Originally a comment by Artymorty on Validate or else.

That’s Kathleen Stock’s insight: that people who call themselves trans are immersed in a dangerous fiction. Immersion in fiction can be a fine thing, and it can be a harmless thing, but if it gets hooked into a fad for “validating” the fiction as rock-solid truth…not so much.

What’s worse, is that the kids don’t know what kind of fiction they’re getting immersed into. The adults playing along with this fiction have their own agenda, and the kids aren’t being let in on it.

To many adult men, transgender is a special kind of immersive fiction, distinct from the nerdy hobby of live-action role-playing (LARPing).

Larpers get together in groups, and enact their roleplaying personas while they’re among the group, and revert to their real selves when interacting with people outside the group, or when they’re not actively “in session.”

But trans is more akin to kayfabe, a word that came into use at the turn of the last century as “professional” wrestling emerged among the travelling carnivals and sideshows that roved the American frontier. (Its etymology is unclear, but it’s probably derived from pig latin for “be fake.”) Kayfabe is like the reverse of Larping: you can let your guard down and be your true self only when you’re alone with your in-group peers; in the presence of outsiders you must always maintain the illusion that your roleplaying persona is real.

Wrestlers depended on elaborate fictional backstories and soap opera-like rivalries to generate excitement and draw crowds to thier (rigged, performative) bouts. Their livelihoods came to depend on keeping up the illusion that these personas were real; if word got out that they were faking it, the whole profession could collapse for loss of viewership.

“Pro” wrestling continues to this day, and the omertà of kayfabe was strictly maintained until as recently as 1989, when executives from the World Wrestling Federation, facing athletic regulation laws, testified to the New Jersey state senate and for the first time publicly admitted that wrestling superstars like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant were, in fact, paid entertainers and not professional athletes. Up until then, many of wrestlers’ own relatives were kept in the dark about how fake the whole thing was.

Fetishistic trans-identifying men are just like pro wrestlers in this regard. When they’re alone with each other they’re completely open about being fetishistic men, and they make and share pornographic videos with each other, etc. But in the presence of outsiders, ma’am’s the word. The lie must be maintained or the whole enterprise could collapse: no more unfettered access to women’s spaces and no more power to force everyone else to play along with their fantasy.

A clear example of a trans person’s private reality vs. public kayfabe is Lia Thomas’s social media: his public Instagram account is the usual guff about protecting trans kids and trans women are women blablabla… But he has a second, private Instagram account, which he uses to interact with his private circle of fellow fetishists and to allegedly share content about fetishistic transvestism and porn.

All of this is to say that these fetishists aren’t upfront that it’s all kayfabe to the children and their famililes they’re targeting, or with the institutions that are backing them. They’re not being let in on the scheme. This can and will be devastating to a lot of kids when they grow up and realize that most of the people leading the “trans community” are conspiring together in a lie to serve their personal, private sexual fantasies.

Julie Bindel on “conversion therapy” and the laws.

The [Scottish National] party has proposed a new law that could criminalise parents for refusing to fully validate their child as transgender.

Among the actions that could be criminalised are preventing someone from “dressing in a way that reflects their sexual orientation or gender identity”, even if that decision were to be taken by a parent acting to protect their child from gender ideologues.

The SNP proposed a law to force parents to encourage their children to believe in a delusion.

Five or ten years from now will the SNP be writing laws to force parents to let their children dress up as dogs, sheep, dolphins? Not for parties or giggles but for daily life, including school?

Over the past decade, the number of children claiming to be transgender or non-binary has rocketed, as has the number accessing gender clinics.

The facts are shocking. A high proportion of children attending gender clinics have some form of autism; puberty blockers almost always lead a young person on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach the age of 18, and the serious mental-health issues and trauma that the child may well be experiencing are often overlooked in favour of simply validating (labelling) them as transgender. 

Imagine if mental health issues caused children to think they are rabbits, weasels, frogs. Imagine how healthy it would be to encourage such delusions.

The interim Cass Review into the NHS Gender Identity Development Service was very clear that there is both a distinct lack of evidence about the effects of puberty-interrupting drugs on children and a great deal of confusion as to their purpose. Parents have not just the right, but a duty, to prevent their children from becoming immersed in a dangerous fiction that will affect them for the rest of their lives. 

That’s Kathleen Stock’s insight: that people who call themselves trans are immersed in a dangerous fiction. Immersion in fiction can be a fine thing, and it can be a harmless thing, but if it gets hooked into a fad for “validating” the fiction as rock-solid truth…not so much.

