Category: Notes and Comment Blog

It’s probably an exercise in futility.

In schools across Britain, educators are mobilizing to fight back against [Andrew] Tate’s messages, belatedly realizing the outsize influence he has among their students. A British-American former kickboxer, Mr. Tate gained a following of millions with videos glorifying wealth and a particularly virulent brand of male chauvinism, before being barred last summer from many mainstream social media sites.

It’s nice that they’re mobilizing, but I think it’s hopeless. They’re the schools, and Tate is the opposite. Schools, parents, adults, females – it’s all the same thing. It’s all duty, respectability, boredom, obedience. Nah we’ll take the other side thanks.

Believing that schools are a microcosm of society — and a preview of its future — educators said it was crucial to target Mr. Tate’s influence early. Since last fall, principals have sent letters to parents warning of his reach, and Britain’s education secretary has said that influencers like Mr. Tate could reverse the progress made in countering sexism.

What progress? There hasn’t been that much. Some, but it’s always a battle. We certainly have never reached the sunlit uplands where contempt for women is a thing of the past.

British schools were already reckoning with what officials have recognized as an endemic culture of sexual harassment of students, leaving both young girls and boys feeling victimized and often unsure of the rules of interaction. Now, educators unexpectedly find themselves spending class time discussing Mr. Tate rather than their lessons.

“I am sad that I have taken up important curriculum time to talk about Andrew Tate,” said Chloe Stanton, an English teacher in East London. “But women have to fight enough in society without this type of attitude to deal with.”

Indeed, but teachers talking about it aren’t going to make a dent. I wish they could, but they can’t.

In recent months, Ms. Stanton said, students have started bringing up Mr. Tate in class. They extol his wealth and fast cars. And for the first time in her 20 years of teaching, her 11- to 16-year-old students have challenged her for working and asked if she had her husband’s permission.

She has heard students talk casually about rape. “As the only woman in the room, I felt uncomfortable,” she said. Once, a student asked her if she was going to cry. At home, even her own three sons seemed to defend Mr. Tate.

“He is brainwashing a generation of boys, and it’s very frightening,” she said. “They seem to think he is right. He’s right because he’s rich.”

Can we all just be hermits? Let’s do that.

Another fantasy idenniny unmasked:

Members of the American Friends Service Committee, a prominent Quaker organization known for its progressive values and social justice advocacy in the U.S. and abroad, have raised an alarm about a woman holding a leadership position within the organization who they say has misrepresented her ethnic background for years and who they fear may be working on behalf of groups seeking to undermine their organization.

Raquel Evita Saraswati, a Muslim activist who for years has encouraged people to believe that she is a woman of color, including Latina as well as of South Asian and Arab descent, is the AFSC’s chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer, a senior position that gives her access to the files of dozens of the organization’s staff and volunteers. But Saraswati, who was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel, is not a person of color, according to her mother, Carol Perone.

It’s a tad greedy, pretending to be so many DiVerse idenninies that you’re not. Latina and South Asian and Arab – come on.

Saraswati, her mother added, is of British, German, and Italian descent — not Latina, South Asian, or Arab. “I’m as white as the driven snow and so is she,” added Perone.

But she’s brown in her soul. Her lived experience is brown. She started speaking a mix of Spanish, Arabic, and Urdu when she was just a tiny child.

Perone noted that her daughter converted to Islam in high school and that at some point she seemed to have felt the need to portray herself as having a different ethnic identity.

Well that’s high school for ya.

Oskar Pierre Castro, a human resources professional who participated in the search committee to fill Sarawati’s position, told The Intercept that she had presented herself as a “queer, Muslim, multiethnic woman.”

In other words she presented herself as Interesting.

“It really touched all the points,” said Castro, who works for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a Quaker group that frequently partners with the AFSC, and who was involved in the search along with AFSC staff members. He added that he had been impressed by Saraswati’s credentials and charm and that he thought she would be a good fit for the diversity and inclusion role because “it seemed that there was an element of lived experience and understanding because of the lived experience, not just the academic and extra training that come with being in a position where you are an equity and inclusion practitioner.”

And the best part is you get to tick a whole bunch of boxes with just this one person.

Castro added, “In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim, it’s a woman, all these things, and someone who seemed to get it. I definitely feel conned. … I feel deceived.”

