Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Deemed controversial

    If women say no they must be punished, and if they talk about being punished they must be silenced. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

    Today, I was given a permanent ban of posting on my Facebook page,

    @Meta. The page can exist – apparently – but I am not allowed to post on it anymore. The page has been deemed controversial due to the Giggle v Tickle case and increased popularity of 25,000 new followers in a week. I don’t want to labor the irony of being banned on a social networking platform while fighting in court for the right to ban men from a woman only social networking platform, it is what it is. Frankly, I’d love to have the same right that you do, @Meta.

    Women are routinely punished for not accepting men as women. It doesn’t turn those men into women. Nothing will.

    Nothing will, but the fun of punishing women is forever.

  • The Office for Women and Skirty Men

    “Does the office for women stand with biological women? Or does this office also include men identifying as women?”

    “We stand with all women, Senator.”

    And by “all women” of course she means women and men who call themselves women.

    If you let men who call themselves women in then it’s no longer an office for women. It’s so simple, and so obvious, and so crucial, yet these buffoons dig in and cling to the Big Lie.

  • Plz give back racist map

    Of course it did.

    Alabama on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to use a congressional map favoring Republicans in this year’s elections, despite a lower court’s ruling that the redistricting plan intentionally discriminates against Black people.

    Duh. The two go hand in hand. In the case of Trumpians the two are indistinguishable.

    Attorney General Steve Marshall told the court that the state did not intentionally discriminate against Black residents and should be allowed to hold elections this year under a map chosen by lawmakers, not judges.

    It was an accident! So let us keep doing it!

  • Moving fast and breaking things

    He wants us all dead.

    Key officials responsible for leading US research on infectious disease threats have been barred from speaking directly with the World Health Organization — effectively shutting some of them out of the global discussions on virus outbreaks, according to documents and multiple sources who spoke to CNN.

    The Trump administration issued the directive stopping individuals at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from communicating with the WHO.

    The federal health subagency was led for decades by Dr. Anthony Fauci and oversaw developing treatments for public health emergencies including HIV/AIDs and Covid-19.

    What next? Disband all the fire departments? Convert all the hospitals to branches of McDonald’s? Set all the forests on fire?

    The restrictions hobble quick cooperation with global counterparts, multiple current and former health officials said. One staffer characterized it as unheard of during a US response to emerging public health emergencies.

    The more unheard of the better, as far as Trump is concerned. He likes to be Special.

    The directive is part of a broader Trump administration retreat from participation in global health forums — the US withdrew from WHO in January at President Donald Trump’s direction, a move that was widely criticized by public health officials — and as many US health agencies are operating with interim heads.

    Among the vacant positions are the director of the infectious disease agency; surgeon general; head of the Food and Drug Administration; deputy health secretary; and head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a leadership vacuum that observers say is unprecedented.

    They like doing unprecedented things. They think it makes them look Special.

    Taken together, it’s an unprecedented moment for national health leadership, said Dr. Dan Jernigan, a former CDC official who resigned after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted Dr. Susan Monarez, the sole confirmed director of this administration, last August.

    “Not in my 31 years at CDC” has there been a moment like this, said Jernigan, noting that a slew of other top positions are also unfilled.

    Knowledge-envy. Trump and Robert Kennedy are ignorant fools with no medical expertise, so they want to get rid of all people who know more than they do. Public health is one place to start.

    The limited cooperation with the WHO is a vestige of residual Trump and Republican frustration for the way the organization handled the Covid-19 pandemic, said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former Obama and Biden administration State Department official.

    Chains of communication that previously existed but have now been wiped out would have alerted US health officials sooner to the unfolding Ebola crisis, Konyndyk said.

    “We have public health leadership in this country now that have written off most of the institutions with global health,” he said.

    At the same time, several of the on-the-ground medical organizations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries have been severely hampered. They were previously funded by the US Agency for International Development, a division of the State Department that was dismantled amid the sweeping cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency last year.

    Musk’s revenge.

