Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Potentially damaging to children’s mental health

    Government and heads of schools differ over the “What To Do about students who say they are trans” problem.

    School leaders have described advice from the attorney general, Suella Braverman, to “take a much firmer line” with pupils who identify as transgender as “unhelpful” and potentially damaging to children’s mental health.

    In an interview last week, Braverman said schools in England do not have to accommodate pupils who want to change gender and are under no legal obligation to address them by a new pronoun, or let them wear a different uniform.

    They shouldn’t have to or be under a legal obligation to, it seems to me. Schools aren’t required to play along with all students’ fantasies, after all, so why is this one fantasy singled out for Careful Handling? Especially when the basic job of schools is to educate, and that requires not lying.

    Headteachers, however, who are increasingly having to navigate their way through these issues, fear that not listening to young people “would risk damaging mental health” at a time when pupils have already suffered during the pandemic.

    Maybe it would, but here’s the thing: maybe so would “listening to young people” in the sense of agreeing that they are the other sex. Maybe both are risky. Maybe both are risky but one is more risky than the other and it’s not clear which one. Maybe the listening and agreeing approach is more risky over time – a palliative now but the source of disaster in two or five or ten years. It’s really not the case that humoring the belief system is obviously and clearly and reliably the safer option.

    The attorney general told the Times that under the law, under-18s cannot legally change their gender, so schools are entitled to treat all children by the gender of their birth. She also said some teachers were effectively encouraging gender dysphoria by taking an “unquestioning” attitude.

    This prompted criticism from Caroline Derbyshire, the executive head at Saffron Walden county high school, leader of the Saffron academy trust and chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable – a non-party political headteachers’ group operating as a thinktank.

    She said: “No good can come of any young person being forced to adopt a gender they feel miserable with. It certainly won’t improve their learning.”

    How about letting the young persons dress (and cut their hair) however they like, and just set aside all the My Gender Is stuff until later. (It’s hard to know what “adopt a gender” even means. A girl isn’t “adopting a gender” if teachers continue to call her “her.”

    “Schools do all kinds of things to safeguard the welfare of young people that they are not ‘bound’ to do by law,” she went on. “I am a believer in rules and following them, but I think that not listening to young people and their parents on this quite particular and personal matter would risk damaging mental health.”

    But what if agreeing to young people’s fanciful and socially-induced ideas about their Magic Gender would also risk damaging their mental health? Which, if you think about it, seems pretty damn likely.

    Some schools have already adapted their uniform codes to remove distinctions between boys’ and girls’ schoolwear in an effort to accommodate transgender students. Dysphoric or transgender pupils at Brighton College, a private day and boarding school that takes pupils from reception to sixth form, can choose between wearing a traditional blazer, tie and trousers, or skirt and bolero jacket.

    That. Do that. Relax about the clothes, and then stop thinking about them. Don’t draw wild conclusions about teenagers being the other sex because they don’t like the clothes they’re made to wear. In fact why can’t they wear trousers and a bolero jacket? Why can’t they wear trousers and a turtleneck? Why make them wear ties for god’s sake? They’re not working in office towers. Loosen up on the clothes, and leave “gender” for much later, when it’s someone else’s problem.

  • But they are

    Even apparent adults do it. Roger Pielke seems like an adult:

    Roger Pielke, Jr. has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001. He is the director of the Sports Governance Center within the Department of Athletics. Roger’s research focuses on science, innovation and politics. In 2011 he began to write and research on the governance of sports organizations, including FIFA and the NCAA. Roger holds degrees in mathematics, public policy and political science, all from the University of Colorado. In 2012 Roger was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden and was also awarded the Public Service Award of the Geological Society of America. Roger also received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich, Germany in 2006 for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. Before joining the faculty of the University of Colorado, from 1993-2001 Roger was a Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

    Impressive. Serious. And yet…

    Updating: Naif informs us Pilke’s a climate change denier.

  • Motion 38 is wilfully divisive

    Holly Lawford-Smith says unions shouldn’t persecute women. Seems sensible.

    THE Universities and College Union (UCU), which represents academic and related staff in UK universities, meets for its annual Congress this week.

    …

    UCU has chosen to include in the agenda a highly divisive motion celebrating a lesbian feminist academic losing her job after a relentless campaign of bullying and harassment.

    Anyone seeing the images of masked activists on campus demanding the sacking of Professor Kathleen Stock must have wondered how political debate on women’s rights could sink so low.

    The UCU Sussex branch notably failed to offer any solidarity to Stock, who had been a loyal member for decades.

