The NY Times reported several weeks ago that Republicans are hard at work purging voters.

A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.

…

The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.

Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.

The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.

The bigger risk, they note, is disenfranchising voters.

The even bigger risk is electing that monstrosity again.

We are learning to Be Kinder.

An interesting detail from Michael Cohen’s testimony yesterday:

He reported directly to Mr Trump, on “whatever concerned him, whatever he wanted”, Cohen said, calling his ex-boss a micromanager. “Everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off,” he said.

At the same time, Mr Trump was careful about paper trails, Cohen said. The Trump Organization founder never had an email address, telling Cohen that “emails are like written papers”.

“There are too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said Mr Trump once told him.

Gone down, eh? As in, been exposed as criminals? If Trump did say that it tells us he knows he’s a crook and takes steps to hide his crookery. Granted, that’s a no shit Sherlock, but it’s interesting to see it spelled out like that. “We don’t use email here, because it could be useful to the cops.”

Many many people, especially women, are asking why the BBC keeps promoting drag and why it doesn’t equally promote blackface. It’s a fair question.

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on True Selves.

His “true self” being the woman he is not. His fake true self, his pretend true self, his fantasy true self. Back in the before times a true self meant something along the lines of a self not repressed and stifled by convention. It didn’t mean childish fantasy. Adults didn’t prance around saying their true selves were birds or race cars or space travelers or Nobel laureates or ponies. Fantasy and delusion are now what’s real, so I guess truth and sanity are fake.

How are we supposed to even try to show compassion for people who may or may not have debilitating dysphoria when so many of the most vocal claimants spout endless “true self” cultspeak bullshit? The conditions we’re being asked to accept aren’t just slowly creeping up, they’re exploding in our faces like a joke can of nuts filled with spring-loaded snakes.

Part of the problem with gender dysphoria — or any identity disorder, I guess — is that it’s a disorder relating to one’s relationship with their social environment, as in everyone else, as in their relationship with us — a kind of social contract that we were at one time merely asked to sign up to. At first this new social contract that the trans rights movement was establishing, with the help of the fields of psychiatry/psychology, seemed like a much more modest ask. Something like, if someone has this debilitating disorder, they’re doing the best they can to manage it, and that might entail some unconventional appearance and behaviour… and that point is where you and I and the rest of society come in: a humble request that people be understanding and compassionate and offer some leeway towards their unconventionality because of this rare condition which creates a difficult situation.

And that fits fairly well generally with liberalism: not unlike feminism, it involves chafing against social norms. Not unlike homosexuality, it involves an atypical set of behavioural preferences that others might not understand but they’re merely being asked to tolerate and to open up space for a modest footprint in the social space to go about their business in; and not unlike mental and physical disabilities, we’re being asked to apply some of our collective capital towards better accommodating those whose needs are greater than ours. It’s not unlike economic egalitarianism, too.

Not that that ideal of a functional kind of transgender rights ever worked so well in practice. It was always unstable. Because of the disorder part of the equation, and because many of the people who purported to have gender dysphoria were not being honest at all about their innermost motives. (Not honest to themselves or to others.)

The transgender social contract is no longer voluntary — we’re not being politely asked to play along but forcefully commanded, and on top of that, it’s been rewritten so that it puts 100% of the onus on us, the rest of society, and requires no work at all on the part of the patients themselves — in fact they’re not even supposed to be understood as patients anymore! Anyone can declare a transgender identity. Once you do, you’re free to make up whatever fantasy story you like about yourself, and everyone else is obligated to bend over backwards to make your fantasy seem as real as possible to you. You are automatically the boss of everyone. (Come to think of it, I’m rather surprised more men with trans identities don’t sign up to be referees. All that power to order everyone around, and you even get a whistle! Seems a natural fit.) It’s that Twilight Zone episode where the bratty kid obtains omnipotent powers and terrorizes the townsfolk, only we’re giving that power to every single fucked up, narcissistic man (and more than a few women). What were we thinking?

