Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Secrets and lies

    The ACLU has organized what it says are lawmakers targeting “LGBTQ” rights into six categories plus “other.”

    They are

    Accurate IDs

    Civil Rights

    Fress Speech and Expression

    Healthcare

    Public Accommodations

    Schools and Education

    Under Accurate IDs they say

    These bills attempt to limit the ability to update gender information on IDs and records, such as birth certificates and driver’s licenses. This puts transgender people at risk of losing jobs, facing harassment, and other harms. Trans, intersex, and nonbinary people need IDs that accurately reflect who they are to travel, apply for jobs, and enter public establishments without risk of harassment or harm.

    But what the ACLU means by “Trans, intersex, and nonbinary people need IDs that accurately reflect who they are” is that trans etc people need IDs that DON’T accurately identify who they are. The ACLU is talking about the new kind of ID that instead of recording the simple facts, records the ID-haver’s fantasy about xirself.

    Under Free Speech & Expression they tell us

    Despite the safeguards of the First Amendment’s right to free expression, politicians are fighting to restrict how and when LGBTQ people can be themselves, limiting access to books about them and trying to ban or censor performances like drag shows.

    But what does it mean for trans people to “be themselves”? It means pretending to be what they are not, which is an odd way for people to Be Themselves. It also, as we know all too well, frequently interferes with other people’s right to be literally non-fantasyly themselves.

    Under healthcare:

    These bills target access to medically-necessary health care, like Medicaid, for transgender people. Many of these bills ban affirming care for trans youth, and can create criminal penalties for providing this care. 

    That is at the very least disingenuous. “Affirming care”=non-medically necessary amputations, sometimes followed by stripping healthy tissue from arms or thighs to make a simulacrum of a penis or a vagina, with frequently miserable results. That’s not “health care” as commonly understood. It’s risky at best and a horror at worst.

    Public accommodations:

    Public accommodations bills seek to prohibit transgender people from using facilities like public bathrooms and locker rooms.

    That’s just a straight-up lie. No they don’t.

    Schools & Education:

    State lawmakers are trying to prevent trans students from participating in school activities like sports…

    Again, just a lie. No they aren’t. They’re trying to prevent boys from competing in girls’ sports.

    The ACLU is a disaster zone.

    H/t Sackbut

  • Everyday whatever this ism

    Advertising on that Guardian article:

    Hur hur guys hur hur.

  • Behind the scenes

    There is audio.

    A newly released audio recording offers a behind-the-scenes look at how former US president Donald Trump’s campaign team in a pivotal battleground state knew they had been outflanked by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election.

    But even as they acknowledged defeat, they decided to “fan the flames” of allegations of widespread fraud costing Trump victory there, which were ultimately debunked – repeatedly – by elections officials and the courts.

    In other words they decided to amplify a lie, knowing it was a lie. Not surprising on one level, but there are other levels.

    The audio from 5 November 2020, two days after the election, is surfacing as Trump again seeks the White House while continuing to lie about the legitimacy of the outcome and Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 win.

    …The audio centers on Andrew Iverson, who was the head of Trump’s campaign in the state.

    “Here’s the deal: comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We’ll do whatever they need. Just be on standby if there’s any stunts we need to pull,” Iverson said.

    “Stunts we need to pull”=lies we want to tell.

    Iverson is now the midwest regional director for the Republican National Committee. He deferred questions about the meeting to the RNC, whose spokesperson, Keith Schipper, declined comment because he had not heard the recording.

    How convenient. “Talk to the bosses, who will say they know nothing, nothing. Repeat forever.”

    The meeting showcases another juxtaposition of what Republican officials knew about the election results and what Trump and his closest allies were saying publicly as they pushed the lie of a stolen election. Trump was told by his own attorney general there was no sign of widespread fraud, and many within his own administration told the former president there was no substance to various claims of fraud or manipulation – advice Trump repeatedly ignored.

    To put it more bluntly, the meeting is yet more evidence of how shamelessly Trump and his gang tell lie after lie after lie.

  • Wake up ACLU

    The ACLU is getting more captured by the day.

    So much wrong in that one simple sentence.

    The health care they have in mind has nothing to do with LGB people.

    There’s no such thing as “gender-affirming” health care. Amputating parts of your body to match a fantasy that you’re the opposite sex is malpractice, not health care.

