J.A. alerted us to a back and forth between a philosopher and a biologist a few days ago. Here’s how it ended on day one:

https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1625989800875659266

Here’s how a new chapter started yesterday:

https://twitter.com/TomasBogardus/status/1627429553365987328

Earth. How about the earth – it definitely predates societies, because otherwise where would the societies have been? No earth, no societies, yeah? Ok, so the earth. Right. Is the earth a social construct? Hell yes! Look at globes! And photos in National Geographic. Therefore, trans women are women. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Bogardus continues:

Myers also claims that I was being "spectacularly dishonest." I disagree; I think I was being pretty chill. But you can read the thread and decide for yourself, starting around here. (I

… Read the rest

It’s probably an exercise in futility.

In schools across Britain, educators are mobilizing to fight back against [Andrew] Tate’s messages, belatedly realizing the outsize influence he has among their students. A British-American former kickboxer, Mr. Tate gained a following of millions with videos glorifying wealth and a particularly virulent brand of male chauvinism, before being barred last summer from many mainstream social media sites.

It’s nice that they’re mobilizing, but I think it’s hopeless. They’re the schools, and Tate is the opposite. Schools, parents, adults, females – it’s all the same thing. It’s all duty, respectability, boredom, obedience. Nah we’ll take the other side thanks.

Believing that schools are a microcosm of society — and a preview of its

… Read the rest

Another fantasy idenniny unmasked:

Members of the American Friends Service Committee, a prominent Quaker organization known for its progressive values and social justice advocacy in the U.S. and abroad, have raised an alarm about a woman holding a leadership position within the organization who they say has misrepresented her ethnic background for years and who they fear may be working on behalf of groups seeking to undermine their organization.

Raquel Evita Saraswati, a Muslim activist who for years has encouraged people to believe that she is a woman of color, including Latina as well as of South Asian and Arab descent, is the AFSC’s chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer, a senior position that gives her access

… Read the rest

Does Labour have a women problem? Ooooooooooooooh that’s a tough one, I dunno, do we think it does?

https://twitter.com/OkBiology/status/1627282514392875008… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Artymorty on A good teacher wouldn’t do this.

There’s no doubt that it’s a sexual fetish. We can even speculate about its roots, because there’s quite a lot we know about this kind of fetish in men. It’s likely that in his childhood, as his sexuality was undergoing its first spurts of hormonal awakening, he suddenly discovered a great interest in the breasts of one of his schoolteachers. A schoolboy-crushing-on-schoolteacher’s-breasts narrative became a fetishistic fantasy that never went away for him, and because he’s got the “sex-role-reversal” glitch that drives most crossdressing straight men, he’s now fixated on playing out the role of the teacher with the breasts that will captivate the student. In his … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s a disguise.

So wearing it in classroom settings in order to force the participation of minors legally required to be in school (a captive audience) is the whole point. The discomfort and distress of reliably accessible gatherings of kids, over whom he excercizes authority (granted him by people who could easily take it away), is the whole point of the operation. If this core, essential, personal identity is so integral to his being, why does he drop it as soon as he’s away from an audience? Call me a closed-minded transphobe, but this looks a lot more like public performance of a fetish than the right to personal expression … Read the rest

It turns out that the gigantic breasts guy doesn’t wear them as part of his “transition”; it turns out he wears them some of the time, to…make a point? Surprise the crows? Exercise those hard to reach muscles?

While parents have raged about transgender teacher Kayla Lemieux being allowed to wear Z-cup prosthetics in front of students, the shop teacher was spotted ditching the controversial fetishistic fashion after work and stepping out in public dressed as a man.

…

The teacher — who until a few years ago went by the name Kerry — left Ontario’s Oakville Trafalgar High School this week wearing the gigantic breasts, a blond wig and glasses, but it wasn’t long until the cartoonish clothing

… Read the rest

Gretchen Felker-Martin is on the job again.

A renowned transgender horror author who signed a letter last week condemning The New York Times’s coverage of trans issues has tweeted that she wants to slit J.K. Rowling‘s throat.

Gretchen Felker-Martin named a series of writers she accused of transphobia – including Rowling – in a tweet sent on February 12. She added: ‘If they all had one throat, man.’

…

Another writer she railed against, journalist Jesse Singal, condemned Felker-Martin for making the death threat, and said she has a long history of making threats of violence.

In Felker-Martin’s debut novel, Manhunt, published in February 2022, Rowling is murdered by being burned alive. 

That’s … Read the rest

The UN’s 2022 report on gender equality:

The latest available Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 data show that the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030.

Or any other date.

COVID-19 and the backlash against women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are further diminishing the outlook for gender equality. Violence against women remains high; global health, climate, and humanitarian crises have further increased risks of violence, especially for the most vulnerable women and girls; and women feel more unsafe than they did before the pandemic. Women’s representation in positions of power and decision-making remains below parity.

Also (which they don’t say) women’s rights are being further eroded by gender ideology and all that goes … Read the rest

So sometimes the UN does know which people are women. Unless there’s an unspoken “including/especially trans women” here.

