The Guardian version:

A transgender woman found guilty of raping two women before transitioning has been jailed for eight years.

Is he a transgender woman though? Even in their terms? He “transitioned” after he was arrested. Does even the Guardian really think he really thinks he’s a woman?

Isla Bryson was convicted last month of raping two women – one in Clydebank in 2016 and one in Glasgow in 2019 – while still a man known as Adam Graham.

“while still a man” ffs. He didn’t magically change into a woman – he tried to get away with his sexual violence against women by claiming to be a woman.

She was found guilty of two charges of rape in January after a six-day trial at the high court in Glasgow.

Pronouns über alles.

The victim said: “I said to stop but he (Bryson) just kept on going, and that’s when I just closed my eyes and I am doing what he wanted to do.”

Again with the helpful “he (Bryson)” as if we might not know the victim meant Bryson.

On Tuesday, Lord Scott said Bryson was, in fact, “preying on these two women because of their vulnerability and raped them in their own homes where they were entitled to feel safe”.

Addressing Bryson, he added: “You are not at the stage of accepting what you did or acknowledging the serious harm you inflicted on two women.”

That kind of woman doesn’t matter though. It’s only the kind like Bryson who matter.

ITV on that rapist fella:

A transgender rapist who raped two women has been jailed for eight years at the High Court in Edinburgh.

Isla Bryson, from Clydebank, was sentenced to eight years in prison with a further three years on licence.

…

The 31-year-old was convicted last month of raping two women: one in Clydebank in 2016; and one in Drumchapel, Glasgow, in 2019; committing the offences while known as Adam Graham.

That is, committing the crimes before changing his male name to a female one.

Bryson met both the victims online, with prosecutors saying Bryson “preyed” on vulnerable women.

The case sparked an uproar after Bryson was initially housed in an all-female prison before being moved to the male estate following the outcry.

Note the frightened avoidance of the pronoun, a part of speech whose purpose is to avoid the clumsy awkwardness of repeating the name over and over.

Then there’s a bit where the reporter actually corrects the victim for saying “he.”

The second victim, who gave evidence via live video-link, told the court Bryson continued to have sex with her after she said stop.

The victim’s police statement said Bryson instead told her to “stay there” because “he [Bryson] wasn’t finished”. The victim told the court: “I said to stop but he [Bryson] just kept on going, and that’s when I just closed my eyes and I am doing what he wanted to do.”

Oh gosh how impolite of her to call the man who raped her “he.”

H/t Alan Peakall

Trans epistemology:

In trans epistemology, statements that trans women who are convicted of violent crime will be barred from female prisons = statements that trans women are male predators. In trans epistemology the limiting clause “who are convicted of violent crime” becomes invisible, so that the statement becomes simply “trans women will be barred from female prisons.” Mind you, that is what ought to happen, but it’s not what the sentence Willoughby is fulminating about says. The sentence says one thing, and Willoughby claims it says quite another thing. That’s trans epistemology.

Simon Edge on the Guardian’s dereliction of duty:

If you fail to report on the biggest medical scandal of the century, even though the story is everywhere else, you are part of the cover-up. You are deliberately hiding the story from your readers, who may well treat you as their primary if not only news source.

This is inexcusable at the best of times, but all the more so when those most at risk in this scandal are more likely to read the Guardian than other newspapers. By your silence, you’re telling those vulnerable people there is no scandal.

You’re also effectively telling them that any stories they may hear elsewhere about a supposed scandal aren’t valid – because if they were valid, you’d have reported it, right? In other words, you’re reinforcing the narrative that this is all a culture war motivated by hatred.

This is dereliction of journalistic duty on a gargantuan scale. I can’t think of any parallel that comes close to it. And I can’t think of a greater gap between a newspaper’s self-righteous image of itself and the nasty, shabby reality.

The struggle continues. Why why why WHY won’t people remember to call this man “they” or “them” whenever they refer to him? WHY????

He’s not really beyond annoyed and upset though, he’s thrilled that he gets to rant in public about how oppressed and bullied he is because people can’t remember to call him “they.”

One piece of good news…or at least one piece of bad news finally thrown out.

That’s not all.

And…

Hoo-boy. Listen to this.

“We give puberty blockers to cancer patients so obviously they’re fine for trans kids right??”

Yes, absolutely, that’s definitely the way medical treatments are managed: if it’s prescribed for one thing then it can be prescribed for a different thing. All medications are completely interchangeable! Yippeee!

