Some replies to the ACLU’s smug triumph at trashing girls’ sports:

I kept meaning to get back to that ruling that it’s fine for huge hulking boys to compete against girls as long as the boys say they are trans girls. The ACLU is delighted to see girls deprived of opportunities and wins in this way.

They’re such liars these days. The issue isn’t “trans youth” or “transgender students”; the issue is boys invading girls’ sports. “Trans youth” are not an issue for the boys, but boys are an issue for the girls, whether they identify as trans or not. This ruling doesn’t harm boys, and it does harm girls, so that’s fine then.

“Trans youth have a right to equal and fair play,” says the ACLU smugly, no doubt via the keyboard of Chase Strangio. Sure, trans youth and all youth have a right to equal and fair play, but what does that mean? It certainly shouldn’t mean that boys who are either pretending to think they are girls or actually deluded into thinking they are girls get to destroy girls’ sport. Girls have a right to equal and fair play too, and letting boys take over isn’t that.

The fact that Strangio and the ACLU are so careful in their wording hints that they actually know perfectly well how grotesquely unfair this is.

Joan Smith on the disaster in Scotland yesterday:

So crazed are MSPs by this ideology that on Tuesday evening they voted down an amendment that would have placed barriers in the way of convicted sex offenders who seek to apply for a GRC, complete with a new female name. They even rejected an amendment — proposed by Michelle Thomson, an SNP MSP who has waived anonymity to reveal her own experience of being raped when she was fourteen years old — that would have paused the process of acquiring a certificate for men charged with sexual offences.

This is an extremely troubling development. Let’s not forget that the SNP-Green government has pressed ahead with the legislation even after Lady Haldane’s judgment established last week that a GRC changes someone’s legal sex for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act. Scottish women are now expected to accept that any man standing in front of them, waving a piece of paper, is a woman — even if they’re in court and the man is accused of raping them. 

And they’re expected to live in a country where the law doesn’t acknowledge the most basic physical realities of who is a woman and who is a man.

This is scary.

Current predictions of ice melt in the Arctic are probably way off. According to an updated model, glaciers in the icy north could be slipping into the sea up to 100 times faster than previously forecasted.

Too bad they couldn’t have been way off in the other direction. Arctic ice melting way more slowly than we thought! But no, always it’s faster.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) think they’ve figured out at least part of the problem.

Gaps in data meant that climate scientists have been plugging in observations from accessible glaciers to build models of how all glaciers melt.

But what’s happening to the Antarctic ice sheet amid rapid global warming is significantly different from what’s occurring to Arctic glaciers.

In Greenland, for example, recent observational research has found that warm ocean water in the nation’s fjords is chiseling away at parts of the floating ice sheet from underneath.

Not good news.

The “Institute” has been tweeting a lot of posters lately…including, of course, the give us money kind.

What does that mean? Works with them how? It’s very vague and general – could mean anything or nothing. Is that an accident? Or could it be because they don’t actually do anything? Except self-promotion?

Contribution for what purpose? What do they do?

A person agrees with him.

Hoo-boy – where did he get that idea? It’s not the world’s premiere anything. It’s an obscure academic and her website.

H/t Mostly Cloudy.

So, they’ve done it.

The Scottish Parliament has passed legislation which aims to make it easier for transgender people to change their legally recognised gender.

At the expense of women.

Campaign groups have warned that the reforms – which seek to make the process for people to obtain a gender recognition certificate easier – could risk the safety of women and girls.

Will. Not could, but will.

However, supporters of the changes insist that it is about simplifying the process and removing hurdles within the current requirements.

That’s not a however, it’s just an and. Of course it’s about simplifying the process and removing hurdles, which is what makes it a risk to the safety of women and girls.

Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman hailed the result as a “historic day for equality”.

It’s got nothing to do with equality. Allowing men to pretend to be women and thus invade women’s spaces and steal women’s opportunities has nothing to do with equality.

“The last three days of debate have shown the best and worst of our Parliament. But today isn’t about party politics. It is about the future and the progressive and inclusive society that we want to build.”