The left continues to blast away at its own feet.

Labour’s London region has suspended the party’s candidate for a closely-contested council by-election in Hackney following allegations of “transphobia“.

…

A Labour source has confirmed that the candidate, Laura Pascal (front right in photo), has been “administratively suspended”, which means a complaint has been made about her by another party member and a decision taken to investigate it.

The timing of the suspension means there is not enough time to nominate a different candidate in time for the by-election, which will be held next Thursday. This means that if Pascal wins, she will sit as an independent councillor. The source confirmed that Labour will do no further campaigning for her.

Labour doesn’t need its feet. It can get along fine without them.

Pascal’s views about biological sex and gender identity were known well before she was selected as the Cazenove candidate and are expressed in a pinned post on X/Twitter, published on 30 July last year.

She wrote: “My embodied reality as a member of the oppressed sex class is experienced in a world where biology has a significant impact. You can believe what you want but I believe that biological sex is a real thing and neither law or some kind of new scientific concensus wld change that.” In her X/Twitter profile she describes herself as “feminist”.

Well obviously Labour can’t allow that. The mystery is why she didn’t become a non-person on 30 July last year.

Social media critics of Pascal have characterised her selection as Labour embracing a “new wave of horrific transphobia” and have accused her of “bullying trans women“. In social media exchanges, Pascal has said: “trans women are not female. By definition they are male”.

Which is true, and furthermore not insulting or belittling or hatey. It’s just a fact.

On London understands there have been multiple complaints about Pascal, including alleged racism as well as transphobia.

I understand On London is allowing itself to insinuate that Pascal is a Bad Person without offering any evidence.

Déjà vu all over again eh Hahvahd?

Several Jewish students have filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of becoming “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment”.

Harvard already was anti-Jewish, for generations, but in the other way – the Waspy snobby ew ick way, not the wokey trendy pro-Hamas way. It’s weird to see them make the full circle.

The lawsuit filed earlier this week mirrors others submitted since the 7 October Hamas attack on southern Israel, including legal action against the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania.

In the Harvard lawsuit, the plaintiffs include members of the Students Against Antisemitism. They accuse Harvard of violating Jewish students’ civil rights and allege that the university tolerated Jewish students being harassed, assaulted and intimidated – behavior that has intensified since the 7 October mass killing.

…

Fallout from the Israel-Hamas war has roiled campuses across the US and reignited a debate over free speech. College leaders have struggled to define the line where political speech crosses into harassment and discrimination, with Jewish and Arab students raising concerns that their schools are doing too little to protect them.

The issue took center stage in December when the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. Asked by Republican lawmakers whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate campus policies, the presidents offered lawyerly answers and declined to say unequivocally that it was prohibited speech.

It’s interesting that lawmakers don’t want lawyerly answers.

The US Department of Education has repeatedly warned colleges that they are required to fight antisemitism and Islamophobia on their campuses or risk losing federal money.

Jumbled categories. “Semitism” is a racial or ethnic label, while Islam is a religion.

This subject doesn’t bring out the best in people’s thinking.

But this isn’t parody. Should be but isn’t.

The diktat by bosses at data watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office suggests that it is not enough to call employees by their chosen gender pronouns.

It says staff can show their support for trans colleagues by ‘thinking of the person as being the gender that they want you to think of them as’. 

Compliance not enough; visible actions not enough; you must think what we tell you to think.

Oh yeah? Well how are you gonna know? Magic?

The ICO’s Trans Policy and Guidance says its staff should ‘be guided by your trans colleague and their preferences’ in an effort to support them and they ‘must call a person by their chosen or preferred name’. 

It adds: ‘ICO staff can support trans colleagues or individuals who are transitioning by… Thinking of the person as being the gender that they want you to think of them as.’

But they can’t. Seriously. Adults should know this already. You can’t support people by thinking something for the simple reason that what you think is locked in your head; other people have no access to it. You can of course say you think it, perform thinking it, put post-it notes on the wall saying you think it, but none of that is the same as actually thinking it. Other people’s minds are a black box, and on a subject like this in an environment like this…I would be very very skeptical of any self-reports of “how I think of you, fellow-employee.” Anyway all this saying and putting on the wall isn’t what the ICO is demanding: they’re demanding the thinking itself. Well how are they going to check? Eh?

