Last May, an interview with a woman who founded a company:

Daniella Peri is the Founder of Yoppie, a DTC subscription-based, organic period care and PMS solutions provider. As part of our FemTech Founder series, FemTech.Live interviewed Daniella about her mission to improve menstrual health care.

So Daniella, tell us a bit about yourself and Yoppie.

I’m the Founder and CEO of Yoppie – a FemTech company that enables women to take control of their menstrual health. It’s my one and only experience in the FemTech world.

Yoppie is a DTC subscription-based, organic period care and PMS solutions provider that uses smart tech to enable women to not only personalise and manage their menstrual care but also to better educate themselves while they do it. From convenient product delivery to content personalisation, we’re helping women to sync menstruation with the modern world using a tech-driven approach.

Ok. Sounds slightly unnecessary to me (it’s not that much trouble to buy a box of tampons), but ok. However…someone must have Said Something.

So much for “fem tech.”

Taunty McTauntface.

A few days ago Jolyon Maugham gave the world his views on the Cass report on gender identity services, in great detail and at much length, because he is…an expert on the subject? No, but he plays one on Twitter. The final point he makes is that doing nothing is not doing nothing.

And so on and so on. This will mean “a lifetime of people discriminating against you and sneering at you.” By not giving blockers “you scar someone with that life.” The purpose of blockers is “to stop those changes from happening whilst the teenager reflects, before further medical interventions which are irreversible.”

That’s all true enough. Not giving blockers has consequences just as giving them has. Sure. You could say that about anything. Not setting fire to people has consequences just as setting fire to them has. But his take on it leaves a lot out. He himself is making blockers sound more neutral than they are – he claims that blockers just “stop those changes,” but it’s not like pausing a podcast or stopping in the middle of a walk. Stopping the changes itself has consequences, major ones. It’s not the case that one can just resume them a few years later and all will be as if there had been no pause.

There’s been a lot of discussion of this lately, especially since the Keira Bell case, so he can’t be unaware of it. So he’s framing himself as sounding a note of caution about this dangerous refusal to give puberty blockers, but what about the possibility that it’s at least as reckless to give them? What about kids who think they’re “gender incongruent” for a year or two and then adjust to puberty and realize they’re not? Are they better off if they get blockers or if they don’t?

The tribunal is looking into the issue of the hostile work environment too.

A level of fury. There always is, isn’t there. There’s always a Karen.

And the “belief,” let’s remember, is that a trans woman is not literally a woman. In other words compared with the contrary belief it’s not really a “belief” at all but just the default. It’s the contrary view that’s a belief, but the CGD view is that the default is not worthy of respect while the fanciful contrary view is. Backwards in short.

There’s another argument one could get into here, about whether this kind of humoring is in fact for others’ dignity at all. Does it really enhance the dignity of adults to play let’s pretend with them? Is there any end point? What if adults start saying they identify as snakes, aardvarks, trees, cars, planets? How much pretending must be humored and flattered?

So to sum up:

Boom.

Originally a comment by latsot on You conflate identity and reality.

One of the issues here is that ‘identity’ is such a heavily overloaded word. I mean ‘overloaded’ in the technical, computer science sense: it has lots of different meanings which can be used only somewhat interchangeably. The overall semantics might be broadly the same, but you’ll quickly run into trouble if you use the wrong one.

I think two different senses of ‘identity’ that are relevant here are:

1. Stuff I make up in my head. How I feel. What I want to be seen as. Let’s call this ‘idenniny’.

2. Assertions made about me by the proper official bodies, documents etc. Let’s call this ‘identity’.

So on the one hand, we have documents like my birth certificate which assert various facts about me and on the other, we have unverified things I assert about myself. The clue here is in the word ‘certificate’: the authority is certifying things like my date and time of birth, the name I was registered with at birth, my sex and my parents. If anyone ever needs to know any of those things, the government will certify the facts.

Now, I can change my birth name any time I like. I can suddenly start doing so right this minute without taking a single action other than making that decision. In fact, I have: my birth certificate records my name as Robert, but I absolutely never use that name; it’s always been Rob. That, you’ll have to take my word for because the government doesn’t care what I call myself.

(In fact, that’s not quite true in my case: my driving licence and passport both say “Rob” but since my birth certificate was used to apply for both, there’s a clear chain of evidence that all those documents refer to the same person. But this just illustrates my point even better: the relevant authorities are certifying my identity even though I have two different names.)

