Very granola, very crunchy person turns trumpian insurrectionist:

Before the pandemic, Rachel Powell, a forty-year-old mother of eight from western Pennsylvania, sold cheese and yogurt at local farmers’ markets and used Facebook mostly to discuss yoga, organic food, and her children’s baseball games. But, last year, Powell began to post more frequently, embracing more extreme political views. Her interests grew to include conspiracy theories about covid-19 and the results of the Presidential election, filtered through such figures as Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the Infowars founder Alex Jones.

Some more time passes and she turns up at the January 6 insurrection.

Videos show her, wearing a pink hat and sunglasses, using a battering ram to smash a window and a bullhorn to issue orders. “People should probably coördinate together if you’re going to take this building,” she called out, leaning through a shattered window and addressing a group of rioters already inside. “We got another window to break to make in-and-out easy.”

The FBI is now looking for her.

“I was not part of a plot—organized, whatever,” Powell, who was speaking from an undisclosed location, told me. “I have no military background. . . . I’m a mom with eight kids. That’s it. I work. And I garden. And raise chickens. And sell cheese at a farmers’ market.” During the interview, she reviewed photographs and videos of the Bullhorn Lady, acknowledging that many of the images showed her, and offered detailed descriptions of the skirmishes they depicted.

Powell was born in Anaheim, California, and grew up on what she described as “the really bad side” of Fresno. She was raised by her mother, who worked at a local shop, and by her stepfather, a plumber. “It was rough, but she didn’t do without anything,” her mother, Deborah Lemons, who has had a strained relationship with Powell for the past several years, said. “She always had clothes. She always had food.” Lemons said that, when Powell was a child, she and her stepfather were the victims of a carjacking. Powell was held at gunpoint and her stepfather was kidnapped for several hours by their assailant. “Knowing what that feels like, I am just absolutely amazed that she would participate in something like this and not consider or have a lot of compassion for the people who were inside that building,” Lemons said, referring to the riot. “She well knows what it’s like to wonder if she’s gonna lose her life.”

Ideology can do strange things to people.

Three years ago, Powell separated from her husband. Since then, she has worked various part-time jobs to support her children, who range in age from four to their mid-twenties. She told me that she has a certification as a group fitness instructor, and has taken a course in alternative medicine. “She’s very granola, very crunchy,” a friend, who asked not to be identified, told me. “Does yoga, eats vegetarian, homeschools all their kids.”

And bashes out windows in the Capitol so that people can get inside to hunt down Democrats.

She wasn’t a fan of Trump’s in 2016, but the masks requirement changed everything.

Paula Keswick, who co-owns a local creamery that sold Powell cheese and yogurt, said that Powell was barred from working at some events after she refused to obey pandemic restrictions. “She was just adamant she was not going to wear a mask,” Keswick said. (Powell said that she now works part time at a local bookstore.) Last summer and fall, Powell said, she attended various protests, including anti-mask rallies. “If there was a protest in Harrisburg, I was there for almost all of them,” she told me. On July 4th, she drove for four hours to join members of several far-right groups, some of them armed, who gathered at the Gettysburg National Military Park, purportedly to protect Civil War monuments from desecration. At the rally, a man wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt was surrounded and aggressively questioned by about fifty demonstrators. In a video posted online, Powell is among the group…

Because masks, freedom, masks.

She told me that she did not share the racist views espoused by some on the far right. (In 2013, she tweeted, “what’s up, my niggas?” Powell defended the use of the N-word, saying, “My favorite book is ‘Gone with the Wind,’ and it uses that term freely.”)

GWtW is a hair-raisingly racist novel and movie, and did a lot to teach generations to be even more racist than they would have been anyway.

So she voted for Trump this time.

Concerns about mask requirements, which she called a “liberty issue,” were instrumental in her decision. She claimed that the risks of the coronavirus had been overstated by public-health officials, saying that she had not seen many deaths in her county. On November 5th, 2020, she wrote in a Facebook comment directed at a friend, “I won’t get a vaccine either. I hear what you’re saying about the whole world being in on the conspiracy as far as the corona virus goes.” On December 27th, she posted, “I’m unashamedly a ‘super spreader,’ ” attaching photographs of crowded, mask-free holiday and birthday parties. That day, she uploaded a video of a large maskless meal, during which several children said, “No masks,” and Powell could be heard saying, “The masks are total bullcrap. You guys just need to get out there and live. Get arrested—it’s fine.”

