I don’t think so.

I don’t think it’s daft or purist or obstinate or stupid to dislike customized pronouns. It’s maybe somewhat stupid or wrong to tell off other people for using them, but I think we have good reasons for objecting to them in general.

For one thing they condition us, as is the plan. If we say it we start to believe it, involuntarily. I don’t want to be conditioned to believe it.

For another it’s a falsehood, and not the minor personal kind to save people’s feelings but the major public kind to convince us of a general falsehood. I just don’t think we should be pressured to comply.

And on a more trivial level it’s just irritating and stupid and tedious, and extra effort to remember.

On the other hand…it’s trickier for a journalist, because Singal can’t just use the real pronouns as the default, in a normal no-problem way. His not using them would send all kinds of messages, which he won’t want to send in a piece of journalism. We’ve been boxed into a no-win situation here.

Jolyon Maugham, aka The Good Law Project, continues his bullying of the LGB Alliance.

The Tribunal has agreed to hear our arguments as to why the LGB so-called Alliance (LGBA) should not have been given charitable status and why their activities are not those of a charity. This means Mermaids, the claimant in the case, will have the opportunity to present the facts in full. The hearing will take place in May 2022.

…

To be registered as a charity, an organisation must be established exclusively for purposes which the law recognises as charitable, and it must pursue them in a way which gives rise to tangible benefits that outweigh any associated harms. We don’t believe that legal threshold has been met.

Naturally he doesn’t, because he doesn’t think women have any rights which men who identify as women are bound to respect.

On Today this morning:

James Kirkup thanks Harry Miller and Fair Cop.

He talked to Harry almost three years ago about what the cops had done.

After all, he’d broken no law, and even the police force involved confirmed that. Instead, he was contacted and a record was made of his conduct under rules around ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). These were introduced after the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, with the intention of giving the police a means of tracking behaviour that, while not crossing the threshold of a crime, gave a fair indication that a person’s actions were likely to escalate to full-blown crime.

Aaaaand does that apply to gender critical tweets? Are gender critical opinion-havers likely to commit full-blown crimes?

Of course not.

What happened next was a legal campaign lasting almost three years that has seen not just Humberside Police’s treatment of Miller ruled unlawful last year, but the whole NCHI regime called into question by the Court of Appeal.

That latter ruling came this week and would have been bigger news were it not for the Covid blight. In short, the Court accepted Miller’s argument that rules on the use of NCHIs set by the College of Policing for individual constabularies were too broad and blunt. The application of those rules cast the net for hate incidents too widely, and thus risks a ‘chilling effect… on the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression’.

The college is now revising those rules, hopefully returning the hate-incident regime to its original, narrow and valid purpose. Ministers may change the law too, via the Policing Bill now in the House of Lords. There is talk of tens of thousands of NHCIs being stricken from the record. Harry Miller v The College of Policing is therefore a big deal, important for the way we conduct ourselves as a society and the way we deal with difficult, contested ideas.

The subject was discussed in the House of Lords last month, too.

My point is that the failures of the NCHI regime were plain to see, especially to the politicians, lawyers and officials who are supposed to make sure that stupid policies get fixed, or at least, get made a bit less stupid. But it wasn’t those people who fixed the NCHI regime and its chilling effect on free speech. It was Harry Miller and his fellow campaigners from the Fair Cop group he founded: Sarah Phillimore, a barrister, and Rob Jessel, a writer.

They didn’t have to, he says, they could have had a quiet life, he says, but they did it anyway.

Harry Miller and his friends didn’t have to have that fight. But they did. They fought and they won. They corrected a wrong, and made public policy better. There isn’t much positive news these days, but that really is a good story.

You’re darn tootin’, as Helen Joyce put it.

Genius.

Patreon

Gregor Murray three days ago:

Gregor Murray two days ago:

He means (he clarifies in a later tweet) that the Scouts deleted his Office account, not that he did it.

In short he had a tantrum and “resigned” on Twitter, and the Scouts said Okbye and deleted his removed his access to the account, and now he’s pretending to be concerned about the fallout for The Children.

