Eva Kurilova draws up a partial list of the contradictions of trans ideology. There are so many and they are so contradictory.

“Trans women” are in danger in men’s spaces and that’s why they deserve access to women’s spaces.

Women who worry about their spaces becoming mixed sex are bigots.

…

Trans people are a very tiny minority and so they must be listened to.

Detransitioners are a very tiny minority and so they must not be listened to.

---

Gender is a social construct.

But “trans women” need to be treated as literally female in all aspects of life.

That’s a biggy, isn’t it. The biggy. Women are women via social convention, but trans women really are women and don’t you forget it.

If the perpetrator of a crime is a trans-identified man, he is reported as a woman.

If the victim of a crime is a trans-identified man, he is reported as a trans woman.

Oof. I hadn’t noticed that one.

Trans women make the covers of magazines for achievements in science, technology, and sports.

Trans men make the covers of magazines for being pregnant. Progress!

That one’s not so much a contradiction as a different rules problem.

Physical differences between men and women don’t matter in sports.

But “trans women” need to compete in the women’s category because HRT makes them weaker and disadvantaged against other men.

So much different rules problem.

So Owen Jones thinks Hamas gets its views on gay rights from the British empire?

And if it weren’t for that there would be a gay bar on every corner, yes? Because Islamists are so notoriously broad-minded about such things?

Did the British Mandate Criminal Code also prohibit women’s rights?

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on What would you spend that 9k on?

I have no idea about the health risks, but I think people are underestimating the privacy risks.

Anyone who donates eggs or sperm is incurring the risk that some years down the line, they or their family members will be contacted by the child. I don’t care what privacy protections you were promised when you made the donation, or even what laws exist in your jurisdiction to provide privacy — you don’t know what the law is going to be 20 years from now, and the general direction has been towards “I have a right to know my genetic heritage!”

More importantly, the law may be irrelevant, because the official clinic records won’t be needed in many instances. With so many people eagerly signing up to put their DNA in the databases of Ancestry.com and the like, it’s not going to be hard for people to find their genetic relatives. Even if you, the donor, are careful not to participate in anything like that, you can’t guarantee that your siblings or other relatives won’t.

Of course some people will view this as a positive thing. What could be better than one day discovering and getting to meet some new relatives, right? In which case, I guess, have at it, though note that any future spouse and children might not share your enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, advertising aimed at convincing women that selling their eggs is a fab fun way to pay for a trip.

Ah how sweet.

Anita Singh at The Telegraph on Orwell’s misogyny:

George Orwell was a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” man who wrote women out of his story, according to a biographer of his wife.

Anna Funder said that Orwell was a brilliant writer but a complicated man whose personal life was at odds with the “decency” of his writing.

…

“Decency is such a core Orwellian value. He writes about it. It’s the quality of the ‘proles’ in 1984 that is going to save us. He wanted to be decent, to be seen as decent, by which he meant a man of integrity, the same inside and out,” said Funder.

If that’s what he meant by decency then I think it’s inadequate at best. I always assumed it meant not being a shit – not being sadistic or selfish or ruthless. Not harming other people, in short. I think that matters more than integrity and being the same inside and out.

Wifedom is not the only book this year to reassess Orwell through a feminist lens. Sandra Newman has written Julia, which retells 1984 through the eyes of its main female character.

Newman was invited by the Orwell estate to take on the project. She had “absolutely idolised” the author when younger, having read his political works.  “Then you read his fiction, particularly 1984, and that hatred of women is really extreme,” said Newman.

Decency isn’t enough.

I’m so tired of seeing men cry crocodile tears over men who pretend to be women in order to invade women’s spaces in order to watch them take showers. SO TIRED of it.

Wtf else would he be?

Even if you think he is in genuine psychic anguish about having a male body, it still doesn’t follow that he gets to move in with women and ogle them when they’re naked. His anguish does not trump their right to get naked away from men.

Why is The Washington Post peddling this misogynistic bullshit?

The Herald [Scotland] helps Willoughby push his narrative:

Britain’s first transgender newsreader has spoken of her surprise at being nominated as Woman of the Year amid an increasingly hostile debate about trans people. 

India Willoughby, known for presenting Loose Women, said she hoped it would be a “small green shoot” for the trans community and a sign that “most mums, grandmas, sisters are on our side”. 

Writing exclusively for The Herald, the outspoken broadcaster spoke candidly about her experiences of abuse on social media, where she says she is frequently called a “groomer”, “paedophile”, and a “man”. 

The reporter who wrote this tripe is a woman. News flash: Willoughby himself is highly abusive on Twitter. The Herald should quote some of his gems.

Ms Willoughby said: “Maybe it’s just that some of my sisters are starting to see the injustice of it all, and are tired of the anti-trans movement using them and the phrase ‘women’s rights’ to justify an irrational hatred and bigotry of 0.2% of the population.