Have another bowl of granola.

One more visit with Alison Phipps.

“…the cultural power of white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears.”

It’s so…hit them don’t hit me. So chickenshit. So malicious. She’s lily-white herself and she’s climbing the academic ladder by heaping shit on white women. She makes scholarship look like a con game.

Hur hur radical feminists, they’re exactly like Brexiters and men’s rights activists, hur hur hur.

We’re all doomed.

Alison Phipps says we’re “stalking” her “profile,” which apparently means seeing one of her tweets. How very dare we.

Reading the Definition of Political Whiteness from Her Book does not, oddly enough, convince me that her way of deploying it is clever and enlightened.

Nope. Not convincing. Why “whiteness”? Why that word instead of another? Why not maleness or richness or powerfulness?

I haven’t read her book so I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because it sounds good. It sounds hip and knowing and like what the cool kids say. It’s sort of like jazz or blues or hip hop, ya know? But academic. Academicish.

So, does that help her make the case that we nasty “gender crits” are tainted by this evil whiteness thing, this interaction between supremacy and victimhood?

Well, not as far as I’m concerned, but no doubt the cool kids think it’s genius.

I thought Chase Strangio couldn’t get any worse. Silly me.

There’s a lot to fume at in that tweet, but I especially bristle at that “especially.” Why especially? Why women especially? WHY WOMEN ESPECIALLY?

Moira Donegan on AOC and what she told us:

On Monday night, after making several public allusions to the gravity of her experience, AOC used Instagram Live to describe her experience of the Capitol attack on 6 January. She spoke of hiding in her office as the mob breached the Capitol; she hid behind the door in a bathroom as she heard people ransacking the rooms outside. Someone came into the bathroom where she was hiding, their face on the other side of the door that she hid behind. At one point, a voice yelled, “Where is she? Where is she?” That turned out to be a Capitol police officer, but he did not identify himself; Ocasio-Cortez describes feeling ambivalent and uncertain about who he was and why he was really there.

Eventually, she escaped, and wound up barricaded in the office of Representative Katie Porter, of California, and later she moved to the office of Representative Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts. She spoke several times of how she feared the marauders could attack, with the intelligence she was receiving from security personnel mixing with her own anxious imagination. If she turned that corner down the hall, would an insurrectionist mob appear with guns? If bombs were found a block away, did that mean the building she was sitting in could explode? It’s clear from her account that at several points throughout the day, she thought she was going to die.

The description of these events on the broadcast – the terror and trauma AOC recounted, the frankness with which she detailed her mounting fears of bombs and guns – would already have been remarkable. But early in the broadcast, as she described her frustration over Republican calls to move on from the insurrection, she revealed something else: “I’m a survivor of sexual assault,” she said, the first time she has made that disclosure publicly. “The reason I say this and the reason I’m getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize,” she said. “These are the tactics that abusers use.”

Which, I’m guessing, is not a coincidence, but a commonality. The same kind of people are drawn to today’s Republican party and to a habit of being abusive.

In recognizing the common rhetorical strategies used by both Republicans eager to minimize the attack and perpetrators of gender violence eager to avoid accountability for their treatment of women, AOC was echoing feminists who compared Donald Trump’s increasingly hostile and reckless behavior in the last two months of his term to a pattern common to domestic abusers, who are known to escalate their violence in the weeks immediately following their victim’s severing of the relationship.

I hadn’t thought of that before. It’s interesting. Not surprising, but interesting. Of course angry entitled violent abusive men get even more angry and violent and abusive when their victim escapes.

AOC is correct in her observation that the rhetorical strategies used by Republicans – to deny their own wrongdoing, attack the victims seeking accountability, and to pretend that the true wrongdoing has been committed against them – are the same strategies deployed by other tyrants, be they political or domestic, seeking to uphold other unjust and dangerous systems of power.

Because what else would they do? It’s not as if they can turn to reason and argument and persuasion and justice. They have to use the tools they know.

