Tipping.

More on the drought:

The megadrought currently choking the western United States is the worst drought in the region in more than 1,000 years. It’s having an enormous impact across many states and on several major reservoirs including Lake Mead, a water source for millions of people in the West. 

…

This week, local officials in Southern California started restricting water use, including watering of lawns to once or twice a week, for about six million residents. It’s also having a major impact on Lake Mead, which is a major source of water for agriculture and for millions of people in the American West.

Ok hang on – why not just ban watering lawns entirely? Lawns make no difference to anyone apart from a stunted kind of aesthetics. Lawns can come back. Lawns don’t feed anyone. Lawns don’t matter. When it’s a choice between crops and lawns why in hell are lawns getting any water at all?

The megadrought is connected intimately with climate change, of course. And our story is part of our ongoing coverage of the Tipping Point.

The Colorado River Basin, a lifeline of the American Southwest, is shrinking. And, with it, the country’s two largest reservoirs are going dry. Just 30 miles east of Las Vegas sits Lake Mead on the border of Arizona and Nevada. It’s the largest manmade reservoir in North America.

It’s not good when a country’s two largest reservoirs go dry.

Lake Mead gets water from Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the country. Its water supply is around a fourth of what it used to be.

States in the Southwest have started limiting some of their use of the Colorado River Basin. And, last month, federal officials took unprecedented action to temporarily keep enough water in Lake Powell, one of the country’s largest reservoirs, to continue, generating hydropower for a million homes.

Is the situation going to improve?

No.

Meanwhile, drought.

A once-in-a-lifetime drought in the western part of the US is turning up dead bodies – but that’s the least of people’s worries.

It’s not once-in-a-lifetime any more. Lifetimes are going to be radically different in the future (the future meaning now and tomorrow and so on – not some distant prospect beyond the horizon).

Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead – formed by the creation of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River – is the largest reservoir in the United States and provides water to 25 million people across three states and Mexico. Here, the stunning scale of a drought in the American west has been laid plain for all to see.

Used to provide.

If the lake keeps receding, it would reach what’s known as “dead pool” – a level so low the Hoover Dam would no longer be able to produce hydropower or deliver water downstream.

And why would it not keep receding? It’s not as if we’re doing anything differently.

Nasa, which monitors changing water levels, is warning that the western United States is now entering one of the worst droughts ever seen.

“With climate change, it seems like the dominoes are beginning to fall,” Nasa hydrologist JT Reager told the BBC.

“We get warmer temperatures, we get less precipitation and snow. The reservoirs start drying up, then in a place like the West, we get wildfires”.

Not next century or next decade or next year but now.

75% of Lake Mead’s water goes to agriculture. 75% of not much is not much.

Over a third of America’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts are grown in California. But tens of thousands of acres lie idle because farmers can’t get enough water to grow crops.

There it is – the bottom line I keep mentioning in climate disaster posts: crop failures. Something the most obliviously optimistic of humans can’t ignore forever.

Now there’s a surprise.

When Hillary Clinton ran for the US presidency in 2016, she received sexist comments “on a constant basis” and her team had “no idea” how to deal with them, her former aide Huma Abedin has said.

Abedin, who worked closely with Clinton on her campaign, recalled that the former secretary of state was deluged with openly sexist remarks as well as unhelpful advice, or instructions to emulate male politicians.

Really? Women get abuse? I thought it was only trans people – especially male trans people. We’ve been told for years that women are the evil domineering phobic cruel sex, but now it seems that a woman running for high office has to expect nonstop sexist abuse?

Abedin said these started when Clinton sought the Democratic nomination in 2008 and continued when she ran for president in 2016, and “nothing changed over that period”, which took place before the #MeToo movement began in 2017.

What would #MeToo have to do with it? Does the Guardian really think sexism had faded away, or that feminism had, before #MeToo came along?

Speaking to the Hay festival to promote her recent memoir, Both/And, Abedin said Clinton and her team would feel obliged to laugh off offensive remarks from conservative commentators such as the newsreader Tucker Carlson, who said: “When Hillary Clinton shows up on TV I inadvertently cross my legs.”

Awhawhaw geddit? Castrating bitch! A woman with power is a castrating bitch Karen! Any woman who’s not sexy but compliant but hawt but obedient is gonna cut your balls off with a rusty paring knife.

Girls to the Front has a thread on “Sophie” Cook.

We were not “quite happily” using “Mx” a few years ago. I’ve never used it and never been the slightest bit happy about it. It’s just one more intrusion on and theft of what’s ours.