Why was he excited about ticking the Muslim box? Would he be excited about ticking the fundamentalist Protestant box, or the strict Catholic box? Conservative religions are conservative, whether they’re “diverse” or not. “Saraswati” wears hijab while women in Iran and Afghanistan are beaten up, imprisoned, tortured, killed for refusing to wear it. Why are organizations that consider themselves progressive excited to sign up a woman wearing hijab (along with heavy makeup, sculpted eyebrows, and earrings)?

The revelation that Saraswati appears to have created a false impression about her ethnic background has roiled the AFSC.

Where “created a false impression”=”lied.”

H/t Sackbut

Does Labour have a women problem? Ooooooooooooooh that’s a tough one, I dunno, do we think it does?

"Lloyd messaged me saying he'd been told not to message me"
Rosie Duffield

Lloyd Russell Moyle ignoring boundaries yet again. Just like he did when he crossed the house to glare menacingly at Miriam Cates🚩#IstandwithRosieDuffield #IstandwithMiriamCates pic.twitter.com/RDiFNfonAo

— Biology Rules Ok (@OkBiology) February 19, 2023

Originally a comment by Artymorty on A good teacher wouldn’t do this.

There’s no doubt that it’s a sexual fetish. We can even speculate about its roots, because there’s quite a lot we know about this kind of fetish in men. It’s likely that in his childhood, as his sexuality was undergoing its first spurts of hormonal awakening, he suddenly discovered a great interest in the breasts of one of his schoolteachers. A schoolboy-crushing-on-schoolteacher’s-breasts narrative became a fetishistic fantasy that never went away for him, and because he’s got the “sex-role-reversal” glitch that drives most crossdressing straight men, he’s now fixated on playing out the role of the teacher with the breasts that will captivate the student. In his case, he’s gotta make the “breasts” as big and captivating as he possibly can. And he seems to be completely out of control, like an addict gone off the deep end. He’s taken his hands off the wheel and the brake lines have been cut. (Sorry, I’m mixing my metaphors again!) I know it’s unpleasant to think about it. Because it’s unpleasant! He’s very much enacting his sexual fantasies in a room full of children. It’s truly awful. He should be fired, criminally charged, and forced to get therapy.

But I’m equally furious at the school board. Do they really not know that this is a fetish? Or are they just pretending not to know? Do they think culture war politics override the safety of the students? It enrages me. I know (or knew, as they’ve mostly abandoned me by now) far too many people who would look at this story and see it as nothing but an unpleasant culture-war episode. They see the fetishistic abuser teacher and all they can think is, “Boy, those evil MAGA monsters from the bad tribe are gonna use this to score points against the vulnerable trans people in our good progressive tribe” and then they just try and put it out of their minds (because no one likes to dwell on the times when their enemy got the upper hand and scored a hit) and completely forget about the part with the ACTUAL REAL LIVE KIDS getting actually harmed by this asshole.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s a disguise.

So wearing it in classroom settings in order to force the participation of minors legally required to be in school (a captive audience) is the whole point. The discomfort and distress of reliably accessible gatherings of kids, over whom he excercizes authority (granted him by people who could easily take it away), is the whole point of the operation. If this core, essential, personal identity is so integral to his being, why does he drop it as soon as he’s away from an audience? Call me a closed-minded transphobe, but this looks a lot more like public performance of a fetish than the right to personal expression of a “legitimate” gender identity (whatever that might be). If this isn’t the parading of a fetishistic fantasy, how are we supposed to tell the difference between some sick kinkster getting his jollies at the expense of minors in his charge whom he’s supposed to be teaching, and a genuine trans identity arising from dysphoria? How would his defenders have us distinguish truly marginalized and victimized trans identified males (like him, they would claim) from the opportunistic perverts taking advantage of the current (and one hopes, fleeting) concern for trans “rights?” Will there be appeals to some kind of “gender fluidity?” “Pippa” Bunce trolled the business world; this guy’s fucking around with children. But we can’t just stop there. What difference would his purported “gender identity” make to the acceptability of this behaviour in the classroom? None. Even if he’s “really trans,” what he’s doing is disturbing, disrespectful, and inappropriate, and his “rights” should not override the requirements for safety, dignity and professionalism that one expects to be incumbent on all teachers.