The question is answered: yes Trump’s new “legal team” is willing to repeat his lies.

Donald Trump’s legal team for his second impeachment trial has filed a 14-page brief defending his actions on January 6, when the then-president incited a violent insurrection at the US Capitol.

On January 6, Trump repeated his baseless claims that Joe Biden won the presidential election because of widespread fraud, and he encouraged his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol as Congress certified Biden’s victory.

He encouraged them to do more than march to the Capitol.

“Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

The president’s legal team said in its brief, “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.”

Straight up lying.

Putin is still Putin.

A Moscow court has sentenced Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a prison colony in a landmark decision for Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on the country’s leading opposition figure.

Calling it a “crackdown” makes it sound legitimate. The right word would be “suppression.”

Navalny, who has accused the Russian president and his allies of stealing billions, was jailed for violating parole from a 2014 sentence for embezzlement in a case he has said was politically motivated.

…

After a judge read the verdict, subtracting the 10 months he had spent under house arrest from his original three-and-a-half-year sentence, Navalny and his wife Yulia stared at each other across the court room. She took off her mask, smiled, waved, and then shrugged. “Don’t be sad! Everything’s going to be alright!” he yelled to her. She declined to comment as she walked out of the courtroom, looking straight ahead.

…

Outside the courthouse, she stood next to Navalny’s two lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Vladimir Kobzev. They said they planned to appeal to the European Court on Human Rights. “You saw what happened in there,” Mikhailova said. “It was a horror, like always.”

Navalny’s team called for an urgent protest at Moscow’s Manezh Square by the Kremlin. As of 9.30pm, hundreds of riot police had begun detaining Navalny supporters.

Putin putining.

In a fiery speech from a Moscow city courtroom decorated with portraits of Cicero and Montesquieu ahead of the sentencing, Navalny had accused Putin of ordering his assassination with the poison novichok and said that the Russian leader’s “only method is killing people”.

The US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said Washington was “deeply concerned” and reiterated calls for Navalny’s unconditional and immediate release, saying it would coordinate with allies to hold Russia accountable.

At least our days of slobbering all over Putin are in the past.

Originally a comment by Vila Restal on The war on cis women.

As someone who works in the VAWG sector it’s interesting to note that the helpline number given at the end of the article is for Galop. Ostensibly for LBGT survivors, it’s focus is on male victims, and they’ve been given a lot of support and training by the women’s organisations.

You see women working in VAWG jobs do recognise that men can be victims – for example young gay men involved in the chemsex scene are vulnerable to abuse while under the influence of drugs and are reluctant to approach the police because of the illicit nature of the drugs involved. While male victims can’t be accommodated within the women’s sector, women have given freely of their time and expertise to help build up organisations supporting men.

And how has the male sector repaid those women? Every damn conference or training that the men’s sector are invited to ends up dominated by the Galop staff whose first and just about only contribution is ‘what about the trans women?’ and ‘why won’t you help trans women in the VAWG sector as TWAW?’ Every time they have a trans victim they make a point of trying to approach women’s organisations for assistance. Despite the fact that they have the expertise to deal with the trans woman – and often more financial support – they try and foist them on the women’s sector, or try and use the women’s sector for ancillary support such as legal advice. I believe it’s known as ‘forced teaming’ but there’s also gleeful pleasure in trying to make the Terfs deal with a traumatised TiM, and surrender their boundaries.

The willingness or otherwise of the organisation to take up a TiM’s case is then noted and the information fed back to the men’s rights / trans lobby so they know who to target – that would be Nia, Southall Black Sisters and the Centre for Women’s Justice, as singled out in the article.

I’d bet a week’s wages that a few of those anonymous women workers in the article are actually the men at Galop.

Sarah Ditum on the “be kind” bullshit:

Setting yourself up as an opponent of kindness would be extravagantly poor taste, especially now the hashtag #bekind is irrevocably associated with suicide prevention. This is unfortunate for me, because I am not a kind person; or at least, I don’t think of kindness as the quality I would like to be defined by or measured against in public life. I’m a critic, which makes it my job to say critical things.

