Author: Ophelia Benson

Yet another deliberate insult.

There are simply no women who could do that. Not one. It just has to be a man in girly makeup.

He says he’s incredibly proud. I bet he is – women are incredulous too.

Even a Catholic college.

Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic women’s college in Notre Dame, Indiana, has reversed a new policy that would consider transgender women for admission following public outcry.

In November, a local student newspaper, The Observer, reported that Saint Mary’s had notified students of an update to its non-discrimination policy, which was approved in June. Saint Mary’s would have considered cis women as well as individuals who “consistently live and identify as women,” for admission beginning in fall 2024, according to the college.

Classic, isn’t it? The Catholic church keeps women down in every way it can think of, but when it’s a matter of men pretending to be women (and taking what belongs to women) why then the church is delighted to give its approval. Heads women are screwed, tails women are screwed.

The LGBTQ+ community, especially the transgender community, has been targeted in recent years as they fight for inclusion and equal rights. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently tracking more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills across the U.S. While progressives push the LGBTQ+ community to be protected, conservatives see them as a threat to gender and sexuality norms.

Wrong. There are plenty of progressives who don’t want men invading and taking everything that belongs to women. It’s a split within the left as well as a split between left and right.

Originally a comment by Piglet on Could be.

There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be?

No, I’ve seen this being seriously argued. The idea is that men are faster, stronger etc than women because they have stronger encouragement to do sport, better coaches, more resources etc. Which is why it’s so important to let male people barge in and hog the meagre resources that female athletes DO have. /s

I read the paper and it’s actually quite funny in a way—it reads like an assignment given to undergraduates so that they can demonstrate statistical methods. What I think they’ve done in this paper is the gender equivalent of The Art of War.

A lot of people read that book (there’s this peculiar idea that it’s useful in business management) and come away thinking it’s all too bleeding obvious. Understand your enemy, focus on his weak points, big whoop. But Sun Tzu was specifically writing a how-to guide for inbred idiotic noblemen whose family connections meant they were leading an army with no idea what they were doing, and he needed a basic handbook to throw at them (possibly literally). There’s a definite sense of “FINE, I’ll actually codify these extremely basic and obvious principles so you don’t lose ANOTHER thousand men in another rout…”

Just fancy, being tethered to a phone all day every day isn’t good for the intellect.

PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.

Never mind. AI will do the math for us.

Screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA survey, wrote that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt “nervous” or “anxious” when they didn’t have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.

There are other surveys.

Studies have shown that students on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information from class, that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs, that students who text a lot in class do worse on tests, and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests. As Haidt, a psychologist, has written in The Atlantic, the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention.

One could stop right at that “students who text a lot in class” – why are they even allowed to do that? Is it because they could be taking notes and the teachers can’t be checking everyone all the time? Or because everyone’s just given up?

Oh well. AI will do our thinking for us.

Dawn Butler working the crowd.

But the trial revealed that the murder wasn’t about trans or “the Trans community.”

Never mind. She’s too busy reporting Mumsnet to the police to bother with pesky facts.

Macron is all bros before hos.

President Emmanuel Macron of France this week condemned what he called a “manhunt” targeting Gérard Depardieu, the embattled French actor whose worldwide fame has been tarnished in recent years by allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Really. Why should mere harassment and assault of women tarnish the fame of a movie star dude? Obviously movie stardom is far more important and valuable than the feelings of 10 or 100 or however many stupid whiny women.

Macron’s comments, which prompted swift criticism, came after a documentary that aired in France this month showed the actor making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea.

Who cares? It’s only women. You can grab them by the pussy, remember?

Feminists and leftist politicians said on Thursday that they were appalled by Macron’s comments.

“Manhunts remain prohibited. The hunt for women, on the other hand, remains open,” Osez Le Féminisme, a feminist group, said on social media, while Sandrine Rousseau, a Green lawmaker, called Macron’s comments “yet another insult to the movement to let victims of sexual violence speak out.”

…

The documentary that set off a new wave of scrutiny aired this month on France 2 and features previously unseen footage of Depardieu on a 2018 trip to North Korea, where he is seen repeatedly making extremely crude and uninhibited sexual and sexist comments about women.