The field of psychiatry and psychology bears some of the blame for this: they set the ball rolling on the idea that if we ask everyone else (women especially) to carve out more and more exceptions for these patients, they’ll be better off. They didn’t see that the cost to everyone else in society was rapidly climbing, and that the sense of entitlement they engendered among many unstable people would prove too alluring to resist.

That’s embarrassing. She’s a lawyer and a journalist and that’s her reading comprehension level?

Probably not, most of the time. Probably it’s an excess of anger that caused her to miss the point so thoroughly. Let that be a lesson to us all: when in a rage, slow down and read carefully before you rush to denounce. Otherwise you’re gonna look like a damn fool in front of all those sages and wits on social meeja.

“A terf, a bullet, social justice”

The cop who escorts Moutot seems to be laughing.

An amusing bit in a Bloomberg piece by Timothy O’Brien:

Cohen, a lawyer, didn’t work for Trump because he was a deft attorney, a skillful accountant or a brilliant money manager. He worked for him because he knew just enough about the law, accounting and greed to help Trump engineer end runs and cover-ups. “I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them,” Cohen wrote in Disloyal, a memoir of his Trump years. “I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.”

“Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen wrote. “In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

I don’t know. Trump’s universe is full of people — employees, acquaintances, hangers-on, family members and reporters, for example — who all claim to have the most intimate understanding of what makes him tick. Having said that, I have spent more than 30 years covering Trump and spending lots of time with him as a reporter and biographer. I would also describe him as a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, and a con man.

What a coincidence.

Ridiculous man thinks it’s personal.

Dude. It’s not about you the person. It’s about this ridiculous destructive ideology, and the myriad ways it harms women (and children, and lesbians and gay men, and confused people). We don’t want you to live your worst life, we just don’t want you demolishing our rights.

The FA did a puff piece on “Lucy” Clark in February 2019.

February is LGBT History Month and Wembley Stadium hosted the Just A Ball Game #StrongerTogether conference on Tuesday 5 February. One of the guest speakers was Lucy Clark, who became English football’s first transgender referee at the start of the 2018-19 season. Here, she tells her story and how the campaign has gone so far…

Notice how they avoid spelling it out, as the media and organizations so regularly do. Just “transgender,” not trans which gender.

The game has always been my outlet throughout life. As a child, a teenager and an adult, my life always revolved around football, whether I was a player, a manager or a referee. But my plan was to give up football this season, as I didn’t think I’d be able to referee as my true self.

His “true self” being the woman he is not. His fake true self, his pretend true self, his fantasy true self. Back in the before times a true self meant something along the lines of a self not repressed and stifled by convention. It didn’t mean childish fantasy. Adults didn’t prance around saying their true selves were birds or race cars or space travelers or Nobel laureates or ponies. Fantasy and delusion are now what’s real, so I guess truth and sanity are fake.

It’s been my first season as the real me, Lucy, and it’s gone well. It’s been really good and positive.

I’ve refereed around 50 games since my news broke last summer, and considering some of the grounds that I’m going to are places I’d been going to for years as the person I actually wasn’t, everyone has been really, really good.

Iss like magic, innit. You say your name is Lucy and bang, you’re a whole different person.

I’ve refereed around 50 games since my news broke last summer, and considering some of the grounds that I’m going to are places I’d been going to for years as the person I actually wasn’t, everyone has been really, really good.

There’s been the odd time that people have got my gender wrong and things like that, but I can understand that and I’m not someone who will be precious about it as no-one has done it maliciously.

So it’s “malicious” to know that an obvious man is a man?

Oh what do you know, it turns out that “Lucy” Clark, who is being hailed as the first “trans football referee,” is not some random fella who just happened to be the star of this story, he’s a Celebrity Personality with multiple masks.

They do? They are?

Why yes.

The Victoria Derbyshire chat was March 2019. This guy didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

Yet another guy tries to tell JKR how to bee nither to the nithe men thtealing all our thtuff.

She’s not playing. None of us are playing.

Oh we’re going to rebuke her tone are we? Because we’re supposed to be ladylike and sweet when defending our rights?

Go have a chat with Jonathan Willoughby instead.