    Promoting these reckless claims about needing amputations to match a personal fantasy is a million miles from what the ACLU should be doing.

    Dragging lesbians and gay men into this foul campaign to encourage self-mutilation is absolutely not what the ACLU should be doing.

  • Guest post: They ought to be able to think it through anyway

    Originally a comment by Sastra on Lord Falconer.

    Whenever I’m accused of fear mongering and creating a problem out of nothing because transwomen are no more violent than other women I always try to point out that they’re tacitly admitting that if transwomen WERE more violent than natal women, then they must believe that there’d be cause for alarm. So — what’s the figure and remedy?

    If their level of violence were — oh, let’s say it’s hypothetically the same as men — would that be enough to put safeguards in place? What would those safeguards consist of? What if transwomen were more likely to be violent than males in general? In their view of things, is there a particular percentage increase where some solution is proposed? Would transwomen at any point cease to be women?

    They don’t answer, and explain it’s because I’m asking hypotheticals that haven’t and won’t happen. But that shouldn’t matter. They ought to be able to think it through anyway. They can’t think it through because “transwomen are just like other women” isn’t and can’t be a conclusion. Conclusions can be falsified. Instead it’s a fundamental assumption which can’t be falsified with any evidence— and they don’t want to see that.

  • Self-pity much?

    Willoughby says he felt as if he were being lynched. Great sense of proportion that guy has.

    What’s “amazing” about pretending to change sex? Would it be amazing to pretend to be an airplane or a sardine or a block of cheese? What is so particularly amazing about trans people? Apart from their success at hijacking everything, that is.

  • Only trans women

    “It’s only trans women that people are gettin’ upset about,” he says. And why might that be Willz? It’s because trans women are men, abusing this deranged new ideology to steal women’s rights, ruin women’s sport, and generally undo all the work women have done over the past six decades to be seen and hired and promoted and talked to as equal human beings. That’s why. You’re stealing everything that’s ours and we don’t like it.

    Later he says it’s a right for “anyone who’s trans” to apply to be in women’s prisons.

  • The belief in reality

    India Willoughby was on BBC Question Time this evening. There are some clips…

    “The individual is a rapist.”

  • Guest post: Such men use the unpredictability

    Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on There are buttons they can push.

    During the second year of the pandemic, I was listening to a frightening story on the BBC as the UK government declared a new period of lockdowns. There was no consideration for women who lived with violent men. A woman reported that she was listening to the news with her abuser as Johnson made the announcement. I don’t recall if it was her husband or not, but he looked over at her and said “Let the games begin.” He knew that he had her isolated. It was chilling, and I had that same feeling that I get when I am watching a horror movie, that I want to turn it off; but it was even worse because it wasn’t a movie nor fictional but a very common reality for many women and especially during the pandemic.

    It’s been my observation in reading and listening to abused women, and some studies I had read in college, that such men use the unpredictability over whether or not they will be menacing or violent to keep their victims off balance and it’s a way to control their behavior. The buttons are hidden, and their victims will be tentative on whatever they say or do in order to avoid accidentally pulling a hitherto unknown trigger for rage. The claim that their victim is responsible for the violence is post-hoc justification.

    What happened in Parliament during that debate mimicked what these men do, and they full well knew the effect that they were having on their female colleagues.

  • Lord Falconer

    From last week:

    Imagine the outrage if, after the discovery that yet another rapist had been found amid the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, the Commissioner had told women to calm down. “The vast majority of officers,” he might have told protesters, “are likely to be safe.”

    The thought is preposterous. Yet it is the very argument made by those defending Scottish legislation that would allow people to change their gender in law without existing safeguards. Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor under Tony Blair, dismissed the complaints of those concerned about the privacy and safety of women, saying, “The vast majority of [applicants] are likely to be genuine.”

    No skin off his noble ass, is it. It’s only women who are put at risk this way, so [yawn] who cares?

    It is not difficult to see the risks. Already, a Scottish judge has ruled that “the meaning of sex for the purposes of the [Equality] Act … is not limited to biological or birth sex, but includes those in possession of a GRC…stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex”.