That’s a crucial distinction. I make some effort not to be actively unkind, which I haven’t always been brilliant at, but like Sarah I don’t want that to be the thing that jumps out at you. (Fortunately it never will be.)

I’m a critic of sorts too, a self-appointed critic, and what I exercise my critic energy on is pretty much everything. Name something and I will critic it for you!

What kind of person do we want to hang out with? Someone who is self-consciously “kind” every minute, so that you start to feel like an invalid or a child? Or someone who has interesting shit to say?

I stacked the deck pretty well. That’s my incomplete kindness.

I think that paying attention to things — how they work, what they do, how people respond to them — is the highest sort of respect, even if sometimes you end up saying that the thing is flawed.

That sentence is why I wanted to do this post. Yes. Paying attention.

Kindness is more like basic equipment than a virtue. Sure you don’t want to be around people who needle you all the time, but you don’t want them damply holding your hand, either. Everybody paying attention is much better.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Still scrambling.

Trump knows that the Senate isn’t going to convict him no matter what defense he mounts. He can ignore the trial entirely, or hire competent counsel and heed their advice, or show up personally and moon Chuck Schumer and call the GOP Senators “my obedient little bitches, especially Ted Cruz who has an ugly wife,” and the outcome will be the same.

So Trump’s goal isn’t to mount a “good defense,” or even any defense at all, except in the sense of “the best defense is a good offense.” What he really wants to do is indulge his own emotional needs and put on a good show for his supporters. Ranting about how the election was stolen from him, how Sleepy Joe Biden is a Chinese Communist tool who also take bribes from the Ukraine, and the Mueller investigation was all a hoax, and COVID is a Democratic plot funded by George Soros, and Rachel Maddow kicks puppies, and I’m-not-saying-QAnon-is-all-true-but-I’m-not-saying-it-isn’t-if-you-catch-my-drift…. it all helps rile up his base, remind GOP officeholders that he still owns the party, and that all sets him up to keep the grift operation running.

Trump isn’t going to measure success in this trial by whether or not 34 GOP Senators vote to acquit him or 50 do; he’s going to measure it by the TV ratings and the amount of donations that come in.

Another scorching exposé of those selfish bitches who support women who have survived sexual violence when they should be supporting trans women instead:

It was at the tail end of 2017 when Cora*, a frontline worker for a south London organisation supporting women who have survived sexual violence, realised that undercurrents of transmisogyny had become a new precedent for her workplace. 

“I just remember there being far more comments like ‘Yeah we only support real women’,” Cora says. 

How dare they!!! How dare they support women who have survived sexual violence instead of men who have a fantasy that they are women? Have you ever heard of anything so selfish?

Both visibility and hostility were on the rise for trans people in the UK thanks to proposed reform to the Gender Recognition Act. As a result, many junior workers were attempting to ensure inclusivity for trans survivors. But senior staff, made up of cis women, responded by shutting down the conversation altogether. 

Don’t you just hate senior women who are also cis? Hate hate hate. There is no one worse.

Cora remembers one member of the counselling department declaring that it was “unsafe” for cis survivors using the centre’s services to have people in the building who had not fully medically transitioned. She was challenged by Cora and her colleagues, who explained that this transmisogyny went against the fundamental principles of sexual violence workers: that you must believe survivors.

Brave brave Cora and her colleagues. Evil evil evil member of the counselling department. Her name is Karen, right?

When Cora and her colleague refuted transmisogynistic claims, the goalposts shifted. Senior staff instead claimed they weren’t equipped to work with trans women because they wouldn’t “understand” their experience with sexual violence. Tellingly, one staff member who used such a defence said they would feel comfortable supporting trans men who had “experienced violence as women” – revealing that they didn’t recognise trans men as men. 

“There is a real focus on the penis,” Cora says.

So irrational, isn’t it, to think a penis=male?

But where does the antagonism towards trans people in the VAWG sector come from? Academic Alison Phipps, professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex, links it to “political whiteness”. Transmisogyny in the UK is focused on violence against white, cis women and “lasers in” on the male body as the source of that violence, Phipps explains. “There’s a lot of straight, [white], privileged [cis] women involved. Whiteness has a lot to do with it. Whiteness and class privilege.”