Burble burble burble. What even are words? Progressive how? Inclusive of what? Buzzwords butter no parsnips.

There are at least two separate forms of manipulation in this here Lemkin Institute for Genocide Protection – the “Institute” that issued a “statement” three weeks ago that said gender critical feminists are genocidal Nazis. One of them is calling themselves an “institute” when they’re not what most of us think of an institute as being. I said in my first post on the subject that I couldn’t find out much about the “institute” but I didn’t think it was a couple of teenagers and their phones, but the joke’s on me, it turns out to be pretty much that, except the “teenagers” are academics old enough to know better.

The other is helping themselves to the name of Raphael Lemkin.

Borrowing a famous name isn’t necessarily bad or wrong. What a Maroon cited the Susan B. Anthony List. But what about guest’s example of Gandhi? Not quite the same, is it. Why? I think because literal genocide or massacres or other bloody horrors. I could be wrong, I’m bumbling around among intuitions here, but the appropriation of Lemkin feels more a step too far to me than the appropriation of Eleanor Roosevelt would.

Originally a comment by latsot on Don’t call me a basket case.

I found the forbidding of ‘blind’ as in ‘blind study’ especially zogborst.

As a disabled person and wheelchair user I find that words don’t matter nearly so much as attitude. Blind people know they’re blind and if I ever forget I can’t walk it’s going to hurt when my face bounces off the deck. We’re generally not shy about our disabilities or embarrassed about them. We’ll joke about them and are happy for others to do the same providing, as tigger said, the intent is humour rather than abuse. My friend Henrietta, who some of you might know from Twitter, is paralysed from the chest down and has the biggest collection of unfortunate wheelchair accident gifs I’ve ever seen. She finds them hilarious. She’s right, they are. It’s a mixture of “yeah… done that” and “he totally deserved it”.

Those I’ve spoken to about this agree that we’d much rather people be straighforward than mangle language without ever actually consulting us. It feels performative and it makes me personally feel as though I’m expected to be grateful.

A couple of illustrations about attitude:

I’m asked very often why I’m in a wheelchair. I don’t mind this at all and I don’t think it’s rude… providing I’m asked by someone I’m already having a conversation with. It’s natural to be curious and frankly it gives me something to talk about. My conversational skills are not the best. But if someone marches up and asks me out of the blue, it no longer feels like a matter of curiosity. It feels threatening. It happens more than you might expect. I’m also asked this quite a lot by people I’m arguing with on Twitter. There, the intent is very clearly malign and it’s definitely rude.

But a lot of people are shocked when someone asks me the question in good faith. They think it’s a topic that should be avoided, for some reason. Who’s that helping, exactly? Me or them? I’d much rather they just ask than pretend I’m not very obviously in a wheelchair and they’re very obviously wondering why.

I’m also asked quite a lot if I need help going up slopes and curbs. It’s easy to see in most cases that the intent is a genuine desire to help someone who might struggle and I always decline politely and warmly. These people are not being patronising, they’re going out of their way to offer help because of simple, honest empathy. It’s not offensive at all.

It is offensive when people grab the back of my chair and push me up the slope without warning or permission. Again, this happens a lot more often than you’d think. It happened when I was doing the Great North Run, for goodness sake! Would anyone just pick up another runner and carry them for a bit, all the time grinning to their friends? It happened in London a couple of weeks ago and when I reacted with shock and some anger, the man was furious at me since he was “only trying to help”.

Was he, though? Was he really? Or was it a performance? His reaction suggests the latter. I don’t like being used as a prop. And if you hang your bag on the back of my chair in the tube or at a bus stop so you don’t have to carry it (yep, happens surprisingly often too) then you deserve the elbow that is about to make contact with your testicles.

So don’t walk on eggshells around us. Make a joke about us rolling our chairs over eggshells, if you like. Just don’t joke about our being unable to walk on eggshells, unless you know us quite well. And don’t alter language on our behalf, it just mildly embarrasses us.