It seems to me that the problem in the above exchange is the common one of slipping between identity and idenniny without due care and attention. It’s a very common Motte and Bailey tactic. The problem is not just that a fact such as my sex is material reality when my ‘gender identity’ might be whatever I want it to be, it’s that the legal and social consequences of the two are not the same. That’s why one needs to be certified and the other does not.

Honestly, we should just put computer scientists in charge of everything, we’d soon have it all sorted out.

[In case it is not clear, absolutely do not do this.

It would be the worst disaster you could possibly imagine.]

More from Luke Easley:

“Offensive” he whines. Easy for him. Predatory men aren’t a threat to him.

He understands it now. He’s the HR guy, and was the HR guy when they pushed Maya out, but he didn’t understand that there are predatory men, and that women have to be cautious because there are.

Yes, “presence of TW would make uncomfortable” in some circumstances, because TW=men. Women are allowed to be cautious around men in particularly risky situations. We have to be, for our own safety, therefore we are allowed to be. It’s not “offensive.”

Yes, because some men are predatory. He’s not quick, this man. He doesn’t understand what’s said to him easily.

Excuse me, I have to go smash things now.

Joan Smith on Keir Starmer’s Message to the Estonians:

Employing the forensic skills that made him a QC, he homed in on the most significant issue of the day: “Trans women are women”, he declared. “And that is not just my view — that is actually the law”.

The Estonians may have thought they had bigger things to worry about, what with Putin having his tantrum right next door, but Starmer knew better.

To be cruelly frank, women are being gaslighted. Labour’s leaders say they believe in single-sex spaces, but what does that mean when they also insist that trans women are no different from natal women? Starmer’s own position is a statement of the law as he would like it to be, rather than as it actually is, as the barrister Naomi Cunningham pointed out at the weekend. Cunningham’s area of expertise is the interaction between the 2004 Gender Recognition Act and the 2010 Equality Act, both of which were cited by Starmer during his interview in Estonia. Asked whether the law says that trans women are women, her admirably concise answer was: “No.”

It is true that the GRA can change some people’s legal sex, but it obviously doesn’t change biological sex; it can say they should be treated as women for most legal purposes, but allows that a trans woman can be refused access to a female-only space if there’s a good reason.

Mind you, the idea that there’s such a thing as a “legal sex” that is different from a biological sex is pretty absurd in itself.

This goes to the heart of the mess Labour has got itself into. Starmer and his colleagues have confused a polite fiction — “trans women are women” — with reality. A piece of legislation that was passed almost two decades ago to make the lives of transgender people easier is now being used in a way that was never intended, making safeguarding of vulnerable women and girls difficult if not impossible.

And along with that, and as a result of it, creating a new and dedicated wave of misogyny that’s steadily wiping out all the gains we had made.

There’s just so much daftery in Luke Easley’s replies at the tribunal.

In other words the head of HR at this economics research institution “had a problem” with renewing Maya’s contract because he thought she might possibly “misgender” someone even though she had told him she would not. Apart from anything else it’s just so tiny and childish.

“There was risk.” What risk? That a grown woman might refer to a grown man as “he.” What kind of “risk” is that?

Then there’s an interesting exchange about a report which was deliberately vague but not, you know, deliberately vague as in hiding anything from Maya. Just…you know…that other kind of deliberately vague.

Why…that sounds as if they were hiding something.

And this is the HR guy, remember. It’s his job to make sure Maya is treated fairly…but instead he appears to have decided to his own satisfaction that she was a threat and must be bundled out without a chance to defend herself. HR guy for some but not others.

Lia gonna make history this week.

This week, a male collegiate swimmer who identifies as a woman will compete in the women’s NCAA Div. 1 Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships. Lia Thomas is the top seed in both the 200-yard and 500-yard freestyle races and will make history as one of the first openly transgender athletes in women’s collegiate sports, no matter how he performs.

It’s a crappy kind of history to make though – embarrassing as opposed to glorious. Or not so much embarrassing as shameful. Shameful of him, and shameful of all the people letting it happen. People would get this if it were a huge muscular man “making history” by playing Little League baseball, but somehow we’ve been bullied into pretending Thomas’s grotesque cheating is a glorious moment for justice.