But it gets worse.

The Times on “Sophie” Cook:

Senior prosecutors are facing criticism over the recruitment of a transgender activist to a key diversity role despite evidence that she has posted derogatory tweets about women.

And is a man.

Sophie Cook, who has supported the replacement of the word woman with “womxn” and used the acronym “terf” — trans-exclusionary radical feminist — has been appointed the Crown Prosecution Service’s “speak-out champion”, a new role.

You know, the CPS could have appointed a woman. It wouldn’t be a bad idea – women have all kinds of issues with the CPS, conspicuous among them the staggeringly low rate of prosecution of rape cases. What does a man who calls himself a woman have to offer the CPS? Why pick him instead of a woman? What’s his edge?

The move, praised by Max Hill QC, the director of public prosecutions, has raised concerns over whether Cook will use the role to “embed” trans activism at the heart of the body that prosecutes serious crime in England and Wales.

If they let him, he will. Bank on it.

Cook describes herself as a “writer, speaker, actor, broadcaster and photographer”. On her website, Cook says that she is an “LGBT & mental health campaigner”, a Royal Air Force veteran and “self-harm and suicide survivor”.

A Renaissance pretend-women.

According to a CPS job advertisement, the new four-day-a-week job has a salary of more than £31,000 and is “home-based” but with an expectation that the postholder will travel to offices and attend meetings.

The advert said the speak-out champion would “be responsible for improving confidence amongst our employees in being able to speak openly about their experiences”. The CPS said that the role would be “instrumental in underpinning positive progress in leadership behaviours”.

I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean or why they think a smirking fraudulent guy who pretends to be a woman is the right fraud for the job.

Hill welcomed Cook in a tweet. However, concerns were raised over historic tweets in which Cook uses the term terf…

In September, Cook tweeted: “Apart from menstruate and give birth (just to keep the TERFs happy (are they ever happy?) nothing. I may not be able to do everything well, but I could potentially do anything just as long as there isn’t a required grade.”

We Are Fair Cop, a group of gender-critical lawyers, tweeted: “Female gender-critical employees of the @CPSUK require urgent reassurance that their political belief will not leave them vulnerable to unlawful discrimination”.

In a post directed at Hill, Sarah Phillimore, a barrister, asked: “What would happen to a female member of the CPS workforce who objected to [your] new ‘Speak Out Champion’ referring to her in this derogatory way? Would she be heard? Or sacked?”

And why pick him? Why him? Why any him, and especially why a him who pretends to be a woman? Why not a woman???

It seems to me far more urgent for the CPS to hear more from women than it is for the CPS to hear more from men who call themselves women. No comparison.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on One’s estates.

The third* most common argument I hear from pro-monarchy Norwegians is something along the lines of “Would you rather have something like the American model and get someone like Trump as the Head of State?”. This seems to presuppose that the monarchy does indeed serve a real function that must be served somehow, so if the monarchy is abolished we need to put something else in its place. My answer is the same as the one I give when religious apologists ask what atheists want to put in religion’s place: Neither the monarchy nor religion serves any function that needs to be served at at all, so we can just abolish both and have nothing in their place.

The fourth most common argument is that the monarchy supposedly plays some unspecified yet vitally important role in luring foreign investors to Norwegian companies. At this point I always imagine someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk sitting there and thinking to himself “I was going to invest my money where one would expect the highest returns, but then I learned that Norway has a monarchy, so now I’ve decided to invest everything in Norwegian salted and dried cod instead and watch my financial empire crumble”.

*The first two are (1) “I still get warm fuzzies about the King’s admirable refusal to concede to the Nazi occupiers in 1940, therefore monarchy good” and (2) “but the Norwegian royal family is so much nicer and more in tune with ordinary people than those pompous snobs they have in Britain!”

Originally a comment by Enzyme on One’s estates.

Campaigners have said much of this land lies on peat bogs, which should be allowed to grow wild to sequester carbon instead of being used for grouse shooting.

OK, but this is important, and it perhaps does undermine some of the point about tree-cover. I’ve no love for grouse-moors, and many grouse moors are close to peat areas: anyone who’s been to the Peak District can attest that there’ll be grouse-butts in one place, and a couple of hundred metres away you’re up to your thighs in peat.

BUT… Peat-bogs are not forest. They are AMAZING carbon sinks. According to the Beeb,

Peatlands cover around 12% of the land in the UK and store an estimated 3 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to all the forests in the UK, Germany and France put together.

