Let’s look at the Pregnant People bit.

Emma Barnett: There are guests who come on this show who talk about “pregnant people.” What should I do, live in the moment – should I get them to clarify themselves because only biological women can be pregnant?

Long, telling pause

Rhodri Talfan Davies: Well, “pregnant people” isn’t inaccurate, it’s clearly one way of framing the statement

Me, interrupting: Now wait just a damn minute. Accuracy isn’t the only relevant quality here, and anyway it could be called inaccurate in some senses. It’s not the usual, familiar, standard, unsurprising way of saying it. Don’t go pretending not to know that. And because it’s not the standard way of saying it, and because … Read the rest

The stations of the cross.

If anyone is wondering why I'm leaving the charity sector after only six months in my role, please see this actual genuine thing that has just been sent to me. "Omnisexual Awareness Day"??? GET A GRIP. pic.twitter.com/nxOBKpF3qL

— Ffion B Goode (@FfiFfi_LaRue) November 11, 2021

I wonder how Asexual Visibility Day is celebrated.… Read the rest

Whoaaaa the ground is shifting.

Extremely effective interviewing here from @Emmabarnett – she did a great job of cutting through the waffle and attempts to sidestep by Rhodri Talfan. I particularly liked "There are also facts, and facts don't have to be balanced." https://t.co/HxGhIZGbbR

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) November 11, 2021

… Read the rest

Doc Stock on the “But but but you wrote a piece for The Spectator!!” expostulation:

I am on the left — or at least, a version of the left that doesn’t involve trying to get employees sacked by bosses, which may or may not be the left as we now know it. One frequent preoccupation of fellow left-wingers is the potential for guilt by association with those on the right. When feminists like Julie Bindel and I share a platform with a Tory, or write something for The Spectator, isn’t that just grist to the mill of our enemies? And, over time, won’t this heinous practice increase the likelihood of our own politics becoming less feminist? My usual

Sorry, can’t do the anti-vax rally, have Covid.

A Republican lawmaker in North Dakota will miss his Monday rally opposing vaccine mandates because he has COVID-19. Instead, Rep. Jeff Hoverson said he will stay home and take a cocktail of medications including the unproven anti-parasite drug ivermectine and the malaria remedy Hydroxychloroquine.

He must be a very intelligent man.

Hoverson has battled mask mandates. He was barred from boarding a flight with his wife at Minot International Airport late last month after taking issue with a TSA patdown. Hoverson said he and his wife were traveling for their anniversary.

Covid doesn’t care what you’re traveling for.

H/t Holms… Read the rest

GCs have convinced the world that teenagers are being “transed” against their will. They should admit, rather, that they simply think they know better than teenagers. They don’t, and when they try to impose their ideas onto teenagers’ bodies, they get into this kind of mess.

— Prof. Grace Lavery (@graceelavery) November 10, 2021

GCs don’t know better than teenagers? That’s just a blanket absolute rule is it? No gender critical adults know better than teenagers?

Come on. Teenagers don’t know everything. They’re young, and their brains haven’t finished developing yet. Of course they don’t know best on all occasions no matter what.

Lavery is an academic in the English department. Academics in the English department have a bad habit … Read the rest

Disturbing indeed.

Disturbing footage posted to social media shows a fight breaking out at a Brazilian school allegedly after a girl confronted a trans-identified male in the women’s bathroom.

Or changing room (or both), I think, because the girl is barefoot.

A newly-posted recording uploaded to Twitter from inside a Brazilian public school caught a violent scene breaking out between a trans-identified male student and a young female. The male can be seen pulling the girl from the women’s restroom by her hair and throwing her to the floor where he begins to thrash and kick her repeatedly.

The fight purportedly broke out after the girl expressed discomfort with the male’s presence in the women’s restroom.

So the male … Read the rest

When “activism” has a price.

In all their crowing about going after the LGBA Alliance the Good Laugh Project forgot to mention that the tribunal hearing the case has prohibited them from having access to the case papers because of QCAnon's tweets. Proper lols. pic.twitter.com/aRPHBXlgda

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) November 10, 2021

Translation: Jolyon Maugham doesn’t get to see the case papers in the LGB Alliance appeal because everyone can see he would tweet about them.

Sigh. Et tu Washington state?

Nurses Callie and Hannah work tirelessly each day to keep mothers & birthing people safe from COVID-19. With the recent surge in cases and hospitalizations, the message is clear — thank health care heroes by getting the vaccine.

— Washington State Department of Health (@WADeptHealth) September 29, 2021

… Read the rest

What I’m saying. Letters to the Guardian:

The results of this survey are sad but unsurprising (Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds, 7 November). At the weekend, I took my 12-year-old son by bus across west London to his football match. While the world discusses how to address climate change, everyone in west London is out driving a 4×4.

