Because of a deeply irritating “They should just get over it already” in the comments I’m going to share a little history lesson from the Library of Congress:

The Convict Leasing System: Slavery in its Worst Aspects, by Lynn Weinstein.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Article XIII, February 1,1865

Emphasis added. That “except as punishment” clause was resisted by the radical Republicans, and they were right. That clause was death to a lot of former slaves and their descendants.

While many believe that the 13th Amendment ended slavery, there was an exemption that was used to create a prison convict leasing system of involuntary servitude to fill the labor supply shortage in the southern states after the Civil War.  Black Codes regulated the lives of African Americans and justice-involved individuals were often convicted of petty crimes, like walking on the grass, vagrancy, and stealing food.  Arrests were often made by professional crime hunters who were paid for each “criminal” arrested, and apprehensions often escalated during times of increased labor needs.  Even those who were declared innocent in the courts were often placed in this system when they could not pay their court fees. Companies and individuals paid leasing fees to state, county, and local governments in exchange for the labor of prisoners in farms, mines, lumber yards, brick yards, manufacturing facilities, factories, railroads, and road construction. The convict leasing fees generated substantial amounts of revenue for southern state, county, and local budgets, and lasted through World War II.

Slavery did not end in 1865.Yes the people whose grandparents lived under this system damn well do have a right to be aggrieved.

Exactly.

Another example of how ludicrous and interrupting and contrary it is to try to talk about women or lesbians (or indeed men or gay men) by invoking the alphabet soup.

October is Women’s History Month in Canada. The government tells us:

October is Women’s History Month in Canada, a time to celebrate the women and girls from our past, and our present, who are contributing to a better, more inclusive Canada.

In 1992, the Government of Canada designated October as Women’s History Month, marking the beginning of an annual celebration of the outstanding achievements of women and girls throughout Canada’s history. 

Ok. So far so good.

This year’s theme, Through Her Lens: Celebrating the Diversity of Women, emphasizes the importance of recognizing the achievements and contributions of women from diverse backgrounds. It focuses on the unique perspectives, experiences, and challenges faced by Indigenous women; women from 2SLGBTQI+ communities; and newcomer, racialized, and migrant women.

Not lesbians, you see, but women from 2SLGBTQI+ communities. Why not just say lesbians? Why translate “lesbian” to “from 2SLGBTQI+ communities”? Why erase the word “lesbian”??

What’s up, Canada? You’re not homophobic are you? Are you?

The discussion gets so laughably (but maddeningly) incoherent, thanks to the secret but binding law that requires us to use ALL the letters EVERY time. LGBTQ Nation (see?) tries to report:

A trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) organization called the Lesbian Action Group applied for an exemption from Australia’s anti-discrimination act so it could hold a lesbian event that excluded trans women.

Or to put it in normal language, a lesbian feminist group applied for an exemption from Australia’s anti-discrimination act so that it could hold a lesbian event.

Why, you might wonder if you didn’t already know, is an anti-discrimination act telling lesbians they can’t hold an event? Why is an anti-discrimination act discriminating against lesbians? Aren’t lesbians the kind of people who should be protected by anti-discrimination acts? Haven’t lesbians faced discrimination over the years?

AHRC has asked for public comments regarding the application, and LGBTQ+ activists are speaking up.

But what about L activists? What about G activists? (I daresay they sometimes want to have G-only events themselves, no?) Are all L activists and G activists “speaking up” to oppose L rights to meet without men present? Of course not, but the stupid LGBTQ+ makes it sound that way, which is the point of it.

One letter signed by 15 LGBTQ+ organizations, including the Melbourne chapter of Dykes on Bikes

Excuse me excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but isn’t Dykes on Bikes an L organization, not an LGBTQ+ one? Can’t we just let L organizations be L organizations instead of forcing them into the umbrella one, in which they instantly disappear? And, worse, in which anything they say is vetoed by the T?

This is in fact the same struggle as the one this article is discussing. Can’t lesbians and gay men just talk to and about and with other lesbians (in the case of lesbians) and gay men (in the case of gay men) any more? Can they never escape the fucking TQ+ when the fucking TQ+ is choking them to death?

