A feel-good story from Paris:

A French policeman who called a female sexual assault complainant a “whore” has been let off by a police court.

The incident happened in February 2022 when the woman filed her complaint at a Paris police station. The officer later rang her and left a voicemail message about paperwork but his insults were accidentally recorded after he thought he had hung up…

During the hearing, the court was to asked consider that the officer made the insults to himself or to his colleagues, and that they were not aimed directly at the woman…A female judge ruled that the comments had not amounted to a sexist insult and acquitted the officer.

Well, sure, it’s not a sexist insult because women who report sexual assault obviously are whores, also bitches and cunts and Karens. Bitches.

Just a straight-up lie. Many people have lined up to point out that there are no such front pages. No newspapers are glorifying the children who killed Brianna Ghey. (It would be extremely odd if there were. What would that even look like?)

The NY Times has plucked up the courage to run a piece on detransitioners.

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Well, no, she didn’t discover “she could be a boy.” She discovered she could claim to be a boy, identify as a boy, pretend to be a boy. Let’s be careful about how we word things, ok?

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

What? How do we know it wasn’t “classic” discomfort with puberty? Why assume it’s “classic” gender dysphoria? Isn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place?

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

Yes, like that. It’s a socially constructed belief, fostered by “reading about transgender people online.” Hold that thought: it’s important.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college…

Well thank god they made sure she was serious first, and then a week or two later let her get her tits chopped off.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

So what did the “gender specialist” actually talk to her about?

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

I guess her parents picked the wrong gender specialist.

Oh hey, the queer rivers book is published by my neighbors at the University of Washington.

A snip at $30 for the paperback.

Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restoration in California, Oregon, and Washington.

What intersection is that exactly? In what way do river sciences and trans theory intersect? For that matter what is “trans theory”?

The politics of rivers in the west is in fact both important and interesting. There’s a lot of real content in that subject. What it has to do with people who think they’re the opposite sex is…opaque.

Incorporating work with salmon, beaver, and floodplain recovery projects, Wölfle Hazard weaves narratives about innovative field research practices with an affectively oriented queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. Drawing on the idea of underflows—the parts of a river’s flow that can’t be seen, the underground currents that seep through soil or rise from aquifers through cracks in bedrock—Wölfle Hazard elucidates the underflows in river cultures, sciences, and politics where Native nations and marginalized communities fight to protect rivers. The result is a deeply moving account of why rivers matter for queer and trans life, offering critical insights that point to innovative ways of doing science that disrupt settler colonialism and new visions for justice in river governance.

Yeah I don’t believe a god damn word of that. I think the result is, on the contrary, an obnoxious change of subject from something that matters to something that is utterly trivial and narcissistic. Put it in a box and bury it.

Heads up! It’s time – long past time, actually – to learn about queer river justice.

Sure sure sure, you can totally see it. Rivers are queer as fuck. They’re long, they can wind, they flow, they’re deep (except when they’re not), they have indigenous names, they’re special, they have souls – the list is endless.

Rivers matter for queer trans lives. Rivers have long been places of encounter for those outside of straight settler propriety; they are brown in the way that José Esteban Muñoz describes, “the way in which they suffer and strive together, but also the commonality of their ability to flourish under duress and pressure…they smoulder with life and persistence.”

That’s so beautiful, and so profound. Look at the Thames now – so far outside straight settler propriety.

Wait what is straight settler propriety exactly? Not humping the cattle on Sundays?

If they’re smoldering they’re probably in Akron or Pittsburgh or Flint, because normally rivers are too wet to smolder. Sounds nice and Heathcliffish though, doesn’t it.

Queer-trans people make joyous moves of solidarity when we swim in rivers and splash along other shorelines – to wear what we like to the beach, to see and support one another, to be admired in our bodies without apology. Such everyday acts of life, love, and dreaming big transgress settlers norms of sexuality and family and require uprising and political transformation.

Yep. That hot new bikini totally trangresses those settler norms. Uprise in your bikini and claim all the rivers for TransForMation!

Filia reports:

On 29th January I attended an event organised by the local council and billed as one of a series, with the aim of ‘hearing your ideas’ to ‘create the positive change you would like to see’ in Brighton & Hove.

This particular evening, the focus was supposedly on making the city safer for Women and Girls, which is why I was there. I’m the co-founder and CEO of a Feminist charity called FiLiA. Many of our team members are survivors of male violence, and we work to amplify the voices of Women, particularly those less often heard or purposefully silenced. What I witnessed during the course of the two-hour workshop left me shocked; silencing, intimidation and a lack of willingness to engage on what is one of the key topics within the VAWG sector currently.

Let’s guess. Someone dared to talk about women? Not women and men who pretend to be women, but just women?