Yes it’s Maya’s fault that he resigned in a huff on Twitter. Definitely.

A fossil of a dinosaur about to hatch.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo that was preparing to hatch from its egg, just like a chicken.

Perfectly preserved skeleton, that is.

The researchers say it’s 66 million years old or more.

The discovery has also given researchers a greater understanding of the link between dinosaurs and modern birds. The fossil shows the embryo was in a curled position known as “tucking”, which is a behaviour seen in birds shortly before they hatch.

And the James Webb telescope lifts off tomorrow.

The “you can’t tell me what to do!!” party continues to embrace death by suffocation.

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, used the same week that the US passed 800,000 Covid-19 deaths to tell a rightwing gathering she would add to that toll herself before she would agree to be given a vaccine.

“It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot,” Palin told a cheering crowd. “I will not do that. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids either.”

Awesome! So brave, so defiant, so protective of her kids’ right to die instead of getting vaccinated.

Palin, who tested positive for Covid in March, was speaking at AmericaFest 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona, an event hosted by the conservative student organization Turning Point USA which attracted other staunch vaccine opponents including Tucker Carlson of Fox News and extremist Republicans Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I wonder if it’s occurred to them that they’re promoting “don’t take steps to avoid COVID” while the other party is promoting “do take steps to avoid COVID” and that thus they are encouraging their own voters to get sick and die. You’d think the effect on elections would slow them down if nothing else did.

Really though I just marvel at the stupidity. What’s the principle they’re defending? That government should do nothing to prevent the spread of a lethal virus? What kind of principle is that?

Is it the principle that no one should ever do anything for the common good, even when it’s their own good too? But what kind of principle is that? Why is this a Republican thing as opposed to a stupid confused people thing? I’ll never understand it.

Let’s have a round of applause for You Cee ELLLL.

University College London has become the first university to formally cut ties to the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, saying its membership of Stonewall’s programmes could inhibit academic freedom and discussion around sex and gender.

UCL announced that it would end its involvement with Stonewall’s workplace equality index, which rates employers on their policies, and its diversity schemes, following a recommendation from the university’s most senior academics.

“Following a period of debate within our community and careful consideration of the issues, UCL has now taken the decision that we will not re-join Stonewall’s diversity champions programme or make a submission to the workplace equality index,” UCL said in a statement.

The Nolan Report may also be due a round of applause, and above all so are the mouthy feminists, especially academics and journalists, who’ve been on the case for years.

From the Telegraph:

Trans people should be able to self-declare their legal gender, MPs have recommended despite warnings of impact it will have on single sex spaces.

That is, on spaces women need for safety and privacy.

A new report from the Women and Equalities Committee has found that the process by which people can legally transition is “unfair and overly medicalised”.

Women and Equalities Committee shafts women.

Drop many of the requirements, the MPs say. No need to live in the bespoke gender for two years first – just go for it.

The Government has also been urged to also remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria before a person can acquire a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), saying that the “focus must be shifted to a system of self-declaration”.

Sure. What could possibly go wrong? Brave Tom can be Tina for the evening in the pub, do a bit of ogling and grabbing in the women’s loo, and go back to Tom on the way home.

Dr Nicola Williams and Professor Rosa Freedman pointed all this out to the Committee, but were ignored.

Professor Alice Sullivan tells us why we would want to know.

And in conclusion:

10/Team #nodebate have lost, and the poverty of their arguments is exposed for all to see. I hope for a changing of the guard at the Women and Equalities Committee. We deserve better.

The Guardian tells us:

Women around the world will take turns to fast for 24 hours in an attempt to put pressure on the UK government to secure the freedom of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from detention in Iran.

The campaign by FiLiA, a female-led volunteer organisation working for the liberation of women, follows the 21-day hunger strike Nazanin’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, mounted outside the Foreign Office in London until mid-November.

Photographs of all the participants in the fasting relay, which begins on Monday, will be published on the group’s website day by day in a display of solidarity.

Joan Smith suggests that maybe just maybe on rare occasions we do need to know when someone is female or male.

