Wait who is the bully in this scenario???

BBC presenter Emma Barnett has faced an online pile-on from trans allies after she questioned why the new transgender CEO of an endometriosis charity was not using the word ‘woman’.

The host was lauded by prominent feminists including Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock for robustly questioning charity boss Steph Richards after her appointment as CEO of Endometriosis South Coast. Listeners had widely praised the presenter and thanked her for ‘defending biological reality’. But she was accused of ‘bullying’ and conducting a ‘disgraceful’  interview on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour by critics including Labour MP Ben Bradshaw. 

Men like it when women get shoved aside that way – men like Ben Bradshaw at any rate.

[Richards] was one of the first to criticise the interview, posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, less than two hours after the segment aired: ‘Did Emma Bartlett (sic) want to talk about #endo or the word “woman”? A missed chance I suspect, to raise awareness of this truly awful disease.’

A truly awful disease which Emma Barnett knows the truly awfulness of because she has it, which Richards does not and cannot because he’s a man.

CEOs of charities of course don’t have to be from the demographic the charity is meant to help, but at the same time it seems strikingly perverse, aka like a calculated insult, to choose a man to head this particular charity when the demographic it’s meant to help is half of humanity. To put it another way, why choose a man when there are so many women? It can’t be anything but a deliberate poke in the eye. If you poke us in the eye, we’re likely to say you’re doing that.

Later Labour MP for Exeter, Mr Bradshaw joined the criticism, declaring:  ‘Huge respect to you and your colleague for withstanding the appalling presenter bullying and defending inclusive language and services.’

No skin off his ass, is it. No, just jump right in, bro, and tell those bitches what they can say.

…the flashpoint occurred when Ms Barnet pointed out Ms Richards had not used the word woman in a statement.

She asked her: ‘There is a concern that as a trans activist, now running, being the CEO of an endometriosis charity for women, that you will not preserve the importance of things like the word “woman” and that experience because in your statement on X, 10% you say of those assigned female at birth suffer from this awful disease. Is the word you are looking for there, woman?’

Smut! That’s sheer smut! It shouldn’t be allowed, especially not on the BBC.

Nonononononono

I haven’t been able to find the image on their Facebook page or via Google.

Oh good god.

There is no “intersection of science and identity.” They don’t intersect. “Identity” isn’t science, it’s a buzzword, it’s rhetoric, it’s a loose label for how we think of ourselves. Sometimes it’s just a basic fact recorded on a birth certificate and/or passport and/or driver’s license and so on, but most of the time these days it’s a tedious Magical Spiritual Essence that nearly everyone is sick to death of hearing about. That version is more or less the antithesis of science.

What does Dr. Clara Barker say?

There is a push to keep identity politics out of STEM – to keep those parts of my identity separate. I have talked before about how it is not so simple: I am trans. Sure, on most days I can simply be a scientist, but on some days I cannot; whether it is comments or sneers across a meeting table, old collaborators no longer wanting to work with me, or having to consider where I travel for collaborations or conferences.

That applies to everyone. Everyone has to deal with meetings and colleagues and travel. Everyone has a life outside of science, including scientists. I wonder if the old collaborators don’t want to work with him not because he’s trans but because he’s self-involved. Can you be trans without being self-involved? It seems to be all but impossible for most who try it.

Many people are supportive of trans inclusion. We are also seeing a challenge to trans-medical experts by a minority, but I hope that we will start trusting those experts again. Whether you support trans rights or not, how we handle the topic will impact science across the board, or else before long we will be throwing out the theory of evolution, saying dinosaurs are fake, the world is flat, and aeroplanes cannot fly.

And that people can change sex.

The Children’s Hospital of Manitoba appears to be a nightmare.

I’m reading it, and it’s horrifying.

Mary [a pseudonym], a vibrant 10-year-old with bright eyes that always seem to be smiling, is a beacon of creativity, kindness, and artistry. She’s a dancer and musician, expressing herself through the beauty of movement and sound. 

No he’s not a musician ffs. He’s ten. He likes music, he’s learning music, he makes music, but he’s not a musician. He dances, but he’s not a dancer. If he plays hospital he’s not a doctor; if he plays school he’s not a teacher.

It’s a nitpick but maybe not just a nitpick, since treating children as if they can make monumental decisions about changing their sex is a massive part of the problem here. Children are children, not tiny adults.