    The failure to support her right to participate in public policy debates about women’s rights sets a precedent that can only damage the labour movement.

    …

    Motion 38 is wilfully divisive. It depicts as “transphobes” anyone who holds “gender critical views,” which means the view that sex matters in a range of contexts, from sports to single-sex service provision.

    The motion denounces anyone who disagrees with the erasure of sex as a legal category, and anyone who criticises the corporate lobby group Stonewall, or opposes “affirmation-only” therapeutic approaches for children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria.

    Wouldn’t you think we’ve had enough of denunciations?

    Motion 38, “Defend trans and non-binary people’s rights,” reads:

    Congress notes:

    1. Government hostility towards Stonewall for its support for trans rights, including disaffiliations by the BBC and government bodies;

    2. Government’s refusal to implement Self-ID in the Gender Recognition Act;

    3. Government’s failure to recognise non-binary as a legitimate identity;

    Wait a second. What is a legitimate identity? What does it mean for a government to “recognize” anything as a “legitimate identity”? What other “identities” does government “recognize”?

    That doesn’t sound like government language to me at all. What business is it of governments what “identities” people have? The word can mean anything and nothing – by meaning anything it ends up meaning nothing. And then add “non-binary” to the mix and you have meaningless nonsense cubed.

    4. The EHRC’s [Equality and Human Rights Commission] attempts to delay anti-conversion therapy legislation for trans people and undermine the Scottish government introducing Self-ID;

    5. The Tories’ anti-conversion therapy Bill that dangerously presents equivalence between oppressive anti-trans conversion therapy and pro-trans affirmative intervention.

    Congress:

    a. Congratulates Sussex University UCU for their solidarity with student protests against ‘gender critical’ views;

    Ohhhh that’s ugly. That is ugly. They’re wanting the union to congratulate the Sussex branch for bullying and terrorizing Kathleen Stock out of her job there, because they hate her view that men can’t literally become women.

    b. Welcomes the founding of the Feminist Gender Equality Network, committed to opposing transphobia on campuses and more broadly;

    c. Resolves to oppose ‘gender critics’ and transphobes promoting ‘gender ideology’ and trying to undermine trans and non-binary people’s rights and promote divisions between women’s and trans people’s rights.

    They want the university union to bully and punish women who don’t think men can become women. They might as well go full Vatican.

  • Worth considering

    Sonia Sodha on the “cotton ceiling” issue:

    If policing people’s sexual preferences through the lens of race feels deeply unpleasant, when it comes to sexual orientation, it is wrong and dangerous. Yet we are in the extraordinary position where lesbians are now being told by some activists that it is bigoted for them to say they are not attracted to trans women who are biologically male. This is not a fringe belief: the chief executive of LGBT charity Stonewall recently said in relation to a BBC story about lesbians feeling pressured into dropping their boundaries: “Sexuality is personal… but if, when dating, you are writing off entire groups like people of colour or trans people, it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attraction.”

    What are “entire groups”? How do we define them? Are trans people the same kind of “entire group” as people of color? How about poodle-havers? Quiche eaters? Fans of Antiques Roadshow? How do we know when we’re “writing off entire groups of people” when there are so many possible groups to consider?

    Last week, a QC on the Bar Council’s ethics committee defended the concept of overcoming the “cotton ceiling” – the offensive idea that a lesbian’s lack of desire for trans women is rooted in bigotry rather than their same-sex attraction – and compared it to initiatives to promote racial integration in post-apartheid South Africa.

    Which outraged not only because it compares lesbians to supporters of apartheid, but also because it compares people who call themselves trans to victims of apartheid. It’s hard to know which is more disgusting.

    Cotton ceiling is a reference to lesbians’ knickers. It is a riff on the glass ceiling and posits that just as the professional advancement of women is hindered by sexism, the sexual acceptance of trans women is impeded by the “transphobia” of lesbians attracted only to females. It was Cathryn McGahey QC, a witness for Garden Court, who drew the analogy between this workshop exploring how “ideologies of transphobia and transmisogyny impact sexual desire” and South African racial integration and who implied it was possible in a non-coercive way to persuade a same-sex attracted lesbian she might want to have sex with a trans woman.

    And on what planet would this “non-coercive way” be found? Certainly not this one. Trans “activism” is the most coercive “social justice” movement I’ve ever witnessed.

  • “Feminist” Stella Creasy

    Stella Creasy continues to disappoint (and that’s putting it politely).

