I would share the originating tweet but he’s locked his account and I don’t follow him so I can’t.
He’s not some petulant and barely literate Young Person, he’s an adult academic at Oxford ffs. Yet he too considers it appropriate and useful to say publicly that Rowling is “spreading hatred” and far to the right of Marine Le Pen.
Updating to add:
Emphatic agree, except for the laugh part. It’s more disgusting than funny.
Oh gee golly guess what the Taliban have gone back on their promise to re-open high schools for girls. I thought they were sincere!
The Taliban on Wednesday abruptly reversed their decision to allow girls’ high schools to reopen this week, saying that they would remain closed until officials draw up a plan for them to reopen in accordance with Islamic law.
Well what’s the holdup? They’ve had months, in fact they’ve had centuries.
Tsss. We know what the holdup is. They have no intention of doing any such thing, and never did.
The keeping women in the dirt part is not some frill on the edge of their theocracy, it’s the whole point. It’s crucial. It’s central. It’s what makes them theocrats. Hatred of women is at the very core of their religion. God is a man and women are garbage.
Talk of their re-opening girls’ schools “in accordance with Islamic law” is nonsensical, because Islamic law=women are garbage, and sly crafty lying cheating garbage at that. Women are worthless, and also guaranteed to try to get away with doing their evil slutty womany things. Of course they can’t go to schools, which would be whorehouses where they learned how to get away with doing evil slutty rebellious womany things.
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Culture wars in a blender.
There’s something about all this ostentatious word-swapping that gives up the game, that exposes the distinction between the reality which transactivists can see just as clearly as we can, and the performance that they put on. The words are so jumbled at this point: if the words “transgender female” are just as likely to refer to someone like Eliot Page (a female who identifies as a man) as they are to Eddie Izzard (a male who, at least some of the time, identifies as a woman), the activists end up having to fall back on their senses to make out which is which: they look at an image of the person or they suss out from context clues what sex the person is. It’s always there: the fact of a trans person’s true sex needs to be known in order to correctly perform the collusion in the trans person’s fiction.
And now that the words have been taken away, it just emphasizes how easily we can all tell — trans activists just as much as the rest of us — what someone’s true sex is, usually just by looking at them.
I imagine a scenario with a police lineup: four men and one rather masculine-presenting woman are lined up for a witness to identify.
Cop asks the witness, “Is one of these five men the person who robbed you?”
Witness says, “Wait a minute. I see four men and a woman.”
Cop points directly to the woman and says, “No! She’s a man!”
Witness replies, “Well then how did you know which one I was referring to?”
Human Rights Watch on the situation in Mariupol:
Thirty-two civilians who managed to escape southeastern Ukraine’s besieged city of Mariupol last week told Human Rights Watch how they struggled to survive in below-freezing temperatures as Russian forces relentlessly attacked the city. They described men, women, and children sheltering in basements with little to no access to running water, power, heating, medical care, or mobile phone service since the siege began on March 2, 2022.
Russian forces laying siege to Mariupol should immediately ensure that civilians in Mariupol are not being denied access to items essential for their survival such as water, food, and medicine, and should facilitate safe passage to areas under control of Ukrainian forces for civilians who choose to leave the city.
“Mariupol residents have described a freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. “And these are the lucky ones who were able to escape, leaving behind thousands who are cut off from the world in the besieged city.”
It’s a long, detailed report, well worth reading.
All 32 Mariupol residents interviewed by Human Rights Watch described periods of sustained and often intensifying attacks with explosive weapons, from the beginning of fighting on February 24 to the moment they fled the city. Witnesses described attacks that killed and injured their neighbors as they took shelter in their homes, prepared food, and fetched water, throwing them from buildings and piercing them with fragments. The attacks also destroyed and damaged homes, businesses, and critical civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, collapsing and burning buildings in numerous parts of the city. The descriptions of the attacks and their effects are consistent with the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects.
There’s a section about medicine, a section about electricity, a section about food, a section about water and elimination, aka 50 people sheltering in a basement having a single bucket to crap in. There’s a section about leaving.
The governor of Indiana governor on Monday vetoed a bill banning transgender females from girls school sports.
The ACLU called it hateful. I guess girls don’t have a civil liberty to have their own sports.
Republican sponsors of the bill said it was needed to protect the integrity of female sports and opportunities for girls to gain college athletic scholarship but pointed out no instances in the state of girls being outperformed by transgender athletes.
Well, good that it hasn’t happened yet, but what if it does?
The law would prohibit K-12 students born male but who identify as female from participating in a sport or on an athletic team designated for women or girls. It would not prevent students who identify as female or transgender men playing on men’s sports teams.
Which shows that it’s not a “transphobic” bill, because if it were it would ban students who identify as female or transgender men playing on men’s sports teams.
Democrats argued Republicans were following a national conservative “culture war” with the transgender girls sports ban.
Why is it conservative to protect women’s sports and liberal to allow them to be damaged? In other words why aren’t Democrats protecting women’s sports with or without Republicans?
“Signing House Bill 1041 into law would have put the lives of our children in jeopardy,” said the state Democratic chairman, Mike Schmuhl. “However, this unnecessary debate has set a tone with kids that being transgender means something is wrong with them.”
See above. It’s not about “transgender”; it’s about males invading female sports.
Yes yes yes apartment blocks and art museums and theaters full of people sheltering from the bombs are being smashed but let’s wring our hands about the trans women who aren’t being allowed to leave Ukraine.
As strange hands searched her body and pulled back her hair to check if it was a wig, Judis looked at the faces of the Ukrainian border guards and felt fear and despair.
…
Judis is a transgender woman whose birth certificate defines her as female.
Legally, there is no reason why she should not be allowed to pass with the thousands of women who are crossing Ukrainian borders to safety every day.
Yet, on 12 March at about 4am, after a long and humiliating search, border guards determined she was a man and prevented her passage into Poland.
…
When Ukraine imposed martial law on 24 February, all men aged between 18 and 60 were banned from leaving the country. Since then, it is estimated that hundreds of Ukrainian trans people have attempted to cross the border. The Guardian has been told by activists and aid workers that, despite their legal status as women, dozens have been mistreated and pushed back at the borders, with many fearing for their lives in the event that Russia’s transphobic regime takes over.
Russia’s transphobic regime. Yes, that’s definitely the standout thing about the Russian regime: its transphobia.
It’s extremely grim that men old enough and young enough to fight are not allowed to leave Ukraine; it’s one of the few ways female people have privilege compared to men. It’s horrible and, cosmically speaking, grossly unfair, but war is like that. War is unfair. I find it simply repulsive that the Guardian bothers to whine about trans women not being allowed to leave in these circumstances. Have sympathy for all the men by all means, but to single out the ones who like to wear skirts is revolting.
The Guardian even took the trouble to take a snap of the trans woman who Wasn’t Allowed To Leave.
Excellent snap. Captures how womany he is. How could the border guards be so cruel?
All those people in the background – they don’t matter, they’re just cis people.