Mary thinks she was about seven years old when she began to articulate feelings of longing to be a “real girl.” Femininity – dresses, rainbows, and girl roles in games and on screen in Disney movies – felt like the only areas that truly aligned with her identity.

That’s how it is with children. They try on stuff. They play. They create involved fantasies that they act out. That doesn’t mean you have to remove their genitals. You shouldn’t remove their genitals.

In Mary’s journey of self-discovery, her family stands as pillars of love and support. “They love me, and I love them, and they support me,” she beams.

Is that how tens talk? I wouldn’t have thought so. It sounds like therapy-speak. Since when do children think of their parents as “supportive”?

Dr. Bhatla suggests strategies to support youth awaiting healthcare, including social transitioning. This involves changes in dressing, hairstyles, and the use of special garments like binders to alleviate the discomfort of being in the wrong body.

And replace it with much sharper discomfort, up to and including broken ribs.

Despite the challenges, Mary envisions a future aligned with her true self. 

No doubt he does, especially with all these lunatic adults telling him there as such a thing as his “true self,” but the likelihood is he will hit a wall at some point. Sentimental glurge about his true self isn’t magic.

Even at age 10, the prospect of a future boyfriend worries her, wondering if or at what phase of dating she’ll need to disclose her journey. And she worries, a little, about never having a baby – but says her plans to be a famous actress won’t allow time to be a mom anyway.

He was never going to have a baby. Also, “plans to be a famous actress,” like plans to become a girl, are just plans. Lots of people want to be actors, and most of them fail.

It’s horrible watching these deranged adults encouraging this poor kid to ruin his body.

Media Matters:

Elon Musk lights his tiki torch

The latest edition of the Elon Musk Twitter experience features the unfathomably wealthy right-wing owner of the site arguing that Jews are wrong about antisemitism. In his telling, Jewish communities are overly concerned with white nationalists like those he has welcomed to his social media platform, when they should worry instead about the brown “hordes” that they themselves have welcomed to the United States.

“You have said the actual truth” was Musk’s Wednesday night response to a paid X Premium user who, in explaining why “Hitler was right,” accused Jewish communities in the U.S. of “dialectical hatred against whites” and blamed them for “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities.” Musk went on to clarify that he was not talking about all Jews, just the Anti-Defamation League (which has criticized Musk for white nationalist content on his platform) and unnamed others he claimed were “unjustly” focusing on “the majority of the West” rather than “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, all of it bad. Musk is promoting the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as many have noted. That blood-soaked fantasy was touted by tiki torchbearers chanting “Jews will not replace us” and echoed by several murderous white supremacists, including the terrorist who massacred Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue, even as it spread through Fox News and the right-wing media and became a fixture of GOP politics. And unlike others who have adopted a less explicit version of the theory, Musk is, in the parlance of the white nationalists who applauded his remark, explicitly “naming the Jew” as the source of the problem.

Can we get Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and the Google dudes in a room with Musk so they can all gang up on him? He won’t listen to peons.

He is boosting white nationalists because he agrees their views are “the actual truth.” 

He agrees with them that criticisms of white nationalists are actually attacks on the entire white population.

He agrees with them that anti-white racism is a major American problem and that there is a broad conspiracy seeking the “extinction” of white people.

He agrees with them that Jews in particular who criticize white nationalism are really engaged in “hatred against whites.”

Media Matters ends with “We are all in a lot of trouble.”

Updating to include the tweets themselves, in response to Coel’s flattering description of them.

I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.

It’s da jooz.

The Guardian:

Elon Musk tweeted his fervent agreement with an antisemitic statement on Wednesday night.

A tweet posted by @breakingbaht on Wednesday night read: “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

The billionaire owner and CTO of X, formerly Twitter, responded the same evening: “You have said the actual truth.” In another reply, he wrote: “I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind.” Musk has feuded with the Anti-Defamation League before, threatening to sue over its accounting of hate speech on his social media network.

The ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, decried Musk’s endorsement of the antisemitic conspiracy. He wrote: “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories. #NeverIsNow.”

On Thursday morning, Musk continued on the same tear about the white race. He approved of a tweet reading: “Everyone is allowed to be proud of their race, except for white people, because we’ve been brainwashed into believing that our history was some how ‘worse’ than other races. This false narrative must die.”

