they can on edge cases to see what happens elsewhere. Of course NZ is also very unlike the USA. We have a single buying agency for the whole country, so inevitably what drugs are approved here (to gain a subsidy) is as much about commercial negotiation as it is about ‘does it work’.
Of course NZ is also very unlike the USA. We have a single buying agency for the whole country, so inevitably what drugs are approved here (to gain a subsidy) is as much about commercial negotiation as it is about ‘does it work’.
Maybe not so unlike us after all. We don’t have a single buying agency in the US, but a lot of drug approvals are commercial negotiations.
Also, what drugs are on the insurance ‘formulary’ – i.e., what will they pay for. Whatever they put on the formulary is determined more by commercial interests (drug company gives them a kickback or a special deal) than by patient needs. Not all patients respond to all drugs the same way, so that leaves doctors in the spot of maybe having to prescribe something that isn’t the best for the patient because the patient can’t afford it otherwise.
Iknklast, it’s actually pretty different. Here’s the link to the Pharmac website. There’s a lot of info, but the linked page and the Myths page will give you a strong flavour. When you are prescribed a medicine (or related equipment) in NZ, you generally don’t pay anything for it at all. A few years back there used to be a fee of $5 per prescription, but that has now been wiped.
When the earthquake devastated Christchurch I took an elderly American couple home for the night. Their Hotel was cordoned off and they had only the clothes they stood up in. Because they both needed prescription medicines I took them to my GP the next day, who organised prescriptions for all the drugs they needed. Two supermarket bags later the prescription charge amounted to NZ$90. The said back in California the equivalent co-pay would have been US$400. The Doctors visit was NZ$50 as the doc kindly treated them as if they were locals.
The flip side of our system is that if a drug is not funded, you have to pay the full price for yourself, which if it is a rare or novel drug can be cripplingly expensive. That is very rare though.
O brave new… miscellany room.
Phew! Feels safe in here . . .
I will admit that I never gave much thought to trans issues until I started reading articles and comments here at B&W. That would be about four years. Since that time, I’ve viewed hours of talks on YouTube by Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater, Helen Joyce, J. Michael Bailey, Debbie Hayton, and others. If I could get a couple of good books on the subject–books that are factual, not polemical–what would you recommend?
The single best book on the topic I’ve read is Helen Joyce’s “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”. It is thorough and fair. If you like good philosophical investigation, Kathleen Stock’s “Material Girls” is excellent.
I also liked Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage”, which is less general and perhaps more polemic.
@Mike B,
I wish there was one single all-encompassing, factual, non-polemical book about this. So far, there isn’t one. (But I’ll be honest: I’d love to write one myself.)
Joyce’s book “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” is fantastic — analogous to Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the sense that it’s a broad overview of the definition of trans and how the concept is not backed by science — just like Dawkins did with the concept of God.
But Joyce’s (excellent) book sticks to the facts, and lacks a broader analysis of the social and political context, which has so much to do with why this nonsense idea has become so popular so quickly.
Here, Stock steps in and takes a feminist-philosophical view in her book Material Girls. (Which — I know, I’m a horrible monster, kill me now — I have only started and haven’t finished. So I can’t really speak to this one too much.)
For a pre-social-media perspective on specifically male transsexualism, transgender identity, and homosexuality, and the connection between them, Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen is very good. (And it’s available as a free PDF now, with the author’s blessing.)
And then there’s Bailey’s spiritual sequel of sorts, Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, which mostly focuses on the controversy surrounding Bailey’s book, and which launches from there into the subject of ideology and activism and how those forces interact with the pursuit of science, for better or for worse. (Very interesting, enlightening and engaging stuff.)
In “Tough Crowd,” Graham Linehan writes movingly about trans from the perspective of the social media landscape and what it’s like to be a celebrity who dissents from the liberal consensus and who dares to blaspheme about the topic. (I’m biased towards this book because I had a hand in its creation, and because Graham is one of my closest and dearest friends. We’re colleagues, too: we host a long-running, popular YouTube podcast together. But all bias aside, the book has been a runaway bestseller because the consensus is that it’s a brilliant, hilarious, and moving read.)
Dr. Az Hakeem has written two books from the perspective of a therapist who has seen first-hand that there’s a way for virtually all (98%) young people who are convinced that they need trans identities and sexchange surgeries that they can climb down from that belief and reconcile their minds with their bodies. His latest is the newest of the bunch of high profile trans books, and I haven’t read it yet, but I hear it’s very good.
I myself have taken a stab at a broad-overview essay, which imagines its reader as an otherwise uninformed liberal progressive looking to get a foothold into this subject. A Cliff’s Notes primer. My essay tries to pare this incredibly complex topic down to a few basic, digestible concepts to a reader who is otherwise hostile to gender-critical ideas. Here it is.
There’s no one way into this mess of a topic, and there’s no single, universal story that comes close to capturing it — yet. But I puzzle every night and day over whether such a solution is possible, in the way mathematicians and chessmasters probably puzzle over abstract theorems. I want so badly for there to be some kind of elegant, simple solution: an easily deployed explanation I can use to break my erstwhile friends free of the spell of gender madness. It’s a cult, and it’s stolen my life away because it’s stolen virtually all of my friends and colleages, and I keep wishing for some kind of science-fiction code word that will break them all out of the spell, like Angela Lansbury’s Queen of Diamonds playing card in the Manchurian Candidate — only in reverse: to break someone OUT of a mind-control trance, instead of inducing one.
There’s gotta be a solution out there somewhere that will solve this problem! Something to stop the madness!
Until we find one, I hope the recommendations come in handy for you.
whew
Another book I can recommend that deals with, among other things, transgender issues is Prof. Holly Lawford-Smith’s Gender-Critical Feminism (2022) from Oxford University Press. You can find it here:
Gender-Critical Feminism
Whew indeed. Thanks Arty.
[…] a comment by Artymorty at Miscelllany […]
Arty, my hat off to you! I’ve heard of most of those books and will start digging in soon.
One reservation, though: I saw an interview with Az Hakeem that alarmed me. There is something about him I do not trust, especially as he raised the spectre of kids dressing as furries and demanding litter boxes at school, which sounds like urban legend bullshit to me.
#522 previous miscellany room, J.A.
And yet Novella’s arguments fall flat in the attempt to undermine the use of gametes as a classification criterion, as we can see from every text book and encyclopedia.
OMG, Arty.
OMFG
MAGA is destroying the Right.
Is it possible TRANS will destroy the Left?
It’s certainly holed the left below the waterline.
I recall, lo these many years ago and almost certainly under a different pseudonym, Ophelia and some others discussing the phenomenon of an R sound cropping up in British-esque accents where it’s not expected by North Americans. I’ve just happened upon a fascinating video on the subject, called ‘linking’ or ‘intrusive’ R (though Dr. Lindsey really dislikes the latter term).
You know, just in case anyone else remembers random comments from who knows how long ago. (Also I hope to bloody Thor the link works because coding it in by hand on a phone is nobody’s idear of a good time.)
I’m now finishing Bailey’s book “Man who be queen” and find the following remark to be fucking stupid:
Bullshit. Many more “cross-dressers,” “transvestites” and “transsexuals” are heterosexual men, so why don’t we see him talking about the corollary:
the cause of autogynephilic [heterosexual] transsexualism are largely the causes of heterosexuality. To be sure only a minority of straight men become transexual, but heterosexual transexuals are a type of straight man.
Other than this, I am really liking Bailey’s book.
Yes I think I did talk about intrusive R at some point years n years ago. “I sore it” for example.
The example that sticks in my memory is ‘Indier and China’. American varieties of English have the same kind of phenomenon, just with a glottal stop instead of an R.
And yes, Artymorty’s collection of book recommendations is epic. I am curious if he plans, or knows of any plans, to rebut Freddie de Boer’s recent essays on ‘being kind’. (I keep meaning to, but other things keep needing more attention.)
Ooh thank you, that enabled me to find it.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/how-to-do-things-with-words/
Sooo many comments.
There’s also this one, which is making me laugh:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/but-stop-the-t-in-odd-words/
@Mike B,
I think the difference in part between homosexual transsexualism and autogynephilia is that the cause of homosexuality is also the cause of an innate inclination towards opposite-sex typical behaviours and interests from birth. (A book called Gay, Straight, and the Reasons Why goes into detail about this from a neurological perspective). Basically, in early gestation it’s the same single variance in the development of a region of the brain (hypothalamus and amygdala) which has two effects — both gender nonconformity at birth (which may continue into adulthoot or may disappear by adolescence), and same-sex attraction (which doesn’t appear until adolescence). Because these two effects express themselves at different points in a person’s journey into adulthood — and they don’t always overlap, in the case of boys with very feminine traits in early childhood who adapt into more sex-typical behavours and interests — it’s taken us a while to realize that they correspond to the same phenomenon. These two effects come from the same cause.
The tricky thing to remember is that childhood brains are extremely neuroplastic. Children instinctively detect from their environments what sorts of interests and behaviours are and aren’t acceptable, and they automatically mold themselves accordingly (to varying degrees of success). Boys with that specific hypothalamus/amygdala variance (the one that makes them more resemble the opposite sex in terms of social behaviour from birth and then in terms of sexual behaviour from adolescence) who are raised in, say, Thailand or Samoa or indigenous Zapotec Mexican culture or parts of Columbia and northern Brazil, aren’t exposed to the same kinds of subtle childhood cultural cues that nudge them towards more “masculine” behaviours, and so therefore virtually all gay males in these regions have grown up to have extremely feminine behaviours, interests, and presentations right into adulthood and for their whole lives — and they’re given their own social “categories” (more like castes, really) apart from “masculine” men as a result. There are virtually no “masculine” gay men in Samoa (in fact, “masculine” men caught engaging in homosexual acts can face up to 8 years imprisonment), and in Thailand and other parts of the world the “masculine presenting” (as opposed to dress-wearing “ladyboy” type) gay man is a relatively new phenomenon. (“Egalitarian homosexuality” emerges as individualism overtakes collectivism in the social landscape, because along with individualism comes a more universalist egalitarian moral framework, which is more amenable to the rights of gender nonconforming people. I know! It’s tricky stuff!!)
Autogynephilia’s a bit different, because it isn’t (or doesn’t appear to be) inherent in heterosexual men the way the potential to be more feminine-typical is in homosexuals. Only about 2 to 5 percent of males appear to be born with whatever still unknown neurological attribute it is that causes them to become sexually attracted to their own selves (and thus, in some such men, if given the opportunity, to attempt to mimic females in their presentation and to try to convince others that they are female).
Hope that makes sense!
I dunno, I think most/all males have at least one weird paraphilia (seems built in), it’s just that the AGP stuff screams “look at me look at me look at me!” in a way many of the others don’t. That whole line of “well now that society is more accepting is why there are more gender goblins” is true to an extent; used to be you kept your paraphilias fairly private but now that it’s glamorized, well, there you go. I don’t know to what degree you should keep that stuff in the closet, which is to say, what is prudery vs. what is just being polite, but that’s the question that should be asked. If your paraphilia requires that unwilling participants must accede to your demands, then tough, can’t be having with that.
I’m afraid I do not follow, and it’s probably not your fault but is the effect of the whole incoherent, asinine taxonomy of the trans system. He never calls “autogynephiles” what they are, that is, heterosexual transvestites, but he’s real keen on using the term “homosexual transexuals,” which is better seen as a form of internalized homophobia. Maddeningly, he even uses the term “non-homosexual transexuals” for HETEROSEXUAL perverts. Yet it’s gays and lesbian who are being smeared with the whole alphabet soup communniny phenomenon. It’s STRAIGHT men who are entering women’s sports and spaces, not gay men, yet you never hear of some HETEROTQAI+ communniny. “Autogynephilia” is just a verbal ten-foot-pole that keeps clinicians like Bailey from having to say what it is–heterosexual perversion.
Excellent point. That’s why they’re so keen on enforcing “TWAW” and demanding the acceptance of transbians. They think it hides the paraphilia the same way they think they pass.
There’s forced teaming within the chimeric “trans community” itself, not just between the T and the LGB. What’s the common ground between AGP males forcing their way into women’s locker rooms for their own sexual gratification and teenage girls desperate enough to escape the strictures of femininity that they’re undergoing radical mastectomies and Itaking T? Which group is most likely to be driving the trans “movement” as a whole, and to whose benefit?
I wonder how much of the beligerence and bullying would disappear from the discussions around gender identity if you could remove the AGPs, and the trans “allies” who are only in it for the “righteous” misogyny? And if you could subtract those who would desist, the social contagion bandwagoneers, duped autistic kids, and trendy, spicy-straight “queers,” would that leave behind only a small(?) core of genuinely dysphoric people, for whom watchful waiting will not be enough? Likely a very small group, whose needs are poorly served by the current configuration of gender identitarianism? We’ll never know.
YNNB, you help bring a lot into focus for me: Looked at long enough, the trans movement reveals itself as a farrago that is hurting that very “core of genuinely dysphoric people.” In other words, the current trans craze is hurting trans people.
Make lives better for girls and women, and there would be a mass exodus of young women from the clinics.
Address internalized homophobia, and many sissyboys would ditch their dresses.
Call out the bandwagoners, and suddenly the “non-binary” dissolve in embarrassment.
I have a terrible feeling that the final step — prohibiting those (sometimes) rich, white, straight, heterosexual AGPs from marching into women’s spaces — is going to be horribly difficult.
What’s left is that “small core” of transexuals who deserve help but whose needs are swamped by the ongoing social clusterfuck called “transgenerism.”
Re the intrusive /r/–that happens in Boston English as well. It’s really a fascinating window into how children construct their language. Kids are natural pattern detectors (really, the human brain is), and so if they hear enough examples like “this cah goes fast” but “this car is nice”, they conclude that words that when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by a word that begins in a vowel sound, you add an /r/ to connect them. It’s similar to the phenomenon that has kids producing past tense forms like “goed”. They may eventually learn when not to apply such patterns if the examples are frequent or salient enough (e.g., they’ll hear people around them saying “went”, and eventually pick that up themselves), but if not, well, that’s one way languages change.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room […]
Professor Jo Phoenix who took her former employer the Open University to an employment tribunal has won her case. The tribunal found that she was discriminated against and harassed because of her gender-critical beliefs and that she was constructively dismissed. This is very good news, not only for Jo but for every rational person in Britain. Jo on nitter.net here (I don’t have a twitter account). Multi-page judgement here.
There is an article in the Guardian, which reports that the OU is considering an appeal, and a good piece on Unherd by Joan Smith.
Snap – I’ve just been posting about that. It’s BRILLIANT news.
Mike B @23
Mike, remember that, while Bailey’s book is about men, homosexual transsexualism is a phenomenon among females as well as males. Autogynephilia is an exclusively male paraphilia.
I think that’s Bailey trying to be precise. Some autogynephiles are, or claim to be, bisexual, and others, asexual.
(The bisexuality is likely part of the paraphilia; they’re not really attracted to men, but they want to be desired by men. For some, men are props in their fantasy.)
Anyway, as Artymorty says, homosexual transexualism is more like an extreme form of homosexuality. Autogynephilia is…well, whatever it is, it’s something else. An AGPs is straight in the sense that the opposite sex turns him on, but his desire is really centered on his own fantasy persona.
” homosexual transexualism is more like an extreme form of homosexuality.
LM, forgive me, but where did you get such a poisonous idea? The very notion is despicable to me (I am an “extreme” form of both “homo” and “sexual.”) If that is the current theory of transexualism (probably from Bailey), then the whole trans thing is more deranged than I thought.
Young “sissified” gay men who eschew other gay men as partners, and who wish to “become” women and partner with heterosexual males, are NOT exhibiting “extreme homosexuality.”
They are exhibiting EXTREME INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA.
Mike B, yes it is Blanchard’s theory (Bailey is following Blanchard here.)
As Artymorty put it–
The point is simply that homosexual transsexuals tend to be more “feminine-typical”–or, in the case of women and girls, more masculine-typical.
The behavior exhibited by the gay men who choose to identify as women may indeed be a mix of internalized AND societal homophobia, with a hefty dose of misogyny mixed in. I think so. But Bailey’s point–which is based on Blanchard’s research–is about etiology. Gay people who transition have personalities more typical (or stereotypical) of the sex they’re not. Transsexualism is one way of expressing that. Is that a poisonous idea?
Via Jerry Coyne,
a Pakistani teacher named Sher Ali has been forced to recant his heretical views (under “Da Nooz”):
https://www.memri.org/reports/following-bomb-attack-islamic-clerics-pakistan-force-biology-professor-sher-ali-read
This is on my “to listen” list.
It looks like it would be relevant to how ‘Trans’ infiltrated so many institutions.
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2024/01/20/yanss-279-why-people-dont-speak-out-against-and-even-defend-norms-they-secretly-despise/
Venting a little here.
I saw a reference to the old saw “if they can put a man* on the moon, why can’t they…”. The footnote said “* or other human person”.
No. It should be “or woman”. That’s the only choice. Unless you are implying that children might go to the moon, in which case you could say “or woman or child”. Avoiding saying “woman”, turning women into “non-men”, erases women as a category.
There are no non-human people, so “human person” seems redundant, but I’ll ignore that one.
Oh, this is so interesting. If you already know Bailey’s work, forward to one hour thirteen minutes to see him get into a spat with an AGP.
https://youtu.be/gSh-4Ha5dKw
Daily Kos: a GOP super-PAC opinion survey includes the question “What is your gender?”, with the following choices:
• Male
• Female, Homemaker
• Female, Working Woman
One wonders if the creators of the questionnaire honestly think of “homemaker” and “working woman” as separate genders, or if they were stupidly unable to figure out how to correlate the gender question and one about employment (I didn’t see any such question, they only asked whether you or anyone in your household worked for a media company).
Ewwww!
Regarding this podcast
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2024/01/20/yanss-279-why-people-dont-speak-out-against-and-even-defend-norms-they-secretly-despise/
Now that I have listened to it:
It was first recorded a few years ago before ‘trans’ really blew up on us & doesn’t mention trans.
I would recommend listening to it, especially for the part about how the psychology behind it can be used both to fight a norm or *to impose one*. It’s almost like the TRAs listened to it and used it to push their BS.