Granted this, complaining that they have lower-than-average tree cover is to miss the mark. In fact, if they had more tree cover, they’d be worse for the environment: much worse, in fact.

Bluntly, in huge parts of the UK, what you want is scrubby upland moors, some of which will be waterlogged, but some of which won’t – and the not-waterlogged bit is ideal for grouse-shooting.

By all means put an end to that. But pointing out lower-than-average tree cover is environmentally misleading.

It can be so difficult to be sure you’re not reading a parody. Surely the BBC wouldn’t publish a parody news item…

When Alexa Hermosillo, 25, came out as non-binary about a year ago, while living in San Diego, California, he found many of the people he dated still boxed him into a gender binary.

He was expecting to find something else? “Dating” (i.e. sex) tends to work that way.

Hermosillo had short hair and presented as more masculine, but was using she/he pronouns at the time. People he dated, however, “would assign that more normatively masculine role to me”, he says (Hermosillo now identifies as trans masculine). “If we drove somewhere, I would be the person to drive. If I took them out on dates, I’d be the main person paying.” 

Is he helpless? Can he not negotiate who does the driving, as in one person drives to and the other drives back? Can he not negotiate who pays? Can he not use his words?

This is one of the many nuanced issues people who identify as non-binary face when dating. Both dating partners and dating apps are likely to assign them to a binary gender. 

No shit. And why is that? Because 999,999 out of 100,000 people want to “date” (i.e. have sex with) a particular sex. Ok that probably undercounts bisexual people but you get my drift. Humans do “assign” other humans to a binary gender. It’s built in. Claiming to be “non-binary” is a new and silly development, and it’s not going to find many eager participants.

They’re subject to misgendering and inadvertent insults, people who try too hard to empathise with their gender identity, and those who don’t try to understand at all. 

In other words everybody gets it wrong and it’s just so unfair.

Dating can be a minefield for anyone who’s looking for partnership – but for people who identify as non-binary, there are even more obstacles, often invisible to people who identify with the mainstream view of gender identity and heteronormative sexuality.

Of course there are. Suck it up. Nobody has to pretend to be “non-binary,” and nobody has to humor people who do pretend to be “non-binary.” Suck it up, move on, transition to being an adult.

The Guardian decides today would be a good day to treat “JK Rowling” as just another political issue people disagree on, and by the way she’s the wrong side to pick.

It seems they have a series called Dining across the divide: two people eat something and talk about how they disagree. Catchy subhead for this one:

One voted Labour, the other Tory, and they disagreed about Brexit. Can they find common ground over JK Rowling?

Can they? Can they? Can they agree that she’s a bitch and a Karen who has no right to say that men are not women?

Of course they can.

John The subject where I felt I was educated is the storm that has engulfed JK Rowling. To my knowledge, I’ve only met two trans people. And he said: “You’ve probably met plenty of others; you just didn’t know it.” And that’s probably true. I didn’t know enough about it; I wanted to know what the fuss was about.

No it isn’t probably true. That’s not probable at all. It’s part of the mythology that trans people are undetectable.

Dan He seemed to have taken a surface-level view, that JK Rowling is just standing up for women’s rights, as someone who’s experienced domestic violence. I tried to explain that you have to disregard a trans woman’s womanhood to be able to even say that this is an issue. While I have a huge appreciation for people who have been through domestic violence, and understand how you might have a fear of the opposite sex because of that, it doesn’t mean you get to oppress already oppressed people.

How nice of Dan to dig beneath the surface to find out that women (women – notice he doesn’t even say the word) who have experienced male violence (euphemistically called “domestic violence”) have no right to dispute men’s claims to be women.

What a lot of deceptive bullshit there is in just that one paragraph. Surface-level view is one, domestic violence is another, a trans woman’s womanhood is another, a huge appreciation is another, might is another, the opposite sex is another, oppress is another, oppressed people is another.

People have trained themselves to do this – to use generic words to avoid admitting that you’re defending men who bully women, to flip perpetrator and victim, to treat arguing for women’s rights as “oppressing” men who pretend to be women. And the other guy lapped it all up. One dude explains to another dude why it’s fine to brush off Rowling’s experience of a violent husband and pretend she’s “oppressing” men by not believing they’re women.

John He knows a lot of trans women, and because of his circle, he has a lot of insights, which I enjoyed listening to. He made a good point, which is that there isn’t really a threat from trans women – it’s the media blowing things out of all proportion. He made very, very strong arguments to convince me that it’s a bit of a storm in a teacup.