The documentary suggests that sexual jokes, comments and attitudes by Depardieu on movie sets were commonplace and widely-known, but that the French movie industry brushed them off.

Merci to Macron for brushing them off some more.

Totally normal.

In the 24 hours since the Colorado Supreme Court kicked former President Donald Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot, social media outlets have been flooded with threats against the justices who ruled in the case, according to a report obtained by NBC News.

The Colorado Supreme Court didn’t “kick” Trump off anything. That’s like the BBC and the Guardian constantly saying people “hit out at” and “hit back at” when they mean “disputed.” It’s a metaphor but news media should avoid that kind of metaphor because it’s far too emotive and manipulative.

Anyway.

Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research, identified “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats, often in direct response to Trump’s posts about the ruling on his platform Truth Social. They found that some social media users posted justices’ email addresses, phone numbers and office building addresses.

In this case violent rhetoric that means it, as opposed to the sloppy journalistic hitting out and kicking off.

“This ends when we kill these fuckers,” a user wrote on a pro-Trump forum that was used by several Jan. 6 rioters.

“What do you call 7 justices from the Colorado Supreme Court at the bottom of the ocean?” asked another user. “A good start.”

Posts — whose images and links were included in the report — noted a variety of methods that could be used to kill those perceived as Trump’s enemies: hollow-point bullets, rifles, rope, bombs.

“Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete,” read a post on a fringe website. “Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.”

Totally normal.

The threats fit into a predictable and familiar pattern, seen time and time again after legal developments against Trump. After the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, a man who had been at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun while holding an AR-15-style rifle. When a grand jury in Georgia indicted Trump, some of his supporters posted the grand jurors’ addresses online. When U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan was assigned to special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference case against Trump, she faced threats from Trump supporters. A federal appeals court pointed out the pattern when it upheld a narrowed gag order against Trump in his election interference case this month, noting that those he publicly targets are often threatened and harassed.

He knows that, and wants it, and encourages it on purpose.

Rebecca Solnit kneecaps her own argument immediately after making it.

Republicans have sought to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote against them and to undermine the systems set up to protect elections from corruption. They’ve sought to give corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the gun industry, immunity from accountability as both climate change and gun deaths devastate the nation, as well as to liberate dark money to dominate politics.

The legislation and legal cases they have pursued makes women unequal to men by overturning the bodily autonomy necessary to make women free and equal participants in society. Having overturned abortion rights in their pliant supreme court, and launched a new era of persecution of both pregnant people and medical providers in the states they dominate, Republicans are now threatening to overturn marriage equality.

In the first sentence it’s women who have been made unequal, and men they’ve been made unequal to. In the second sentence it’s pregnant people.

How dumb can you get?

Marriage equality threatens conservatives not only by making queer couples equal to straight couples, but by establishing that marriage is a freely negotiated relationship between equals, a blow to patriarchal marriage’s demand that wives submit to husbands. Some Republicans, including the new house speaker, also aspire to eliminate no-fault divorce, which would trap unhappy couples in general and abused women in particular.

Wobble wobble. One minute she knows what women are and knows what patriarchal marriage is, the next minute she’s burbling about pregnant people. Get a damn grip.

A new discovery lights up the headlines.

Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity

Ya think???

Sex may be a more useful explanatory variable than gender identity for predicting the performance of athletes in mass-participation races, a new paper has found.

A new paper has found what everyone has always known. Humans are sexually dimorphic.

Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes.

Surely they mean sex disparities in outcomes.

More to the point, what theory? There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be? I thought the theory was just that men who claim to be trans have found an easy way to cheat.

How dare a woman say that men shouldn’t take women’s scholarships?

Anti-Trans Swimmer Slammed After Causing Trans Teen To Lose Volleyball Scholarship

That is, woman yelled at after she points out that a boy won a scholarship intended for girls. The boy didn’t “lose” anything; he was never entitled to that scholarship, because it’s for girls.

Peter Karleby writes:

Anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines has once again sparked outrage after her public campaign against a trans high school student resulted in the teen’s college scholarship being revoked.

That is, Riley Gaines “sparked outrage” in a male journalist after she pointed out that a scholarship for girls had been awarded to a boy.

