Dark places.
I just can’t get over the empathy for women.
Andy Burnham has said biological men who identify as women should be able to use female toilets.
Speaking from a meeting with Manchester’s “Youth Combined Authority” in 2022, the Greater Manchester Mayor said biological men who identify as women should be allowed to use female toilets.
In unearthed footage obtained by the Daily Mail, Mr Burnham also said the idea single-sex spaces should be exclusive for biological women was a “minority view”.
Yuhuh – nearly all women and most men=a minority. Makes sense.
The comments came before the Supreme Court unanimously ruled a “woman” and “sex” under the Equality Act 2010 exclusively apply to the biological sex assigned at birth.
So he just had no idea that men were not women. It must have been a shock to find out.
The Makerfield by-election candidate dismissed gender-critical activists as “supposed feminists” trying to stir up “culture wars” by asking for protections in such spaces.
Well thank god a man came along to set those stupid women straight.
Now what’s all this about Trump giving himself and the fam total immunity from everything forever?
The government, without any fanfare or even announcement, quietly added some very serious terms to the settlement that are remarkably favorable to Trump and those around him.
They say the government is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from bringing claims against Trump, his family or his businesses for past tax issues, up to the date of the settlement this week.
Well how nice for them.
If the terms are allowed to stand, Trump, his family and his businesses would effectively be immune from “claims” or “examinations” related to matters pending before the IRS, including in previously filed tax returns.
The terms were quietly added Tuesday in a hyperlink to Monday’s original Justice Department press release.
“quietly” – gee, I wonder why.
Trump can use the fund to pay off scores of allies who did all manner of things — including sometimes illegal — on his behalf.
That’s most notably the case with those who, in many cases, literally rose up in arms for Trump on January 6, 2021. Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday declined to rule out financial payments to the many already pardoned January 6 rioters who assaulted police, suggesting some of them might too have been “mistreated.”
Diddums.
This is the putz who has destroyed the Washington Post.
Credit is due nowhere. Zero credit zero where.
This is “more mature, more disciplined”?
Pants engulfed in flames.
Are there drugs in the porridge or what?
The Scottish parliament has been accused of making women statistically “invisible” after removing information on whether MSPs are male or female from Holyrood’s website.
The Scottish Conservative MSPs Rachael Hamilton and Meghan Gallacher have written to parliamentary authorities seeking a full explanation on why the decision was made and whether there are plans to reinstate female on the website as a category.
I bet we can guess why the decision was made. What sex people are is so last century; we need to let everyone run free, except of course women, who have to be harshly punished every time they neglect to call a man “she”.
Until this week, the site provided an option to list MSPs by party affiliation and by gender, with options showing as male and female during the last parliamentary session.
However, the change has been made after the election of two Scottish Greens trans MSPs this month.
The newly elected Glasgow MSP Iris Duane, who identifies as a trans woman, has been included in the female list, while a new option has been created for Q Manivannan, who identifies as non-binary.
Everybody gets a box of crayons; play time is from 10 to 10:30; nap time is 11 to midday; no pudding unless you eat all your dinner.
How do intelligent adults let themselves get so stupid?
…Unison stands for every member’s right to work free from discrimination, and that includes standing firmly for the rights of all women, and this includes trans women.
And thus it includes no women.
What is the point of talking about rights, and standing for rights? There is no point unless there are antagonists who want to deny or violate or ignore such rights. In short, cui bono? Who benefits from this ridiculous push to say women’s rights are for men? It ain’t women, so who is left?
If you include men in women’s rights then women’s rights become meaningless. We’re watching it happen.
Women’s rights and trans rights are not in conflict.
Yes they are. Of course they are. We’ve been documenting and demonstrating this for more than a decade.
Our movement is strongest when we are all together.
Yes all together in the women’s toilets and women’s promotions and women’s refuges, yeah? Rapists in with the victims, right?
Oh gosh, Richard not helping again.
No, Richard, to women it doesn’t seem at all like a relatively unimportant matter. If the leader of the Lib Dems and the leader and deputy leader of the Greens disliked beans on toast that would be a relatively unimportant matter, but thinking men are women if they say they are is quite a different matter.
Federal tax returns filed by President Donald Trump, family members, the Trump Organization, and related trusts and affiliates before this week are protected from potential Internal Revenue Service enforcement actions under a controversial $1.8 billion settlement with the Justice Department, a new document posted Tuesday shows.