I understand the need for somewhat performative language in many areas. It’s a sign that people are paying attention to issues without having to address them explicitly and personally. It’s a signal that everyone has understood the tone a conversation will take and the boundaries that have been set. And it’s an agreement that some words and phrases are unacceptable for cultural or historical reasons. It’s when people go out of their way to invent offence on behalf of other people that we get idiocy like the ‘blind’ example above.

Wait, I’m probably not allowed to say “idiocy”, am I?

Wikipedia on the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities:

The Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities (AIPG), formerly the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation,^[1] is a non-profit organization devoted to genocide and mass atrocity prevention.^[2][3] The institute is best known for its Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention held annually at the Auschwitz concentration camp,^[4][5][6][7] and for serving as the technical secretariat of the Latin American Network for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention.^[8]

So. It looks to me as if the “Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention” has helped itself to the prestige of the above mentioned institute and seminar. It looks to me as if it’s hoping to sound more established and respected than it actually is. That needn’t mean it’s worthless or fraudulent; it has put out some informative and sensible statements. On the other hand it has also put out a statement accusing feminist women of inciting genocide, so I’m not feeling particularly charitable about it.

Aha – I wonder if they found that intern.

I wonder if it did find that intern, and then let that intern write a statement for them. I wonder I wonder.

It seems like awfully quick work, but who knows, maybe they’re just efficient that way.

Here’s a funny thing – the Lemkin Institute is on Facebook, with all of 781 followers, and almost no activity. One like per post – maybe put there by the person who posted. Even funnier than that – its “statement” calling feminist women genocidal is not there. Why not?

As people at Ovarit are saying*, the statement reads as if it were written by a trans ideology zealot. It certainly does not read as if it were written by a reasonable adult campaigner for human rights and against genocide…but then again that so often applies to the ACLU and NOW and other rights organizations these days, so who knows if it means some rogue actor wrote it or not. But I’m suspicious.

*thanks to guest for the reference

Updating to correct: the statement is there, dated November 30. Two shares, no likes. H/t Eava

Now here, from nine days ago, is the Lemkin Institute talking about something concrete and specific:

Gender critical feminists haven’t cut anyone’s electricity or access to gas, nor have we threatened to or tried to or planned to. I wonder if the Institute can make out the difference here.

This may be why lots of people started talking about the Lemkin Institute:

One birdbrain replied “Interested to see how they’ll deny away the *actual official genocidal prevention institute* voicing their concern over their rhetoric.” There is no such actual official institute, and if there were, this wouldn’t be it.

I’m sure “Katy” is having the best fun of his life getting people to call feminist women genocidal Nazis simply because we refuse to agree that men like “Katy” are women and our sisters and welcome in our spaces.

This is breathtaking. An institute for prevention of genocide equates non-belief in magic gender with actual genocide. Genocide.

I haven’t been able to find out how reputable or established or widely known the Lemkin Institute is, but I don’t think it’s just a couple of teenagers and their phones.

It issued a statement last month saying we (gender criticals) are on the way to committing genocide.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention voices its concern over the growing number of laws introduced in the United States that target transgender individuals and the transgender community. Anti-trans hostility in the US has become a staple of the Republican Party’s election strategy and is clearly being used to stoke voters’ fears of a changing world by raising the specter of a malevolent polluting force tied to liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and democracy. The Lemkin Institute believes that the so-called “gender critical movement” that is behind these laws is a fascist movement furthering a specifically genocidal ideology that seeks the complete eradication of trans identity from the world.

That’s so crazy it makes my head swim…and scares me a little. I think it’s threatening toward people like me. Are we going to end up screaming at each other “No you’re the genocider no you are”?

If trans ideology disappeared while the people who formerly called themselves trans simply went on with their lives being lesbian or gay, or gender-nonconforming, or both, would that be genocide? Or would it be people dropping a particular way of describing themselves in favor of a different one?

The Lemkin Institute seems to be saying we’re like China versus the Uyghurs: trying to force a set of people to abjure their beliefs and way of life to make themselves acceptable to a totalitarian government. That is, they seem to be saying that unless they’re saying that we’re actually hoping and plotting to kill all the trans people until there isn’t a single one left.