Trans is not the same as lesbian and/or gay. In some ways they are deeply opposed in the sense of having opposite interests. It’s insane to keep lumping them all together on all occasions, and it’s turning out to be lethal to lesbian organizing and activism.

One letter signed by 15 LGBTQ+ organizations, including the Melbourne chapter of Dykes on Bikes, the Trans Justice Project, and the Parents of Gender Diverse Children, proclaiming it is “not appropriate or necessary” for bisexual and trans women to be banned from lesbian gatherings. 

It is of course both appropriate and necessary to ban men from lesbian gatherings. If men are there the gatherings are no longer lesbian gatherings. Ever heard of freedom of association? For that matter, ever heard of lesbians?

And if the judge’s request for pronouns isn’t enough horror for one day, there’s a ruling from the Australian Human Rights Commission a few days ago:

Australia’s Human Rights Commission has released a preliminary decision prohibiting lesbians from holding events for females due to the exclusion of men who identify as “women.” The Commission’s decision comes after a lesbian rights group applied for an exemption under the [Sex] Discrimination Act 1984.

Lesbians may not hold events for women, because men want to intrude.

The application to the Commission was submitted by long-time Australian women’s rights activist Jean Taylor on behalf of herself and the members of the Lesbian Action Group, a collective established to address discrimination experienced by lesbians. The application provided an overview of lesbian organizing and gatherings in Victoria since the early 1970s, arguing that, “many thousands of lesbians benefited from the sense of pride, recognition and wellbeing that a large, well [publicized], public lesbian specific gathering encourages in the participants.”

However, this started to change in 2003 when trans activists challenged the organizers of the 2004 Lesbian Festival, accusing female-only spaces as being discriminatory under the law. This caused the festival organizers to seek and be awarded an exemption that allowed them to invite and only allow access to “lesbians born female.”

The exemption was revoked on a technicality, resulting in lesbian gatherings in Australia being driven underground for almost two decades in an effort to avoid more challenges from the transgender community.

I am so sick of this relentless bullying.

While the Commission recognized that “lesbians in Australia have faced structural and entrenched discrimination” and that “it may be important and beneficial for lesbians to gather together as a community,” it nevertheless was not persuaded that it is appropriate or reasonable to “make distinctions between women based on their cisgender or transgender experience.”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. MEN ARE NOT WOMEN. The Lesbian Action Group are not “making distinctions between women” they’re making the distinction between women AND MEN.

The ruling continued:
“The Commission notes that the grant of this exemption may lead to the further exclusion of and discrimination against same-xes attracted transgender women. Transgender women are a group who have and continue to experience discrimination, harassment and social exclusion.”

Shut up shut up shut up!

So

very

sick of it.

You have GOT to be kidding.

The Jo Phoenix v Open University hearing has started today.

So…

Words fail me.

Lawyers speak up.

Originally a comment by Steven on Their own load of unclaimed baggage.

There’s an interesting/funny circular logic concerning cryptids.

When people talk about cryptids, they mean BIG cryptids. If I claim there is an unknown species of bacteria, or lichen, or insect, or even a small bat in some jungle somewhere, well, sure. There probably is.

But the cryptids that people get excited about are the big ones. Sasquatch. Yeti. Nessi. And the thing about big cryptids is that there just can’t be any of them in lower Manhattan. We’d see them, right? There can’t even be any in Nebraska. The farmers would run into them with their tractors and there would be video on YouTube.

The big cryptids have to be in remote places. The Himalayas. The depths of a Scottish Loch.

But when we say “remote”, we mean remote from us. Places where there are no people. And the reason there are no people in these places is that these places are really inhospitable to life. For a start, they tend to lack food sources.

So the logic of cryptids keeps forcing these animals to places where they can’t survive…which is probably why they don’t exist…

The new know-nothingism.

No one should be writing books on autism, which has to mean also that no one should be doing research on autism, who isn’t autistic? What sense does that make? Is it a rule for all such subjects? No writing or research about blindness if you’re not blind? No writing or research about cancer if you don’t have cancer? No writing or research about chronic depression if you’re not chronically depressed? No writing or research about alcoholism if you’re not an alcoholic?

