Category: Notes and Comment Blog

A Washington Post article on Title IX from last June:

Title IX celebrates its 50th birthday on June 23. Signed into law in 1972, the policy requires educational institutions that receive government funding to treat all sexes and gender identities equally.

Does it? Or does it require educational institutions that receive government funding to treat both sexes equally, with no mention of “gender identities”? I think we can assume it’s the latter, since no one was talking about “gender identities” in 1972, let alone a multitude of sexes.

This mandate has at once been phenomenally successful and disturbingly unfulfilled. In banning sex discrimination, Title IX fundamentally changed American education by creating the legal expectation of equality. Millions of people have seized the expansive gender opportunities Title IX has forced open, and now their children and grandchildren expect and even take for granted those options.

Millions of people? Or, specifically, millions of women? It’s women who were disadvantaged by the status quo before Title IX.

Title IX passed in 1972 amid other policies affirming women’s rights. Feminists celebrated the law, although they initially thought it would only affect academics. Controversy exploded when girls and women rushed to claim space in academic programs and on athletic playing fields.

Title IX’s impact on sports drew the most attention because it was the area in which the sex gap was the most egregious. Girls and women in sports also visually challenged long-held sexist tropes about their capabilities and ambitions.

It’s not ladylike to be athletic.

But after less than a decade, the Reagan administration weakened Title IX. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan crippled the National Advisory Council on Women’s Educational Programs, a women’s federal advisory board on sex equality, by replacing its executive director with a state leader of Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-feminist Eagle Forum group.

A year later, he dissolved the board altogether.

…

Most large universities bowed to Title IX’s pressure to create women’s sports programs, though they often segregated these into “women’s centers” rather than integrate the sexes on equal footing. In these expansive new roles — as in other arenas of women’s increased access due to Title IX, including in business, medicine and entertainment — stereotyping and harassment often accompanied women’s efforts on the playing field.

But that was then. We don’t care about stereotyping and harassment of women any more, because trans women are so much more important and vulnerable and preshusss.

But even if a marker of Title IX’s success is the decades-long assumption of sex equality on campus and beyond, the law has not created a cultural shift from a patriarchal to a more feminist, egalitarian society.

Especially now that we’re spending most of our energies on men who claim to be women.

Planning to disrupt.

Silencing women is not “solidarity.”

What Willoughby is so enraged about:

Ministers will consider advice from the human rights watchdog about amending a legal definition of sex – which would make it easier to exclude transgender people from some groups or services.

Changing the Equality Act term to “biological sex” would make single-sex services offers easier, says the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission).

Well yes but it takes all the fun out of it for men like Willoughby. If you can’t ruin everything for women what’s the point?

LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall said it risks adding to a “manufactured culture war”.

Thus demonstrating complete indifference to women’s concerns about safety, privacy, dignity, comfort – about their right and ability to get away from men when circumstances make that desirable or imperative.

Man who claims to be a woman thinks only of himself.

Several women remind him of what he’s carefully ignoring.

Of course he won’t pay the slightest attention to any of them.

Willoughby is furious.

Look at the fake man calling the lesbian gay bisexual alliance “fake.”

Such a liar. It’s not about “barring trans people from loos.” Single-sex spaces bar men from women’s loos [and women from men’s].

Which is why “LGBT” is such a manipulative label. Why would lesbians want men in women’s toilets? The interests of the T are not the same as the interests of the L.

Notice what he doesn’t mention. A day for women. He doesn’t like to mention women. I wonder why that might be. (Kidding. We all know why.)

What “inequality” does he think he’s talking about? It’s not “inequality” for him to be kept out of women’s toilets and scholarships and prizes.

https://twitter.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1643628975812378625

Oh no it’s only a few years old! While this ludicrous gender ideology is older than the Acropolis, right?

He has one bit of good news.

Awesome. Stand down and be quiet.

Starmer is as bad as Inside Higher Ed.

Keir Starmer is taking women for fools. He imagines he’s solved the contentious question of how to protect women’s rights while meeting the demands of gender dysphoric men and trans rights activists with his ingenious formulation: 99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis. That, he thinks, will reassure anxious floating voters and get his new target, Stevenage Woman, on side. Of course, he tells us, incredulous that anyone should suppose a sensible person like him would believe anything else, being a woman is biological. Well, mostly. Until it isn’t. There is the little matter of that 0.1 per cent.