  • Speaking of offensive language

    From last August:

    An anti-transgender activist has lost her right to appeal an apprehended violence order taken out by a transgender woman, after “highly intimidatory”, “objectively harassing,” and “unnecessarily cruel” X posts.

    Content warning: This story may contain offensive language

    In December last year, regional NSW soccer player Stephanie Blanch was successfully granted the order against Kirralie Smith, who targeted Ms Blanch in multiple X posts that a district court judge described as a “sustained campaign of belittling, harassment and intimidation”.

    Intimidation? Really? Is it really truly possible for women to intimidate men that easily? Isn’t it usually the other way around?

    The posts included photos of Ms Blanch, and described her as the “bloke in the frock” who played for a women’s football team in Wingham on the NSW Mid North Coast coast. At the time of the posts, she was the only transgender athlete on that team.

    That is, he was the only man on that women’s team.

    This is why the compelled language is compelled, of course: it makes it so much easier to confuse everyone. Say “she” and “her” enough times and most of us lose track of which sex he actually is.

    Prior to the posts, seen by thousands, Ms Blanch did not know Ms Smith. The anti-trans rights activist believes transgender women should not participate in women’s sports.

    Manipulative language again. The whole con is pulled off because the manipulative language is allowed and in fact mandated, as witness this particular example itself. Ms Blanch is a man. Ms Smith is not anti-rights, she’s opposed to pseudo-rights that no one has in the first place. No, it is not a human right for adult men to force the rest of the world to call them women. Obviously men should not participate in women’s sports.

    The original judgment said that what Ms Smith had said about Ms Blanch, a person who is already marginalised by being the only transgender woman in the club, was “unnecessarily cruel, offensive, and harassing”.

    Rich, isn’t it? Man steals a position on a women’s football team and the judge claims he’s “marginalised” because he’s the only one. The warpings of the ideology are a sight to behold.

    The Binary Australia website posted multiple articles about Ms Blanch, one of which said the word woman was “[r]endered meaningless when a bloke in a frock is suddenly a woman, as we all know that a ‘woman’ is not a costume, false boobs or a drug to be taken”.

    Yes, and? What part of that is false? We’re supposed to think it’s mean, but what about the meanness of a man depriving a woman of a place on the football team?

    Doesn’t count. Doesn’t even register.

  • Little secret

    In the latest ballroom news:

    Trump has made little secret [of the fact] that his planned White House ballroom is a top priority, invoking the project more frequently than most other issues. And in recent weeks he has raged at anyone — including a federal judge, a Senate official and a local historian — whose actions threaten to slow construction.

    Cool that a fancy party palace is a top priority, because what could possibly be more important?

    On Monday, the president shared on social media a copy of a legal filing that closely resembled his own words and contended that the weekend’s shooting outside the White House campus proved the need for a ballroom.

    “Without the construction of this great Project, the President cannot safely conduct the business of the United States,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche and two other senior Justice Department officials lawyers wrote, urging a federal judge to dissolve his order that could soon halt construction. “This is a terrible, tremendously harmful case to the United States of America, and all it stands for!”

    Hahahaha “closely resembled his own words” – the words don’t resemble his words, they are his words. Nobody else would say “terrible, tremendously harmful” or “this great Project” – that’s pure dodo clumsy excitable Trump. Not to mention the exclamation point.

    The filing also mocked the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued to halt the project, claiming that the group had been “defunded by Congress due to a total lack of respect for them.” 

    Pure Trump. Recognizable from a block away.

    Experts in constitutional law and government oversight see a pattern in Trump’s behavior.

    “Simply put, as President Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said, he believes he can do literally anything,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, wrote in an email. “And he attacks anyone who tries to stop him.”

    Oooh I see that pattern too, and I’m not an expert in constitutional law and government oversight!

    Asked whether Trump has dictated Blanche’s filings in the legal case, which so closely resemble his own rhetoric, the White House and the Justice Department have not denied it.

    How cringe.

    Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly deprecated Alison Hoagland, the historic preservationist who helped the National Trust bring its lawsuit against the ballroom, as “a woman walking her dog,” saying that she had no standing in the case.

    Well yeah obviously women don’t have standing.

    Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization focused on strengthening government, said in an interview Monday that Trump acts as if he sees no distinction between his role as a private citizen and as the nation’s chief executive.

    “It’s such a misunderstanding of his responsibility to the public and the nature of our constitutional system,” Stier said, adding that Trump feels empowered to pursue his personal priorities. “He’s surrounded himself with people who are willing to enable that, and those that aren’t, he fires.”

    That’s putting it rather politely. There is misunderstanding there no doubt, because Trump understands very little, but what he’s doing is much more a matter of will than of cognition. He does what he wants to do, because he wants to do it. Understanding doesn’t really play much of a role either way.

  • On the basis of potential pregnancy

    If you want some tortuous legal reasoning, have I got a treat for you.

  • Guest post: It’s not as if there is a clear line of demarcation

    Originally a comment by maddog on Anyone with any sense.

    If non-macho men use men’s toilets, they will be subjected to humiliation, abuse, and violence.

    It’s always been that way. Smaller boys/men, geeks, effeminate guys, brainiacs, gay men, goths, hippies — all of these and others, who don’t perform macho masculinity, have been humiliated, abused, and violently assaulted. Yet, in no other case did society decide that protecting vulnerable men should be achieved by shoving the men into the women’s room.

    It’s exactly the same problem:

    men beat up other men. In every other instance, the men have had to sort things out themselves. There’s no earthly reason why this case should be any different. It’s not women’s problem.

    It’s not as if there is a clear line of demarcation between the victims of men’s abuse, and the men who abuse others. There are plenty of men who have experienced both sides. Just because a man has been a victim of male abuse doesn’t mean he is not an abuser himself. Male victims of male abuse are not cleansed of all capacity to be abusers themselves. They’re not automatically “safe” non-abusive men.

    Societies are often organized by hierarchies: A is bigger, and beats up B; B in turn bullies C and D, and so on. The same could apply here. If trans women are targets of alpha-male abuse, trans women could plausibly be expected to bully weaker people in the hierarchy. Who are men always superior to? Why, women, of course. What makes anyone think that the same dynamic won’t play out between the men (trans women) and the women?

    But, is OJ’s premise even true? Is the danger for trans women in men’s spaces really that inevitable? One result of MSM’s slavish devotion to T, that a lot more people know about trans women than they did 10 years ago. T’s insistence on being the center of attention — all T, all the time — means that people are aware of what trans women look like, in all their twisted-face, angry, shouty glory. And they’ve seen Harry Styles in a glossy mag photo shoot in a dress. So men should be perfectly prepared for trans women in the men’s room.

    I don’t know if anybody has the statistics on how often trans women get attacked in men’s bathrooms. I’d like to see some data before I take it as an article of faith that trans identified men are at substantially greater risk of male violence than other men.

    The TRAs scream at women to just “live and let live!” Try screaming at the men instead. That’s who need to learn that skill: the men. Let them “live and let live” with each other.

    And, in the last few decades, I think a lot of men have learned a thing or two about coexisting with people who are different from themselves. Maybe it’s not as automatically scary as the TIMs assume.

    In any case, men have a much better chance of defending themselves against other men than women do of protecting themselves against men. If the trans women are really afraid, maybe they should take the steps commonly recommended to women:

    -take self-defense classes

    -practice situational awareness: don’t walk around with your earbuds in, maybe check the men’s room to make sure it’s empty before you go in

    -don’t dress provocatively; maybe pornified drag is not your best look for going out in public

    -carry pepper spray, or carry your keys between your fingers

    -if you’re really scared, there is strength in numbers; get another man to go in with you

    – if they are really scared, just reassure them that you are indeed a trans woman, and that you are where you belong.

  • Trap indeed

    From an article recommended by Mostly Cloudy: The Solidarity Trap.