Originally a comment by Peter N on Backstabbers.

For the record, I’ve been pen-pals with half a dozen federal inmates going back something like 15 years, and I volunteered in a state prison for ten years. I’ve also been active in a local prisoner support group for three years. In all of that, I’ve never heard any first-hand report of rape in prisons. I don’t question that things were very bad in the past, and may remain so in some locations, but it seems to me that today prisons are very, very motivated to avoid rape. Indeed as a volunteer I had to take an anti-rape class mandated by federal law, and re-qualify every year.

What I have heard about is soi-disant trans prisoners. There are apparently a fair number of them. I asked one of my correspondents about that, and what annoys him is that they get cosmetics sold through the prison commissary, clothing options not available to everybody, and yes, “gender-affirming healthcare”. He says they’re generally treated quite well, but he resents that they get extra privileges. Not that my friend is particularly in need of cosmetics, but it’s the principle of the thing — why do they get extra stuff and the rest of them don’t?

Argh. Genevieve Gluck has a thread on the ACLU and its hatred of women, and it’s hard going. Highly informative but painful to read.

The first tweet is cut off, so I’ll just quote it.

The @ACLU hates women and is led by a gay man: a thread. One of the most powerful lobby groups in the United States pushing “gender identity” policies is the ACLU. Currently, the organization is leading the legal fight to place violent men, including sadistic killers and rapists, into women’s prisons. The executive director since 2001 is Anthony Romero. In the past the organization defended NAMBLA, asserted that child pornography is free speech, defended child marriage, took money from pornographers, and argued that sex trafficking is “work.”

Source

The ACLU should be required to change its name. This evil shit has nothing to do with civil liberties.

Oh yay, a new law in Belgium will provide a labor contract to workers in the sex mines. Solidarity forevaaaa!

The Belgian Parliament voted for the law on May 3, with 93 in favor, zero opposed, and 33 abstentions.  

The legislation is being touted as a win by UTSOPI, the Belgium Union of Sex Workers, which had lobbied extensively for the legislation. The law outlines that prostitutes will receive health insurance, a pension, maternity and holiday leave, and unemployment benefits. Their pimps will be forced to provide them with a “safety button” to use for emergencies.

Their website claims that the law “is a historic step in the battle for sex workers’ rights” and will create a “respectful, fair relationship” between prostitutes and their pimps, with UTSOPI spokesperson Daan Bauwens telling media that he believes “Belgium is really demonstrating that it aims to protect sex workers, regardless of any moral judgements about the profession people may have.”

Prostitutes are to be granted “rights” to refuse sexual acts, stop sexual acts, perform sexual acts in the manner they prefer, and refuse to sit behind Amsterdam-style windows (public facing windows where prostitutes are on display). However, should a prostitute use these “rights” 10 times within six months, their pimp can then call on a government mediator to intervene.

Oh. So…not really much of a right then. 10 times in six months is not a whole hell of a lot. Compare the right to a 15 minute break morning and afternoon – that’s every working day. It’s not ten times in six months. That would be an occasional treat, not a right.

Oh well, no doubt it identifies as a right.

National Organization for Women (aka NOW) on Facebook three days ago:

All women should have access to the gender-affirming care they want and need, including those who are incarcerated.

They linked to an article at The 19th with the headline

Incarcerated trans women won sweeping prison reforms in Colorado

Er. Meaning what? That men who claim to be women get to be in the women’s prisons?

Yes, of course that’s what they mean. This is NOW, remember. The W stands for women.

The state signed a legal agreement meant to make prisons safer for transgender women, who are often the targets of violence and harassment.

By “safer for transgender women” they of course mean much more dangerous for women. Did I mention that this is NOW?

The piece goes on to rejoice that

Now, Colorado’s prison system must provide the same gender-affirming health care covered by state Medicaid, and trans women must have the option to be housed with other women.

Which will mean, of course, that those “other women,” the ones who have the bad taste to be just boring old real women, will not have the option to be housed with other women. Men who claim to be women will, and women will not.

This is the National Organization for Women.