I suppose this is an offshoot of the idea that white people should shut up about racism and listen to black people instead of doing all the talking. I think there’s some truth to that, but I don’t think it should be taken completely literally – I think white people shouldn’t talk over black people, and I think we should listen as much as possible, but I don’t think we should take a vow of silence on the subject.

Also, how is autism comparable to “ethnicity”? Answers on a postcard.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on + Month.

A purity spiral in action:

In 1970 it was Pride Day.

By the mid-1990s it was Pride Week.

By the turn of the millennium it was starting to be called Pride Month.

By 2022 the Canadian government had declared all of summer, from June to September, as “Pride Season.”

And now, just a year later, of course, Diversity, Equity, and Incusion busybodies want to extend the season through October.

This will just about get queer people safely to the end of the second week of November, which is the start of Trans Awareness Week. And the day after that is of course the Trans Day of Visibility.

In case you’re worried about that two-week prideless interlude in which people have the nerve to celebrate World War I veterans instead of the real heroes — the Rainbow People — there’s Intersex Remembrance Day on November 8th. But many believe that’s still not enough queer remembrance for November, so there’s an active campaign to ensure the whole month of November is celebrated as Trans Awareness Month.

And earlier in the year, for those who can’t wait until June to express their pride, we’ve got the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia in May, and before that, there’s International Asexuality Day in early April.

Next year we won’t even have to wait until April, because Sunday March 31st is the most holy day of them all: Trans Visibility Day, which unenlightened cisheteronormative folk insultingly refer to as Easter Sunday.

Oh! And speaking of Jesus: south of the Equator, Mardi Gras has already become Australia’s gay pride celebration season.

And back up here, the exclusionary cisheteronormative “Valentine’s Day” is counterprogrammed with Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week, for the seven days following February 14th.

What’s left?

Christmas, New Year’s, and in the U.S., Martin Luther King Jr. Day, remain shamefully unqueer.

But I’m sure GLAAD and Justin Trudeau will team up and make a plan to fix those holidays, too. For one thing, the “+” doesn’t even have a single day yet, let alone a week or a month!

Here, for free, are some suggestions:

Christ+ day

Martin Luther Drag King Week

New Year’s Resolution to End All Queerphobias Eve

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The dog that didn’t bark.

Saying ‘we have evidence’ or ‘there is evidence’ is not the same as presenting evidence. There are a lot of people who claim to have evidence for bigfoot; sure. Show us the evidence. Subject it to rigorous review and repetition to see if the claims hold up. Then you’ll have evidence.

One of the things that many people who argue for the existence of creatures like bigfoot/sasquatch, Mokele-mbembe, or the Loch Ness Monster don’t seem to realize or appreciate is that their claims entail perforce the continued existence through time of an entire population of their preferred cryptid(s). A population and a history. One means more, perhaps many. Now means yesterday, as well as long before. The secretive, hidden existence of a whole bunch of large creatures over long periods of time in the face of multiple, repeated expeditions actively seeking them is much less likely than supposed, impossible singletons. Unless they’re supernatural, any animal needed parents, grandparents, etc. Specimens would have been seen, hunted, eaten and/or stuffed and mounted in museums long ago.

Like the cryptozoologists saddled with bigger claims than they realize they’re defending (an entire breeding population of large animals with an invisible, unevidenced past, rather than just a single, elusive specimen), transgenderists have their own load of unclaimed baggage that they are in no hurry to pick up, apparently happy to leave it circling endlessly on the luggage carousel, hoping that nobody notices it. They depend upon the existence of some kind of gendered soul, but offer no proof of its reality, no physiological origin, or seat of residence, and no reliable, independent test for its presence or nature, beyond stereotype and affectation. “I slink, therefore I’m Femme.” This smuggling of unacknowledged Cartesian dualism is but one problem that hides within genderist claims. How it is able to accommodate the contradictory and incommensurate states of transgender, gender fluid and nonbinary “identities” within its already ill-defined remit is a question that is left unasked.

At least cryptozoologists go looking for their quarry, they have put their money (or, occasionally, someone else’s) where their mouths are. Genderists are content to leave it all a matter of faith. Vague definitions and verbal slight of hand keep things from getting too real or solid. Mustn’t try dissecting the Mysteries of the Faith. And like the Church of old, they reserve to themselves the right to punish heretics who question that faith.