A “dress code” is not going to solve this if it still allows this teacher to wear huge fake tits. What if he started wearing a wig of dreadlocks and spoke in a crude Rasta accent? What if he suddenly sported woven-in sidelocks and claimed to be an Orthodox Jew? This charade of womanface of his is at least as repellent and deserving of censure and resistance as these Black and Jewish hypothetical examples. How long would the school board or teachers’ union support this guy if he’d chosen to appropriate either of those “identities”? He’d be let go. In a flash. And rightly so. But come to work in a shameful, humiliating, degrading get-up that mocks women and girls, and the board and the union defend you and make excuses as to why this is somehow to be accepted and tolerated. Because of Holy Precious Gender Identity.

So what other fetishes are the school board (and union) prepared to accommodate? What if a teacher showed up in baby clothes and diapers, demanding he (let’s just go with the fact that it’s gonna be men that try to pull this shit, shall we?) be changed and fed and cuddled by his students? Would that fly? What if he claimed to be a girl baby, making him trans? They’re happy enough surrendering access to children to the imposture of some wearing huge prosthetic breasts, why would they object to someone dressed up in cute baby clothes?

Why is the school board so desperate to find some accommodation with this man, to allow him to remain in the classroom? He can’t be a good teacher because a good teacher wouldn’t do this. A good teacher would not sacrifice his or her students’ needs, welfare, and dignity in the service of his or her selfish and inappropriatedesires. Teachers taking sexual advantage of students are fired and sometimes arrested. This fetishist doesn’t have to touch a single pupil, but he is forcing a grotesque, sexualized display on his students, and anyone else he comes into contact with in the school. Why is the board so reluctant to deprive this clearly disturbed man of its school property as a platform and venue for his degrading, fetishistic performance? The support of the union is unlikely going to be recalled in the years to come as a shining example of labour activism.

They should fire this guy’s ass and welcome the resulting lawsuit. Buy out his contract and show him the door. Take away his parking space. Whatever. I don’t really care how they do it, but they have to GET HIM OUT OF THE CLASSROOM. He has shown he does not deserve to be there. He is an impediment to learning, and is harming the well-being and dignity of everyone he forces himself upon. If he really wants to dress up like that, he can do it on his own time (of which he’ll have lots more), and he can round up his own audiences victims, who will no longer be offered to him by the classfull, but will consist of people who can walk (or run) away from him without being written up for truancy. I know it’s a become a cliche, but Who will think about the children? Their interests and safety should be paramount in this. If this question does not cross the minds of a GODDAMN SCHOOL BOARD, then maybe they should just resign and go home.

It turns out that the gigantic breasts guy doesn’t wear them as part of his “transition”; it turns out he wears them some of the time, to…make a point? Surprise the crows? Exercise those hard to reach muscles?

While parents have raged about transgender teacher Kayla Lemieux being allowed to wear Z-cup prosthetics in front of students, the shop teacher was spotted ditching the controversial fetishistic fashion after work and stepping out in public dressed as a man.

…

The teacher — who until a few years ago went by the name Kerry — left Ontario’s Oakville Trafalgar High School this week wearing the gigantic breasts, a blond wig and glasses, but it wasn’t long until the cartoonish clothing came off.

After shopping at a department store and pet supplies shop dressed as a woman, Lemieux headed home to get changed and emerged dressed as a man 30 minutes later. 

Lemieux then spent the afternoon in public wearing men’s sweatpants, trainers, a gray T-shirt and a navy puffer vest without breasts, makeup, glasses or wig.

The Post includes a photo. It’s funny because it’s not even a sort of meeting in the middle – not purple sweat pants and a red T-shirt and a magenta puffer vest, but all manly drab boring colors. No flamboyance, no camp, no hint of anything even slightly girly, just grey, grey, and dark blue. Mind you the trainers have little splashes of yellow toward the back. Oooh, daring.

Gretchen Felker-Martin is on the job again.

A renowned transgender horror author who signed a letter last week condemning The New York Times’s coverage of trans issues has tweeted that she wants to slit J.K. Rowling‘s throat.

Gretchen Felker-Martin named a series of writers she accused of transphobia – including Rowling – in a tweet sent on February 12. She added: ‘If they all had one throat, man.’

…

Another writer she railed against, journalist Jesse Singal, condemned Felker-Martin for making the death threat, and said she has a long history of making threats of violence.

In Felker-Martin’s debut novel, Manhunt, published in February 2022, Rowling is murdered by being burned alive. 

That’s how we know how progressive this movement is – publicly fantasizing about torturing people to death.

The UN’s 2022 report on gender equality:

The latest available Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 data show that the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030.