If 0.1 percent can then any percent can. If you say it’s real but very very rare, it’s the “it’s real” part that counts. It doesn’t matter how rare it is, because there is no criterion for it and anyone can claim it and by god a lot of anyones are doing exactly that. How stupid or oblivious do you have to be not to get that?

And with that declaration Sir Keir abandons all safeguarding and flings the door of women’s spaces, sports, showers, jails, awards and intimate care needs wide open to every male who fancies walking through it. If some women have a penis, and any man can self-identify as a woman, which is Labour’s policy, then women lose all privacy, rights and protections. Some 48,000 men identify as trans women. It is impossible for women to distinguish between the genuinely dysphoric men who just wish to live peacefully as women, and men with bad intent. There is no marker. Voyeurs, exhibitionists, sexual fetishists, predators and men who enjoy making women uneasy and humiliated have the right to enter any female space once sex segregation has been abandoned.

Exactly. Round of applause for Jenni Russell.

This is wilful ignorance. There’s no “somehow” or “could” about the rolling back of women’s rights. It’s already a reality, one that huge numbers of women are frightened and furious about. Sir Keir could take a look at the 2,500 livid comments under his Sunday Times piece. Schools are forcing girls to use unisex loos where boys photograph them under the partitions, break open the doors or harass them by listening for the crackle of sanitary products, leaving girls too scared to use lavatories during the day. Women are being described by the NHS as “menstruators” and “uterus-havers”. A handful of rapists and male murderers have been placed in women’s jails. So many male sex offenders are claiming to be female that ministry of justice figures show trans women appear five times as likely to commit these crimes as men.

Starmer has no excuse for ignoring this.

Title IX was enacted to end sexual discrimination in higher education, i.e. discrimination against women and girls. The goal was to provide girls and women with resources and opportunities equal to those provided to boys and men.

We’re now in a world so fucked in the head that we have to pretend it was never about women and girls at all. Inside Higher Education has a long piece on Title IX in which the words “women” and “girls” never appear; not once. If you didn’t already know what Title IX was supposed to be, you would have little idea what the article is talking about. You would get that it’s to do with the Biden administration fixing some Trump messes, but you wouldn’t know it was specifically about the rights of women. Evasion and generality covers that up.

“The Trump-era regulations create incredible barriers for students who have experienced sexual assault to seek and achieve justice for what happened,” said Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us.

…

“We really see the Biden administration releasing their rule by May as crucial to interrupt the harm that students are experiencing under the Trump administration’s Title IX regulation,” said Emma Grasso Levine, manager of Know Your IX, a survivor- and youth-led project of Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit that also signed the letter.

…

The department has to review and respond to substantive comments before releasing the final rule. A department spokesperson said the agency “is committed to equal educational opportunity for all students.”

The Biden administration proposed changes that would once again change how colleges investigate reports of sexual assault, make it easier for victims to report sexual harassment, end the requirement for live hearings and expand protections for LGBTQ+ students, among other changes.

We can mention LGBTQ+ students, but we can’t mention female students. Forbidden. Taboo. Don’t you dare.

The proposed regulations also would expand the definition of sexual harassment to include unwelcome conduct that’s “sufficiently severe or pervasive.” The current sexual harassment standard is unwelcome conduct that’s deemed “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive.”

What is sexual harassment? I don’t understand. Unwelcome to whom? Conduct of what kind?

“We’re encouraged to see strengthened protections for survivors and for LGBTQ students and also for pregnant or parenting students,” Levine said. “We’re also encouraged that students who experience sexual violence off campus are able to access resources, which isn’t currently guaranteed under the current rules.”

There is is again. LGBTQ students we can talk about. Female students nope nope nope nope keep your obscenities out of this article.

Parham said it is important that the administration follows through on its promise to finalize the rule by May. Otherwise, students will remain in a “Title IX limbo.”

“Students can’t wait, and this administration really needs to act now,” Parham said. “We can’t have another year of students’ basic civil rights being denied. They deserve an education that’s free from violence.”

Students. Any particular kind of students? One sex as opposed to the other for instance? Nonononononononono. Never.

I’m worried now. Trump says the US is going to hell.

“The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it,” the 76-year-old told supporters gathered at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida after he appeared in court.

Oh no, there are lots of crimes besides that.

While the charges relate to the payment to Stormy Daniels, prosecutors also released background documents which they say point to a pattern of trying to suppress potentially politically damaging stories.

They listed two other payments they say were made via the National Enquirer, a US tabloid whose publisher is a long-time ally of Mr Trump.

They allege $30,000 was paid to buy the silence of a doorman at Trump Tower who claimed Mr Trump had a lovechild.