Why is it important to know someone’s birth sex? The Conservative MP Caroline Nokes, who chairs the Women and Equalities Select Committee, evidently has no idea. ‘Why on earth would we want to?’ she asked during an interview on this morning’s Today programme.

Why would we want to know someone’s species? Why would we want to know whether someone is animal vegetable or mineral? I don’t know, it’s just part of the whole social thing, isn’t it? I mean if the someone is on the other side of the planet and you’re not interacting then meh, fair enough, no need to know, but when those conditions don’t apply…we may need to know.

Does Nokes really believe that court officials stand around at the end of a trial, not wanting to offend convicted offenders by asking their birth sex and wondering where to send them? Oh, but I’d forgotten: if said rapist announces that he ‘identifies’ as a woman, he may well end up sharing cells and bathrooms with actual women, regardless of how they feel about sharing intimate space with an individual with a penis. 

What if the rapist identifies as a bear? Should we let him tear us to pieces and devour the pieces?

Sometimes we do need to know.

Originally a comment by cluecat on Pretty wild indeed.

This kind of thing was raised against the Suffragettes right from the beginning: a “class problem” of wealthy white women doing things – any things, it doesn’t matter what – and being a “problem” somehow because of Who They Were. Not sticking to approved “Charidee!” work, my dears? Oh no! Women running wild!

This ignores the very reason that wealthy white women were doing most of that work; because working class women were busy working. A 12-hour shift at the factory, plus all the work when they got home, does not leave much time for organising. Nor does the life of a maid-of-all-work. Some of those women did it anyway; many lost jobs and families. They were dismissed as “not knowing their place”. Sound familiar?

Those “Ladies of Leisure” were the only ones who had the time, and often the connections, to make a real difference; a difference which then began to benefit all women, over time, no matter what work they were doing. They also worked together with working class women, helping them with things they couldn’t access due to class background and circumstances – legal issues, things that required a high level of literacy. etc., while the working class lassies told them how the world works for women like them. It wasn’t perfect, there was a fair bit of racism alongside, but it was a path to a better world.

These women were working together to benefit every woman; yes, even the ones they didn’t understand or like. Even those who were actively working against them.

[Yes, this is a massive simplification, and in a British, as opposed to American, context, but the argument remains valid]

All those old insults, slights, and belittlements are being recycled yet again. How dare any white woman thing she can do things?! How dare she think she can make any kind of difference?! She should be working on literally anything else! What if all women, of whatever background, really get hold of the idea that they aren’t just accessories for doodz?!

There are still issues of clueless middle-class women not understanding issues which primarily affect those of other heritages and backgrounds – each community has issues and solutions which are hard for outsiders to understand – but how much of this attack on the dreaded “Karen” is simply a rehash of all the old bitterness and cruelty towards women focusing on anything other than men?

How much of this demand to be the Eternal Mother and Nursey for the whole world is the same old bullshit? It just seems that this time, there are even more things to beat women with; why haven’t you solved Climate Change by yourself?! Why haven’t you coddled every single Failed Male to prevent his violence? That’s all womens’ fault! How dare you think you matter?!

Sure, there are still issues with racism in places – although I might note that the doodz aren’t doing too well on that front really – but the main problem seems to be the same old bullshit that our Great-Grandmothers were fighting; the very idea that women matter at all.

How dare we notice that women share experiences across backgrounds?

How dare we say that even a gilded cage is still a cage?

How dare we refuse to be the mirrors reflecting back the image of men at twice their natural size?

How dare we clearly note that males are not female?

How dare we draw boundaries, to say “NO!” to men?

How dare we recognise that women are fully human, not just an idea rattling around in some dood’s otherwise-empty head? Not a costume for a fetish, not a porn accessory, not smiling angels or dancing devils to coddle men or lead them astray, not an “Identitay” to be claimed.

Just people.

That cannot be allowed. Women cannot be permitted to be fully human. We are not permitted to reject the roles that men have forced upon us over the centuries, that designation of less-then-man because of our biology – that thing we cannot identify out of, however much we might like to do so.