I stumbled upon this yesterday whilst looking for something else:
https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/accessible-and-inclusive-content/inclusive-language/gender-and-sexual-diversity
It’s part of the Australian Government’s official Style Guide. The Ideological capture isn’t surprising, but some of the errors of fact are. Sex is a legal status not a biological category, a gender identity is now apparently given to us at birth … and on it goes.
Another curiosity is that the entire reference list used to compile this ‘information’ was accessed on the same day. It’s as if an intern cobbled it together one morning between arriving and having their first coffee!
Or was it xir first coffee?!
How to encourage reason, I guess: https://youtu.be/zIPPpsJY39c?si=w1gK6H9fF4ZPFXbD
I always find it interesting how strong certain cognitive biases are, especially the primacy effect. Just listen to how wedded this kid is to a conclusion that he came to secondhand.
Nullius, that’s an impressive you man. Thank you.
This is a fascinating read about identity politics, which concludes that like nationalism it can be counter-productive when it gets out of hand.
The futility of arguing against identity politics – by Joseph Heath
Good news–UK police have a new network “all serving officers and staff who hold lawful sex realist and gender critical beliefs.”
They’re on Twitter at @PoliceSEENUK.
An interesting piece on Medium regarding harassment in TTRPGs.
https://medium.com/@volkcolopatrion4/the-worst-people-you-have-never-met-or-what-i-learned-during-a-four-year-academic-study-of-online-fb93bb63870b
Reading it, so much of it crosses over with the basic lack of standards we’ve seen with TRAs that it is downright startling.
Inspired by a comment on a recent thread I obviously had to read In the Beginning by Simon Edge, a sequel to his satirical novel The End of the World Is Flat from 2021. In the latter Edge tells the story of how the highly respected and trusted Orange Peel Foundation is captured by flat-earthers working by stealth and manipulating public opinion through social media to make “globularism”* a hate-crime, an obvious allegory for the capture of Stonewall by gender identity ideologues.
The plot of In the Beginning takes place in the same fictional universe, and involves many of the same characters as The End of the World Is Flat. The “True Earth” (i.e. Flat Earth) craze has died down, but it has become unacceptable to acknowledge that the Earth is more than 10,000 years old. No, the Woke have not suddenly decided to side with Right-wing Christian Fundamentalists (that would break the analogy!). Instead the new public enemies, the “YERFs” (Young Earth Rejecting Fascists), are accused of disrespecting the cultural sensitivities of apocryphal Native American tribes who worship the equally apocryphal godess Ctatpeshirahi. The protagonist takes her former employer to court after loosing her job for violating the new taboo, an obious allegory for the Maya Forstater case.
While I recommend both books for their satirical wit and insight (The Twitter comments are priceless!), one of the main things I got out of reading In the Beginning was the concept of “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (Fibs) which goes back to this blog post by Gurwinder Bhogal:
This touches on something I have previously commented on: Having the intellectual tools to see through a false belief system doesn’t get you very far if you’re not motivated to use them that way. It’s the motivation that’s lacking, not the brainpower. Highly educated and intelligent people are often more rather than less inclined to believe absurdities because their intelligence makes them even better at rationalization. The last sentence in particular strikes me as insightful. “I will believe (or pretend to believe) whatever I have to believe to make my own side right and the other side wrong, and I can not be talked out of it. If this means taking a sledgehammer to other people’s rights and interests, that’s their problem. Fuck’em! If you try to get in our way, I will destroy you, and the fact that evidence and sound arguments are not on my side is not going to stop me!”
This, once again, is why the “good intentions” excuse can only get you so far. There are no brownie-points for doing the right thing “as one sees it” if one’s reason for seeing it that way in the first place is based on self-serving motives and motivated reasoning. Speaking of which:
Makes sense to me. And as I keep saying, just because a person’s motives for embracing a cause or belief system in the first place were both noble and worthy (or, more likely, some combination of misguided “good intentions”, intellectual laziness, sloppy thinking, tribal loyalty, group conformity, peer-pressure etc.) doesn’t mean there is anything particularly “noble” or “worthy” about their motives for sticking to their guns long after the harmful effects should have been obvious to everyone.
*The people opposing flat-eartherism are referred to as “TERGs” (True Earth Rejecting Globularists).
Well, it looks as though PZ is aware that people in certain quarters are laughing at him for his ability to know the sex of spiders from physical clues alone while denying the possibility of doing so with humans. He’s now pretending that he can’t do that after all and has adjusted his language accordingly, while taking care not to commit the crime of misgendering (emph. mine).
Just encountered a “Did you just call me ‘sir’?” at Taco Bell. I’d hope that I would have intervened in contrast to my generally nonconfrontational nature.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith set to announce changes to policies around “gender” issues:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/danielle-smith-unveils-sweeping-changes-to-alberta-s-student-gender-identity-sports-and-surgery-policies-1.7101053
(A link in the above piece takes you to a “CBC Explains: How gender-affirming health care for kids works in Canada” page that carries lots of trans talking points and next to no dissenting ones: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/gender-affirming-care-youth-1.7021529 )
Most of the above measures seem to be aimed at keeping minors from irrevocable changes. Prime Minister Trudeau has done the forced teaming work for Team Trans, calling the proposed policies “most anti-LGBT policies anywhere in this country.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-5ZVhiP3VY
Not to be outdone by the CBC, Global News flaunts its own
captive statusallyship by supposedly “fact checking” Smith’s claims about “trans women” athletes: https://globalnews.ca/news/10268806/fact-check-alberta-premier-danielle-smith-trans-athletes/It spends most of its space discussing the Semenya case and testosterone levels. It downplays the irreversible musculoskeletal and cardio-pulmonary advantages that male puberty confers on trans identified male athletes, and quotes a study that cocluded that
(This “study” was discussed on B&W here: https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/no-unfair-advantage/)
I decided to “Report an error” on the Global News “Fact checking” piece. This is what I wrote:
It probably won’t do a goddamn thing, but still worth it.
[…] a post at Miscellany Room by Your Name’s not […]
Reposting from the original post comments (https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2024/big-up-her-tits/) as I arrived a bit late to the discussion:
It appears AI programming bias could indeed have created the image. This is more of a problem than a ‘one bad actor’ situation.
https://archive.is/1ZuJ4
Whilst a human had to give it the OK, that could easily be due to inattention rather than sexism.
POLITICO: Education Department sends final Title IX rule to OMB for approval
Of course the issue isn’t about “transgender students … participating in sports consistent with their gender identity”, but about male students playing on teams reserved for female students.
Grrrrrrrrr. They always systematically lie about that. Every damn time.
I’ll never understand how Taylor Swift has become a darling of US liberals, even if she drives MAGAts batty. The latest: she may be interrupting her tour of Japan for a quick jaunt in her private jet to watch her boyfriend in the Super Bowl.
Can’t she just watch it on TV, and Zoom him afterwards?
I honestly don’t understand why right wingers are so invested in her either… She’s a generic blonde popstar, who gives a fuck?
Re Swift, my understanding of the situation is that some people are upset that she’s getting some amount of publicity and thus diminishing her football star boyfriend, because girlfriends aren’t supposed to do that or something. And “some publicity” means a few minutes total over the course of several weeks. That she is an extremely successful and well-regarded musician, rather than a mediocre performer whose reputation is elevated by association with a football star, may also play into it. There was a very good teardown of the whole nonsense controversy by a pundit on, of all places, Fox News, that was being shared around social media recently. People were calling her “middle-aged” (she’s 34), wondering why a hunk like her boyfriend would possibly be interested in someone who was too old and too busy to give birth to and stay home with the children, all that kind of crap and more.
I do not fault her for returning to the US to see her boyfriend play in the Super Bowl. That’s the single most important game of the season. Being there in person is significant. The right-wing complainers are choosing this one flight to criticize, but not other flights she or anyone else (football teams, for example) might have taken? Hypocrites.
Oh, the Swift thing gets much crazier than that, and Fox News has been helping with the spread of the latest MAGA conspiracy theory.
Read it and weep…with laughter.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/02/pentagon-to-maga-world-you-need-to-calm-down-over-taylor-swift-00139292
Well if super-rich dudes can have yachts larger than naval vessels, Swift might as well have an air force.
Captured media report on West Virginia “Women’s Bill of Rights” :
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/02/08/a-west-virginia-womens-bill-of-rights-is-an-effort-to-suppress-transgender-people-critics-say/
Doing a Google search of “West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights” yields results that all seem to highlight the view of critics that it is an”effort to supress transgender people.”
Here’s a report from my locality:
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/02/08/a-west-virginia-womens-bill-of-rights-is-an-effort-to-suppress-transgender-people-critics-say/
But is it?
Here’s a link to HB5243 or the “West Virginia Women’s Bill of Rights” or “The West Virginia Act to Define Sex-Based Terms Used in State Law, Help Protect Single Sex Spaces, and Ensure the Accuracy of Public Data Collection.”; it’s five pages long:
https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Text_HTML/2024_SESSIONS/RS/bills/hb5243%20intr.pdf
Here’s the Bill itself:
Even though the word or prefix “trans” appears nowhere in the bill, I can see why genderists are upset by it; it preserves clarity and truthfulness in language as used in law, preventing the substitution of “gender identity” for sex, or including it alongside sex. It prevents the muddying confusion of genderspeak, and enshrines in law the primacy of biological sex, with a definition of each. This bill would make an excellent basis for media style guides.
Critics claiming that it “targets” trans people should be asked exactly which parts of it do that, and how exactly that “targeting” happens. They should be made to explain where exactly the bill goes “wrong” and, if its definitions are incorrect, exactly how they are wrong. But they can’t really do that, because they’re the ones who have imposed novel counterintuitive “definitions”on the rest of us. Most of the world follows those very same definitions, not because of any sort of narrow-minded bigotry, but because they’re correct. If defining the sexes and clarifying terms “targets” trans people, then it only shows that their “rights” are dependent on poor definitions and vague language. And if protecting women’s rights interferes with trans “rights,” then those alleged “rights” must have impinged on those of women. There goes the tenet of “no conflict.” If your cause evaporates with the use of honest language, then it couldn’t have had much of substance behind it to start with. If your “rights” are dependent upon everyone else being bullied into playing along with your stupid word games, and the enforcement of the legal fictions that have been spun out of them, then yes, clear definitions are going to be a threat to your continued demands. They are right to be afraid, but not for the reasons they claim. They’re afraid of being found out and exposed as hucksters and charlatans.
We’re still getting plenty of transperbole though. Here’s one of those critics:
Which women’s rights are the “cover?” Where’s the “transphobia?” Where in this bill are you “dehumanized?” Why is the bill “unjust?” Why is it “disgusting?” Point to the specific subsections. Or are we supposed to take your word for it that this bill is all of those thingsyou say iy is without looking at it ourselves? Well, I’ve looked, and I don’t see it, just as I can’t see the “transphobia” in JK Rowling’s tweets, which mask, according to trans activists, a vitriolic hatred capable of helping to plot trans genocide.
We know you don’t like the legislation, but that doesn’t make it a bad bill. You’re a man. Nothing you do will change that. There is no shame in being a man. or being called a man, but as a man, you are, statistically, a threat to women in women’s single-sex spaces, places to which you should have never had access in the first place. To the extent that your demand to access open the doors to opportunistic predators, then yes, you are a threat to women, whether you yourself are a predator or not. Letting some men in because of a claimed “identity” allows any man claiming that identity the same access. Your supposedly self-evident, self-proclaimed harmlessness gives cover to those who are not harmless., and there’s no way to tell the difference, so it’s a good idea to keep all men out, period. If you cannot admit or see that, that is not women’s problem; they have ever right to keep all men out of their spaces. That includes you. Because you are a man. It’s the way things had always been, until recently; your having been given any access at all to those spaces on the basis of your so-called “gender identity” was an abberation and a mistake. This bill corrects that mistake. Barring you from those spaces from now on is not a diminishment of your “rights” or your “humanity.” If your “humanity” was based on everyone else pretending, along with you, that you are a woman, then you need new standards.
Nothing in this bill removes your “personhood.” There is no doubt cast upon your “reality” or “existence.” Of course you’re real, of course you exist. The only thing being doubted is your claim to be the sex you are not. It’s no different than disagreeing with an anorexic person’s mistaken self-image of being obese. That’s it. You’re not a woman. You can’t be a woman, but not because anyone is preventing you out of malice or bigotry. On the contrary, all the goodwill and validation in the world will never turn you into a woman because it simply isn’t possible, it isn’t any more possible than it would be for you to become invisible. It shouldn’t be necessary to legislate the terms of reality, but this is where we are. Men can’t become women but men are bullying their way into female spaces nonetheless. Laws like this are a welcome and overdue corrective to this unjust, dangerous, misogynistic trend. Your petulant whining stands in the way of that, but your, others like you, and your enablers and “allies” are too righteously self-important to see this. If you could take a moment to step away from having everyone else “centrer” your precious, impossible identity (which, because it is built entirely on frivolous word games, can be completely swept away by the simple refusal to play along), you might glimpse the fact that there are other issues at stake that don’t involve your desires. Harsh? Yes. But women and girls have suffered real harm, and continue to do so, as a result of gender identitarians. If this is the start of the roleback of this gender Lysenkoism, then this is a great step forward.
If the media were to actually do their job, they would not simply repeat the genderists’ charges against this bill, they would investigate the merits of their concern. But no, we just hear that it’s “disgusting,” without any argument as to why they think that. We’ve seen that it’s more than just this bill too. They repeat the forced-teaming lie that characterizes proposed legislation intended to protect the rights of women and girls against gender-ideology’s encroachment. By turning the concept of “conversion therapy” on its head, transing away the gay becomes “Life-saving, gender-affirming care.” Attempts to ban surgical interventions on minors are branded as banning allhealthcare for “trans kids.” Any such legislative remedies are deemed “transphobic” or “anti-LGBTQI bills.” The media follows along, taking its lead from trans activists. Attempts to keep boys and men out of female sports are dutifully reported as “trans bans” rather than male bans. By regurgitating the accusations, and using obfuscatory, genderist language in their reporting, the media become part of the trans activists’ campaign of emotional blackmail. Because of media complicity and repetition, the “Anti-LGBTQI” nature of these bills becomes taken as a given, the same as JKR’s presumptive “transphobia.” Add to this the continued use of “preferred pronouns” (even by ostensibly “right wing” outlets) that mask the the true sex of persons being reported on, and you get some idea of the thoroughness of much of the media’s capture. Being this far entangled and complicit in this mess, it will be hard for them to drop their implicit partisanship in favour of actual neutrality.
I can already see the potential loophole in items 4 and 5 that the usual suspects will no doubt try to exploit.
How long will it be before they claim that being a female born in a male body is a developmental abnormality and that therefore TWAW under the wording of the law?
It might also have been better to include within the bill a specific rejection of the idea that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth, but other than that, the bill is pretty much the touch of sanity that is needed right now.
And I guess that’s what makes it “disgusting?”
Of course. It’s as disgusting as telling an infant that Father Christmas isn’t real.
But not nearly as cruel as telling someone they can change sex, or as dangerous as telling them that they can force everyone around them to act as if they had.
PZ has a new post crowing about ’empirical data’ proving something we already know – people are happier when they get what they want. He quotes this:
“Weighted the survey to try to account for biases” means the surveyors weighted the survey and thus risk influencing the results with their own biases.
The first figure seems to refer to people socially transitioning, crossdressing as opposed to body modification. At no point does it establish that their satisfaction with life should come at the expense of that of women who suddenly find themselves bumped out of sports teams, lesbian bars, workplace quotas, their own change rooms and so on. I also do not see that it justifies making medicalising a minor’s healthy body just because they yearn for it to be different. The protections they chafe against are stringent for good reason.
The post expresses no deeper reasoning than that it makes trans people happy to indulge them, therefore we should. I could almost thank him for making the narcissism at the heart of the trans movement so visible. Also, I’m sure religious people would love PZ’s rationale being applied to them.
Is there any control group, the “happiness” of which the trans group’s “happiness” is being compared to or measured with? Does the survey, apart from self report, actually define the difference between “binary or nonbinary transgender?” After all, in the usual boilerplate formulation, we are told that “TWAW, TMAM, and nonbinary identities are valid,” which suggests that, for some purposes at least, the two categories of “trans” and NB are considered distinct, so how can someon be both? What “biases” are being “accounted for?” Do the questions include one on whether or not the correspondents believe they are no longer the sex they were “asigned at birth?” Is there any attempt to account for the placebo effect, or that correspondents might be saying they are happier because their “treatments” are expected and supposed to make them happier? Is someone who has sacrificed their body to their “gender journey” going to readiliy admit to buyer’s remorse? This is the flip side of the threat of suicide that dysphoric people are expected and supposed to use when they are denied to “gender affirming care?”
Does their level of happiness or satisfaction go down if other people fail to acknowledge or accept them as the sex they are not, whether that involves others’ refusal to use “preferred” pronouns, or if they are refused access to spaces and facilities designated as having been set aside for the sex they are not?
I wonder if there’s a similar survey of detransitioners or desisters? That would be a useful comparison would it not?
Salt Lake Tribune: Utah school board member Natalie Cline questions high school athlete’s gender, causing social media uproar
A Utah school board member complained about a high school student athlete she assumed was trans, using this student as a reason to protest boys competing on girls teams, and other related topics. I didn’t see any links to exact quotes, which would be helpful. It turns out the athlete is a girl, not a trans-identified boy. The board member apologized and removed her post.
The girl was subject to attacks of some sort, possibly online, possibly in person, so the school arranged for police protection for the girl. The board member was criticized, notably by a state representative, who now may face charges of revealing protected information (no idea what kind of protected information) in her criticism.
There is a lot of information missing in this story. I would agree with the goal of keeping boys off of girls teams, but personalizing the problem, especially without evidence, seems off base, and I don’t know what else was said.
Bookshop.org supports independent booksellers. It provides maps showing locations of bookstores, and you can apply filters to the map. The filters available are:
Black owned;
Asian American & Pacific Islander owned;
Latinx owned;
LGBTQIA+ owned;
Indigenous owned.
No “women owned”. No “lesbian owned”, although I suspect they’d claim that’s a part of the fourth category. Maybe there’s a less trendy resource that shows women-owned bookstores.
No Jewish owned, either, I take it. Be trendy or get out.
