Republican slapstick:

In an email on Monday morning, the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced that its chairman, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), presented Trump with its first-ever “Champion for Freedom Award.” The NRSC said that the award is given to conservative leaders who work “tirelessly” to “stop the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”

…

Trump was handed the award on the same weekend that he rambled on about his usual grievances at the RNC’s spring donor retreat while delivering remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The former president, however, reportedly saved his most incendiary insults for McConnell, who he derided as a “dumb son of a bitch” for not opposing the November election results.

Well it doesn’t get much more freedom than that.… Read the rest

Well, no.

https://twitter.com/TessTanenbaum/status/1381025486059360258

Where to begin. “Gender affirming care” isn’t a medical thing, it’s a political thing disguised as medical. There’s no such thing as “gender affirming care.” Saying he means it “in the most literal and serious sense” is ludicrous: not prescribing cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers can’t possibly be seen as literal (and serious) genocide. It’s not even literal withholding of life-saving medical care, which itself couldn’t be called genocide without a lot of other factors added. It’s not even that, and on the contrary, it’s intended to avoid risky interventions in natural puberty. There’s a heated debate about whether cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are harmless or not, about whether they’re harmful or not, about whether they … Read the rest

Peter Tatchell orders women to let men into spaces reserved for us.

Excluding trans women from women’s spaces because of physical or sexual violence by a tiny unrepresentative minority is like banning all Muslims because of terrorist acts by a handful of extremists. SO WRONG!

So then not allowing men into women’s spaces because of violence by a minority is also like “banning all Muslims because of terrorist acts by a handful of extremists”? So then women don’t have a right to women-only spaces at all, ever, no matter what? Do women have to give birth in public then? Do we all have to do everything in public and leave all our doors and windows open?

In other words Peter … Read the rest

Be more inclusive by never mentioning mothers or fathers.

Schools and sporting groups in Victoria will be told to  avoid terms like “mum”, “dad”, “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” as part of a push to curb the dropout and suicide rates of LGBTQI+ young people.

Here’s a surprising fact: lesbians and gay men can have mothers and fathers. I don’t think lesbians and gay men object to the words “mother” and “father.” (I don’t know why schools are talking about “mum” and “dad” instead of “mother” and “father”; mum and dad are personal names, which schools shouldn’t be using for anyone, because it’s intrusive and weird. “Mum” and “dad” are not nouns, they’re family nicknames.)

The North Western Melbourne Primary Health

… Read the rest

Genevive Gluck at Glinner’s site on the core reversal:

In 2018, Me Too campaigner Rose McGowan was at a Barnes and Noble bookshop in New York promoting her memoir Brave, which details the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. During a question and answer session, as Rose was discussing her grief and recovery, a trans-identified male heckled her from the crowd, saying, “We get raped more often. We go through domestic violence more often. Trans women are in men’s prisons, and what have you done for them?”

The viral video depicts a trans-identifying male with hair dyed pink, wearing a pale pink hoodie, standing among a crowd of seated patrons

… Read the rest

The magic is gone.

Several Republican leaders on Sunday expressed concern at incendiary comments made by former President Donald Trump during a speech Saturday night at a Republican National Committee donor retreat.

Incendiary comments were fine as long as he was squatting in the White House, but now that he’s the official loser, they’re discovering an uncomfortable level of heat.

The former president went off-script in a roughly 50-minute keynote speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, ripping into Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, even calling him a “dumb son of a bitch.” Trump also took aim at former Vice President Mike Pence — saying he was “disappointed” in him for not fighting the certification of the

… Read the rest

Ruth Smeeth, CEO of Index on Censorship, complains of polarization…a complaint I always find rather dull and beside the point. “X is for torture and Y is against it; oh no the polarization!” It seems especially beside the point for an organization whose title and purpose is to oppose censorship. It’s not literal censorship to say stop being so polar, but it is a form of pressure to say different things in a different way.

Of course, the reality is this has always been part of our political discourse. There is a healthy tradition of challenge in our public space. But…my concern is it is no longer on the fringes of our national conversations, it now dominates and the

… Read the rest

Young Americans for Freedom made the mistake of sneering at the observation that racism is built into many US highways, thus giving a lot of people the opportunity to educate onlookers about the well-documented fact that racism is built into many US highways. Own goal.

This is not parody. pic.twitter.com/bzbplAnfqO

— YAF (@yaf) April 10, 2021

No, they’re right, it’s not parody, and it’s true.

Not just in NYC. In Denver, I-70 cut off a community called Swansea from the rest of the city

— Amy H (@TheRufusFiles) April 11, 2021

That thing about roads designed not to allow buses? That’s closely tied to voter suppression, too. The suppressionist bills that limit voting places are helped along by extra difficulty … Read the rest

He’s still alive, but it was a near thing.

A second lieutenant in the US army is suing two Virginia police officers over a traffic stop last December in which the officers drew their guns, pointed them at him and used a slang term to suggest he was facing execution before pepper-spraying him and knocking him to the ground.

Body camera footage shows Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, dressed in uniform and with his hands held in the air outside the driver’s window as he tells the armed officers he is “honestly afraid to get out” of his SUV.

But they must have had a good reason for the traffic stop, right?

No.

Daniel Crocker, a Windsor

… Read the rest

At A Blog of One’s Own:

On 11 March, Legal Feminist (a collective of feminist lawyers, of which I am a member: tweeting from @legalfeminist and blogging at legalfeminst.org.uk) tweeted this:

Torrey Peters, who identifies as a woman, has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Peters wrote this: pic.twitter.com/cguNCJX9a2

— Legal Feminist (@legalfeminist) March 11, 2021

That’s from a pre-prize novella Peters wrote called The Masker.