It’s unclear how Gaines knew about the teen, but she took to X, aka Twitter, last week to write a cruel screed against the student, outing and misgendering her, revealing her identity with a photo, and calling on UW to revoke her scholarship.

A cruel screed is it? What about the cruelty of a male student stealing a scholarship intended for a female student?

Gaines claims that the student and her parents deceived the university by concealing her trans identity. Disclosing someone else’s sexual or gender identity without their consent is considered illegal harassment under Washington law.

So males who claim to be trans get to cheat while everyone else has to keep his secret? Why would that be?

Gaines’ supposed concerns about athletic fairness are likely not even valid. The teen is thought to have transitioned before puberty, meaning she never developed any of the supposed athletic advantages anti-trans agitators advocate against.

The “supposed” athletic advantages. Riley’s “supposed” concerns about fairness. What would it take to convince him of the reality?

Those advantages have yet to be proven substantive, even in cases of transition after puberty, according to the limited research on the topic.

Substantive? What are you trying to say, Lassie? Do you mean substantial? Real? Significant?

Anyway, whatever he’s trying to say, he’s trying to say it by lying outrageously. Two words: Lia Thomas.

Woke dogs! Gaslighting dog-havers! DEI for the canine set!

Comment sections filled with discussions on “woke idiots” in dog training. “Radicals are Hijacking Dog Training” posted one trainer, calling force-free training, the anti-aversive movement of which Mr. George is arguably the most prominent face, an “ideology” and a “cult” with a “radicalized agenda” — language that sounded awfully familiar.

Even before this, I’d seen the occasional Instagram post by a trainer using terminology that seemed drawn from another context: I’d paused on several posts that applied the term “consent” to dogs — as in, we should get their consent before we pet them. In some cases, the trainer’s vocabulary seemed drawn from even more distant shores: “I will not project colonial, capitalist, or patriarchal concepts on my dog,” one post read, in between tips on leash reactivity and separation anxiety; “don’t gaslight your dog,” another urged.

We should get their consent before we pet them…hmmmmmmm…how can we ever be sure of a dog’s consent? Maybe that tail is wagging to be polite; how can we know?

But Mr. George’s series of videos seemed to send whatever process had generated those posts into overdrive.“It sounds like dog training has become just one more target for the woke community to prey upon!” a YouTube user wrote. “These are the same people with ‘gender fluid’ dogs,” another wrote, a statement that I found funny, then spent too long trying to parse. (What is standard gender expression in dogs?) I watched a video in which a trainer referred to the “dog training far left,” which should have made no sense, except that at this point, I knew what he meant.

It’s not so much far left as far something else – far incloosive, far validationing, far emotional support dogging…thus bringing us around in a circle.

Far left would be communal ownership of the means of production. The soppy touchy-feely validationy wing of the left isn’t really lefty at all, it’s its own weird thing. It’s dripping wet emotionalism run riot.

Everyone I spoke to for this story was deeply sincere (these are, after all, dog people): “The world of dogs does not exist in a vacuum of pet guardian and pet but is interconnected with systemic oppression,” Rachel Forday, a positive trainer, told me when I asked about her use of political language. “Systemic oppression dictates who is allowed to own a dog and what kind of dog they own.” Robert Cabral, a balanced trainer, worried in one of his videos that the rise of science citations in dog training was turning the profession into an “elitist realm.” “I have an issue with that,” he said. “I’m a simple guy. I didn’t go to college.” He continued, “I think when you make things complicated, you cut out a lot of good people.” The vibes these people are projecting are simply who they are.

Meanwhile their dogs are sniffing other dogs’ butts.

Will he be sued? Is he trawling to be sued? Does he have wistful daydreams about being sued? Does he identify as being sued?

By the way it’s not “denigrating” anyone to point out that people can’t change sex.

Not a hate crime after all?

Within 48 hours of Brianna Ghey’s murder, DCS Mike Evans of Cheshire police told the media that the force had “no information or intelligence to suggest it was a hate crime”. The statement caused an immediate uproar, particularly among the LGBTQ+ community, who held vigils in her memory. Many people suspected that Brianna’s being a transgender girl [might] well have played a role in her killing and were angry that detectives seemed so quick to rule out transphobia as a motive.

