The perils of being too friendly.

Richard Dawkins Claims, Yet Again, That a Trans Woman Is “Not a Woman” https://t.co/UJq1JIfZqa pic.twitter.com/e4ST3NFfuL

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) October 31, 2021

Biologist claims “yet again” that a man is not a woman. Scandalous!

Sums it up with great clarity.

2 / Either – – It’s OK if lesbians get assaulted. – OR: There is a priest class of human who uniquely amongst humans could never and would never abuse anyone (i.e. that those women are lying).

3/ – OR: The assaults did and do happen, but overall it is better to keep quiet for the sake of protecting a marginalised community. We’ve seen this before.

4/ When women and children reported abuse in the Catholic church, many felt that ‘christians don’t do that’, it was more important to not give the church a bad name etc. When rape was reported in the SWP those loyal to the party protected the party by

A chat with Richard Dawkins:

His considerable reputation as an evolutionary biologist, atheist and intellectual was forged in the hot cauldron of public debate. With forceful clarity and occasional rattiness, he has for decades gone about slaughtering sacred cows like a bloodthirsty butcher. So if Dawkins is now afraid to speak his mind, I’m not sure where that leaves the rest of us. “I self-censor,” he admits. “More so in recent years.” Why? “It’s not a thing I’ve done throughout my life, I’ve always spoken my mind openly. But we’re now in a time when if you do speak your mind openly, you are at risk of being picked up and condemned.”

Well, we’re in a time where Twitter … Read the rest

“Socialist workers” forsooth. Trotsky would spurn them. Behold SWP response to letter from Woman’s Place UK.

Trans people are facing a barrage of attacks. 

No they’re not. Some people disagree with their belief system, and explain why; that’s not an attack, let alone a barrage of them.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) stands with the oppressed and unequivocally says, “Trans women are women,” and, “Trans men are men.” Trans people have the right to organise against their oppression and the right to protest against it. We stood in solidarity with the trans students and workers at the University of Sussex who were rightly outraged by Kathleen Stock’s views. 

They’re not oppressed though. Not believing wild claims about the self … Read the rest

The BBC has internal networks of inquisitors.

It has that statue of Orwell with the now too familiar admonition: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Yes and no: people don’t want to hear “You’re ugly” and it’s not an important kind of liberty to say it. But that’s a quibble.

I’ve always felt that particular line stands for something important about the way journalism should be done.

I thought of it again last week, when a senior figure told me about ‘a climate of fear’ at the Corporation, surrounding stories on race and on transgender issues. A small but significant number of the BBC’s staff

Bossy little shits at another university order everyone to be more twanz-incloosivv more of the time.

Students and staff at Leeds University have called on their vice-chancellor and senior employees to include gender pronouns when introducing themselves in meetings.

I call on those students and staff to sit down and shut up.

They also said that the vice-chancellor, Simone Buitendijk, should state her preferred gender pronouns in her email signature. Both measures are designed to show support for the transgender community.

The university was accused of having “a deeply entrenched culture of transphobia” in a letter signed by LGBT staff and student groups, as well as by the Leeds branch of the University and College Union (UCU).

Because people don’t … Read the rest

Girl Guides? Really? Really?

This week is #AceWeek – a time to raise awareness and understanding of the asexual community. So here’s a shout-out to all of our asexual volunteers and members – thank you for everything you do in Girlguiding. pic.twitter.com/XUdjpbAK1s

— Girlguiding (@Girlguiding) October 28, 2021

What does this have to do with Girl Guides? (In the US called Girl Scouts.) Nothing nothing nothing nothing.

I suppose this nonsense is Stonewall yet again.

Earlier this year we launched our new diversity and inclusion strategic plan so Girlguiding can be a place where everyone feels welcome, free to be themselves and has an equal sense of belonging. Please be respectful whilst communicating on our social media pages.

— Girlguiding

Plotting the coup:

On 4 January, the conservative lawyer John Eastman was summoned to the Oval Office to meet Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Within 48 hours, Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election would formally be certified by Congress, sealing Trump’s fate and removing him from the White House.

And Trump was hell-bent on stopping the certification, as if he had every right in the world to do that.

Eastman, who had a decades-long reputation as a prominent conservative law professor, had already prepared a two-page memo in which he had outlined an incendiary scenario under which Pence, presiding over the joint session of Congress that was to be convened on 6 January, effectively overrides the

Now here’s a guy who spells it all the way out, which they mostly avoid doing, probably because it shows too clearly how stupid the whole thing is.

Man tells woman that men who call themselves women are “far less powerful as a group” than women and men.

One, it’s a sly move to say “than you or I” as if women and men were on a level when it comes to power. Women and men are not in the same group when it comes to evaluating power, status, rights, freedoms, fairness, basic respect. Women don’t have the same power and status and rights and freedoms as men have.

Two, and most obviously, no of course men are not … Read the rest

They had a plan.

On the night before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Washington Post reporter Robert Costa walked through the streets of D.C., surrounded by a throng of Trump supporters. He says he remembers a particular energy in the crowd that night.

