Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on About that capacity to persevere.

Perhaps Museum London is preparing her for the next round of this exhibition by giving Hutchison further opportunities to “persevere through all kinds of different challenges.” Being cancelled is just another “different challenge.”

And as for any trans participation in this event, surely there’s no greater challenge than standing up against what is possible in the realm of material reality. A man claiming he’s a woman demonstrates a Sisyphean resilience in the face of the permanently unattainable. Or to throw in another classical allusion of perpetual torment, being constantly misgendered is just like the punishment of Prometheus, having his ever-regrowing liver eaten anew each day by an eagle. Yikes! So it’s like these guys are rolling rocks up a mountain while having their livers eaten!! Every day!!!* By all rights, this presentation should be nothing but TiMs.

*Of course neither Sisyphus or Prometheus had the Canadian Powerlifting Union or the Ontario Human Rights Commission looking out for their interests by cancelling Zeus, so it’s not exactly the same. Had they had these two organizations batting for them, it would have been Zeus’s liver on the line.

That letter from Museum London [Ontario] merits close attention.

That second paragraph. The Ontario Human Rights Commission says “the words people use to describe themselves and others are very important.”

Are they though? Especially the ones they use to describe themselves? People have a tendency to think more about themselves than others, to flatter themselves more than others, to puff up their descriptions of themselves more than others. People have a tendency to think they matter more than others. Maybe all this huffing and puffing about idennniny and the words people use to go on and on and on about themselves is not a new form of Justice or Empowerment or Incloosion but just more of the same old vanity and self-absorption we’re so accustomed to in humans. Maybe we really don’t need more of it, but rather less.

At any rate, even if you agree that we should all care deeply about how other people label themselves, there remains a difference between truth and lies. “Misgendering” someone in the sense of not lying about what sex they are is not a form of illegitimate or wicked “discrimination.” Women absolutely need to know which people are men and which are not, and we need to be free to warn other women about men who are disguising themselves as women, whether for the purpose of attacking them or stealing their athletic prizes. Museum London is way out of line ordering women to pretend some men are women, and punishing them if they refuse.

Another woman punished, banished, called harsh names for the greater glory of men who claim to be women.

“BREAKING: I now face a 2-year ban by the CPU for speaking publicly about the unfairness of biological males being allowed to taunt female competitors & loot their winnings. Apparently, I have failed in my gender-role duties as “supporting actress” in the horror show that is my #sport right now. Naturally, the CPU deemed MY written (private) complaint of the male bullying to be “frivolous and vexatious.”

And then

It just never ends.

The latest on the corruption of Clarence Thomas:

Leonard Leo is a longtime Federalist Society leader and a key architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. He also steers a network of nonprofits that promote conservative causes in the courts and beyond.

Leo arranged for Ginni Thomas’s for-profit firm, Liberty Consulting, to receive an unknown sum for a contract that was to have “no mention of Ginni.” In 2012, he told pollster Kellyanne Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25k,” documents show. He directed Conway to get the money by billing a nonprofit he advises. In a statement to The Post, Leo praised the work by Conway and Ginni Thomas as an “invaluable resource.”

Since 2016, nonprofits steered by Leo have paid at least $1.8 million for public relations efforts to defend and lionize Clarence Thomas,including in a laudatory film about his life.

…

Anthony Welters provided a loan that allowed the justice to buy a $267,230 luxury RV in 1999. A congressional investigation found that Thomas made some interest payments, but that it was declared settled by Welters in 2008 without Thomas repaying a substantial portion — or perhaps any — of the principal. An attorney for Thomas said in response that the loan’s terms “were satisfied in full” but has not said what those terms were.

Listen, a luxury RV should just plain come with the job, so it’s all fair and not a bit corrupt.

The Heritage Foundation paid Ginni Thomas more than $936,000 between 2001 and 2007, tax filings show. Tax filings before 2001 are not available. Clarence Thomas reported her employment at Heritage in 2011, after left-leaning activists raised questions.

It’s the conservatives who have this kind of money to spare.

There’s more.