Musk wrote: “Yeah, this is super messed up. Time for this nonsense to end and shame ANYONE who perpetuates these lies!”

The tweet provoked immediate and strong backlash both on X and off. Tweets condemning Musk’s reply as a “white supremacist conspiracy theory” poured in while antisemitic support for him erupted simultaneously. The Atlantic published an essay lambasting Musk, titled “Elon Musk’s Disturbing ‘Truth’”, and the watchdog publication MediaMatters headlined its story on the topic “Elon Musk lights his tiki torch”, in reference to the infamous 2017 march by white supremacists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Don’t worry, this is all fine.

H/t Tim Harris

John Cassidy at the New Yorker on Trump’s verminspeak:

If the phrase “live like vermin within the confines of our country” sounds vaguely familiar, it should. In February, 1933, days after Adolf Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany, Wilhelm Kube, a Nazi politician, wrote in a propaganda publication, as reported at the time by the Jewish Daily Bulletin: “The Jews, like vermin, form a line from Potsdamerplatz until Anhalter Banhof. . . . The only way to smoke out the vermin is to expel them.” In 1936, when Oswald Mosley’s British Fascists were harassing Jews in London’s East End, they referred to them as “rats and vermin from the gutters of Whitechapel.” Hitler himself used similar language more than once. In a 1934 interview, he said, “If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!”

…

Until 2020, Trump reserved his most offensive language for undocumented immigrants. During the 2016 campaign, he referred to them as “drug dealers,” “criminals,” “rapists.” From the Oval Office, he referred to them as “animals,” and in a 2018 tweet he said that Democrats wanted them “to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13.” This dehumanizing rhetoric went down well with many of Trump’s hard-core supporters. He also made derogatory comments about prominent Black figures, calling Representative Maxine Waters “low I.Q.” and Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, “dumb.” He referred to Baltimore, a predominantly Black city, as a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.”

It goes down well with his supporters, but it goes down well with him, too. He likes that kind of thing. Why? I don’t know, it seems to be just who he is. He’s a mean angry sadistic resentful guy with no inhibitions and no conscience. In turn it seems that half the population love that about him.

All Presidential contests are important, of course. But this one is shaping up as a struggle for the future of the country—a struggle in which one of the major political parties is under the control of a would-be strongman, who, during his Veterans Day speech, also took the opportunity to praise the governing styles of Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbán. It’s a struggle in which the former President’s associates are reportedly busy preparing post-election plans to staff the Justice Department with Trump loyalists who are willing to target his opponents; to invoke the Insurrection Act and dispatch the military to political demonstrations; and to build giant camps to hold undocumented migrants. In other words, it’s a struggle to prevent the election of a President whose embrace of fascistic imagery and authoritarian governance goes well beyond what comes out of his mouth. That, unfortunately, is where we are. The reality cannot be avoided.

All true.

Speaking of people speaking of “vermin”…

Trump is calling us vermin now.

Vermin.

At a campaign event Saturday in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He then said his political opposition was the most pressing and pernicious threat facing America.

Vermin.

His daddy was a slumlord, so he knows damn well what vermin are.

He’s telling us “Yeah I’m a Nazi and you can’t stop me.”

Of course one of his spokies denied it.

“Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, “and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

With zyklon b no doubt.

Last month, Mr. Trump told a right-wing website that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase recalling white supremacist ideology and comments made by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf.”

But never mind all that, the important thing is, what are your pronouns?

Is that right?

What are they then? Stallions? Bulls? Bucks? Roosters? Rams?

If trans women are not men then what does the “trans” in “trans women” mean?

Oh golly Jolyon slipped up. Psssst dude you’re not supposed to admit that people can’t change what they are just by saying so, except in the case of purely social or cultural or legal types of “what they are.” As in, profession or political leaning or music preferences, yes; species or age or sex, no. You’re not supposed to admit that a law can’t make you literally the sex you are not.

Police harassment continues:

The officer who unlawfully questioned our client for saying ‘transwomen are men’ turned up at her house overnight to post a handwritten envelope. The enclosed letter contained no apology, no acknowledgment of the alarm & distress, but simply stated that there would be no further action PENDING FURTHER INFORMATION. The level of inappropriateness is breathtaking. This is stalking. @CCJardineNP @NPNland