“Carries books I actually wish to purchase” probably should feature… It’s as bad as those pricks that encrust their roof repair truck logos with crosses and Christianese puns…
This morning Jerry Coyne posted a signpost to this new paper from the American College of Pediatricians, “Mental Health in Adolescents with Incongruence of Gender Identity and Biological Sex”. From the Conclusions section:
For the record, a commenter pointed out:
Personally, I eschew the genetic fallacy, and even confirmation bias, and will read that paper closely, consider its methods and limitations, and make up my own mind.
Peter N, since TAs call everyone who disagrees with them right-wing, making up your own mind definitely sounds like the most prudent path. Being accused of misusing or mischaracterizing scientific papers is not necessarily to actually be guilty of misusing or mischaracterizing scientific papers in today’s climate, where anything certain people don’t like is accused of something.\
Even if it’s true, being right-wing doesn’t mean they must always be wrong about everything, even if sometimes they are right for the wrong reason.
Found this UNRISD video in my recommended. For some reason. More of the same conflation of homosexuality with Genderism and queerness. Blah blah blah.
That piece Jerry Coyne posted about appeared in The Washington Monthly, which isn’t a conservative magazine. I find that interesting, and an indication that it’s something to consider on its merits, not its politics.
When did the world go mad? And please can we return to an age of reason.
Fucking hell!
What’s good for the gander is certainly not good for the goose.
https://www.kvoa.com/news/local/breaking-news-tucson-teacher-loses-job-over-onlyfans-account/article_33f938fa-cb6b-11ee-a52d-d34f5a6df6a6.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=user-share
Once again, men can pretend to be women, but a woman can’t pretend to be black – that will follow you for all time.
I don’t approve of what Doleful did, but she’s gone from being an academic and suspected activist, to looking after kids after school and running an only fans page. That’s sad.
Yeah, I now lack any interest in the cancelling of Dolezal what with the gobbos running around everywhere (and think Blackness as a concept probably should be jettisoned entirely).
Anyone else read “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky? Great stuff…
Helen Clarke has been challenged on twitter over her truly abysmal article on the LGB Alliance. Maya Forstater has pointed out that neither of the articles Helen cites in relation to her claim that the LGB Alliance ‘has connections to the US religious right’ do anything at all to back it up. Clarke hurriedly cites an article in Pink News (!) and a post on some trans propaganda site. A chap called Philip Swallow points out that neither of these actually support what he calls, rightly, her ‘attempted smear’:
Maya then challenges Helen to ‘withdraw the claim and make a correction’. Fat chance, of course, as Philip Swallow observes:
Nothing more is heard from Helen.
Definitely a caution against working with rightoids just because they do think they know what a woman is…
Good stuff; thank you.
The Philip Swallow name is a joke: he’s the protagonist of David Lodge’s academic trilogy Changing Places & something & something. His profile is all in-jokes about academic in-jokes.
Thanks for that. I read Changing Places and the follow-up books decades ago, when they first came out, but I’d forgotten the name of the protagonist.
I did notice that ‘Philip Swallow”s twitter bio is a collage mainly of allusions to titles from campus novels: The History Man (Bradbury), and Changing Places, The British Museum Is Falling Down (both Lodge). I presume ‘Waiting for the Barbarian’ is an allusion to J. M. Coetze’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, which I’ve never read, and also Constantine’s Cavafy’s poem from which Coetze borrowed the title (translation here). I am not sure whether the mention of Hazlitt is a hint at ‘Swallow’s’ academic research interests or homage to a notably acerbic nineteenth-century essayist and journalist.
Another day, another judgement goes against Trump. Isn’t he tired of all that winning?
Eric and Junior were also fined and barred for two years from serving as officer or director of any NY corporation.
Of course he’ll appeal, but hopefully this will eat up his time and money.
And… forgot the slash before the closing blockquote again.
You know, an $80 million judgment here, a $350 million one there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money!
There’s *another* horror novel written by a transwoman, that’s getting aggressively promoted by the publishing industry, which takes gratuitous swipes at gender-critical feminists, This time it’s “Brainwyrms” by Alison Rumfitt.
“When a TERF bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231012055220/https://gnofhorror.com/brainwyrms-by-alison-rumfitt-horror-book-review/
Outrageous. Where is the evidence that gender-critical feminists have ever carried out bombings or other terrorist activities?
To answer your question M.C., projection is one hell of a drug.
“projection is one hell of a drug.”
Indeed.
” Rumfitt’s second novel tugs on the current mess of anti-trans bigotry in the United Kingdom (and beyond), depicting transphobia as a ravenous brainworm that causes its hosts to go violently mad….The book tracks Frankie and Vanya’s increasingly fraught relationship against the backdrop of rising fascism and anti-trans violence, at the heart of which is a conspiracy involving trans-exclusionary feminists, a J.K. Rowling stand-in and the titular helminths”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231016025552/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/books/review/brainwyrms-alison-rumfitt.html
Why are these writers (Gretchen Felker-Martin, and others) so *obsessed* with Rowling? Is it jealousy of her success? Anger that they can’t shut Rowling up with their “accountability culture”? A feeling of betrayal that their favourite childhood author might have different political views to their ones?
Probably all of the above, but it could also be a matter of stirring things up and keeping the pot boiling. In some quarters, particularly large portions of the media, it is now taken as read that Rowling is “transphobic.” It doesn’t matter that the charges are false and baseless, the existence of the charges is sufficient to make her “controversial.” These assholes don’t want anyone to forget how “evil” she is, so she continues to be used by trans activists as their very own Emmanuel Goldstein (though the hate has been pretty much continuous, and not limited to daily installments of two minutes each. It must get tiring.) Any outsider would think she ate trans kids for breakfast, lunch, and supper. But no, all she said was that sex is real. For this she can never be forgiven. Moreso because she never backed down or knuckled under. One wonders, if genderists had known this in advance, whether they might have sought out a less determined and more compliant victim to spotlight and shame. Choosing Rowling as their prey certainly seems to have failed in the rest of the world outside the trans-o-sphere.
“Probably all of the above, but it could also be a matter of stirring things up and keeping the pot boiling. In some quarters, particularly large portions of the media, it is now taken as read that Rowling is “transphobic.” It doesn’t matter that the charges are false and baseless, the existence of the charges is sufficient to make her “controversial.” ”
Of course. Repeat it again and again.
There’s a pro-trans forum (that I *won’t* name here because they have a history of going after people who publicly criticise them (doxxing, etc.) and they know all about B&W).
This website had a thread praising Alison Rumfitt’s first novel, “Tell Me I’m Worthless”. TMIW has fictionalized versions of real-life GCs activists (or what the forum called “Bigoted, anti-Semitic TERF scum”) as its villains. Hence the praise from the forum posters.
I just found this on Jane Clare Jones’ Twitter feed.
Mary Harrington has just delivered a speech for the reactionary Heritage Foundation attacking the contraceptive pill:
https://nitter.poast.org/janeclarejones/status/1759132377572319460#m
So according to Harrington, women can either have Hugh Hefner’s society or Pat Robertson’s society.
Maybe women don’t want either?
Oh yes, Ms. self-declared “reactionary feminist”. Listened to her talking with Yascha Mounk a while back and hated her immediately.
“People at parties tune me out as soon as I say that being a mum is the most important thing about me, because mums are boring! *WHINE*”
*I don’t see why being a reactionary is a bad thing.*
Yascha wasn’t at all sure what to do with her; he had a much easier time with his prior “post-liberal” guest than her…
Colin Wright has addressed the latest pants-on-head stupidity from PZ.
Jerry Coyne summarizes the argument and provides links:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/18/colin-wright-corrects-p-z-myers-about-the-sex-binary/
Some highlights, via Jerry–
Wright winds up:
NYT: After Nonbinary Student’s Death, Oklahoma Schools Chief Defends Strict Gender Policies
A young woman has died, possibly (unclear at the moment) as the result of a fight at school. At a meeting, people blamed the death on the school district’s policy that there are two sexes (“genders”), and (apparently) that students should use the bathroom appropriate for their sex. “You brought it on”, said a vice-mayor of an adjoining town. The girl claimed to be “nonbinary”.
It isn’t clear what happened in this case.
Sure, having sensible policies means it’s perfectly acceptable for people to bully or attack those who are different. This makes as much sense as saying that boys having their own bathroom makes it OK to attack girls. Or perhaps that criticizing a political position makes it OK to assault those students who disagree.
I wonder which bathroom non-binary would use? If they are neither male nor female, how do they know where to go for relief?
Most of the non-binary people I’ve known seem to be expressing as the opposite sex; if not, they are simply changing nothing, but putting up ridiculous pronouns on their profile.
Non-binary is as meaningless as queer, and as dishonest as trans.
Matt Osborne has a lot more information on that girl’s death:
Her Name Was Dagney Benedict. The Pride Flag Mafia Changed Her Name To ‘Nex’
The SPLC has a new method for submitting anonymous tips to expose “activities of hate groups and other extremists in the U.S.” It is a convoluted method involving the use of Tor and onion routing. I am slightly tempted to use it to report the SPLC itself for the misinformation in the CAPTAIN report and the suppression of women’s rights in favor of men.
https://www.splcenter.org/submit-tip-intelligence-project
Please be so tempted that you do it.
#98 Sackbut
Huh, I always thought those photos looked you for a 16 year old. I had wondered if she was experiencing an eating disorder, but it turns out the people of gender simply used photos from a few years ago instead of anything current. Those younger photos were much more… cute and harmless? Not that she looks menacing or anything, but cynical ol’ me can’t help but think thy were chosen specifically to advance the storyline of Most Vulnerable.
Speaking of people being completely dishonest about gender, does anybody know why the FTB network has been down for at least the last 3 days? All I’m getting is:
Golly. No idea.
About the FTB outage:
https://bsky.app/profile/pzmyers.bsky.social/post/3kmiapxxhqk2s
Hoo boy.
In the Guardian today:
LGBTQ+ people protest in Florida over Republican conversion therapy bill
The Florida legislature is a mess, but (as we’ve discussed often here) they are sometimes on the sane side of the transgender ideology battle, and right-wing legislatures often enough field trans-related bills that are carefully worded (perhaps deliberately aiming to be divisive among those on the left side of the political spectrum). That appears to be the case here.
The Guardian article is full of claims about “LGBTQ” and “conversion therapy”, which is a “scientifically discredited practice”. They are misrepresenting the bill quite badly. You can read the text (PDF) of the bill here. What it does:
– Use a sensible biological definition of “sex”;
– Require that people list their sex on identification cards;
– Require that insurance companies that cover sex-reassignment also cover detransition;
– Require that insurance companies make available policies that do not cover sex-reassignment;
– Prevent insurance companies from prohibiting mental health coverage for people questioning their gender.
That last one was a bit convoluted, but my understanding is that some companies provided coverage for mental health services, but prohibited that coverage from being used if the therapy was to counsel people who thought they were trans, because people who think they are trans are trans and should therefore just go see a medical doctor about transition. So this bill allows mental health care providers to talk to patients about their thoughts of being the opposite sex, and requires insurance companies to pay for such services.
The shouting about “conversion therapy” is probably about both this psychological counseling portion and the detransition portion.
So, nothing about LGB, or Q+ for that matter, and nothing about what might be properly referred to as “conversion therapy”.
The protest for some reason also featured images of Dagney “Nex” Benedict, as if her death was somehow relevant to this bill.
That thing about the mental health coverage is horrifying if you’re right (and that seems to be the obvious meaning).
Regarding FTB: https://web.archive.org/web/20240225170211/https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/02/25/our-nemesis-revealed/
The latest on the status of FTB:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/were-still-down-99448063?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
It does seem to be an arbitrary and capricious decision on Bluehost’s part to take FTB down. I know I shouldn’t be feeling this, but the schadenfreude I’m feeling given Myers’ horrible treatment of his critics for years on his blog is I suppose to be expected.
Well, to be fair, and possibly even charitable, it looks like Freethought Blogs was taken down in response to someone who has adopted the name of an Egyptian terrorist leader killed by a U.S. drone attack in 2022. So I would guess it’s FtB’s general irreligious tenor, not their attitude toward the gender-critical, that inspired the complaint. And one might infer that the takedown (and the web host’s cheerful email outlining how to get a “quick resolution”) was auto-generated. Or maybe it’s really a human being who happen to be sympathetic to the religionist. So really, it could happen to any of us, and it’s wrong and unfair no matter who’s affected.
I also see that FtB’s Wikipedia page hasn’t been updated since January 24 — it’s almost as if nobody’s noticed it’s gone.
From PZ’s notes (replies 107 and 104 here), I would assume the complaint is spurred by the anti-Islamist tenor and the criticism of Islam, not about the general irreligious tenor.
And yet Islam so thoroughly deserves criticism.
Brian Mulroney died.
I’d love to attend his funeral.
But only if there is dancing.
There should always be dancing at funerals… Moping around is unbecoming of the living.
Peter N, #109:
True enough, but if we apply the same standards of evidence to this that PZ and his baying mob use when deciding whether somebody is ‘transphobic’, then the accusation is proof enough. I doubt that PZ would see the irony in his situation, though.
I saw something horrifying, and I feel the need to share it. I was going through a new cookbook, marking the recipes I want to try, and I came to the section on sandwiches. This section was titled ‘Wiches, Bitches. Seriously? There is way too much wrong with that to unpack, but of course there are obvious lines crossed, not just the use of bitches, but the concept of sandwiches…make me a sandwich, bitch.
The cookbook is edited by a team of young men and women, most of them Millennials. I fear they believe that they need to reclaim the word ‘bitches’, and that all us old feminists are just too stodgy to have fun. I’m sorry, I have a sense of humor, but that is not funny.
I should probably send the editors a letter of disapproval, but I’m struggling because I know I could well be subjected to a torrent of abuse. I’m not in the best of places emotionally right now, and I’m afraid I couldn’t handle it. I feel like a coward.
Well game out what the likely results of complaining would be; would they be likely to change the title? Would it actually make you feel better? Would you be dismissed as a fringe demographic? A torrent of abuse is certainly possible but not the most likely outcome.
Nothing cowardly about not putting in wasted effort.
I think you should do it. I became aware of the prevalence of subtle gendered slurs by reading B&W — these cookbook people probably haven’t had that privilege. So someone should tell them.
Since my doctorate is in Applied Linguistics, and in fact I’ll be going to a large Applied Linguistics conference in a couple of weeks, I decided to take a look at the article that Kathleen Stock mentioned in the Unherd post Ophelia discussed the other day. I didn’t read the whole thing (one reason I’m not in academia is that I really don’t want to read or write articles with words like “problematize”), so I won’t offer a full critique, but I think the authors have some valid points about how framing research in terms of previous literature* can lock in, and more importantly lock out, certain viewpoints; this is especially true I think in the social sciences, where it’s easy to let your prejudices color your work.
What I found truly interesting about the article, though, was that it seems to be essentially an extended literature review, with an extensive list of references (I didn’t bother to count). The authors write from a theoretical framework with a pedigree, which can be seen in their use of terms like “symbolic violence”, “epistemic theft”, and “misrecognition”.
I guess the point is not so much that lit reviews are bad, but rather that everyone else is doing them wrong.
*Another reason I dislike academia: calling academic writing “literature”. Jane Austen would take the piss.
I was going to post this in a discussion that touched on “we can’t believe our eyes anymore, we have to question whether any slightly masculine woman we see might actually be a TiM”, but I can’t find it, so here it is.
President Biden made a post on Facebook honoring Women’s History Month. This photo was included. I don’t know who that extremely tall Black woman is in the middle of the photo. I don’t know if she is actually a woman. It would be in keeping with the gender ideology capture to put a trans-identified male literally front and center in a photo that is supposed to show women, but I simply don’t know. It irks me that this is an issue, that I can’t trust my eyes, that there are people who go quite far out of their way to trick me.
Not just tall but massive. It was a very odd decision to put someone who dwarfs everyone else right in the middle like that. As so often, it feels like a taunt.
About that photo, if you look to the right and back a bit you can see another black woman who is as tall as the one in the center, so it would seem to be a case of the shortest women being put up front, as you would expect, with that one exception. So I’m not thinking this is a case of a transwoman putting themselves forward, at least not on the face of it.
A group called Environmental Progress has published “The WPATH Files.” From their press release:
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files
There’s a link to a PDF of the full report in the press release.
In the latest news about the wetness of water….
The UN has gotten around to saying that there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe that Hamas committed sexual violence during the Oct. 7th attacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XUe8sHVRCI
It’s one thing to criticize Israel’s conduct during its campaign against Hamas. I genuinely do believe that Netanyahu is motivated by a desire for genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It’s another thing entirely to soft-peddle Hamas’ own crimes in an effort to try to pick a ‘clean’ side in this mess.
On my way to work this morning, I noticed some chalked slogans on the sidewalk in front of our local library branch. It almost got its message right. Alongside the demands to “LEAVE KIDS ALONE”, “NO TRANS FLAG” , and “NO DRAG QUEEN STORY TIME”, they wrote, twice “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS.”
No, only two sexes. (Had I had some chalk in my pocket, I’d have been sorely tempted to edit this for the anonymous scribe.) If you’re going to take the time to scrawl on the sidewalk, keep your message on point. Sex is real “gender” is bullshit. Using trans activists’ terms hides the reality of the situation (which plays into their hands), and by helpfully conflating sex with gender, you’ve done most of their work for them. Gender is a tar baby best avoided altogether; sticking with “sex” gets the true meaning across. The apparent reluctance or squeamishness about using the word “sex” (which is more likely to grab the attention of passersby walking on your message, and, being shorter than “gender,” saves on chalk), leads me to suspect that it was written by a religion-inspired critic of trans ideology. Using chalk rather than paint might just be the force of habit brought about by Canadian politeness.
I expect that it will be washed off the sidewalk by the time I pass by again. Our branch has hosted DQST events, and several female staff members wear name tags sporting “she/her” pronouns redundantly informing me how I’m supposed to refer to them when they are not present, so I expect they will try to clean it off in the spirit of compliant allyship expected of them, if they can’t wait for today’s expected rain to do the job. I also suspect it will be reported as an anti-trans incident (hate crime if they can manage it), but that if it makes any media at all, the actual words of the graffiti will not be quoted.
On the bright side of things, France has enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution by the overwhelming vote of 780:72. That shouldn’t seem as remarkable as it is in this crazy world.
Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the global temperature curve decades ago. Exxon kept that information to itself in favour of spreading doubt about climate science and policies, advocating a ‘watch and wait’ strategy because there’s no point in throwing money at a problem that might not exist. Exxon now accepts that the evidence shows climate change is a real problem, but it’s too late to do anything about it, and anyway it’s the public’s fault because the public aren’t prepared to pay to fix things and Exxon won’t cut into their profits and upset investors by investing in clean energy.
It looks like Exxon has been using vast quantities of gas to gaslight the entire planet.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures
Not to mention pissing away petroleum we need for plastics, fertilizer, etc… let’s literally light precious natural resources on fire to accumulate money, a substance of no material value that exists only as a shared dream and way of keeping score (I’m pro capitalism but let’s not pretend here).
Heh, the Willoughby story is being reported all over. Even in Variety–
https://variety.com/2024/film/global/jk-rowling-police-report-india-willoughby-alleged-transphobia-1235933347/
Roz Kaveney is in a threatening mood:
@MayorofLondon
I’m not sure you understood the implications of your support for the Labour Women’s Declaration, which is using the ‘single sex spaces’ concept as part of an attempt to exclude trans people from all safe participation in public life…You have up until now been a reliable ally to the LGBTQIA community and they to you. As your former colleague on the Liberty EC, I feel entitled to ask you to reconsider this unfortunate and ill-judged decision which has serious potential implications for future support.
https://twitter.com/RozKaveney/status/1765711602563559795#m
“Play the game or we’ll use our “Accountability Culture” on you.” Not nice.
Again we have the assertion that women have no legitimate reason to defend the integrity of their single sex spaces, and that their sole motivation is to hurt trans people. This claim is essential because it is used to mask the fact that trans “rights” impinge on women’s safe participation in public life.
Talk about inflated sense of self-importance. If you’re going to start playing duelling demographics, you might not want to go up against half the population.
“How the Ministry of Gaza Fakes Casualty Numbers.”
After analyzing the numbers (which you can do for yourself; I can’t, as I’m not trained in statistical analysis,) Abraham Wyner concludes,
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers
Oh dear. The awful Andrea “Sissy P**n made me Trans” Long Chu is back again, with a long piece called: “Freedom of Sex : The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.”
To confront the reality of biological sex is not, by definition, to swear fealty to that reality; no one knows this better than a child who wishes to have their biological sex changed. We must be able to defend this desire clearly, directly, and — crucially — without depending on the idea of gender.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240311194829/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trans-rights-biological-sex-gender-judith-butler.html
Children want to change a lot about themselves -things that it might not necessarily be a good idea to change.
Does Chu think, for instance, that children should be allowed to have leg-lengthening surgery, and that anyone who objects is a reactionary bigot?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55146906
Thanks for that. The piece is so long I can’t muster the will to comment on it (because I can’t muster the will to read more than the first 2% of it or so).
Bridget Phetasy pointed out that Autogynephile Long Chu just tweeted this after her NY Magazine article plugging gender surgery:
speaking of which: my sweet friend theo is having painful complications from their surgery last year and urgently needs a revision, pls help out if you can.
https://www.sotwe.com/BridgetPhetasy
“Alexei Sayle’s Stuff” had a skit where the words “HEAVY IRONY” would flash on the screen. ALC’s tweets reminded me of that.
But they’re GLORIOUS JOYFUL painful complications.
You can’t change your sex though, and pretending you can is not good for your mental health either.
Indeed, TRANS JOYFUL painful complications.
Also, there’s some really creepy stuff going on in Chu’s essay.
The TERF does not, after all, fear being assaulted by a Y chromosome in a women’s restroom. Her paranoid fantasy is of a large testosterone-fueled body wielding a penis — an organ to which, as Butler points out, the TERF attributes almost magical powers of violence.
So feminists are obsessed with a certain male body part?
This is all just Andrew Tate-style male supremacy with a thin patina of identity politics on top.
Also, It was once asked of Ayn Rand: Is it is ridiculous to call a woman writer a misogynist?
Well, I certainly think Judith Butler is a misogynist.
Well said.
Lauren Duggan from Unherd gives a sceptical overview of ALC’s essay:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/andrea-long-chu-sex-changes-should-be-a-universal-birthright/
Proponents of transgender treatments respond to fears about child transitions by claiming that minors typically don’t undergo cross-sex genital surgery. In addition, they argue that the treatments minors do undergo are generally reversible, and that there are firm guardrails in place preventing children from undergoing said procedures due to a sudden change in gender identity or psychiatric problems. Chu, conversely, argues that the practice “should be happening”. “What does this freedom look like in practice?,” the writer asks. “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again.”
Whatever happened to “first do no harm?”
I am in favour of adults being allowed to have “sex reassignment surgery” if it is the only way to treat gender dysphoria, but I have always regarded the use of srs medication and surgery on children and teenagers as being wrong.
Interesting article in the Philsopher’s Magazine by Gary L. Francione :
https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/321-the-transgender-rights-issue
Speaking of infantalizing us–on Twitter, Rudy (@theneonrequiem) shares a thing from Dylan Mulvaney:
https://x.com/theneonrequiem/status/1768016339120136447?s=20
Those lyrics are a ripoff of The Cure’s song “Friday I’m in Love”. Grrr.
#142:
Hmm, I wonder which particular ‘twinks’ are being referred to here? The affluent ‘twin income, no kids’ twinks of the middle-class or borderline legal-age homosexual boys?
My question may be rhetorical.
Over here we call them DINKYS (double income…) to avoid confusion. But yes, highly rhetorical.
Mostly Cloudy @ 141, thanks for that link.
Vapid stereotype laden glurge in pop music? Would you really be paying attention if it didn’t involve that ridiculous goblin? Maybe, it is a “kids these days” kinda complaint, but still I ask the question.
As to the twinks question it’s obvious; Mulvaney used to be one…
Mulvaney is a grifter more than anything else, and he’s certainly not the only one.
I’d buy that for a dollar!
Artist Nina Paley refuses to allow the Vagina Museum to show her film “Seder Masochism”, citing the museum’s contemptuous treatment of women (including using women-erasing language, and mocking women who objected to that language as TERFs):
https://blog.ninapaley.com/2024/03/15/press-release-nina-paley-declines-screening-permission-to-vagina-museum/
I just came across For Women Scotland’s “Did you know…” page on their website. It’s long, it’s devastating, it’s loaded with links to documentation of their assertions. For example, here are just the first two of about 30 paragraphs:
It goes on, addressing all the issues.
(Peter N @ 150, excellent page, thanks for the link.)
In other news, I saw this article at POLITICO that I thought was insightful:
In on the Joke: The Comedic Trick Trump Uses to Normalize His Behavior
A couple of excerpts:
I’m going to need a stronger irony meter before reading anything else written by PZ. In a post about a creationist’s attempt to disprove evolution, PZ asks
For the same reason that you and your mob do it all the fucking time, maybe?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/03/17/will-knowland-knows-nothing/
I’m not sure the strong-enough irony meter for that exists.
This is quite moving and shocking. Helen Joyce and Richard Dawkins. I hope the link works.
https://youtu.be/WFXxMOIDROk?si=hhog9C37aUVGnuYj
The link does work, and yes it is.
Finally, I’ve learned all about Maya and her case. Oh, she’s wonderful.
Best quote (paraphrased) “Transphobia is just women saying ‘no!'”
https://youtu.be/r5DBgD4ycF8?si=oy6HcXLluYLh-dxG
Folks, this monologue is simply amazing. Carol is a former “trans man” who tells it like it is (or “was” for her) in the trans world. You. Will. Not. Believe how fucked up it was. She is a terrific speaker–she lurches through hilarity, absurdity, only to smack you upside the head with horror. The video is a crescendo: she keeps outdoing herself with her stories. I had an epiphany when, towards the end, she says something like, “In the trans world, to be ‘free’ means not having any boundaries whatsoever around your sexuality.” And, “Taking “T” turns young trans identified girls into “holes.”
https://youtu.be/VaYtxIt0cJA?si=NeDhu5ejpRzj3091
NYT: R.B.G. Award Organizer Cancels Ceremony After Fallout Over Honorees
This falls under “what the heck were they thinking?”.
The award was established by Ginsburg herself in 2019 as the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award”, and was intended to honor “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility”. This year the name of the award was changed to the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Award”, and they decided to include men in the candidate pool, because of Ginsburg’s “teachings about equality”. And instead of honoring people who “exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility”, they picked people “who have made significant contributions to society”.
In other words, let’s just throw out everything this award is about, but keep the name.
And who did they pick this year? Four of the five honorees were men: Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, and Sylvester Stallone. (The fifth was Martha Stewart.) A rogues gallery. Let’s honor RBG by giving an award in her name to people who represent everything she was fighting against? Was that the thought process?
Family and friends are, as one would expect, furious.
That is ASTOUNDING.
Interesting to see the Guardian step so carefully now that we’re talking about a lawsuit. Kelly-Jay is now just an “activist”, without the “ANTI-TRANS” so joyfully trumpeted at the time. By the same journalist in fact.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/19/victoria-opposition-leader-john-pesutto-defamation-case-kellie-jay-keen-posie-parker-ntwnfb
Instead of discussing the WPATH revelations and their effect on working-class children and teenagers, Jacobin magazine publishes an article on pseudo-intellectual Judith Butler. This article (by a Joanna Wuest) then turns into a rant about “TERFs”, which the article claims are all controlled by right-wing politicians and millionaires:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240316182102/https://jacobin.com/2024/03/judith-butler-whos-afraid-gender-review
British TERFs, who are afforded an entire chapter in Butler’s book, are similarly criticized without any reference to the broader right-wing forces that quite literally orchestrate their anti-trans screeds. Kathleen Stock, for instance, is a columnist for UnHerd, an online magazine that touts itself as an unorthodox truth-teller in world saturated with narrowly “defensive liberal or angry reactionary” outlets. Notably, UnHerd owner Paul Marshall is the manager of one of the UK’s largest hedge funds, a Conservative Party donor, and a Brexit funder who contributed over £100,000 to the Vote Leave campaign.
Eh? While I suspect Stock is grateful to Paul Marshall for giving her an outlet, I don’t see any evidence that Marshall “quite literally orchestrates” Stock’s writings. Given that even mildly gender-critical women are driven out of left-wing publications by organised campaigns (ask Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman) people like Stock are compelled to write for right-wing outlets like Unherd instead. Self-righteous pseudo-socialists like Joanna Wuest then cite this as proof of Stock and co. “incipient fascism”, or whatever buzzword the Verso Books crowd are promoting this week.
Part of me wants to point and laugh at that piece but I just can’t summon the will to keep reading it. Apart from anything else the constant dutiful “their” instead of “her” is, of course, confusing, and I got very tired very fast of having to keep resolving the confusion. Plus the writer seems stupid.
Here’s a story I came across fom Canadian Press that has been carried on a number of new services:
Transgender people bear brunt of misinformation about gender identity, experts say
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/03/18/transgender-people-bear-brunt-of-misinformation-about-gender-identity-experts-say/
(They have no idea how true that is, but not in the way they’re thiking; trans identified people pay with their health and well-being for the misinformation they’re fed. I’d say that’s “bearing the brunt” alright. This story contains some of that very disinformation from these “experts.”)
Well what about the lies, intimidatio, and denial of reality? I can imagine that one could develop an antipathy towards transgenderism without needing to draw upon religion. There are plenty of “stereotypes” and “misconceptions” within genderism itself, and I wouldn’t trust this man’s definition of “hate.”
I don’t care how sad he is, social contagion is a thing, and it preys upon confused youth, many of whom are suffering from other problems, none of which will be solved by transing them. Many, if not most of these children and youth would, if not shunted into the “gender affirming” pathway, desist, and grow up to be gays and lesbians. How real can it be if it’s something you can grow out of? If it looks like a trend, and walks like a trend, and talks like a trend, it can’t very well be fundamental and innate, can it?
Nope.
The sacrifices are no proof that it’s not part of a trend. People will do any number of harmful, deluded things in persuit of something that is not real. And as for self hatred, and problems with self image, see above regarding comorbidities that transing won’t fix.
Advocates think that puberty blockers are like a pause button; Advocates think that puberty blockers are safe when used off-label. They believe that it’s possible to go through the “wrong” puberty, whereas a human body is primed to go through just one, and that it will happen only once. There is no “choice” in the matter, no Door Number Two, no Plan B. Blockers prevent the natural growth and development programmed into the body. Disrupting that is not hitting “pause.” There is no alternative puberty that can be offered the person denied the one and only puberty they will ever have a chance of experiencing. To suggest otherwise is clouding misinformation.
And how much of that is because they’ve been told that’s what they’re “supposed” to be feeling? No discussion of gender identity touching on children fails to claim this; kids doing their own “research” and self-diagnosing as trans are going to see this formula all the time. It’s become part of the script, it’s part of what kids have been told is key to getting their own way. It’s what’s expected of them. It’s a bunch of self-selected subjects and no control group.
Great; forced teaming. Though I have to laugh at the oxymoronic idea of “the realities of gender identity.” As if.
Bullshit.
More bullshit. If people couldn’t be “influenced” in regards to their “genderidentity” there would be no detransitioners.
Yes, and you’re not doing that at all, are you?
What do you consider to be the “right” information? What myths are you passing off as truth? What’s your take on puberty blockers? Do you think that sex is “assigned” at birth? Is there more than one sex? Can humans change sex?
Hey look, there’s a myth right there, the pause button. The vast majority of children put on blockers end up being given wrong sex hormones.
But other studies have caused several countries to stop the use of blockers for children, and that gender affirming care does not result in improvement in mental health issues or suicidality. And let’s not forget the damning revelations of the WPATH papers and what they mean for the entire concept of “best practices” in “gender affirming care.”
These are experimental procedures that can permanently fuck up a person’s life.
Indeed, these can permanently fuck up a person’s life.
But the genitals aren’t being “reconstructed,” they’re removed and replaced with a non-functioning resemblance of the other sex’s organs. Just as a glass eye is not actually a functional eye that restores sight when worn, a “neo-vagina” isn’t a vagina at all; a “neo-penis” is not a penis. Sexual function is not restored, it is lost.
Using the euphemism “top surgery” to replace the more accurate (and unavoidably more charged) double mastectomy is dishonest and minimalizing. You’re not changing a t-shirt, you’re removing healthy breasts.
What about more psychological consultation beforehand? If gender clinicians were really concerned for their patients’ well-being, the best case scenario that would be that of desistance through watchful waiting. That would be their first, best choice for resolving or dealing with their patients’ issues. A pathway that avoids pharmeceutical and surgical interventions should be considered a course than one that requires more aggressive “treatment.” But watchful waiting is now off the table, thanks to “experts” like these.
So sometimes the diagnoses are incorrect? Sometimes mistakes are made? And the times when “corrective” surgery can’t “reverse” the effects of hormone therapy? Ooops.
Oh dear.
That makes sense, in that they will never become the sex they are not, whatever the course of “treatment.”
But you are a man, and nothing you do, nothing done to you, changes that. And I can address you a man if I like, because that’s what you are. You might have found doctors willing to cater to your delusions, who in turn encouraged you to force others to do the same, but I will not let you dictate my reality. You are not a woman of any kind, and never will be.
And as for “misinformation,” apart from actual right wing bigots, I doubt you’ll find any amount deception or dishonesty to match the amount and degree employed by genderists on a regular basis. “Gender affirming” clinicians sell promises of the impossible while trivializing, downplaying, and euphemizing the risks and consequences of the regime they are selling. They have joined in the effort to make talk therapy that might lead to desistance illegal, and made the procedures and treatments they are offering sound harmless and reversible, falsely suggesting they offer their patients some kind of “choice” in matters where they can have none, and being able to make changes that cannot be made.
Does anybody know what’s happened to We Hunted The Mammoth? The site has been down for ‘maintanance’ since last August, and although I know next-to-nothing about site development I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take seven months to pretty things up. The ‘page marker’ that appears in place of the site does contain a link to Futrelle’s writing coach course, which I assume would only appeal to those who have never seen his writing. https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/
It couldn’t be that his switch from defending women to joining the ‘womenz-haterz club’ has driven away the cash donors who paid the bills…could it?
Really? Is this any different from what all of us go through at some point in our lives? Women live every day under the image of what society expects, and what we are rarely able to live up to, even if we want to (which many of us don’t).
It’s called reality. Get used to it.
Great summation, not Bruce.
AoS – I don’t know, but you could ask him – he’s on Twitter @DavidFutrelle.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany […]
Another story about gender affirming “medecine,” this time from the National Post.
As Europe bans puberty blockers, Canada doubles down on transgender treatments for kids
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/europe-canada-puberty-blockers-for-kids
That’s rich, claiming that the genderist approach is “evidence based.”
Warnings of “restricting choices” from the same lobby that worked so hard to criminalize “watchful waiting” as “conversion therapy”? Cry me a river. Their ideas of what constitutes “appropriate care” are a horror show worthy of Cronenberg. Never mind that the “treatment” they offer leads to permanent harm (see “Cronenberg”).
.
Comedy gold, I tell you. Or it would be, if theyweren’t defending the mutilation and sterilization of children.
You’d think said commentator would use the opportunity to explain how the Europeans are wrong, and what science they’re ignoring. When you’re claiming to be “evidence based” it’s important to show up with, you know, evidence.
Oh look, it’s “NO DEBATE” all over again.
.
Interesting that the National Post pulls a “Both sides” play here. I would really be interested in Malott’s take on what counts as “shamelessly anti-trans” “extremism.” Note that the other side is described as “pro-everything transition” rather than “shamelessly anti-reality” or “shamelessly anti-woman.” (Looking at his twitter feed, I’m pretty sure Malott is trans: https://twitter.com/alottamalotta?lang=en Also, he’s a lot more sympathetic to GC ideas than mot other trans identified males I’ve seen on social media. Still, I do wonder about his characterization of “shamlessness.”)
Nobody has said their suffering isn’t real, but what if it has nothing at all to do with being “born in the wrong body”? It is not possible to be “born in the wrong body.” If you’re so keen on claiming the mantle of “evidence based treatment,” you might do well to drop the unwarranted Cartesian dualism to the problems you’re claiming to treat. It’s about as legitimate and confidence-iunspiring as ascribing mental health problems to demonic possesion.
