Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscelllany Room.

I wish there was one single all-encompassing, factual, non-polemical book about this. So far, there isn’t one. (But I’ll be honest: I’d love to write one myself.)

Helen Joyce’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality is fantastic — analogous to Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the sense that it’s a broad overview of the definition of trans and how the concept is not backed by science — just like Dawkins did with the concept of God.

But Joyce’s (excellent) book sticks to the facts, and lacks a broader analysis of the social and political context, which has so much to do with why this nonsense idea has become so popular so quickly.

Here, Kathleen Stock steps in and takes a feminist-philosophical view in her book Material Girls. (Which — I know, I’m a horrible monster, kill me now — I have only started and haven’t finished. So I can’t really speak to this one too much.)

For a pre-social-media perspective on specifically male transsexualism, transgender identity, and homosexuality, and the connection between them, Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen is very good. (And it’s available as a free PDF now, with the author’s blessing.)

And then there’s Bailey’s spiritual sequel of sorts, Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, which mostly focuses on the controversy surrounding Bailey’s book, and which launches from there into the subject of ideology and activism and how those forces interact with the pursuit of science, for better or for worse. (Very interesting, enlightening and engaging stuff.)

In Tough Crowd, Graham Linehan writes movingly about trans from the perspective of the social media landscape and what it’s like to be a celebrity who dissents from the liberal consensus and who dares to blaspheme about the topic. (I’m biased towards this book because I had a hand in its creation, and because Graham is one of my closest and dearest friends. We’re colleagues, too: we host a long-running, popular YouTube podcast together. But all bias aside, the book has been a runaway bestseller because the consensus is that it’s a brilliant, hilarious, and moving read.)

Dr. Az Hakeem has written two books from the perspective of a therapist who has seen first-hand that there’s a way for virtually all (98%) young people who are convinced that they need trans identities and sexchange surgeries that they can climb down from that belief and reconcile their minds with their bodies. His latest is the newest of the bunch of high profile trans books, and I haven’t read it yet, but I hear it’s very good.

I myself have taken a stab at a broad-overview essay, which imagines its reader as an otherwise uninformed liberal progressive looking to get a foothold into this subject. A Cliff’s Notes primer. My essay tries to pare this incredibly complex topic down to a few basic, digestible concepts to a reader who is otherwise hostile to gender-critical ideas. Here it is.

There’s no one way into this mess of a topic, and there’s no single, universal story that comes close to capturing it — yet. But I puzzle every night and day over whether such a solution is possible, in the way mathematicians and chessmasters probably puzzle over abstract theorems. I want so badly for there to be some kind of elegant, simple solution: an easily deployed explanation I can use to break my erstwhile friends free of the spell of gender madness. It’s a cult, and it’s stolen my life away because it’s stolen virtually all of my friends and colleages, and I keep wishing for some kind of science-fiction code word that will break them all out of the spell, like Angela Lansbury’s Queen of Diamonds playing card in The Manchurian Candidate — only in reverse: to break someone OUT of a mind-control trance, instead of inducing one.

There’s gotta be a solution out there somewhere that will solve this problem! Something to stop the madness!

Until we find one, I hope the recommendations come in handy for you.

Yes but.

Tensions within CNN over coverage of former President Donald J. Trump burst into the open on Thursday during an internal call with the network’s journalists, as an executive candidly questioned the approach of the channel’s new chief executive, Mark Thompson.

CNN aired roughly 10 minutes of Mr. Trump’s victory speech after he won the Iowa caucuses on Monday before cutting away. The decision to cut him off prompted derision from the former president and his allies, although critics on the left questioned why CNN had taken Mr. Trump live in the first place, given his tendency to spread falsehoods and conspiracies. MSNBC chose not to take any of his remarks live.

Mr. Thompson opened his morning conference call on Thursday by acknowledging a debate within his newsroom, saying he believed the network had a journalistic obligation to broadcast the remarks of the leading Republican candidate for president.

Not so fast.

Other things being equal, yes, news outlets do have that kind of obligation.

But other things are not equal.

Trump is not a normal political candidate. Trump is not even a normal human being. Trump is a monster and a terrible threat.

Mind you, not broadcasting his remarks might make him and his troops even worse.

But news people shouldn’t be talking about Trump as if he were a normal candidate and a normal human. Ever.

Is your dog Mormon or Catholic or Independent Fundamental Baptist?