“Is Isla Bryson a man, or a woman?” Sophy Ridge asks.

Well I think Isla Bryson is at it if I’m honest, I think they’re a dangerous individual, a deceptive individual, I don’t think they’re a true trans woman, I think they’re trying to play the system for personal advantage; now what I can’t do, Sophie, is I can’t change law: the law, which has been the law for many many years, allows Isla Bryson to self-identify as a woman if they wish. I I I I think they’re at it, I don’t think they’re a genuine trans woman so I wouldn’t describe them in that way. What I would say is we need to be really careful in this discussion, because what we can’t do is roll back the rights for those trans women, the 99.9 percent who don’t commit any crime, to live their lives like you and I do, not interfering with anybody else’s rights. What we can’t do is regress and and and decide to curtail people’s rights because of one despicable individual, so no, I don’t believe Isla Bryson is truly and genuinely a trans woman.

I wonder where he got that 99.9 percent. I suspect he got it out of his ass. I also wonder how he thinks he knows it’s such a very very very rare thing for men to pretend to be trans women in order to play the system for personal advantage. I also wonder why he isn’t more concerned about the obvious danger to women this whole religion is.

One of the funnier ledes of all time:

Sex education has been suspended in Isle of Man schools after a drag queen allegedly told 11-year-olds that there are 73 genders.

That’s what we’re calling “sex education” these days?

Parents of pupils at Queen Elizabeth II High School in Peel, on the Isle of Man, have reported that Year 7 pupils were taught by a drag queen who told them there are 73 genders. 

And who parodied women in the process. Why are drag queens teaching anything?

Some 11-year-olds at the school were taught about oral and anal sex, while another group learned about sex change operations and were shown how skin graft taken from a girl’s arm could be used on an artificial penis, according to reports. 

When a penis and an anus love each other very much…

Originally a comment by Sackbut on ACTUALLY you’re the racist.

This is a complicated issue to me.

I read what Adams said, and I think the way it’s being presented in the media is inaccurate. I don’t like Adams, I think he’s proven himself to be a jerk in oh so many ways, but I think that one quoted bit has a point, even if it’s a strained one.

I used to serve as a moderator on a couple of online discussion forums. One issue that came up frequently was whether to deal with individual posts or with patterns of behavior. For instance, to tell if Oswald is attacking Beatrice in violation of the rules, do we need to show there is a single post from Oswald that constitutes an attack, or can we look at a whole bunch of posts from Oswald that indicate a pattern of harassment, even if the single posts don’t cross some line?

I think Adams’ comment seems sufficient as a “last straw” for the pattern of objectionable statements from him; in and of itself, it seems insufficient. As an advocate of the “pattern of harassment” viewpoint in the past, I’m OK with the newspapers deciding to drop his strip on that basis.

What did he say? He noted that a survey showed 53% of black people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white”, meaning that 47% disagreed or were unsure; if nearly half of black people don’t think it’s OK to be white, he claimed, then “that’s a hate group”. He elaborated further on that basis. It’s a strained point, it doesn’t acknowledge “unsure”, is misses the implications and history of “It’s OK to be white”, and it is insufficient basis for his “advice” to “stay the hell away”, but it’s a point. Mind you, I find casual designation of any group as a “hate group” problematic, given the way “hate group” is bandied about. But nearly half of a population saying “it’s not OK to be gay” or “it’s not OK to be atheist” or whatever would certainly be a concern.

I don’t agree with Musk’s statement, that US media is now “racist against whites and Asians”. Partly this is because I don’t think I share the same meaning of “racist” that he uses, and because I don’t think it’s the media that he’s really talking about. Jay Caspian Kang, an Asian writer who used to have an opinion column in the New York Times, wrote a number of cogent pieces about college admissions and high school admissions, and about how Asians were discriminated against in an effort to deal with Asian over-representation. I don’t think that’s “racism”, and I don’t think that’s the media. This discrimination was used as a wedge in the effort to dismantle affirmative action. Some opponents think affirmative action is a good thing badly implemented, some think it’s a bad thing in and of itself. Musk’s statement gives me the impression he thinks any means of taking race into account in school admissions is “racist” (in his terms) and therefore bad. I don’t agree either that it’s “racist” or that it’s bad, but I can see that many ways of taking race into account are clumsy and problematic.