Awww, that’s just heartwarming, John, thanks for sharing.

To think I used to admire Peter Tatchell.

So, who cares, right? So 80 “cis lesbians” do get pressured to have sex with men pretending to be women, so what? Bitches. Karens.

A lot of people make the point that Simon makes:

How many people was that claim based on? 27.

Bros before hos.

Simon Edge tells us that the publishing industry is full of horrible little censors. Little in mind, regardless of stature.

He and Stock and Joyce and Shrier and Bindel all found publishers who would ignore the tiny-minded ones, but they still deal with retail staff who hide the books and rebuke customers who want to buy them.

(Off topic – All those shiny buildings? They’re all brand new. That part of the city used to be low-rise, drab, quiet, uninteresting, a neglected edge of downtown.)

We know what’s next.

But if the custom is to yell and cheer and scream, a bizarre silence is itself any unpleasantness. Very unpleasant indeed if you ask me.

And now another ratchet. You thought it couldn’t get worse? Ha.

A blacklist. Very progressive.

A crudely written vituperative piece on the Allison Bailey tribunal by one Moya Lothian-McLean:

Barrister Allison Bailey – a co-founder of the LGB Alliance, a transgender-exclusionary organisation – is suing, in one fell swoop, Garden Court, her legal chambers, and Stonewall, the largest LGBTQ+ organisation in Europe. 

It’s just stupid and ludicrous to call the LGB Alliance “transgender-exclusionary.” There is no law or rule or unwritten agreement that lesbians and gay men must “include” trans people in everything they do. It’s not particularly obvious why they’re expected to “include” them at all ever. Stonewall, meanwhile, could be said to have become a mostly trans-focused organization, and it can certainly be called one that treats some lesbians and gay men like The Enemy.

Bailey’s case is just one of several legal challenges brought by those who fall under the umbrella of what’s now termed the ‘gender critical movement’. They’re made up of a loud (and often public-facing) minority, that run a gauntlet from rightwing evangelicals, in the American mould, to radical feminists.

Oh sorry are we loud? That must be awful, when the trans minority is so very whispery and gentle and self-effacing. Also “run the gauntlet”? She means “run the gamut.” Too bad nobody at Novara caught that. Embarrassing.

Binding them is an inexplicable opposition – in many cases, what feels closer to virulent hatred – to the existence of trans people.

Mkay now we’re getting defamatory. She’s implying that the gender critical movement wants to genocide trans people.

Increasingly, their focus is on the law and attacking even the current meagre rights it offers trans individuals, from access to healthcare to protection from the likes of conversion therapy. 

From the likes of? This fool cannot write.

An interview with a Stonewall lawyer follows, but it’s too stupid and dull to go into.

Oh, gee, I thought Priss Choss was such a keen environmentalist.

The duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, two of the royal family’s largest portfolios of land, have snubbed tree campaigners who are calling for the royals to rewild their estates.

Well. You know. There’s The Environment, and then there’s One’s portfolio of land.

Rewilding advocates at the campaign group Wild Card have been meeting for months with the crown estate, which manages most of the royal land and pays the revenue into the Treasury. They say relations have been “really positive”.

However, the duchies are separate to the crown estate, and not subject to the same level of accountability. The two organisations – described by the land campaigner Guy Shrubsole as “medieval anachronisms” – manage more than 73,000 hectares (180,000 acres) of royal land between them, with all profit going directly to the royal purse.

That’s how it is when your ancestor was the successful mob boss.

Both estates have lower levels of tree cover than the national average. The duchy of Cornwall, run by Prince Charles, has only 6% tree cover, and the duchy of Lancaster has 13%. The average in the UK is 16%, while in Europe it is 38%.

Choss is a tree-hugger of other people’s trees.

The duchies have no intention of talking to any of these pesky rewilding people.

“The duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster have categorically ruled out meeting with our campaign. This is an appallingly undemocratic affront to our futures,” said Emma Smart, campaigns manager for Wild Card, which has highlighted the lack of forest cover on royal land.

The group has delivered a 100,000-signature petition and emailed the duchies on nine occasions, but has had no response.

Wild Card is asking the royals to practise what they have preached during the Queen’s jubilee tree-planting scheme and allow more trees to grow on their own land.

…

The duchy of Lancaster owns about 2,020 hectares (5,000 acres) of grouse moors on the North York Moors and about 180 hectares (450 acres) of grouse moors in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire. Campaigners have said much of this land lies on peat bogs*, which should be allowed to grow wild to sequester carbon instead of being used for grouse shooting.