Yup yup yup, they’re all Karens; I told you so. Saying that men are not women is so racist and so white. So unlike Alison Phipps.

Weaponising woundedness against marginalised groups has always been a core component of white womanhood and political whiteness, adds Phipps. “It’s Carolyn Bryant [Emmett Till’s accuser] all over again,” she says. “[Trans-exclusionary feminism] is grounded in fear and, in some cases, a hatred of the Other and a deep need for protection.”

It’s not Carolyn Bryant all over again or the first time or ever, and refusing to agree that men are women is nothing whatever to do with Emmett Till – it’s revolting to use him that way.

Phipps believes many transphobic, white radical feminists also think that acknowledging their own privileges compared to the likes of trans women is tantamount to erasing their traumatic experiences. “It’s as if they think ‘if you tell us we’re privileged because we’re cis, that means we haven’t been raped or haven’t experienced these awful things’,” she observes. “Well of course you have and that’s awful and it’s because of your gender. But that doesn’t mean you don’t also have race and class and cis privileges.” 

There’s no such thing as “cis privilege,” and it’s wildly insulting to tell women that we have it. Phipps is maddeningly gullible and thought-free.

In the VAWG sector in particular, Phipps says there is the feeling of “living in the past”, with particular aping of the 1970s women’s liberation movement. It’s a notable reference point for trans-exclusionary feminists, many of whom experienced the movement as young women. But they’ve created a warped pastiche that erases contemporary critiques of white radical feminism that were made at the time, says Phipps.

In other words they’re witches; burn them.

Maybe feminism is just plain doomed, eternally doomed, because of shit like this – because of the New generation of So Much Hipper women who fall all over themselves in their hurry to flatter and pamper men.

Another “guide to transgender healthcare” bites the dust.

The Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) has removed a recently published guide to transgender healthcare from its website following questioning of the report by Gript. The report “Guide for Providing Care for Transgender Patients in Primary Care – Quick Reference Guide” had been written in conjunction with the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI).

Why would a professional medical organization write any medical guidance in conjunction with a political network? And that goes double or triple for a political network promoting the claim that people can be born the wrong sex.

Following publication of the document Gript reached out to ICGP’s press office and, when no response was received, directly to Dr Des Crowley, one of the studies authors, and the Quality and Safety in Practice Committee of the ICGP, with questions regarding TENI’s involvement in the publication – Vanessa Lacey, health and education manager at TENI, was one of the authors of the document. We also asked for clarification of the relevant qualifications possessed by the second study author, Dr Des Crowley, given that his area of expertise seems to lie primarily in addiction management.

This is one way they get so immovably entrenched. Somehow convince medical professionals that being born the wrong sex is 1. possible and 2. a medical issue (while not being something that requires cure, oh god no, it requires Support and Accommodation and Respect), and then convince them that they have to summon you to help with medical guidance. Boom, there you go, now being born in the wrong sex is a Scientific Fact, look it says so right here, and anyone who thinks it’s fantasy is an evil criminal who should be hounded into repentance or death, whichever comes first.

The ICGP, winsomely, hasn’t responded to the questions, but it has removed the “guidance.”

Sections of the ICGP document were taken directly from material TENI had previously been involved in the creation of, with some parts being word for word copies of TENI material. Gript asked the ICGP to clarify the level of involvement that they and TENI had had in the production of the document, and to what extent the document was written by TENI.

One section described puberty blockers as “reversible interventions” whilst making no note about the research limitations in this area or the growing concerns regarding this claim. The NHS, for instances, had previously claimed that puberty blockers were fully reversible but has now moved to say that “little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria”, that “it is not known what the psychological effects may be”, and that “it’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.”

FULLY REVERSIBLE. Maybe. We think. Or maybe not.

The document repeatedly directs GPs to consult with TENI resources in order to decide how best to work with transgender patients, despite the fact that TENI is not a medical organisation, but rather an advocacy group.

My point exactly. Why on earth are medical organizations handing over medical work to advocacy groups this way? Especially when what they’re advocating is medically nonsensical, and in practice destructive?

Maybe some day we will get an answer.

Huh. It turns out there are drawbacks to basing your defense on an obvious lie. What drawbacks are those? The lawyers who refuse to take your case.