Brighton Sisters have highlighted that 100 Sussex police officers have been investigated for allegations of domestic abuse in the past five years and that the police force has failed to record almost 10% of sexual offences. Brighton & Hove’s own Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy (2023-2026) reveals that ‘during 2021/22, the police recorded 1,239 sexual offences in Brighton and Hove, of which 1,077 were serious sexual offences including 397 rape offences.’ 463 crimes and incidents of stalking were logged in the same period and 45% of respondents to a survey about VAWG in public spaces stated that they had experienced sexual harassment.

It is this context in which the Re-Imagine Brighton event took place.

First the ground rules were set, which included:

• Treat everyone with respect, empathy and kindness
• Allow individuals to share their stories at their own pace and comfort level

One survivor of male violence, Allison Hooper, welcomed the Re-Imagine Brighton initiative. She asked that the issue of Women self-excluding from mixed-sex services please be addressed. Allison raised the case of Sarah Summers who is suing Brighton’s Rape Crisis Centre Survivors’ Network for discrimination because it ‘refused to provide a women-only peer support group’. Allison had chosen to share her story and request via the printed page, which was distributed by a couple of attendees at the start of the workshop.

An enraged council employee and facilitator (who I believe has something to do with policy and communications) tore around the room with fury across her face, snatching the document from hands and tables. When she reached for mine, I had to place my hand firmly on top of the paper as she tugged at it. ‘No’ I said firmly, looking her in the eye, and she retreated to the remaining tables to complete the task as best she could. The task contradicted everything the workshop was supposed to be about and set the tone for the rest of the evening.

Sooooo that’s treating everyone with respect, empathy, and kindness is it? That’s allowing everyone to share her story?

At the end of the two hours, an attempt was made to redistribute Allison’s contribution which (if handled properly) could have provided an opportunity for an important and respectful discussion that clearly needs to take place in this city.

What followed was intimidation of the Woman doing the distributing. One individual simply stood and stared intently at her for a lengthy period; another followed her out of the room to tell her that she had no right to hand out such leaflets. The two security personnel were busy chatting with the aforementioned policy and communications facilitator at the back of the room and did nothing to intervene to de-escalate the situation.

An article in Brighton and Hove News claims ‘She and other council officers and councillors described them to other attendees as “offensive” and “transphobic”.’

So an event billed as about improving things for women turns out to be about coddling men who pretend to be women while abusing and silencing women who try to talk about…improving things for women.

How dare she.

Women and girls are whipped, beaten up, imprisoned, killed for not wearing that loathsome snuffer. What is the purpose of it? To keep men from getting erections because a woman has hair on her head. How about forcing men to wear iron underpants instead of forcing women to wrap blankets around their heads?

And so we arrive at full circle: contempt for and mockery of lesbians by The Most Oppressed of Them All.

I’m gobsmacked by that, I must say. The new contempt for lesbians just like the old contempt for lesbians. Don’t worry: just be sure to mock and dismiss women and you’ll always be on the right track.

That Tweet is providing cover.

Dawkins is now a human shield!

Bloomberg on the cruise ship question:

When Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas embarks on its first official voyage on Jan. 27, the journey is sure to make waves. The world’s largest cruise ship, the Icon is over 1,000 feet long (360 meters) and weighs in around 250,000 gross registered tons. It boasts 20 different decks; 40 restaurants, bars and lounges; seven pools; six waterslides and a 55-foot waterfall. Royal Caribbean says its boat will usher in “a new era of vacations.”

Maybe so. But the Icon is also a doubling down on a negative aspect of cruising’s current era: greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2022, Bryan Comer, director of the Marine Program at the International Council on Clean Transportation examined the carbon footprint of cruising as compared to a hotel stay plus air travel — since cruises are effectively floating hotels. His analysis found that a person taking a US cruise for 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) on the most efficient cruise line would be responsible for roughly 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of CO2, compared with 518 pounds (235 kilograms) for a round-trip flight and a stay in a four-star hotel. In other words: Taking a cruise generates “about double the amount of total greenhouse gas emissions” as flying, Comer says.

Also, Bloomberg goes on to say, people usually fly to get to the cruise ship.

People are also going on cruises in bigger numbers than ever.

Cruise ships’ climate impact isn’t limited to emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere. The enormous vessels also spew a soot-like substance known as black carbon, which absorbs sunlight and traps heat on the ground. In the Arctic, which is playing host to a growing number of cruises, black carbon can settle on snow and ice, speeding up the rate at which glaciers melt. Bartolini Cavicchi says that while cruise ships account for around 1% of the global fleet, they’re responsible for 6% of black carbon emissions.

Well maybe once Alaska is covered in soot people won’t want to take cruises there any more.