Or any other date.

COVID-19 and the backlash against women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are further diminishing the outlook for gender equality. Violence against women remains high; global health, climate, and humanitarian crises have further increased risks of violence, especially for the most vulnerable women and girls; and women feel more unsafe than they did before the pandemic. Women’s representation in positions of power and decision-making remains below parity.

Also (which they don’t say) women’s rights are being further eroded by gender ideology and all that goes with it.

So sometimes the UN does know which people are women. Unless there’s an unspoken “including/especially trans women” here.

The gender gap in food security has risen dramatically over the last 3 years, as more women and girls go hungry.@UN_Women explores the unique challenges & opportunities presented to women when it comes to food security. https://t.co/iaZS4EsG49 pic.twitter.com/hJAzFqmMsK

— United Nations (@UN) February 19, 2023

News out of Florida:

Art lovers in Miami looked on in horror on Thursday night, when a collector accidentally knocked a $42,000 (£34,870) sculpture by US pop artist Jeff Koons to the ground.

Oh no, $42,000 gone, just like that!

The statue – one of Koons’ iconic Dog Balloons – smashed into tiny shards, and had to be swept into dustpans by gallery staff.

…

Luckily for the woman, the piece is covered by insurance, Bénédicte Caluch, an art advisor with Bel-Air Fine Art galleries which represents the sculpture, said.

Whew, that’s a relief!

But what I want to know is, in what sense was the piece actually “worth” 42k?

In the sense that someone might be willing to pay that for it, and the sense that Koons and/or people who market his work think people will be willing to pay that for it.

Fortunately however there are lots of them, and I daresay Koons could just whip up another one, or a dozen more, if he thought there weren’t enough now.

The sculpture was part of a limited edition which has now shrunk from 799 to 798.

A limited edition. What’s a limited edition? A device to drive the price up.

“That’s a good thing for the collectors,” Mr Boero told the Times, laughing.

Hahaha yeah. So really this is a happy story!

All the more so because hey, people want to buy the smashed balloon dog.

Despite [its] being shattered into thousands of pieces, there is still interest in buying the destroyed sculpture.

Mr Gamson offered to buy it there and then because, as he said on his Instagram account, “it has a really cool story”.

Will the insurance company still have to shell out 42k?

The usual apologies for the Mail, but it reports that medical people are being told to talk in Gender Neutral unless told otherwise. 1% of people claim to be Gender Interesting so everyone has to be confused by doctors and nurses carefully avoiding calling them women or men.

Steve Barclay last night ordered an urgent investigation into new guidelines that tell NHS staff to treat all patients as gender-neutral.

Nobody is gender-neutral, so it’s bonkers to treat patients as gender-neutral because a few wannabe originals pretend they’re neither women nor men.

It instructs doctors and nurses not to use phrases such as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ until a patient has confirmed their gender identity.

Mind you, “Mrs” is the wrong word to use in the absence of information, while “Mr” isn’t. Surely the Mail understands that after what’s it been now? Half a century? “Mr” works for all adult males and assumes nothing; “Mrs” of course is specific and assumes marital status. The implications of that discrepancy are indeed insulting (they go back to coverture), so yeah, don’t call a woman Mrs unless she tells you to.

The 16-page document features a foreword by Dr Michael Brady, national adviser for LGBT health at NHS England, who describes it as a ‘must read’ for all health and social care professionals.

Oh stop. Call L Ms; call G Mr; problem solved; no need to read boring guidelines for something so basic.

It doesn’t though. It doesn’t ensure that people feel respected. On the contrary. I would feel enraged if a medical person did that to me.

There is textual evidence that Fox knowingly lies.

What Fox’s loyal viewers wanted to watch — and what Fox News was willing to do to keep them — emerged this week as a central question in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against the network by Dominion Voting Systems.

A stunning cache of internal correspondence and deposition testimony obtained by the software company and made public on Thursday in a Delaware court filing showed high-level Fox executives and on-air stars privately agonizing over the wild and false claims of a stolen election that Trump allies promoted on Fox airwaves in the weeks after the 2020 election. “Sidney Powell is lying,” prime-time star Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer about a Trump lawyer who had appeared on Fox and spewed baseless accusations. “There is NO evidence of fraud,” anchor Bret Baier wrote to one of his bosses.