A serious scientist can risk ruining their career if they admit to believing in cryptids, though the consequences for doing so do not spread much farther than their own livelihood and credibility. There are plenty of serious scientists who seem quite happy to believe in genderist claims; it is often the unbelievers who are at risk of sanction and ostracism.

Eventually, however, reality will win because it persists and endures. It will still be there long after the tweets that don’t age well, and the slanted, dishonest reportage that tries to obscure it. It only has to do nothing but wait. In the meantime there is real harm. Reality can’t win fast enough. The consequences of this belief, and its translation into practice, go far beyond those who espouse it. Yes, their reputations will eventually suffer because Reality (see above). If this were a battle that consisted solely of heated arguments by cloistered devotees hurling incomprehensible arguments at each other within the pages of obscure journals, we could safely ignore them. But the power of gender ideology reaches much farther than academia. It has gained influence in many of the fundamental institutions of the state and society, and it uses that influence to advance its demands and to punish its perceived enemies. This is academic argument with a body count amongst both proponents and opponents of transgenderism. Those who are seduced, ensnared and say “Yes” to its impossible promises, pay with their flesh and blood and fertility. Those who dare stand up and say “No” to its demands, particularly and especially women, are demonized, vilified, slandered, cancelled, fired, bullied, threatened, harassed, and assaulted. In short, agree or disagree with a transgenderism powerful enough to enforce its will, you lose.

How many?

But…but…but…

Laurier has Pride

Each June, Pride Month recognizes and honours the experiences and history of Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual (2SLGBTQQIA+) and other identities and communities and celebrates the positive impacts 2SLGBTQQIA+ people have had around the world.

Isn’t that enough?

Meanwhile where is Women’s Month?

Wilfrid Laurier University aims to create safe and equitable campuses for all 2SLGBTQQIA+ members of its community. The university will celebrate Pride Month with a series of educational and inclusive events, some of which are highlighted below.

Flying the Progress Pride flag represents Laurier’s commitment to honouring the identities, experiences, and contributions of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community and its continuing struggle for social, political and economic equality, as well as the university’s commitment to the inclusion of First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Black and racialized voices in 2SLGBTQQIA+ and other equity initiatives.

But not women. Never women.

Seriously now. Take a good hard look at that cover.

What is the central image, the one that jumps out at the viewer? A very conservative Muslim couple, the woman in a burqa chador and a man with the regulation full beard, with a child between them, both of them wreathed in smiles as they walk a few inches behind an apparent gay couple.

That is not the real world.

Very conservative Muslims do not beam joyously on gay couples in the park. They don’t. Secular liberal Muslims yes, but the uniform-wearing ones, no. Theocrats, Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Muslim, do not beam approvingly on same-sex couples, not even when they’re actually not same-sex couples because one of them is a trans man. They wouldn’t be tripping the light fantastic holding their child’s hands while the spawn of Satan loitered right in front of them.

Also look at that harlot just above the man, with her bare arms and hair. Not ok. Look at the little girl with the ice cream cone – why, she’s practically naked.

What’s the thinking here? That they’ll distract from the fiction of the pregnant “man” by presenting a fiction of cheery tolerant friendly conservative Muslims frolicking with the gender communiny?

Granted the cheery tolerant conservative Muslims aren’t physically impossible the way the pregnant “man” would be. But they are absurdly implausible, because believers who are that liberal don’t dress that way. The conservative dress is a marker, a marker of conservatism. Part of its job is to be a rebuke to the rest of the world.

Surely the publishers know this.

Rich guy who shares some of his millions:

Hamish Ogston is one of Britain’s richest men…

He has spent the last five years building up his eponymous foundation, which has donated tens of millions to heritage projects, healthcare and women’s education in the global south.

He’s had dinner with Charles Windsor. Anne Windsor’s husband has had dinner with him. Heady stuff.