An agency that supplies animals to the media has asked owners whether their pets are gender neutral or non-binary in a drive to be more “inclusive”.

Urban Paws, which describes itself as the leading animal talent agency in the UK, included four gender options on the application form owners are required to complete to register their pets: male, female, gender neutral/non-binary and prefer not to say.

Well it’s an animal talent agency, so it’s wall-to-wall lovvies, so it makes perfect sense. The kind of people who want their pets to make it in show biz are the kind of people who think “non-binary” is real and that it applies to non-human animals. Once you start believing in horseshit there’s no stopping point.

Yes it’s just unfathomable that women would want to be away from men in some circumstances isn’t it. It’s like saying crocodiles speak French.

Sex based rights create division, so women should not have any rights. Seems fair.

Sums it up.

So MR, a member of the board of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, doesn’t know whether a “non-binary” person has a sex? She isn’t qualified to answer that question? She would have to ask advice before answering it?

Then what is rape? If you don’t know the most basic facts about what sex humans are how can you understand what rape is? What are you doing on the board of a rape crisis center?

Naomi Cunningham points out that if you pretend [aka lie that] ERCC doesn’t employ men when its boss is a man, women who’ve been raped won’t feel safe there, let alone helped in any way.

My Twitter is heavy on the bizarre claims at the tribunal today.

“Confused” as in [cough] not being over-scrupulous about the truth.

Do NBs get to “present as male”? What does that even mean? Where did all these brains go when they left people’s heads?

MR is Mairi Rosko and she’s quite the piece of work.

As Naomi Cunningham said – “You need to tell the truth.”

Originally a comment by Artymorty on This novel should be about something completely different.

Talk about Not Getting it. Here’s yet another example of Canada becoming a global joke because it’s full of goody-two-shoes bureaucratic busybodies. I can’t imagine any other country treating its own literary legacy the way we do. If Lucy Montgomery wrote characters as annoying as Canadians appear to be today, no one would have bothered with the books.

It’s infuriating. Anne of Green Gables is surely Canada’s most famous book, and that’s because because Anne’s story has resonated with girls (and maybe a few boys, ahem) around the world, across cultures. It was never about ethnic or religious cultures, it was about a girl and her life, told colourfully and humanistically.

An Anne anecdote: when I was young, I briefly had a housemate, a seventeen or eighteen year old Japanese girl named Reiko, who had run away from her troubled home in Japan to Prince Edward Island, so obsessed with Anne of Green Gables she had been. A sympathetic retired couple on the island took her into their home for a while — how very Anne of Green Gables-like! But she eventually moved to Toronto, I guess because there’s not much work in PEI besides… I don’t know, lobster fishing, potato farming, and more Japanese Green Gables tourists?

It still amazes me that she travelled all the way across the globe as a sixteen or seventeen year old, all by herself, to PEI, because her love of Anne was so strong.

Reiko’s is a sad story, though: teenage runaways, especially undocumented girls from Asia with no family in the country, don’t tend to thrive. She ended up working in a “parlour” for a while, but me and a couple other housemates got her out of there and away from the sleazy pimp who had convinced her he was her boyfriend, and she eventually went back to Japan to try and work her life out. So… not a very Anne of Green Gables-like story in the end.

But there’s something in this anecdote about the fact that characters like Anne have a lot of meaning and significance to girls going through difficult situations all around the world. Anne of Green Gables ain’t broke. So don’t fix it.

Oh come on.

Federal commemoration of Anne Of Green Gables will be reworked with “new narratives” from Indigenous, Black and French perspectives, Parks Canada said yesterday. 

Look, if you dislike Anne of Green Gables because it’s too white then don’t commemorate it, but if you are going to commemorate it then leave it the fuck alone. It’s a brilliant work, and really very progressive in a lot of ways.

Novels depicting the red-haired orphan raised by a white, English-speaking Presbyterian couple on Prince Edward Island have been bestsellers since 1908…

WRONG. They’re not a couple, you dumbfucks, they’re sister and brother.

‘Cultures not currently presented, e.g. Acadians, Black, Indigenous and people of colour, will be shared with visitors.’

What for? Just for the sake of pissing on a classic novel about a girl because it isn’t about something else? Everyone and everything can’t be “presented” in every novel so just get over yourselves.

Sicker and sicker and sicker.

Believe men can be women, or convincingly pretend to, or else you’re terminated. From a rape crisis centre run by a man. You couldn’t make it up.