There it is, it’s the grouse shooting again. What do the environmental benefits of trees matter compared to a handful of toffs shooting birds out of the sky for the mere sake of killing them?

*Updating: see Enzyme’s comment on peat bogs as much better carbon sinks than forests are.

Honoring Pride Month.

H/t Jane Clare Jones

Jon Pike talks about conceptual engineering and That Word:

There is a growing approach in philosophy called “conceptual engineering”. It’s a cool name for an interesting project. Indeed, one of my colleagues at the Open University is heavily involved as a conceptual engineer. They look at our concepts and see if they are doing good work — if they are functioning well. If not, then we should try to improve them (“ameliorate” is the key term). The chief thinker behind this is Sally Haslanger; the title of her main work Resisting Reality: Social Constructions and Social Critique gives you a flavour of what she is up to.

…

So far, the term (and concept) “female” has seemed relatively immune from such attempts. The term “female” is straightforward. It’s generally accepted as an ordinary scientific and biological term. You can see that it is unambiguously a sex term rather than a gender term by realising that it applies across species: we don’t have woman squirrels, but we do have female squirrels.

It’s a good thing that we have some fixed and simple terms that apply to regular and important features of the world. It enables us to describe those features of the world in straightforward ways. To have the term “female” is a help in describing features of the world that matter — sexed features. That there are such features of the world seems to me important, and obvious. You only need to look at the work of Caroline Criado-Perez to see why, and the emergence of organisations like Sex Matters is part of a political move to focus on those features of the world where, well, sex matters.

The word is useful, we need it, so let’s not re-engineer it so that it means something else.

Creasy, and others, want to decouple “female” from the reality of biological sex. That project I find intellectually disturbing. It’s lots of other things — I think it’s politically damaging to the party we both support, I think it’s an affront to women, and I think it radically distorts the discussion. In policy, I think a redefinition of “female” would be disastrous, most obviously in health care. In the words of Keir Starmer, it generates more heat than light.

The affront to women is particularly…noticeable, in my view. It’s very affrontful. It’s an absolute classic of the “Well women don’t matter much so…” school of thought.

But my concern is in some ways quite narrow. I write about sport, and sex categorisation in sport. Here, it is obvious that sex matters. I have to be able to refer to biological sex in order to do my job. Creasy, then, is blunting the tools — the words — that I need. I argue for this claim: it is unfair for people with male advantage to compete in female sport. I try to give reasons for that view, to argue for it with governing bodies, to work out ways to apply it to sport policy. Whether people agree or disagree with that substantive view, this is legitimate academic work. In order to do it, I have to use a term to refer to biological sex. If Creasy succeeds, I will have to reorder my position. I will have to say that “it is unfair for people with advantages accruing from Homeostatic Property Cluster One to compete in sport designated for people with Homeostatic Property Cluster Two” or something similar. If we reached that point, there would be a loss to public debate. It would become obscure and technical.

Not to mention just way too goddam much trouble. If we have to use nine words instead of one to name women we won’t be able to name women at all, because any time we try people will just walk away.

Warwick Pride Issued a Statement the other day – which is to say, it wrote a public post on Facebook. It’s quite a surprising document.

STATEMENT REGARDING EXTERNAL SPEAKER NADHIM ZAHAWI

That is, Facebook post regarding external speaker Nadhim Zahawi.

TW: Transphobia, SA, abuse, homelessness

SA = sex abuse, right? So why isn’t it either “SA, A,” or “sex abuse, abuse”? Or indeed “abuse, sex abuse” – it’s more usual to start with the general and go on to the specific.

Picky picky.

It has been brought to our attention over the past few weeks that the Warwick Conservative Association is running an external speaker event, inviting Nadhim Zahawi, the Conservative Secretary of State for Education, to campus on Friday the 27th of May.

It’s very pompous, that “It has been brought to our attention” – makes it sound as if they’re so important and powerful and busy that they don’t have time to keep track of events, and as if they have armies of sycophants eager to bring things to their attention.

Towards the beginning of this academic year Nadhim Zahawi said the following regarding former Sussex University Professor Kathleen Stock, a notorious transphobe that is a signatory to the WDI (Women’s Declaration International formerly known as the WHRC) “Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights”, that published the transphobic book “Material Girls”, that is a trustee of the LGB Alliance:

What’s up with saying “that” instead of “who”? Three times? Is it deliberate, to indicate that Kathleen is a thing rather than a person? Or just illiterate?