After all, it’s not as if the detectives could have known more about it than the “many people” who were watching from Twitter.

Although transphobia did not come up in the trial, the judge, Mrs Justice Yip, may consider it to be an aggravating factor when sentencing one or both of the teenagers. But she told potential jurors on the first day of the trial to put aside any “uninformed views” about Brianna’s killing.

She also took a dim view of online commentators who pronounced that the defendants were transphobic. After the case was opened, the prosecution complained about a tweet from the barrister Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, saying the teenagers had exchanged “transphobic slurs”.

Yip said the tweet was potentially in contempt of court, a serious crime that has previously resulted in short jail terms for those judged to have prejudiced a trial. Heer said the prosecution had deliberately not used such terms in the presence of the jury.

Maugham was spoken to by police and deleted the tweet, the court heard.

Good law indeed.

Typical Trump: if the reporting says he said something repulsive he then repeats it 9 thousand times to demonstrate that he can be repulsive if he wants to so NYAH.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night denied he was inspired by Hitler while repeating his comments that immigrants were “destroying the blood of our country” — despite coming under intense fire for similar remarks over the weekend.

Not “despite”; because of.

“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing — they’re destroying our country,” Trump said Tuesday at an event in Waterloo, Iowa, echoing comments he made at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday in which he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

…

Trump brushed off the Hitler comparison, claiming that Hitler’s rhetoric was said “in a much different way.”

Wrong.

“I never read ‘Mein Kampf’” he told the audience in Iowa. “They said Hitler said that — in a much different way. No, they’re coming from all over the world — people all over the world. We have no idea — they could be healthy, they could be very unhealthy, they could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country. But they do bring in crime. … They’re destroying the blood of the country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them out.”

Of course he never read Mein Kampf; he’s never read anything. He doesn’t read. He watches Fox News.

Originally a comment by Sackbut on Its sanitized depiction of slavery.

The NYT article did mention the disturbance of gravesites as part of the reason, but that appears secondary.

The group, which is affiliated with an organization called Save Southern Heritage Florida, sued the Defense Department in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Sunday, arguing that the Pentagon had rushed its decision to take down the monument and that it had circumvented federal law by not preparing an environmental-impact statement. It also said that the work would damage the surrounding graves and headstones. A hearing on the matter was scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday.

I hope this isn’t too much of a digression: there is a large Confederate memorial at the Alabama state capitol here in town. The Confederate battle flag that used to fly on top of it was taken down in 2015. The monument itself includes this inscription, over the four sides of marker:

North/Navy Side

“The seamen of Confederate fame startled the wondering world: for braver fight was never fought, and fairer flag was never furled.” Anon.

West/Cavalry Side

“The knightliest of the knightly race who since the days of old, have kept the lamp of chivalry alight in the hearts of gold.” F.O.T.

South/Infantry Side

“Fame’s temple boasts no higher name, no king is grander on his throne: No glory shines with brighter gleam, the name of “Patriot” stands alone.” C.T.R.

East/Artillery Side

“When this historic shaft shall crumbling lie in ages hence, in woman’s heart will be, a folded flag, a thrilling page unrolled, a deathless song of Southern chivalry.” I.M.P.O.

The monument was erected in 1898 by Historical and Monumental Association of Alabama & Ladies Memorial Association of Alabama, which I think explains some of the focus of the inscription on the perspective of war widows. The text is quite blatantly praising the men who fought for the Confederacy as “patriots”, “knightliest of the knightly race”, and “chivalrous”. I don’t think there is any effort to try to move it. There is also a statue honoring J. Marion Sims (“father of gynecology” who operated on slaves without consent or anesthesia) at the capitol, and recently a monument honoring his victims (titled “Mothers of Gynecology”) was unveiled; perhaps a counter-monument like that might be appropriate.

Not so fast, Treason Dude.

A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

And the Supreme Court will of course wave him through.

The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

Trump’s attempted coup was also the first of its kind in history.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War.

And let’s be real: he did actually do that. They’re not making it up, and they’re not exaggerating.

Because the rozzers have NOTHING better to do.