    But of course she didn’t meet “with a number of women involved in all your groups.” There are no such women. The People’s Front of Judea part is insulting. She’s being dismissive and contemptuous and hostile…to feminist women, when she claims to be a feminist woman herself.

    Would she like to hear from some gender critical women now?

    No.

    It seems she once held an online workshop along with Stonewall on…wait for it…misogyny. Yes, let’s bring Stonewall in to inform us about misogyny. Women who argued were booted out.

    There is to be no arguing with Stonewall. If Stonewall explains misogyny to women then women are to shut up and listen. They’re not there to argue with Stonewall. Stonewall is never wrong.

    For Women Scotland weren’t thrown out, but that’s because they were never allowed in. What do women know about misogyny?! It’s Stonewall that’s the expert! God knows they’ve had a lot of practice.

  • Thick as a plank

    More genius thinking from Billy Bragg.

    That’s not about trans women, it’s about violence against women!

    How the hell does he think he knows the difference? How does he think anyone does? How does he think women do?

    We can’t. That’s the point. That’s why all this self-ID nonsense is such bullshit – because it’s an open door the size of Texas for predators. There doesn’t happen to be any Magic Filter Device that turns purple when a “male predator” disguised as an innocent Trans Lady enters the women’s toilets. There’s nothing. We can’t tell, and we don’t want to be forced to have to try to tell. It shouldn’t be dumped on us. The end.

  • Subjects to avoid

    Piers Morgan says he did not either censor Kate Smurthwaite on his tv chat show. Kate says he did.

    On the list of alleged subjects to avoid was Morgan’s “vindictive obsession” with Meghan Markle, according to comedian and political activist Kate Smurthwaite…Smurthwaite continued: “They didn’t want me to get ‘too personal’ with Morgan. They didn’t want me criticising or seeking to explain his ‘vindictive obsession’ with [Meghan Markle].

    “The main thing they didn’t want me to say was: ‘You know that no matter how many hours you spend slagging her off, she’s still not going to shag you?’. True. Funny. Insightful. What’s not to love?”

    Not a thing.

  • Denying her agency?

    Stella Creasy says she met with the groups; the groups say we’d be happy to meet with you Stella, just name the date.

    Oh she has done so?

    Maybe it was trans sitting down with? Identifying as sitting down with?

    Updating to add another:

    And another.

    And one more so that’s ALL of them.

  • Planned Peoplehood

    Another one.

  • When the dividing lines limit and oppress

    The theft of Title IX:

    Equality for women in sports followed decades of struggle. Fifty years ago, President Nixon signed Title IX, which banned discrimination in higher education. This opened doors to previously all-male classes and led to many more female teams and scholarships.

    The result is a massive increase in women’s sports.

    Some trans activists are challenging aspects of Title IX, specifically its implicit acknowledgment of biological difference. And supporters, not least the Biden administration, say transgender girls should be permitted on girls’ sports teams. They have pushed for a federal Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, education, employment and credit.

    Only that’s not equality, it’s something else. Forced endorsement of other people’s fantasies, combined with a complete takeover of women’s sports by men calling themselves trans women.

    The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.”

    Some trans activists and academics welcome that. Nathan Palmer, a lecturer at Georgia Southern University, wrote in Sociology in Focus: “Nature loves diversity, but humans love simplicity. Separating males from females may be socially useful, but when the dividing lines limit and oppress, we have to acknowledge they are social constructions.”

    Limit and oppress whom?

    If they succeed in putting an end to women’s sports there will be very few women in sports. Apparently that’s the goal.

  • Collective frustration

    Today in the NY Times:

    The women on the Princeton University swim team spoke of collective frustration edging into anger. They had watched Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who swam for the University of Pennsylvania, win meet after meet, beating Olympians and breaking records.

    So we’re going to talk about this now? In the Times? At long last?

    The team met with the executive director of the Ivy League athletic conference, Robin Harris. They enumerated the physical advantages males have. Harris said she wasn’t going to change the rules in the middle of the season.

    The battle over whether to let female transgender athletes compete in women’s elite sports has reached an angry pitch, a collision of competing principles: The hard-fought-for right of women to compete in high school, college and pro sports versus a swelling movement to allow transgender athletes to compete in their chosen gender identities.

    It’s all about the swelling, isn’t it.

    Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner and head of the International Association of Athletics Federations, which governs world track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”

    The American Civil Liberties Union offers a counterpoint. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”

    The ACLU doesn’t “offer a counterpoint,” it insults us with lies. ALL women athletes are women athletes; Lia Thomas is a man. He – obviously – does not belong on any women’s team.