The gender gap in food security has risen dramatically over the last 3 years, as more women and girls go hungry.@UN_Women explores the unique challenges & opportunities presented to women when it comes to food security. https://t.co/iaZS4EsG49 pic.twitter.com/hJAzFqmMsK

— United Nations (@UN) February 19, 2023

… Read the rest

News out of Florida:

Art lovers in Miami looked on in horror on Thursday night, when a collector accidentally knocked a $42,000 (£34,870) sculpture by US pop artist Jeff Koons to the ground.

Oh no, $42,000 gone, just like that!

The statue – one of Koons’ iconic Dog Balloons – smashed into tiny shards, and had to be swept into dustpans by gallery staff.

…

Luckily for the woman, the piece is covered by insurance, Bénédicte Caluch, an art advisor with Bel-Air Fine Art galleries which represents the sculpture, said.

Whew, that’s a relief!

But what I want to know is, in what sense was the piece actually “worth” 42k?

In the sense that someone might be willing to … Read the rest

The usual apologies for the Mail, but it reports that medical people are being told to talk in Gender Neutral unless told otherwise. 1% of people claim to be Gender Interesting so everyone has to be confused by doctors and nurses carefully avoiding calling them women or men.

Steve Barclay last night ordered an urgent investigation into new guidelines that tell NHS staff to treat all patients as gender-neutral.

Nobody is gender-neutral, so it’s bonkers to treat patients as gender-neutral because a few wannabe originals pretend they’re neither women nor men.

It instructs doctors and nurses not to use phrases such as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ until a patient has confirmed their gender identity.

Mind you, … Read the rest

There is textual evidence that Fox knowingly lies.

What Fox’s loyal viewers wanted to watch — and what Fox News was willing to do to keep them — emerged this week as a central question in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against the network by Dominion Voting Systems.

A stunning cache of internal correspondence and deposition testimony obtained by the software company and made public on Thursday in a Delaware court filing showed high-level Fox executives and on-air stars privately agonizing over the wild and false claims of a stolen election that Trump allies promoted on Fox airwaves in the weeks after the 2020 election. “Sidney Powell is lying,” prime-time star Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer about

… Read the rest

Trans woman Juno Dawson is angry at his MP.

https://twitter.com/junodawson/status/1626688287384522752

He guesses to this man he does not count as a vulnerable woman. Well of course he doesn’t, because he’s a man. Of course he’s not “vulnerable” in the way women are. In other ways he may be, but not the ways specific to women.

The names he childishly smeared out are Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce. More power to their elbows.… Read the rest

Phoenix is already lethal.

America’s fifth biggest city has always been hot, but day and night temperatures have been rising due to global heating and the city’s unchecked development, which has created a sprawling urban heat island that has literally become unliveable for some residents. In the past three years, 911 calls and emergency room visits for heat-related emergencies have skyrocketed and more than a thousand people have died from extreme heat.

I did not know that. You’d think it would prompt a mass exodus.

The city is scattered with cooling centres – air conditioned places where residents can go to cool down – but clearly this isn’t working for many people. I wanted to spend a good

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

I’ve been studying social aspects of science as a layperson for at least 25 years, some college courses before that, and through discussions with working scientists on my podcast since, and just chatting with Greg Laden. I don’t claim to be an expert on science by any means, since I have limited practical experience designing and conducting experiments only when they are part of an undergraduate course and so that just gives basic context of how some science works. But it’s such a broad area of investigation, that even among working scientists there are concepts in the philosophy of science that they don’t accept or … Read the rest

I haven’t read much Roald Dahl because I was put off by his unabashed hatred of women decades ago.

You still have a story in which evil witches who want to kill kids are hiding amongst us, looking like "normal" women, and if only you knew who they were straight away, you'd be able to eliminate them. It's still basically how people find Dahl appalling write about Mumsnet today.

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) February 18, 2023

"They look like everyday women, but they're not, and violence against them would be self-defence!" runs through The Witches. It's very now. The people who have a problem with it really shouldn't.

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) February 18, 2023

Hatred of women never goes … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

…an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language…

Like bleeders, uterus-havers, clownfish, cis and TERF? Or is the problem the fact the NYT didn’t use their preferred terms like bleeders, uterus-havers, cis and TERF?

…while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.

Or maybe the Times reported on the contoversy surrounding how best to treat dysphoric children, and discussed options other than just “gender affirming” care. And as for the omission of “relevant information,” how about an admission that humans can’t change sex? Call me mad, but that seems somewhat relevant to me. And what about … Read the rest

It seems Buttigieg has been neglecting his job.

On the very day that DeWine was uttering these dire words [telling people to evacuate the area after the East Palestine train disaster], Buttigieg appeared on three Sunday news shows: CNN’s State of the Union, NBC’s Meet the Press, and ABC’s This Week. Remarkably, on none of these programs was Buttigieg asked about the ongoing East Palestine disaster—despite the fact that, as transportation secretary, regulating train safety is one of his responsibilities. Nor did Buttigieg feel it incumbent on himself to raise the issue and offer what guidance and assurances he could. Instead, Buttigieg’s ubiquitous TV appearances were taken up with the transparently hyped-up issue of a

… Read the rest

Andrew Sullivan on That Letter.

[T]his week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

It’s an echo of Evergreen and Yale and Middlebury and Reed. The ploys are repeated because they work and there’s no downside. And almost all the university presidents caved.

… Read the rest