So yeah, they false reported me to the rozzers. On Saturday, I was arrested then interviewed under caution about my interview with @andrewdoyle_com on @GBNEWS and my @StandingforXX speech at #LetWomenSpeak in Leeds. Five hours later I was released from custody and told no action would be taken against me coz I haven’t committed any crimes, obvz. The worst part was when they arrested me I was naked except for a towel and still had flippin shampoo in my hair, then had to go get dressed in front of another copper with a bodycam like I’m some kinda terrorist. They took mugshots, DNA swabs and finger prints too. I’m taking those psychos back to court at Twixmas so can’t into anymore detail right now. Just wanted to say thankyou everyone for having my back when I was in ze gulag, especially our @Glinner. What an absolute fucking farce

Arrested and interviewed and detained for five hours for knowing that men are not women. This is hell, nor are we out of it.

Speaking of monuments to the Confederacy and Just Asking Questions about why we should remove them and who is going around defending slavery anyway, let’s take a quick look at Florida and its education standards.

Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, part of new African American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by a state teachers’ union as a “step backward.”

The Florida State Board of Education’s new standards includes controversial language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the Florida Department of Education.

Yes of course they did; how could it have been otherwise? The whole point of them was to do work for the slaveowners such that the slaveowners would make big profits. Of course that meant developing skills. That doesn’t count against the fact that they had no choice in the matter, they couldn’t leave, they weren’t paid, they were property from birth to death, they had no rights, any children they had were also property from birth to death, they could be whipped, tortured, locked up, killed at their owners’ discretion.

H/t Seanna Watson

The Times on the Confederate statue and the pause in its removal:

Hours after workers began removing a towering Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily halting the effort to dismantle one of the country’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy on public land.

Emphasis mine, for the benefit of people who pretend to be puzzled about why the monument should be removed.

The memorial has been criticized for its sanitized depiction of slavery, and the plan to remove it from the country’s most famous cemetery is part of a militarywide effort to take down Confederate symbols from bases, ships and other facilities. Dozens of Republican lawmakers have opposed removing the memorial.

Why would the military want to take down Confederate symbols? One, because a military needs unity, which becomes more difficult in an environment full of reminders of subordination and injustice. Two, because the creation of the Confederacy was an act of treason, and the military tends to frown on treason. Three, because the military has become a very significant path out of poverty and obscurity for people who don’t have the boost of white ancestry.

On Monday, as the work to remove the monument was getting underway, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that had been requested by a group called Defend Arlington.

The group, which is affiliated with an organization called Save Southern Heritage Florida, sued the Defense Department in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Sunday…

Save what Southern heritage? The slave-owning one. The enslavement-defending one. The Glorious Cause one. That Southern heritage.

The memorial was the latest such monument to be targeted for removal since the public backlash in 2020 against Confederate statues after the killing of George Floyd. That movement helped push Congress to establish the Naming Commission in 2021 to devise a plan to rid the military of statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy.

The Defense Department mandated that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be removed by Jan. 1, 2024.

But apparently it’s a very bad thing to devise a plan to rid the military of statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy. Somebody warn the Defense Department.

UK Schools can now say nope.

Schools will be able to overrule parents who want their children to change their gender identity if they feel it goes too far under new guidance.

The long-awaited guidance states that schools must take a “cautious approach” that complies with their legal duties.

It explicitly states that some forms of social transitioning — under which children change their pronouns, names and uniform — “will not be compatible with a school’s statutory responsibilities”.

Responsibilities like providing single-sex toilets and changing rooms, and not letting boys compete against girls in contact sports. (Should be any sports, but it’s a start.)

No duty on schools
Ministers had wanted to ban social transitioning but were unable to do so within the confines of existing legislation. Instead, they have opted for a compromise, with the guidance stating that schools are under no “general duty” or obligation to facilitate social transitioning. It will urge them to proceed with extreme caution and state that changing gender identity is not a “neutral” act. Ministers believe this will stop schools from taking “affirmative action” over social transitioning.

Protections for teachers
Teachers and fellow pupils will not be “compelled” to address children by their chosen pronouns if they have a “good faith” objection. As a compromise, they will be advised to use a child’s chosen name. This is designed to avoid teachers facing sanctions if they have principled objections to a child changing their gender.

It’s a start.