    Ms. Thomas herself has chosen silence. In March, after winning the 500-yard freestyle in the N.C.A.A. women’s championship in Atlanta, she skipped a news conference. She has of late spoken only to Sports Illustrated, saying, “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.”

    It’s a harmful mistake to refer to Thomas as Ms. Thomas and she. It’s doubly true in his case, because it’s not just that trans women are men, it’s also that it seems very unlikely that Thomas is even a trans woman. It seems much more likely that he’s just cheating, without any illusions about himself.

    Even nomenclature is contentious.

    Well of course it is – nomenclature is all there is. It’s the most purely linguistic form of “activism” ever seen.

    Descriptive phrases such as “biological woman” and “biological man” might be seen as central to discussing differences in performance. Many trans rights activists say such expressions are transphobic and insist biology and gender identity are largely social constructs.

    Gender identity is of course social, and stupid besides. Biology, no.

  • As the party continues to flounder

    So the Telegraph gets to report that Labour doesn’t know what women are.

    Stella Creasy was wrong to assert that a woman can have a penis, a Labour minister has said, as the party continues to flounder with the issue of defining womanhood. 

    What oh what is a woman? We just don’t know…except when we want to know which people to catcall on the street, which people to pay less, which people to forget to promote, which people to rape, which people to boss around.

    Anneliese Dodds, the Labour Party chairman, was asked on Sunday if she agreed with Stella Creasy, her fellow Labour MP, that a woman can be someone who was born with a penis. 

    Ms Dodds, who is also shadow women and equalities secretary, said: “No, I don’t agree with her. Biological females obviously aren’t. Of course, there are also trans women who have made a transition in their gender, but sex is not the same as gender. Obviously, I have a huge amount of respect for my colleague Stella Creasy, she has done a huge amount of campaigning for women – but on that issue around biology, I do have a different opinion.”

    The Telegraph points out that this is a shift from what Dodds was saying just a couple of months ago.

    This “gender” ploy is pretty absurd, really. It’s like saying adult humans can put on costumes and pretend to be Eleanor Roosevelt or Shakespeare or Rosa Parks or Vladimir Putin and we will all say they’re not literally those people but they are pretend-those people so we’ll be polite and play along with their game. We don’t do that. We don’t play let’s pretend games with adults…with the single large but clearly demarcated exception of acting, in the sense of movie and theater acting. We do the willing suspension of disbelief thing as audiences at plays and movies, but we don’t carry it on beyond that. Why is “gender” so different? Why is the word “trans” so magical?

  • Something we can agree on?

    Stella Creasy continues to…do whatever this is.

    How can “we” work on prison reform when Creasy insists that men are women if they say they are? That claim has major implications for how prisons operate, so no, we can’t work “together,” because we have a fundamental disagreement on who and what women are.

    There needs to be some honesty here??? From Julie and the rest of us disobedient women???? We’ve BEEN honest, over and over again every day. We’re not the ones who pretend that people’s fantasies about themselves are reality while the blunt physical facts about them are airy nothings.

    The kicker: I’ve learned from the back and forth that Creasy benefited from being on an All Women Shortlist: she got elected. Talk about pulling the ladder up after you.

  • The most offensive comparison possible

    Ratcheting the rhetoric up and up and up.

    He’s comparing people who don’t accept the claim that men can become or be or transition into women, to Nazi genociders. Nazi genociders.

    Many more like that. Real fury and disgust.

  • NJ’s own Hannibal Lecter

    Truth.

    From the Reduxx article Rowling links to:

    An inmate at New Jersey’s Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCFW) is speaking out against the transfer of trans-identifying male convicts into the facility.

    Speaking with Reduxx, incarcerated woman Miseka Diggs explained that the female inmates in EMCFW are “scared to death” of the men. Under the current policy, the men do not need to undergo any surgery, and Diggs asserts that most of the men are not on hormone replacement therapy. She stated that a majority of women incarcerated at EMCFW have past trauma, with many being victims of male violence, and the presence of men in the facility is causing them severe distress.

    Not, that is, the baseline distress of being in prison, but added distress at being in prison with some men who call themselves women. Another word for it is cruel and unusual punishment.

    Diggs described her anxiety at having to share a shower with one of the male transfers, whom she identified as Nikita Selket. Selket, formerly Neil LaBranche, is a 6′ 7″ man serving a thirty-year sentence for the murder of his roommate in 1995. The New Jersey Department of Corrections has recorded LaBranche as “female.” He is one of 27 men who have been transferred into the women’s facility since last year. The decision was the result of a legal settlement between state officials and ACLU New Jersey.

