Life is very dangerous for girls in Nigeria.

Families in Nigeria waited anxiously for news of their abducted daughters after more than 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by gunmen from a government school in the country’s north last week, the latest in a series of mass school kidnappings in the West African nation.

Worried parents on Sunday gathered at the school, guarded by police. Aliyu Ladan Jangebe said his five daughters aged between 12 and 16 were at the school when the kidnappers stormed in. Four were taken away but one escaped by hiding in a bathroom with three other girls, he told The Associated Press.

…

Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the abductions and called for the girls’ “immediate and unconditional release” and safe return to their families. He called attacks on schools a grave violation of human rights and the rights of children, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

And specifically of girls – who tend to be raped and impregnated once they’re kidnapped.

The most notorious kidnapping was in April 2014, when 276 girls were abducted by the jihadist rebels of Boko Haram from the secondary school in Chibok in Borno state. More than 100 of those girls are still missing.

Seven years with Boko Haram. It’s got to be hell.

A male reporter on Eastwood a couple of weeks ago:

BOZEMAN — When you’re a transgender athlete, and it seems the world is taking aim at what you are instead of trying to understand who you are, a walk — or run — on the wild side is the straightest path to clarity and balance and resilience.

As always, the issue isn’t being “a transgender athlete,” the issue is a male person competing against female people. It’s beyond annoying that journalists keep obscuring this point. Nobody is “taking aim” at what or who Eastwood is, but many of us are saying male people shouldn’t race against women, for the simple reason that it’s unfair. It’s unfair to all the women in the race, and they matter too.

Though it has been more than a year since Eastwood last competed at UM, and much of her focus now is on earning a post-graduate degree in environmental philosophy from the school, she has resurfaced publicly now that the Montana Legislature is back in session. House Bill 112, authored within days of the opening gavel by Whitefish representative John Fuller, seeks to ensure that sports designated for women or girls are open only to those who were female at birth.

Supporters hail it as the “Save Women’s Sports Act”. Eastwood sees it as an attempt to disenfranchise an already-challenged class of women.

Except that it’s not a class of women. It’s a class of men who say they identify as women. We used to know that it’s not possible to change physical reality with the power of thought, but now that magical idea is not just accepted, it’s embraced and mandated with menaces.

“That’s unfathomable to me,” she said of male athletes making such a dramatic physical and emotional transition simply to win medals. “If you’re comfortable in your body already, there would be no reason to transition. I don’t think anybody would ever do that to win some race or have a competitive edge in sports.”

Why? Why wouldn’t anybody ever do that? Why is Eastwood so sure no one would? Or is he just pretending to be sure? That’s the thing, you see – people can pretend. It’s not unheard-of. They can also genuinely feel as if they ought to be the other sex, or as if they “are” the other sex, but that feeling is just a feeling, it’s not by itself a reversal of reality.

Eastwood immersed herself in her running, especially with her UM teammates, many of whom will be “lifelong friends.” Sports, she said, enabled her to be with people who were less concerned by what she is than who she is.

“For me, that’s what running is all about — more about community and friendship and self-development than winning a race. That’s just a cherry on top in the process,” she said.

Fine! Brilliant! There’s the solution – do the running and the community and friendship and self-development but stay out of the actual races. Get all the community and friendship you want, and refrain from doing harm to those female people you say are your friends and your community.

Well we always knew that Biden is a conservative Democrat and that the Democrats in general are very conservative.

… we have seen Democratic senators prepare to surrender the $15 minimum wage their party promised by insisting they are powerless in the face of a non-binding advisory opinion of a parliamentarian they can ignore or fire.

That explanation is patently ridiculous and factually false, so Democratic apologists are starting to further justify the surrender by suggesting that even if the party kept a $15 minimum wage in the Covid relief bill, conservative Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would block it anyway.

So persuade them. Do the work.

And yet, whether you call this all deliberate deception or learned helplessness, this fantastical myth of the Powerless President will inevitably be used to shield Biden from criticism for abandoning his pledge to fight for a $15 minimum wage.

The apologism is particularly absurd because unlike his predecessor Barack Obama, who was a relative newcomer to politics, Biden’s major selling point was that he knows “how to make government work”. The guy explicitly pitched himself as the best Democratic presidential candidate by suggesting that in an era of gridlock, he knows how to make the Democratic agenda a reality and Get Things Done™, like master of the Senate Lyndon Baines Johnson.

