This week’s Jesus and Mo:

snerk

J and M on Patreon

Originally a comment by Timothy Harris on Call me them.

I feel as though the act of misgendering erases the person I have worked so long and hard to become.

How can you ‘become’ in this way? I am a bit long in the tooth now, but even in my mis-spent youth I should not have been able even to begin to think in these terms. All human beings are astonishingly complex, nobody really knows who, intrinsically, they are because your self is not something that exists in some pristine and well-locked little box inside you, and that might be changed by some effort of the will (who changes who?), but is in a state of constant flux & creation through your relationships with others, with society, and with the wider world, with things that are beyond your control.

I find in this sort of statement the long and unacknowledged reach of Christianity, with its insistence on willed belief, and the whole Western insistence on achieving things through force of ‘will’, a mostly meaningless concept whose existence and nature are assumed and never examined. What these people work ‘so hard and long to become’ is in fact a caricature, not a person.

SCOTUS says nah.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an effort to overturn the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania, signaling the high court would not go along with President Trump’s unprecedented efforts to win another term despite a decisive defeat in the popular vote and Electoral College.

The lawsuit was brought by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who argued a 2019 state law authorizing universal mail-in voting is unconstitutional and that all ballots cast by mail in the general election in Pennsylvania should be thrown out.

But the law wasn’t unconstitutional until Trump lost.

Kelly, along with several others, filed the lawsuit on Nov. 21 and requested Pennsylvania either reject the more than 2.5 million ballots cast by mail or allow state lawmakers to select presidential electors. Republicans control Pennsylvania’s Legislature.

Yeah see November 21 is a little late, because it kind of suggests that it’s not the ballots cast by mail that are the problem, but the fact that Trump lost on November 3.

The state Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the lawsuit on Nov. 28, saying the GOP had waited too long to challenge the law. “Unsatisfied with the results of that wager, they would now flip over the table, scattering to the shadows the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians,” Justice David Wecht wrote. “It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters.”

You’re not allowed to flip over the table because you lost.

Oh by the way the law authorizing universal mail-in voting?

The law was passed in 2019 with widespread support from Pennsylvania Republicans, who control both chambers of the state’s Legislature.

I think that was Trump’s last hope. The ship has sailed.

Gilead? What’s that got to do with anything?

More appropriation, that’s what it’s got to do with. The Handmaid’s Tale is about a theocratic enslavement of women. It’s not about trans people or the state of being trans. There can be books about women. They don’t all have to be about men who say they feel like women.

Also, are trans parents people who don’t have any children but say they feel like parents?

I’ve been stalling on this one because I know it’s going to annoy me so intensely. Via guest, MK Fain’s exchange with Kaitlyn Tiffany while the latter was working on her “Radical Feminist Women Are Evil” piece for the Atlantic.

First of all, KT is deceptively polite for someone who’s going to talk the lying shit about Fain that she did talk. That’s what journalists do, but given the dishonesty and venom of KT’s article I think it’s unethical.

But what really gets up my nose is her insistence on how hateful the radical feminists are, given the vast quantity of revolting obscene misogynist garbage directed at gender critical women (and at opinionated women in general). I’ve never seen feminists say anything even close to the familiar “I hope your disgusting dried-up cunt bursts into flames you bitch cunt hag” singalong aimed at JK Rowling and the rest of us. I’m betting KT hasn’t either, since she didn’t mention having done so when MK asked.

For example:

K.Tiffany to M.K.Fain:

– I know we talked about this a little bit already, but how do you respond to Reddit banning r/GenderCritical for hate speech?

M.K.Fain to K.Tiffany:

3. I think Reddit banning r/GenderCritical for hate speech demonstrates that male-run, centralized, and proprietary platforms can not be trusted to have women’s best interest at heart, and that we must create our own solutions. It is also a symptom of wider misogyny in our society that women speaking up for their sex-based rights, the very rights our feminist foremothers fought for, is considered in any way “hateful”. This is made even more clear when compared to content that is allowed on Reddit, such as violent pornography.

Whoosh, went right past the recipient. She still portrays feminists as hateful and trans women as their victims.

Tiffany:

— I just want to dig in a little bit more on the last question from my previous email. Speaking to a trans scholar on the topic, she pointed out that trans-exclusionary feminism is also feminism that wants to eliminate trans women by stopping surgeries and therapies and recognition of their identity, etc. I understand that you don’t consider this hateful, but was hoping you might be able to explain that a little bit more. I don’t want to mischaracterize your beliefs. 

It’s not “elimination” to fail to agree that a man is a woman if he says so. The man is still there. The man is still at liberty to think of himself as a woman. The man has no right to try to compel women to endorse his conception of himself, especially when it’s a personal fantasy as opposed to reality.