    Young women in their teens and twenties have come of age in an institutional culture that presents support for transgender identity as the natural extension of progressive values they already hold. Feminism, as it has been transmitted to this generation through education, social media, and popular culture, has been substantially reframed around the language of inclusion, allyship, and the rejection of exclusionary boundaries. To question whether a male bodied person should have unrestricted access to women’s changing rooms is, within this framework, not a safeguarding question. It is a question about whether you are a good person.

    That paragraph is an article all by itself.

    News flash: you can’t have functioning political movements that value “inclusion” above all else. If feminist movements have to be incloosive of rapists and men who bully women and men who sneer at women and men who assault women, then those feminist movements can’t be feminist, can they. Politics is inherently about excluding some values or claims or policies or organizations. Politics is political. That means it can’t be all-embracing without ceasing to be politics.

    I suppose that’s why I mock inclusivity by spelling it wrong: because the idea of blanket unquestioning inclusion is death to any kind of Revolt of the Underlings.

  • Anyone with any sense

    Hmmm.

    Wait. So “trans women” are in danger in men’s toilets, so, therefore, for that reason, “trans women” must be allowed to use women’s toilets, because putting women in danger is fine, while putting men in danger is an outrage.

    It’s so interesting to follow the logic of how the OJs of the world view women.

  • Just two little tweaks

    Um…sir…there’s a lot more going on between those two photos than just hair and makeup.

    The tweaks are very many. The hairline is different. The eyes are very different. The mouth is different. The ears are all but invisible. The lower face and jaw are different. The length of the face is different. The Adam’s apple is deleted. The clothes are different. The black and white is made color. It’s a very very very fake photo there on the right.

    Here’s ChatGPT showing what he would have looked like if he had been a completely different person.

  • The relocation process

    Time to go.

    New Orleans is locked into a watery future which could see it surrounded by ocean as early as this century, according to a new expert analysis, which says the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.

    The paper’s conclusions are stark, but it’s no secret that New Orleans is highly vulnerable to rising seas as the planet warms. Coastal Louisiana is one of the lowest lying regions in the world, and New Orleans, a city of 360,000 people, is particularly exposed. It sits in a bowl-shaped basin, mostly below sea level, in the middle of a rapidly shrinking delta.

    …

    The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.” They argue the city must seize the opportunity to develop strategies for relocation that could make it a model for places facing a similar fate.

    The thing is, though, “relocation” would be relocation of the people but not of the Nawlins. A city can’t be relocated, and that’s especially true when the site of the city is why it became a city in the first place and the reason it can’t stay where it is. N.O. is on the Mississippi and near the Gulf; there’s not going to be another city on the Mississippi and near the Gulf. See also New York City, and San Francisco, and Seattle.

    It’s possible to build new cities, far from major bodies of water, but they certainly won’t be clones of the old ones.

  • Pick your side of history

    The Times enters the ring with trans ideology. Rob Burley writes:

    When the new director-general of the BBC, Matt Brittin, introduced himself to staff last week it wasn’t long before he found himself addressing the handling of transgender issues by the corporation. “I’m not an expert,” he confessed, aware these were treacherous waters. “I’ve seen comments in the press over the weekend from Fran Unsworth [the BBC’s former director of news]. I’m not going to go into that. I don’t know the history.” Well, if you’re reading this, Matt, you’re in luck, because I do.

    Unsworth’s incendiary interview — part of my 10,000-word investigation into the capture of the BBC by trans activism, published by Unherd — was the first account of life at the top of the BBC during, for want of a better phrase, peak woke. Fran opened up about the way “progressive madness”, especially transgender rights, consumed the BBC and ultimately led her to end her 40-year BBC career.

    Only it’s not actually progressive. It puts on the skirts and lipstick of progressive but its beliefs and actions are very regressive indeed. The believers think trans ideology is progressive, of course, but they’re profoundly wrong. That’s the fight in a nutshell.

