Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • A wealthy cohort of middle-class reactionaries

    Sometimes I get the feeling we live in parallel worlds.

    The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill sits on the edge of passing through the Scottish Parliament this week – and all it took was six years of undelivered manifesto commitments, two public consultations and one online apology for failing to deal with transphobia in the SNP from the First Minister herself. Not that it changed anything.

    Oh no not public consultations! Obviously laws that contradict reality should be passed instantly with no public consultation at all.

    Six VERY long years, where Britain’s chattering class lost its collective mind in service to a relentless campaign of anti-trans misinformation; a conspiratorial crusade that falsely claimed, among many other things, that child murderer Ian Huntley was actually transgender, and that Scotland’s LGBTQ+ community was trying to lower the age of consent.

    Says a columnist for The National. If that’s not chattering class what is?

    But more to the point, “a relentless campaign of anti-trans misinformation” is debatable at best. At worst it’s just a casual lie, which reflects how easy and automatic it’s become to call lucid feminist women rude names and accuse them of bad behavior.

    For our queer and feminist communities, it has felt closer to an eternity.

    And feminist?

    Trans ideology is profoundly anti-feminist. This piece itself illustrates how, with its bullying and lies and taking it for granted that feminism is for everyone but women.

    Having wasted no time in perpetually branding the legislation as “controversial” until it inevitably became so…

    Read your own writing, pal.

    The conclusion of the bill in the Scottish Parliament, whatever the outcome, will at the very least provide a degree of breathing space from the keyboard warriors and sock accounts that have made obsessive discussion of the lives of trans people an all-consuming hobby. Once they’ve tuckered themselves out anyway.

    No. Wrong again. We really don’t care about the lives of trans people (more than anyone else’s life), we care about what trans ideology is doing to women and children and adolescents. The issue isn’t how anyone lives, the issue is law and policy and rights and telling the truth.

    Throughout the process of bringing this bill through Parliament, the so-called gender-critical movement has been given near everything they wanted, with the exception of throwing the legislation out entirely.

    …

    Harmful opposition flourished in the space left by the Scottish Government’s inaction – and having pushed a vulnerable community onto the stage, the SNP made a quick exit and left us under the fire of a wealthy cohort of middle-class reactionaries who wanted to cosplay the rebel faction.

    There it is. There’s that unabashed hatred of women. “Mummy said no!!”

    It’s for that reason that any victory on Wednesday will be a bittersweet one indeed. The hurt caused by the cowardice of the Scottish Government won’t be made wholly right by the passing of this bill, nor will it bring back those lost to the violent rhetoric left to spread unchecked in the promise left behind.

    Those lost? Who would that be? Name one.

  • Reckless but not criminal

    Mike Pence tries to split the difference:

    Former Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday that he hoped the Department of Justice would not bring charges against Donald J. Trump, calling the former president ’s conduct “reckless” but not criminal.

    It’s not criminal to try to overturn an election in order to steal a second term? It’s not criminal to incite a mob to attack the legislature and then watch them do it on tv for hours before gently urging them to back off for now?

    I kind of think Pence might be wrong about that.

    Asked about facing potential criminal indictments that could stem from the House investigation into the Capitol riot, Donald J. Trump suggested he had little to fear because of a social media message he posted hours later urging the mob to stop the violence and return home.

    His problem is that it’s well known via multiple witnesses what he was doing during those hours. He wasn’t doing his job, he wasn’t reading vital reports, he wasn’t packing his bags, he wasn’t even stealing more classified documents to take to Marlago – he was watching his fans smash up the Capitol on tv.

    In a radio interview on Monday, Mr. Trump said that House investigators skimmed past his “fantastic” Twitter post, and also failed to consider why thousands had attended his speech just before the riot.

    Ooh ooh I know this one – it’s because he told them to, and because they wanted to help him steal the election by doing an insurrection. I think the House investigators did consider that, quite intensely.

  • His kids and your kids

    Aha. Levine is glad he transitioned late, because otherwise he wouldn’t have his children.

    So……….

  • Four

    The four referrals:

    Again:

    He was stupid enough to incite the insurrection right in front of us, on the big screen, where everyone can see.

  • Insurrection

    Referrals.

  • The symbols of what did you say?

    Yet another sneaky dishonest bit of word manipulation to deceive the readers or audience: Kezia Dugdale, former Member of the Scottish Parliament in the Times:

    There is a rotten irony in the tagline “women won’t wheest.” That line is used by many campaigners against the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which will go through its stage 3 proceedings in the Scottish parliament this week. The phrase implies both that women are united in opposition to this legislation and that they have been somehow silenced during the bill’s passage.