Aw come on, that has to be parody, doesn’t it?

Daughter wants to pretend-transition to boy so that she can transition to girl in a few years? That can’t be real. Can it? (And “we’ll lose the deal with TLC” sounds parodic too.)

AnnLesby – that’s a known parody-maker, right?

Trump owes the NY Times:

Former President Donald Trump has been ordered to pay the New York Times nearly $400,000 (£313,900) in legal fees for a failed lawsuit.

Mr Trump’s $100m lawsuit accused the newspaper and Mr Trump’s estranged niece, Mary Trump, of “an insidious plot” to obtain his tax records. A judge dismissed it last year, saying its claims “fail as a matter of constitutional law”.

Free press? Ring a bell, Don?

The lawsuit, over a 2018 investigation that alleged the former president was involved in “dubious tax schemes”, accused three journalists who reported on the story of working with Mr Trump’s niece as part of a “personal vendetta” against him. It claimed they relentlessly pursued her and convinced her to turn over documents.

Judge Reed dismissed the case in May, saying that the legal system has “long recognised that reporters are entitled to engage in legal and ordinary newsgathering activities”,

A “personal vendetta” ffs. He’s not some guy down the block, he was the head of state. He shouldn’t have been, but he was. Nobody needs a personal reason to want full information on his crimes and corruption.

This is a point that should be made more often. A LOT more often.

Males who identify as women do not want to share private spaces with other males. But women don't want to share those spaces with men however they identify. So the transwomen insists on the very same right that they maintain we must deny women.

— Prof. Gary Francione (@garylfrancione) January 12, 2024

Indeed. “We men don’t want to be around men in private spaces, so you have to let us be around you in private spaces, even though you don’t want to be around men in private spaces either.”

Trump threatens:

There will be “bedlam” in the US if criminal cases deny Donald Trump a White House return, said the former president who incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress but who is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination this year.

Why will there be bedlam? Because Donald Dictator will foment it.

“I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes,” Trump told reporters, referring to Joe Biden and Democrats, after a court hearing in Washington DC on Tuesday.

Hey, you know what’s not the way it goes? A guy who loses an election sending an armed mob to attack the government, that’s what.

A reporter asked: “You just used the word ‘bedlam’. Will you tell your supporters now, ‘No matter what, no violence’?”

Trump walked away.

Of course he did.

His prediction of “bedlam” stoked widespread alarm.

Maya Wiley, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, alluded to Republican endorsements of Trump when she said his “warnings” were “heard by too many as calls to action. Every Republican should come forward and repeat these simple and unequivocal words: ‘Political violence is never acceptable … it has no place in the democracy. None.’ This isn’t a game.”

Tim O’Brien of Bloomberg News, a longtime Trump-watcher, recapped [the] remarks in court and added just one word: “Fascism”.

Fascism and bedlam.

Jerry Coyne on the decline of Science Based Medicine:

Lordy, how many of us used to love the Science-Based Medicine (SBM) site? I did! It was the go-to place for enjoying the debunking of medical quackery and the scrutiny of dubious medical claims. Started in 2008 by Steve Novella and David Gorski (“Orac”), SBM is affiliated with the Society for Science-Based Medicine.

Sadly, it’s now going down the tubes, having bought heavily, like the ACLU and FFRF, into gender activism. It started with an incident I reported here, involving Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage and a positive review by SBM editor, skeptic, and physician Harriet Hall. 

Let’s let Wikipedia sum it up:

On June 15, 2021, Science-Based Medicine published a book review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage written by founding editor Harriet Hall. In her review, Hall wrote that Shrier’s book had raised legitimate concerns about the science surrounding drug treatments for gender dysphoria in children and that there was a lack of quality scientific studies on the subject. Several days after the review was published, Novella and Gorski replaced the review with a retraction notice and responded with a review of their own, the first of six SBM posts rejecting Shrier’s claims and addressing the retraction.

Six. It was that kind of dogpiling that prompted me to get the hell out of Freethought blogs. I had thought Novella and Gorski were more adult than “the horde”; live and learn.

That SIX articles were needed to defend the retraction of Hall’s review and criticize Shrier’s book was not only a sign of trouble at SBM, but an almost obsessive act.

Obsessive and worse. Sadistic. Pointless. Overkill. Backstabby. Unreasonable. Mean.