Transgender women across the country face life-threatening circumstances behind bars — and the majority of them are forced to live with men. 

Because they are men. But now that will change! Now these men can live with women, while the women cannot refuse to live with the men. What progress!!! Life-threatening circumstances behind bars will be women’s alone to enjoy.

Stupid AND bossy.

Just shut up. You’re not the boss of JKR, you’re not the boss of us.

That’s the bad manners part. Now the bad epistemology part.

Is that right? Is it basic decency to call people what they want to be called? What if they want to be called Hitler? How about Hannibal Lecter? Timothy McVeigh? Stalin?

Booby McBoobtits? Pussy Galore? Slutty Slutface? Katy Cunty?

Marc Lépine? OJ Simpson? Killer O. Women?

Just shut up. It’s basic decency.

The Telegraph taunts the French for being just as stupid as the British about the whole knowing the difference between women and men thing. The French ffs! Cue lascivious Maurice Chevalier-type laughter.

France is failing to learn from Britain’s transgender mistakes, two French feminists who received support from JK Rowling after receiving death threats have told The Telegraph.

Dora Moutot, 36, and Marguerite Stern, 33, have been thrust into the spotlight after releasing Transmania, their bestselling gender-critical book.

Or, to put it another way, Moutot and Stern have written a bestselling gender-critical book. Naturally some spotlight goes along with that, thrust or no thrust. Meanwhile: will you look at that now?! Gender-critical book is best seller! So ha!

Making simple assertions such as “women are Homo sapiens females and men are Homo sapiens males” has become impossible without coming under attack or being censored, they wrote.

After a first run of 15,000, its publisher has printed a further 20,000 copies. However, critics, including Paris’s Socialist town hall, have branded the pair “transphobic”. Both strenuously deny the accusation.

Of course they do. We all do. It’s not phobic to know the difference. Au contraire, without the difference, there wouldn’t be any humans to know the difference or be phobic. Our existence as a species depends on the difference.

While sales have surged, they say they have been censored by many French bookshops and attacked by Paris’s Socialist town hall, which pressured the capital’s billboard company JCDecaux to pull posters advertising the book.

“Sexual orientation and gender identity are not an ideology”, said Emmanuel Grégoire, Paris’s deputy mayor, for whom “the dissemination and promotion of such discourse runs counter to the values espoused by the city of Paris. Transphobia is a crime. Hatred of others has no place in our city. Paris must not be used as a platform for this intolerance.”

Eeeesh. Where is the famous French cleverness and wit? No, “transphobia” – aka knowing that men are not women – is not a crime, even if France has been stupid enough to make laws saying it is. It’s not a crime to know which people are women and which people are men. It’s not a crime and it’s not even a phobia. It’s not even hatred. And saying hatred of others has no place in Paris is just ludicrous, especially when doing so in order to stir up hatred of the people you’re talking about. You can’t rule a basic human emotion out of a city.

The pair have been sued for “incitement to hatred” by two LBGT+ rights groups, including SOS Homophobie, which has received €350,000 in funding from Paris and “has hijacked the struggle of women to submit to trans dogma”, they assert.

Ms Moutot has also been charged with “incitement to anti-trans hatred” after appearing on a chat show in 2022 beside France’s only trans local mayor, Marie Cau, who[m] she refused to call a woman and instead described as a “trans-feminine male”. She faces a four-month suspended sentence. Ms Cau has likened the authors to “Nazis”.

Oh yeah? Well I liken Mr Cau to “Nazis” so there nyah. It’s not “Nazi” to say that a man is not a woman, and by the way why is the Telegraph calling Mr Cau “Ms”?

On Sunday [May 5], chants calling for Ms Moutot to be thrown into the Rhine in the Strasbourg protest – one of several around France against “transphobia” – were picked up on by Ms Rowling.

“As someone whose death has been demanded on placards for exactly the same reason (knowing ‘woman’ isn’t a feeling in a man’s head), I send @‌doramoutot love and solidarity,” she tweeted to her 14.1 million followers.