And $150,000 was paid to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who said she had a sexual relationship with Mr Trump.

It’s all so dignified, isn’t it. Doorman, “lovechild,” Playboy model. (Why is it “lovechild”? When the whole point is that that’s exactly what it isn’t? Fuckchild would be the accurate label. Sexchild, mistakechild, condombrokechild.)

Tune in next month for another episode of Big Don and the Porn Star.

Willoughby thinks he’s a brave activist as opposed to a bullying misogynist. Not good at self-knowledge, that one.

Men who claim to be trans are not comparable to “Black and Gay” [notice he didn’t mention women]; they’re comparable to the people who oppressed “Black and Gay” (and women). Willoughby isn’t on the side of the despised and rejected, he’s on the side of the bosses. He wants to boss everyone, especially women. He wants to push women aside and take over. He especially wants to force himself on us, calling our refusal “segregation.” He’s a very bad man.

So did Trump give a doorman hush money to cover up Sexual Relations with a housekeeper?

Maybe.

Donald Trump was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records on Tuesday. Trump became the first former president ever to be indicted, for his role in disbursing hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels. And what else was among those payments? A $30,000 payment to a former Trump Tower doorman for their silence about a potential Trump child out of wedlock.

It’s all so dignified, so impressive, so to the credit of all of us.

“In one instance, American Media Inc. (‘AMI’), paid $30,000 to a former Trump Tower doorman, who claimed to have a story about a child TRUMP had out of wedlock,” the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced Tuesday, referring to the company that owned The National Enquirer at the time.

That poor kid, if there is such a kid. Imagine being a child of Trump’s. Really: imagine it.

“During the election, TRUMP and others employed a ‘catch and kill’ scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects,” the district attorney’s office noted. “TRUMP then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws.”

Classy classy classy. From the gilded living room to the catch and kill scheme to the phony business records, it’s just classy all the way. Cary Grant looks like a bucket of slops in comparison.

Another censor on the job.

Uh oh uh oh – somebody showed Adult Human Female and that must not be allowed.

Yes indeed, pubs have to be accountable for what people they let in and what films they show and what they talk about and whatever else occurs to us as we light the fire.

Oh is that all. Modesty itself.

That’s all. It’s about getting the permission of every random rager before you make a move. You have been told.

Money that could have gone to someone starting a PhD doing real research.

Let’s see what the Equality Act 2010 says about how to define “sex.”

Under the Equality Act 2010, ‘sex’ is understood as binary, being a man or a woman. For the purposes of the Act, a person’s legal sex is their biological sex as recorded on their birth certificate. A trans person can change their legal sex by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate. A trans person who does not have a Gender Recognition Certificate retains the sex recorded on their birth certificate for the purposes of the Act.

Well there’s a train wreck. Sentence 2: “a person’s legal sex is their biological sex as recorded on their birth certificate.” Sentence 3: A trans person can change their legal sex by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate. In other words, a person’s legal sex is their biological sex and a person’s legal sex is not their biological sex. No wonder that needs “clarification.”

The Equality Act protects individuals from discrimination and harassment on the basis of a protected characteristic. Protected characteristics include sex (being a man or a woman) and gender reassignment (being an individual who is ‘proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process or part of a process to reassign their sex’).

Well guess what, chumps, you can’t do both of those. You can’t and you aren’t and you don’t. You can’t protect women from endless bullying and shunning and persecution if you insist on pretending that men can become biological women by getting a “gender recognition certificate.”

What on earth is this supposed to mean?

Saying “sex” means “biological sex” is a change? From what? What does it mean in the Equality Act now? Height, nationality, hobby?

They need advice? They don’t know what “sex” means?

So we’ll have to read what they say.

On 21 February 2023, the Minister for Women and Equalities asked for our advice on the definition of the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010.

Section 11 of the Equality Act 2006 allows the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to advise the UK Government on the effectiveness of equality law.

The EHRC’s initial response to this request is set out in a letter sent to the Minister on 3 April 2023.

Baroness Kishwer Falkner, Chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said:

“A change to the Equality Act 2010, so that the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ means biological sex, could bring clarity in a number of areas, but potential ambiguity in others.

“Our response to the Minister’s request for advice suggests that the UK Government carefully identify and consider the potential implications of this change.”

So in the Equality Act 2010 “sex” currently means…what? Social sex? Cultural sex? Psychological sex? Literary sex? Political sex? Fashion sex? Eye of the beholder sex? Possible sex? Approximate sex? Fictional sex?

