More on the Laurel Hubbard question aka the trans women competing against women in sport question:

Hubbard is a transgender athlete, who as a male named Gavin did not make a ripple on the international stage until becoming a woman in her mid‑30s. Now, though, Hubbard is a realistic contender for an Olympic medal and creating a tsunami of protests from women who fear she has an unfair advantage because of the residual benefits of being a male. As the Australian weightlifter Deborah Acason put it: “I feel that if it’s not even, why are we doing the sport?” The Samoan prime minister has also weighed in.

The women don’t so much fear Hubbard has an unfair advantage as know… Read the rest

Aw, trouble in paradise.

Tracie Harris, Jen Peeples & Clare Wuellner got on YouTube to discuss the right-ward slide of the Atheist Community of Austin, and their experiences with the transphobic takeover of that organization.

You may have noticed that FtB hosts The Atheist Experience, the blog for the call-in show of the ACA. Although I’m sure the blog isn’t a major contributor to their popularity — it’s primarily driven by YouTube traffic — it does get a good number of comments each week.

We’re currently discussing dropping the blog from our network in our backchannel, because it has drifted into incompatibility with our mission statement, which I’ll remind you is:

Freethoughtblogs is an open platform for freethought

At Inside Higher Ed today:

How should the discipline of philosophy respond to current discussions of sex and gender identity?

Recent conversations among academic philosophers have given traction to proposals to censure or silence colleagues who advocate certain positions in these discussions, such as skepticism about the concept of gender identity or opposition to replacing biological sex with gender identity in institutional policy making. Those who support such sanctioning have appealed to various considerations, among them the contention that these positions call into question the identities of trans people, thereby making our discipline less open and welcoming to all.

We, all scholars in philosophy at universities in Europe, North America and Australia, oppose such sanctioning. The proposed measures,

Is it hypnosis? Terror? Room 101? Hostage taking?

The Vancouver Dyke March assures us it is “centering” trans people. Cool. Next up: anti-racism march to center white people. Poor People’s March to center billionaires. Union march to center scabs. Atheist march to center Westboro Baptists.

In a bid to stamp out trans-misogyny and transphobia, the Vancouver Dyke March is centring the voices of trans people at this year’s march, which takes place Aug. 3, in East Vancouver.

Actual dykes can just stfu, right?

Dannielle Livengood, secretary treasurer of the Dyke March said the group invited WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre to be grand marshals of the march, because it admires how the centre has evolved to include trans, non-binary and

Last month the Australian Associated Press reported:

Trans, gender diverse and intersex Victorians will no longer need to have gender reassignment surgery in order to change the sex on their birth certificate, under proposed new laws.

The state Labor government will on Tuesday introduce a bill to parliament which, if passed, will allow applicants to self-nominate the sex listed on their birth registration as male, female or any other gender diverse or non-binary descriptor of their own choice.

I wonder how the “any other gender diverse or non-binary descriptor of their own choice” is evaluated. It’s their own choice but it has to be gender diverse or non-binary – so is there a master list of approved terms somewhere? … Read the rest

It was a big party. They had a lot of fun.

The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president’s rally in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd.

His voters and supporters were having fun. The “Send her back” chant directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values.

What values? The values of racist contempt, white triumphalism, belligerent patriotism, paranoid nationalism, generalized anger.

To watch raucous crowds of (mostly) white Americans unite in frenzied hatred of a black woman — to watch them cast her as a cancer on the body

Nell Painter in the Guardian:

In the 1970s, I thought changes in US laws and customs had put cries of “get out” and “go home” to rest. I thought the legislation of the 1960s on immigration, civil rights and access to the vote had put all that behind us, in law, at least, if not totally in practice. I thought the United States had turned a corner, had moved away from “this is a white man’s country” and relegated “go back to where you came from” to schoolyard taunts.

I didn’t quite think that, but I thought the changes and legislation had made the more overt behavior more shameful and thus less practiced in public.

Trump has made us

It wouldn’t matter, except that he’s a Labour Councillor.

https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152497636110458881

https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152556948149166081

But what is “one’s identity”? The first definition via Google is “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.” The first in the Concise Oxford is “the quality or condition of being a specified person or thing.” (The Concise Oxford is 1672 large closely-printed pages, so it’s not all that concise.) In other words the first definition is factual. So…trans women are trans women, but that doesn’t mean they are women, and in fact they’re not women, they’re men who “identify” (in a different and rather nebulous sense) as women.

So what are we talking about when we talk about being respectful of one’s identity? … Read the rest

In honor of the 50th anniversary…

(The anniversary bit is the last few seconds.)… Read the rest

Two days ago:

Six years ago:

… Read the rest

The ruling that lifted the publication ban in the Yaniv hearing is available for our reading pleasure. It presents the reasons for lifting the ban.

In the Original Decision, I reviewed Ms. Yaniv’s privacy interests and found that they  were complex. I identified factors weighing both for and against a publication ban. Ultimately, I decided to err on the side of protecting Ms. Yaniv’s privacy because, once that is lost, it could  not be regained. The primary factor which tipped the balance in favour of this outcome was Ms.  Yaniv’s assertion that she faced threats and harassment which would escalate if she was  exposed as the complainant in these proceedings: para. 48. I expressly found, however, that if  new

One wrong undone:

A man who was sacked by the supermarket chain Asda for sharing a video clip of the comedian Billy Connolly mocking religion on social media has been reinstated.

Brian Leach was dismissed last month after a colleague complained that a sketch he shared, in which Connolly said “religion is over” and called suicide bombers “wankers”, was anti-Islamic.

He shared the sketch on Facebook, I think in a friends-only post. He didn’t slap it up in the break room at work, so I fail to see how it’s any of his colleague’s business at all, let alone their employer’s.

The National Secular Society has been in touch with Mr Leach throughout an internal appeals process and has

Brendan O’Neill adds his take on the Yaniv Frolics:

A born male who identifies as female, and whose male genitalia is still intact, is suing female-only waxers on the basis that their refusal to wax his bollocks – sorry, her bollocks – is an act of discrimination. Yes, this person believes that because he identifies as female he should therefore have access to every female service, including the most intimate female services. Any female beautician who refuses to tend to his testicles is being ‘transphobic’, apparently, because they are denying his womanhood. Even though he has a penis. And testicles. And is a man. That’s hate speech, I know.

It’s parody-leftism, it’s made for people like O’Neill, and … Read the rest

A BC human rights tribunal has been hearing Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv’s complaint that a woman who did genital waxing for women out of her living room refused to wax Yaniv’s balls. It got rowdy.

At one point, the complainant compared the business owner to a neo-Nazi. The lawyer for the business owner accused the complainant of engaging in “half-truths and fabrications.” Tribunal adjudicator Devyn Cousineau frequently had to interject to maintain decorum and to keep the hearing from careening off course.

But a substantive question remained at the core of the raucous daylong hearing: should a business be allowed to deny service on the basis of gender identity?

But that is not the substantive question. That’s pretty much the opposite … Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on Watch for the nod.

I’ve been talking and writing about the breaking of checks and balances in the tech industry for a couple of years and there’s a possibly useful analogy to politics. We know that checks and balances aren’t worth anything now but I think that’s because we’ve forgotten what checks and balances are.

In the tech industry, we’ve got used to everyone stealing and misusing our data in return for supplying us with things we probably don’t really want in the first place. We’ve got used to DRM being the norm so that we don’t own any of the things we buy (including things like vehicles and houses as well as … Read the rest