The Justice Department, as part of the settlement, barred the federal government from prosecuting or pursuing “any and all claims” that could have been made by the IRS, which included “tax returns filed before” the effective date of the settlement, according to the document, signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The protection extends to Trump, his family members, the Trump Organization and “parties including trusts, parent, sister or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.” It covers any pending tax audits of Trump and the others referred to in the addendum that the IRS would have been conducting at the time of the settlement.
Blanche is Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer.
Words fail me.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said the provision violates federal law “that prohibits interference by executive branch officials in IRS audits.”
“Democrats are going to fight every element of this self-dealing settlement, but regardless of the outcome of those efforts, future administrations and IRS leadership should consider this illegal directive completely invalid,” said Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. “The Trump family is not above the law, no matter what Trump or his personal attorney say.”
Of course it’s not, but it’s going to act as if it is unless/until someone stops it.
The settlement resolved a $10 billion lawsuit filed in Miami federal court by Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and their company against the IRS over the leak of Trump-related tax filings by an IRS employee.
The Trumps on Monday dropped that suit in exchange for the Justice Department agreeing to finance a so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund with $1.8 billion. The fund is set up to be used to compensate purported victims of law enforcement actions by the department under the Biden administration. The Trump administration has referred to such action as “lawfare.”
Democratic members of Congress have called the settlement a “slush fund” for allies of Trump, including defendants convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and disrupted the confirmation of the electoral victory of former President Joe Biden.
Blanche, during testimony to a Senate appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday morning, would not rule out allowing people convicted of assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6 riot to get compensation from the fund.
Filth.
I said words fail me, and they do. Filth is the only word I can summon.
Trump is having the government give him a massive load of cash because there’s nothing corrupt about that no sireeeee.
Trump, his two eldest sons and the Trump Organization dropped their $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service on Monday in exchange for the Department of Justice creating a $1.776 billion fund to settle claims by people who allege they are victims of so-called lawfare.
Can you say extortion? I know I certainly can.
A Miami federal court filing by Trump’s lawyers dropping the lawsuit suggested it effectively barred a judge from analyzing whether the president’s civil suit was legally valid and from dismissing it if she found it was invalid.
I don’t know what that means. Is it up to Trump’s lawyers whether or not dropping the lawsuit bars a judge from whatever? Can’t the judge just say no it doesn’t and get on with her job?
The move came days after ABC News reported the DOJ was negotiating the settlement, which was blasted by Democratic members of Congress who called the then-expected deal a “slush fund” for allies of Trump who had been prosecuted under the Biden administration.
That’s certainly what it sounds like from here.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team, in a statement, said, “President Trump, his family, supporters, and countless other America First Patriots were illegally targeted by the Democrat-lead law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Justice, and the IRS.”
“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated actor to unlawfully leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to left-wing news outlets such the New York Times and ProPublica, which was then illegally released to millions of people,” the spokesman said. “Similarly, President Trump was also the victim of illegal harassment and invasions of privacy as part of the politically motivated and completely discredited Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and the wrongful, election interfering raid of his home at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.”
Oh very professional. Echo Trump’s childish wording and then fail to mention the fact that he kept cartons of top secret documents that he had zero legal right to have at his “home at Mar-a-Lago”.
The advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington blasted the settlement, calling it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”
“While Americans are struggling with an affordability crisis, President Trump plans to use nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to pay off his friends and allies – including potentially the violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6th,” said CREW President Donald Sherman in a statement.
“By settling his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration, Trump and the Justice Department just engaged in the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency, and did so quickly in order to avoid the scrutiny of the judicial process, while quite likely violating the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause in the process,” Sherman said.
Just one more reason to wish Trump had fallen off a cliff at age 13.
That thing where you say you want to make something clear and immediately proceed to make it as unclear as it could possibly be.
I want to make something clear following recent public coverage relating to someone I was previously professionally connected with online.
I’m deliberately not naming the individual because I do not wish to direct additional traffic towards their platforms or content.
I appeared as a guest on a podcast hosted by that person. Since then, views and commentary have been publicly expressed which I find deeply harmful and fundamentally opposed to what I stand for, both personally and professionally. Over time I repeatedly raised concerns directly, but those conversations ultimately went nowhere.