P. G. Wodehouse is now writing the scripts for gender havers.

Bingo the Non-binary Priest – it should be a whole series, shelved next to the Molesworth oeuvre.

My favorite part is the fact that our man Bingo thinks the Bible was written in contemporary English.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on How long a chain of logic do you have to use?

…but one thing I think matters is: how long a chain of logic do you have to use to reach the conclusion that this affects someone’s ability to do the job?

Of course, if the reasoning is sound, and the premises are solid, even a long chain of logic can lead to a justified conclusion. Too often, however, the conclusion is simply claimed to follow while the actual premises and inferences are best left unspecified.

It’s very similar to the way “worker’s rights”, “egalitarianism”, “solidarity”, “anti-imperialism”, “anti-colonialism”, “anti-fascism” etc. in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China were basically just synonyms for “whatever the party/the leader does” (e.g. living like emperors while the workers were living off scraps). It’s easy to be in favor of, say, “worker’s rights”, but how do you get from that to uncritical support for autocracy, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, thoughtpolice, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, forced collectivization, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc.? How does criticism of the latter translate into rejection of the former? Of course, you might as well forget hoping for an answer. Just by asking the question you would have marked yourself as “anti worker’s rights”, as well as “pro-fascism”, “pro-colonialism” etc. No need to spell out the intermediary steps.

Likewise, it’s easy to be in favor of “trans rights” (e.g. there isn’t a single “right” – properly formulated* – that I’m granting myself that I’m not also granting every trans-identified person on the planet), but how do you get from that to uncritical support for sex denialism, biological males in women’s sports/bathrooms/changing rooms/showers/jails/domestic abuse and rape shelters, forced teaming, the idea that it’s bigoted for lesbians to not be into “lady-cock”, automatic “affirmation” and medicalization of children etc. etc. etc.? How does disagreement with the latter translate into denial of the former? Once again, all the major premises are unstated, and all the critical inferences are left unspecified.

* By “properly formulated” i mean formulated in the most generally applicable way possible. E.g. I don’t recognize any universal right to use the “men’s room”, although I do claim that right for myself. Nor do I recognize a universal right to use “the bathroom appropriate to one’s gender identity”. What I do recognize is the right of everyone to use the bathroom intended for their biological sex. My own right to use the men’s room is just what follows from this more general right.

Horrible bossy fool gloats at the prospect of getting people in trouble with the law for not lying about what sex ThEy is.

What about the intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment Whittle and people like Whittle are creating for people who refuse to lie about what sex other people are? Why do Whittle and people like Whittle gloat over forcing people to lie about what sex someone is?

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Without forgetting her nursing training.

I’ve been trying to sort out my views on when someone’s statements or behavior outside of their work capacity should justify disciplinary action. (I mean morally justify, not what the legal lines are.)

It’s hard to come up with a formulation that doesn’t involve a lot of case-by-case judgment. The extreme bright-line rules don’t seem workable to me. It just can’t be the case that an employer should shrug and ignore a manager who is posting statements about how members of group X are intellectualy inferior, etc. — that obviously raises concerns that such a person can’t fairly make hiring/firing/employee evaluation decisions. Ditto for someone who is the “face of the company” but has made themselves toxic to the general public and/or your customer base, etc. Conversely, I’m also uncomfortable with the notion that people can’t have separate existences from their job, and that every employee’s every utterance is fodder for HR.

There’s obviously a lot of factors to consider (is it a public-facing job, how far beyond the pale are the statements, etc.), but one thing I think matters is: how long a chain of logic do you have to use to reach the conclusion that this affects someone’s ability to do the job?

When you have to make arguments like “Employee X made statement Y. Statement Y is contrary to the position of advocacy groups for minority such-and-such. Therefore Y constitutes ‘violence’ against that group, and members of that group would be justifiably ‘afraid’ to be treated by X even if X would never utter Y on the job, therefore X can’t do the job and must be fired or disciplined,” I think something has gone wrong.

Also from Reduxx:

A male athlete who has dominated the women’s category of cycling competitions across the United States took home two first-place medals over the weekend, bringing his tally of women’s gold medals up to 10 since December of 2022.

So that’s ten gold medals stolen from a woman.