The Masker isn’t a one-off: there’s a genre. It’s called “sissy porn,” and “forced feminisation” is a popular trope among aficionados^[2]. It is a manifestation of a phenomenon known as autogynephilia: a tendency in some heterosexual males to be aroused by the thought or image of themselves as

… Read the rest

They just will not report on this subject honestly.

A protest against trans health-care scheduled this weekend in downtown Vancouver has reignited a debate pitting the protection of vulnerable youth against the right to free speech.

It’s not a “protest against trans health-care.” Nobody is campaigning to prevent trans people from getting health care. The issue is not health care at all, it’s health-compromising body modifications to match the sex one is not. It’s also not a matter of trying to block the protection of vulnerable youth. Nobody is demanding the free speech right to keep vulnerable youth from being protected.

Vancouver social justice lawyer Adrienne Smith fears the April 10 event will include transphobic rhetoric that contributes

… Read the rest

Andy Lewis on confusion between ontology and epistemology of sex

Much confusion appears to exist in popular discussion about the nature of sex. This has political importance at the moment, most visibly in recognition of people with trans identities in law and society. Confusions abound around conflations of the terms sex and gender, but, most fundamentally, about what a sex is, and what it means for an organism, animal or human, to have a sex. What is a sexed body? How can we tell what sex an organism is? Clear responses to these questions are so often lacking. And without that, policy, law and social arrangements are likely to be incoherent and unjust.

Much of that lack of clarity is … Read the rest

McKinnon did his CNN bit. He’s highly excited.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380896144801341441

CNN calls him Associate Professor of Philosophy at College of Charleston, which is misleading since he’s “quit” [or been told to quit or be fired, or just plain been fired] and will be gone as of May 15 and has been on sabbatical and then medical leave all this year.

His fans are gloating at his…erm…whatever this is.

https://twitter.com/DaniD2021/status/1380897441025814534

Anyway. Point is, things have to be arranged to suit McKinnon. That’s all you need to understand about trans women in sport.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380903237277077505

There you go. If transgender people had their own sports then McKinnon would literally have no one to race against, and we can’t have that, so all of … Read the rest

Oh look, a provocation from Dawkins that doesn’t make me roll my eyes.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 10, 2021

Been discussing for several years now. Progress slow.

"the argument that we cannot say what an adult is because of the difference between a biological and legal definition sounds like a last ditch plea in a paedophile trial."
Spot on!

— Bea Jaspert (@hogotheforsaken) April 10, 2021

https://twitter.com/JudyWeb92176381/status/1380863145883930626

It’s outrageous that children are … Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on The most extreme elements.

A compromise is supposed to be a mutual acceptance of terms. A deal. It’s expected that each party give something up to achieve a result beneficial to everyone. The phrase a “compromise on the rights of women” implies that it’s only women – as usual – who are expected to give anything up and what they’re expected to give up is – as usual – their rights.

This is not a compromise as the word is generally understood. Sullivan uses it to make disagreement seem unreasonable and himself the sole arbiter of reason.

That much is obvious. What’s not, apparently, is that negotiation isn’t really about making compromises, it’s … Read the rest

This kind of crap.

https://twitter.com/MagsVisaggs/status/1380198966348877825 https://twitter.com/MagsVisaggs/status/1380199252379496451

No you’re not, because I for one did say it and you didn’t and you can’t, because you don’t know where I am and because it’s hardly worth it to travel from wherever you are and because there’s no such thing as “period diarrhea” and because if there were you wouldn’t be keeping it in a tub now would you.

Anyway. This. This is why the whole idea is so fucked up. The belief that women can’t function in the world because [gasp] they have periods is one of the pretexts for subordinating and confining us for however many years it’s been. To see fetishizing fantasizing men claiming they’re menstruating and that as … Read the rest

It takes my breath away sometimes to see with what relaxed confidence some men will tell women to compromise on our rights. Andrew Sullivan is one such man.

If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who

… Read the rest

This is very bad news: Amazon succeeded in blocking the union.

Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.

That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.

The union said it would challenge the results.

It accused Amazon of interfering with the right of employees to vote in a “free and fair election”, including by lying to staff about the implications of the vote in mandatory staff meetings and pushing the postal service to install a mailbox on company grounds in an effort to monitor the vote.

“Amazon has

… Read the rest

“Rachel” McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy is working his final weeks at the College of Charleston and still finding time to abuse a student on Twitter. It’s almost as if he’s just not a very nice man.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380316558912815113 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380317893372620800 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380479516993335307

Selina Soule was of course not suing to ban trans women from sport, she was suing to keep males from competing in women’s sport.

But also, this is a man in his late 30s, a professor, holding a first year student up to ridicule on Twitter, and lying about her in the process.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380480258424631302 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380480761711710208

I guess Rhys McKinnon wants bullying a teenage girl on Twitter to be his legacy at 39. Yikes.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380481705866362883

Yes definitely the fact that he never … Read the rest

Mm. Progressive.

https://twitter.com/Slatzism/status/1380295311399264259

More on “Jessica Marie” Hann from March 2019:

Desert Hot Springs, California. Jason Michael Hann was convicted of senselessly murdering his infant daughter and son, and abandoning their bodies in storage units. At the time of his arrest, he was found to be subjecting a third infant, his son, to life-threatening harm. Now on death row, the 45-year-old serial baby killer says he identifies as a woman, and is demanding that the state of California approve him for gender-affirming surgery to supplement the bras, makeup and hair-styling tools he is permitted to use.

In 1999, Mr Hann was living in Vermont with Krissy Lynn Werntz, the mother of his children, when he beat their infant son,

… Read the rest