The plaintiff’s lawyers argue that such messages prove Fox brass knew the claims that Dominion had “flipped” votes from Trump to Biden were untrue — but “spread and endorsed” them anyway.

I look forward to Fox’s having to give Dominion $1.6 billion. That will be fun.

But the Dominion filing also lends ammunition to their long-held argument: that Fox allowed the false claims to air because it was fearful of losing viewers to Newsmax, an ever more pro-Trump news channel.

“The texts and emails support [Dominion’s] claim that Fox was more concerned about its audience and market share than the truth concerning the 2020 presidential election,” said Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School who specializes in the First Amendment and called the breadth of the internal communications “extraordinary.”

You want extraordinary? Here’s extraordinary.

Within Fox, the messages show, many worried that the network had been hurt by two key incidents: a debate in which some conservatives believed Fox anchor Chris Wallace lobbed unfair questions to Trump; and Fox’s election night prediction that Biden would win the hotly contested state of Arizona.

Hannity wrote to Carlson and Ingraham on Nov. 12 that the combination “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

“It’s vandalism,” Carlson responded.

And what brand is that? Rabidly right-wing and dishonest to boot? Cool brand, bro.

Trans woman Juno Dawson is angry at his MP.

https://twitter.com/junodawson/status/1626688287384522752

He guesses to this man he does not count as a vulnerable woman. Well of course he doesn’t, because he’s a man. Of course he’s not “vulnerable” in the way women are. In other ways he may be, but not the ways specific to women.

The names he childishly smeared out are Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce. More power to their elbows.

Phoenix is already lethal.

America’s fifth biggest city has always been hot, but day and night temperatures have been rising due to global heating and the city’s unchecked development, which has created a sprawling urban heat island that has literally become unliveable for some residents. In the past three years, 911 calls and emergency room visits for heat-related emergencies have skyrocketed and more than a thousand people have died from extreme heat.

I did not know that. You’d think it would prompt a mass exodus.

The city is scattered with cooling centres – air conditioned places where residents can go to cool down – but clearly this isn’t working for many people. I wanted to spend a good chunk of time in Phoenix to better understand why, and also who is most affected by the hotter days and nights.

…

It was eerie driving around [last June] as there were so few people outside. In fact, it soon became clear that it was predominantly those with nowhere else to go, the unhoused, who were outside, desperately looking for shade in car parks, shop doorways, bus stops, parks and behind dumpsters. As Phoenix has gotten hotter, the number of unhoused people has also skyrocketed amid an affordable housing crisis and this has been a deadly combination: around a half of the city’s heat deaths are unhoused people. Another big risk factor is drugs. In Phoenix, fentanyl, a downer which can be 50 to 200 times more potent than morphine, and methamphetamine, an upper which increases the risk of heat-related medical complications, are frequently used in combination.

And, I’m guessing, drug addicts aren’t hugely appealing as tenants, so it’s a feedback loop. Seattle has the same issue minus the scorching heat.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

I’ve been studying social aspects of science as a layperson for at least 25 years, some college courses before that, and through discussions with working scientists on my podcast since, and just chatting with Greg Laden. I don’t claim to be an expert on science by any means, since I have limited practical experience designing and conducting experiments only when they are part of an undergraduate course and so that just gives basic context of how some science works. But it’s such a broad area of investigation, that even among working scientists there are concepts in the philosophy of science that they don’t accept or fail to understand. It’s likely that this is due to a lack of interest since they spend so much time mastering a specific field that the broader arguments hold no interest for them. So, when specialists speak out of their field, and I know that they are talking out of their ass but using their authority as say, a theoretical physicist, to expound on a subject that they don’t have experience in researching,. it’s maddening. I’m thinking of a couple of TV and multi-media physicists in particular.

I subscribed for a while to an email service called “The Big Think”: and they used to blast out emails with videos of famous scientists answering questions. Sometimes the questions were lame, sometimes they sparked my interest. But one video in particular was really frustrating. The question that was assigned to physicist Michio Kaku was lame, but I hear it all the time from Creationists, or people new to the evolution v creationism mess: “Has human evolution stopped?” Kako, having the physicists usual arrogance that they are the Top Scientists, decided to wing it with an answer. And, I, with my bachelor’s in business, but with extensive reading in talk.origins, knew the answer. Michio did not. Rather than pass along the question to a biologist, he answered that due to medicine and the advances that we are making, evolution by natural selection is basically over.

I canceled my subscription. The video should not have been sent out, and they should have gotten their money back from Kaku.