    For many of the BBC staff, if Stonewall thought something, it was probably right and supporting a vulnerable group such as trans people who were fighting for their rights was a no-brainer. If Stonewall says list your pronouns then that was the right thing to do.

    Reinforcing this was a desire not to be “on the wrong side of history”, a mantra BBC executives told me they recalled hearing time and time again from the growing number of true believers. This approach discouraged critical thinking and made the position on trans rights an article of faith, as witnessed by the repetitious insistence that “trans women are women”.

    But which was the wrong side of history? How was it so self-evident to so many people that the side of bulldozing women’s rights was the right side of history?

    As the groupthink started to be reflected in the output, numerous people refused to fall into line. People like the scriptwriter Cathy Leng, who told me how she had questioned the use of inaccurate pronouns and was ostracised by her peers and disciplined by her managers. And others, particularly women, who (anonymously) reported hatred directed at them for suggesting stories that were less than affirmative about trans rights.

    In this environment, in late 2017, Theresa May announced plans to introduce self-ID, making it much easier for people to legally change gender. The initiative enjoyed cross-party support. The women campaigners who feared that it would grant access to women’s-only spaces to biological men were largely ignored by the BBC.

    Largely ignored for ten long years.

    All of this raised serious questions for BBC management and it was frustrating that only one (Gavin Allen, the former head of programmes) would speak to me on the record. Knowing it was a long shot, I put in a speculative bid for Fran Unsworth, the former director of news. I didn’t expect her to say yes or, when she did, to be so candid. I called her in Australia where she spends part of the year and it quickly became clear that she believed she had reached the pinnacle of BBC News just as, in her view, the world went mad. “It was bullying,” she said, “but it wasn’t just the trans issue. There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them; all that safe spaces shit.”

    When I asked her about the BBC management’s failure to get a grip on the trans problem, her first instinct was to mitigate the charge. “I think you have to remember that this wasn’t something that just affected the BBC at this point,” she said, “The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. There was a sort of progressive madness going on.” I’d heard this argument before and I didn’t buy it.

    Yeah I don’t buy it either. The BBC didn’t just fall off the apple cart yesterday. The BBC has been around the block a few times, and should know how to look at a new and peculiar ideology with a skeptical squint.

    “It’s what you might expect of arts institutions or universities,” I said to Unsworth, “but we are journalists. Journalists are sceptical people. They don’t just lie down. They’re supposed to stand up there and think about it first. And there was an absolute absence of that, and just a complete caving.” I could tell this stung. “I don’t feel I completely caved. I really don’t. But I do think that it [the trans right issue] could have done with something more robust.”

    I put it to her that some BBC News journalists, including editors, thought that there was only one legitimate viewpoint on trans issues and that everyone else was wrong. “Yeah,” she says, “that was how it was.” And it affected everybody. “There was a sea in which we all swam,” she recalled “… an atmosphere. We need to be kind to transitioning people. It’s a social phenomenon. And I think this ‘be kind’ thing was at the heart of it.”

    But why? That claim explains nothing. Why was “be kind” suddenly the job? Why, especially, when the “be kind” actually meant “be kind to men who pretend to be women”? Why is the job to “be kind” to this one particular set of people at the expense of half of all humans?

    The most extraordinary part of our conversation came when we turned to discuss the question at the heart of all this: are trans women women? Unsworth told me that “impartiality only operates when you can look at evidence and facts and point to them as the basis of your reporting”. Until the Supreme Court ruling made clear last year that a woman — for the purposes of the Equality Act — meant a biological woman, she said, “the facts at this point were incredibly disputed”.

    No they weren’t. There was a noisy political campaign to try to make them disputed, but 99% of people still knew that men are not women. Noisy political campaigns aren’t necessarily the best source of truth.

  • Undermining the vis

    The struggle to erase women continues.

    Holyrood‘s new Presiding Officer has been urged to act after the Scottish Parliament removed information about the sex of MSPs from its website.

    Kenneth Gibson was told the decision “risks undermining the visibility of women’s representation in public life”.