The vast majority of children going to play football and rugby on the pitches where we spent the morning were driven there. The roads were gridlocked, the car parks were full, and tempers were fraying. Yet the parents will make the same choices next weekend – and no doubt what I saw

Feel-good story:

Marcus Rashford has vowed to keep campaigning to lift children out of poverty after receiving his MBE, saying he will give the medal to his mum.

The England footballer, who last year forced two major government U-turns to extend free school meals into the school holidays, received his MBE for services to vulnerable children at Windsor Castle on Tuesday.

Rashford, 24, has helped raise enough money since March 2020 to help the food waste charity FareShare distribute more than 21m meals for families experiencing food insecurity.

Rashford was outspoken in his opposition to the government’s axing of the £1,040-a-year – £20-a-week – universal credit uplift on 6 October.

It’s not a particularly glamorous or sexy cause. Respect.… Read the rest

Meanwhile we continue to race toward the cliff.

The world is on track for disastrous levels of global heating far in excess of the limits in the Paris climate agreement, despite a flurry of carbon-cutting pledges from governments at the UN Cop26 summit.

“Pledges.” Pledges are cheap. Pledges butter no parsnips.

Temperature rises will top 2.4C by the end of this century, based on the short-term goals countries have set out, according to research published in Glasgow on Tuesday.

And they won’t meet the short-term goals anyway. It’s not “countries” setting out the goals but the governments of countries, which will be voted out by all the people who don’t want to do what it will take to prevent … Read the rest

Arizona Lunatic Paul Gosar did what?

He tweeted a doctored anime video that shows him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, haw haw, very normal healthy sensible behavior.

Martin Pengelly reports:

Twitter attached a hateful conduct warning to Gosar’s tweet, which also showed the sword-wielding congressman appearing to threaten Joe Biden and was also posted to Instagram.

It’s not just “hateful” conduct though. That would be less alarming. It’s “get people killed” conduct. It’s incitement conduct.

The roughly 90-second video is an altered version of a Japanese anime series, interspersed with shots of border patrol officers and migrants at the US border with Mexico.

Because migrants at the southern border are a reason to get very very racist.

In one section,

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Another insipid essay.

I imagine that every religion does this, but I do find it amusing how Christians catapult themselves into the finals of “Science vs. Religion,” conveniently bypassing all the playoffs that would have to take place against all the other religions in order to actually earn that spot. Hell, there are hundreds of versions of Christianity alone that would have to go up against each other, too.

Before “Religion” gets to go head to head with Science in the Explaining Reality Championship, it has to figure out a few things. There are so many things that religions have never agreed upon with each other, even before facing Science.… Read the rest

ALL the red lights were blinking.

The head of intelligence at D.C.’s homeland security office was growing desperate. For days, Donell Harvin and his team had spotted increasing signs that supporters of President Donald Trump were planning violence when Congress met to formalize the electoral college vote, but federal law enforcement agencies did not seem to share his sense of urgency. On Saturday, Jan. 2, he picked up the phone and called his counterpart in San Francisco, waking Mike Sena before dawn.

Sena listened with alarm. The Northern California intelligence office he commanded had also been inundated with political threats flagged by social media companies, several involving plans to disrupt the joint session or hurt lawmakers on Jan. 6.

Imagine getting Covid because Fox News told you to.

The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern

Well I couldn’t pass that up.

Another insipid essay trying to reconcile religion & science, b/c both have "desire to know what is true" But scientific method is grounded in factual evidence, whereas religious "truth" comes from self-appointed prophets, whose claims one cannot question. https://t.co/katQnvRTPz

— Ronald A. Lindsay (@RALindsay) November 8, 2021

So I read it.

I have never had much interest in faith versus science debates. They simply did not resonate with me. I believe God created the world, but I never felt the need to nail down the details or method of creation. 

Well naturally not! “God created the world” is just a claim of magic, and there’s no nailing down the details of that, or … Read the rest

Originally a comment by J.A. on A set of contingencies that can be played with.

You mean that if I really, really, really, love my velveteen rabbit enough that someday it will really will become real?

That said, the story of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams is a classic and deservedly so, because it shows how human love and affection can be imparted to what is an inanimate object in a fictional tale, and it’s impossible to read that story to a child without there being a bit of a tear in one’s own eye. We humans are capable of feeling affection for animate beings like puppies and kittens and by extension their inanimate imitations.

Children though don’t … Read the rest

Fantasy spreads until it pervades everything…… Read the rest

Grace Lavery back in June explaining how it really really is true that you can change sex.

Berkeley News: Your work in trans feminist studies focuses on the belief that transition works — that it is truly possible to change sex. Can you talk more about what you’ve found in your research? Did you begin to explore the idea during your own transition?

Grace Lavery: I suppose, on some level, I’m bound to cop to that: Research is me-search, as they say. I think what my research has come to demonstrate is that for the past 150 years or so, roughly since the time that people started performing transition or transitioning or whatever you want to call it, there