When it’s not pronouns it’s “respect” for clerics or bosses or royal personages.

A Thai court has sentenced a man to 50 years in jail for comments deemed to have defamed the monarchy – the highest ever sentence handed down under the country’s notorious lèse majesté law.

Thirty-year-old Mongkol Thirakot was originally sentenced to 28 years for posts he made three years ago on Facebook. But on Thursday an appeals court added an extra 22 years to the sentence.

50 years ffs.

The lèse majesté law criminalises any negative comment about the monarchy. The law, which has been widely criticised, is still in force despite the election last year of a civilian government for the first time in 10 years.

This is a bad habit humans have. We need to get over it.

Odd choice.

Helen. above all, just wants people to value evidence-based epistemology and the free exchange of ideas.

Just say no.

It is “highly, highly unlikely” that a trans woman with a history of violence against women will be sent to a female prison, MSPs have been told.

Never mind the highly highly; just don’t do it. Ever.

Teresa Medhurst, the head of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), said such a move would only happen in “exceptional circumstances”, after a “fairly in-depth analysis of the individual’s life history.”

Oh well if it’s fairly in-depth that makes it fine.

The SPS boss was being grilled by MSPs over the service’s new Policy for the Management of Transgender People in Custody, published at the end of last year. It was developed following the row over trans rapist, Isla Bryson, who first appeared in court as Adam Graham.

Following conviction, the SPS made the decision to divert Bryson to Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only women’s prison, rather than the planned destination of HMP Barlinnie, sparking outrage. 

Yeah no shit. Endangering a bunch of women for the sake of the feelings of one violent man – what the hell is wrong with you?

The new policy is due to come into force in February 2024. It initially states that a transgender woman “will not be eligible to be considered for admission or transfer to a women’s prison” if they have been convicted for a raft of crimes, including murder, assault, robbery, abduction, rape, and sexual harassment.

However, it then goes on to say that there is an exception to this rule if the SPS’s Risk Management Team, and subsequently an executive panel, “are satisfied there is compelling evidence that they do not present an unacceptable risk of harm to those in the women’s prison.“

What would such “compelling evidence” look like? And why does it have to be compelling? Why are there all these barriers in place to prevent men from being sent to men’s prisons? Why is so much energy being devoted to forcing helpless women into the presence of men 24/7?

Unison is supposed to be a labor union aka a trade union. It bills itself as the union for public service workers. And yet…

The Hackney branch of this labor union bashing the local Labour candidate for not believing that men can be women. Solidarity Forever eh???

“Unison” but not for women.

“Community” seeks to banish the witch:

Kauai’s Bethany Hamilton is a surfer, author, mother, and shark attack survivor. 

She recently gave birth to her fourth child, competed in the Vans Pipe Masters, and was invited to attend the Oshkosh Women’s Fund’s Annual Power of the Purse event as the keynote speaker in Wisconsin. 

But in light of Hamilton’s stance on transgender athletes, the event’s been met with backlash as community members demand that she be replaced. 

Yeah what stance is that? Does she pile them up and stand on top of them?

The controversy stems from Hamilton’s early 2023 announcement that she would officially withdraw from future World Surf League competitions in response to its policy on allowing transgender athletes to compete.

I bet that’s not what she annnounced. The news media never get this right, so I’m betting they got this one wrong too. As always, the issue is not “transgender athletes” but men in women’s competitions.

In a letter obtained by WLUK-TV, members and allies of Oshkosh’s LGBTQ+community retaliated against the Fund’s decision to select Hamilton as the keynote speaker. In the lengthy letter, protesters explained their decision to boycott Hamilton. While the Fund’s mission is to “improve the lives of women, girls, and all members” of its community, the letter says Hamilton’s views do not. 

Letting men compete in women’s sports does not improve the lives of women and girls. It’s no doubt very nice for the men who do it, but it does no one else any good at all.

The Adams vs Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre tribunal continues. Nicole Jones is testifying now. MW=Mridul Wadhwa, the man who runs ERCC.

Man in charge of rape crisis centre burbles about himself and his journey.

Yeah very different because it doesn’t Center Men.

Man in charge of rape crisis centre says fire staff who “aren’t sure” about including men in a rape crisis centre.

How did we get here?

How to turn feminism inside out and gloat in public about the clicks you’re getting as a result:

Liv Hewson clearly has no idea what “misogyny” means. It’s not hatred of women to say that teenage girls who get their breasts cut off for a fad belief in magic switchable gender are making a mistake. I don’t hate the girls who make that mistake, I hate the ideology and its advocates who urge her to make that mistake.

