Headlines – another person comes out as self-obsessed and expecting us to be interested in xir self-obsession.

Demi Lovato has announced they have a non-binary gender identity.

This is of no interest. There is no need for people to make “announcements” about themselves this way. It doesn’t matter. It’s not significant. People’s custom-built Selves are of no interest.

Says it all, doesn’t it – “I’m so happy to share more of my life with you all.” No, don’t be happy to do that – recoil from it with scorn and loathing. Don’t look ever more into the self, look away from the self, at everything there is out there to explore and think about. Also don’t be “proud” … Read the rest

Oh no, not mocking his faith. The horror.

THE BBC has been accused of “taking the mickey” out of the newly elected leader of the DUP over his religious beliefs.

Ian Paisley, the party’s MP for North Antrim, said the broadcaster had “lambasted” Edwin Poots because he is “a man of faith”.

The BBC says no we didn’t.

During the introduction to the programme, Mr Poots was described as “a creationist from the party’s Free Presbyterian roots, who once banned donations of blood from gay men”.

Just the facts ma’am.

“I would say absolute cobblers to your programme so far,” Mr Paisley told presenter Faisal Islam. “I’m reminded of the Frank Skinner line, you can be anything in Britain

Not just civil.

The New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it is pursuing a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization, in addition to the ongoing civil probe.

“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time,” Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement.

Closing in.… Read the rest

No they don’t.

Many trans women have to be hospitalized because of how bad their period cramps get, your assumption that trans women are physically the same as cis men is simply ignorant.

Please stop trying to take basic human rights away from me until you know wtf you're talking about.

— Broken Doll (@AnnHertzz) May 19, 2021

Hospitalization for cramps is not a thing, and if it were, it would not be a thing that happens to men. Men don’t get cramps.

There are many basic biology lessons in the replies.… Read the rest

Eric Trump is confused.

Trump compared Biden and Harris unfavorably to his father and criticized them for not giving more press conferences.

“I think they’re lazy,” Trump said. “I think they lack motivation. I think they lack the charisma to do what my father did.

See he thinks being president means talking constantly and being on camera a lot and performing non-stop, like a clown on cocaine. He thinks that because his imbecile daddy thought that.

“My father was on a plane every single day. He was literally going somewhere every single day and where are these two? Why don’t you ever hear from them?

“They’re not giving press conferences. They’re not going out in the Rose Garden like

Republicans have gone all identity politics on us.

At this point, the best — and probably only — way to stop Trumpism would be for a significant share of Republicans to align with the Democratic Party, at least temporarily. But here’s the problem: For many Trump-skeptical Republicans, both elite and rank-and-file, being a Republican, and definitely not a Democrat, is a part of their personal identity. And so far, too few have been willing to prioritize the health of the country over this attachment.

That’s odd though, because what has Republican identity now become? It’s deeply entangled with Trump and trumpism and Trump’s revolting character and temperament and smashed moral compass. If you’re Trump-skeptical why would you cling to … Read the rest

Cancellations rebuked:

The University of Essex has today published Akua Reindorf’s Review of two events involving external speakers, concerning the controversy surrounding events at which Professor Jo Phoenix (Open University) and Professor Rosa Freedman (University of Reading) had been invited to speak.

The report concludes that the University breached the Professors’ rights to freedom of expression because of preconceptions about their views on trans rights and gender identity.

It was in breach of statutory duties and its own policies.

In Professor Phoenix’s case, a seminar which she was due to give in December 2019 was cancelled at the last minute because of threats of disruption. A flyer was circulated in the University bearing an image of a

Another letter.

With anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ hate rising in the UK and across the world, we’ve joined 38 LGBTQ+ organisations calling on the @EHRC to step up for our communities. #TogtherWithTrans

Read our open letter here: https://t.co/v7fjZV5IcY pic.twitter.com/f6PrAiJUTd

— Stonewall (@stonewalluk) May 18, 2021

The letter contains no surprises.

As leaders of trans and LGBTQ+ organisations we are writing to express our frustration and disappointment at the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) recent record on LGBTQ+ people’s rights and trans people’s rights specifically.

The emphasis is always on trans people. Why?

Probably because people are so easily bored. Lesbian, gay, that’s so last week – let’s have something fresher!

We are disappointed that, despite the realms of possibility to

Brilliant: another mosque in India demolished in defiance of the law. That will turn out well.

A local administration in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has defied a state high court order and bulldozed a mosque, in one of the most inflammatory actions taken against a Muslim place of worship since the demolition of the Babri Mosque by a mob of Hindu nationalist rioters in 1992.

That did not go well.

On Monday, police and security services moved into the area and cleared it of people, then brought in bulldozers and demolished the mosque buildings. Debris was then thrown into a river, according to images and local accounts. Security services have been deployed to prevent anyone coming within

The University of Melbourne.

The student union.

The women’s department of the student union of the University of Melbourne PRESENTS

Menstruation Beyond the Binary.

Oh goody I cannot wait. I am so sick of those selfish bitches – women – keeping menstruation all for themselves. There’s no privilege like cramps privilege! Feeling that uterus contract to expel the sludge is just the best damn thing, second only to the sheer fun of catching the sludge and then disposing of it without attracting attention or flies or anything else untoward.

You think I’m joking. No such luck. It’s two days from now.

The gendering of menstruation needs to stop, periodt.

I don’t know if “periodt” is a typo or some … Read the rest

Oh, one of those. Jeff gave Bill advice on how to get away from That Woman.