Now, in Thomas’ first year swimming against women, Sports Illustrated describes him as throttling the competition and says Thomas has “set pool, school and Ivy League records en route to becoming the nation’s most powerful female collegiate swimmer.”

Except for the “female” part. He won’t actually be setting any records at all.

One USA Swimming official has resigned in protest.

Cynthia Millen made the decision late last year after learning that Thomas was competing in women’s meets. She describes being stunned after working for years to ensure athletes had optimal and fair conditions in which to compete.

“I thought, ‘This is wrong. This betrays all of this fairness,'” she told CBN News. “I mean, if a swimmer was wearing an illegal swimsuit we would tell the swimmer ‘go change your swimsuit. That’s not the right fabric. It’s giving you an advantage.'”

Details matter, except just this one little tiny one…

Wait though. Hold the phone. We may have a case of corpsephobia here.

Corpsegender is a xenogender so surely Luke Easley is violating his own principles.

His view.

But then Luke Easley is denying Maya’s reality, and not only Maya’s but many other people’s too, many many many other people’s. Furthermore he’s denying an objective, material, factual reality, and furthermore again he’s denying an objective reality that is at the root of the fundamental human inequality, that between women and men. That’s a lot of reality-denial for a guy who wants to banish women for denying an eccentric new fantasy-based “reality” about being Born In The Wrong Body.

Life under Russian occupation:

Russian soldiers patrol the streets of Berdyansk in cars and armoured vehicles marked with the “Z” symbol that denotes the Russian occupying force.

Local government officials in this city in southern Ukraine, which has been controlled by Russian troops for the past two weeks, have been kicked out of their offices, and the local radio station plays Soviet ballads and Russian pop songs, interspersed with excerpts from Vladimir Putin’s speeches and news items about Ukraine being “liberated from Nazis”.

Many towns in southern Ukraine are already under Russian occupation.

In Berdyansk, a port city to the west of Mariupol with a population of a little over 100,000, the majority of city councillors have remained loyal to Ukraine. They continue work to run the city, in defiance of the Russian occupation. However, the Russians may be about to transition to more violent methods.

In nearby Melitopol, the similarly defiant mayor was reportedly kidnapped by Russian soldiers on Friday night, marched from his office with a bag over his head, and has not been heard from since.

The Nazis are who now?

It seems the Russian army expected large segments of the population in places like Berdyansk and Melitopol to welcome the Russian army as liberators, as happened in 2014 in Crimea.

“For years they have been lying to themselves that people in Ukraine were supposedly waiting for Russia to come,” said the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a video address released over the weekend. “They did not find collaborators who would hand over the city and the power to the invaders.”

…

“Of course, there are some fans of the ‘Russian world’ among the population, but every day they are fewer and fewer. People can see that the ‘Russian world’ is not what Russian propaganda promises. It’s poverty, violence and destruction,” said Anna Ukrainska, a schoolteacher in Berdyansk.

But we were told Putin’s a great guy.

From the Maya Forstater tribunal today [LE is Luke Easley, a Vice President at the Center for Global Development]:

It’s astounding stuff. This isn’t some random young “activist” on Twitter, it’s an executive at an economic research organization. This is adult world, yet the executive thinks identity is reality and people with no identity are corpses.

LE replies: “but you can have that discussion without offensive comparisons to Rachel Dolezal.”

What makes the comparison “offensive”?

Why should you have that discussion without the Dolezal comparison?

How, exactly, is Dolezal’s identity different from a trans identity?

It’s unnerving that adult executives are this confused.

The first two sentences of this Spectator piece by Stephen Daisley need a post of their own before I read the rest.

Sir Keir Starmer’s interpretation of the Equality Act has caused something of a stir. The Labour leader cited the Brown-era legislation to support his assertion that ‘trans women are women’ and that this ‘happens to be the law in the United Kingdom’.

What does equality have to do with the assertion that “trans women are women”?

Even if the Act does say that (which apparently it doesn’t), what does equality have to do with it? Nothing. “Equality” doesn’t mean “you get to force everyone to agree with whatever you say about yourself.” Even if the fatuous repetition of “trans women are women” made it true it still wouldn’t have anything to do with equality. It’s a different subject, and equality doesn’t come into it. It’s hard to say what the subject is, exactly, because it’s all so peculiar and twisted, but it’s definitely not equality.

An item from yesterday:

This is of interest because Featherstone is a former LibDem MP.