Princeton historian Tera W. Hunter in The Nation:

When I was growing up, my Florida high school required me to endure a course called “Americanism vs. Communism.” I was hardly alone. Between 1962 and 1991, Florida mandated the class for all high school juniors or seniors in public schools. Each lesson had the same takeaway: “Americanism” was all good and “Communism” all bad.

No doubt an offspring of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. You’d think activities should be evaluated on their merits, right, not their location? It’s just dumb to label activities un-Swedish or un-Egyptian or un-Chinese or un-American. America has lots of activities, most of which it shares with other countries or land-masses – speaking of which, by Un-American activities do they mean un-United States activities on Un-American Continent activities? Either way there are lots of activities, and the same goes for all the other countries (let alone continents) on the planet.

“Americanism” v Communism is a jumble. Communism is a political and economic ideology, while “Americanism” is…what? Whatever US conservatives currently approve of, basically.

The concept of “Americanism” dates to the colonial era. It’s meant to identify the nation’s distinctive historical origins and democratic political idioms. Individuals and groups across the political spectrum have marshaled it for varying purposes, including an inclusive vision of citizenship, but also racist anti-immigrant campaigns during the 1920s . Its capaciousness shrank considerably during the Cold War as political conservatives used it to buttress exclusive ends. The rise of the Soviet Union and the fear of totalitarianism it provoked was an existential crisis that could only be neutered, they believed, with a contrast nationalist creed: Americanism.

Of course, Soviet communism was all mixed up with nationalism too, so waving the “Americanism” flag was perhaps not a total change of subject.

Concerned that high school students were vulnerable to a Soviet plot to control the world, the state of Florida designed the course to ensure no teenager be tempted by communism. It defined Americanism as: “the recognition of the truth that the inherent and fundamental rights of man are derived from God and not from governments, societies, dictators, kings or majorities.”

Uh…wrong. Not from god either. It’s true that the point of human rights is that they don’t [can’t, mustn’t] depend on government or majorities and the like – that the first step in protecting them is framing them as inherent in human beings rather than dependent on outside forces and thus vulnerable. They’re vulnerable anyway, but the idea of the inherent nature of them is a necessary starting point. “God” is just human beliefs dressed up in robes and a crown, no better than your local corrupt mayor driving a Lamborghini.

An all-white, mostly male advisory committee consisting of educators, legislators, and private citizens representing the Florida Bar Committee, Florida Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion designed the course starting in fall 1961.

What could possibly go wrong?

Reports from the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover’s, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in American and How to Fight it (1958), were prominently featured. Hoover also famously provided consultation and endorsed the course.

Awesome. From frying pan to fire in a single jump.

The Florida legislature formed a committee in the 1950s like the one Senator Joseph McCarthy led in Congress to annihilate “un-American” activities it labeled as communist. The Johns Committee, as it was known, first attacked Black Americans for supporting civil rights and then moved on to target lesbian and gay faculty in the early 1960s at the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (a historically Black college), which led to firings and forced resignations. If DeSantis is confused about the relevance of Queer theory to African American studies, this is a case book example of the Lavender Scare and the Red Scare intersecting to destroy presumed enemies of the state.

That’s interesting.

DeSantis is openly flaunting the resuscitation of a decades-old playbook. His “stop woke” indoctrination of school children and his attacks on the free speech and academic freedom of teachers and college professors are sustained through a bevy of restrictive policies. The governor signed a law last year that requires teachers instruct students about the “Victims of Communism,” which echoes the objectives of the course that I had to take. He supported the state’s designation of a new civics and government curriculum falsely claiming that the founding fathers did not believe in a strict separation of church and state.

So it’s not about the actual “Founding Fathers” but the imaginary ones who would have been DeSantis if only they’d known how.

Boston Children’s Hospital again. They’re so creepy. So perky and cheery and soothing about the nightmare things they’re doing. “Many surgical centers require you to be eighteen,” [winsome tilt of head]; “at Boston Children’s Hospital for top surgery [bi-lateral mastectomy] we’ll see people as young as fifteen if they’ve been affirmed in their gender for a long period of time, and don’t really have any other life complications that make surgery inappropriate.”

Any other life complications like being too fucking young???

She brags about Boston Children’s eagerness to mutilate 15-year-olds, in a gooey sincere caring voice that would lead you to think she’s going to make that bad owie go away right this minute.

Updating to add: Sorry, forgot to include the tweet!

Blasphemy hunts continue:

Four pupils have been suspended from a West Yorkshire secondary school after a copy of the Quran was damaged by students.