Tessa Johnson, a male who self-identifies as a woman, took the top spots in both the Women’s SingleSpeed and Category 1/2 races, with the latter also coming with $150 in prize money.

During the races, which fell on the weekend before Halloween, Johnson was dressed as Barbie as part of the optional costume competition.

Attaboy: cheat the women and mock them at the same time.

According to the Chicago CycloCross Cup’s website, the competition prides itself on “first and foremost fostering a positive & supportive community built around competitive cyclocross racing,” continuing: “That means welcoming and challenging everyone who wants to contribute to the series and make it better in that regard.”

So women will never be able to win anything? Cool; thanks a lot.

Reduxx a couple of months ago:

An LGBTI rights organization in France is calling on the Minister of Equality to intervene in the case of a gynecologist who they are accusing of “transphobia.”

On September 8, SOS Homophobie, which describes itself as a “national association against LGBTIphobia” took to X (formerly Twitter) to condemn a gynecologist for stating he only provided services to females. The comment from Dr. Victor Acharian, who operates in the Pau region, was made in reply to a Google review he received in which a trans-identified male’s partner complained that Acharian refused to provide services to him.

What I wonder is, what the hell does a man expect a gynecologist to do for him? However he “identifies” and whatever he calls himself, what, when it comes right down to it, is he looking for? Is the gynecologist supposed to play a game of let’s pretend? For the sake of “validating” Monsieur?

“SIR, I am a gynecologist, and I take care of real women. I have no skills to take care of MEN, even if they have shaved their beards and come to tell my secretary that they [have] become women. My GYNECOLOGICAL examination table is not suitable for examining men. You have specialized and very competent services to take care of men like you,” Acharian wrote, emphasizing his text with capitalized letters. “Thank you for informing TRANS people to never come for consultation with me.”

(Reduxx made a little mistake in translation there, putting that “have” in “have become women” in brackets. The French is “qu’ils sont devenus femmes” and that’s because devenir is one of the few verbs that use être for the past tense instead of avoir. Ils sont devenus femmes isn’t a mistake, it’s just how it’s done in French.)

In their X post on Acharian, SOS Homophobie wrote: “We denounce the transphobes and discriminatory remarks of gynecologist Victor Acharian in Pau. Transphobia is a reality with serious consequences, particularly in access to health. It affects the entire territory.” The organization also tagged Bérangère Couillard, France’s Minister of Equality between Women and Men and the Fight against Discrimination, in an apparent effort to have Acharian investigated.

So what does SOS Homophobie want doctors to do? Pretend that men really are women and go on from there? Really? Have they thought this through?

H/t Guest

The BBC offers training for female self-shooters.

Female Self Shooters is a practical self-shooting skills training programme for factual TV and documentary, supported [by] the BBC.

Good good good. Thanks, BBC.

Aimed at female (and those identifying as female) TV producers or those at producer level, who will be in a position to use the acquired skills after the training, e.g. as 2nd camera operators, shooting taster tapes or directing your own self-shot film. 

Oh. Never mind.

Dirty trick, BBC.

Oh dear I detect a mentation deficit.

A crucial point in this piece on Amy Hamm:

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms warned that “professional misconduct must not be permitted to be redefined to include speaking unpopular truths” — in this case, unpopular truths that bear directly on Hamm’s medical training and responsibilities as a nurse and nurse educator. Hamm knows that sex is observed, not “assigned”, at birth. Her case highlights the contradictory expectations professionals in her position face: to pretend to go along with a strange new set of beliefs about sex and gender without forgetting her nursing training, in which sex is not a postmodern riddle but rather a constantly relevant factor in medical evaluation and treatment. 

It’s all very well* for people who aren’t medical professionals to echo the stupid mantras but people who are medical professionals had god damn well better not lose track of which people are which sex, and everyone knows it, and even the zealots don’t actually want their nurses and doctors pretending they’re the other sex when it makes any kind of medical difference which sex they are. Do men who claim to be women want to see a gynecologist? Do they want their gynecologist to ram a speculum into their genitals? Do they want to be checked for breast cancer but not for testicular cancer?

