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

And speaking of that man and the woman who appointed him…

He scratches her back, she scratches his.

Women lose.

Labour MP. Formerly a BBC reporter.

Charming. Women who question putting a man in charge of an endometriosis charity are bullying, while the man put in charge of an endometriosis charity and the woman who put him there are their victims. Welcome to Backwards World.

The Vermont Daily Chronicle:

Following the resignation of a member of a Burlington Neighborhood Planning Assembly (NPA) over another member’s unwillingness to use preferred gender-related personal pronouns, the Burlington City Council Monday night approved a resolution to redraft NPA bylaws preventing ‘gender discrimination.’

You mean discrimination against women?

Hahaha of course not, don’t be so silly.

Lee Morrigan is a biological female who identifies as non-binary. Jeff Comstock refuses to use assigned pronouns at the NPA meetings because he considers them an effort to impose an agenda on individuals and society at large.

And, let’s not forget, to burden them with the duty to keep in mind a counter-intuitive use of language, which would mean being hyper-vigilant about everything one says in the presence of gender Stalinists.

The NPAs are local advisory groups intended to increase citizen participation in civic matters. At a recent meeting of the Wards 4 & 7 (New North End) NPA steering committee, Morrigan and others tried at length to persuade fellow NPA member Jeff Comstock that it’s ‘disrespectful’ to refer to Morgan with female pronouns. 

Way not to increase citizen participation in civic matters! Way to send people screaming for the doors, never to return! Way to change the subject from civic matters to one person’s greedy ego.

Morrigan: So why won’t you use my pronouns? Can you explain?

Comstock: Some folks are trying to impose their personal agendas on others. One of the concepts that I think this entire gender identity issue is failing at is the recognition of the concept that your rights end where my nose begins. There is an awful lot of cultural and social imposition of some people’s agendas on others in our society.”

Morrigan: I have a responsibility to keep myself safe. So what I’m hearing is that you are not going to use my pronouns, correct?

Comstock: And how does that impact your safety?

Morrigan: I’ve been explaining this for the past 20 minutes on how this impacts my wellbeing. You’re not going to use my pronouns, correct?

Well-being is not safety. Furthermore, referring to a woman as “she” is not a threat to anyone’s safety at a neighborhood planning meeting, especially not one in Burlington Vermont.

Monday night, the Burlington City Council approved a resolution clarifying what constitutes discrimination on the NPA level, establishes a complaint process, and creates a pathway for removing members who fail to comply. 

So Comstock will be booted out and petulant whiny self-centered entitled Morrigan will return. Burlington’s loss.

Kenny Farq is miffed that his staggeringly banal and clueless “let’s you compromise” column is attracting contempt and derision.

Who could have predicted that anyone would write such an absurdly clueless column for a serious newspaper?

Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour surprises us all by telling Steph Richards and Jodie Hughes (founder of Endometriosis South Coast) some harsh truths.

Starts at 22:15.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Let’s give your rights away.

The result of giving in to the demands of narcissists and sociopaths is never peace. It always leads to another round of demands, and so on and so forth until they have absolutely everything; and then what?

First they came for the lesbians, now they’re coming after women and children simultaneously. It was ‘just’ preferred pronouns, now they’re mandatory wrong-sex (or illogically plural) pronouns if you want to keep your job. It was just “We want to live our lives in peace” and now it’s “You have to let us into ALL women’s spaces, shelters, toilets, sports, changing rooms, jobs, BIGOT”

Surely this bloke isn’t so full of himself that he didn’t do any smidgen of research into the subject, especially the history of appeasement and the results, before writing? Nah. Must be another narcissist, looking out for opportunities for himself, sod everyone else.

Oh how I love it when men say let’s do a compromise on women’s rights.

How the trans row will end in compromise

By comparison, debates about Brexit and Scottish independence are akin to a chorus of Kumbaya at Brownie camp. There is something about the trans issue that brings out the irrational, the visceral, the absolutist.

Ooh I bet I know what that “something” is. I bet it’s the crazy irrational brainless stubborn wacky stupid mindless unthinking daft witless nature of women. Stupid bitches need a big patronizing man to show them how to do a compromise.