The point is, that when it comes to claims of pseudoscience, the reader still needs to apply critical thought, even if a scientist makes the claim. More to the topic at hand, Sean M. Carroll, another physicist, shared an image about DSDs with some verbiage about what “The Science” says about trans issues. So, as a physicist he doesn’t even know what the transgender claim is, and as a physicist, he has the god-like brain to make a declaration that is irrefutable. He didn’t respond to any of the replies that pointed out his error.

So, GLAAD, which is another organization that once existed to promote the well-being and social acceptance of lesbians and gays, wrote about how the science was settled and that the Times were promoting pseudoscience to dispute it.

Anyone with a basic understanding of science knows that the “science is never settled.” All answers are provisional, subject to further exploration.

It sticks in my craw, and grinds my gears because the proponents of transgenderism are using a propaganda technique of sounding sciency and using the language of science to promote their own pseudoscience, and all those people who have those signs on their lawns about “in this house we believe” that “Science is Real” are fooled into thinking that it’s settled. The Dutch and the Danes figured it all out years ago, and any objection is denialism. Well, no one wants to be called a denialist! Especially if they don’t fully understand how the science is supposed to work.

Along with all of the other weaknesses in our educational system, teaching the process of science is one of the weakest. Teaching critical thinking and the acceptance that even the best science can be overturned by new facts and new techniques is lacking. We are taught that science is a body of knowledge, not that it is an imperfect process of gaining understanding. We’ve lost the spirit of the IGY, and just take in as accepted fact what we hear from experts who tell us what we already agree with. It’s easier to let other people do our thinking for us, and we can then get back to doomscrolling and “liking.”

– footnote about Neil DeGrasse Tyson –

I really like him, but whenever I see that clip of him saying to Bill Maher that “Science is true, whether you believe it or not,” it pierces me. Deeply. I may be a pedant, but that is such an imprecise statement that he shouldn’t say it. It gives a completely wrong impression of what science is.

I haven’t read much Roald Dahl because I was put off by his unabashed hatred of women decades ago.

You still have a story in which evil witches who want to kill kids are hiding amongst us, looking like "normal" women, and if only you knew who they were straight away, you'd be able to eliminate them. It's still basically how people find Dahl appalling write about Mumsnet today.

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) February 18, 2023

"They look like everyday women, but they're not, and violence against them would be self-defence!" runs through The Witches. It's very now. The people who have a problem with it really shouldn't.

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) February 18, 2023

Hatred of women never goes away. Never.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

…an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language…

Like bleeders, uterus-havers, clownfish, cis and TERF? Or is the problem the fact the NYT didn’t use their preferred terms like bleeders, uterus-havers, cis and TERF?

…while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.

Or maybe the Times reported on the contoversy surrounding how best to treat dysphoric children, and discussed options other than just “gender affirming” care. And as for the omission of “relevant information,” how about an admission that humans can’t change sex? Call me mad, but that seems somewhat relevant to me. And what about the testimonies of desisters and detransitioners? They’re villified and ostracized and accused of never having “really been trans.” As if anyone is. What about loss of sexual function and sterility? What about the documented harm caused by puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones, not to mention the horror shows that can arise from surgical “treatments” designed to carve the body into a crude, non-functional visual likeness of the target sex? That’s a lot of data supression right there, all of it relevant. Informed consent much? And trans activists have hidden it, lied about it, denied it and shot a multitude of messengers who’ve dared to bring these skeletons to light. Watchful waiting has nothing to hide. Genderists have long since run out of rugs under which they could sweep their dumpsters full of dirty, monstrous secrets. Does trans activism really want to go down the path of science, and studies, and sources, and follow-ups? Because it if it does, it will lose.

…swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.

Are you going to protest reality, too? It is by far your biggest and most determined opponent. That’s a stream with a mighty powerful rate of flow, and you ain’t gonna get far against it. Where will you find the appropriate address to which you can forward a copy of this letter? The NYT could just write honestly about realities (which it did not itself create) and you would be complaining about “bigoted coverage.” And as for pseudoscience, you’re way ahead of everyone else with the Genderbread Person, not to mention your reintroduction of Cartesian dualism.

More than 180 contributors…have penned a letter raising “serious concerns” about the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.

The only thing keeping these demographics together is forced teaming, and a shared incoherence when it comes to defing any of these “conditions” in a non-circular way that doesn’t rely on sexist steretypes, or wilfully misgender the rest of the population as “cis.”