…

…the White House continues to say it is “fighting our guts out” for Neera Tanden’s nomination, even though it might not have enough Senate votes for her confirmation. And yet, the same White House is simultaneously retreating on the minimum wage, seemingly unwilling to force a floor vote on the issue, even though presidential pressure, legislative brinkmanship, and negotiation could change the outcome.

So…confirming Neera Tanden is worth fighting for but a raise in the minimum wage isn’t?

The real story, then, is that Biden seems unwilling to use the same influence to push as hard as possible for a minimum wage increase that would boost the pay of millions of Americans during an economic emergency.

Pathetic.

How about Nazis? War criminals? Genociders? Torturers? Rapists? Sadists?

You don’t know which people are those things on sight, but then you don’t know that about cops and “terfs,” either. (Unless the cops are in uniform but then they wouldn’t be, would they.)

What a world, when women who know that men are not women are considered more evil and shun-worthy than Nazis, war criminals, genociders, torturers, rapists.

The dogma is digging away its own foundations.

In other words everything has to be about “the trans community.” Even rape, and rape victims, and the solidarity rape victims may feel or seek with other rape victims. That has to be about trans people in some way, and this sociology grad student won’t tolerate our refusal to agree that men are women if they say they are.

By “a space here” all she means is replying to her tweets. Some people take a weirdly grandiose view of their own Twitter accounts, and treat them like exclusive clubs. Not being able to reply to someone’s tweets isn’t the loss of or banishment from “a space,” it’s just not being able to reply to someone’s tweets. It’s not a big deal. It’s so pompous and self-admiring to threaten people with it, as if it’s like being banished from a university or union or political party.

It’s almost as if all this performative shouting about “the trans community” isn’t really about “the trans community” at all but about the narcissism of the shouter. “Look at me look at me I’m saying something bravely pugnacious about thetranscommunity! Look how heroic and correct I am!”

Originally a comment by latsot on Talk about imperfect timing.

And as for (over) sharing in general…. When I was an academic computer scientist, a lot of my research was about privacy. I’ve expanded on this work a little since for people with actual money and for the book I’m supposed to be finishing (I’ll do it in a minute, OK, stop nagging.)

Anyway, without going into detail, one of the things I talk about a lot is the idea of privacy as a community enterprise. We have a tendency to see secrets, for example, as things we own. But we don’t; most secrets are shared with other people and if they’re not, the mechanisms by which we keep secrets are shared. Think of codes of silence or village huts with very thin walls; we pretend not to hear or we give people space if we think they need it. We work at producing environments in which we can keep secrets or share them (either implicitly or explicitly) under some mutual understanding that if you blab, the tables could be turned.

It’s all a lot more complicated than that of course but hopefully you get the idea.

Anyway, it should be obvious that social media is not built according to this model. It encourages over-sharing and the custodians of our privacy are no longer people we kinda-sorta trust, working in mudily mutual self-interest. I hypothesise that this is one of the reasons that social media is so batshit insane. It’s not anonymity as such that’s the issue, it’s a mistuning of inhibition because the space we’re operating in is fundamentally different to how we think it is and the nature of our interactions is not what we believe it to be.

So, to badges announcing our pronouns, sexualities, love of the Klingon language and cycling proficiency test scores. There’s a technical term (really) in privacy research called “ick.” Ick is when something doesn’t feel comfortable. It feels like oversharing. Someone knows a bit too much about you or you know a bit too much about them. For instance, one night when he was drunk, my dad told me out of the blue that he was circumcised. I didn’t know what to do with that information and now neither do you. It’s icky. It didn’t fit the expectations of our interaction. There were no rules within that interaction that told me whether or not it was appropriate for me, for example, to share that information on a public blog. Ickiness muddies the rules. That unexpected item (or lack of it) in the baggage area (so to speak) ruins the reasonable expectation of privacy. It also creates a prompt to over-share; he told me something personal… am I supposed to tell him something personal to balance things out? Ick can feel like a debt even when you didn’t want the information you’ve learned in the first place.

You can see where I’m going with this. Interactions between a patient and a doctor are intimate but now the patient is being bombarded with whatever information the doctor has chosen to broadcast. It’s icky, it changes the balance of power and it creates an expectation to over-share. Am I supposed to tell my doctor about my sexuality? Is she expecting it, or just open to hearing it? Is she open to hearing about it? Just because she showed me hers, it doesn’t mean she wants to see mine. Or does it? Who the fuck knows any more?