    From where I sit, it is the women who support this legislation who find themselves voiceless: women who have watched the colours green, white and purple, the symbols of universal suffrage, be appropriated by a cause they don’t support…

    There it is. Yes, the colours green, white and purple are symbols of universal suffrage but not just any old universal suffrage, but specifically women’s suffrage. It’s not a straight-up lie to say the colours are symbols of universal suffrage but it’s highly misleading and incomplete and deceptive. The flag stands for women’s suffrage. Dugdale of course knows this but she pretends not to.

    All too typical, isn’t it – take something that’s for women and force it to become more “universal” and thus take it away from women. All Lives Matter.

    While I have written previously about what this proposed legislation does and does not do, I have resisted the temptation to enter the debate online or in the media, safe in the knowledge that the bill had a parliamentary majority. It would pass, and so too in time would the fractious debate. But with hours to go, I feel that there is a need to call out the populist tactics at play and to defend the process and indeed the people this bill is really about — the trans community — and their human right to live their lives with dignity and respect.

    Anything about women’s right to live their lives with dignity and respect? Nah.

    Opponents of this bill fall into two categories: those who want to diminish the universal human rights of trans people because of the actions of predatory men pretending to be something they are not, and those who simply do not believe changing sex is something that is possible.

    Wait a second!

    Nobody wants to or is trying to “diminish the universal human rights of trans people.” It is not a universal human right to force people to say you are the sex you are not. It never has been. Search the UDHR until there are spots before your eyes, you won’t find it. It’s not a universal human right for men to be able to force women to say the men are women. That doesn’t even resemble a human right.

    This bill is one of the most consulted upon in Scottish parliamentary history. Those opposed to it do not want delays to improve it, they want to use them to dilute and defeat it. Each attempt to postpone or weaken the legislation perpetuates the unfounded stereotype of trans women as violent or predatory.

    Another lie. That’s at least the third lie in this shambolic editorial. Nobody claims all trans women are violent or predatory; feminists point out that all trans women are men. We point out that just as with other men, we can’t know which ones are violent and predatory in advance, so we need some privacy away from men when we’re vulnerable.

    Please, tell us more about “rotten irony.”

  • Diverse sources of advantage

    More from Jon:

    You can see where they’re going with this. We’re familiar with the “argument” – it’s the one that goes “Why don’t you ban very tall [or strong or muscular etc etc etc] women from women’s sports?!”

    Just a bit.

  • Who might be stakeholders?

    The thing about this is, it’s about women’s sport, of course, but it’s also about the bizarre shocking surprising enraging utter indifference to women and our rights that it reveals.

    “the athletes that would be most directly” affected by making a subset of men eligible for women’s sports, “namely trans athletes and/or athletes with sex variations.” Not, you see, women. Women aren’t as directly affected by allowing men to be “included” in their sports. Why aren’t they? Because they don’t matter. They’re not really people. They’re sort of quasi-people, fractions of people, lesser people. Inferior, to put it bluntly.

    It is quite breathtaking.

  • Evil victory

    The ACLU is a misogynist organization.

    Women and girls have a right to equal and fair play. Boys who compete against girls by claiming to be girls do not have a right to destroy the right to equal and fair play of women and girls.

  • Et tu Forbes?

    Here I was thinking Forbes was a conservative sedate business magazine but I find it’s running a classic dopy childish “Rowling is the devil” piece:

    JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has become the most prominent face and voice in the world of anti-trans rhetoric, where she spends all day on Twitter sparring with critics and activists.

    No she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. She’s a very busy human. She writes books, lots of them; she writes fast but not that fast – she can’t possibly spend all day on Twitter and also write a long novel every few months. Plus she does other things, like philanthropy. You’d expect that kind of sloppy casual lying in a tweet, but in a Forbes article? They let angry teenagers write their stuff?

    Now, she’s gone after a prominent trans gamer for her thoughts on whether or not supporting an upcoming Harry Potter project like Hogwarts Legacy, the sprawling video game, is harmful because of this author’s views.

    Has to be an angry teenager – the writing is so bad. Whose thoughts? (A man’s, actually, the man who got a day’s fame because Rowling mentioned him.) Which author?

    Then the hapless teenager lets slip that he missed Rowling’s sarcasm.

    Earl’s argument was actually that no you don’t need to burn the books or movies you already own, that may have comforted you long before Rowling’s recent turn, but now, buying something new like Hogwarts Legacy is knowingly supporting her directly

    Yes she knows, that was her point; she’s making fun of Jessie Gender’s hand-wringing advice that it’s ok to keep the contaminating JKR books on your shelves under a few stringent conditions. It’s called sarcasm. Too sophisticated for Forbes?

  • Doing the purethink wrong

    JKR had a little fun with an Twitter ActiVist yesterday.

    He won’t begrudge anyone. Isn’t that sweet? So compassionate, so caring, so broad-minded.