And so we keep fighting, over and over again, for the recognition of our basic humanity

For the basic humanity of ALL WOMEN to be recognised – even the women we don’t like, even the women actively working against us.

There’s a new one.

Original headline:

Scout leaders apologise to woman hounded after calling bearded man he

New headline:

Scout leaders apologise to woman backed by J. K. Rowling who was hounded for two years after inadvertently calling a bearded transgender scout leader he on social media

Apparently even the Mail is scared to call an obvious man a man.

Originally a comment by Roj Blake on Feeble.

The current gender wars are not a fight against the binary roles that constrict our society,

Oh deary me, here I was thinking that it was gender roles that were restricting. Men tough, women caring. Men hunt, women cook and clean. Men talk to god, who lets them know how women should dress, behave, and be docile wives.

Women’s liberation didn’t fight to end the sex binary, it was to set women free from their gendered roles and to make them equal in all aspects of life. And by achieving that, they also helped some men break from their gender assigned roles so they could become better partners to women.

TRAs are intent on enforcing a code of what a woman looks like, how she acts, how she submits, all while ignoring the “lived experience” of actual women. The TRA performance of woman is the same as that desired by MRAs and incels.

Oh good – Trump is coming apart at the seams.

Donald Trump is increasingly agitated by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter, and appears anxious he might be implicated in the sprawling inquiry into the insurrection even as he protests his innocence.

Gee, Don, what was your first clue?

He’s pissed off that Mark Meadows said so much, he’s pissed off that his co-crooks are taking the Fifth instead of just ignoring the subpoenas like that swell guy Bannon.

When Trump sees new developments in the Capitol attack investigation on television, he has started swearing about the negative coverage and bemoaned that the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was too incompetent to put Republicans on the committee to defend him.

Good. I hope he’s in mental agony.

In a reflection of dwindling legal avenues available to undercut the investigation, Trump has returned to launching attacks-by-emailed-statement on the select committee, stewing over his predicament and what he considers an investigation designed only to hurt him politically.

Tick tick tick tick.

Always reframing.

The current gender wars are not a fight against the binary roles that constrict our society, instead this particular manifestation of the culture wars is a battle against trans women in particular. Most of the debate concerns what services trans women should or should not be allowed to access, from public toilets to public services.

And why would that be? Because trans women are men, and women need protections from men in certain circumstances.

Perhaps all of this was to be expected, and perhaps it is just part of a larger backlash against the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ rights over the decades.

No, it isn’t, because “LGBTQ+ rights” aren’t a big pudding, they’re a bag of rocks, and the rocks are not all compatible with each other. The T “rights” aren’t always rights, and the ones that aren’t rights are often in conflict with actual LG rights. The T “rights” are mostly about being ratified as the other sex, and that is in fact not a genuine right, any more than it’s a genuine right for me to identify as two feet tall and get in brawls with toddlers.

This debate may remain contentious for some time, but any lesbian, gay or bisexual person, in particular, supporting the current war on trans people, should remember that while T is near the end of our acronym, the other letters are just further back in the queue.

Uh…okay.

Any talk of the movement going too far, or the community getting too broad is just a shameless display of exclusion, pointing at someone else you think is weirder than you and saying they are the real problem.

No, that’s wrong. It’s just handwaving. There are real issues, and declaring them automatically invalid because the T is near the G is just empty sloganeering.

So naturally I had to look it up.

Oh yeah?

The Trouble With White Women:

(Let me guess. They’re all Karens. Do I win?)

Subtitle: A Counterhistory of Feminism with Kyla Schuller; author journalist Anne Helen Petersen.

I spent the first two decades of my conscious life figuring out how to confidently declare my feminism. I’ve spent the next (nearly) two decades of my life trying to figure out how to leave white feminism behind. That doesn’t mean that I’m trying not to be white and trying not to be a feminist: it means that I’m trying to leave behind the priorities of “white feminism” as a posture, an ideology, a way of thinking of what we should be fighting for and who should be leading the fight.