Wut?
If that’s making something clear, what would making it murky look like?
In light of recent developments I wanted to make my position absolutely clear. I do not endorse or align myself with the views now publicly associated with that platform or the individual behind it.
I won’t be getting into public debate and request that you don’t discuss any individuals in the comments of this post. I know this situation may feel upsetting or difficult for some people and if you want to speak to me directly, you’re welcome to DM me.
If she really wanted to make her position absolutely clear, she must be confused about the meaning of the word “clear”.
He won’t stand for it, I tell you.
Holyrood’s newly elected presiding officer will crack down on MSPs who misgender their new trans and non-binary colleagues.
In an interview with The Times, Kenny Gibson, who opposed Nicola Sturgeon’s gender reform legislation in 2022, said he would take incidents as they come.
But he made it clear that he would not tolerate politicians deliberately or maliciously refusing to use the chosen pronouns of the newly elected Green MSPs Iris Duane and Q Manivannan.
But why?
There’s no such thing as “chosen pronouns”. That’s not how it works. We don’t get to make tiresome rules about language that require other people to call us something Special and Fictitious. Very young children can do that, but nobody else can. Pronouns exist to save trouble, not to generate more trouble. It’s a nuisance for all parties to repeat someone’s name with every mention, so we have generic pronouns that save us that labor. Trying to force us to use special luxury ones for just this one special person creates more labor, and anxious labor at that. The anxiety part is revealed by this silly promise to rebuke or punish legislators who get it “wrong”.
Luxury pronouns are the kind of thing you expect from kids in first grade. They are not the kind of thing you expect from grown-ass adults legislating for a nation.
“You have to respect what that person wants to be called,” Gibson said. “And if someone doesn’t do that, then you have to call that out in the chamber and you have to take the appropriate action.”
No you don’t. No you don’t. No you don’t. That’s a ridiculous claim. What if that person wants to be called King Charles, or Keir Starmer, or JK Rowling, or Peter Tatchell? What if that person wants to be called Xmfzlxnx? How about BigTits or ThrobbingCock or RapeyMcRaperson?
No, you don’t necessarily have to respect what that person wants to be called, because there are infinite possibilities of grotesquerie like the above. This fact should make the absurdity of the claim obvious, but of course it won’t.
Nevertheless it is grotesque for adults to demand to be referred to as “she” when they’re men or “he” when they’re women. It’s a toddler game transported to a national legislature. It’s about as grotesque as grotesqueries can get.
“If there’s a clear issue of it looks like it’s being deliberate, then you have to act on that because you can’t have someone, a member of the parliament, feeling undervalued or disrespected.”
What about the women who are members of that parliament who feel undervalued and disrespected by men who insist on being referred to as “she”?
“So whatever your personal views are of what they call themselves, it is what they want to call themselves, I think, which is significant.”
Oh yeah? What if they all want to be called Kenny Gibson? Eh? What if even one of them wants that?
A Scottish Greens spokesman said: “If any members were to be misgendered in the chamber we would expect the presiding officer, alongside other parliamentary authorities, to ensure MSPs feel safe, secure and respected in the environment they work in.”
At the expense of everyone else, and especially of the female part of everyone else.
The new presiding officer said he was not expecting trouble in the new parliament with an influx of new members, a new party in Reform and a bigger Green group, but added: “If there’s trouble, it will be dealt with.”
Gibson said: “I was shown a magic button actually yesterday where I can immediately cut it off, if necessary. I don’t expect to have to do that.”
Great. So the MSPs have a choice between lying and being silenced. Brilliant.
From Out magazine:
Trans athlete forced to share 1st place with cisgender girls at track meet
Note both the deception and the discrepancy. They (the enemies) are called cisgender girls while he is called trans athlete. Listen, Out, when you’re avoiding spelling out the realities, that tells us you know they make you look like bullying shits. You are bullying shits. A rude bullying boy stole first place from two girls, and here you are trying to hide the stark facts behind the usual obfuscating verbiage.
California’s two-time state champion AB Hernandez dominated her latest division track meet this past weekend, and despite protests and controversial policies, she aims to close out her high school athletics career with a third state championship title.
Despite protests from people who think boys should not compete in girls’ track meets, he aims to keep competing in girls’ track meets, because he’s a greedy ruthless young shit.
