Jonah Mix has an absolute stemwinder of a piece on the hot fashion of guys lolling around on Twitter explaining how complicated biology is. I stashed a couple of sentences to remember and then I gave up because it was all that good.

It’s so easy to get sucked into this debate, to get that hot indignation in your stomach that comes when a foolish claim is so proudly asserted. And I don’t even have skin in the game — binary or not, my sex will still land me squarely in the “paid more, raped less” category.

That’s the first one I stashed, that second sentence.

The point is, debating “what is a woman, really?” is a luxury, given … Read the rest

Good grief. She’s still at it. She announces in this that Comey is “a dirty cop.” I despise the way Comey handled the emails issue, but needless to say that’s not what Sanders is talking about.

Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation notes several instances where Pres. Trump pressured his top aides to lie or mislead. One day after the president fired FBI Director James Comey, @PressSec told reporters Comey no longer had the confidence of Trump and other people. pic.twitter.com/8EiLL2Dn5E

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) April 19, 2019

I suppose I shouldn’t bother being surprised. Stephanopoulos explained it this morning: she was under oath when she admitted lying to Mueller’s people (admitted to Mueller’s people that she lied); she’s not under … Read the rest

What do we mean by “above the law”?

I’m reading an Atlantic piece on the Mueller report as impeachment referral, and I stop at this paragraph:

But there is another, simpler way to understand Mueller’s report. A footnote spells out that a criminal investigation could ultimately result in charges being brought either after a president has been removed from office by the process of impeachment or after he has left office. Mueller explicitly rejected the argument of Trump’s lawyers that a president could not be guilty of obstruction of justice for the conduct in question: “The protection of the criminal justice system from corrupt acts by any person—including the President—accords with the fundamental principle of our government that ‘[n]o

A slide from a talk at a recent European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Rome:

Notice anything?

It’s…everything. It’s a long list of feelings and behaviors that most people experience or perform at least occasionally (diagnosed conditions apart). Feeling lonely, feeling guilty, feeling of not fitting in – all could be gender dysphoria! Or, could be normal ups and downs of life. It’s like saying having two feet could be a sign of gender dysphoria.

This is not about helping people who feel acute discomfort with their gender or their sex, it’s about recruiting more people into a Movement. It’s about promoting and encouraging and bigging up a fashion. It’s a branch of advertising – got … Read the rest

The report paints an ugly picture.

The White House that emerges from more than 400 pages of Mr. Mueller’s report is a hotbed of conflict infused by a culture of dishonesty — defined by a president who lies to the public and his own staff, then tries to get his aides to lie for him. Mr. Trump repeatedly threatened to fire lieutenants who did not carry out his wishes while they repeatedly threatened to resign rather than cross lines of propriety or law.

At one juncture after another, Mr. Trump made his troubles worse, giving in to anger and grievance and lashing out in ways that turned advisers into witnesses against him. He was saved from an accusation of

The Guardian is excited about a new movie.

Watch the trailer for Seahorse, a new feature-length documentary produced in association with the Guardian, about one trans man’s pioneering quest to start his own family. This is the story of the dad who gave birth.

Freddy is 30 and yearns to start a family but for him this ordinary desire comes with unique challenges. He is a gay transgender man. Deciding to carry his own baby took years of soul searching, but nothing could prepare him for the reality of pregnancy, as both a physical experience and one that challenges society’s fundamental understanding of gender, parenthood and family.

In other words, a woman had a baby. Stop the presses!… Read the rest

Guest post by Claire Ramsey.

I have not been able to reconcile the competing ideas, feelings, and pieces of knowledge in my mind since the fire at Notre Dame in Paris was in the news.

In 2012 an act of white terrorism drove me to engage in anti-racism learning and action, when Trayvon Martin was murdered in cold blood by a domestic terrorist merely because he was Black. I could not go on living with the hatred and violence generated by white supremacy. Studying, reading, and learning have all offered compelling evidence that white people in the US, and particularly white women, are the only ones who can dismantle racism. We need to listen to Black voices, we need … Read the rest

The footage of the race is shocking. How people can cheer this on confounds me.

… Read the rest

Mir Sabbir reports from Dhaka:

Nusrat Jahan Rafi was doused with kerosene and set on fire at her school in Bangladesh. Less than two weeks earlier, she had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her headmaster.

Her courage in speaking out against sexual assault, her death five days after being set alight and everything that happened in-between has gripped Bangladesh and brought attention to the vulnerability of sexual harassment victims in this conservative South Asian country.

The vulnerability of female people in general.

“Conservative” isn’t really the right word for setting a woman on fire because she reported sexual abuse. (I’m going out on a limb here and surmising that “harassment” also doesn’t quite cover what the headmaster did.) … Read the rest

On a different part of the planet:

One of four women who was recently subjected to a brutal public lashing by armed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan has spoken about her experience, amid an increase of violent punishments given to those violating its strict interpretation of religious law.

Aziza, who like many other Afghan women only uses one name, was rounded up by the Taliban’s shadow police for being out of her house without her husband and not being fully veiled. She was beaten so badly she lost consciousness.

Not punishments and not any kind of police, just a group of criminal men committing extreme violence against a woman.

Aziza said she was arrested by armed Taliban fighters after they

Eugene Scott at the Post points out that Trump tweeted about Notre Dame twice but had said nothing about the three Louisiana black churches that burned down.

On Tuesday, state authorities charged Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old white man and the son of the local police deputy, with hate crimes in the Louisiana church attacks. He was earlier charged with arson.

Of course, the churches in Louisiana are significantly younger than Notre Dame. But they also have a rich history and played a significant role in St. Landry Parish’s black community. At least one hosts a cemetery containing graves of black people enslaved in Louisiana.

“My church has a lot of history,” the Rev. Gerald Toussaint of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church,

Spare a thought for the flying trans people.

Flying while transgender — a term that increasingly includes not just those who are male or female but also those who identify as both or neither, like me — is undeniably improving.

So transgender means being the sex opposite the one “assigned at birth” and being neither sex and being both sexes. So it’s entirely incoherent. Could its real meaning be just “more special than you”?

Anyway, at least the flying part is improving. Because? Airlines no longer give pink drinks to women and blue drinks to men? But they’ve never done that. It’s hard to see what difference it could make.

Last month, United Airlines expanded its gender options:

https://twitter.com/AliceStrudel/status/1118419181781815301… Read the rest