We are close to a compromise on the trans issue that will satisfy neither side of a deep divide. In fact each will greet a deal with dismay. And yet a middle way is necessary on this issue that has scarred public discourse like no other in recent years.

Except who is that “we”?

It’s a different “we” depending on who is talking. When Kenny Farquharson is talking it’s reasonable decent good people like him, who all happen to be men and thus who have nothing to lose if other men do help themselves to women’s rights. When the “we” who are talking are women things look rather different…but he’s too manly and important to pause for a think about that.

What does compromise look like on the issue of trans rights? Its exact contours are still indistinct but its general shape is now discernible. A useful guide is the judgment offered by Lady Dorrian earlier this month in a case brought by For Women, a feminist campaign group.

Dorrian upheld an earlier judgment that trans women should be treated the same way as biological women under legislation to improve gender balance on the boards of public agencies. She rejected the argument that this was incompatible with the Equality Act in which, she accepted, “sex” meant biological sex.

In short, she sought to protect trans rights while upholding a biological definition of woman.

Oh that kind of “compromise.” The one where men who call themselves women still get to steal jobs reserved for women, but in return the women get…uh…nothing.

I sometimes get the feeling diehards on each side of this argument would rather lose than compromise. Defeat would require no giving of ground.

Where’s the compromise? Spell out for us exactly what the compromise part is. Telling us that putting men who call themselves women on the boards of public agencies as a way to increase the representation of women on those boards is not repeat NOT a compromise. Saying “sure, they’re not literally women, but we’re giving them the women’s places on the boards of public agencies anyway” is NOT a compromise.

A key belief of gender critical feminism is that a man can never become a woman. And yet existing laws in place for decades allow a man to gain a gender recognition certificate to help them live the life of a woman.

And yet a “certificate” does not and cannot change the physical reality that a man is a man and not a woman. Imagine if a “certificate” could allow people to live the life of Kenny Farquharson; do we suppose he would cheerfully allow this someone to live in his house, drive his car, spend his paycheck?

A strand of thought is emerging that not only should extending trans rights be blocked but existing trans rights should be rolled back. At this point the distinction between gender critical feminism and social conservatism becomes hard to discern.

Define “trans rights.” Spell out exactly what they are and say what makes them rights as opposed to demands.

The compromise required of this particular side of the debate is to accept that for most intents and purposes a man can indeed become a woman in the eyes of society and in the eyes of the law.

Oh that compromise. The one that other people spell as “total submission.”

As a man, my view on the definition of woman is necessarily as an outsider. Having accepted this, I am still entitled to a circumscribed view, which I pose as a question: surely womanhood in all its glory is capacious enough, generous enough, diverse enough, to accommodate and perhaps even to welcome a small number of people who did not start life’s journey as women?

No, you’re not. You’re not entitled to jack shit when the issue is women’s rights.

There’s even more of this clueless entitled smug lecturing; read it at your peril.

This is where centrism gets you, especially radical centrism.

Split the difference, yeah? Call him “she” if you like him or think he’s a centrist or want to annoy some non-centrist pedant who knows what pronouns are. Call him “he” if he veers too far to the left or the right. Either way you’re obviously better than everyone else.

The new CEO of Endometriosis South Coast issues a “statement” i.e. a tweet.

Endometriosis South Coast (ESC) are a small local charity with an annual income of around £8000. Our team consists of six trustees and five volunteers, all of whom were assigned female at birth and myself.

None of us are paid a salary; we do it to improve the lives of those who suffer Endo.

In the UK, 10% of those assigned female at birth suffer from this awful disease, which, via the NHS, takes on average eight years to diagnose. The cost to the economy every year is £8.2 billion, but honestly, how do you put a price on pain?

Our chair at ESC suffers from Endo very severely and is currently working towards her endometriosis research PhD – understandably, she wants to take a step back.

The trustees decided that the organisation needed an activist with a proven record to drive the charity forward and advocate for a women’s health hub in our city, and when asked, I duly obliged – I feel very honoured; thank you @EndoSouthC

My birth sex doesn’t come into it …..my CV does.