“Whatever the reason, I hope the trans community see this as a small green shoot. We are not alone. Most mums, grandmas, sisters are on our side.”

The side of men who claim to be women and who help themselves to everything that belongs to women, including even Woman of the Year contests.

Anna Slatz at Reduxx tells us:

The Washington Post is under fire after sympathetically profiling a trans-identified male who enrolled in a sorority at the University of Wyoming and reportedly exposed his erection to the female members. Artemis Langford, who began identifying as a “lesbian” in 2017, was accepted into Kappa Kappa Gamma despite not even meeting basic eligibility requirements.

Plain old boring everyday women can’t do that, but special special special men who say they are women are welcomed with fireworks and a parade. Why’s that? What’s so special about a man saying he “identifies as” a lesbian? Why isn’t it just a childish taunt or insult?

On October 14, the Washington Post released an extensive profile on Langford sympathetically portraying him as the victim of a hate campaign. In one section, the writer, William Wang, attempts to compare Langford’s transgender experiences and the history of women being excluded from higher education institutions.

But you see it’s not the same thing. Women being excluded from universities is not the same as a man pretending to be a woman. The two are really quite different.

While the female complainants have expressed a desire to appeal the decision, there have b been reports that KKG administrators are attempting to bar the young women from doing so.

Women must not be allowed to win anything.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Sobwhinesobwhinesobwhine.

@YNNB:

“Prepare the child for the road — not the road for the child.”

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure Lukianoff and Haidt talk about a sea change in child rearing and education which threw out this idea of instilling resilience and toughness for a more sensitive, concerned, child-centered approach — and as a consequence kids and adolescents became anxious and depressed. The book came out in 2018 and doesn’t really mention transgender issues, but the fragility and sense of entitlement they describe possibly hits its apotheosis there.

Great god almighty.

The Beeb has more on Trump’s interventions:

During remarks to a crowd of supporters, Mr Trump said Israel had to “straighten it out because they’re fighting, potentially a very big force”.

He called Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant a “jerk” and repeatedly called Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group in Lebanon, “very smart”.

Mr Trump also said that Israel had initially agreed to work with the US on a 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, but that they backed out at the last minute.

“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” he said. “That was a very terrible thing.”

That “Bibi” crap is so grating. He wants to remind us that he knows Netanyahu personally. Just leave it at home, Don.

Mr Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, noted a pattern in his old boss’s foreign policy statements.

“Hezbollah aren’t smart, they’re evil,” he said in a radio interview on Thursday.

“But the former president also said when Russia invaded Ukraine in a similar, unprovoked, unconscionable invasion a year-and-a-half ago, he said Vladimir Putin was a genius.”

Well they can of course be both. Trump himself is “smart” in the sense of “good at committing crimes with impunity.” But in the case of Hezbollah and Trump, how “smart” they are is irrelevant to how profoundly evil they are.

The Washington Post editorial board on Trump’s contribution to the response:

In a reckless category of their own, however, were the comments of GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump. To be sure, he labeled the Hamas attack a “disgrace” shortly after it occurred — then pivoted to blaming it on Mr. Biden’s policies. That was about par for the partisan course, alas. Yet the former president went in a bizarre new direction Wednesday by heaping scorn on Israel itself for failing to anticipate the attack and lecturing the Jewish state to “step up their game.”

He labeled the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group “very smart,” comparing it to an authoritarian he rates highly for ruling “1.4 billion people … with an iron fist”: Chinese President Xi Jinping. And he referred to Israel’s defense minister as a “jerk” for purportedly revealing weaknesses in the country’s northern defenses. To top it off, the former president said Mr. Netanyahu had “let us down” by refusing to aid the deadly strike Mr. Trump ordered against the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force on Jan. 3, 2020.

An Israeli spokesman denied the account and dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments as “shameful.” There’s a lesson here for Mr. Netanyahu, who forged a close relationship with Mr. Trump during his presidency, based on the latter’s generally uncritical support for Mr. Netanyahu. There’s a lesson, too, for the Israeli public, among whom Mr. Trump was popular while in office.

The lesson is: Don’t be fooled by a momentary alignment of Trump’s views with your own, because he doesn’t have any real views, he has only HimSelf, and he will turn on you in an instant if he thinks it will give him some kind of jollies.

Mostly, though, it is Americans who need to take notice of these comments — especially Republicans, both voters and politicians. To their credit, some of Mr. Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination denounced his remarks. Even by his standards, they showed an extraordinary penchant for rubbing salt in the wounds of an ostensible friend and for converting an international crisis into a drama about himself. Mr. Trump’s latest outburst showed how fortunate this country is that he is not in the White House now and how unfortunate it would be if he ever returned to it.

“Unfortunate” is putting a little too mildly. It would be a catastrophe.

An “activist” (and stripper) called Tom Harlow is making quite a name for himself.

He’s so oppressed by those women.

He might want to be a little cautious though.

It’s SCIENCE.

So a surprise guest turned up at the Filia conference.