Shejumped higher than any other girl and took first place in three track and field contests. But a state athletic policy enacted last year forced transgender athlete AB Hernandez to share the podium on Saturday with cisgender girls who couldn’t matchherperformance.
No, the policy forced the girls to share the podium with a boy who ran in the girls’ race. It’s grossly unfair.
The 17-year-old was apparently warming up for her next event when the long jump medal ceremony took place, so Moorpark High School’s Gianna Gonzalez stood alone on the first-place podium, despite finishing more than a foot behind Hernandez, Fox News reported.
Yes, because Hernandez is a boy, and it was the girls’ long jump ceremony, so he shouldn’t have been on the podium at all.
The author of this lying drivel is Dawn Ennis, whose real name is Don.
Jeez, where is everybody? Not a peep in 8 hours; do you all have the flu?
The Justice Department on Monday announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration.
“The creation” forsooth – you mean they’re stealing our money to give it to their crooked buddies. I can’t wait to hear about the nine hundred billion fund to compensate Trump for [insert outrage here].
It’s an unprecedented move that would allow the president’s administration to pay his supporters from a government agency he controls with taxpayer money.
An unprecedented move aka a colossal theft in broad daylight.
The so-called “anti-weaponization” fund, with its symbolic 1776 figure, is likely to face immediate challenges in court from Democrats and watchdog organizations who say the effort amounts to corruption by allowing the president to enrich allies over what critics they say are unfounded claims of political prosecutions by the Biden administration.
Gosh ya think? It could hardly be more obviously corruption if it painted CORRUPTION on the roof and front door.
New health boffin doesn’t know what a woman is.
The new Health Secretary has claimed that the definition of a woman is up for “debate” after arguing that trans women are women.
James Murray, a Starmerite minister chosen to replace Wes Streeting, previously said he defined women as “adult female and trans women”.
Adult human female and men.
Maybe he should be moved from Health to something less…physical?
He said it was very important to have “this debate” in an unearthed interview in which he defended a transgender swimmer competing against female athletes.
So in other words he’s yet another man who does not give a flying fuck about women and our rights. Good to know.
Stuart Andrew, the shadow health secretary, told The Telegraph: “It is striking that the Health Secretary responsible for women’s healthcare appears unable to answer a basic question about biological sex.
“His role oversees maternity services, breast cancer screening, female hospital wards and the rules on single-sex spaces for patients and staff.
“These are serious issues that shape care and safeguarding across the NHS. Following the Supreme Court judgment, clarity on biological sex is not optional. The Health Secretary should be able to define a woman without implying it is up for debate.”
I hate it when the Tories are right and Labour is contemptibly wrong. I hate having my nose constantly shoved in the fact that men on the left will destroy women’s rights with a cheery grin on their faces.
A source close to the Health Secretary said on Friday evening: “These comments were from four years ago. It’s safe to say James’s position has evolved since that interview.
“He really welcomed the Supreme Court ruling which made the law clear in this area and looks forward to upholding the new guidance that will be published on single-sex spaces”.
But four years ago he thought some men were women. That should be a disqualifier.
Another credulous fool steps up.
The incoming boss of the UK’s biggest trade union has claimed she would not be comfortable representing someone like Sandie Peggie.
What is “someone like Sandie Peggie”? A woman who is a hospital nurse who doesn’t want to have to change her clothes with a man in the changing room. The top union boss would feel oooky having to represent her. Have we reached peak disgusting yet?
Andrea Egan, who will take charge of Unison on January 22, asked “what were the real issues” in a high-profile employment tribunal brought by the nurse against NHS Fife.
…
Asked how she would react if a similar case came to Unison, Egan told Politics Home: “I haven’t followed that case.
“But what were the real issues within that? I have trans friends, trans women friends; my nephew is a trans man. I wouldn’t have an issue. I’d want to understand. Because the argument can then develop to anybody saying… ‘Well, I don’t want you there because you’ve got blonde hair’ or ‘I don’t want them there because they’ve got blue eyes’,” Egan says.
Really? So then all public toilets should be for both sexes?
The union chief’s comments were questioned by Scottish Labour MP Joani Reid.
“I’m concerned by these comments from Ms Egan,” she said. “They suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of the law and a troubling lack of regard for women’s safety.