But maybe your dysphoric patients are not actually “transgender.” If “gender identity” does not exist (and I don’t know of any definition that is not circular, based on sexist, gender stereotypes, or usefully distinguishable from “personality”) then treating your dysphoric patients, or more precisely their alleged “gender identities,” is not going to get at the root cause of their distress. Think about it. Their poor mental health can’t be being caused by a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. Take a step back. Their mental illness is not caused by having been born in the wrong body, but their belief that they were born in the wrong body. However they came to it, that belief is wrong; it is delusional. Agreeing with that delusion does not help them; quite the opposite. It would be like agreeing with an anorexic person’s mistaken body self-image that they were in fact obese, and abetting their continued pursuit of further, life-threatening weight loss.
There are people who suffer from the mistaken belief that one of their arms is an alien or foriegn entity, even that it is some kind of robotic prosthesis that has somehow been grafted onto their body without their consent. The mind can be extremely creative in its rationalizations when it has to be. These people truly, sincerely believe that the arm is not a part of their body, and that it is acting of its own volition rather than theirs. This is not a momentary, transient confusion but a continuing, persisant belief, . I can’t imagine how confusing or terrifying such a delusion would be. I can’t imagine being that disconnected from reality on an ongoing basis. But obviously there are people who are thus cut adrift. They are dependent upon the skill and judgement of people firmly rooted in reality. Would a responsible doctor be right to “affirm” the delusion and comply with such a patient’s demand to amputate their completely normal, healthy arm? If not, why not? How is this impossible belief any different from the impossible belief that someone has been “born into the wrong body”? How is removing the arm of someone suffering from the mistaken belief that the arm is not theirs any different than providing double mastectomies to confused young women who believe they’re actually male? I don’t think it is any different. Yet at this moment in time, while the former would be considered unconscionable mutilation, the latter is deemed an essential part of life-saving, gender-affirming care. Just one of the many horrors hidden by breezy euphemisms like “top surgery.”
Dr. Wong; you’re supposed to be the grounded, anchored one, pulling your patients to the safety of the shore. How can you do that if you jump into the maelstrom of their delusion, joining them in a quest for the impossible? This is not the counsel of reason they so desperately need. This is not an “evidence based” approach. You’re supposed to be a lifeguard, not a swimming buddy. The reality of their suffering is not an indication of the veracity of their self-image. You can’t, and therefore shouldn’t, promise the impossible. Sometimes you have to say “No.” No; humans can’t change sex. No; men can’t become women, and women can’t become men. If your patient believes they can fly, your job is to talk them off the ledge, not leap off it with them. How does agreeing with their mistaken beliefs help them get better? For most useful values of “better”, it doesn’t. Not in the long run, not beyond the brief honeymoon afforded by the combination of the placebo effect and the sunk-cost fallacy.You’re dealing with flesh and blood humans with actual mental illnesses, but the “treatments” you’re offering are informed more by the tropes and theories of literary criticism and gender studies departments, than they are by the study of biology or medicine. How many mental illnesses are treated by surgery on parts of the body other than the brain?
They seem to be safe and efficacious? Is that some doubt creeping in? Maybe you should be asking yourself if stopping puberty is really a good idea? Many, if not most dysphoric children desist upon puberty. Why would you want to interfere with that? Desistance and acceptance of really what is, and how things really are should be the outcome you’re aiming for. Shedding delusions is a good thing. You’re supposed to help the anorexic see that they are not obese, not help them starve themselves. Helping someone come to understand that the arm that was frighteningly alien is actually a part of their body is a win. You can’t do that if you amoutate the arm on the patient’s first visit. Assisting someone to feel at home in their own skin is what you’re supposed to be doing. You can’t do that if you’re telling them that their body is “wrong,” and in need of a never-ending, lifelong course of drugs, hormones, and surgery to carve and beat it into a “right” shape it can never have. You’re not there to save your patient’s “transness”, you’re there to save them.
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Ooops. Corrections:
…you might do well to drop the unwarranted Cartesian dualism and focus on the mental problems you’re claiming to treat.
he’s a lot more sympathetic to GC ideas than most other trans identified males
Desistance and acceptance of what really is.…
You can’t do that if you amputate the arm on the patient’s first visit.
“Nullification.”
I learn something new every day.
I love Carol. She’s my new hero.
“It’s Barbies! They’re making Barbies.”
https://youtu.be/hf4FptLxNe8?si=4O5hbaEERsLl7uTO
Ophelia, #166:
I would, but I’m not on Twitter.
Has there been an outage? A comment I posted earlier has not appeared.
Sorry Mike! I don’t know what the problem was but they all went to spam. Lemme know if it happens again.
It might be the link I was posting.
Look up “Carol” on YouTube, “Lesbian of the butch variety.” She is a hilarious butch lesbian who has come out the other side of the trans racket. She has a short vid called “The hidden nullification page.”
I had never heard of “nullification” before and I kinda wish I hadn’t.
“It’s Barbies! They’re making Barbies!”
Thanks for introducing us to Carol’s videos, she’s great.
not Bruce, another situation I’ve seen with regards to “trans” – people with depression or a similar mental health problem who Google their symptoms. They’ve never had a day of dysphoria in their lives, never imagined themselves the opposite sex, and never cried when referred to by appropriate pronouns. Suddenly, they are hit with sites that convince them they are trans, and it can be very difficult to convince them otherwise, especially in an environment that “affirms” in therapy rather than confronts or guides. They are not gay, they are not autistic, they are not dysphoric…but suddenly, there it is, bold in black and white (or rainbow colors, of course): they are the opposite sex!
Hmm. BBC Presenters Told To Challenge Guests Who Label Others “Transphobic” After J.K. Rowling Errors.
Is this a sign that the worm is turning? (There’s a lot to digest there; I’m not going to try to summarize it.)
Speaking of Rowling, she’s threatening legal action after a website makes false claims about her daughter, and misidentifies a completely different woman as Rowling’s daughter:
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/jk-rowling-threatens-legal-action-32403293
Jesse Singal is reporting that trans activists in Canada have smashed the windows of Radio-Canada’s headquarters after the radio station aired a “transphobic” documentary:
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1769415868960673828
New article in Persuasion “When Everything is Eugenics, Nothing Is” by Amy S.F. Lutz, starts off with that “don’t take testosterone while pregnant” non-troversy.
Trans protestors have reportedly thrown smoke bombs and tried to break down doors at a health conference in Euston, London. The conference was the First Do No Harm conference on gender dysphoria and children’s health. Julie Bindel has more info:
https://twitter.com/bindelj/status/1771504525486051352
The Daily Telegraph now has a piece on the Euston protests against the FDNH conference here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/23/doctors-gender-critical-conference-ambushed-protestors/
Jane Symons, vice-chair of the Medical Journalists’ Association, said: “It’s the first time I have ever attended a medical conference requiring police protection. Healthcare should be driven by evidence not ideology.”
Some snowflake-y college students satirize themselves in front of a camera. I nearly pulled every hair out of my head watching.
https://youtu.be/zxvyeZa1YSI?si=KFFFksqanhyVGSTR
This week will be a very interesting one in Trump world. Lots of news coming up about his criminal charges, and lots of action geared to take place around his finances.
Today’s the deadline for Trump to pony up his $450 million-and-rising New York judgment. AG Letitia James may announce the beginning of the process of seizing his real estate assets as soon as tomorrow.
But even more interestingly, some time this week, Donald Trump’s years-in-the-making stock market scam will enter into its endgame phase. There’s a chance he could pull off a $3 billion coup, but there’s also a chance he could lose it. Here’s my stab at a brief explainer for those trying to catch up. (The stock market is all Greek to me, so this is also my attempt to wrap my head around the scheme for my own sake. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about any of this!)
In a throwback to the tumultuous ’80s in stock market pump-and-dump schemes (think Gordon Gekko), some shady businessmen concocted a scheme that would allow a handful of inside investors to use Trump’s name brand to harvest potentially billions of dollars from naive amateur individual stock market dabblers, a.k.a. retail investors. In 2021, two seemingly unrelated businesses were launched, one being a private company with a phony “product” and the other being a publicly traded company with stocks available for purchase on the Nasdaq. The product was a dubious “social media company” called Truth Social, which in reality was nothing more than a Trump-branded copy of the freeware Twitter knockoff software Mastodon. The share trading vehicle was an empty shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corp, which went public and began trading on the Nasdaq almost immediately after incorporating, despite being an empty shell with no actual business going on (this is called a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC).
Shortly after its IPO in September 2021, this strange little publicly traded empty-shell company announced its intention to eventually merge with Trump’s “media company.” This meant that eventually, shares in the shell company would transform into shares of Trump Media, encouraging the general public (retail investors) to start investing in the stock to get in on the action early. Of course, insiders like Trump and his cronies were the original shareholders, now seeing their own shares go up in value.
All of which is to say, this was a clever way to spin up a publicly traded Trump company with as little regulatory oversight as possible, more-or-less bypassing the hassle of an IPO, while allowing Trump and insiders to get the best financial advantage possible right from the outset, as they would already be the majority shareholders long before any business announcements were made public. It was all a little too clever, though: regulators have been battling with them right from the start, trying unsuccessfully for two years to shut down this obviously shady arrangement.
(It seems until now Trump’s businesses have almost always been private, not publicly traded, the better to keep his crimes in the dark. He did dabble in a publicly traded casino hotel once in the ’90s. He got out with millions while the rest of the investors lost everything. Which is exactly his plan again this time.)
And now, with legal battles out of the way, as well as some internal wrangling among some of the initial shareholders in the shell company, the proposed merger was officially sanctioned in a board meeting on Friday. Any time this week, Nasdaq’s “DWAC” will be re-christened “DJT”, and anyone who owns shares in the empty shell formerly known as Digital World Acquisition Corp will now be an owner of shares in Trump Media and Technology Group.
Right now, those shares have reached a value of $5 billion total, thanks largely to amateur and first-time investors from the MAGA camp, who are treating it as a “meme stock”. Trump himself owns the majority of the company’s shares, and his piece of the pie is now valued at $3 billion, thanks to his loyal fans jacking up the trading price.
So the pump is done. Now we move on to the dump.
Trump Media isn’t really a media company and it doesn’t actually make any money. So it’s only a matter of time before its stocks become worthless as people realize they’ve invested in a worthless company.
Trump and his allies need to keep the value of the stock afloat only long enough until they can cash out their shares, which will almost certainly lead to an immediate crash in the stock price and leave the rest of the shareholders — the MAGA loving laypeople duped into investing — high and dry with worthless stocks in an off-the-shelf freeware copy of a Twitter clone that no one uses.
The media is reporting as though it’s a mystery whether Trump would dare to do something as reckless as cash out his $3 billion given that it would leave the rest of the investors high and dry. Who are they kidding? They also report that there’s a clause that Trump can’t sell his shares until at least 6 months after the merger, but then they report that he controls the board which can override this clause. So, duh. He’ll definitely make that happen as quickly as possible.
Naive reporters: when will they learn that if there’s any way at all for Trump to get money out of something, he has no sense of impropriety which would ever make him reluctant to seize an opportunity. If it’s not going to immediately land him in jail right away, he will commit the crime.
And so, it’s very likely that Trump will pull some wonky stock market business very soon.
It’s not a shoe-in that Trump will successfully pull off the stock dump in time, though. If enough of the other investors clue in that this thing is a pump-and-dump scheme, they could sell off their own shares while they’re still relatively high in value, leaving Trump’s stocks in the rubble.
So it’s something of a face-off between Trump and his own supporters: who will manage to sell off their shares first before this empty bubble collapses? Trump himself, or his dupes?
Already on Friday, the share price went down about 14% on the news that the merger was approved. This was presmumably the initial wave of clever investors pulling out before the run for the money begins.
So we should all definitely rush to buy shares, right?
It’s a great opportunity! Sell your house and your car! Put it all on Trump and let it ride!
And they will all still vote for him.
Incredibly, the courts have caved. Trump’s bond has been reduced to $175 million, and he’s been given another extension, this time for ten more days.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/trump-new-york-fraud-bond-cut-to-175-million-in-appeal-from-454-million.html
I can’t help but wonder — why? These judgments could be among our last chances to stop a dangerous dictator from destroying democracy. Why are judges so afraid to simply do their jobs and enforce the punishments the man so clearly deserves?
I read a piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker last night, about Hitler’s rise to power, all the opportunities the establishment had to stop it, and all the reasons they didn’t seize upon them. Mostly it was a strange belief that if they obstinately played nice in the face of Hitler’s naked ambition, that somehow in the long run their rigid adherence to rules and procedures would ensure that democracy prevails. They were stupid to think that, and the whole world paid — none more than the Jews.
I’m sick of judges blowing our chances to stop Trump out of some foolish belief that if they demonstrate an abundance of charity and caution it will pay off in the long run.
We’re running out of time. There’s no more long run to rely on. It’s now or never, people.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAT
So now nothing can be done for several months of appeals, by which time at the very least Trump will have made himself a whole lot richer through continued fraud, or he may well have made himself Emperor of the US and impervious to any judgments basically ever again.
Great going, New York appeals court.
Trump awards himself two trophies for winning both the Club Championship and Senior Club Championship (at his own club, of course), describes his play as ‘amazing’ and thanks himself. Kim Jong-un couldn’t do better.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/mar/25/trump-hush-money-trial-fraud-bond-deadline-latest-updates?page=with:block-660180778f08049f814f55ea#block-660180778f08049f814f55ea
A better link for the Trump awards: Love this passage:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/25/trump-golf-biden-response
Also, how the Hell did he pull this scam off?
The Trump appeals court reprieve really bothers me. Here’s a take by David Graham in The Atlantic, which argues that, even though Trump routinely exploits legal procedures to get out of justice, it’s right of the appeals court to lower his bond and grant him yet more extensions. It would be “unjust” for Trump to lose his ill-gotten assets if he succeeds in getting this case dismissed:
In other words, in the face of Trump’s brazen abuse of legal procedures to get out of justice, if we lean into offering him more legal leniency, the very kind which he keeps using to his advantage, it will in the end prove that the legal system works just as it’s supposed to. The idea is, give him every possible chance we can, so we can show the world that when he eventually loses, there can be no question that he lost fair and square.
The problem is, we’re not trying to use Trump as an example to demonstrate how noble the legal system is. That’s a foolish idea. Right now we need to use the legal system to urgently stop a dangerous man from destroying democracy. Trump and his followers don’t care about fair-and-square; they won’t ever be reasonable. The judgment against him is plainly reasonable and the odds of a successful appeal are minimal. That’s grounds to take hard action, now. He will rage about procedure no matter what you do moving forward, so stop trying to appease him. There’s no fucking point in saying please and thank you to an angry bull. It won’t stop him from charging.
This is exactly the kind of cowardice we saw when the Germans were puzzling over how to stop Hitler’s brazen power grab in 1932. In the face of someone recklessly trampling over the institutions that uphold a democratic society, the instinct to lean harder into process, procedure, decorum and restraint is perhaps understandable, but it’s all wrong. That logic ignores the asymmetry at play when you’re dealing with a corrupt narcissist.
Democratic systems keep failing at dealing with raging bulls because too many individuals within “the system” are cowards. What people like the appeals court panel who granted Trump reprieve today and the SEC who greenlit his blatantly illegal stock scam are doing is passing the buck: they’re preemptively ceding to Trump the benefit of the procedural doubt because they’re scared to do their jobs, to uphold the rules, when it’s their turn to step into the ring and face the bullhorns. They tell themselves that the system will eventually work and justice will prevail, because viewing “the system” as an abstract force for good is easier than facing the fact that “the system” is only ever as just as they, the tangible, fallible individuals it’s made of, are willing to act under duress.
Trump has lately taken to comparing himself to Al Capone. That’s an apt comparison. It took Eliot Ness and his Untouchables to bring down Capone. Ness recognized right away that playing strictly by the book was no use after corruption had reached the threshold where it was threatening the survival of the system of law and justice itself. Extreme circumstances sometimes call for extreme measures.
And Trump has shown very clearly that today, more than the justice system is broken — the entire democractic system is ill-equipped to defend against this kind of tyrant.
But don’t worry, says David Graham. There’s plenty of time to play nicey-nice; it’ll all get sorted out down the road:
No, David. We don’t have the luxury of time. There may not be any legal system left by the time the credulously pedantic legal idealists are done extending Donald’s rope. The time for passing the buck is over. This is a tyrant and if there are opportunities within the legal system to stop him, we must grab them now while we still can.
We should have brought the Untouchables in to clean this up years ago.
Ok so I’m about to admit to being lazy here… but in my defense (/excuse/cri-de-coeur/whatever), see my latest comment at B&W about dealing with a *touch* too much alcohol in combo with a *touch* too much anxiety and a *touch* too much frustration at this particular moment…
Anyone have any good sources for not-too-obvious, subversive-style “women are women” (let’s be honest: T.E.R.F.), pins or jewelry, or other subtle accessories? Bags/purses, lanyards, hairclips, etc… I’d even be up for necklaces, earrings, or hairpins…but no fists, swords, or other explicitly “aggressive”-coded logos, as yeah I’ve got a mortgage to pay and would like to keep my job (postsecondary instructor in an oversaturated but stupidly-expensive-cost-of-living market :-| ).
Essentially, I want to make it as-clear-as-is-plausibly-deniably-possible that I DON’T CARE if you “Self-ID as a Particularly Special capital-P-Person”, while making it as clear as possible that I am supportive of my female students who are trying to navigate a still-male-dominated world.
The internet searches I’ve come up with so far have yielded a bunch of anti-feminist stuff that I’m SO NOT interested in… Gawds but the capitslism-driven “enshittificatiom” of everything does stink :-/
Try https://wildwomynworkshop.com/tag-product/terf/
[…] a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany […]
To Am and ib:
I’m watching all this, too, incredulous, enraged–impotent. Is it happening? Yes. But what am I? A mere fly speck.
Genus Homo is wondrous, but also very stupid. Especially in groups, Homo is stupid. And the bigger the group entity, the stupider participants in that group.
I suspect this is an evolutionary inevitability.
We’re still savages, sad to say.