Today, a Sunday Times investigation reveals evidence that suggests for the last 15 years he has engaged in the exploitation of vulnerable southeast Asian sex workers. Documents suggest Ogston has trafficked or attempted to traffic Thai and Filipina sex workers, and hosted women who entered the country as tourists only to stay at his property and engage in sex work. Others are, in his words, already in the country “illegally” and beholden to mama-sans (female Thai pimps) or members of organised crime gangs, making them less likely to report potential abuse.

Yes but he’s had dinner with Charles Windsor.

Ogston said that he did not recognise our account and denies entirely that his conduct amounts to the systematic exploitation of vulnerable women. The potential offences include breaking laws on immigration, prostitution and human trafficking — defined as arranging or facilitating a person’s travel to another country to exploit them for sexual or domestic servitude. It is also a crime to “knowingly” employ adults who do not have the right to work or are in the country illegally, and to control a person’s prostitution for gain. Such crimes can result in lengthy prison sentences.

Even if the perp has had dinner with Charles Windsor? Surely not.

Ogston’s alleged exploitation has severely affected a number of the women involved. He has asked sex workers to perform acts on himself, his friends and other prostitutes so extreme that some have required medical attention and risked chronic disease.

I have no sarcasm for that one. It’s staggering. Some men are happy to injure women and leave them chronically ill for the men’s sexual thrills. Scales: on the one hand women’s safety and health, on the other hand some guy’s tingle. His tingle is worth more than her entire well-being.

And there’s more. Scotland Yard helped him. Scotland Yard was on Team Men’s Tingle as opposed to Team Women’s Safety.

In 2016, Scotland Yard contacted a woman who Ogston had paid for sex and subsequently accused of blackmail. Extraordinarily, an officer sent two emails they had received in which the woman alleged exploitation by Ogston back to the man himself. The officer also assured Ogston they were running checks and trying to find an address for her. The millionaire then hired a private detective to track her down.

That is indeed extraordinary.

Bahahahahaha behold the progressive paradise where men carry babies and women are muffled in burqas. Theocrats and gendercrats join hands to defeat the dreaded feminist monster! And everybody is smiling!

Classic. Right-wing ideology in a nutshell. People must be allowed to do whatever they want, provided that what they want to do is expensive and destructive and dangerous.

Fuck public transportation yeah? Fuck pedestrians and cyclists yeah? The only decent people are the ones in cars, god damn it, so give everything to them and punish all those reckless lazy anti-capitalist people who don’t have six cars in their garages.

Freedom! Freedom freedom freedom!

For people who own cars, that is. Not for all those other people, the ones who refuse to support the automobile industry. Lazy irresponsible greedy buggers.

Queering the what now?

One year ago:

So naturally I had to find the source.

York Art Gallery: Queering the Burton

York Art Gallery and the York LGBT Forum have been working to queer the Burton Gallery by telling the stories and sharing the perspectives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) people. Art works from York Art Galleries collections will be ‘coming out’ from the stores as well as looking again at some of the art already on display from an LGBTQIA perspective.

Visitors will be able to explore the stories which draw on LGBT Forum participants original research, as well as creative responses to the art which are inspired by lived experience.

‘Queering the Burton’ at York Art Gallery supports York Museum Trusts ambition to make the Gallery an inclusive and welcoming space for everyone. Historically, the term Queer has had a number of meanings. Our use of the word Queer is a positive affirmation. Here, we are de-weaponising what was once a slur, and reclaiming Queer as a collective term to represent sexual and gender minorities.

That is, they think they are de-weaponizing a slur, but a hell of a lot of members of their “community” strongly disagree.

There’s also the tiny little matter of the T’s war on members of the female community.

So anyway. Saint Agatha has been unqueered.

A closer look at that now-removed panel:

Who doesn’t want to read the self-absorbed driveling of a Person of Gender while visiting an art gallery?

The Times on that canceled anthropology panel:

For a big annual conference on anthropology, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, put together several panelists around a controversial theme: that their discipline was in the midst of erasing discussions of sex, which they believe is binary — either male or female.

So she collected a panel of speakers, only to have the profession…er…erase it.

That statement again, in case it’s faded over the past few days:

In a joint statement on Thursday, the two sponsors of the conference, the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, said that they wanted to protect the transgender community: “The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community.”

The statement also compared the panelists’ views to eugenics.

“The function of the ‘gender critical’ scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the ‘race science’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is to advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people,” the statement said.