“Trade unions have a long and proud history of standing up for women at work and in society more broadly and that principle should be upheld without equivocation.”
Damn right they should.
Trump is still bullying Greenland.
But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.
The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.
Does giving Trump an offramp ever work? He’s not an offramp kind of guy. He’s a bull-headed kind of guy who wants to do whatever he wants to do, and does not listen to warnings or refusals or anything else that’s not instant submission.
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
Who would like it? It’s basically an invasion.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
Of course they do. They don’t consider Donald Trump their boss.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.
How about lowering Trump’s pants halfway.
Trump has recorded himself reading scripture from the Old Testament for a marathon Bible reading billed as “a national reading of God’s law.”
Fresh off a public tirade against the Pope and backlash over an AI-generated image portraying himself as Jesus Christ, the 79-year-old president prepared a two-and-a-half-minute reading calling for repentance from God’s people for an event at the Museum of the Bible.
The White House has called the reading an event to “honor Holy Scripture, renew our faith, usher in a historic resurgence of religion on American shores, and rededicate the United States as one Nation under God.”
Trump’s passage comes from the Old Testament book of II Chronicles, which has become one of the Christian right’s favorite passages.
“If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land,” Trump’s passage reads.
Trump yesterday:
Pre-reccorded and pre-released – it’s the same clip.
They just recycled the video without, apparently, saying it was recycled.
Time for some heavy-duty smiting!
From the long Unherd article about the BBC’s love affair with trans ideology:
In January 2017, the BBC led the news with the commutation by President Barack Obama of the WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning. Cath Leng was a chief writer for the channel, and she was struggling with Manning’s pronouns; Manning now identified as a woman called Chelsea and the BBC scripts, as per the Style Guide, referred to Manning as she/her throughout. Leng’s position required a commitment to accuracy and impartiality and as she remembers: “It was my job to make sure everything was true. I said, ‘You have to give me reasons why I should lie about this person’s sex. Really good reasons.’”
So Leng set to work on the pronouns, changing them from “she” to “he” to the outrage of some of her colleagues. Reaching an impasse, the subject was taken to the “huddle” of news editors in charge that day. Leng was overruled; from then on, for her, everything changed. “I was ostracized,” she remembers. There were some staffers who were sympathetic but they weren’t willing to back her up publicly. She was up against a generation of younger staff who were suspicious of anyone who questioned the right to self-identify, and who were backed up by the Style Guide. “It was a war of attrition.” she says. “They wear you down.”
Sounds exactly like Freethought Blogs back then – although my blowup there was in 2015, so two years before Cath Leng’s. Anyway: I know the feeling.
Leng argues forcefully that she is neither a bigot nor a transphobe; her objection is based on what she considered to be the principal duty of a journalist: to tell the truth. Her refusal to back down was rewarded with disciplinary action. Ultimately, she won, but left the BBC in 2023, effectively forced out after 25 years, she believes, because of her views.
Leng’s objection — the sacrifice of truth — is a powerful one. As one long-serving presenter put it to me: “It’s the only area of our professional life where we’re told you have to say things that aren’t true.”
And if the profession at issue is journalism, there should be no such area. Not one.
In October 2017, the then-prime minister, Theresa May, put transgender issues on the political agenda by announcing at a PinkNews Awards that she wanted to “demedicalize” the process of applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate: by scrapping the requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. This was “Self-ID”.
On the night May announced her plans, a self-identified transgender woman using the name Karen White — real name Stephen Wood — was spending another night in New Hall women’s prison in Yorkshire, where he’d been sent because he identified as a woman. He had already carried out a series of sexual assaults against female prisoners, but remained there while the offenses were investigated. The following year, Wood was sentenced to life in prison for a catalog of violent sexual offenses.
This was exactly the danger women concerned about allowing biological men into women’s spaces had highlighted. They weren’t suggesting that transgender women were more likely to offend, but opposed making it easier for men to declare themselves women because it risked making access to victims — whether in prisons, women’s refuges or changing-rooms — easier for offenders like Wood.
How ridiculous that there has to be any cautious whimpering about not suggesting that transgender women were more likely to offend, because of course they fucking are. Are men more likely to rape women than women are? Why yes, Doctor Peabody, men are more like to rape women than women are. As any fule kno.