    What about the civil liberties of the women in that prison and in prisons throughout New Jersey? Does the ACLU take them into account? At all?

    It gets worse.

    The first male inmate transferred to EMCFW was Perry Cerf, who uses the name “Michelle Hel-loki Angelina.” As previously reported by Reduxx, Cerf is serving a 50-year sentence for the murder of Ecuadorian immigrant Flor Andrade. He accepted a longer sentence to have his rape conviction removed from his record.

    “Going to prison on a sex charge would be a safety concern for me,” Cerf said at the time. He boasted of drinking the woman’s blood after killing her. Cerf was later found wearing her clothing, driving her car, and had placed his own photograph over hers on the victim’s identification.

    Diggs told Reduxx that the day Cerf was transferred into the facility, she witnessed him being escorted by approximately 15 guards. As he was being moved down the corridors, she saw him attempting to kick down doors to women’s cells. While incarcerated in the men’s facility at New Jersey State Prison, Cerf assaulted other male inmates and at one point was placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day.

    But the ACLU has forced New Jersey to place men like that in the state’s only women’s prison. It’s not just stupid and reckless, it’s not just sadistic, it’s murderous.

  • The elites who dominate our culture

    It’s the elites. That’s the problem. Not fanatical gun-worship, not psychopathic gun marketing, not copycat massacres by gun, but elites – and not your old-fashioned elites who are rich and powerful but those new elites who are elite in the sense of not agreeing with people like Ted Cruz.

    Continuing where I left off –

    The GOP speakers shifted blame for the latest tragedy from the availability of high-powered weapons to an array of other culprits, such as declining church attendance, physical and social media bullying, weak families, violent video games, opioid abuse, lack of mental health services, multiple points of entry at schools and unlocked doors.

    The speakers also pivoted from condemning the evil of the Uvalde school shooter to vilifying “elites,” the media, Democrats, and “communist Marxists,” eliciting cheers from the under capacity but vocal crowd.

    “The elites who dominate our culture tell us that firearms lie at the root of the problem,” Cruz said. “It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness, giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil.”

    So Ted Cruz is not part of the elites who dominate our culture? Despite the fact that he’s a Senator? A Senator who gets a lot of air time and news media coverage? A Senator said to have a net worth of $4 million?

    Who decides which opinions are “elite” ones and which are the humble kind? Can we identify our way out? Can I be trans-humble even if I think people shouldn’t be able to buy AR-15s as easily as they buy lunch?

  • An array of other culprits

    Trump, naturally, chose the Go All-in Option on the guns question at the NRA festivities yesterday. Why not after all? Clearly the proliferation of automatic weapons is being nothing but beneficial.

    Former president Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), among other speakers, broadly rejected proposals for new restrictions [on guns] and called instead for more school security or mental health screenings, while issuing dark warnings of alleged Democratic plots to take weapons.

    “We all know they want total gun confiscation, know that this would be a first step,” Trump told the crowd in an auditorium about 300 miles from the site of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex. “Once they get the first step, they’ll take the second step, the third, the fourth, and then you’ll have a whole different look at the Second Amendment.”

    You’d have a country more like Sweden than El Salvador in the matter of slaughter by gun. That would be bad why exactly? The guys who wrote the 2d Tweak didn’t have automatic weapons to deal with, nor movies and tv and games full of gun violence, nor a long string of mass shootings by angry men. Tweak Two was about local militias, not an assault rifle in every pot.

    The GOP speakers shifted blame for the latest tragedy from the availability of high-powered weapons to an array of other culprits, such as declining church attendance, physical and social media bullying, weak families, violent video games, opioid abuse, lack of mental health services, multiple points of entry at schools, and unlocked doors.

    It’s fair enough to say that guns don’t carry out massacres by themselves, but it’s also fair, and urgent, to repeat as loudly as possible that making it horrifyingly easy to buy and carry and use an AR-15 does not help. If there’s a disturbed guy roaming your neighborhood at night shouting threats and scattering used needles all over the sidewalks, as there is where I live, the first thing you do is NOT leave a few AR-15s out for him to use. Deal with bullying by all means, deal with opioid abuse, deal with lack of mental health services – but also stop marketing AR-15s as if they were tennis rackets or six-packs of beer.

  • Fox refuses to comply with henhouse subpoena

    They’re busy stealing the next election.