…

Costa’s new book Peril, which he co-wrote with journalist Bob Woodward, centers on President Trump’s final days in office — specifically the events leading up to and following the Capitol siege.

As the crowd agitated outside, Costa says, inside a “war room” at the nearby Willard hotel, Trump lawyers and allies, including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, were laying out a strategy to overturn the

I have left this question unasked for too long.

Why does Zuckerberg wear his hair like that?

Not ok.… Read the rest

Via Ex-Muslims of North America, who captioned it “Queer eye for the Islamic guy.”… Read the rest

On the other hand, Justin Weinberg of Daily Nous also reports on Kathleen’s resignation, and to my surprise the comments are mostly not “she had it coming.” Quite the reverse. And the approval rate for the comments is high too.

The warmest comment:

Kathleen will no doubt thrive outside of academia. Any serious philosopher, however, should feel deep embarrassment and shame at how Kathleen has been treated by the profession, if I may speak with such generality. Her decision comes after many years of personal abuse, ostracisation, attempted blacklisting, wilful misrepresentation, and defamation, and that is just from philosophers, never mind the ‘protesters’.

Three factors stand out. First, a good deal of male philosophers appear to have outsourced their morals

The Guardian reports on Kathleen Stock’s resignation from Sussex, and gives the copious last word to…Pink News. Yes really.

The philosophy professor was awarded an OBE in the 2021 new year honours list for services to higher education.

But hundreds of academics criticised the decision, signing an open letter that criticised Stock’s comments on transgender and gender non-conforming people.

The link is to Pink News.

The letter claimed her “harmful rhetoric” about transgender and gender non-conforming people reinforced “the patriarchal status quo”.

“Academic freedom comes with responsibility; we should not use that freedom to harm people, particularly the more vulnerable members of our community,” the letter added.

“Conflating concern about the harms of Stock’s work with threats to academic

Julie Bindel underlines that the bullying of Kathleen Stock is intended as a warning to all of us.

Claims that Stock is a ‘transphobe’ are not only unfounded but wilfully misguided. Stock is being punished not for her views on transgender issues, but for standing her ground in the face of persistent and sadistic bullying over sex-based rights, and a belief in the immutability of biology.

In other words she was supposed to take it all back, and she refused, so she had to be made an example.

Women are supposed to cave in. Patriarchy works not by all men holding a gun to the heads of all women, but by public displays of male power, such as the treatment

Owen Jones is providing the mirth for today.

No response from Keir Starmer's team so far, except that he has unfollowed me on Twitter over this tweet. https://t.co/7l401O3bOX

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) October 28, 2021

The world totters on its axis – the top dog in the Labour party has unfollowed the great Owen Jones!

Updating to add:

What a loathsome prick.

'Queer and trans students united, never to be defeated!!'

LGBT+ students at the University of Sussex have been victorious in their peaceful protest against the employment of philosophy professor and LGB Alliance trustee Kathleen Stockhttps://t.co/JaksEOEZs8

— Vic Parsons (they/them) (@vicparsons_) October 28, 2021

He wrote the Pink News story. The title is as stupid as his tweet.

Anti-trans professor Kathleen Stock quits Sussex university in ‘massive win for LGBT+ students’

She’s not “anti-trans.” How is it a win for L students to bully an L professor out? How is it a win for LGB students to bully an L professor out? How is the win “massive”? More likely James Barry is right that Sussex … Read the rest

More book-sniffing:

A Republican state lawmaker has launched an investigation into Texas school districts over the type of books they have, particularly if they pertain to race or sexuality or “make students feel discomfort.”

State Rep. Matt Krause, in his role as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an Oct. 25 letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.

Krause’s letter provides a 16-page list of about 850 book titles and asks the districts if they have these books, how many copies they have and how much money they spent on the books.

I don’t think state legislators are supposed … Read the rest

Meanwhile Peter Tatchell steps up.

.@BBCNews has published a demonising article suggesting that a significant number of trans women are pressuring lesbians to have sex with them. This is like demonising all Muslims because a handful are terrorists. Please protest to the BBC. Sign here: https://t.co/MV1KuegCbf pic.twitter.com/CmKYN6H8UA

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) October 28, 2021

Notice that “a significant number of” isn’t the same as “all” yet he leaps from the first to the second for his stupid analogy. Also notice how glibly he simply shrugs off the part about men pressuring lesbians for sex. Not a problem for Peter so he’s not going to take it seriously or even discuss it honestly, in fact he’s going to try to … Read the rest

Joan Smith on Sussex’s failure to hang on to Kathleen Stock:

The Vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, has written to all staff at Sussex, insisting that the university ‘has vigorously and unequivocally defended [Stock’s] right to exercise her academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech, free from bullying and harassment of any kind’.

Stock has responded by saying that the university leadership’s approach ‘more recently has been admirable and decent’, leaving open the question of what it did when she was first targeted. Because Stock and other gender critical academics, such as Professor Jo Phoenix of the Open University, have faced slurs and bullying for at least two years — so much so that Phoenix is raising funds to take the OU