“”your career is over” if you speak on the subject” – British female athletes on the trans issue:
https://www.bbc.com/sport/68564019
I think some people here might be interested in this: an article by Katha Pollit strongly criticising Judith Bulter, the Ayn Rand of gender:
https://archive.is/T3IWQ
Hey, we all know the various incantations of the trans cult: TWAW, etc.
How about this ironic rejoinder to the most pernicious one: Better a live girl than a dead boy.
“Better a live heterosexual than a dead homosexual”
?
I just saw the documentary “The Coddling of the American Mind”.
It barely mentions trans, but it talks about the way ‘woke’ encourages the denunciation of anyone who questions any part of the doctrine you are supposed to believe. Trans just applies that to its particular doctrine.
This is off-topic — isn’t everything here in the Miscellany Room? — but a scene right at the beginning of that buzzy new Netflix show 3 Body Problem has been haunting me ever since I watched it last week. I woke up this morning and decided I had to write a little piece to get it out of my system. Anyways, I thought I’d share with you cats.
The piece is about the perils of science denialism. The show itself is pretty good, I guess. I enjoyed it. That first five-minute scene is astonishing.
https://artymorty.substack.com/p/a-fictional-struggle-session-thats
The one thing that bugged me (heh) about the show is the idea that cicadas destroy crops. All they’re looking to do when they emerge is to get laid and die.
But yeah, good point about science denialism in the name of ideology. Apparently it’s caused a lot of controversy in China, even though they can’t actually watch the series.
I think what bugged me the most was the stars blinking on and off. This is why science fiction is hit-and-miss with me: I get nitpicky with the physics sometimes. They never explained how the alien device, which I understand can otherwise only exert a phyical effect on a single proton at a time, could do that. Otherwise it can only do things like mess with the results of particle accelerators, project rudimentary messages into people’s vision by “scratching” out shapes in the protons in our retinas, or send more elaborate communications by flipping the ones and zeroes inside devices’ computer chips. Though admittedly the turning-off-the-sky scene looked pretty cool. I hear the books are much more faithful to physics and that scene never happened. (Rather, it was a trick pulled off inside the character’s eye or something.)
I know what you’re saying, but I basically just chalk those things up to magic (like the transporters in Star Trek). I’m more bugged by getting basic facts wrong.
Arty, I follow your substack and I enjoyed that post. The video you linked to with the analysis of the opening scene was quite nicely done, although I wish I could have watched the scene itself. But I don’t have Netflix, so I won’t be able to watch the show. I very much enjoyed the books; they are some of my favorite science fiction.
Those books were an introduction to me of Chinese science fiction. Really different style of story. I read several other books by Cixin Liu (some were excellent, some not as compelling to me), a collection of stories (including a “fan work” in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (aka Three Body Problem) universe) by Baoshu, and several books by one of the translators of the trilogy, Ken Liu, who is an American of Chinese origin.
I am enormously pleased to hear that the show is good and respectful of the books. It would be a shame to treat such excellent source material badly.
Artymorty:
WaM:
I think that I’m still mentally scarred from the explanation of why the Earth’s interior was suddenly and catastrophically heating up, barely five minutes into the ‘blockbuster’ movie 2012.
“It’s the neutrinos: they are evolving”!
I thought they were mutating… honestly, quite a thrill ride but the obviously awesome step-dad getting brutally killed just to restore the “proper” nuclear family was really fucked up.
“Transgenderism” is clearly a “both sides” phenomenon:
The Right pushes and enforces the toxic stereotypes and homophobia that trap gender-nonconforming boys and girls in cycles of self-hatred.
The Left pushes and enforces the conveyor belt of disfiguring “treatments” that seem to provide the way out for these suffering incipient gay children.
Fuck. Them. Both.
Improve the lives of young women and girls, let gay boys be sissies and lesbian girls be tomboys–let them go through fucking adolescence, for chrissakes–and “transgenderism” will all but disappear.
That’s my two-cent epiphany for the day.
When you want to laugh for a couple hours, that quote is featured in this show:
Dara O’Briain – “This Is The Show” (Dara O’ Briain Live 2010 Stand Up Full)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpcZ196VOQo
It appears that changes to Title IX to allow transgender male athletes to compete with female athletes are being held up because of election-year politics:
Biden Title IX rules on trans athletes set for election-year delay – Washington Post
Proposed regulations would outlaw state bans on transgender athletes but allow some targeted restrictions
“Arguing”. Right. The truth is that males have an advantage over females when it comes to sport. This is why redefining Title IX to equate gender with sex is going to create a mess and the Biden administration knows this, which is why they’re kicking the can down the road until after Election Day in November. They could do the right thing and rule that discrimination on the basis of one’s sex precludes transgender males from competing in female categories of sport, but that of course would upset the trans activists and result in loss of support among progressive younger voters in some critical swing states like Wisconsin. I suppose the best that can be hoped for is for Biden to win and then do the right thing and not conflate sex with gender when it comes to sport.
Totally right on, with modification. If straight boys prefer things often considered girly, let them. Don’t assume they must be gay, and don’t assume they are trans. (My husband was considered gay for decades before we married because of his profession and interests). Let girls, straight or lesbian, be tomboys without making assumptions about their sexuality or “gender identity”. See above. I have been considered to be lesbian because I love stomping in wetlands and am a scientist.
We just need to stop categorizing people based on such things; obviously there are men who can match their colors, love art, and work as librarians…they may be gay or straight, but they are still men. There are women who like sports, fishing, hunting (or stomping in wetlands)…they may be gay or straight, but they are still women. Their clothes, their activities, are who they are, not what sex they are. Their sex is biologically determined; their behaviors are determined by a suite of factors including biology and environment.
Wings is so worried about the new Scots hate crime law that he is closing down his website from tonight and wiping all his old tweets.
Oh jeez.
Well, a tiny ray of hope: it may be temporary. He hasn’t had the legal advice yet.
I frequently use Google image search to help find reference material for future projects (that may or may not see the light of day outside of thinking about doing them). Today, for the first time, I noticed that phony, bullshit AI-generated images had been included in the search results. Fortunately, I’m already well enough versed in what I’m researching (in this case whales), to spot them. While the renderings are photo-like, the images themselves were actually quite grotesque; one image of a breaching “Humpback” sported a surfeit of pectoral fins. https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/c94a27b4b0214d9ab3b6aa30c6e414ff.jpeg (Any real whale with this anatomy would have been front page news in any number of science journals.) Others were bizarre, inept, and impossible mash-ups of features from several species, (https://www.dreamstime.com/fin-whale-balaenoptera-physalus-second-largest-animal-earth-blue-known-its-streamlined-body-distinctive-image289369450) while some must have been generated by computers on bad acid trips:
https://assets.simpleviewinc.com/simpleview/image/upload/c_fill,h_780,q_60,w_640/v1/clients/pismobeachca/whale_0726fb3f-1067-4cf4-9d05-145962fa00bf.jpg
(https://www.prompthunt.com/prompt/cl90fk35t261759vmqyeso0mg5y?selectedAsset=cl90fkdiw285950vmqyz4imtis3)
These are in a different league from the phony, photoshopped, click-bait images used often on Youtube to promote videos in which, like bad sci-fi movie posters of the past, nothing like the sensationalized, phony promotional image ever appears. Though I’m hoping they don’t get any “better” as AI “learns” (since I want them to remain poorly done and easily spotted), I still resent having to wade through crap like this when I’m looking for useful reference material.
Not even a first world problem, or really important, or germane to anything, but I needed to vent.
Hey, this ain’t called the Miscellany Room for no reason. And it’s interesting. Makes the cut those two ways at a minimum.
Has anyone here seen this?
“The sadness of Sceptical Man” by Victoria Smith, about how rational commentator types like Freddie deBoer, Jon Ronson and Adam Buxton have a blind spot for the extremism and the harm of modern trans ideology.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-sadness-of-sceptical-man/
Yep, see Be kind of obsessed.
Whoops! I didn’t see that it was posted already.
I mentioned it because deBoer published an unhinged rant on his Substack three days ago. It started out discussing the “Palestinian Plate” controversy, then became a rant about deBoer’s percieved opponents. There’s lots of attacks on gender-critical feminists in the rant:
“Six million TERF Substacks would find a way to turn this into a complaint about how some people with penises wear dresses…What does Joe Rogan Thought amount to? – a relentless fixation on the absolutely minuscule portion of the child population receiving medical intervention for gender transition..”
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/palestinian-painted-plates-and-the
There’s loads more waffle in that essay, all largely indistinguishable from the the pro-TRA material that deBoer’s frequent targets like Drew Magary and Michael Hobbes used to write.
For deBoer’s former admirers – and I am one of them- the essay is embarrassing, a sign that perhaps deBoer is having psychological problems again.
Oof, that’s a lot of rant. It’s interesting how wholly uninterested he is in women compared to his interest in trans people and Palestinians and workers etc. He uses the word only twice, and not with any solidarity. Lots and lots and lots about our trans comrades, zip about women. So very…like everyone else.
Looking at John Wasson’s link to the CBC Nature of Things documentary Fluid: Life Beyond the Binary posted here on the “Diddums” thread: https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2024/diddums-4/
(At the moment, I’m going over the website page devoted to a summary of it. I’m not sure I’m going to play the actual episode. I have my limits).
SPOILER ALERT: They’re not going as far “beyond the binary” as they think and claim, because trans/cis IS ANOTHER BINARY. They’re not so much transcending the binary as replacing one binary with another. Did they not think anyone would notice this?
Things don’t start well. Here’s the caption for the photo at the top of the page describing the set used for parts of the episode.
Let’s just say that this taste of self-congratulatory, smarmy, infantilization did not give me much confidence in the watchability (or reliability) of the program itself.
I’m not even past the first illustration in the article and I’m already wrestling with problematic, disturbing questions, and not the kind of questions this show is intending to raise, let alone answer.
Does the CBC typically surrender set construction to particular demographic groups? Would an episode on deafness or blindness have sets built by “all-deaf “or “all-blind” teams? Would a segment on evolution screen out anyone with Creationist sympathies from picking up hammers and saws? What did that job call look like, and how did not run afoul of labour code practices? Were “non-queer” set workers barred from participating?How do they screen out those of their workforce who aren’t queer? Is there a questionaire? (that would be particularly intrusive.) Why did the CBC feel the need to a) do this and b) tell us about it? In a word politics. The testing for political purity would be as intrusive as the litmus tests for “queerness.” Who would have guessed that one little performative sentence would raise so many questions about backstage machinations at the CBC? This tells me that this show is going to be at least as much (if not more) about politics as it is going to be about science. Not that this is a bad thing, as often the two are inextricably entwined, and at least this show wears its politics on its sleeve. But it does militate against its honesty and neutrality, and thus its overall value. To put it bluntly, this show cannot and should not be trusted.
Onward.
What follows seems to be a quick tour through the contents of the episode, a sort of TL;DWatch precis. Here are some of the things that jumped out at me.
The whole show sounds like an excersize in forced teaming between biology and “gender studies.” I’d be willing to bet a large sum that, given the examples in this write-up, there’s going to be a lot of opportunistic conflation of “sex” and “gender” throughout the show, moving from one to the other at the whim of the “arguments,” without warning or warrant. In this first patragraph we have the assertion that “gender fluidity” and “sexual fluidity” occur in both the human and non-human world, when in fact, “gender identity” is not something present outside of human culture, and humans can’t change sex. Immediately we are plunged into dishonesty and bad faith.
What is a “non-normative sex trait”? Maybe I’m just sheltered or poorly read, but I’ve never heard this phrase before. Or is this an attempt to muddy the waters and suggest some kind of connection with “gender non-conformity”?
Some questions here. (Perhaps they are answered in the episode itself, but I’m in no mood to confirm or deny this at this time. Maybe someone else here will take a bullet for the team?) Shouldn’t we back up a step or two and demonstrate the existence of the “gender spectrum” and the evidence for it, rather than presenting it to us as a given from the get-go? Some of your audience might be new to this, never having been exposed to the concept; some of your audience might be all-too-familiar with it, and may not be convinced that it even exists. You owe it to both of these groups of viewers to show your work.
Gender norms are quite varied and variable across, between, and within cultures. They have varied over time within our own society. How do they map onto (or how are they mapped from) this supposed “gender spectrum” that you posit and reify offscreen? How is the scale of this “gender spectrum” calibrated? What are the units used to quantify the “masculinity” or “femininity” of any given individua? Could it be the Barbie to G.I. Joe scale? Perhaps the colourful and imaginative Scientific American infographic that plots various DSDs along a non-existent continuum while presenting them as shades of colour along a “spectrum” made up of whole cloth? Where do “non-binary” people fit on the “spectrum”? Are they the gender equivalent of x-rays, ultraviolet, or infrared, showing up outside the “visible” spectrum? Or are they on a third dimension of this supposed “spectrum” turning it into some kind of three-dimensional form? And what of all the other bespoke genders? How do they fit, and what biotic parallels do we see alongside the usual suspects such as clown fish and hyenas? Or is it all just an ad-hoc excuse kludged together for the sake of expediency, but unable to withstand prolonged scrutin of its details?
Hold on. Maybe I missed a memo or two, or nodded off during the relevent struggle session, but isn’t (wasn’t?) gender ideology based on the concept of “being born in the wrong body” on male/female brain differences? Or have we thrown out assertions of neuroanatomical difference altogether in favour of gendered “souls”? Not that I necessariily think that there are such things as “male brains” and “female brains” per se, but I am curious how a science program is going to revivify Cartesian dualism in their absence
Here we have some forced teaming with homosexuality shielding the concept of “transness” from further inquiry. So once the spectrum was “discovered” all other research is officially forbidden? Gender ideology itself already posits some kind of “mismatch” or “disalignent” between putative “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth.” That language suggests pathology, a straying from nominally “normal” development or growth. Surely such an incongruity would call for more study, not less. How is it that this potential field of knowledge and information gets to wall itself off from examination? Trans ideology’s use of “cis” vs “trans” is already judgemental and “normative.”
The idea that there’s “really only one kind of human brain” is a lie. There are eight billion human brains on the planet; they can’t all be identical. Somewhere between the numbers one and eight billion, there must be some meaningful differences that are distinguishable between them. Maybe there are no such differences when it comes to sex, but even such things as handedness, colour blindness, synesthesia, etc. are going to be the results of some kind of differences between brains of people with or without the particular functional variance. Even if one isn’t out to somehow “cure” these “conditions”, curiousity about their origins and effects is perfectly normal and legitimate. Is there anyone stygmatizing and shutting down this research?
So where exactly is the “gender spectrum” located? What are those genes and hormones doing/ What tissues and or behaviours are they producing or modifying? How do you get from a gene or hormone to Barbie or G.I. Joe? What’s the process? What’s the pathway? If “transness” doesn’t reside in the brain, then where is it found? Maybe they’re afraid of anyone asking this question in case the answer that comes back is “Nowhere.”
I would be much more sanguin about the prospect of “more perspectives” if I didn’t suspect that it would be combined with the wholesale redefining of basic terminology and relaxing of standards in order to “include” a wider range of “answers” than an unreconstructed science would normally countenance or permit. Do these researchers know what a woman is? I have no confidence that they would agree that they are actually adult human females.
And to fully understand “transness,” does not one need to understand “cisness”? Figuring out the complexities and novelties of clownfish and other “sexually fluid” species requires knowing the more conventional pathways of sexual development. Without that background, the clownfish story is incomplete. Surely elucidating the nature of “transness” calls for study of its companion state of being. Is anyone looking into this? If not, why not?
I’m guessing that the resulting research under this presumably relaxed regime would have a lot more in common with the “discovery” of N-rays ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-ray ) than the finding that heart disease in women shows different symptoms in women than it does in men, and that failure to recognize and account for this difference can be fatal to women. I also suspect that these “additional perspectives” and the findings arising from them will come, like so much of gender “research” at the expense of women. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but both the CBC and “gender” researchers have form for screwing women over for the sake of trans ideology, so colour me skeptical at the prospect of their sudden and unlikely conversion to honesty and clarity.
Here’s another bet: I suspect that the concepts of “desistence” and “detransition” do not appear anywhere in this show, even though, if “gender identity” actually exists, these phenomena would be vital in delimiting and defining the very boundaries and parameters of gender identity itself. Rather than being ignored or denounced, desistors and detransitioners should be considered vital test cases for the concepts that genderists claim to be investigating.
Do they talk to any girls who share “difficult life experiences” because they have been screwed over by transgender activism? That’s a group whose numbers are less than zero, and perhaps larger than those of “trans youth.” And as for health-care professionals, “more informed” in “trans” terms probably means “more thoroughly indoctrinated.” Given the Tavistock and WPATH revelations (and doubtless more yet to come), it’s more important for them to have an understanding of sex and gender that is honest and accurate, because without that foundation, as we have seen, “empathy” is worth less than nothing.
Good rant, as usual, not Bruce. This sort of stuck out at me. That is an important category, to be sure. But another category is also relevant to this question – what about girls who share ‘difficult life experiences’ because they are female?
Talking to some of those girls might help people understand why trans has become such a fad among young females, when at one point it was mostly a male phenomenon. Why don’t girls want to be girls? Gee, I can’t imagine why! Unless, of course, they really are boys ‘inside’.
No, you twit. As a girl, I shared ‘difficult life experiences’ with a lot of girls…and as a woman, I share ‘difficult life experiences’ with a lot of women. Why? Because of our sex. Because we are the despised sex by too many. Because men have the power…and they carry that power with them into transness…pardon me for not following the narrative (are you listening, Scotland?), but TRANSWOMEN ARE MEN. They act like men, like self-obsessed, overly entitled men.
Just wanted to clarify. I was not referring to not Bruce as a twit, but the imaginary trans activist I channeled in the previous paragraph.
Artymorty@204,
Re the 3-Body Problem:
That is not my understanding. The sophons can be reduced to the size of protons (because they’re folded up), but they’re not limited to that size if they “unfold” their higher dimensions, and are not limited to affecting one proton at a time.
Man, I so want a like button for Screechy at 225! Arty – fantastic piece on Stack.
I’ll also say I thought 3 Body was compelling. The second and third books were very good, but felt a little mechanical in places. Not sure whether that is due to translation or if it’s the writer or part of the cultural manner of telling stories. Certainly enjoyed the trilogy though.