I’m amazed that, in this quote at least, they didn’t use the standard LGBTQ formula, as that could rope in gays and lesbians to artificially inflate their numbers.

It seems Buttigieg has been neglecting his job.

On the very day that DeWine was uttering these dire words [telling people to evacuate the area after the East Palestine train disaster], Buttigieg appeared on three Sunday news shows: CNN’s State of the Union, NBC’s Meet the Press, and ABC’s This Week. Remarkably, on none of these programs was Buttigieg asked about the ongoing East Palestine disaster—despite the fact that, as transportation secretary, regulating train safety is one of his responsibilities. Nor did Buttigieg feel it incumbent on himself to raise the issue and offer what guidance and assurances he could. Instead, Buttigieg’s ubiquitous TV appearances were taken up with the transparently hyped-up issue of a Chinese weather balloon that entered USA airspace—quite possibly as a result of unpredictable wind patterns.

Ask yourself, which is more glamorous, a train wreck in Ohio or a Chinese balloon that might be spying on us just in case Google Earth crashes.

It took Buttigieg a full 10 days to make a statement on the East Palestine disaster.

In a twitter thread on February 13, Buttigieg wrote, “I continue to be concerned about the impacts of the Feb 3 train derailment near East Palestine, OH, and the effects on families in the ten days since their lives were upended through no fault of their own.” The next day, Buttigieg followed up by writing, “We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe.”

This statement was only partially true. It’s undeniable that the Trump administration’s deregulations have been a problem. But Trump whittled regulations that had already been watered down by Republicans in Congress in 2015 thanks to railroad industry lobbying.

Equally important is the fact that the Biden administration and its transportation secretary have made no effort to remedy the situation. As The Lever reported on February 10, “In the aftermath of a fiery Ohio train derailment, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has not moved to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes, ‘there will be more derailments [and] more releases of hazardous materials.’” In fact, under Buttigieg’s watch, the Transportation Department was contemplating stripping down brake safety rules even further.

I guess this is the arrangement they have. When Republicans have the executive branch they eliminate safety regulations, and when Democrats have it they do nothing. Activity on the one hand, passivity on the other. Heads they win tails we lose.

In a follow-up report, The Lever debunked Buttigieg’s hapless complaint that “we’re constrained.” In fact, industry watchers and union activists have suggested multiple ways Buttigieg could use his existing power to ramp up the regulation of the railroad industry. Buttigieg’s policy paralysis is a matter of choice, not structural barriers. It’s hardly surprising that Buttigieg, whose résumé includes time as a McKinsey consultant, is allergic to government regulation of industry. By both ideology and formation, Buttigieg is a thoroughgoing neoliberal.

And that’s the best we can do. The worst is Trump, and the best is…this.

Andrew Sullivan on That Letter.

[T]his week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

It’s an echo of Evergreen and Yale and Middlebury and Reed. The ploys are repeated because they work and there’s no downside. And almost all the university presidents caved. They held meetings and meetings; they apologized; they appeased; they conceded core liberal principles of free speech and dissent; they terminated dissident faculty; they equivocated and collaborated in the pursuit of “diversity” and then “equity.” In a word, they were pathetic.

The Times bosses were supposed to do the same, but they didn’t.

Check this out, from the executive editor of the NYT. It’s the response we always needed from the leadership of besieged liberal institutions before and never got:

It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism. In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort. Their protest letter included direct attacks on several of our colleagues, singling them out by name. Participation in such a campaign is against the letter and spirit of our ethics policy … We have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such atacks …
We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.

I take “will not tolerate” to mean some asses could be fired.

The letter is available at the elegantly short address nyletter.com.

We write to you as a collective of New York Times contributors with serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.

Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly. Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.

15 thousand in eight months? So under two thousand a month? That’s not a lot. That’s not even close to a lot. An article or two per month. It’s a pressing issue, it’s in the news constantly, why would the Times not be covering it? Apart from the fact that the letter-writers don’t like the content?

Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender⁠-⁠affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” 

Then again calling it “gender⁠-⁠affirming medical care” is also highly tendentious, and in fact misleading. It’s not medical care as commonly understood, and “gender-affirmation” isn’t medical at all, it’s political, and fatuous besides.

To sum up the letter is bad and wrong, and the writers and signers should feel bad.