That’s a lot of bad packed into one brief retort. The final sentence is a passive-aggressive insult, but it’s the first that’s so striking – flatter yourself in public much?

If the heart of the real issue is equality, why are women being bullied to put men’s demands ahead of our own rights?

Yes she does attack, yes she is rude, she has no idea how to reason.

Nimco today:

Same.

We live in confused times.

Headline: She Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third.

Subhead: Harvey Marcelin was charged with murder after a head was found in her Brooklyn apartment. Officials said it belonged to a dismembered body discovered in a shopping cart.

The reporters:

The story:

An 83-year-old Brooklyn woman convicted twice of killing women she lived with was charged with murder on Thursday, after investigators found a head in her apartment that, officials said, belonged to a body discovered in a shopping cart last week.

Harvey Marcelin, who had served decades in prison for murder and manslaughter before her release in 2019, was arrested March 4 and was initially charged with concealment of human remains.

Ms. Marcelin — who was listed as male in earlier court records but now identifies as a woman, according to a law enforcement official — was indicted on second-degree murder charges on Thursday in the death of Susan Leyden, 68. She is accused of dismembering her and hiding her body parts.

He has the right to remain silent. He has the right to a trial. He does not have the right to be referred to as “she.”

H/t Helicam

Terry Gross talked to Masha Gessen about Putin’s war on Ukraine last Thursday.

My guest, Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist who reported in late January and February from Ukraine, then went to Moscow after the invasion. On the night Putin shut down the last remaining independent source of TV news, Gessen was at that studio. Gessen’s dispatches are being published in The New Yorker, where Gessen is a staff writer. Gessen left Moscow on Thursday and is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia’s leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen moved to a popular science magazine. In 2013, when it became too dangerous to remain in Russia because of Putin’s anti-gay laws, Gessen moved to New York with their partner and their adopted son and their two other children. Gessen uses the pronouns they/them. They have written extensively about Putin, including in their book “The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin.” Gessen warned about Trump’s authoritarian style of leadership and its parallels to Putin in the book “Surviving Autocracy.”

The interview is not great (which is unusual for Fresh Air); Gessen talks very slowly and as if with difficulty, which is entirely understandable in the circumstances but just not ideal for radio. It’s good that there’s a transcript.

That said…I find it pretty jarring to go from what’s happening in Ukraine and Moscow to luxury pronouns. Using “they/them” is really not ideal for a journalist doing an interview for the simple and non-political reason that it’s confusing. Ordinarily in such an interview “they” and “them” would mean Russians or Ukrainians or refugees or soldiers, not one of the people doing the interview. Also the interview is about Ukraine, not Gessen (and I’m sure Gessen would agree), so making room for the specialty pronouns is just not very appropriate in this context. It’s a bit like pausing to ask “What are you wearing?” It’s extra, it’s non-essential, and therefore in this context it’s frivolous and a bit obnoxious. For all I know Gessen would have preferred to leave it out, and it was NPR or Gross or both who decided to say it. At any rate, I wish they’d left it out.

Another they does an interview.

Kae Tempest is perched at a table outside a station-side cafe, playing with a cigarette. Murphy, Tempest’s alaskan malamute, stirs as I approach, and on clocking me, Tempest returns the cigarette – still unlit – to their chest pocket. For years, Tempest’s long curly barnet was a trademark look. Today, though, wearing white trainers, upturned jeans and a turquoise jacket, their hair is short, a neat fade that, Tempest says, they still occasionally catch themselves admiring.

Got it? Tempest is special. Tempest is a they, Tempest perches and plays and has a malamute, Tempest has short hair.

In August 2020, in an Instagram post, Tempest came out as non-binary. They announced their name is now Kae (pronounced like the letter K), and explained that, going forward, they would be using they/them pronouns. “I have tried,” they wrote at the time, “to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection. This hiding from myself has led to all kinds of difficulties in my life. And this is a first step towards knowing and respecting myself better.” Beyond this statement, however, today is one of the first times they have publicly spoken about their experiences.

So what? Do we have to hear about such experiences from everyone on the planet? We couldn’t even if we wanted to, due to time constraints, but fortunately, we don’t want to.