    In other words, trans women with a certificate must always be treated as women: allowed into single-sex spaces, such as changing rooms, prisons and schools; permitted to provide intimate care to female health patients; sanctioned to participate in women-only domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centres. With no meaningful safeguards stopping men acquiring the necessary certificates, and with them the right to enter women-only spaces, the scope for abuse is clear.

    And what’s also clear, horribly, is the complete indifference to women on the part of The People In Charge. Tough shit, girls, you’ll just have to suck it up; now on to important stuff.

  • A new atmospheric pathway

    More tipping points than we thought:

    Trees set ablaze in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest could contribute to melting glaciers in the Himalayas and Antarctica because distant ecosystems essential to regulating the Earth’s climate are more closely connected than previously thought, new research has found. 

    Scientists have discovered a new atmospheric pathway that originates in the Amazon, runs along the South Atlantic, then across East Africa and the Middle East until it reaches central Asia, according to a paper published this month in Nature Climate Change. That connection, which stretches 20,000 kilometers (12,400 miles) across the globe, means that when the Amazon warms, so does the Tibetan Plateau, whereas the more it rains in the Amazon, the less it rains in Tibet.

    So Bolsonaro sealed Tibet’s fate and thus much of Asia’s along with Brazil’s.

    The study is among the first to investigate the interaction between ecosystems at risk of reaching a climate tipping point — a point of no return that would transform them irreversibly. More significantly, the newly-discovered pathway suggests that the collapse of one ecosystem could destabilize others too, leading to a cascade of tipping events across the planet.

    Scary enough yet?

    The latest report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saw an increased probability that the Amazon will cross a tipping point. The question now is what that might mean for the Himalayas, one of the world’s great reserves of fresh water, which is already seeing unprecedented glacial melt. 

    Just India, Pakistan, China – no biggy.

  • Every way that matters

    The things people say, and write, and publish. It’s astounding.

    Many ways, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome…and what else? Name one – just one of those “many ways.”

    The “presence of a penis” of course isn’t the issue.

    As for biological male being a socially constructed category – then how did all these billions and billions of critters get conceived and gestated and born? If female and male are mere social constructions how has conception ever happened? Is it all just a Mystery?

    What’s “socially constructed” is that absurd “in every way that matters.” Oh really? So it doesn’t matter that women do the gestating and birthing? It doesn’t matter that men are bigger and stronger than women? It doesn’t matter that men can rape women but women can’t rape men? What does matter then? Clothes, hair, makeup? Is that it?

  • Flippant tautology is flippant

    Staggering. MSP asks Sturgeon if a rapist who “changed their gender after being charged by the police” should be considered a woman, and her oh so cute answer is that a rapist should be considered a rapist.

    But that’s not the question. We already consider a rapist a rapist; the question is whether we consider a man who is a rapist a woman.

    H/t latsot

  • 13 people in 6 months

    Rolling Stone on one of Trump’s more hideous triumphs:

    By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch.

    In short Trump is a serial killer. The killings were legal, but they were far from legally required. Trump and his people made haste to do the killings while they still could. Trump chose to have 13 people killed. He’s not legally a murderer, but he’s killed more people than your average murderer.

    As he geared up for another election, Trump White House sources say, the president was telling advisers that carrying out capital punishment would insulate him from criticism that he was soft on crime. And in his attorney general, Bill Barr, a longtime death-penalty advocate, he had the perfect accomplice.

    Cool, so Trump killed 13 people for the sake of his re-election.

    The executions, carried out in the name of law and order, took place at a time of peak lawlessness within the White House. While his administration killed prisoners at an unprecedented clip, Trump spent his final months attempting to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6 ransacking of the U.S. Capitol. 

    The ransacking that got five more people killed.

    The killing spree ended with Trump’s first term, as President Biden suspended capital punishment on the federal level, but it may only have been a pause. The former president is running again — and opened his 2024 campaign with a speech that promised more executions if he wins: “We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said in his November campaign announcement. “Because it is the only way.”

    Of course, he has a record.

    Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty dates back decades. His first real foray into politics was a public call for executions after five teenagers of color were arrested in the brutal rape and assault of a female jogger in New York City in 1989. “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police,” screamed a full-page ad Trump had placed in the New York Daily News at the time. The Central Park Five, as the young men came to be known, were later exonerated by DNA evidence, after they had served years in prison. But Trump never apologized for the ad.