Just kidding. By that time people will be killing each other for a loaf of bread.

But liquid natural gas! Better!

LNG-powered ships do emit 25% less CO2 than those running on conventional marine fuels, but one 2023 investigation by environmental activists found that cruise ships running on LNG often leak some of it directly into the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas that in the short term is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. For three out of four engine types, the investigation determined that LNG was worse for the climate in the short term than conventional fuels.

Ok ok ok but long term it will be great. Somehow.

Joan Smith on Keir Starmer’s buddy relationship with the People of Gender:

[G]ender-critical women’s organisations and even some of his own MPs struggle to get a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer. 

Not so trans activists, for whom Starmer apparently has all the time in the world. This week he welcomed members of the lobby group LGBT+ Labour to a reception at Westminster and offered them everything the most dedicated trans activist could want, short of self-ID. Starmer was accompanied by a raft of frontbenchers including his deputy, Angela Rayner, and the Shadow Women and Equalities Minister, Anneliese Dodds.

“Together we’ll ban conversion therapy, strengthen hate crime laws and tackle health inequalities,” Dodds posted excitedly on X.

But the “conversion therapy” she means isn’t conversion therapy, and by “health inequalities” she probably means the tragic unfairness of not being able to swap sex as easily as you can swap hats. Meanwhile, what about women? The people who are subject to rape which goes uninvestigated, unprosecuted, unconvicted, unpunished? Any inequalities there?

It must be galling for Labour MPs such as Rosie Duffield, who has been relentlessly targeted by LGBT+ Labour, to see the party’s leading figures palling up to its members. Starmer has not spoken to Duffield for more than two years, leaving her to cope unsupported with endless smears and demands that she should lose the Labour whip. He is evidently more comfortable with the widely-ridiculed MP for Jarrow, Kate Osborne, who was at the reception despite having boasted on X about her delusion that some women have a penis. 

It’s galling for Rosie and for all of us – galling, infuriating, frustrating. It feels as if 50 years of progress have been torched.

Trump loses another fight. Loser.

Donald Trump’s attempt to bring a case in the UK against a former MI6 officer who compiled a salacious dossier linking him to Russia has failed. The former president had been seeking to use data protection laws to sue the company run by Christopher Steele but the High Court has thrown out the case.

Mr Steele compiled the dossier which contained unproven allegations about bribing officials and sex parties. It was leaked to the media just before Mr Trump was sworn in as president.

It was BuzzFeed that leaked it, not Steele.

Trump filed the case too late. He says that’s because he was too busy being president. Too busy tweeting is more like it.

Dawkins is prodding the gender ideologues.

The way the non-binary faithful obsess about intersexes, and about individuals who can’t produce gametes, amounts to a pathetic clutching at straws while they drown in postmodern effluent. Yes, some fish change from sperm-producing male to egg-producing female (or vice versa). That very statement relies on the gametic definition of male & female. Ditto hermaphroditic worms & snails who can produce both male & female gametes.

In any case, the existence of intersexes is irrelevant to transexualist claims, since trans people don’t claim to be intersexes. Also, as if it matters, humans are not worms, snails, or fish.

The rare tetra-amelia syndrome (babies born without limbs) does not negate the statement that Homo sapiens is a bipedal species. The rare four-winged bithorax mutation does not negate the statement that Drosophila is a Dipteran (two winged) fly. Similarly, the occasional individual who can’t produce gametes doesn’t negate the generalisation that mammals come in only two sexes, male and female, defined by games size.

Sex is binary as a matter of biological fact. “Gender” is a different matter and I leave that to others to define.

It’s interesting that there aren’t equivalents for “gender” in other physical categories of human. There aren’t claims that species is physical while [???] is social or cultural. I suppose it’s only a matter of time.

Meanwhile of course the People of Gender are lining up to tell Dawkins how wrong he is.

(Remember Dear Muslima? I lined up to tell Dawkins how wrong he was that time, but then Dear Muslima was not, repeat not, a matter of science, or even about science or a scientific claim.) (Also, the origin of Dear Muslima was a post of PZ’s that was about an incident that happened to me, along with a different incident that happened to Rebecca. I was naturally interested in the comments on that thread.)

More on that “trans people have worse mental health” gotcha:

In fact there’s a large stream of people saying “Well duh of course they have more mental health issues, like for instance thinking they’re in ‘the wrong body’.”

The Guardian tells us:

Transgender people in England are much more likely to have a long-term mental health condition, the first study of its kind shows, with some facing a risk five times higher than cisgender people.

…

The research, led by the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Proud Trust and LGBT Foundation, was published in the Lancet Public Health journal.

“Trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people across England face widespread discrimination, leading to stressful social interactions and feelings of unacceptance, increasing the risk of poor mental health,” said Dr Luke Munford, a senior lecturer in health economics at Manchester and co-author of the paper.

Or maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe it’s bad mental health that caused them to try to be the opposite sex?

The survey questions did not record when their mental health condition developed. Munford said the researchers could therefore not rule out the possibility that the mental health condition predated the change of their gender identity.

Ah. Well then it’s not much use as a survey, is it.

Alongside investigating the frequency of mental health conditions, the researchers looked at how well people’s mental health needs were met at GP appointments. Those with a gender identity other than cisgender male or cisgender female were more likely to report unmet needs at their last consultation.

But there again – who is deciding what these “mental health needs” are? Maybe those with a specialty “gender identity” are reporting “unmet needs” that their GP considers delusions as opposed to needs.

Well capitalism isn’t taking all this climate change stuff lying down. It’s SUING, god damn it.

Business and agricultural groups sued California on Tuesday over the most sweeping climate disclosure mandates in the nation, arguing the policies signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year overstep on the federal government’s authority to regulate emissions nationwide.

While business and agriculture have every right to destroy what’s left of the planet so that they can keep making a profit.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, California Chamber of Commerce, American Farm Bureau Federation and other groups filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. They argue the new rules go too far in part because they apply to companies headquartered outside of California as long as they do business in the state.

The nerve! State borders are sacred, and far more important than not cooking the planet.

The groups also allege the laws infringe upon the First Amendment by requiring companies to comment on what the lawsuit calls a “politically fraught” topic — climate change.

Yes but you know what climate change is besides politically fraught? An unfolding disaster that will alter the entire planet and everything that lives on it.

Be sure to keep the causes of climate change a secret so that the causes can continue to cause.

Business and agricultural groups sued California on Tuesday over the most sweeping climate disclosure mandates in the nation, arguing the policies signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year overstep on the federal government’s authority to regulate emissions nationwide.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, California Chamber of Commerce, American Farm Bureau Federation and other groups filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. They argue the new rules go too far in part because they apply to companies headquartered outside of California as long as they do business in the state. The groups also allege the laws infringe upon the First Amendment by requiring companies to comment on what the lawsuit calls a “politically fraught” topic — climate change.

Here’s the thing: the “topic” can be as politically fraught as you want but that doesn’t change the reality of climate change and what it’s going to do to the children of all these Chamber of Commerce and Farm Bureau litigators. Climate change doesn’t care about your political; it just does what it does.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat representing San Francisco who authored the law, called the lawsuit “straight up climate denial.”

“The Chamber is taking this extremist legal action because many large corporations — particularly fossil fuel corporations and large banks — are absolutely terrified that if they have to tell the public how dramatically they’re fueling climate change, they’ll no longer be able to mislead the public and investors,” he said in a statement.

But hey he’s a D so he would say that, while the people who are R say the other thing. Meanwhile, climate change continues, in complete indifference to the D and the R.

They knew back in 1954.

The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

…

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” [Samuel] Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.

Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.

Fascinating. They were among the earliest to know, I guess so that they could get a head start on hiding it.

The newly discovered documents now show the industry knew of CO2’s potential climate impact as early as 1954 via, strikingly, the work of Keeling, then a 26-year-old Caltech researcher conducting formative work measuring CO2 levels across California and the waters of the Pacific ocean. There is no suggestion that oil and gas funding distorted his research in any way.

The findings of this work would lead the US scientist to further experiments upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that were to provide a continual status report of the world’s dangerously-rising carbon dioxide composition.

Keeling died in 2005 but his seminal work lives on. Currently, the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level is 422 parts per million, which is nearly a third higher than the first reading taken in 1958, and a 50% jump on pre-industrial levels.

This essential tracking of the primary heat-trapping gas that has pushed global temperatures to higher than ever previously experienced in human civilization was born, in part, due to the backing of the Air Pollution Foundation.

News from Australia:

Victorian MP Georgie Purcell has hit out [objected] after an edited a picture of her was shown on a commercial television bulletin last night.

The Animal Justice Party MP says an image used by 9News Melbourne to illustrate a story about her opposition to duck hunting featured enlarged breasts, while her dress was altered to become a cropped top and skirt.

Seems too conservative. Why not put her in a bikini?

Ms Purcell says it’s an example of the “ongoing, insidious” treatment of female MPs in the media. 

9News Melbourne director Hugh Nailon apologised in a statement. “As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs,” he said. “During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original.”

Uh huh and the changes just happened to be in the direction of “make this bitch look hotter.”

Beyond parody:

But wait! Network Rail can say which people it’s talking about…when they’re the right people.

Where a man identifies.