It’s slightly staggering that they don’t pause to remember that gender critical people don’t have quite the same kind of power and reach that the Chinese government has or that Hitler had. We don’t control armies or prisons or the medical establishment or the universities (all too obviously) or the banks or the media. We don’t “seek the complete eradication of trans identity from the world”; we point out what’s wrong with trans ideology and its consequences for women. Also, by the way, we’re not the ones cheering on surgeries that sterilize people.

I’ll stop there for now. I’m having a hard time believing what I’m reading.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Don’t you call me a basket case.

As a crippled old women who isn’t confined to a wheelchair, but uses one if I have to walk more than a few steps (because I prefer to avoid unbearable pain and nasty falls), and who spends most of the rest of my time in bed (because, until I get a better wheelchair, it’s the only place where I can recline and raise my legs), I find the ‘confined to’ phrase ludicrous. Since I can transfer from my bed to my wheelchair, and back; and from my wheelchair to and from the toilet, the shower, and my vehicle, I don’t regard myself as ‘confined to’ anything.

It’s just wheelchairs and beds which get that weird description.

I have never been described as being ‘confined to’ my reading glasses, or my sticks. Are people with hearing difficulties ever described as being ‘confined to’ their hearing aids?

I was ‘confined to’ home for fourteen months by the CoViD pandemic, until I was vaccinated. I’ll accept that usage, because I was unable to leave. But all other tools are just that; tools. We use tools in order to be able to do things which able-bodied people can do unaided. That doesn’t mean that we’re ‘confined to’ them!

Yes, there are people who have to use their wheelchair whenever they are out if bed, and cannot get out to stand, even briefly. They likely (although not necessarily) need help with transferring to a toilet. But they get into bed when it’s time to go to sleep.

That said, I don’t have a problem with people who use that phrase. It’s been around for a very long time, and few people have had any reason to reflect on it. I also understand that many people have a problem with the word ‘cripple’, although I don’t.

I only have a problem with words which are said in a way which is intended to hurt. I’ll only nitpick phrases when it’s important for clarity. If I hear a shop assistant asking a colleague to help ‘the lady confined to a wheelchair’ I won’t be bothered. Far too many people grew up with that being the only way to describe a wheelchair user, and have never heard any other way to say it. It’s almost a single word, confinedtoawheelchair.

Florida judge got creative:

Former Hillsborough county circuit judge Jared Smith denied a 17-year-old girl access to an abortion in January, citing her low school grades as justification for his ruling that she lacked the maturity to make the decision for herself.

So she’s not mature enough to decide to have an abortion but she is mature enough to push out a baby??? And then raise it?

It’s a massive catch-22, isn’t it. You’re too young and clueless to decide not to have a baby, so you have to have a baby you don’t want to have, which will obviously go very well for the baby and the mother and anyone who may be around to pick up the pieces.

There is adoption of course but surely judges aren’t ruling on abortion cases while assuming the unwilling girls and women condemned to have babies they don’t want will all have the babies adopted? Surely?

They probably are, which reduces the female people they condemn to unwanted childbirth to machines for the production of infants for other people.

Non-binary government boffin Sam Brinton got lucky with that second stolen bag:

The nonbinary Biden administration official facing up to five years in prison for allegedly stealing luggage in Minnesota now faces up to 10 years in prison for stealing another bag in Nevada, according to a police report obtained by Fox News Digital.

Samuel Brinton — who has served as the Energy Department’s (DOE) deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition since June — allegedly stole a suitcase with a total estimate worth of $3,670 on July 6 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, according to a declaration filed by a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) detective on Wednesday. The bag contained jewelry valued at $1,700, clothing worth $850 and makeup valued at $500.

(Makeup worth $500???? What do people do, put diamond dust on their faces?)

Living the nonbinary dream:

Thanks to latsot we can have hours of fun picking apart Stanford’s ElimiNation of HarmFul LangUage InItIaTive, which is “a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford.” I guess all the other bits of Stanford will go right on having harmful language.

It’s not that I don’t think there is such a thing as harmful language (although I wouldn’t use the word “harmful” to characterize it). It’s that…oh well, you’ll see.