And all for what? Not for advocating bad or cruel treatment of trans people, or for talking supernatural nonsense, but for not accepting a new and eccentric claim about human sexes. That’s it, that’s the crime that merits all this over the top rebuking and “correcting” and badmouthing.

From Reduxx:

The World Health Organization is under fire for choosing a group of trans activists to develop its first global guide to “gender-affirming care,” with particular concern surrounding an appointee who advocates for halting children’s puberty. 

Why is the WHO doing that at all? Why is the WHO promoting a stupid fad that urges people to ruin their own bodies? Why do people in Nigeria and Laos and Afghanistan need to adopt this brainless destructive fad?

On December 18 of 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally announced the individuals who had been selected to make up its guideline development group (GDG). According to the global health body’s website, the GDG will create “implementation guidance on health sector interventions” for “trans and gender diverse people.” Among them are academics, trans activists, and former leaders and financial backers of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The WHO said the 21 appointees will meet at its headquarters in Geneva next month to collaborate on the guide.

So millions more people all over the planet will ruin their own lives. Brilliant.

[T]he appointee who has sparked perhaps the most controversy for his continued focus on advocating for childhood ‘transition’ is Florence Ashley, currently an assistant professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law in Canada. Since 2018, Ashley has repeatedly written and spoken about “transgender youth” and has called for pubertal suppression to be mandated as a “default option” for “gender creative youth.”

Ya see that’s where they go wrong, this idea that it’s “creative” or some other rah-rah word to try to live a delusion, wreck your own body, and demolish women’s rights, all on the basis of a fiction that people can swap their sex.

There’s a lot more about this Ashley fella, all of it sick-making.

Kath Murray, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Lisa Mackenzie write:

This week the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee will consider the Scottish Prison Service revised policy for transgender prisoners, finally published after a five-year hiatus…

As before, the revised policy is based on self-declaration principles. Prisoners seeking to be accommodated and/or searched based on their gender identity are required to “demonstrate” their identity, but this is not essential. As the SPS explain, the “policy is also explicit that decisions should not be made based on an individual’s ability to provide a wealth of evidence and there may be many reasons why an individual cannot provide this evidence and should not be penalised for this”.

Because the people of gender identity must never be penalized for anything. There is no such rule about women of course.

Whilst the revised policy starts from a default position of excluding men with a history of violence against women from the female estate, it also provides for access if the risk is not considered ‘unacceptable’ – or in plainer language, SPS thinks there is an “acceptable” level of risk it can create here.

An “acceptable” level of risk to other people, that is. Those other people just happen to be women.

Despite consulting more widely, compared to the preceding 2014 policy, the SPS has nonetheless arrived in the same place. To reach this position, it has ignored a swathe of evidence relating to the vulnerability and trauma of women prisoners, male offending risks, and relevant human rights instruments.

It’s interesting how the goal is doing what men who claim to be women want, and everything must be arranged to accommodate that goal, as opposed to the goal’s being to do what women need for safety. Why is that? Why are men who claim to be women so massively more important than women? Why does men’s fun outweigh women’s basic safety?

Despite the clear relevance of the policy to female prisoners, the Equality and Human Rights Impact Assessment (EHRIA) only sought to understand the policy impact on transgender prisoners in any depth. It ignored the 2007 Corston Review of Vulnerable Women in Prison and 2012 Commission on Women Offenders chaired by Dame Elish Angiolini, as well as its own policies that foreground the prevalence of trauma in the female prison population. It did not consider human rights instruments relevant to women but instead cites the controversial Yogyakarta principles at length. It relegates women to the status of “non-transgender women” and describes risks to their safety as “perceived” and a “perspective”. 

How do people get this way?

The lack of balance demonstrated here is not an isolated case. The same failures are evident in the analyses underpinning the two Scottish Government consultations on gender recognition reform. In each case, it appears the policy was decided at the outset, and the evidence retrofitted to that aim. Like the SPS, the Scottish Government ignored relevant evidence, including cases demonstrating the adverse impacts of policies and laws based on self-identification. 

Mass hypnosis. That’s all I can suggest.

Pathetic NPR:

“I think just a few years ago, before Roe was overturned, it was unimaginable for people to tell their stories about traumatic pregnancy loss and about abortions without the fear of public stigma,” Molly Duane of the Center for Reproductive Rights told NPR.

For people to tell their stories? Avoiding something?

Now, it’s different. “Women and pregnant people in this country are so angry and so shocked at the treatment that they are receiving at the hands of the state that they have been compelled to tell their stories,” she says.