Wednesday’s incident at Wakefield’s Kettlethorpe High School happened when a copy of the Islamic text was brought in by a Year 10 pupil.

Head teacher Tudor Griffiths said the book remained intact and there was “no malicious intent” from those involved.

There is no shortage of copies of Islam’s holy book. It shouldn’t be a news story that one copy out of billions was “damaged.” You might as well fret that a newspaper got torn.

Maybe if people do it out of malice they should be told to stop bullying, but other than that, nothing to see here.

The school held a meeting “with concerned community leaders” – which I suppose means with men from the “community” of Muslims. The BBC does love to sort religious people into their respective “communities.”

Independent councillor for Wakefield East, Akef Akbar, called the meeting after being contacted by people calling for more information. He said reports the Quran had been burnt or destroyed were untrue, and he had inspected the book himself during the meeting.

Mr Akbar said he had been told the book had been taken to school as a dare by a pupil who lost while playing a Call of Duty videogame with other students.

It’s a book. Schools sometimes have books.

Head teacher Mr Griffiths said in a statement: “We would like to reassure all our community that the holy book remains fully intact and that our initial enquiries indicate there was no malicious intent by those involved.

It doesn’t matter. It’s one copy of a very widely available book. Its state of health is of no real significance.

“However, we have made it very clear that their actions did not treat the Quran with the respect it should have, so those involved have been suspended and we will be working with them to ensure they understand why their actions were unacceptable.”

Oh stop. Mass-produced inanimate objects don’t require “respect.” Tell the kids not to bully other kids, and make sure they don’t, but don’t bother to protect ubiquitous physical objects.

“This morning, we met with our local Muslim community leaders, local councillors and police to share all the information we currently know, the action taken and the immediate steps we have taken to reinforce the values and behaviour we expect from every member of this school community to ensure that all religions are respected.”

We don’t have to respect any religions.

Elon launches another “Hooray for racism!!” into the world.

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

He’s a busy man, he doesn’t have time to comment on what Adams said, he has time only to defend him for saying it.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Questions of bodily autonomy.

Medicalisation of children, and the surgical removal of healthy body parts which are necessary for a full and healthy adult life, aren’t an issue of ‘bodily autonomy’; they’re an issue of bodily integrity. Adults should be protecting children from harmful physical interventions which are wholly unnecessary, and equally should be protecting them from an ideology which is telling them that they need those interventions in order to ever be happy again.

We allow children a say in medical and surgical interventions according to age and competence. My son had no say in the procedure to give him some hearing at the age of four months, so I had to weigh up the probability of being deaf having a massive negative effect on his acquisition of language and his safety, versus the slight risk of the procedure itself, and make the decision for him. Using medicines and surgery on a child when to do nothing is harmful, but the outcome of the interventions is beneficial, is quite different to removing their ability to mature alongside their peer group, or to grow into adulthood with necessary body parts intact; it is quite different to turning them into lifelong medical patients because of iatrogenic health issues.

When it comes to girls and abortion, it has been proved time and again that a timely termination of pregnancy is far, far safer than allowing it to go to term. That truly is an issue of bodily autonomy, and girls are capable of having a say in the decision, provided that they have had proper, fact-based, counselling. Proper, fact-based, counselling is exactly what children are not being given when pushed onto the ‘trans’ track.

She sums the mess up nicely.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Questions of bodily autonomy.

It’s interesting how they mention the anti-abortion laws, but those immediately fall away. It looks like abortion rights are like anti-racism; they have become a tool for trans to use for their own interests, to tie trans to unrelated activism in order to tie their issues to other issues that really are issues of rights.

Indeed. We saw TiM speakers at rallies, which were ostensibly protests against the overturning of Roe v Wade, turn the fight for abortion rights into a subsection of trans demands for “bodily autonomy.” Women’s rights pushed aside for boutique demands. To complete the hijacking of women’s platforms, captured orgs like the ACLU, NOW and Planned Parenthood tweeted about abortion rights without using the word “woman.” Once women have served their purpose of getting the T centred, women and their needs are cast aside. Mission accomplished.