When philosopher Kathleen Stock and athletic coach Linda Blade testified as expert witnesses on Hamm’s behalf, opposing counsel declined to ask either woman a single question, perhaps fearing any elaboration on the common-sense views they share with Hamm. “We’ve had language for boys and girls, men and women, since the beginning of time,” Stock testified on Tuesday. “Biology hasn’t gone away” — something a nurse should know better than anyone — “but all of us have lost the ability to freely refer to facts about ourselves, important facts, for instance that we are a sexually dimorphic species.”

We used to be a sexually dimorphic species. Now that kind of thing is old hat, so we’re creative and poeticalish instead.

*it’s not all very well at all of course

No.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Portents.

I think that for a long time, pro-choice advocates were regarded as the boy who cried wolf. “You keep saying that Roe will be overturned, but it never is, and all these abortion laws mostly get struck down by the courts and the abortion clinics survive the ones that aren’t anyways. I’m not pro-life, but I’m gonna vote GOP because [taxes etc.]”

And indeed for a long time, there was a school of Savvy Punditry that insisted that Republicans didn’t want Roe overturned anyway, and that’s why it would never happen. (My take is that the first part of that was largely true — there were definitely a lot of GOP strategists who liked having the issue to rally voters but didn’t care about it and certainly didn’t want to deal with a post-Roe backlash — but the second part was wrong because when you appoint and confirm anti-choice justices, they don’t care that you had your fingers crossed when you did it.)

Anyway, all those voters who are pro-choice but didn’t vote on it because they took Roe for granted have now had a rude awakening. And having seen Republicans pass all sorts of draconian laws and abortion clinics shut down, they’re not likely to buy the new focus-group-tested GOP spin that they just want “reasonable restrictions” on “late-term abortions” and certainly don’t want bans no why would you say that such a crazy thought never mind what our party platform says and what most of our elected officials said up until two months ago.

It’s not a great consolation for losing Roe, of course. But at least there’s some consequences.

Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia.

Abortion rights advocates won major victories Tuesday as voters in conservative-leaning Ohio decisively passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, while those in ruby-red Kentucky reelected a Democratic governor who aggressively attacked his opponent for supporting the state’s near-total ban on the procedure.

In Virginia, a battleground state where Republicans pushed a proposal to outlaw most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Democrats were projected to take control of the state legislature after campaigning heavily on preserving access.

Women push back.

Boots said what??

Good that they’ve corrected it now but what the hell.

Now there’s a fine impartial headline from the CBC:

Nurse tells B.C. hearing she’s not transphobic, but calls gender identity ‘metaphysical nonsense’

There’s no “but” needed in that headline. There’s no contradiction. “Transphobic” means “mean and horrible to people who claim to be trans.” It’s neither phobic nor mean & horrible to know that “gender identity” is metaphysical nonsense. It would be metaphysical nonsense to say that people can be rabbits by thinking they are rabbits, and the same applies to all the other nouns that name something one can’t turn into via the power of thought. People can become teachers, pilots, parents, friends, colleagues, reporters, nurses, and the like. People can’t become trees or planets or watermelons. It’s not phobic to grasp this overarching distinction.

When legislatures decide they get to define women.

A man who is pretending to be a woman is not a woman, no matter how long he has been doing the pretending.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Anne Frank wasn’t diverse enough.

This is the second time this specific article has crossed my radar in the last twenty-four hours, whereas none of my normal German sources have even mentioned it, which I think is somewhat telling. Let me trawl for an actual German article…ahh, yes, a bunch of highly-motivated right-of-centre rags…some respectable publications…no highly-motivated left-of-centre rags…

Ahh, there we are, something actually readable and vaguely objective that isn’t publicly-financed (which is nearly unnecessary to qualify, as publicly-financed media in Germany are often barely readable and quite rarely objective).