With mere hours left before a deadline for Donald Trump to officially answer the impeachment charge against him, the former president was still scrambling to assemble a legal defense, announcing that he had hired two new lawyers after a five-person team abruptly quit their roles.

Trump has until noon on Tuesday to reply to a charge of incitement of insurrection, for encouraging the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January in which five people died. His trial in the Senate is scheduled to begin on 9 February.

Let’s pause for a second to remind ourselves that he got those five people killed, along with the two cops who committed suicide afterwards. The rest of us would feel pretty consumed with horror if we had gotten seven people killed by doing a criminal thing to further our own self-interest. I’m betting Trump hasn’t wasted a second on the thought.

The unveiling of Trump’s new legal pairing – one a Fox News commentator and former counsel to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the other a former county prosecutor who opposed charging Bill Cosby with sexual assault – fueled concerns the provisional return to normalcy since Joe Biden’s inauguration is about to be upended.

I don’t think two worthless lawyers who work for Trump are going to be able to upend much. I’m a lot more worried about Greene and Boebert than about Trump’s mobster lawyers.

The trial could be particularly dangerous, legal scholars said, if Trump builds his case around his lie that the November election was stolen and Senate Republicans effectively endorse that lie, in unprecedented numbers, by voting to acquit.

Multiple reports suggested Trump jettisoned his previous legal team because they were unwilling to recite the election fraud lie. Trump’s new lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor, did not indicate what defense they had planned.

Well they’ve barely had time to comb their hair, let alone plan a defense.

Schoen is an eager media presence whose past clients include Roger Stone, convicted for lying to Congress in the Russia investigation but pardoned by Trump. The attorney also told the Discovery channel Epstein had asked him to take over the defense of his case before the convicted sex trafficker killed himself in prison in August 2019.

“I don’t believe he took his own life,” Schoen said, demonstrating an ease with the conspiratorial thinking that has fed Trump’s election lies and taken over the Republican base.

In other words he’s an absurd hack. Who else would take Trump’s case?

It’s all for show anyway; the Republicans are determined to let him off.

“The ‘crisis’ over Trump’s legal team quitting assumes that the substance of the impeachment case will sway Senate Republicans,” the Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer tweeted. “Most already have their answer. Trump could offer no defense or he can go on the floor to read lines from the Joker movie – they would still vote to acquit.”

On the other hand it seems the lawyers have to be somewhat careful.

Any lawyer who repeats Trump’s fraud claim before Congress would risk legal sanction, analysts said, noting that in the midst of Trump’s attempts to get ballots thrown out, not even the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani would make certain claims about election fraud before an actual judge.

Interesting.

Another military takeover:

Myanmar’s military has seized power after detaining Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically elected leaders. Communications are limited, troops are patrolling the streets and a one-year state of emergency has been declared.

…

The army’s move follows a landslide election win for Ms Suu Kyi’s party in November. She has urged her supporters to “protest against the coup”. In a letter written in preparation for her impending detention, she said the military’s actions would put the country back under a dictatorship.

The military has already announced replacements for a number of ministers.

They gave civilian government nine whole years.

Too feminist, apparently.

With allies like these…

He’s “tolerated” this woman he calls a rude name because he thinks she might be of use to him, but now the time has come for him to denounce her in public, because he just can’t deny himself the fun a moment longer.

Women are so horrible. He’s so sick of seeing them “use” the abuse they have suffered, when they could be talking about him.

What a good thing he’s here to set us straight about what feminism is.

So true. Feminism is not about oppression of women, because that would be BO-ring. Feminism is not about “wallowing” in our victimhood because we need to be mopping the brows of all the suffering men, instead. How dare we use our victimhood as a weapon against…urm…well, against Mark Green when all he wants is one of the stupid bitches to offer to be his agent, for free.

The guy in the antlers wants to testify in Trump’s trial. I’m sure that would be a big help.

The lawyer for an Arizona man who took part in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol while sporting face paint, no shirt and a furry hat with horns is offering to have his client testify at former President Donald Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial.

Lawyer Albert Watkins said he hasn’t spoken to any member in the Senate since announcing his offer to have Jacob Chansley testify at Trump’s trial, which is scheduled to begin the week of Feb. 8. Watkins said it’s important for senators to hear the voice of someone who was incited by Trump.