Similarly NBs, and even TiFs, are afterthoughts within trans activism itself for the core of TiMs who seem to be driving the agenda. If there was some means of dismantling the forced teaming and dismantling the “umbrella,” TiMs would find it harder to advance and defend their demands. A good wedge issue might do the trick. Pushing on things like getting men men out of women’s prisons might help do this. It’s harder to hide the impact of the trans agenda on the prison issue than it is to conceal in “health care for trans kids.” There are far more candy-coated euphemisms to unpack and translate in the medical arena than in the prison one, making the incarceration of men with women a harder position to hold, and an easier one to attack. It looks bad to start with, and I don’t think TiFs or NBs have much of a draw to this issue. I don’t see TiFs clamoring to get into men’s prisons in the name of TMAM, and as for NBs, who really gives a fuck what they think or want?

For TiMs, it’s TWAW in all situations and circumstances; or, as Stonewall used to put it, “Acceptance without exception.” No ground can be given: TWAW is a total(itarian) position. In the UK, TiMs in women’s prisons was promoted as the perfect test case for getting men into any and all female single-sex spaces. They can’t afford to let this one go. All the better for our side. Bring it on. Let this be their Stalingrad.

Andrew Sullivan on the war on dissenters:

Five years ago when I wrote “We All Live On Campus Now,” I noted how illiberal practices that originated in elite colleges — bullying, ostracism, public condemnation, speech shutdowns, purges of dissenters — were becoming common in every sphere of life, super-charged by social media. From 2020 on, that dynamic has intensified, especially in journalism, with the media purges of 2020 lifted straight from the campus woke playbook.

And this week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

But the New York Times isn’t a university. Newspapers have different goals, different rules, different standards, different criteria and reasons for the criteria, different consumers/markets – so many differences. Universities cater to people who don’t have fully developed brains yet; newspapers do not. Student activism isn’t always bad or repressive or wrongheaded…but sometimes it is.

Students like having A Cause that the adults have neglected, and they have been known to do great work. The Civil Rights struggle featured a lot of students, and they helped it wake up a callous nation. But Trans Activism is Not Like That. The activists want it to be, but it isn’t. The cause isn’t the same and it isn’t even similar, not even similarish. It’s grotesquely dissimilar – it’s luxury protest as opposed to the life and death kind.

But is it health care, or is it dangerous invasive tampering?

After a midterm election and record flow of anti-transgender legislation last year, Republican state lawmakers this year are zeroing in on questions of bodily autonomy with new proposals to limit gender-affirming health care and abortion access.

Calling it “gender-affirming health care” is tendentious at best. “Attempted sex-changing surgery and hormones” would be more accurate, though of course believers in the ideology would see it as an outrage.

You can’t change sex. You can change gender only if gender is being understood as entirely external and social, which is not how most people understand it. Either way it has nothing to do with health or health care. Assisting it is not medical.

More than two dozen bills seeking to restrict transgender health care access have been introduced across 11 states — Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — for the legislative sessions beginning in early 2023.

See that’s even more misleading. It sounds as if the bills say trans people can’t have health care, which would indeed be outrageous. The bills are about restricting measures to make people trans, which is not the same as restricting health care. Measures to make people trans can be the opposite of health care.

Gender-affirming health care providers and parents of trans youths are the primary targets of these bills, many of which seek to criminalize helping a trans child obtain what doctors and psychologists widely consider “medically necessary care.”

Really? How widely? In what way medically necessary? What is the evidence that “gender-affirming health care” is medically (as opposed to socially or psychologically or emotionally) necessary care? What is the evidence that the purported medical need for such treatment is permanent? What is the evidence that no harm is done, that no one regrets such health care?

Oh, here it is.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said last year that teens experiencing gender dysphoria can start taking hormones at age 14 and can have certain surgeries at ages 15 or 17. The group acknowledged potential risks but said it was unethical to withhold early treatments, which can improve psychological well-being and reduce suicide risk.

Ah yes WPATH, which notoriously has no vested interest at all whatsoever. Yes it’s risky but it’s unethical not to do it because maybe it will make the victims happy. Maybe. Ignore all the people already saying they wish they hadn’t done it.

What does this remind me of? Oh yes…

The Blood Libel.

The term blood libel refers to the false allegation that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian children, for ritual purposes. The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews, with Julius Steicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer making frequent use of ritual murder imagery in its antisemitic propaganda.

So, in a similar vein, terfs use the blood of trans women to thicken their energy drinks.

Blood libels, together with allegations of well poisoning, were a major theme in Jewish persecution in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period. They were a central component in the development of modern antisemitism in the 19th century.

That’s ok though. Don’t worry about it. These people whipping up murderous hatred against feminist women defending our rights…they’re fine. They’re just more enlightened than the rest of us.

1. (Rubie 💜🤍💚 [↩]