OK, I’m quite aware that I’m having badges do quite a lot of heavy lifting here, but I hope you see my point: the reason they seem icky is because they violate our tacit expectations of how that kind of formal but intimate relationship is supposed to work and we have no idea how to react. As when we use social media, the environment is taken out of our hands and placed in those of people who do not have our best interests at heart for reasons we don’t fully understand.

And we don’t know how to react. And it’s icky.

Trump got to put on his party suit and give a speech again!

A long long speech which started 50 minutes late because he couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.

Who you calling impotent?!

90 minutes they’ll never get back again.

Ructions!

Oh no! Splitters! Where did it begin? This maybe?

Sad sad sad. Next you’ll see Mike Pence falling out with Donald Trump and then where will we be?

Or maybe this is where it started?

Who knows. Anyway it’s funny.

That explains it.

Leading gay, lesbian and bisexual rights charity Stonewall has recognised CQC’s commitment to equality in the workplace by placing it in the top 100 UK employers in the Stonewall Equality Workplace index for the first time.

They forgot the T.

That was back in 2015. They’re not forgetting it any more. Not allowed to, mate.

The top 100 list is based on the results of Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index 2015, the eleventh published by the charity. The index is based on a range of key indicators which include a confidential questionnaire of lesbian, gay and bisexual staff, with over 9,700 participants. This consistently revealed that employees from organisations ranked in Stonewall’s Top 100 exhibited higher levels of staff satisfaction and loyalty. CQC has been placed 94 in the index, a rise of 17 places from a ranking of 111 last year. Over 800 employers took part in the index.

Still no T. What a difference 6 years can make.

It’s on Facebook, too. Not faring well.

Many sharp comments.

I would find it rather creepy/threatening and definitely intrusive if I was being cared for by a health professional who was wearing badges, written in a faux childish script, announcing ‘I am straight’ and ‘I like women’.

As a doctor myself, I would be concerned that some patients might take it as a license to be inappropriate as well. Plus, given how little time I have as it is to see patients – regrettably – I just don’t have the time to get into chats about ‘music’ and ‘cats’ and I wouldn’t want to set up expectations that I couldn’t fulfil in the moment.

These badges are unprofessional and possibly dangerous. Sexual feelings are largely concealed in the workplace for a good reason! Who you want to sleep with shouldn’t be relevant to your day job in health and social care and this gimmick is potentially damaging to HCW/patient relations. Please put a stop to it. It’ll only lead to trouble.

Another experienced professional:

Is this meant to be serious?

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding it deeply disturbing.

I worked in the NHS for most of my working life. It was not considered professionally appropriate to bring your sexuality, your personal life and your political views into work.

Being at work is not All About You.

It’s rather like religion. We don’t want people in medical settings greeting us bedecked with religious symbols either. It’s not our concern, and we don’t care. That’s not what we’re there for.

Why have professional organizations forgotten this basic fact?

And speaking of changing everything for the sake of a handful of narcissists…

In a medical setting? People getting vaccinated or treated for Covid are supposed to want all that in their faces? Are you joking?

Philosophy academic at Georgetown:

That’s a puzzlement I’ve always had about the trans issue – the whole business of reversing everything we know about sex, dimorphism, who is which, feminism, oppression, language, and more, because a tiny fraction of the populace has emotional reactions.

But that’s not what this is.

What??? Women who can’t pretend that men are women are an example of the impulse to organize everyone’s entire world around the emotional reactions we have? We’re an example of that while the people who order us to do so are not?

Bonkers.

How can we stop this troublesome woman?

More bullying, and more, and more, and more! There can never be enough!

So much hilarity.

Another bad thing undone:

The Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management on Friday rescinded a grazing permit that was granted to Eastern Oregon ranchers who were previously convicted of arson on public lands.

It reverses the decision by former President Donald Trump’s Interior secretary, David Bernhardt. He had granted the permit to Dwight and Steven Hammond on Trump’s final day in office. The permit gave the Hammonds the right to graze livestock on public land for 10 years.

…

In its notice, the BLM wrote that it had remanded the decision for additional consideration after finding flaws in how the previous administration had made its decision to issue the permit. The government failed to immediately alert the public, resulting in confusion and preventing people from having the full 15-day period to object to such a decision, as required by federal rules.