“Should they wish to pursue work in this area, we recommend detailed policy and legal analysis be undertaken, in compliance with the Public Sector Equality Duty and with due regard to any possible disadvantages for trans men and trans women.”

Oh, so that’s it. The definition of “sex” now has to cater to people who think they’re the sex they’re not.

Why?

Sea level is going to rise around Charleston.

The city is in the lowcountry region in South Carolina, and it is very, very low: more than a third of the houses in the city are at 10 feet above sea level or less. The first settlers saw mostly marsh when they arrived in 1640, stepping gingerly over scores of muddy creeks. Much of the city was built on fill – trash, oyster shells, wooden pilings, human waste, loose dirt – over centuries, and now nature wants its land back. Charleston’s residents have already become accustomed to frequent high-tide flooding on days when the sun is shining.

The message that climate change is happening, and happening quickly, is acknowledged by national governments around the world. But the translation of that message into action at the local level is not yet, really, happening.

The trouble is that sea level rise is taking place relatively slowly compared with the human attention span – which is, let’s face it, gnat-like, and made even shorter when other crises (a global pandemic, the threat of world war, domestic political instability, rising inflation) are on our minds. City leaders, occupied with running for re-election, prioritize continued growth and expanding the tax base over protecting against future doom. Awareness is smoothed over by the common cognitive bias toward believing that anything awful is anomalous. Humans are not by nature long-range planners, particularly when they are focused on simply surviving. Boosterism and denial are at work in Charleston, as they are everywhere.

What I keep saying. Nothing is being done; planes still fly in their thousands every day; cars still zoom in their millions; cruise ships keep advertising and passengers keep boarding; nothing is changing.

Extraordinary.

A community sentence handed down to a man who raped a 13-year-old schoolgirl when he was 17 has been described as “extraordinary” by a leading KC. Sean Hogg, now 21, attacked the girl in Dalkeith Country Park, Midlothian, on various occasions in 2018.

Judge Lord Lake said that if the offence had been committed by an adult over 25, Hogg would have received a jail sentence of four or five years. Tommy Ross KC said the 270-hour community sentence was “very unusual”. Hogg’s punishment has also been condemned by Rape Crisis Scotland.

Not to be confused with Rape Crisis Edinburgh, whose CEO is a man who calls himself a woman.

Another man uses his fame to throw women overboard.

Swim England has been accused of sacrificing the interests of young female divers to appease high-profile athletes such as Tom Daley.

On Monday the national governing body became the first to create an open category for competitors who were born male, including transgender women or non-binary participants, with the women’s category exclusively for “athletes with a birth sex of female”. In diving, however, the rule will not apply to all competitions. Self-identification by trans divers will be permitted in some Swim England-approved events below elite level.

Brilliant. “Most people with male advantage will be excluded from competing against people with female disadvantage…but we’re making an exception for some divers.”

World Aquatics (WA) decided in June to ring-fence the women’s category for females, ruling ineligible any athlete who has gone through male puberty. It plans to release details of its own open category in July on the cusp of the World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. World Athletics has banned trans women from competing in the female category at international events and is considering an open category.

Daley said in June that he was “furious” with WA over the decision. “Anyone that’s told that they can’t compete or can’t do something they love just because of who they are, it’s not on,” he said. “It’s something I feel really strongly about: giving trans people the chance to share their side.”

It’s not “just because of who they are.” It’s because of what they are: males. If you don’t divide sports by sex then women will never win anything; sports are divided by sex so that women will be able to compete and to win. What’s “not on” is throwing that principle out because a few selfish men want to cheat by competing against women.

It just is the case that there are countless things we can’t do “just because of who [or what] we are.” There’s a long list of jobs we can’t do because who we are=someone who doesn’t have the right skills or professional training for the job. There are many things we can’t do because we lack the time, or money, or freedom, or health, or energy, or years of practice.

Pro Publica has a very interesting piece on the way railroads have been making trains longer and longer, without doing the corresponding safety properly. Lots and lots of one or two mile trains with empty cars in front and heavy cars in back and other safety mistakes; result: lots and lots of derailments.

I’m all the more interested because as I think I’ve mentioned a few hundred times I live near the tracks, and enjoy hearing the locomotives thundering past, especially at night. Sometimes they’re especially thundery, so then you know there are four or five locomotives pulling that one train, and maybe one at the back too. When I walk on an overpass above the tracks I often stop to look at an especially long parked train; sometimes they’re so long I can’t really see the end, only a blur. The length of them has surprised me but I didn’t realize it’s an innovation…or how dangerous it is.