    Or anything else. He’s not an apologize kind of guy. He has none of the qualities necessary for a person who apologizes: no compassion, no conscience, no generosity, no basic decency, no empathy, no ability to look at himself from the outside and perceive flaws. He doesn’t even have receptors for that most basic feeling of happiness or relief in making someone else feel better.

  • Like a natural

    Now there’s someone who really knows how to woman.

  • It plans to submit its own plan

    So it’s done.

    Seven US Western states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River have failed to reach an agreement on cutting water consumption.

    California, the largest user, did not join a water cut proposal put forward by six others by a federally requested 31 January deadline.

    …

    The government had asked for a plan to reduce water use from the Colorado River basin by two to four million acre-feet, or one-third of the river’s yearly average flow.

    Six of the states agreed on a plan that would bring it down by two million acre-feet of water. Under that plan, California – the state with the largest water consumption rate – would need to cut more than one million acre-feet.

    California had previously offered to reduce their consumption by just 400,000 acre-feet.

    The Chair of the Colorado River Board of California told the Associated Press that the state “remains focused on practical solutions that can be implemented now to protect volumes of water in storage without driving conflict and litigation”, and that it plans to submit its own plan.

    Again we see that humans are smart enough to create technologies that break the planet but not smart enough to stop using them.

  • There are buttons they can press

    Victoria Smith has a brilliant piece about male anger and how women experience it.

    Years ago, I lived with a man who hit me, though not most of the time. Sometimes he would only shout at me, but again, not most of the time. I couldn’t predict when things would go wrong, though I tried to work out a pattern. One day, you’d say something and it would be fine; the next, you could say the same thing and you’d know, instantly, that you’d ruined everything. 

    …

    Sometimes it would end in physical violence; sometimes it would not. This made little difference to the initial terror because, of course, you didn’t know. Afterwards, if no blows had actually been struck, it would be decreed that “nothing happened”.

    I think a lot of women live with “nothing happening” an awful lot of the time. A man does not have to hit you more than once for all the occasions upon which he could have hit you to have the required effect. He might not have to hit you at all. One of the reasons why it has been so important for feminists to promote awareness of coercive control is that physical violence is not the only means by which men terrorise women. There are women who live in constant fear of men who can justifiably say, “I never even touched her.”

    And, I think, there are women who live in something much less acute than constant fear, but still more than nothing. An aversion to male rage, if nothing else. I’ve mentioned a few times that I experienced very occasional male rage growing up (and after growing up), not the physical kind, only the shouty kind, but the shouty part alone was terrifying to me. It seems to me that men should know better than to do that. We can’t know ahead of time that the shouting isn’t going to proceed to violence, even if it never has in the past. It feels pre-violent.

    Whilst very few men might risk treating a woman in public the way an abuser would treat her in private, there are buttons they can press, ways of occupying space that show an awareness of who has the upper hand. There can be an expectation of deference, and a belief that it is acceptable to treat insufficiently deferential — that is, insufficiently fearful — women as aggressors. 

    …

    An example of this would be the recent behaviour of Labour MPs Ben Bradshaw and Lloyd Russell-Moyle towards female MPs speaking about Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill. To many women, myself included, the shouting and bullying felt disturbingly familiar. 

    Yes. Yes yes yes fucking yes. That contorted face on Russell-Moyle – how dare he?

    The sense of moral superiority expressed by Russell-Moyle in the aftermath, claiming that his “passion” led him to adopt the wrong “tone”, was utterly predictable. She, Miriam Cates, made him do it. Anyone with principles would have done the same. Who could call that abusive? 

    I know I am not the only woman who saw this and felt genuine dismay. This behaviour should have no place in public life. It should have been condemned by Keir Starmer rather than airily written off with platitudes about “respect”. Starmer claims to care about violence against women and girls but seems oblivious to the broader dynamics that underpin it. If nothing happened in the House of Commons, then nothing is happening in most abusive households either, until something does happen and we all have to pretend that nobody could have foreseen it. 

    Afuckingmen.