Tempest dreamed of cutting their hair. “I wanted to, so much,” they say, “that every time I saw somebody with short hair or a fresh haircut, it would physically hurt me.” For years, Tempest felt trapped in their longer locks: everyone said cutting those long curls would be a travesty. It became symbolic: a shield Tempest hid behind, yes, but also representing their ever-present discomfort with expectations of femininity. “I convinced myself I could never risk cutting it,” they say. “I’d think: ‘If I do, will I still be able to go on stage? People will stop listening.’ It’s wild what dysphoria does to you.

“I was resigned to living the life I was in,” they say, “and then maybe at 50 when I stopped having this career I thought I might be able to finally transition. But increasingly I couldn’t bear it.” In January 2020, they chopped their hair short. Their eyes light up when recalling the sense of liberation. And then, the pandemic hit. For the first time in what felt like for ever, Tempest was forced to take a beat. A few months later, they came out publicly.

They chopped their hair short, and then the pandemic hit. Bit of a disjunction there. There’s really no need for that much angst over a woman cutting her hair short. Ever seen photos of Audrey Hepburn? Jean Seberg? Shirley MacLaine? It’s not unknown for women to cut their hair short. I get that it’s more fraught for some than others, and maybe extra fraught for a performer, but still – it’s not really that significant. Encouraging this kind of navel-gazing is a mistake. One might even say it’s Not Helping.

Arbeit macht frei, prostitution is empowering.

A clinic which receives NHS funding has been promoting prostitution as a way for transgender people to pay for their transition treatment, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Being a sex worker ‘can be useful and sometimes empowering’, according to a guide produced by CliniQ, a sexual counselling service for transgender people at King’s College Hospital in London. It adds: ‘It can help us pay for parts of our transition.’

Well of course it can; money is money. It can help pay for, or just pay for, anything; that’s how money works. Robbing banks can help pay for stuff too, unless you get caught.

Entitled Cruising: A Trans Guy’s Guide To The Gay Sex Scene, it advises readers to circumvent men-only restrictions at gay saunas by only performing sex acts ‘without others seeing your genitals’. Experts warned doing so would be committing the crime of sex by deception.

The pamphlet, which features crude sexual language including 22 uses of the words ‘f***’ and ‘f******’ in its 44 pages, focuses extensively on extreme sex acts, including sadomasochism and bondage.

What about the words f* and f**************? If you’re going to be coy about it just don’t mention the word.

‘Sex in public spaces is legal, so long as other members of the public cannot see you,’ it states. ‘Or so long as it is unlikely someone will come across you having sex. For example, having sex in a quiet woodland, away from the road or path, late at night.’

This pamphlet is for “trans guys,” so here it is telling women it’s a good idea to sell yourself in quiet woodlands away from roads late at night.

Kate Barker, managing director of the LGB Alliance, said: ‘We are astonished that a leaflet encouraging vulnerable girls to undertake criminally deceptive and breathtakingly risky sexual acts in gay men’s saunas and quiet woodlands is being endorsed by the NHS.

‘The fact that this ugly and demeaning guide wraps itself in the rainbow flag is an insult to all the same-sex attracted people who are as horrified as we are by the casual homophobia of CliniQ. Encouraging young women to believe they are really gay men is cruel, dangerous and deeply wrong.’

No no no it’s sex-positive and empowring.

Not helping what?

First, to repeat myself, I hate this use of “hit” and “hit out at” and “attack” for argument and disagreement. It frames dissent as physical violence, and that’s not a useful or intelligent way to frame it. Nobody hit anybody, Rowling was not hit, she was not hit out at, she didn’t attack the Scottish government. There’s way too much talk of violence in this discussion already, and newspapers shouldn’t be adding to it via stupid metaphors.

Second, nonsense. Women have rights too and we are allowed to remind everyone of that, and insist on keeping them, and resist efforts to take them away.

Third, yes she is “helping.” Who put Slater and Harvie in charge of who is helping and who isn’t? I’ve just been reading in the archives here from way back in 2010 when science journalist Chris Mooney spent many weeks telling the world that vocal atheists were “not helping” and we vocal atheists spent the same many weeks asking why he was in charge of who was helping and why we couldn’t just decide for ourselves what we wanted to help without being slandered by Chris Mooney for weeks n weeks n weeks. This seems like that all over again. We are “helping”: we’re helping what we want to help instead of what other people want us to help. Sometimes people get to do that. We’re helping each other defend women’s rights. Funnily enough we think we have every right to do that.