Trains are getting longer. Railroads are getting richer. But these “monster trains” are jumping off of tracks across America and regulators are doing little to curb the risk.

…

[T]he corporations that ran those trains had recently adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster than ever, with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any time in history. Driven by the efficiency goals of precision scheduled railroading, companies are forgoing long-held safety precautions, such as assembling trains to distribute weight and risk or taking the proper time to inspect them, ProPublica found. Instead, their rushed workers are stringing together trains that stretch for 2 or even 3 miles, sometimes without regard for the delicate physics of keeping heavy, often combustible tanker cars from jumping off the tracks.

…

Today, the rail administration says it lacks enough evidence that long trains pose a particular risk. But ProPublica discovered it is a quandary of the agency’s own making: It doesn’t require companies to provide certain basic information after accidents — notably, the length of the train — that would allow it to assess once and for all the extent of the danger.

Ahhhh that old trick – don’t collect the data on X, so that you can truthfully say you don’t have the data to show that X is a risk. Clever.

On July 31, 2017, CSX assembled Train Q38831 in a rail yard in Chicago, destined for a city outside of Hyndman. It had five locomotives at the front and 136 cars trailing behind, about half hauling hazardous material: propane, isobutane, ethyl alcohol, phosphoric acid and molten sulfur heated to 235 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a bomb train, as some workers refer to them, given its combustible cargo. When it left the yard and traveled east, the train grew. In Lordstown, Ohio, workers added 28 cars. In New Castle, Pennsylvania, they added 14. Now the train was 2 miles long.

Engineer Donald Sager, who boarded the train on the night of Aug. 1 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles west of Hyndman, was uncomfortable with it. It was, he later told federal investigators, “big and heavy and ugly.” It had 38 empty cars near the front with almost all the train’s tonnage behind them, so the empty cars would be lurching around as all that weight bore down on them. He said the train would be bucking.

Sager took the train with his conductor, James Beitzel, from the Connellsville yard at 8:28 p.m. under a clouded sky and began climbing the backside of the mountain outside Hyndman. The climb was steep and the train needed a push from an extra locomotive, which coupled onto the rear. The locomotive broke off when the bulk of the train crested the mountain, passing a sign that read: “Summit of Alleghenies, Altitude 2258.”

THE LONG, WINDING DESCENT into Hyndman is one of the steepest in all of CSX territory, and the train weighed 18,252 tons, heavier than 200 fueled and loaded Boeing 737s. An engineer on a train like that has to closely watch the speed. It’s best to operate the brakes proactively, but as the train started down the mountain, Sager’s instruments were telling him the air brakes were beginning to fail. He stopped the train at 11:36 p.m. and radioed dispatchers.

Urgh. It just does not seem like a good idea to take an 18 thousand ton train down a steep mountain. Gravity is not your friend.

It’d be easy to blame Bobb or Main for what was about to happen. But they were only following CSX policy when they set the hand brakes on this huge, heavy train and sent it rolling down the long, steep hill. A safe and proper move would have been to break the train into two at the top of the hill and drive each section down separately, said Grady Cothen, a former FRA attorney who has written a widely cited white paper on the challenges of operating longer trains. 

Yes do it that way. Do it more slowly and safely.

There’s more; it’s interesting.

Good old mainstream meeja, giving extra publicity to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

CBS came under fire after devoting an interview on its flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right pro-Trump congresswoman from Georgia who has espoused conspiracy theories and faced censure for threatening behaviour towards Democrats.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York progressive congresswoman among those threatened by Greene, told Semafor: “These kinds of extreme and really just unprecedented and dangerous notions are getting platforms, without much pushback or real kind of critical analysis.”

Matthew Gertz, of the progressive watchdog Media Matters, told the same outlet: “Anyone who believes that the congresswoman from QAnon is serious about renouncing far-right radicalism and conspiracy theories should make me an offer on my Jewish space laser.”

…

Gertz said: “Less than 48 hours after CBS News gives her a mainstream platform to airbrush her image, Marjorie Taylor Greene will be rallying with Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame and the quasi-fascists of the New York Young Republican Club to defend Donald Trump from what she calls the ‘political persecution’ of a ‘Soros-backed’ district attorney.”

Yes but Stahl definitely shook her head in disagreement at one point. Hard-hitting stuff.

When the men decide.

He’s a guy though. Hidden replies are firm on this point.