I haven’t been following the story about music protests in Mazatlán, Mexico, but it appears the gist of it is: it’s a resort area, and the visitors are fond of peace and quiet in the evening. The people who live there, however, are fond of their rousing Banda music at that time of day. The hotel owners, in deference to the complaints from their guests, were seeking passage of a noise ordinance. There were protests, some turned violent, but ultimately there was no noise ordinance.
The battle has been referred to as “gentrification”, a term I usually associate with high-income residents rather than high-income visitors, but OK, maybe it applies to visitors, too, especially with hotel development. And the tourists are largely Americans, as one might expect.
So Daily Kos had a cartoon about the battle. The victorious “cultura!” musicians defeated the American tourist, labeled “gentrification”. The tourist is depicted as a middle-aged male carrying a cocktail.
The cartoon is captioned: “Strike up the banda! Banda music wins the battle against Amerikaren tourist gentrification in Mazatlan, Mexico.”
My, how utterly cute, to take a misogynist slur, embed it in a new word, and imply it is perfectly fine to use because the depicted target is male. I’m not buying it.
Ugh.
Two unrelated articles of interest in the Washington Post today. First, gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Apartheid is considered a crime against humanity, so labeling what the Taliban do “apartheid” could help, though I’m not sure it’s a strong enough word. But why call it “gender” apartheid? I don’t doubt the Taliban treat men who dress up as women badly, but I doubt they would treat a woman who calls herself a man any better than other women. It’s sex, not gender.
Second, House Republicans want to rename Dulles Airport after Trump. I’m all for changing the airport’s name, but, well, let’s hear from Gerry Connolly:
.
Re: naming something after Trump
In the Pogo comic strips, every so often the “Fort Mudge Memorial Dump” was mentioned.
It may be that they used “gender” to avoid the ambiguity of “sex” – which means the activity as well as the body category.
Well, yes, but gender is ambiguous as well, and that just underscores the problem of having those two words to describe three different (albeit related) things. I mean, polysemy is fine (hell, if it weren’t for polysemy, I would’ve had to write an honest dissertation:)), but it can also be manipulated for dishonest reasons.
“Gender” is used in a lot of phrases (e.g. “gender pay gap”, “gender-based violence”) where “sex” might be appropriate under current understanding, but it simply wasn’t an issue until this whole gender identity ideology thing came along. For most people, for most uses, “gender” is a (possibly more polite) synonym for “sex”.
I used Google Trends to check the popularity of “gender apartheid” versus “sex apartheid” over the last ten years. They seem to track about the same until about 2020, then “gender apartheid” began trending noticeably higher.
Quite a few articles have popped up in my RSS feed about Korbin Albert, midfielder on the US Women’s National Soccer Team, because of her social media content that apparently includes “anti-LGTBQ+” items. She has been roundly criticized, and she has apologized profusely, groveling in the manner that appears to be required for such grievous offenses.
I can find precious little information about exactly what she did that ignited this storm. Most of the commentary I’ve read seems to assume automatically that she has done something that demands an apology. Even Albert herself is working on that assumption. As best I can tell, she is some variety of conservative Christian, and she liked and/or shared some material that included a Christian man talking about how he used to be gay, and was “feeling transgender”, and thought he might “actually be” a woman, but now Jesus saved him. Garden variety Christian views, totally non-threatening except that they don’t align with certain left-wing views.
I might not agree with the comments from the man in the video about being gay, and I might agree with his comments about “feeling transgender”, I can’t tell without details, but these are just expressions of his views, they aren’t threats or disparagement of anyone. Korbin Albert merely shared the video; she might agree with him, but she in turn did not disparage anyone, did not threaten anyone. None of the other scant view details I can find alter that perception. But no disagreements are allowed, as we here well know.
On the subject of cruise ship hatred, here’s a funny entry in the venerable subgenre of literary magazine editors commissioning writers to document the strangeness of cruise world.
https://archive.is/IsB7e
This time it’s Gary Shteyngart for the Atlantic. I have mixed feelings about him as a writer: his schtick is a bit much sometimes, but he’s got many great observations and witty phrases, too. I was won over by the end. Good piece!
I’ve read about half. (Will read the rest later. It’s a little strong, like swamp gas.) It sounds even worse than I imagined.
Hahahahaha!
(That’s the comment. Just conveying that I’m delightfully amused already.)
Another scandal involving puberty blockers, this time in Italy:
A criminal investigation has been opened following an audit of the gender clinic at Florence’s Careggi hospital, according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera.
https://twitter.com/binseypoplar/status/1776694012520386932?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/back-to-best
Request for help: I’m looking for materials (especially research papers) that show that children and teenagers who don’t take puber.ty block.ers gradually grow out of their gender dys,phoria.
I was wondering if any of the posters on B&W could point me in that direction.
Abigail Shrier’s book would probably be a good source.
Mostly Cloudy @ #239
This recent paper looks as though it may be some use to you: Pien Rawee, Judith G. M. Rosmalen, Luuk Kalverdijk, Sarah M. Burke, ‘Development of Gender Non‑Contentedness During Adolescence and Early Adulthood’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, published: 27 February 2024. Available as a pdf download.
Abstract:
I suspect we’re soon going to see a lot of analysis and uproar about this decision, here reported in the Guardian:
NAIA votes for effective ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports
This seems like a reasonable approach. It is explicitly reserving women’s sports for women. The framing in several articles, as expected, focuses on the “unfairness” to “transgender women” or “transgender athletes”, rather than keeping men out of women’s sports. I do note that this article mentions the topic is a hot-button issue for “conservative groups and others”, so maybe somebody got the message that it isn’t just conservative groups.
Nightcrow @ #241
Thanks for that link. It’s really useful.
I like the way they addressed that, since it prevents transmen on testosterone from competing as well. In short, it returns women’s sport not only to women, but to women who are not doping. Others could learn from this.
Mostly Cloudy –
Stephanie Davies-Arai has posted summaries of several older papers, with links, on a page on her Transgender Trend site:
The page is undated but the HTML code shows that it was posted in 2017 and last revised in April 2022.
The Scottish police are not at all happy about the new hate law. The general verdict is that it is completely unworkable. They’re also pretty miffed at the sheer volume of reported hate crimes – 8000 in the first week of April – all of which have to be investigated to some degree. To put that figure into context, for the last 10 years they received between 6000 and 7000 reports of hate crimes per year, so this is more than a year’s worth in one week.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/08/scotland-hate-crime-law-police-embarrassed-snp/
The Final Cass Report has dropped:
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
Mostly Cloudy, I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve heard good things about Alex Byrne’s book Trouble With Gender.
http://www.alexbyrne.org/trouble-with-gender.html
Journalist Jesse Singal has also done some good work. This, for example:
https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/everyone-myself-included-has-been-misreading-the-single-biggest-study-on-childhood-gender-8b6b3d82dcf3
It isn’t just @salltweets (Sall Grover founder of Giggle) who has been in the sights of men who hate women having anything for themselves.
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/tas/2024/04/10/mona-ladies-lounge-court
MONA is a quirky part of Tasmania’s art scene founded by a successful gambler. More about MONA here.
https://mona.net.au/visit
Tasmania is also the state that has banned Lesbian only meetings unless they are also open to males.
@249, “… legislation which has the objective of prohibiting discrimination”:
I can’t see that the legislation has that objective. It’s about speech, not conduct.
I hope everything’s ok over at B&W HQ.
That’s a +1 (and I suspect several more). The day feels strange without you all.
It is now!
Neighborhood power failure.
Re #247, the final Cass report:
I suppose this kind of spin regarding the final Cass report is expected, given the reaction to the interim version. Guardian:
Hilary Cass’s proposals are mostly common sense. She must reject anti-trans bias with the same clarity
The author I gather is a trans-identified female, and she notes she’s been immersed in the topic for a decade. She makes a lot of “well, we knew this already, we’ve agreed with this for a long time” kinds of statements. The big take-away regarding puberty blockers is not that there is no evidence for their effectiveness and they should not be given, but rather that there are long waiting lists.
But the big problem in this review is that she accuses Cass of “anti-trans bias”, without being clear what that means. I haven’t read the report myself, only highlights reported in general and gender-critical news media, but I might presume that “anti-trans bias” is similar to typical understandings of “transphobia”: disagreement with the idea that “transgender” has a coherent definition, rejection of the idea of women who have male bodies and men who have female bodies, refusal to state that transwomen are women and transmen are men. I might expect the report to focus on the medical rather than political implications of these treatments for gender dysphoria, but for some readers the lack of explicit acknowledgement in favor of gender ideology constitutes a bias against it.
To wit:
Nobody is disagreeing that you exist. They are disagreeing that the concept of “trans people” is coherent and reasonable. You are perhaps a person unhappy with your sex, and therefore wish to pretend to be the other sex. Of course there are children who similarly wish to pretend to be the other sex. But neither you nor they are the other sex, regardless of personality or mannerisms or clothing preferences. My admittedly second-hand understanding of the Cass report is that it is looking at the medical risks and effectiveness of typical interventions for gender dysphoria, and not taking the position that claims of being “transgender” are based on misinformation and nonsense, but lack of explicit support for gender ideology is often enough read as “bias” against it.
As pro-TRA arguments go, this piece is more reasonable than usual.
However: “In reality, the problem has never been disagreement about how to care for trans children and young people.”
So why were Stonewall saying:
“Research suggests that children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity. Yet, many nurseries and schools teach a binary understanding of pre-assigned gender.
https://twitter.com/stonewalluk/status/1550427949819695104?lang=en
And why was Susie Green publicly promoting what she called “Life-saving puberty blockers” last year, despite the controversy over their usage?
https://www.gendergp.com/susie-green-joins-the-gendergp-team/
Thanks for the additional pointers, Ophelia, Nightcrow and Lady Mondegreen.
If it wasn’t already bad enough that Sall Grover has to spend years fighting a misogynist cock in a frock, and that women in Tasmania no longer have the right to anything exclusively female, our old mate Dean Laidly is back up to his tricks.
Is anyone at all surprised? This bloke has form, going back years. Stalking. Assaulting. Harassing. But nothing he does warrants a custodial sentence.
But that’s OK, it was only a woman who was in fear. And good old Dean gets credit for “doing the right thing”.
And this man, this misogynistic POS was in the running, down to the last round, to be coach of the women’s team of the football club I’ve supported for over 60 years. Fortunately the club saw sense and found a highly credentialled woman without the baggage as our new women’s coach.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ex-afl-coach-admits-stalking-woman-but-spared-more-time-in-custody-20201118-p56fnq.html
Ugghh. Thank you.
P.S. might be the same tricks though; the article is from November 2020.
Disgraceful excuse for an article by someone called Sasha Baker in the aptly titled “Dazed”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240411153926/https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/62379/1/cass-review-british-government-is-throwing-young-trans-people-under-the-bus
The therapy-based approach encourages patients to consider alternative reasons for their gender-related distress, often eating disorders, neurodivergence, or social acceptance (as if being trans makes you popular at school) – all of which must be carefully worked through before medical transition can be considered.
Yes, Sasha, it’s called “First Do No Harm”. If you actually cared about real children and teenagers, you’d go for the approach that heals children rather than the one in line with your ideology.
(I should mention I found this wretched article retweeted by Richard Seymour – the same guy who ridiculed people worried about the attack on “Charlie Hebdo” as supporters of a ” fetishized, racialized “secularism.” )
Please turn off your irony meter before reading further
PZ, talking about his experience of social media site, Mastodon:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/
snerk
Which version of Mastodon, BlueSky? By all accounts that’s a hellish place.
In Maine, abortion rights have been shackled to “gender affirming care.”
https://www.pressherald.com/2024/04/10/maine-house-advances-abortion-gender-care-shield-law-after-heated-debate/
BKiSA, he’s on both Mastodon and Blue sky and is trying to decide which one to stick with.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/04/11/too-much-social-media/
Mike B – God what a tangled mess that article describes.
Acolyte of Sagan:
My mistake, thought Blue Sky was just another Mastodon instance (like Truth Social). Oops…
For my sins, I read Ross Douthat
This Is Probably Not the Deal the Pro-Life Movement Bargained for With Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/opinion/trump-abortion-pro-life.html
Douthat analyzes the current political landscape with respect to the abortion issue. This is a mostly pointless exercise, but it makes him happy and I guess it is better than filling up the op-ed page with Lorem Ipsum.
But then we get to his characterization that Trump is
and I’m like, no.
Donald Trump has the motivational structure of a rabid raccoon. Writing as if he is a principled politician trying to find a way forward on a contentious issue is either hopelessly naive or cynically disingenuous.
Ross Douthat is an actual grown-up person who should know better than this.
In fact one could describe Donald Trump as a trans rabid raccoon.
What do you people have against rabid raccoons?
Good summaries and rebuttals of the false statements made by transactivists about the Cass Report:
https://www.quackometer.net/blog/2024/04/breaking-down-cass-review-myths-and-misconceptions-what-you-need-to-know.html
Rabid raccoon caught on video.
Thanks for the video, NightCrow. That rabid raccoon did bear an uncanny resemblance to Trump. Especially during the debate with Hillary.
I noticed in the news today that in Trudeau’s budget, he’s introducing some sort of measure to promote “halal mortgages,” which are regular mortgages which use tricks to avoid the word “interest.” It’s one of these things that annoys me because it’s just so silly. As if Allah is too stupid to see through such a flimsy ruse? If God said he didn’t want people paying interest on loans, then he surely meant exactly what he said, and he didn’t want his followers scrounging around for loopholes.
But it’s extra annoying because of course the very idea of the government promoting special mortgages for a religious class is going to stoke more culture war froth. Some people will assume “the libs” are giving Muslims a special financial break; I’m more inclined to suspect Muslim customers will be saddled with extra fees for the real or supposed administrative burden such loans may incur. (You never know which is which with the banks.)
And I’m extra-extra annoyed, because it’s still more nonsense from the government, throwing everything at the wall to try and dig Canada out of its catastrophic real estate bubble and the impending mortgage armageddon we appear to be headed for.
https://calgary.citynews.ca/2024/04/16/halal-mortgages-federal-government-budget-2024-canada/
May I vent?
How I hate public radio. Let me count the ways.
In Maine tonight, there was a piece about “confirmatory adoption” and the way laws affect same sex couples who adopt children.
The piece featured two women — normally referred to as LESBIANS — with an adopted child.
Throughout the piece, over and over, they were referred to as an “LGBTQ” couple and this issue as affecting “LGBTQ” couples. Not once were they referred to as LESBIANS.
I hate this shit. Apparently, same sex couples are now permanently joined at the hip to the host of other ideninnies — real and fake — that are now all the rage.
Of course you may vent! “Miscellany” is just another word for “vent.”
And it’s a good venting, too.
Mike @ 275
I had to look that up. Confirmatory adoption appears to be a way to assert parental rights for non-biological parents. Why would they be non-biological? Because both members of the couple are the SAME SEX and cannot procreate. (Also used for step-parents and other situations.) This is needed despite the fact that same-sex couples can both be listed on birth certificates. I know the issue is fraught in other cases, too, such as rape or abandonment, but it bothers me that birth certificates don’t contain the important information about biological parentage and yet is still insufficient to establish parentage. What the heck good are they, then?
But of course none of this has anything to do with how the parents dress or act or identify themselves, only about whether they participated in the biological process that led to the child being born, something that is impossible for both members of a same-sex couple but entirely possible for a mixed-sex couple that “identify” as queer or the sex they aren’t or giraffes.
Interesting message from the former Head of patient services at GenderGP:
An important message to ALL trans folk – no matter your thoughts on the issue
Regardless of which publication or platform they’re from PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE WITH JOURNALISTS (especially if they’re çisgender) ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF DIY GENDER AFFIRMING CARE
https://twitter.com/Adi_Aliza_DG/status/1781068832829825377
They’ve got nothing to hide, guv. Honest!
Re #278, they are responding apparently to requests from journalists looking to do a story on do-it-yourself “HRT” (that is, cross-sex hormones, possibly puberty blockers). The Guardian is specifically mentioned as seeking to talk to people, especially “under-18s” (that is, minors).
Çisgender?
Wow. No matter what your thoughts on the matter, do what we tell you, to protect us, the hell with you.
The Washington Post actually published an op-ed by Paul Garcia-Ryan of Therapy First that offers a positive take on the Cass Report.
Daniel Dennett.
https://dailynous.com/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-death-1942-2024/
Guess I finally have to get through “Consciousness Explained” though I imagine I’m going to have difficulty tolerating his compatibilism. “Breaking the Spell” was certainly an interesting contrast to “The God Delusion” and “Faith vs. Fact”.
This is what we need to see more of: https://www.outkick.com/sports/west-virginia-girls-protest-transgender-biological-male-track-field
Cheers to those girls, and good job to the parents for raising resilient daughters.
Nullius @ #285
Re: https://www.outkick.com/sports/west-virginia-girls-protest-transgender-biological-male-track-field
One of the infuriating things about this news story is that insists on talking about stepping out of the competition “to protest the inclusion of the transgender girl at the center of this case. ” I’m sure that the girls would have used the word BOY to explain what they were protesting.
The two uses of it in the following mark the only appearance of the word “boy” in the story. It’s all “transgender girl” or “transgender athlete.
Well duh, he is a boy. For humans, one’s ‘sex at birth” is one’s sex for life. There’s nothing he can do that will stop the student in question from being a boy; nor does of “all the work he has done” turn him into a girl. HUMANS CAN’T CHANGE SEX. This is the basis of the girls’ actions and it is studiously ignored and hidden by the judge and the reporter.
The judge is expecting all of the girls this boy is competing against to accept and validate him as a “girl.” Why are the boy’s needs so much more important than the girls’? It’s not evil or unkind or even rude or inappropriate to call him a boy, because that’s what he is, the complicity of parents, teachers, and coaches notwithstanding. In fact the wrong falls on the other side. I say it is rude, inappropriate, unkind and evil to insist he is a girl.