…

The pair faced even more direct threats on Monday when they turned up to give a talk on their book at Pantheon-Assas University, in Paris. Protected by 15 vans of riot police upon arrival at the university, the pair were branded “Terfs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) by protesters chanting: “A Terf, a bullet, social justice.”

Wait which people are the Nazis here?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Oh no she compared a man to a man.

Transition is literally about the self. It’s definitionally a self-centered phenomenon, based on an assumption of entitlement to not just spaces and benefits and language, but to the perceptions and thoughts of others.

Excellent points. But there’s still the issue of how to explain the acceptance of their pretense of womanhood by so many. How does the thinnest application of stereotypical “womanface” make up for the complete lack of the basic, and again stereotypical, markers of female socialization?

In World War Two, in the run-up to D-Day, the Allies used crude decoy trucks, tanks, and aircraft to fool the Germans into thinking that the imminent invasion of France would be launched across the Pas de Calais rather than in Normandy. These phantom units looked convincing from thousands of feet, and were good enough to pass for the real thing in high altitude photos, but would have fooled nobody on the battlefield.

Flash forward eighty years, and somehow, governments and corporations have surrendered to crude decoys of women. Institutions which have always known exactly who and what women were have now, seemingly, been taken in by lipstick and bad wigs, giving away women’s rights, with a wink and a nod, to any guy effecting a pout and a tilted head, even as they indulged in aggressively assertive behaviour that would have traditionally been condemned as “unwomanly”.

California to women: sucks to be you.

A California surf competition has been told it must allow a transgender woman to compete in the women’s division or it will be in violation of state law. The California Coastal Commission said surf competitions could “not discriminate based on gender”.

So surf competitions can have women’s divisions, but they have to let men compete in them. That means women will never be able to win their own competitions, because there will always be men eager to take advantage of the California Coastal Commission’s idiotic rule.

Why is it ok to discriminate on the basis of sex but not on the basis of gender?

Stupid question: so as to enable men to cheat women out of any hope of winning. Duh.

Next question: why don’t the men who do this shit hate themselves? How do they sleep at night?

Todd Messick, whose American Longboard Association organises the competition, had announced on 25 April that the contest would not allow transgender women to compete in the women’s division, saying he wanted to “offer an equal playing field for all athletes”. He told the BBC he was “surprised by the amount of anger” that the decision generated, but added: “What I found too is that there was a lot of people very appreciative of me speaking up.”

Cool that the California Coastal Commission has ruled against a level playing field. Cool for men; end of competition for women.

Lowerson – an Australian who previously won men’s events in her home country – said she had encountered mostly positive attitudes in the world of competitive surfing when she began living as a woman.

Stop with the lying, Beeb. He’s a man, gloating over his power to cheat women.

Since transitioning, she has contributed to the development of new guidelines adopted by Australia’s national governing body allowing transgender women surfers to compete in women’s events.

That is, he has contributed to the development of new guidelines adopted by AusSurfers like Hamilton who oppose transgender women participating in the women’s event argue that they have an unfair strength advantage.Surfers like Hamilton who oppose transgender women participating in the women’s event argue that they have an unfair strength advantage.tralia’s national governing body allowing male surfers to compete in women’s events, thus destroying the events for women. Stop with the oily flattering lies, Beeb. The guy’s a shithead.

Surfers like Hamilton who oppose transgender women participating in the women’s event argue that they have an unfair strength advantage.

Of course they fucking do. Everybody knows they do. The BBC knows they do, it just pretends not to.

The surfer said that despite the furore she would continue to enter women’s events. “I’ve inadvertently become a poster-child for trans women in surfing,” she said. “Not that I wanted to do that, but it just kind of happened.”

That is, the guy said that despite women’s objections he would continue to enter their events and ruin them for women. Why is the BBC licking his bum so fervently?

“Sport is about community,” she added. “It’s about sharing and having fun with other like-minded people, and the fact we’re losing sight of that is really sad.”

Oh fuck you. The fact that you’re cheating women out of fair competition is what’s sad, you pious thieving cheating piece of crap. And fuck you too for quoting him, Beeb.