Of course gender critical scholarship is not “like” 19th century “race science.” Claiming it is is just enhanced bullying.

In recent decades, many anthropologists have moved to a more nuanced view of sex, one that often rejects it as simply binary.

Nuanced shmuanced. The word they’re looking for is “supernatural.”

Dr. Lowrey said that she and the other panelists were blindsided by the decision and that none of them had been contacted about any concerns from the anthropology groups since the panel received its July approval. In a statement, the panelists said that it was a “false accusation” that their ideas were intended to harm the transgender community [trans people].

Of course their ideas weren’t “intended to harm” anyone, and sneaking that “community” in there is just part of the general manipulation and outright lying. I don’t know if it’s the Times that sneaked it in or the goons who canceled the panel, quoted by the panelists, but either way it’s manipulative.

The move was criticized by some academic freedom advocates who said that the two anthropology groups had caved to political pressure and proved the panel’s point: that the discipline was unfriendly to dissenting views on sex and gender.

But Ramona Pérez, the president of the American Anthropological Association, rejected the attacks.

Bam, there it is again. What “attacks”?? The Times is putting a big fat foot on the scales here. Saying the cancellation is wrong is not an “attack.”

The panel was nixed, she said, only after complaints that it did not have scientific merit and that it was harmful to some of the association’s 8,000 members.

“This was an intention to marginalize, not engage scientifically,” Dr. Pérez said.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Dr. Lowrey’s panel received preliminary approval based on a relatively anodyne abstract, reviewed by people without subject-matter expertise, Dr. Pérez said. It was later, when others took a closer look at more detailed plans for each presenter, that the association started receiving complaints by biological, evolutionary and cultural anthropologists, Dr. Pérez said.

“We looked at who was actually in it,” she said, and “we began to see that this really was one of those times where people who have an alternative agenda come into professional associations, try to get into these conferences, in order to push an agenda that doesn’t actually match up with the discipline.”

That’s extraordinarily offensive. The witches “come into professional associations” like people crashing a party – please ignore the fact that they’re anthropologists at an anthropology conference. They “try to get into these conferences” because they are anthropologists and the conferences are anthropology conferences – that’s how that works. Not all panels are accepted, but it’s not fraud or gate-crashing or sneaking in the back door to propose one. The Times sucks at this.

You know, it’s just occurred to me to wonder something. I don’t know why it took me so long. What I wonder is: if the trans ideology is based on truth – if it really is true that people can be born in the wrong body – why are there not whole bookshelves full of accounts of the experience? Why has this truth been hidden from us for so long? Why didn’t we already know about it, before 2010 or whatever it was? Why aren’t there memoirs and autobiographies and biographies and histories telling us about it?

There are of course memoirs and novels and so on that express discontent with the rules of gender, including some with a wish one could be the other gender. There’s Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. There are gripes and thought experiments; there are Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Eyre and Nancy Blackett. But are there rows and rows of books about people adamantly insisting that they literally are the sex that’s the opposite of their bodies? Not that I know of.

Well if the core claim of the ideology were true, there would be. We would already know all about it, because we would have been told, for centuries. It wouldn’t have just popped up in the last ten or twenty or fifty years.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What’s that smell coming from the basement?

…the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond…

We all know what happens to organisms whose ability to adapt fails to keep up with the pace of its changing environment. Humans are numerous and resourceful enough to be around for a long time (even if it is ultimately in only small numbers, in widely spaced patches). Civilization is another story. Its dependence on the combination of cheap, reliable energy, and immediate access to material resources on a planetary scale makes it vulnerable to disruptions of either. The unacknowledged and unprotected foundation of all of this economic activity is a healthy, thriving biosphere, which is needed to keep the soft, squishy humans who think they’re in charge alive.