“It was unacceptable that a scholar of her calibre should be hounded out of university. For me that was just a terrible stain on the history of that great university.”

The WDI declaration argues for the legal elimination of transgender people. Quite frankly, Kathleen Stock’s behaviour as well as the university’s reaction is the only real “stain” on Sussex University concerning this incident.

That makes it sound as if the WDI Declaration argues for genocide. It’s as malevolent as it is stupid, and that’s saying a lot.

There are about 15 more paragraphs of the usual spite and blather. I miss the good old days when lefty students campaigned for workers and women and people of color and lesbians and gay men.

Headline news: Lia Thomas does not admit that his competing as a woman in swimming competitions is unfair. No, really?!!

Transgender NCAA swimming champion Lia Thomas is firing back at those claiming her dominance is unfair to biological women … saying trans athletes will not destroy women’s sports.

“Firing back,” eh – that’s tactful. He’s already physically bullying every woman he competes against; he’s not the one who needs to do any “firing back.”

The University of Penn athlete broke her silence on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday … saying she knew she’d face backlash once she started competing against women, but no amount of scrutiny would stop her.

And no amount of women pointing out how unfair it is would stop him. Of course it wouldn’t: he’s an entitled prick.

“I was prepared for that, but I don’t need anyone’s permission to be myself and do the sport that I love,” she said.

Except that it’s not himself. It’s a fiction. Himself is a man, but he’s competing against women, while claiming to be a “trans woman.”

And the boast about not needing anyone’s permission is very rapey, very entitled, very domestic violence-like.

“Transitioning to get an advantage is not something that ever factors into our decisions,” he says. I don’t believe him. “Trans women are not a threat to women’s sport,” he says. Of course they are. Men have physical advantages over women, so if men start forcing their way into women’s sport, they will ruin it for women. That’s a threat.

A tale of hecklement and Labour royalty:

One of the students who led a trans protest that hounded Nadhim Zahawi off a Russell Group campus is the son of Labour grandees Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls, it has emerged today.

Is a trans protest a bunch of people sitting at Starbucks pretending they’re at a protest?

Mr Zahawi was hounded by around 30 activists who chanted ‘Zahawi is a transphobe’ and ‘Tory scum’ outside a talk the Cabinet minister gave to Warwick University’s Conservative Association.

In video posted by the Warwick Labour society, Joel Cooper interrupts the Education Secretary’s Q&A to heckle him over his trans views. He then sits down to cheers from fellow Labour activists. Later, he shared the clip to his Instagram story, Guido Fawkes reported.

I wonder what the views are. That men aren’t women? Crazy stuff like that?

In a statement issued by Warwick Pride before the talk, they branded Mr Zahawi a ‘reactionary harmful transphobe’ after he defended Kathleen Stock, a former Sussex lecturer who was hounded for her views on trans rights and left the university following protests against her.

…for being “a reactionary harmful transphobe” blah blah blah and thus we go on until every reasonable human on the planet has been told to wheesht.

The group added that the Education Secretary ‘plays a significant role in institutional transphobia’ in the UK, ‘trivialises’ the effects of outing LGBT+ young people to their parents and claimed he has used the ‘common transphobic dog-whistle ‘adult human female”.

The what? We’re not allowed to use the words “adult human female” now? While “women” no longer means “women”? What word or combination of words are we allowed to use to name the female sex? (Obviously not “female sex”; I committed a crime by using those two words next to each other.)

The Mail tells us a little about the Pride activists who were protesting.

Less is known about Warwick Pride’s president, who goes by the first name Mia. A mathematics and physics undergraduate, Mia identifies as ‘transgender, non-binary, genderfae, asexual, demiromantic’ and ‘neptunic’. Their interests include ‘music, electronics, programming, arcana, community management and moderation’ – and ‘Lego’.

It’s not just the eccentricity of the labels, it’s also the wealth of detail. Nobody cares. That’s a basic truth that people should learn early and never forget. Nobody cares about the details of wonderful you. Ask yourself how much you care about other people’s details of wonderful them. Got it? It’s a very small figure, isn’t it. Now notice that it works the other way around. Now resolve never to forget it again.

I do wonder what “neptunic” is though.

The trumpies lose one.

Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Democrats, was acquitted on Tuesday of a felony charge that he lied to the F.B.I. about having no client in 2016 when he shared a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.

The jury returned the verdict after about six hours of deliberations split by a holiday weekend. It was a blow to the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, and a vindication for Mr. Sussmann’s decision to fight the case before a jury.

Good. The more blows to Durham the better.