At the end of the intro to the thingy on harmful language there’s a WARNING all in bold that the language ahead is…harmful. Or offensive. It fails to warn that some of it could be both. Proceed at your own pace, it says. Race ya!

So. Clearly it’s alphabetical. It starts with Ableist. I know, I know, I’m not supposed to call stupid ideologies “stupid.” But the EHLI has a whole long list of words; we could spend days just on that. Everything Not Permitted Is Forbidden. Make a note of it.

It’s in three columns: instead of; consider using; context.

Item one: instead of “addict” consider using “person with a substance use disorder”. Context (by which they apparently mean “why,” or “why the fuck”): “Using person-first language helps to not define people by just one of their characteristics.”

Why that’s not at all bureaucratic or obscurantist.

I get what they’re trying for, I think. Calling people drunks or junkies or addicts is dismissive. On the other hand, “addicts” is a good deal more neutral and clinical than junkies or drunks, and a blathery circumlocution might not be an ideal substitute. It’s also way more blunt, and sometimes bluntness is exactly what an addict needs. Addiction goes hand in hand with denial, so periphrasis is not always helpful.

Then we can’t use “addicted” figuratively because that trivializes blah blah blah.

But fortunately with the next one they lighten the mood.

Instead of “basket case” consider using “nervous” because “Originally referred to one who has lost all four limbs and therefore needed to be carried around in a basket.”

How is that a reason to use “nervous” instead?!?!

This is going to be hours and hours and hours of fun.

The BBC starts with a man who says he is a woman.

The diamond grass of Cathkin Park is glinting in the winter sun as Ellie Gomersall reflects on something intensely personal – her identity. It is a bitterly beautiful December day on the south side of Glasgow and Ms Gomersall, 23, is telling us about “coming out” as a woman.

You can’t “come out” as a woman. Coming out is a lesbian/gay thing, and that in turn is because being lesbian or gay has not always been socially acceptable, to put it mildly. It’s also, I suppose, because the majority is straight, so the working assumption about people is generally that they’re straight, so “coming out” is making it clear to that majority that the person doing the out-coming is in the not-straight minority. Other categories of people don’t have to come out because their category is obvious, written on their bodies.

But of course the priests of trans ideology like to call it coming out because that assumes it’s real. “Here is the hidden truth about me, that you didn’t know because I give every appearance of being a man. I’m not a man, I’m a magic special unicorny WOMAN. There, now I’ve come out.”

Ms Gomersall is currently president of the National Union of Students Scotland, although she is speaking to BBC News in a personal capacity.

But the fact that he is currently president of the National Union of Students Scotland is probably why the BBC chose him to talk to. What they talk to him about is how hard it is to get a gender recognition certificate.

The Scottish government – led by the Scottish National Party but also including ministers from the Scottish Green Party, of which Ms Gomersall is a member – wants to remove some of those hurdles, making the process quicker and easier.

The process, that is, of making it official and a matter of law that this man is a woman.

Ms Gomersall is a strong supporter of the legislation, which she says would make her life easier and more dignified.

But it would make the lives of countess women harder and less dignified, but Gomersall cares about Gomersall, not all those stupid pesky women.

She argues that gender identity should not be a matter for the state.

“I think ultimately the only person who can really describe my own identity, my own gender is me,” she insists.

That’s the ideology, but it’s bullshit. One, it’s a Cheats’ Charter; two, it’s not true – people are not always right about themselves.

It’s unfortunate that this fad is so narcissism-friendly. All it has, literally, is this bone-headed clueless idea that people are infallible about their own “identities” and self-awareness. We’re not! We can’t be, because we can’t see ourselves except through our own eyes. That’s a bias. We favor ourselves because we are ourselves. We can’t help it, although we can try to correct for it, mitigate it and so on. Pro-self bias is absolutely built in, so the fatuous claim that “ultimately the only person who can really describe my own identity, my own gender is me” is the opposite of the truth. Ultimately you are the last person who can be trusted to give an honest account of yourself; we all are.