A healthy biosphere means leaving leaving large swathes of Earth “undeveloped” so it can go on doing what it’s doing, unhindered. Civilization doesn’t do well with “undeveloped,” as it regards such “unused” spaces in much the same way an artist or writer might look at a blank canvas, or empty page, believing its plans for use can only ever be an improvement on what is already there. There’s always that urge to fill in this supposed emptiness, to “improve” the “wasteland, ” and the inability to know when to leave well enough alone. We’ve developed powerful tools and technologies, and claimed exclusive, unlimited ownership of the entire planet before we’ve even learned about everything that constitutes it and how it all works together. We’re clever, but not smart. We aren’t living up to Linnaeus’s wildly optimistic species epithet of “wise,” and have made insufficient progress towards his injunction to know ourself. We’re a bunch of hyperactive, barefoot, psychotic apes with nuclear weapons, throwing our weight around in a house of glass.

The normal operation of civilization, which is now geared to a recklessly dangerous degree towards maximized, short-term returns for only a few, is destroying this biogeochemical foundation. Civilization is autolytic; it is consuming itself, and there’s more concern about who will extract the most out of the world before the whole Ponzi scheme collapses (this is called “winning”), instead of the fact that that this collapse is hastened by continued pursuit of business as usual itself. It’s a game of musical chairs being played by chainsmokers on board the Hindenburg, where the last one left with a chair congratulates himself on his entreprenurial accumen and asbestos underwear, even as the chair he’s on ignites beneath him.

Now to see if I can tolerate reading all of Grace Lavery’s Address to the Genderariat.

The emergence of a liberal ideology of trans rights over the last two decades has precipitated a crisis in higher education. The purpose of my lecture today will be to sketch the contours of that crisis as I see them, and to propose a couple of possible ways forward.

The trouble is though, it’s not a liberal ideology. Very much the opposite. It’s dictatorial and punitive, not liberal. It rests on bullshit claims and personal fantasies, which are not good foundations for a liberal ideology.

…there is in this room some number—perhaps a sizable number—of people who are perturbed by the growing conflict between certain members of the LGBT community and certain feminist activists and organizations. I hope to offer an account of that conflict that differs from the mainstream account, with which everyone in this room is familiar: that by insisting on the axiom that “trans women are women,” LGBT activists have engendered a set of conflicts between the rights of women and trans rights. In fact, no such conflicts exist, and the widespread attempt to diagnose them, however well-intentioned, has had the effect of weakening the women’s movement throughout the UK.

[Bronx cheer] Of course such conflicts exist. His presence is a conflict; his giving this talk is a conflict. He is displacing us. That is a conflict.

I do not believe that most of those responsible for this schism are feminists—many are simply reactionary trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos and Graham Linehan; some others are opportunistic centrist journalists like Helen Joyce and Jesse Singal; and still others are conservative ideologues like Toby Young and Rob Liddle.

Graham is nothing like Yiannopoulos. Helen is not “opportunistic” (and by the way what about the opportunism of “Grace” Lavery himself?).

However he admits there are some feminists who don’t bend the knee to him.

My argument today is not complex, and it is more or less encapsulated in the title of the lecture. Over the last decade, trans civil rights claims (particularly those of trans women, and especially those of trans women who love women) have become the scapegoat for an increasingly pervasive anxiety: that young people, or social media, or young people on social media, are incapable of rational thought, and their modes of reasoning need to be radically suppressed for the good of their blameless victims, which are sometimes figured as “women,” sometimes as “the university,” sometimes as “children,” and sometimes as “lesbians.” In order to defend this facially rather improbable account of the world, the gender critical movement must maintain a constant state of battle-readiness: always ready to swarm some graduate student on Twitter, to circulate some collection of memes that prove that trans teenagers are more likely to detransition than is widely believed, or to smear anyone who contradicts any of their positions as a rapist, a pedophile, an apologist for rapists or pedophiles, a misogynist, a wife-beater, a homophobe, or all of the above.

What a flippant way to describe the conflict – as well as inaccurate. What a male-centric way to ignore women’s concerns about our rights and change the subject to some mythic fretting about the social media habits of young people.

…the GC movement is not merely a threat to academic freedom, it is the greatest threat in a generation: not only have GC academics created a system whereby one teaches one’s students best when one teaches them at gunpoint, not only have they done so to the great delight of conservative politicians who despise the cultures of learning that have been sustained by the higher education sector, but they have done so while persuading liberal media outlets like the BBC and the Guardian that the students really do need to be put down for the good of the country. 

Ok that’s enough of “Grace” Lavery.