As for calling medically unnecessary mastectomies “mutilation,” the issue isn’t how “nice” it is, the issue is what a drastic mistake such mastectomies are.

Cutting healthy breasts off is not “medical intervention.” It’s horrifying quackery and abuse.

Please go soak your head.

What are we to conclude? That it’s a mistake to “cause offence” to a few hundred men who claim to be women but not a mistake to insult millions of women by knuckling under to petulant men who claim to be women.

Why are a few men more important than millions of women?

No one has explained that yet.

What did she say?

Laura Pascal was announced to be running for the position by Hackney Labour back in December. In recent weeks, tweets have been found from the potential councillor where she states that trans women are not women.

They’re not.

So she was suspended for not repeating a lie, and now she’s unsuspended because she knuckled under and repeated the lie, or at least apologized for not repeating it.

In the Labour rules it states: “We should not give voice to those who persistently engage in abuse and should avoid sharing their content, even when the item in question is unproblematic. For the avoidance of doubt, this includes where members either share or like (or otherwise favourite) any social media content that is racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, ableist, or uses otherwise racist and/or discriminatory language.”

Notice that “sexist” is almost the last item on the list, and appears after “transphobic.”

Newsweek:

 transgender woman in Oregon was recently arrested after posting photos showing several guns and speaking about being angry over transphobia.

FBI agents in Oregon arrested Elizabeth West last week after reviewing several social media posts that included photographs of guns, a criminal complaint reviewed by Newsweek said. West was accused of interstate threatening communications, according to the criminal complaint.

The complaint states that on September 26, 2023, FBI agents in Eugene, Oregon, received a tip regarding a social media post made by West in a “Trans Woman Support Group” page on Facebook that showcased two guns and mentioned being bullied by “trans phobic” individuals.

“Well, I wish I had better news to tell but what I’m writing to you right now is the fact that I’m at the end of my rope I’m probably gonna get fired from his job…I’m too old to keep looking for jobs and I’ve had it up to here being bullied by trans phobic a**holes I am left with no alternative. I’ll probably have to go out in a blaze of glory. I’ve been preparing for this moment a long time at least then I’ll be remember I have no family no friends,” the post said.

Possibly because he’s not all that likable. Just a hunch.

“From November 27 through December 15, 2023, agents frequented West’s page as it was available to the public. Agents observed that West posted and reposted multiple memes, videos and statements that contained violence toward Black and Jewish people and immigrants, images of weapons owned, idolizing of Hitler and the Nazi flag, and a live-streamed video of the Christchurch Mosque shooting in New Zealand,” the complaint said.

On November 24, a post from West said, “bring it on blackie,” and included photos of firearms.

“On December 5, 2023, West uploaded a picture depicting a shotgun, an assault rifle, two handguns and an AK-47 with a white and green camouflaged body. The comment on the picture states ‘don’t forget white women,’” the complaint said.

Hey. We don’t call them “white women.” We call them Karens.

He’s nothing if not thorough.

“Upon searching West’s residence the same day, agents seized approximately 11 handguns and 16 rifles, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, firearm accessories, a black book that matched the description of West’s “black shadow” journal, 48 drawings, and a black and white composition notebook containing notes made by West,” the complaint said.

Tens of thousands of rounds.

It’s about a culture of intolerance.

I wanted to use my story to explain that “cancel culture” is not mainly about being fired or even losing a platform; it’s about a culture of intolerance and its effect on free speech. When one’s own institution abandons its founding values, it abandons those who are working to uphold them. Being personally attacked for that work, especially when the institution appears to condone it, is quite disorienting, to put it mildly.

An inability to pursue one’s academic interests, the loss of friends, and damage to one’s reputation predictably lead to the ruination of careers and mental health. One way I know this is from all the feedback I’ve received from others who went through something similar. I believe this happens because of DEI culture, the values it emphasizes and the human weaknesses it exploits.

Each case like mine ripples through campus, intimidating and silencing others. What happens in universities should nurture a thriving democracy, but the opposite is happening. But there are solutions. When those with institutional power summon the courage to uphold the value of Veritas—which is not incompatible with a form of diversity and inclusion—we can return to open debate, discovery and excellence.

But coddling men who claim to be women is way more important than all that truth and freedom stuff.