    Of course he’s milking it for all he’s worth.

    She didn’t retweet him with a “nonsensical argument,” she retweeted him with mockery.

    He even did a video about it! Dude knows how to milk.

    Community, solidarity, and caring, but not for women.

  • Guest post: If it’s fair

    Originally a comment by Sastra on Far from being deprived of a chance.

    As far as I know, when black athletes were allowed in the mainstream sports teams & leagues, the argument was about fairness and wasn’t followed up with “it won’t be that many and they won’t be that good.” When gay marriage passed into law nobody was reassuring people to “relax, there won’t be a lot of same-sex marriages.” That’s because if it’s fair, it shouldn’t make a difference whether there are a lot of them or whether they win all the prizes or not.

    And since they’re now arguing that it’s “fair” to let trans-identified males into women’s sports, I give absolutely no weight to the argument “it’s fair because there aren’t that many and they’re not that good.” BS. If every women’s sport team were 90% male and 90% of the records were held by the trans-identified, there’d be no “oops, we were wrong, let’s fix this.” If a TRA isn’t prepared to celebrate that and raise their chin with a so-what attitude, then they’re showing they don’t believe TWAW and didn’t believe it before, either. The depths of their not caring about “Cis” females cannot be overestimated.

  • Cringeworthy

    Hmmmm. Who has a cringeworthy desperation to be edgy? Who wants to be considered dangerous, rebellious and exciting? As opposed to self-involved, dim, and pseudo-radical?

    I really don’t think it’s feminist women who refuse to agree that men are women if they say they are.

  • Guest post: King Haakon refused to yield

    Originally a comment by Harald Hanche-Olsen on No tell us what you really think.

    This is a bit of an aside from the main story, but since monarchy was discussed, I dare say that Norway has the best functioning constitutional monarchy in the world. The royal family demands tremendous respect, and much of it is well deserved.

    When the union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved in 1905 and king Oscar of Sweden could no longer be king of Norway, prince Carl of Denmark (full name Christian Frederik Carl Georg Valdemar Axel, how is that for a mouthful?) was offered the throne. Many Norwegians were in favour of a republic instead, so prince Carl demanded a referendum to decide between the alternatives, republic or constitutional monarchy. The monarchy side won by a good margin, and he accepted the throne, taking the name Haakon.

    In 1928, the Labour Party won the election for parliament. Conservatives were alarmed at this, as the Labour Party was more of a revolutionary party in those days. But Haakon, determined to stay within his constitutional role, asked a representative of the Labour Party to form a government. “I am also the communists’ king” he said – a statement well remembered.

    Then, when Nazi Germany attacked in April 1940, the occupiers demanded that the King appoint one Vidkun Quisling – yes, that Quisling – as prime minister. At that point, Parliament had dissolved itself, giving over all its powers to the King and government for the duration of the war. The government was undecided, but King Haakon refused to yield, saying he would rather abdicate. So in the end, he escaped to England with the government and stayed there for the rest of the war.

    These two events go a long way to explain the popularity of the royal family to this day. One more story, from more recent days:

    After the July 22 terror, a nearby hotel was converted to a center for taking care of the survivors and their families. At one point, two girls walked through the lobby, both crying. There they walked into the arms of an elderly man, and after sobbing into his chest for a while, one of them looked up and discovered they were being hugged by the king.

    I am still tearing up just writing this, and that helps explain why, though I am a republican in theory, I am sort of a monarchist in practice. I think many Norwegians share the sentiment. So long as the royal family keeps living up to the high standards they have set for themselves, I am willing to put my republican impulses on the back burner.

  • Nothing new under the sun

    The public shaming of women is nothing new, just as lynching is nothing new, torture is nothing new, misogyny is nothing new, brutality and sadism are nothing new. We know that already. We don’t need the Jeremy Clarksons of the world to remind us, let alone instruct us.

    French women after the liberation for example:

    The victims were among the most vulnerable members of the community: Women. Accused of “horizontal collaboration” — sleeping with the enemy — they were targeted by vigilantes and publicly humiliated. Their heads were shaved, they were stripped half-naked, smeared with tar, paraded through towns and taunted, stoned, kicked, beaten, spat upon and sometimes even killed.

    Women in Aceh under sharia:

    Indonesia Aceh

  • Unspiked

    No doubt he’s relishing the attention.

    A Jeremy Clarkson column in the Sun about the Duchess of Sussex has provoked outcry online, with social media users labelling it “vile”, “horrific” and “abusive”.

    …

    The comments have drawn widespread condemnation. The comedian John Bishop tweeted that the remarks were a “blatant appeal to incite humiliation and violence on a woman” and the actor Kathy Burke called Clarkson a “colossal cunt”.