Firstly, let’s clarify a few points of confusion or misconceptions. “Kindergarten”, though it is a German word, means something different in Germany than it does to Anglophones — namely, it is a daycare centre for young children (from three years on) which can (but not must) serve as a sort of pre-school for its older wards, and is usually only open to lunchtime or early afternoon. This story doesn’t involve a Kindergarten, however, but rather a Kita (short for Kinderstätte), which takes children for the whole day and theoretically has no lower age limit and is even less likely to have a heavy emphasis on pedagogy (though it also can for its older wards). In East Germany there are relatively few Kindergärten and many more Kinderstätten, and while the difference may seem academic and opaque to foreigners, they are not the same thing. In short, the institution in question is much more like a daycare than a pre-school or the first cohort of a public school.

And the AfD, while admittedly stronger in East Germany and undeniably a right-wing nationalist party, are neither Nazis nor at all relevant to this discussion; the mayor of the town is an independent, and while he doubtless does not wish to anger AfD voters (or at least not attract their attention away from their anger at the Federal Republic), there is absolutely no evidence that he or his council have based their decisions with respect to the daycare upon the AfD or its voters in any way. And the new proposed name, Weltentdecker, translates to “world explorer”; this is hardly a name designed to appease a right-wing nationalist. In point of fact, according to Wikipedia, the AfD received just under 12 percent of the vote and only got 3 out of the 28 seats in the council. We can effectively rule out pleasing the AfD as a motivation for this change.

In further point of fact, the quotes about anti-Semitism growing “among the Far Right” and the implication that the AfD is dangerously antisemitic are doing a lot of work here; the AfD has Jewish wings in its federal and several state parties, though of course these are not uncontroversial in the broader Jewish community in Germany. But, as this is entirely a red herring to the current discussion, it bears no further investigation or exposition here.

To the point of the article, the proposed name change is just one of several progressive reforms to supposedly “modernise” the daycare, which has apparently been in progress for the last 14 months. Other reforms include no longer grouping the children by age and allowing children to follow their own interests and desires rather than having a more uniform, strictly-regimented day.

The mayor writes in an address to the town (probably as a result of the outcry):

Weit vor den aktuellen Diskussionen und Ereignissen ist bereits Anfang 2023 auch die Diskussion aufgekommen, diese grundlegende Konzeptionsänderung durch einen anderen Namen der Einrichtung auch nach außen hin sichtbar zu machen, um diesen fundamentalen Neuanfang sichtbar zu markieren

which translates to

Far removed from the current discussions and events, we have already been discussing since the beginning of 2023 how to make this foundational conceptual change externally apparent through changing the name of the facility, in order to visibly mark this fundamental new beginning

which is a fine example of a German politician covering his arse, but does put paid to the idea that the name change is in response to the recent flare-up of the interminable Levantine brawl. In fact, the Hamas attack has likely drawn far more attention and enhanced the outcry, including getting national reporters in England to sensationalise local news in East Germany.

It is unlikely the name will be changed at this point, but I am not sure what difference that will make in the long run. There is a narrative worth exploring here, of Germany’s continuing evolution and its reconstitution through migration, and what the ethnic Germans of yesterday and today owe the increasingly-non-ethnic-Germans of today and tomorrow (and vice-versa). In some of these Kitas in the major cities, the share of non-ethnic-German children can exceed 80 percent, and there are precious few where this proportion is far below 50; if this continues, there will be a demographic shift in this country within our lifetimes that is essentially unprecedented in the history of the world.

That cannot but have consequences. If the only parties anticipating and discussing those consequences get called Nazis for doing so, then either only Nazis will do the discussing or the term “Nazi” will so lose its meaning and potency that nobody will care when actual neo-Nazis do actual neo-Nazi shit.

In particular, what do these new peoples who have come to Germany owe to Anne Frank? These peoples, who have virtually no connection to the Holocaust or any other part of German history, who bear no collective guilt for the industrial massacre of European Jews in the middle part of the 20th Century? These peoples who tend to see Germany not so much as a land of opportunity but as a rich lifeboat whose byzantine bureaucracy they must navigate in order to get free accommodations and an allowance without having to (or in many cases even being legally allowed to) work?

These are very important questions with very important answers. And as Germany sacrifices its economy in order to punish Russia’s malfeasance, we are only going to see more and more ethnic Germans asking them, and, should those answers prove unsatisfactory, the next round of questions may be even less to our liking.