Tiffany:

In my own recent experiences on Ovarit, I’ve seen quite a bit of what I would consider hate speech.

Interesting. Anything at all close to this sort of thing?

So that’s how that went.

This was supposed to be a vaccine summit.

Still lying about it and still constantly changing the subject to it.

More on that Florida police raid yesterday:

Florida law enforcement agents searched the home of former state data scientist Rebekah Jones on Monday, entering her house with weapons drawn as they carried out a warrant as part of an investigation into an unauthorized message that was sent on a state communications system. …

The Florida Department of Health is the agency that fired Jones in May, after she helped create the state’s COVID-19 dashboard.

Jones has said she lost her job after she refused requests to manipulate data to suggest Florida was ready to ease coronavirus restrictions. A spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at the time that she “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department.”

Fun fact: insubordination is defined as refusing to obey reasonable and lawful orders – not just any old orders. If her bosses told her to manipulate data that’s not reasonable or lawful.

The search warrant was authorized as investigators tried to learn who sent a chat message to a planning group on an emergency alert platform, urging people to speak out publicly about Florida’s coronavirus strategies.

Still not seeing why the weapons were drawn.

Jones posted a short video of the raid online Tuesday, showing several agents entering her home, carrying pistols and at least one rifle. In the footage, Jones tells them that her husband and two children are in the house.

…

As the agents enter, one points their weapon upstairs. Jones says the agents pointed a gun at her and at her children.

It’s not clear from the video whether agents pointed a gun at Jones’ family members. The top of stairs are not in view.

But if you’re pointing the gun at the top of the stairs…even if the children are not yet in the line of fire they could be at any second. It’s a fairly terrifying sight.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Rick Swearingen denies Jones’ assertion, issuing a statement about the raid that states, “At no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home.”

They were just pointed at the top of the stairs where the remaining people in the home had just been ordered to come downstairs.

Jones says the raid and the seizure of her computer and other devices won’t stop her work in tracking and reporting COVID-19 data. And she urged state officials to focus on easing the pandemic’s horrible effects on Florida’s citizens.

“DeSantis needs to worry less about what I’m writing about, and more about the people who are sick and dying in his state,” Jones told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “And doing this to me will not stop me from reporting the data.”

A NOTHER one. This time, jarringly, in or at The Atlantic, where it stands out like a sore thumb gender marker.

So I opened it up so that I could start banging my head against the wall too.

So. Let’s get to it.

The Atlantic has it filed under Technology, and the subhead is:

After they were banned from Reddit, trans-exclusionary radical feminists became the latest of many toxic communities to simply build their own platform.

But it’s not really about the technology.

Kaitlyn Tiffany (yes that’s really her byline) starts by explaining the feminism of MK Fain as if it were an exotic plant.

After volunteering at a domestic-violence shelter and experiencing an abusive relationship herself, she committed to some of the radical feminist ideology most often affiliated with the second-wave icon Andrea Dworkin, which is focused on the roots and prevalence of male violence. Eventually, her beliefs radicalized further: She became convinced that gender is fixed, trans women are men, and trans-rights activism is just another weapon of the patriarchy.

Yes, it’s so terrifyingly radical to think that men are not women.

Then Fain found gender critical Reddit.

Among other online feminists, the common name for this group Fain found is “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs. The name the community has chosen for itself is the somewhat more palatable “gender critical,” though, as other feminists often point out, that name means nothing; all feminism is critical of gender.

All genuine feminism is, yes, but the kind of feminism that puts men who identify as women front and center loves gender and wants to have its babies.

TERFs constitute “a minority of a minority of feminists,” says Grace Lavery, a UC Berkeley literature professor and writer.

Kaitlyn Tiffany (KT henceforth; I can’t call her “Tiffany”) neglects to mention that “Grace” Lavery is a man who identifies as a woman. He doesn’t get to rule on who is a proper feminist.

Nevertheless, this tiny group has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the past several years, in large part thanks to social-media platforms. Anti-trans feminists have a presence in many mainstream online spaces, including Twitter, “radfem” Tumblr, the Black women’s beauty forum Lipstick Alley, and the British parenting forum Mumsnet.

One – trans people are tiny group, and they get a ludicrous amount of attention, and of rewards and favors and prizes. Two, we’re not “anti-trans” – we’re critical of the fatuous ideology behind it.

On these sites and others, they use many of the same trolling tactics as other internet-based fringe political movements to disrupt conversation, skew reality, and make the internet another dangerous place for trans women through doxing and harassment. 

Oh yes? Paid any attention to the way trans women talk about us ever? The threats, the images of dripping axes and female corpses and burning witches?

There’s more of this kind of drivel, and then a triumphant boast that Reddit got rid of the gender critical subreddit. I suspect the attention of most Atlantic readers is long gone by now.