Even if his current pre-pubescent age doesn’t confirm the physiological advantages that normal, male bodily development would bring, sports teams intended for girls should be off limits to him for the simple fact that he is not a girl. He’s still breaking the rules, and rules are being broken for him if he’s allowed to participate when he fails to meet the most fundamental criterion of eligibility, which is being a girl. Would this court and this reporter be as teary-eyed and supportive if this boy’s parents, teachers, and coaches had been trying to force him into a younger age division? Would they be so contemuously dismissive of the rights and needs of the younger children he would be cheating against? No. They wouldn’t. So why are these girls’ rights and needs so casually sacrificed for this boy? No number of degrees in Gender Studies
Also note here that the boy began transition at age six or seven, likely by homophobic parents who observed their son playing with the “wrong” toys and expressing preference for the “wrong” clothing. How else would this have happened? Children can imagine themselves to be any number of things that parents don’t try to turn them into: robots, giraffes, alligators. But one whiff of effeminacy, or too long with a Barbie, and BANG! it’s off to the gender clinic to turn him into a “her.” At this age transitioning cannot possibly be a “life saving” procedure. No six or seven year old is going to have “suicidal ideation.” The only thing that’s being “saved” here are the egos of the parents who don’t want to have to live with the fact that their son might just be gay. For this, they push him onto a lifelong path of medical and psychological trauma in an attempt to turn him into something he can never be. If he wasn’t suicidal before, just wait a few years.
This story is also an example of the contradictions inherent in trans “thought.” We’re told by genderists that “sex” and “gender” are two different things, at least when it is to their immediate advantage. But they will also readily conflate and confuse the two when it suits them. If sex and gender are two separate things, then changing “gender” should have no impact on sex, and of course it doesn’t because it can’t. Yet this Judge Heytens, who is clearly a genderist, believes that changing “gender identity” also changes sex. Sports (and washroom facilities, change rooms, prisons, hospital wards…) are segregated by sex. In a sane world, changing “gender identity” would have no impact on this discrimination. But genderists want it both ways, and want “gender identity” to be equivalent to sex, or supplant it, and try to redefine the terms and conditions of the original establishment of these facilities to meet their unreasonable demands for “inclusion” on their newly minted gendered terms.
Also again, we see the press abandoning good faith impartiality for partisan advocacy. They’ve taken a side. Obvious if you know the signs, but otherwise cloaked in a phony neutrality that would be overthrown with the inclusion of the one sentence that would turn this court decision into a scandal: Humans can’t change sex.
YNnB:
Troof. It’s that “ignoring the original transgression” thing once again.
Bill Maher is really terfin’ it up lately.
An addendum to my #286.
There are a number of conclusions we can draw when we start from the basic fact that humans can’t change sex, conclusions that have important consequences for the way the above story has been reported.
Anyone who told this boy that he was actually a girl, lied to him.
Anyone who told this boy he could become a girl, lied to him.
Anyone who told him had had become a girl a girl lied to him.
Anyone who told him that he belonged on a team intended soley for girls, lied to him.
I really feel sorry for this boy. Surrounded by parents, doctors, teachers, coaches and probably others, all of whom were telling him he was, could become, or had become a girl? He never stood a chance. All of those adults who should have been looking out for him failed to protect him. Now we can add this judge and this reporter to the crew of liars who should know better. But however much I might sympathize with this child, he must not be given a spot on a girl’s team as any sort of reward or consolation prize foreverything that has been done to him.
The girls he’s been forced upon are considered acceptable collateral damage to gratify and sooth the egos of the adults who created this medical, moral, and now legal, tragedy. What about the hopes and dreams of these girls? What about their fun and excitement? The question answers itself; they’re just girls. ; they’re unimportant. They are to be bit players in the story of someone else’s life, not the stars of their own. Their needs are nothing compared to those of this boy.
Because of the manifest failures of so many adults, they’ve had to take the step to refuse to participate in a corrupted competition, thereby setting themselves up to be portrayed as Karens-in-the-making. And to top it all off, their brave, principled stand against participating in the presence of the intruding, deluded boy forced upon them by dishonest, deluded adults is deliberately hidden behind reporting that only talks about the girls as if their issue is soley with the boy’s supposed “gender identity” rather than his actual sex. If you simply recall that humans can’t change sex, the basic point we started with, the fact that is conveniently hidden, the story collapses into an ugly heap of smug dishonesty and histrionic self-righteousness. Child victims all around, and no adult to take responsibility.
I wonder if this isn’t the core of the problem with the TRA moral paradigm. Or rather, that their ethics assumes the antithesis of this.
In their view, the advantaged (i.e., “cis”) are apparently obligated to infinitely absorb the misfortunes encountered by the disadvantaged (i.e., “trans”). If someone has the misfortune of experiencing gender dysphoria, it is the moral duty to sacrifice in order to accommodate him. That potentially many women and girls suffer for the benefit of one man isn’t evidence that something is wrong, because their suffering is simply an unremarkable, obvious, implicit necessity. Their act of sacrifice is a moral good, and their refusal to sacrifice would be a moral evil.
It’s an inversion of how we normally think of desert and justice, so there’s no reason to expect that any argument grounded in our normal assumptions would be compelling to them.
And if the society can manage to compartmentalize that “sacrifice” to limit its overall cost, so much the better. This makes it easy for men to give away women’s rights in backroom deals, as it’s not costing them anything. Besides, women have had these rights for such a short time, they’ll barely miss them, right?
Yes. This is the essence of “Be kind,” which takes advantage of female socialization that instills self-effacement and seeing to the needs of others before their own. Refusal is painted as monstrous and unnatural, the essence of “Karenhood.” Never mind that men are not expected to give way in this fashion, and, giving the game away, trans identified men are excersizing their male socialization and privilege by being aggressive and assertive, taking what they believe they are owed, whether it is offered or not. (“We’ve been using women’s toilets for years!”) No demur, ladylike bashfulness and self abnegation for them!
Judith Butler was on the humorous NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (start at time stamp 21:30). For those unfamiliar with the show, one of the segments is called Not My Job. It involves a celebrity guest who is given an extremely soft interview, followed by several multiple-choice questions, usually funny, about something that is decidedly not their job. In this case, given the title of her book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender”, they went with a topic of horror movies. The interview is cringeworthy to me, with a discussion about the performative nature of gender and absolutely no pushback , but the ground rules are that they are not supposed to challenge the guest in any way, I’m sure. Apparently she wanted to be a clown when she was young.
Letter in yesterday’s Observer:
It’s SO interesting to see that they call it an ideology.
Ok, am I in the general minority in that I think the Dems should’ve backed McCarthy and now should back Johnson as long as he’s willing to get mega important things passed?
BKiSA,
The problem is with that “as long as he’s willing to get mega important things passed.”
As I understand it, McCarthy offered Democrats nothing. Not a sausage. Not even a commitment to bring things like aid to Ukraine (which roughly half the GOP caucus supports anyway) up for a floor vote. Possibly McCarthy was arrogant, possibly he thought that any attempt to get Dem support would doom him as a GOP leader anyway, who knows. But basically the choice was whether the Dems should break with all precedent to vote for an opposing party speaker just to save the GOP from its own dysfunction, in exchange for nothing at all. I’ve seen arguments that they should have — Bill Scher at the Washington Monthly was a proponent — but I never found them persuasive.
With Johnson, I don’t think things have gotten that far yet. MTG keeps threatening her motion to vacate, but I don’t think it’s moving forward? And the GOP’s majority is so slim that I think they know they can’t afford another round of umpteem failed Speaker votes in a year when they’re trying to tell voters they can be trusted with power.
That’s the other thing — I’m not sure how much more can/will happen in Congress this year. No major legislation is getting passed in a divided Congress in an election year. Absolute “must-pass” stuff like appropriations bills tend to get passed anyway, just with a lot of drama and continuing resolutions first.
So, in theory, should Dems be open to a deal where they get some concessions in exchange for propping up a GOP speaker? Sure. Deals are the essence of politics. But as far as I know, no serious deal has been put on the table.
In McCarthy’s case they should’ve said something like “we will save you but here’s a couple of things you can reasonably give us in exchange”; may well have been he just wasn’t interested in remaining Speaker and didn’t want to jeopardize a future lobbying job. Still consider it a bit of a missed opportunity.
The other problem is that McCarthy became notorious among both parties for not being a man of his word. He broke multiple promises about bringing certain things to a floor vote.
So you have a situation where a guy who chose to put his fate in the hands of the most radical members of the GOP caucus is facing the logical outcome of that decision, he’s not offering any concessions for your support, and he’s proven untrustworthy in the past, and Democrats are supposed to beg him to cut a deal that he’ll probably renege on… for what? To stick it to Matt Gaetz?
I’m not sure that Johnson is any worse than McCarthy from the Dems’ point of view. And the chaos that followed McCarthy’s ouster was I think humiliating enough to the GOP that it actually weakened rather than emboldened the fringe. Sure, they proved they could oust a Speaker, but what did that gain them?
PZ has lost the plot. A post about his pet tarantula and he refers to it as they/them throughout, as if spiders have gender identities. It’s painful to read. I’m guessing it’s his way of answering those critics who have pointed out how he had no problems recognising the sex of his lab spiders; rather than being honest about things and admitting his hypocrisy he’s doubled down and now pretends not to recognise sex at all, regardless of the species.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/04/26/are-all-my-pets-psycho/
I’m reading the final nonfiction assignments for my Creative Writing class now and am encountering for the first time “they” used casually as a pronoun for a character in a student’s narrative. The effect is kind of shocking: it obscures the identity of the character, whose name is sexually ambiguous (“Max”). I had to decide how to comment, so I said this:
“The imprecision of this pronoun annuls Max as a character. If this is done at Max’s request, then perhaps it’s best to say so, because it’s rather jarring.”
I hope I don’t sound like a meany.
Mike B @ #300
Christ, I’m glad I’m not teaching Creative Writing any more.
No, I don’t think you sound like a meany at all. You are warning the student that the ambiguity with regard to Max’s sex, and the lack of clarity as to what this is supposed to indicate, are impairing the narrative.
Excerpt from a local news story:
Who was taken to the hospital? The suspect and all the responding cops?
Impressive that a victim with multiple stab wounds could put up such a fight that the cops had to be taken to the hospital.
I initially thought the multiple stab wounds were taken to the hospital, perhaps along with the one victim.
Mike B, I encountered that in my writing group. A young man writing a screenplay very conclusively described a character as a female, the character presented as female, and the writer used “they”.
Today on Doonesbury: Trump has dementia. Not exactly news, of course, and the claim that mental health experts are too scared to tell us is not true of all of them, as witness this piece in the Mirror last month.
Sigh. Appeals court rules that insurance plans have to pay for “gender-affirming” surgery.
According to the court, this is just like a woman with cervical cancer getting a hysterectomy.
In as much as the outcome is sterility, it isn’t exactly wrong.
Kevin Drum says we shouldn’t place too much faith in polls. He might have a point, but his example is inadequate, and illustrates something different from what he claims.
The example poll asked young people if they consider themselves transgender or non-binary, and if so, it sought further clarification (in a question not shown unless they had answered “yes”). One of the clarifying options was “No, not transgender or non-binary”, essentially negating the question that prompted the request for clarification. He also noted that around 4% of respondents said “yes” to “transgender or non-binary”, and half of those indicated “Gender non-binary”, so there should be 2% of people choosing “Non-binary” from the three choices in the “Gender” question, but there were 0%.
He is expecting consistency from people who claim one of these special gender identities? Good luck with that. I’m sure there are variety of ways that people might answer inconsistently in surveys, but I suspect gender ideology questions would be answered highly inconsistently. The results Drum highlights I think are more due to the nonsensical nature of gender ideology than any tendency of poll respondents to fail to be consistent.
” a set of cases out of North Carolina and West Virginia, where state officials argued that their policies were based on cost concerns rather than bias.”
Well when you make a disingenuous argument… Not saying that costs weren’t of interest, but it’s all about those icky trannies. Mind you, thinking trannies are icky is fine in my book, but lying about it?
Making an argument on cost is identical to the reasons that most insurance companies failed to adequately fund contraceptives and mental health treatment for a long time…until they were pushed into a corner.
I’m not sympathetic with that argument. Still, most insurance companies have restrictions against experimental therapies, and this would fall much better into that category. That’s what they should have argued, that at this point, the evidence doesn’t support the contention that this is necessary care. Unless they are required to pay for cosmetic surgery done for a non-medical reason, they should not be required to pay for “trans-affirming” surgeries, because they are strictly cosmetic.
Next they’ll be saying insurance companies have to pay to have bunny ears attached, or to change the facial features to more resemble the baby some adults claim to be.
This morning NPR had a long story about Florida’s abortion law. I found it sinister that a story about a law that threatens the reproductive freedom of women does not use the word WOMEN once. I listened, carefully, and every single time, it’s “pregnant people” and “patients.” The WOMAN who narrated the piece had to have been coached. She successfully made a story about women not be about women. I find this horrifying.
That is enraging.
This was reported earlier this morning and guess who also gleefully picked up on said spitting claim tweet? (Hint: hand grenade.)
Oh good grief. As if Jerry Coyne would go around spitting on people. The accusation is medieval.
Also what’s with using “spit” as the past perfect? What happened to “spat”?
Have been ignoring him since October 7th but can’t imagine he’d be spitting on anyone on purpose; spitting at someone while talking, sure, but on? Nope.
Myers now is saying it’s a he said/she said matter, without making an effort to verify the story. It’s obvious that Myers’ intent here is to damage Coyne’s reputation online, or at least excite his horde a bit more. So much for any pretense at skepticism though.
One to lighten the mood a little. A Sumatran orangutan living in the wild in Indonesia has been observed treating a large wound on its cheek by chewing the stem of a medicinal plant and applying the juice to the wound, then chewing the leaves and packing them into the hole. The plant has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties, and the wound was healed with no signs of infection in just five days. It’s the first time an animal in the wild has been seen treating an injury in such a way.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68942123.amp
I saw that! And damn near posted about it here but ran out of time. I took care of two orang babies–>toddlers when I worked at the zoo. Yes of course it was as fun as it sounds.
I’m not jealous…honestly.
I’m jealous of myself.
Another scientific report:
Risk of Suicide and Self-Harm Following Gender-Affirmation Surgery
“Gender-affirming surgery” is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks”.
https://www.cureus.com/articles/201512-risk-of-suicide-and-self-harm-following-gender-affirmation-surgery#!/
Oops.
There seems to be an increasing amount of false reports of (strictly US?) actions against gender ideology. Here, for example, is a fact checking article about a report that the US women’s national swimming team would resign if Lia Thomas is allowed to try out for the team:
False claim US national team threatened to quit over transgender swimmer
The writer of the original piece supposedly said it was satire or humor; uh huh. I’ve seen a lot of these, they seem deliberately misleading and provocative, and too easily dismissed with “It was just a joke”. Topics include Lia Thomas being stripped of medals, Lia Thomas’ records being expunged, and Lia Thomas’ medals being given to Riley Gaines. (I am pretty sure I’ve seen some that are not about Lia Thomas, but I don’t recall specifics.)
How annoying.
A small victory, but they all count. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/06/gender-specific-toilets-to-be-required-in-non-residential-buildings-in-england
If course, being The Guardian it insists on using ‘gender’ in place of sex except when directly quoting the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, speaking of single-sex spaces. It also contains a whopping great lie. Part of the new guidelines is the order that all new, non-residential buildings have single-sex toilets with additional unisex facilities only if space allows, so the writer claims that
No, they have NOT argued that at all. They have insisted that trans people must be allowed to use facilities that match their gender identity and that ‘gender-neutral’ (or ‘unisex’, as we actually call them) toilets are a transphobic means of excluding the trans. The last word goes to Mermaids, who are bleating about last week’s decision that schools must maintain single-sex toilets and changing facilities for all children over the age of eight.
Well, tough.
A guest columnist in the Washington Post points out that the emperor has no clothes.
Apparently the issue is that the Cass report wasn’t stamped “Made in USA”.
I wonder if this would be the approach taken if we were talking about aircraft safety, following a series of fatal accidents with a particular model being flown by European carriers?
At the risk of falling for the sarcasm filter again, that is exactly the approach taken in aviation safety. When a US plane crashes anywhere in the world US authorities want to peer over the shoulder of the investigating country, and same when it’s a European maker of EU authorities. Part of that is because they do tend to be better resourced and more experienced, and a part of it is that they want to protect the reputation of ‘their’ manufacturer against rogue, incompetent, inexperienced, biased investigators.
Medical regulators are particularly prone to this though. It always used to puzzle me when NZ regulators would refuse to follow the findings of huge international studies until they had seen local evidence. After all NZ was/is never going to fund comparable studies. Eventually it dawned on me that even reputable overseas regulators sometimes approve drugs or procedures on the basis of political pressure, flawed studies, or whatever. NZ (and other medical regulators) often want time to closely evaluate the evidence for themselves even if they don’t commission a smaller scale study themselves. Then they’ll wait for as long as they can on edge cases to see what happens elsewhere. Of course NZ is also very unlike the USA. We have a single buying agency for the whole country, so inevitably what drugs are approved here (to gain a subsidy) is as much about commercial negotiation as it is about ‘does it work’.
Maybe not so unlike us after all. We don’t have a single buying agency in the US, but a lot of drug approvals are commercial negotiations.
Also, what drugs are on the insurance ‘formulary’ – i.e., what will they pay for. Whatever they put on the formulary is determined more by commercial interests (drug company gives them a kickback or a special deal) than by patient needs. Not all patients respond to all drugs the same way, so that leaves doctors in the spot of maybe having to prescribe something that isn’t the best for the patient because the patient can’t afford it otherwise.
Iknklast, it’s actually pretty different. Here’s the link to the Pharmac website. There’s a lot of info, but the linked page and the Myths page will give you a strong flavour. When you are prescribed a medicine (or related equipment) in NZ, you generally don’t pay anything for it at all. A few years back there used to be a fee of $5 per prescription, but that has now been wiped.
https://pharmac.govt.nz/about/what-we-do/how-pharmac-works
When the earthquake devastated Christchurch I took an elderly American couple home for the night. Their Hotel was cordoned off and they had only the clothes they stood up in. Because they both needed prescription medicines I took them to my GP the next day, who organised prescriptions for all the drugs they needed. Two supermarket bags later the prescription charge amounted to NZ$90. The said back in California the equivalent co-pay would have been US$400. The Doctors visit was NZ$50 as the doc kindly treated them as if they were locals.
The flip side of our system is that if a drug is not funded, you have to pay the full price for yourself, which if it is a rare or novel drug can be cripplingly expensive. That is very rare though.