    I do not like feeling the things I do when I see men shouting at women in ways I know they would never dare shout at men (no matter how “passionate” they are feeling). I would rather not make the connections I do. It is not opportunism. It is not a weapon I like to wield. In many ways I would rather un-feel all this, but I can’t. As long as I can’t, it enrages me that men who exploit the fear of women — who have enough insight into male dominance to exercise it, but not enough to acknowledge it — still have the nerve to tell women which men we “really” need to worry about. 

    Along with everything else they feel like telling us.

    I am quite aware that, just as I never found a way of backing out of a confrontation in the past, there is no way of expressing this persuasively to men who like yelling at women. To them, I am weaponising trauma. I am whiny and manipulative. I am playing the victim. I am seeing threats of violence everywhere. 

    They will say “nothing happened”, and on a basic level they will be right. I think that “nothing” matters, though. I think that “nothing” deserves to be named. 

    Victoria Smith is a stone cold genius.

  • Bad knickers

    Can’t anybody get it right? Not even firefighters? The people who rescue us from burning buildings and smashed cars?

    A fire chief has promised a full independent inquiry into claims firefighters took photos of car crash victims and shared them on WhatsApp.

    Male firefighters at Dorset and Wiltshire Fire Service (DWFS) are alleged to have made degrading comments about the women in a group chat.

    A female firefighter told ITV news she had heard comments about the type of underwear women had been wearing.

    Had been wearing before they were killed in a crash.

    Why would anyone do that? Whence comes the impulse to mock dead women for their underwear? There’s no tangible payoff the way there is with rape or robbery, there’s just random sneering at freshly dead women. I can’t see the fun in it.

    Dorset Police said it would lead inquiries into the allegations, after consulting Wiltshire Police.

    A spokesperson added the details in the ITV report were of a “very concerning nature” which “understandably caused concern amongst the public and especially families of victims”.

    Yes you don’t really want to hear about firefighters taking postmortem photos of your daughters’ or sisters’ underwear.

  • A peculiar report

    Oh really?

    A school district in Virginia said it received a peculiar report last week from one of its junior varsity girls’ basketball games: An assistant coach for the Churchland High School Truckers had stepped on the court on Jan. 21, and played against teenagers.

    The assistant coach and the head coach are no longer working at the school, the Times tactfully adds.

    Details of how exactly an adult coaching staff member had managed to put on a jersey and play alongside the teenage athletes in their game against Nansemond River High School were still unclear on Tuesday as the district continued its investigation.

    Yes you’d think it would be kind of obvious, wouldn’t you, and yet…

    Gabrielle Ludwig, transgender college basketball player, pushes boundaries | KPCC - NPR News for Southern California - 89.3 FM

    Churchland High School is not the only school to have dealt with adults posing as teenagers in games in recent years, possibly using experience and size to their competitive advantage.

    Possibly? What mean, possibly? Typo for “obviously”?

    In Dallas, a 25-year-old man posed as a 17-year-old student and played in a high school basketball team, becoming a star player before he was arrested in 2018 and charged with tampering with government records, The Dallas Morning News reported. He was sentenced to six years probation in 2019, the newspaper reported.

    And in Memphis, in 2013, a 22-year-old man was accused of faking transcripts in order to join a high school basketball team, according to Fox 2, a local television station.

    And that’s not ok?

    No, of course it’s not ok. So why is it ok for men to do it to women???

    H/t Sackbut

  • Once you swallow the mantra

    Alex Massie in the Times on Sturgeon and TWAW:

    The first minister’s shock at discovering that her own government’s prison policy allowed male rapists to be incarcerated in a woman’s prison is transparently convenient, self-serving and bogus. Once you swallow the mantra “trans women are women” no different to any others, there is nowhere to go. Self-ID is an all or nothing proposition but if not everyone claiming to be a woman should be treated as one, the policy collapses in a heap of its own contradictions. This is the point we have now reached even if the first minister does not appear to realise it.

    Exactly. He’s talking about that exasperated “Well yes.” Those two little words knocked the support beams out from under the whole ludicrous fantasy.

    As recently as 100 hours ago the Scottish government argued it was ridiculous to suppose people might take advantage of the opportunities afforded by its gender reforms. Bad people need no fresh licence, we were told. Now we see — and the government appears to agree — that they had ample licence anyway but the Scottish government thinks the answer to this is to expand that licence tenfold. 

    While admitting “Well yes.”