Go to hell, NPR. There are no pregnant men in this or any other country; we don’t need you erasing us in the very act of reporting on a drastic curtailment of women’s rights.

Across the country, dozens of women use their full names in high-profile court cases, not just in Texas but also in Idaho and Tennessee, detailing extremely intimate experiences in legal filings, writing op-eds, doing interviews, and having their photographs in the news.

Women. Yes. Hold that thought.

But then NPR skips up to pretend it’s a men’s issue too.

The geography of abortion access is dramatically different [from] before Dobbs. The data show that abortions zeroed out in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri, while the number shot up in other states, including Illinois, North Carolina and New Mexico. In states with bans, people WOMEN who are seeking abortions and have the means, travel to states where it’s legal.

But why did the overall number increase? Upadhyay suggests there may be an increased demand for abortion because of the economy, or because of reduced stigma as more people WOMEN talk about their experiences with miscarriage and abortion.

They do it four more times before the story ends.

Awww look at that adorable cutesie-wootsie kittycat and look how stabby it is and how threat-makey it is. I always love that combination of violent threat and cuddly diddums.

I didn’t know about this guy:

A beluga whale that turned up in Norway wearing a harness in 2019, prompting speculation it was a spy trained by the Russian navy, has reappeared off Sweden’s coast.

First discovered in Norway’s far northern region of Finnmark, the whale spent more than three years slowly moving down the top half of the Norwegian coastline, before suddenly speeding up in recent months to cover the second half and move on to Sweden.

On Sunday [May 22, 2023], he was observed in Hunnebostrand, off Sweden’s south-western coast.

…

Norwegians nicknamed him Hvaldimir – a pun on whale in Norwegian, hval, and a nod to its alleged association with Russia.

When the whale first appeared in the Norwegian Arctic, marine biologists from the Norwegian directorate of fisheries removed a human-made harness from him.

And the reason I learned of his existence is a reunion with one of those marine biologists:

A tender moment between “Spy Beluga” “Hvaldimir” and fisherman Joar Hesten, is shared in this photograph, which was given finalist status in the 2021 Sony World Photography Awards.

Hesten was the one who freed Hvaldimir from the military camera harness he had been wearing when he suddenly showed up in northern Norway in April 2019. During that summer and autumn, Hensten visited the whale, looked after it, and discussed with local fisherman how they could best protect it.

5 weeks ago, Hvaldimir, who comes and goes as he pleases, was in Sórfold Norway appearing fit and active. He has been there since November, according to locals who keep an eye on him.

The chronology is confusing, but anyway, I like the affectionate reunion. I’m a sucker for affectionate reunions of this kind.

Man tells world he can’t understand why women don’t want men strip-searching them.

Originally a comment by Papito on Relating to coercive behavior.

Since “changing gender” doesn’t really mean anything, how can one prevent it? If you are “assigned sex at birth,” but you are born with an inherent, inalienable gender, then it never changes, so you can’t prevent it changing. For example, once upon a time, in a deleted universe, there was an actress named Ellen Page, but in our more valid universe you can see that a fellow named Elliot Page has credits for Juno, where he played a pregnant girl, and Hard Candy, where he played a 14-year old female vigilante. Because he was always Elliot, he never changed gender. He played those roles as a remarkably talented young lad.

In the case of a young girl who was assigned male at birth, a similar rule holds: she is already a girl, and she doesn’t need to do anything in particular to prove that. We are informed by many transwomen that having a penis does not mean they’re not a woman – it’s a “ladydick.” So preventing a child from having genital surgery isn’t preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Many transwomen are balding and bearded, but they’re still women, so preventing a child from taking puberty blockers or female hormones is not preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Some women, trans or otherwise, even wear clothes typical of men on a daily basis, so preventing a child from wearing women’s clothes isn’t preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Some women go by names that are more typical of men, like Freddy or Jack, so preventing a child from taking on a typically female name is not preventing her from changing or expressing gender.

As long as a woman can look like anything, have any body, and be called anything, no restriction in dress, address, or medical treatment can prevent, define, or change a child’s gender. Parents should feel free to uphold whatever rules they prefer, with no worries that they can be misinterpreted as attempts to suppress or change a child’s gender.

Yes, yes they would. Next question?

Parents are allowed to talk about gender identity, but they are of course not allowed to say it’s not a real thing. It’s like the church. Parents are allowed to talk about the religion, but they’re not allowed to say it’s bullshit.