Bachelor sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein gave Bill Gates advice on ending his marriage with Melinda after the Microsoft co-founder complained about her during a series of meetings at the money manager’s mansion, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Gates used the gatherings at Epstein’s $77 million New York townhouse as an escape from what he told Epstein was a “toxic” marriage, a topic both men found humorous, a person who attended the meetings told The Daily Beast.

Bros before hos.

The people familiar with the matter said Gates found freedom in Epstein’s lair, where he met a rotating cast of bold-faced

Matt Gaetz’s buddy pleaded guilty.

Joel Greenberg, a former Florida tax collector and close confidant of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, formally pleaded guilty on Monday morning to six federal charges in a court hearing, admitting to a federal judge that he had knowingly solicited and paid a minor for sex.

…

The guilty plea from Greenberg, a former Seminole County, Florida, tax commissioner, comes after he struck a deal with federal prosecutors to avoid some of the other 33 federal charges he had faced that ranged from identity theft to fraud and bribery allegations.

He sounds nice.

As part of the plea, Greenberg has agreed to give “substantial assistance” to prosecutors as part of their sprawling investigation, including

Foxkiller giving us our orders again.

Employers have a duty to protect their staff against bigotry. Replace "trans" with "gay" or "disabled" if you can't see why Maya's views are a problem. pic.twitter.com/eT3qxvGTQN

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) May 9, 2021

Employers should protect staff from bigotry, yes, but what are we defining as “bigotry”? Foxie of course is defining not believing that men are women as “bigotry,” which is just silly. He doesn’t expect us to believe he’s a woman, so why does he expect us to believe other men are women simply because they say they are? He’s a lawyer ffs: surely lawyers are sharply aware that people often say things that are not true.

And no, replacing “trans” … Read the rest

Deborah Cameron has an interesting post about “a longstanding feminist bone of contention: the use of the terms ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ to address teachers in UK schools.”

You can see where the contention comes in: “Sir” ain’t comparable to “Miss.”

In other contexts the female address term analogous to ‘Sir’ is not ‘Miss’ but ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’: though ‘madam’ has undergone some semantic derogation (it has acquired the specialised meaning ‘woman in charge of a brothel’), as an address term it retains a higher degree of formality and gravitas than ‘Miss’. That’s presumably why the related form ‘Ma’am’ has become the standard address term for senior female officers in the armed forces and the police. ‘Miss’ does not suggest deference

Bad.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider a major rollback of abortion rights, saying it will decide whether states can ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The court’s order sets up a showdown over abortion, probably in the fall, with a more conservative court seemingly ready to dramatically alter nearly 50 years of rulings on abortion rights.

The court first announced a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and reaffirmed it 19 years later.

The case involves a Mississippi law that would prohibit abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The state’s ban had been blocked by lower courts as inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent that protects

Brenda Brooks at Feminist Current on the Oprah interview with Ellen “Elliott” Page:

I watched the Oprah interview with interest, hoping that Page might be encouraged to discuss the nature of the compelling urge that led to such a seminal modification in herself. I wondered: what were the specifics that define a woman or a man so clearly that altering one’s body to eliminate one set of discrepancies, and confirm others, made sense? A clear definition between the two would be required, wouldn’t it, in order to choose to go forward in life as one sex, rather than the other? Was transition a mostly psychological event, or primarily physical? I wondered what changes would occur in future relationships. Would

Trust Ash Sarkar for that. Woman’s Hour talks to a couple of women and Sarkar intervenes to tell it to talk to different people instead. Self-hating woman rebukes Woman’s Hour for not being as self-hating as she is.

Any chance of hearing from transgender and non-binary people on this issue, @BBCWomansHour? https://t.co/BGPJLq5TjB

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) May 17, 2021

Right, because we never hear from “trans and nonbinary” people, apart from all the fucking time. It’s mandatory to interrupt women who are talking about how something affects women to say shut up about women when are you going to talk about “trans and nonbinary” people instead? Women don’t matter, women are old news, women are Mommy and we … Read the rest

Some warped legal reasoning here from a University of Alabama law guy:

Laws that prohibit physicians from providing treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy to minors are bad public policy. Their advocates claim that these are efforts to protect kids, who they argue may later change their mind, from medical treatments they characterize as irreversible. But these arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny: The laws—such as the one Arkansas just passed and those that more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, are actively considering—will certainly harm transgender children, denying them medical care that they need and causing them psychological pain. That should be reason enough to oppose these laws.

Trans identifying Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir is shocked shocked that anyone thinks people have a right to say that men are not women.

Last week a court in the UK heard an appeal from a tax researcher called Maya Forstater who lost an employment tribunal in 2019 – she was sacked after tweeting that transgender women can’t change their biological sex.

…

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) saw reason to intervene. In my view it is bizarre that they found it important to speak up for someone who clearly holds hostile views towards a vulnerable minority. 

It’s not “hostile” to say that men are not women. It’s also not a mere “view” that men are not women. It’s … Read the rest

Alan Sokal points out (not for the first time) a certain insouciance about the difference between facts and fantasies.

For millennia—since at least ancient Greece—philosophers have debated what constitutes knowledge and how one can legitimately acquire it. But when philosophers returned from their seminars back into the real world, even the most ardent anti-realists generally adopted the common-sense view that there do exist objective facts—situations in the external world that are independent of our beliefs—and that, sometimes at least, we can obtain reasonably reliable knowledge of those objective facts, through evidence and reasoning.

But, starting about 40 years ago, a small coterie of social-constructivist sociologists of science began to break this consensus, with radical claims like:

-The validity of theoretical