But why do you call it white feminism? Why do you put scare quotes on it if you take it seriously? Why do you take it seriously?

Some feminist women are, of course, more privileged than other feminist women. There are all kinds of ways people can be more privileged, and they overlap each other, so calling it “white feminism” is at the very least simplistic and unhelpful. Class, money, education, looks, height, weight, age, occupation, intelligence, talent, strength, skills – all those and more confer or withhold privilege. It doesn’t all boil down to “white,” and by the way why is it white feminism specifically? What about white Men’s Rights Activism? What about white Trumpism? Why is it feminism that’s singled out for the disdainful “white” label?

Which is why I find Kyla Schuller’s new book, The Trouble with White Women, so valuable. She’s highlighting the fundamental brokenness of white feminism, in part by showing just how long feminists of color have been doing this work…

What work? The work of blaming Karens for everything?

Just in case you were wondering (I was) – Kyla Schuller:

So what is the trouble with the karens?

I landed on the title The Trouble with White Women (after some hesitation, tbh) because I like its double register. There’s the trouble white women pose, but also the trouble white women face. The trouble they pose is in creating a feminism that understands gender to be the primary, sometimes even the singular, power hierarchy they contest. The idea that feminism is about gender equality may initially seem a no-brainer… until you start to wonder about what happens to other systemic injustices. Where do structural racism, wild wealth disparity, and climate collapse fit within this framing?

Good question! Also where does pastry fit within the framing of coal mining? Where does weather fit within the framework of Eine Kleine Nacthmusik? Where does plankton fit within the framework of Instagram?

Yes, feminism is about women. What the fuck else would it be about? Women are allowed to be a whole entire subject all on their own just like everyone else. Is Schuller asking these stupid questions of BLM or Stonewall? Of course not, but women aren’t allowed to have their own movement for equality, women have to share everything, even womanhood.

Meanwhile, well-off white women are lured by the rights and opportunities their brothers, fathers, and perhaps boyfriends or husbands possess. The men of their social world set their standard, and they confuse attaining those privileges as true equality. 

But that’s about money, not specifically whiteness. The two are of course linked because of the long history of racism aka white supremacy, but linked is not identical.

This seems to be all there is to her, frankly. She mashes together “white” with all the other kinds of privilege and then adds “women” so that she can join the chorus of people yelling at “Karens.” It’s crude and stupid and intensely anti-feminist.

And then we get to the “blame TERFs” part.

In your chapter on transfeminism, you write that “double essentialisms characterize the TERF position: biological essentialism and experience essentialism. The former assumes that women have a common embodiment and the latter that women’s experiences of those bodies are likewise shared. Both positions are two sides of the same white feminist coin.” Can you unpack that more? And, if you’re up for it, what can the history of TERFism tell us about why it’s gained such a foothold in the UK in particular right now?

To put it bluntly, TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, are a type of white feminist. It’s not immediately obvious, because the TERF position that “sex is real” and that trans people violate the basic laws of nature, seems at first to have nothing to do with race or racism.

That’s not the TERF position, but anyway.

It seems to be straightforward biological essentialism —that is, the idea that biology is destiny. And TERFs are biological essentialists! But that position is saturated by the history of racism and race science. Going back to my academic work, their belief that sex is real refuses the extent to which the absolute male/female binary itself was invented by race science over the decades. But bodies and lives belie the binary. This, by the way, will likely be the topic of my next general audience book — Sex is Not Real: The Racist History of the Male/Female Binary.

So there was no male/female binary (“absolute” or otherwise) before 19th century race science? Then how were people? Who made them? How did they do it?

TERF thinking contains another essentialism, too. Experience essentialism, which is probably a term I’m making up, identifies the fantasy that there is a universal Woman. This fantasy says Woman has the same girlhood, a similar sexuality, a common experience of menstruation, and illness, and partnerships, and family. Trans women, TERFs say, can’t be women because they weren’t raised with this universal experience of Woman. But Woman is a white fantasy!

No that’s not what we say, and no women are not a white fantasy.

It’s embarrassing to read this kind of thing.