Furthermore parents will be jailed for seven years only in the case of coercive behavior, like telling their sons they’re boys and can’t change themselves into girls.

How very liberal.

Dave Hewitt is brilliant.

There is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in political discourse many times in recent years, which goes like this:

• An existing term is colonised and its meaning subverted to new political ends
• Previous users of the term are forced to try to come up with a new term to replace the old one
• The new occupants demonise the old, and deny political legitimacy to any new terminology

The best description I can think of for this process is semantic gentrification, in which users of a word’s original meaning are forced out by newcomers who consider themselves morally enlightened in comparison to the older population, who completely change the character of the term in service of their own, narrow interests, and who regard the now-homeless former inhabitants with contempt.

It’s not so much a description as a metaphor, and it’s a brilliant metaphor. Let’s use it a lot.

Inherent in this is a sense in which the new meaning is superior to the old, representing a progressive, moral inevitability, and that attempts to reassert old meanings are denied legitimacy as regressive, backwards, and “on the wrong side of history”. Why would you want to hold on to a run down, backwards old semantic neighbourhood, when the shiny new hipster takeover is such a clear improvement?

It has huge windows! Wifi for cats! Luxury lightbulbs! Espresso machines in the showers!

…the female-centric analysis of feminism was colonised and redefined into a gender-centric one promising “equality for everyone”, women’s studies supplanted by gender studies, and so on. Rather than a movement to redress historic in[e]quity for women, and bring women’s needs to the fore, this shift reinforces women’s stereotypical role as primary caregiver, sacrificing their own needs – their own words – to right all of the world’s wrongs.

It reinforces it and it abuses all women who resist. Win-win.

Of course, in this inverted analysis, the most wrongs are perpetrated against the most “marginalised genders”, and the most marginalised of all are the men who wish to be seen as women, whose concerns have become so central that any women’s issues that exclude them are deemed hateful.

Deemed hateful and punished accordingly. Cops arrest us, friends berate us in public, judges tell us to call our male assailants “she” in court. It’s 1960 all over again.

Shared understanding cannot be assumed because the entitled new occupants have appropriated the old semantic structures, and supplanted them with their new, fashionable concerns. Every attempt to speak with precision about the pre-gentrification meaning of these words, to talk only about women’s rights and needs, to talk specifically about LGB issues, to make a feminist stand on a newsworthy event or a matter of policy – all becomes a trans issue. The conflict is inescapable, and a huge amount of time is expended trying to restate entirely reasonable feminist points from first principles. All the while the new inhabitants of these well-respected old semantic neighbourhoods have free rein to use their stolen goodwill to reshape society in the way they see fit.

The neighborhoods now have no grocery stores or parks or libraries but there’s a Starbucks on every corner. Enjoy.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Too many organisations have let them get away with it.

Our generation had Punk. They practised what we’d probably now call “trolling” and got the desired response. That was their passport to seeing themselves as lonely misunderstood romantic heroes. Then came Goths and most people were a just little wiser and pretty much let them get on with mooching about in cemeteries at midnight and writing bad poetry. We’d been there. Then came what? We’d reached a point when nothing anyone could do in terms of presentation or “lifestyle” could shock or even slightly perturb the older generations. We, who had become those older generations, were all too busy desperately denying the reality of our ageing bodies.

So what do you do when dying your hair an unnatural colour and weighing down your body with a jeweller’s case of heavy metal isn’t getting a response? You make demands – inherently unreasonable demands. Except the generation which is still young enough to be successfully denying the reality of their bodies but has gotten their hands on the mid-level reigns of power, is way ahead of you. They’re actually happy to accede to unreasonable demands – indeed it’s a badge of pride(!), because postmodernism, or something, though mostly just to deny that they’re no longer young romantic heroes and have gotten hold of the power they profess to despise. And if it’s just the rights of women in prison (or women in general) that need to be sacrificed well that’s not a sexy issue, and won’t look good on social media, and almost certainly will never affect them or anybody they know (until one day they look in the mirror and realise they’re old and everyone else sees them as old and are plotting to push them out of the way, and no they can’t identify out of being old but that won’t happen, surely not?).

So the reasonably well-off twenty-somethings get to play the romantic hero and be a dick to women on the internet and everyone else gets to be a dick to women on the internet. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. Well, it could be if they could just get their head around where all the shouting is coming from.