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is now signaling he won’t comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee examining Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his presidential reelection loss. The California Republican will be joined in this defiance by other colleagues who played important roles in the attempted subversion.

    The same Kevin McCarthy very well may be House speaker in 2024. If Congress doesn’t revise the antiquated process that governs how Congress counts presidential electors, he could play a critical role influencing which electors get tallied, potentially swinging the outcome.

    If he can, he will. I think that’s all too obvious.

    “McCarthy and his allies in Congress are actively concealing the plot that almost succeeded due to the [Electoral Count Act of 1887],” legal scholar Matthew Seligman, an expert on the ECA, told me. “Anybody who would conceal their own role in such a scheme can’t be trusted to count the right electors next time.”

    It’s true that the committee’s subpoena of GOP House members is an extraordinary event. But the information that those members are concealing has to do with an even more extraordinary event.

    Consider McCarthy himself. He’s refusing to divulge information about his direct communications with Trump at the very moment Trump was essentially weaponizing a mob to intimidate his vice president and GOP lawmakers into subverting the electoral count, to keep himself in power illegitimately.

    In other words he’s being consistent about attempting to make Trump president by cheating and lying.

  • Their struggle to define the term

    Blurgh urgh urgh urgh what do words mean let’s just pretend we have no idea and never have had. The Telegraph:

    Stella Creasy is clarifying her position on the word ‘woman’. “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes”, she declares. “But they are now women and I respect that.”

    What other words shall we ask people to clarify their positions on? How about “pear”? Shall we decide it means “vegetable similar to broccoli”? Or “ocean”? Can we clarify that it refers to an amount of water that could fit in a thimble? Or “night”? Should we alert the world that it means the time starting with sunrise and ending at sunset?

    Zero women were born with penises. People born with penises are called “men.” In French it’s hommes, in German it’s Männer, in Spanish it’s hombres. It’s silly to ask people what they “think” about it; it’s not an opinion, it’s just a small simple fact. There’s no such thing as men who “are now women.” There is no such metamorphosis. There’s also nothing to respect.

    …as with all conversations with politicians these days, particularly Labour politicians, any discussion about women quickly turns to their struggle to define the term in the first place. Many of her colleagues have notably declined to even try.

    Because suddenly way too many people have decided that women don’t get to go on being women and saying they’re women and men aren’t women – suddenly we have to change all that, and punish women if they say no.

    Surely, as a fellow feminist, she and JK Rowling aren’t too far apart on the issue? “No, I don’t agree with her and I’m told I am a bad feminist because I take a different view,” she reveals.

    Of course you are. You’re a terrible feminist if you think men are women the instant they say they are (or any other instant).

    “As an old fashioned feminist, I’m still fighting the patriarchy. I’m not interested in fighting amongst ourselves. And one of the things that happens to trans women is that they are oppressed because the patriarchy goes, ‘Oh well you’re a woman, right that’s it, let’s pick you apart’. So it’s right for me to stand with my trans sisters and say: ‘Let’s fight these battles together’.”

    But they’re not your sisters, and the patriarchy doesn’t “go” the way you claim it does, and above all, those “trans sisters” have zero interest in fighting those battles with us. Their battle is all about bullying us to let them take over and shutting us up.

  • With a gun

    John Pavlovitz talked about the cult of the gun back in 2017.

    Enter the seductive cowboy fantasy of “the good guy with a gun.”

    It’s the deadly lie that men have been led to believe; that the world is in grave danger, and that we’re all poised to be the steel-jawed hero—riding in, packing heat, and saving the day by gunning down the bad guys and getting the girl.

    It is the perpetuation of a dangerously antiquated gender trope, where men all want to save and women all just want to be saved; that misogynistic myth sold by Hollywood, Republicans, and Bible Belt Evangelicals. This fantasy is incredibly persuasive and undeniably effective—but it is not reality. 

    I think it’s not all that persuasive, at least not to adults. It’s a branch of entertainment, but outside that context, I don’t think most people long to see a man with a gun all over the place. But it’s persuasive to all these loonies who buy the damn things, which is what counts.

    The National Rifle Association nurtures and exploits this same sick celluloid dream the in the minds of men; thereby manufacturing the very horror that these “good guys” imagine themselves rescuing people from. The NRA creates the deadly demand and simultaneously generates the violent supply. They flood the world with guns to then necessitate the need for gunslingers. They generate an endless, self-replicating revenue stream—and more and more people die long before they should.

    And the actual guys with guns won’t even go in, because hey the guy with a gun might shoot them.

    H/t Carrie Chapman