All the cool kids.

And speaking of hatred and incitement to violence – heavily filtered man in a dress brandishes his fists in our general direction.

Watcha gonna do, Indy, punch the nearest woman? What’s your point?

He takes us through his morning, which starts with checking Twitter for what people are saying about him.

I dry my hair, do my make-up. Head off to the cafe where I’m writing my book.

And, after ordering my usual pot of Darjeeling, sit down, and open my email.

“Congratulations on being nominated as a 2023 Woman of the Year”.

Congratulations on being even more of an insult to women.

Wow. Considering I live on what is now internationally known as Terf Island – where trans visibility and recognition is close to outlawed – I can’t believe it.

And I know it’s going to infuriate Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, GB News, and all the other forms of life that have grown like bacteria since 2018.

No mention of women though, the people he so insultingly tries to replace with his own glorious self.

I re-read the email. The nomination came from a panel of women. Interesting, considering I and the rest of the UK trans population are constantly told that the female population view woman like me as a threat and an offence to their dignity.

We also know perfectly well that there are many captured women.

Instead of moving forwards, Britain has hurtled backwards. It’s now normal to watch or listen to studio debates of non-trans people explaining what trans is, and how awful we are, with nobody trans there. Wouldn’t happen to any other minority.

You’re a white guy, Willz. You’re not an oppressed minority.

The BBC four days ago:

Antisemitic incidents in the UK have more than quadrupled since Hamas’s attack on Israel, says a charity which helps Jewish people in the UK. The Community Security Trust (CST) recorded 89 “anti-Jewish hate” incidents from 7 to 10 October. That marked a more than four-fold rise on the 21 antisemitic incidents recorded in the same period last year.

Security Minister Tom Tugendhat said he was “very concerned” at reports of an increase in antisemitism.

…

Mr Tugendhat said he took the rise in antisemitism in the UK “extremely seriously” and urged a crackdown on the spread of hate. He compared the ideology of Hamas to that of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s. “What the Nazis were doing is exactly what Hamas is doing today,” he told Sky News. “It is preaching a blood libel, preaching a hatred for Jews and preaching a hatred that extends around the world.”

…

The Met Police’s deputy commissioner Dame Lynne Owens has written an open letter to London’s Jewish community to reassure them that the force will “do all that we can to make sure you feel safe and protected here at home”.

All they can do turns out to be not very much.

Goodness gracious me, a woman refused to have a conversation with a random guy who walked up to her in the street and requested a chat.

Nobody has to consent to invitations to talk from total strangers encountered randomly out in the world. Nobody. An appeal for help is one thing, but a request to chat is very much another. A man accosting a woman for a “conversation” of course has certain overtones, but women aren’t entitled to demand a conversation either. No one is.

Originally a comment by YNnB (yes again) on A blanket fort for big babies.

Happily, this is a task at which anthropology should excel: spotting where the preoccupations of one cultural order—in this case, that of a late-modern, mostly Anglophone, very-online ecumene—are fervently insisted upon by members of that order as constitutive of reality itself.

Wait. Is she saying that the freshly-minted concept of “transness” is a narrow, Western, hegemonic, colonial imposition on the rest of the world’s varied cultures?! Say it’s not so!

This is just so outrageously meta, with anthropologists failing to recognize the global projection and reification of their own particular, parochial concerns and ideas. They can see the arbitrary, constructed, local nature of everyone else’s belief systems, but not their own. They’re giving a pass to the incoherence and contradictions within their own thought system, nodding in agreement at the punishment of anyone daring to step outside this awkward, stuffy little frame of reference to point out the peculiar restrictiveness of its tenets, all the while insisting that “this is how things are; agree or else.” They can’t see they’re just like any other cult which has found the Truth.

Like the Church’s self-defeating persecution of Galileo, the cancellation of Lowrey’s panel makes the anthropological community look foolish. My understanding of Galileo’s intention was that he was trying to strengthen the Church by suggesting that its teachings should conform to reality rather than try to dictate it. He could see with his own eyes (and through reading Copernicus, who was clever enough to wait until he died before publishing his heliocentric hypothesis) that the Church’s attachment to Ptolemaic geocentrism was going to be a problem. Lowrey can see that her field’s attachment to gender ideology is a problem right now. Except the worldview the anthropologists are clinging to isn’t some centuries old, sclerotic orthodoxy, but a jumbled, incoherent, faddish confection of word play and reality denial slapped together in the last decade or so. She doesn’t want to destroy anthropology, but save it from itself, restoring its practice to the proper, provisional relationship to observable reality, before it stumbles further into heedless, blinkered, trendiness.

Why curl yourself into such a tight uncomfortable ball of insularity when you can pop out, stretch your legs and enjoy the sunshine? The sun will always be there, so the fight to remain in self-imposed, cloistered darkness will be never ending. Future anthropologists will look back, shaking their heads and use this episode as an object lesson in professional self examination.