Watkins said his client was previously “horrendously smitten” by Trump but now feels let down after Trump’s refusal to grant Chansley and others who participated in the insurrection a pardon. “He felt like he was betrayed by the president,” Watkins said.

Don’t want your lo-o-o-o-o-ove any more

Don’t want your ki-i-i-i-i-isses, that’s for shore.

In successfully seeking his detention until trial, prosecutors said Chansley went into the Capitol carrying a U.S. flag attached to a wooden pole topped with a spear, ignored an officer’s commands to leave, went into the Senate chamber and wrote a threatening note to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

But all entirely on Trump’s orders so isn’t that a rock-solid exculpation?

Not something to celebrate.

Single men, adopt by all means. Deliberately set out to take an infant from its mother so that you can have it for yourself, no.

I’m depressed to see what comes up when I google “single dad by choice via surrogacy” – part of the headline in Amy’s tweet.

The Observer’s architecture critic does a little swerve into medical critic in response to the Tavistock ruling:

To be transgender is not a lifestyle choice. It is not a fad or a craze. It is not easy, but requires courage and commitment. It is a part of who you are, like being gay, and, as such, denial of it can be annihilating. Denial of the medical treatments that can help trans people can also be devastating.

Well that’s a bold first paragraph. How does he know? How does he know that to be transgender is never a lifestyle choice? How can he tell? How can he reconcile that claim with the endlessly-repeated mantra “people are who they say they are”? How can he possibly know that’s true when the rules of the game are that simple assertion is all that’s required?

The rules of the game make it possible for people to choose it as a lifestyle, so how can he know that no people are doing exactly that?

How can he know, for instance, that no male people are exploiting the assertion-only criterion to enable them to compete against women in sport? What would be different about for instance Rachel McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy if he were doing it to win competitions rather than because it is “part of who he is”? How can anyone be confident that he’s not doing exactly that?

I offer these views as the father of a trans man, which has caused me to see and reflect on these issues more than I would otherwise have done.

And yet still not enough.

If you are a trans adolescent, you may find puberty unbearable, as your body changes in ways that you don’t want.

If you are a female adolescent, you may find puberty unbearable, as your body changes in ways that you don’t want. Girls have to deal with a lot as puberty gets going. Adolescent boys are all too likely to see adolescent girls as targets, for harassment, abuse, “flirtation” that’s actually more of a veil for sexual aggression, and outright assault. Puberty can be disconcerting for boys too but they do gain a lot of strength and muscle definition and voice resonance – a lot of markers of Power and Dominance – that girls don’t. Boys get a consolation prize and girls not so much.

Then he gives a rosy and incomplete picture of the joy of puberty blockers, then he minimizes the harm.

Blockers are largely reversible, though according to the NHS, some of the the side-effects are unknown. If you later decide that transition is not for you, your body will continue to develop the characteristics of your natal sex.

Good medical advice for an architecture critic.

The high court case was brought by Keira Bell, a woman who had believed herself to be a trans boy, and at the age of 16 was prescribed puberty blockers by the Tavistock clinic in London…

Wait wait wait what? She believed herself to be a trans boy? You mean she was wrong? How is that possible? If it’s not a lifestyle choice, how can it be possible to be wrong about it? If it’s a belief, how can you tell it’s not a lifestyle choice?

[T]he court paid minimal attention to the consequences for trans people of puberty unhindered by blockers. It thought it more important to protect transgender children from blockers, which are reversible, than from the effects of unwanted puberty, which in many ways are not. Doing nothing is not a neutral option and can be harmful, a point that the court did little to acknowledge.

But blockers are not reversible. They are stoppable, but not reversible.

It’s true, in a way, that either course is doing something, and neither is neutral – “in a way” because the whole idea of fiddling with one’s sex in order to attempt a simulacrum of the other one is relatively new and, I think, tragically futile. At any rate even if we agree that there is a fork in the road at puberty and children age 12 or so can decide which kind to have, it’s still not true that they’re equally ok or safe or likely to be the best thing for the customer’s next 60 or 70 years.

Well said.