Remember these guys?

The Hammonds’ arson conviction in 2012 led to the revocation of their previous grazing permit. The case was central to the armed takeover in 2016 of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which devolved into a 41-day armed standoff. A jury later acquitted leaders of the takeover, including brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy.

A jury acquitted them even though they did the whole thing out in the open.

Trump pardoned the Hammonds two years later.

Of course he did.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on What do we lose?

On a related note, one of the take-home messages common to authors who have studied the rise of authoritarian populism (Snyder, Mounk, Applebaum, Temelkuran, Levtisky/Ziblatt etc.) that I think applies to the Gender Wars as well is to not concede the other side’s language with its implicit framing of the issue (the “ordinary”/”real” people who vote for the populist vs. the “elite” who don’t etc.). This is why I cringe whenever gender critical people start talking in terms of “cis” vs. “trans” women etc. As I have previously written, “cis woman” is not another word for “biological female”. Indeed, referring to biological females in Genderspeak is no more possible than referring to political freedom in Newspeak. Even “cis” women are entirely defined in terms of “female”/”feminine” ways of thinking and feeling* (best left unspecified), while anyone who fails to think/feel in the ways required doesn’t qualify as a “woman” of any kind. The only relevant difference is that the “cis” women accept the “gender” they were “assigned at birth” (with all its implicit cultural “baggage”) while the “trans” women do not.

Buying into the “cis” vs. “trans” framework, concedes the idea that there is indeed such a category as “women” (once again, defined in terms of “female”/”feminine” ways of thinking and feeling) that “cis” and “trans” women are both different versions/subsets of, to the exclusion of both “cis” and “trans” men (defined in terms of “male”/”masculine” ways of thinking and feeling), but the “TERFs” are arbitrarily choosing to exclude one subset of “women” out of pure bigotry and hate (hence the obligatory attempts to lump in “trans women” with “black women”, “disabled women”, “working class women” etc.).

Instead of conceding their framing we should make it clear that TIM’s and biological females are not different versions of “women” any more than flying mammals and clubs for hitting baseballs are different versions of “bats”. There is no non-trivial definition that applies to both at the same time. Being a “man” or “woman” is about biological sex or it isn’t about anything at all. If biological sex is not a valid category, then neither is “man” or “woman”. There is no such thing as a “male” or “female”, “masculine” or “feminine” way of thinking or feeling, which means there is no “gender” which means there is no “gender binary”, which means there is no “cis”, which means we’re pretty much all “non-binary” or “gender non-conforming” or – even better – “agender”. If the gender concept applies to people on the trans spectrum (or their allies who will say anything to make the TRAs right and us wrong), they are pretty much the only ones to whom it applies as far as I’m concerned. If trans women are women, they are the only “women”. If trans men are men, then I’m not.

*They are women₂ rather than women₁ as I have previously put it.

A Waterstone’s in a former Victorian wool exchange in Bradford:

The Sydney Morning Herald:

Almost 100 academics have demanded the University of Melbourne take “swift and decisive action” in response to a website created by one of its lecturers that has been labelled “transphobic” and potentially in breach of the university’s own guidelines on research integrity and inclusion.

And how are the almost 100 academics defining “transphobic”? With the precision and care expected of academics? Or with the wild abandon of Twitter “activists”?

On Tuesday, Holly Lawford-Smith, an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, launched www.noconflicttheysaid.org in response to legislation in Australia and elsewhere designed to be inclusive to transgender people but which, she says, “replaces sex with gender identity”.

The site calls for women assigned female at birth (“cis” women) to anonymously share stories about any time they have felt threatened by transgender women.

“We’re worried about the impacts on women of men using women-only spaces,” the website introduction says, “including but not limited to: changing rooms, fitting rooms, bathrooms … rape and domestic violence shelters.”

“I think it’s outrageous that these changes are being introduced and people aren’t even acknowledging the possibility of a conflict of interest,” Dr Lawford-Smith said of her motivation for creating the site. “No governments are gathering data on this, there’s no place in the world for people to report where creepy things are happening in women’s bathrooms or women’s changing rooms or rape support groups.

I do think there’s an inherent pitfall in the project: the fact that the stories are anonymous means they can’t be authenticated. But I also know there’s massive pressure to shut up about any stories, so that’s part of the picture too.