    In the last session of the parliament, users of the website were able to filter MSPs by male or female.

    Yes but this is now, when we have realized that female people just don’t matter. Try to keep up.

    Two Conservative MSPs have written to Kenneth Gibson asking to explain the thinking behind the change.

    In the letter, Meghan Gallacher and Rachael Hamilton said: “As female MSPs, we believe it is important that women continue to be clearly and transparently represented within the Parliament’s official records and public-facing information.

    “The removal of female as a distinct category risks undermining the visibility of women’s representation in public life and makes it more difficult to accurately assess progress relating to female participation within Scottish politics.”

    Yes, it does, and that’s why they did it. Women must be erased and stifled and ignored.

    Dr Kath Murray, of policy collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, said the change had the effect of “obscuring” female representation.

    For Women Scotland said the only way to measure progress was “to count the number of women elected”.

    But the Scottish Parliament won’t be able to hear them. Women, you see – they’re inaudible. Much too loud of course, but nevertheless inaudible.

  • Anyone with any sense knows this

    So…

    So……? So women must be subjected to humiliation, abuse and violence instead. Obviously. Women must fall on the grenades to save the men who pretend to be women. Everyone knows this. It’s what women are for.

  • The consensus temptation

    Something Bjarte said that resonated with me:

    Once again, if the fate of Movement Atheism™ should have taught us any lessons, it’s that rejecting one particular subset of unjustified beliefs does not amount to rejection of bad ideas in general, nor does it imply that everyone who rejects said beliefs is doing so for the right reasons.

    It’s true, and the temptation to get it wrong is always there. We want everything to fit together. We want that kind of simplicity and coherence; we want one thingism. I oppose this and also that, and you have to do the same. It’s like having a bit of ash in your eye to bump up against someone being right (in your book) about one thing and wrong (in your book) about another.

    This is probably what Adam and Eve squabbling over an apple was all about. There they were, all happy and perfect, and then they had to go and disagree about something. Result: she tempted him and he fell. (The misogyny aspect is a separate issue.) Harmony over! Apple yes, apple no, apple yes or no sex for you.

    There’s agreement or there’s war; no in-between.

  • Shrinking

    As the brain rot deepens he admits more and more.

    He’s been doing this all along, of course – he thinks he’s funny and kind of adorable, a standup comic of thieving bullies. He’ll go on thinking it until his brain is 100 percent soup, but he’ll also admit more and more rebarbative malice and envy. Hur hur hur, so funny, he can’t stand to see a friend happy.

  • Speaking of rhetorically loaded lingo

    Apparently it’s a “trans panic”.

    I’m quoting in medias res because the first few paragraphs are too boring to share.

    The whole website brouhaha is another great example of For Women Scotland and the gender critical movement using rhetorically loaded lingo with a sprinkling of statistics to cover what is fundamentally a whiny moral-panic argument. 

    Objecting to men calling themselves women and stealing everything we have won is a “moral panic”? Men sandblasting women’s rights is no big deal?

    The real problem for women in Scottish politics is that, according to research by feminist group Engender, a record number of women MSPs chose not to stand for re-election this year. When asked why, two of the reasons for leaving were misogynistic abuse (including on social media) and threats to safety. None of their recommendations for dealing with the reasons women leave politics had to do with defining womanhood.

    The Jo Cox Foundation found that between 2023 and 2024, abuse towards women MSPs increased more than a hundred-fold, and in a 2025 survey, 84% of women councillors in England and Wales reported experiencing abuse or intimidation. Step back a bit further, and the wider reality is that domestic abuse incidents in Scotland surged 25% from 2024 to 2025, alongside a 21% rise in indecent communications and a 20% increase in indecent images of children.

    How does any of that mean or imply or hint that knowing men are not women is beside the point? If we’re not allowed to know which MSPs are women MSPs, how can we find out how much abuse toward women MSPs increased? Or anything else along those lines? Talking about abuse of women MPS becomes meaningless, so why is Marissa MacWhirter talking about it?