CEO’s are appointed by boards/trustees because of their “skill set”, not because of their sex (note I have a GRC).

There are numerous examples of charities/organisations employing CEO’s whose sex doesn’t correspond with those they serve – look no further than Laura Kerby at Prostate Cancer UK and Simon Cook at MSI Reproductive Choices.

Many gynaecologists are men – I don’t see any headlines about them. Some midwives are men – I don’t see any headlines about them either. And how about the male paramedic who may deal with miscarriage or prolapse – there are no headlines about them either. Am I wrong?

No, I am not.

I do believe the complaints against me are transphobic @millihill @runthinkwrite @HJoyceGender @MForstater @helenstaniland will not agree, of course.

In my opinion, many charities have failed women. For example, in Spain, Japan, South Korea and Zambia, women have rights when experiencing disabling periods. Why are we not talking about this instead of publishing headlines about trans women?

We need to talk about #Endo and supporting #women much more. Women deserve ACTION – that is why ESC asked me to be their CEO.

Recently, I did an FOI to our local Portsmouth hospital, asking them how many women they treated in 2022 with Endo. The answer was 249 – I want to know why this figure was so low, so I have made another FOI digging deeper. To date, I am still waiting for a reply. This is what activists do!

Diversity should be seen as a strength. Stereotyping is wrong, and by appointing me as the CEO of ESC, I will look at the issues Endo suffers endure with a different perspective than others. Who can argue that is not a positive?

ESC are an inclusive charity, meaning we welcome EVERYONE with endo and adeno. We do not mind if you are straight, gay, black, trans, non-binary or whatever.

WE ARE HERE FOR YOU.

ALL OF YOU.

Finally, a massive thank you to the many people who have sent me messages of support (even GC people).

Best wishes, Steph

Sure, have lots of diversity – by hiring and appointing more women for instance. Hiring a man as CEO of a women’s charity isn’t “diversity” it’s “same old shit.” The fact that he calls himself a woman does not make him more “diversity.” It makes him more narcissistic displacer of women.

Julie Bindel on the latest calculated insult to women:

When the announcement was made, by Endometriosis South Coast on Monday, many of us considered it to be a parody. “We are excited to share with you all that we welcome Steph to the team as our new CEO. Supporting to move forward with our missions as a charity – we are all grateful to have Steph on board” read the announcement on X. 

The new CEO is a man who identifies as a transwoman.

You know who can never have endometriosis? Men.

Steph Richards is well-known as a trans-activist, often leading the charge of protesters at feminist events, such as one I attended in 2021, in his hometown of Portsmouth. The FiLiA Women’s Rights conference, a gathering of more than 2,000 women from around the world, was picketed by a large group of protesters, draped in trans flags. 

Steph was amongst them, screaming about “transphobic feminists”, whilst inside there were women speaking about being raped in refugee camps, trafficked into prostitution, and overcoming childhood sexual abuse. 

How dare women talk about bad shit that happens to women instead of about men who pretend to be women?

It is utterly outrageous to employ a man to run a women’s health charity, however he identifies. There are plenty of women, including those whose lives are blighted by endometriosis, that could do the job. It is gaslighting in the extreme. 

And because it is gaslighting in the extreme, it’s all too obvious that it’s a deliberate, calculated, with malice aforethought insult. It’s an intentional attack on women and women’s rights and women’s right to organize and talk and campaign for their own issues.

Thanks to extreme transgender ideology being adopted by many women working in the sector, Steph is not the only example of a man taking such a role from a woman. The chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis is a man called Mridul Wadhwa, employed by the handmaidens in order to look “intersectional” and “inclusive”. In 2021 Wadhwa caused outrage when he said on a podcast that those that believe in single sex spaces for rape victims and survivors, need to “reframe their trauma” if they are in the least bit bothered about a male person being in the vicinity of a supposed women only space.

How about men “reframe their trauma” instead? How about Steph “reframes his trauma” by not deliberately stomping all over women?