Fain framed the ban flatly as persecution. “They use the label hate speech to silence speech they don’t want,” she told me.

Hello, KT, saying “they silence speech” is not the same as saying “this is persecution.”

After that it’s just ever-more-boring sludge about internet groups.

I gotta re-paper that wall now.

News from the office of the Texas Attorney General:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton today filed a lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the United States Supreme Court.

Uh huh. The old “suing states that didn’t vote the way you want” trick. When I say “old” I mean “I never heard of that before.”

The Michigan Attorney General is not impressed.

What happened to the whole idea that it’s a mistake to spend too much time thinking about yourself instead of everything else there is to think about? That idea does exist, doesn’t it? I didn’t imagine it?

Normally we think people who go on and on and on about themselves are boring, yes, but worse than that, they’re…well, the obvious: they’re self-obsessed. It’s bad to be self-obsessed. We used to know that, didn’t we? What happened to that?

Behold: from Science Mag: Why I came out as nonbinary to my Ph.D. lab

Who cares?

The illustration nails it:

Yes, every bit as smug as that.

But maybe the content is better than the title would lead you to expect?

No.

My hands shook as I sat down to write the email. “I wanted to let y’all know that I use they/them/theirs pronouns,” I typed. “I know that gender-neutral/non-binary pronouns are not a common staple in our language, but I ask that you please do your best to respect them.” Proclaiming my identity—one I had still not quite figured out yet—to a group of co-workers made me feel incredibly vulnerable. But I knew that if I wanted to survive graduate school, I needed to be open with my labmates, no matter how scared I was. After a few anxious moments, I clicked “send.”

“Their” hands shook as “they” sat down to tell “their” colleagues to go to the trouble of remembering that “they” must be spoken of in a tiresomely non-intuitive way that will take extra effort and attention to remember to use.

“They” should have just cut to the chase and said “Dear co-workers I ask that you please pay much more attention to me than you do to everyone else, because I alone am Special.”

And what does telling co-workers to waste their attention on remembering to refer to Someone Special by Special Pronouns have to do with surviving graduate school?

Never mind all that, the point is paying extra attention to Them.

During the months leading up to graduate school, I had been exploring the idea of using gender-neutral pronouns. I didn’t know whether they’d suit me; I just knew the words “she” and “woman” didn’t feel quite right when they were used to describe me.

Pronouns aren’t supposed to “suit” people, they’re not shoes or a haircut, they’re just a shortcut in talking about other people without saying their names every time, that’s all.

There’s a lot more fragile self-absorbed drivel after that; I can’t face reading all of it. What will these people be like in 20 years?

Brilliant. Trump scores again. Absolute genius.

Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered in late summer to sell the U.S. government additional doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, according to people familiar with the matter. Now Pfizer may not be able provide more of its vaccine to the United States until next June because of its commitments to other countries, they said.

Thanks, Don! That’ll be a few hundred thousand more deaths because you’re such a genius. What was the plan? That Ivanka would design an awesome vaccine and you could rake in all the profits?

As the administration scrambles to try to purchase more doses of the vaccine, President Trump plans on Tuesday to sign an executive order “to ensure that United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations,” according to a draft statement and a White House official, though it was not immediately clear what force the president’s executive order would carry.

Blah blah blah executive order blah everybody has to give all of it to us before anybody else gets any by order of me Donald Trump because I say so blah blah. Piss in the wind some more why doncha.

The vaccine being produced by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, is a two-dose treatment, meaning that 100 million doses is enough to vaccinate only 50 million Americans.

…

Asked if the Trump administration had missed a crucial chance over the summer to snap up more doses for Americans, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said, “We are confident that we will have 100 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine as agreed to in our contract, and beyond that, we have five other vaccine candidates.”

That wasn’t the question.

This is shocking.

I’m guessing the film is from a security camera.

I freaked out when the guy in front pulled his gun –

– and then he pointed it.

I did a quick Google and found she was fired from her job at the Florida Department of Health last May; she had been tracking COVID numbers.

Updating to add:

Trump gave the Prez Medal of Freedom to a wrestler today.

This prestigious award is the Nation’s highest civilian honor, which may be awarded by the President to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

Like, you know, wrestling.

How about poker? Any prez medals for that?

Bridge? Checkers? Monopoly? Hide & seek?

He’s trolling us (or maybe the wrestler gave him cash for it).

Another lawsuit stamped NO:

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia.

The lawsuit was brought by former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell and relied on baseless conspiracy theories to argue Biden’s victory, which has been upheld by two recounts, was illegitimate.

“They want this court to substitute its judgment for the 2.5 million voters who voted for Biden,” US district judge Timothy Batten said of the lawsuit. “This I’m unwilling to do.”

Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said today that the state would move forward with recertifying Biden’s victory after another recount confirmed his win.

Trump is being completely grown-up and reasonable about it.

Michigan trumpers are armed and dangerous.

Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson said dozens of armed protesters gathered in a threatening manner outside her home on Saturday evening chanting “bogus” claims about electoral fraud.

Armed protesters. Outside her house. In support of a criminal trying to steal an election. We’re on a knife-edge here.

In a Twitter statement on Sunday, Benson said the protesters were trying to spread false information about the security and accuracy of the US election system. “The demands made outside my home were unambiguous, loud and threatening.”

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel, in a separate Twitter post, accused the pro-Trump demonstrators of “mob-like behavior (that) is an affront to basic morality and decency”.

“Anyone can air legitimate grievances to Secretary Benson’s office through civil and democratic means, but terrorizing children and families in their own homes is not activism.”

Knife-edge.

Mmmm.

No, chum, that’s not it. Spend your month off to learn being passed over for jobs and promotions, being ignored at meetings, being expected to make the coffee and keep the break room clean, being lectured and shouted at on social media, being a member of the sex seen as second, as an afterthought, as subordinate, as irrelevant, as stupid, as feeble, as scheming, as ball-breakers, as whores, as frigid bitches, as outsiders, as the enemy.

The Daily Mail again, sorry:

Two transgender women who viciously beat up and stamped on a teenager after he mocked them in central London have admitted they ‘overreacted,’ but have slammed Britain as ‘transphobic’.

Tamzin Lush and Tylah Bryan walked free from court last month after admitting violent disorder, alongside a third trans woman, Amarnih Lewis-Daniel, who has not since spoken out. 

They were filmed beating up and stamping on a 19-year-old who mocked them and told them: ‘You’re not a woman. You need a f**** to be a woman’.   

A fanny, that is, which here in the US is just very mild slang for butt/bum/ass/arse, so mild that it may have dropped out of use altogether, but in the UK is rude slang for The Lady Parts.

Anyway.

Now Lush, 29, and Bryan, 24, have spoken about the incident, admitting ‘we took it too far,’ as they said their actions were ‘entirely wrong’ after they reacted violently, spurred on by alcohol. 

…

The trans women said they faced abuse every day, but spoke about the attack, which was filmed outside Leicester Square tube station in 2018.

Bryan, from Barking, east London, said: ‘You get people that make passing comments and by the time they’ve said anything, they’re gone – they keep walking.

‘We were telling him to jog on and leave us alone. This guy was adamant to let us know his beliefs and it wasn’t just a passing comment.’

On the other hand it was just a comment, as opposed to slamming him to the platform and then kicking him.

So anyway Rudy has the Covid. Serves him right.

Giuliani was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital on Sunday, a source familiar confirmed to CNN.

Nice for some. Ordinary people can’t get admitted to anywhere unless they’re gasping, and not always even then, but Rudy just checks in the day he tests positive.

The former mayor of New York has been crisscrossing the country to battleground states, leading the President’s long-shot legal battle to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

In other words Giuliani has been doing lots of traveling as the pandemic gets ever worse and the medical experts and health care workers plead with us all not to travel, and he’s been doing this stupid reckless dangerous to others thing in an effort to help Trump steal the election. What a sewer.

Giuliani has repeatedly disregarded public health guidelines, appearing maskless in state capitols, hotel ballrooms and at indoor news conferences in recent weeks. At many of the events, most of the other people in the indoor settings were also not wearing masks.

At some of those events, Giuliani was spotted shaking hands, hugging and taking pictures with people while not wearing a mask.

It’s a wonder he didn’t actually spit into their mouths.

He traveled to Michigan on Wednesday for a state House committee hearing that lasted four and a half hours, during which he was maskless as he pushed misleading claims that the election was stolen from Trump.

…

Giuliani also eschewed US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine guidelines after his son, and close contact and campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn, tested positive in late November. The day Epshteyn announced he had tested positive, Giuliani traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he addressed a group of Republican state lawmakers in a crowded hotel ballroom.

These are not good people.

Georgia Democratic state senator Elena Parent, who attended the hearing at the Georgia Capitol on Thursday with Giuliani, told CNN that Giuliani and his team “willingly endangered all of us to pander to Trump.”

“It was reckless and irresponsible for the Georgia Senate Republicans to hold an in-person hearing without requiring masks and social distancing during a pandemic. Clearly the COVID risk from (Giuliani) and team, who have been attending hearings maskless all around the country, was high and they willingly endangered all of us to pander to Trump,” Parent said in a statement emailed to CNN Sunday.

She added, “Mayor Giuliani’s blatant disregard for public safety measures in this pandemic is irresponsible and puts Georgians in danger.”

That’s who he is.