    For Women Scotland rhetorically claims to be “working to protect and strengthen women and children’s rights”, but in practice, its campaigns and legal actions focus largely on opposing trans inclusion. I scoured their website and statements in mainstream media and found no evidence of any campaign, statement, press release, or public condemnation specifically addressing online abuse, misogynistic trolling, threats, or harassment of women politicians in Scotland. Talk about invisible women – their silence is telling.

    See above. How can we talk about online abuse, misogynistic trolling, threats, or harassment of women politicians if we can’t say which people are women?

    How do they not get it? How do they not get that redefining women to include men who say they are women makes it impossible to track or prevent online abuse of women and all the rest of the armory against women?

    In March last year, sociologist Sally Hines published a peer-reviewed paper tracing the history of trans-exclusionary politics in the UK from the 1970s to the present. 

    Ah well. She cites Sally Hines. A hopeless case.

  • Guest post: Not as the side of truth but as the side of good

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on When the rights of one group are eroded.

    It is pathetic. And it’s a damn terrible shame that so many gender-critical groups didn’t have the foresight to stay away from the legitimately terrible right-wing orgs that wooed them. The Alliance Defending Freedom, the American College of Pediatricians, arrays of neocon/libertarian/Brexit groups, right-wing think tanks, and on and on.

    It’s very, very, very hard to get the message across that we’re the good guys when so many of the loudest voices on our side constantly, willingly align themselves with the bad guys.

    Whatever calculus people did in their heads to rationalize these dubious alliances, or to keep their objections quiet when they saw them, the math was wrong. It didn’t benefit these gender-critical groups to publicly align themselves with toxic right-wing organizations. And it hasn’t benefited the quiet majority of GC activists to not denounce those ill-advised ties more vocally.

    All the logic and reason in the world is on our side, but this war isn’t being fought in the domain of logic and reason. It’s about political image, identity, and tribal affiliation. The gender movement has sold itself not as the side of truth but as the side of good. It’s awfully hard to fight that when so many of its opponents really aren’t good. Tribal allegiance is instinctual, deep-rooted, and liable to shut down any challenge to it the instant it smells danger. Just one connection to the Alliance Defending Freedom is enough for most people to shut out someone who’s trying to get them to change their mind.

    I guess it’s a preaching-to-the-choir kind of phenomenon: the kinds of people who’ve already come over to the gender-critical side are the ones who don’t have such a strong tribalistic association with the gender movement, and who are therefore not as bothered by its association with toxic allies like the ADF. They were blind to the fact that to everyone else, that’s the most important thing that’s keeping them from buying into it. The GC early adopters have failed to see that they are the psychological outliers, and that’s why they’re not succeeding at selling their view to the people they most need to get through to — those who are tribally loyal to the left.

    It’s just made an already very difficult political pitch even harder to sell.

  • When the rights of one group are eroded

    Amnesty International UK:

    NEW RESEARCH: Exposing the anti-trans networks

    A hostile environment against trans people did not emerge overnight.

    Amnesty’s new research traces the rise of the UK’s “gender critical” movement and the role the media have played in normalising anti-trans narratives.

    Anti-trans movements are increasingly connected to wider anti-trans networks like the US organisation the Alliance Defending Freedom which worked to overturn Roe vs Wade and access to abortion care.

    When the rights of one group are eroded, the consequences never stop there.

    Solidarity matters. For those who want to take our rights away, it’s their worst nightmare.

    Trans rights are human rights.

    Read the research.

    But what are “trans rights”?

    People who call themselves trans should have human rights of course, but if there are new rights that are specific to trans people, they may not be rights at all. There is no right to force people to agree with one’s personal fantasy idenniny. We can all daydream that we are magic or brilliant or supernatural or twenty feet tall or from a distant planet, but none of that generates a right to make other people endorse our daydreams.

    It’s pathetic to see Amnesty International recycling this fatuous bilge.