The two dozen writers of the open letter said “they were concerned that material promoted and produced by Dr Lawford-Smith and taught to students “conflicts with the faculty commitment to diversity and inclusion”.”

But what does “diversity” mean? What does “inclusion” mean? Does “diversity” really mean “people who pretend to be what they’re not”? Does “inclusion” really mean women including men in everything, regardless of their need for safety or privacy or solidarity?

Concerns with the site were first raised on Wednesday by fellow Melbourne University academic Hannah McCann, a senior lecturer in cultural studies, who labelled the site transphobic, saying it “promotes the vilification of transgender people”.

There is a photo of McCann, who looks very inclusive.

Dr McCann also believes the site “is in conflict with the values of the university as a safe and inclusive space”.

Safe for whom? Inclusive of whom?

One little word.

The [UK] government has agreed to change its bill allowing ministers to take maternity leave, so that it uses the term “mother” rather than “person”.

The Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill would ensure up to six months’ leave on full pay.

But the House of Lords rejected the use of the word “person” in its text.

The government initially argued this was in line with “drafting convention” but has changed its view, saying use of “mother” is legally “acceptable”.

I strongly doubt that it’s any kind of “convention” to use “person” in single-sex legislation. I think the goal when writing legislation is to be as precise and clear as possible, so if a law affects one sex only, what would be the added precision in using “person”?

The problem isn’t boys on girls’ teams, the problem is bad coaches!

The February 26, 2021 passage of the Equality Act in the US House of Representatives piqued conservatives into a moral panic.

The bill, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, had a terrifying potential for Republicans: the presence of trans girls in high school sports.

No, not the presence of trans girls in high school sports, the presence of boys in girls’ sports. And it’s not just Republicans or just conservatives who think this will be unfair to girls.

All this language of the need to “protect,” the need to root out other children from “bathrooms” and “locker rooms,” is hard to square with reality.

It’s not “other children,” it’s boys; it’s not “bathrooms” and “locker rooms” but girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

It’s no coincidence that the wording is always evasive this way. It has to be evasive, because if it were precise and accurate, the problems would be way too obvious.

Which means that at some level they know they’re talking shit, and shit that is oppressive to girls and women…but they do it anyway.

Abigail Weinberg then tells some stories of abusive coaches, then wraps it all up.

As scandal after scandal emerges about the pervasive abuse of young athletes, it’s time we reevaluate our priorities. Trans athletes aren’t the problem.

Again, the issue is not trans athletes but boys competing against girls. And that is a problem, and we can pay attention to both problems – abusive coaches and unfair competition.

Men who identify as women can invade women’s sports, but maybe not those contests where people score women on how fuckable they look in bathing suits. For that kind of thing the customer wants an actual woman, by golly.

Beauty queen Anita Noelle Green competed in the Miss Universe pageant, was the first transgender contestant for Miss Montana USA and title holder for Miss Elite Earth Oregon 2019. Only one pageant has excluded her on the basis that she’s not a “natural born female” — Miss United States of America. A federal judge OK’d that policy on Thursday.

It’s a consumer issue. If you buy a steak at the grocery store you don’t want to unwrap it at home to find it’s pickled herrings.

Green sued Miss United States of America in December 2019, claiming its gender identity discrimination violates Oregon’s Public Accommodations Act and infringes on her First Amendment rights to free speech and free association.

But the pageant claims it, too, has the First Amendment right to free association: in this case, the right to deny access to “non-biological females.” The pageant says in court documents that its mission is geared toward “natural born women” and that including Green would “undermine its vision” and mar its “message of biological female empowerment.”

The pageant’s motion to dismiss repeatedly misgenders Green, referring to her as “a biological male who identifies as female” and “a man who identifies as a woman.”

How is that “misgendering”? Trans women are men who identify as female, so where’s the misgendering in saying so? That’s what “trans” means.

Green clarified in a declaration to the court that she has “always been a woman.”

“I never altered my gender or sex,” Green said. “I simply affirmed my underlying gender identity as female based on a realization of who I deeply was.”

That’s a religious belief, and as such, cannot be imposed on unwilling others.

Green says she wants the voices of all women to be heard in pageants like Miss United States of America.

Oh please. Ugly women? Average women? Short women, fat women, old women? Beauty pageants are not “inclusive”: exclusion is the whole point of them.

Green is debating whether to appeal or not.