Originally a comment by Artymorty on “Discrimination” is not always a pejorative.
It is a difficult question. I thought about this a lot in the New Atheism days, with respect to Islam. I see the issue as a conflation of actions and “identities”. Actions can have moral consequences. I think it’s trickier with respect to mere identities. Doing bad and identifying as a part of a group that advocates bad aren’t the same thing. But there’s a gray area. It’s at least circumstantial evidence, if not quite enough to convict, so to speak.
I think there are some parallels between Islam and trans here.
Regarding Islam:
On the one hand, the teachings within Islam are deeply misogynistic and homophobic. And many, many people who hold onto Muslim identities believe that they’re entitled to discriminate against women and gays because they “are” Muslim. So it’s at the very least a red flag when you meet someone who identifies as Muslim, with respect to their stance on women and gays, because there’s homophobia and misogyny baked right into the group’s “rules”.
On the other hand, identities are sticky things; people hold onto them for various reasons. Some people still identify as Muslim even though they reject the misogynistic and homophobic tenets of the religion. I wouldn’t want to see those people discriminated against simply because they still “are” Muslim. Maajid Nawaz is an example of a liberal reformist who still identifies as Muslim.
So it’s not quite a “hard” bias, but a “soft” one: I don’t completely write people off on-sight when I learn that they’re Muslim, but there’s valid reason to hesitate.
But then, Muslims themselves whose actions are misogynistic and homophobic often cry foul that they’re being discriminated against simply for “being” Muslim. Like the conservative Muslim activists who sought to destroy Maajid Nawaz by painting him as an anti-Muslim bigot for his liberal stance. Counterintuitively, they want a “hard”, morally-binding connection between simply having a Muslim identity and siding with misogyny and homophobia.
Here’s the trans parallel:
India Willoughby’s actions are what made him toxic. He believes he was entitled to take those actions because of the “identity” he feels he has. He believes there’s a hard moral link between “being” trans and taking actions which, from a secular lens, are plainly bigoted.
“Being trans”, to Willoughby, means being entitled to say and do a whole lot of terrible things.
Obviously, a lot of other people who hold onto trans “identities” believe the same thing, because it’s very much a part of that identity group’s current cultural ethos. We’re trans because we were born this way; it’s our mission to prove to the world that biological sex is either fictional or irrelevant; anyone who disagrees is Public Enemy Number One, and must be destroyed by any means necessary before they destroy us…
But not everyone who has a trans identity necessarily believes those things or acts on them. For example, there are people who identify as transgender because they underwent (or were subjected to, as minors) cosmetic appearance-modifying procedures, but who no longer believe that they’ve literally changed biological sex, and who may even be allies with gender-criticals.
So I’d stop short of “hard” discriminating against anyone simply for having a trans identity. But it’s certainly a red flag in the same way that having a Muslim identity is a red flag: it’s a group that has discrimination against others baked right into it. Yet, at the same time, affiliation with that group doesn’t quite come with the guarantee that one will act on its tenets.
It’s because identities are sticky and irrational, not easy to uncouple ourselves from, that I don’t think there’s a moral justification for outright discriminating against people — say, explicitly rejecting someone’s job application because of their identity — even if that group has some ugly beliefs at its core. Some people are outliers within their identity groups, “stuck” in them even though they aren’t entirely aligned with their core tenets.
(Well, there’s a caveat here: it should be at least reasonably possible to “be” an X without signing up for bad things. Some identites really have no room for outliers, and are therefore, as far as I’m concerned, hard-wired to moral judgment. Nazis, for example: it’s not reasonably possible for anyone to identify as a Nazi today without being deeply racist and antisemitic. That’s a hard link, not a soft implication.)
And I think most people agree: I don’t think anyone’s outright discriminated against Willoughby because he’s trans, but I do think that having a trans identity is now a giant red flag, and there’s going to be some “soft” discrimination on the basis of it. It’s certainly going to cause quiet hesitation among the hiring committees.
And that’s just the way it is.
Ultimately, these things are commensurate: the degree of trans culture’s affiliation to misogyny and homophobia is equal to the degree that its group members are going to be implicated in the moral consequences of misogyny and homophobia. I wouldn’t call “being trans” a smoking gun, but it’s still fit for the jury.
Tough luck, Willoughby.