    How stupid is that? Horrible man says horrible things about a woman, a different woman angrily calls him a woman’s genitalia. A cunt never raped anyone; dicks on the other hand…

    The 5 Live presenter Rachel Burden tweeted: “So … there’s Jeremy Clarkson writing what he did. And then the editor deciding to publish it.”

    That. The Sun didn’t spike it.

    I wonder if Spiked will defend it.

  • Why they do not share concerns

    Scottish Human Rights Blog at Amnesty International UK assured us a couple of weeks ago that men taking everything that belongs to women is fine fine fine not a problem at all.

    Women’s and human rights organisations in Scotland, including Amnesty, have written to the UN Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women and Girls restating their support for Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

    The organisations – many of whom provide services for women and girls – wrote to Ms Alsalem detailing why they do not share concerns she expressed about the Bill. 

    To refresh our memories on those concerns she shared last month:

    The Scottish government’s proposals to reform gender recognition laws could allow violent males to “abuse” the system, a UN expert claims.

    The organisation’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls said the legislation could increase potential safety risks.

    But Amnesty and an unspecified number of other “women’s and human rights organisations” are confident enough to reply that no it could not increase potential safety risks. That’s a lot of confidence, to deny even the possibility.

    In the letter they state:

    “We see the paths to equality and the realisation of human rights for women and trans people as being deeply interconnected and dependant on shared efforts to dismantle systems of discrimination.”

    Why? Why do they see them that way? That’s a stupid way to see them. Women and “trans people” have very different needs and demands. Bundling them is a crude and dumb mistake.

    But oh well, Amnesty Scotland is down with the kids.

  • Essential services for profit

    Oh the joys of privatization.

    Dozens of people have been evacuated from their flooded homes and thousands have been left without water after two water mains burst in north London.

    And not just any North London.

    About 60 firefighters were called to Belsize Road in Camden at about 02:50 GMT when homes were deluged with about 50cm (1.6ft) of water.

    Belsize Road in Camden=Belsize Road in Hampstead, one of the very poshest and most desirable areas of London.

    London Fire Brigade (LFB) said 24 people were led to safety and a hub was set up at Swiss Cottage Library.

    Thames Water apologised after multiple postcodes were left without water.

    The bitter joke is Thames Water is private, aka a profit-making corporation. It was part of Thatcher’s wave of privatization that also ruined London Transport. I’m seeing many bitter tweets about the huge profits Thames Water made last year at the expense of little things like checking the god damn water mains.

  • Guest post: Far from being deprived of a chance

    Originally a comment by Holms at Miscellany Room.

    Connecticut rule allowing transgender athletes in girls’ school sports upheld

    The usual lie is packaged in the article heading – the issue is male athletes in girls’ sports. Par for the course.

    A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged a Connecticut policy allowing transgender students to compete in girls’ high school sports.

    The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims by four cisgender female students that the policy deprived them of wins and athletic opportunities by requiring them to compete with two transgender sprinters.

    They had sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), which oversees scholastic sports in Connecticut, saying its policy violated Title IX, a law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics.

    I’ll take correction from a lawyer, but the argument that a right has been breached seems strange to me. As we’ve said in response to Veronica Ivy’s claim ‘access to sports is a right’, no, at least not as an individually stated thing. This seems to me more like a breach of promise undertaken by the athletics association of that (and other) states, as they fail to provide a fair competition despite claiming so.

    I suspect this different framing makes the burden on the moving party lighter, as breach of rights often requires stringent judicial tests.

    I also take issue with the reasoning supplied in the verdict:

    But U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, writing for a three-judge panel, said that far from being deprived of a “chance to be champions,” the four plaintiffs all regularly competed in state track championships and on numerous occasions came in first.

    This is an argument with diminishing returns. It is only true so long as there are other competitions in which female participants can find a fair field, meaning the argument cannot be applied to every competition available – once the last competition succumbs, the premise of the argument – that there are other avenues available to women – is no longer true. And if an argument cannot be applied generally, then it seems it is not generally valid but relies on externalities to mitigate the impact its own successes.

  • No tell us what you really think

    Why do women keep banging on about misogyny, eh? I just can’t figure it out.

    https://twitter.com/simonharris_mbd/status/1604116770004111360

    I don’t have a settled opinion about Meghan Markle. There are too many conflicting accounts, and I’m not interested enough to delve into them all. But I very definitely do have a settled opinion about men writing in widely-read newspapers about wanting to see a particular woman dragged naked through the streets while people throw shit at her. Yes I do indeed. In fact his writing this has helped me out a good deal with the conflicting accounts: if people think stuff like this about her, and the Sun is happy to publish it, then maybe she and Harry haven’t been exaggerating all that much.

    This is related to that thing I was saying the other day about gut-level fear around angry men. If this is how they talk about us in public…yeah that’s scary shit.