ALL genders get pregnant, all of them, ALL OF THEM I tell you.

Gaby Hinsliff at the Guardian chatted with Kathleen Stock. Some interesting points came up.

“I’m excited in a weird way, excited about my future,” she says. There is relief, too, at escaping what she felt was an “aggressive, intimidating environment” at her workplace of 18 years. Interestingly, while some blamed the Sussex standoff on a generation of students unable to tolerate views they dislike, Stock tells a different story. “Most of the students I encounter are completely open-minded and even if they disagree with me, which I’m sure a lot of them do, they wouldn’t hold it against me as a personal character flaw.” The problem, she says, was her peers.

Who are older, and thus, you might think, should know better.

[T]he backlash really began with a 2018 interview she gave to the local paper in LGBT-friendly Brighton, arguing that while most trans women wouldn’t dream of harming anyone, they shouldn’t have unrestricted access to places where females undress or sleep because “many trans women are still males with male genitalia”, words some find instantly offensive. Under the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall’s preferred definition of the term, denying a trans person’s stated identity is transphobic. 

But first of all, Stonewall isn’t the boss of us. No one died and made Stonewall god. Stonewall can prefer what it likes, but it doesn’t get to force us to define words the way it prefers. That’s all the more true when its preference is both stupid and dangerous. It can’t be some kind of firm principle of social justice or humans rights that everyone is required to agree with how people “identify” with no questions asked. Obviously. I could claim to be you and take all your stuff, and vice versa. We could all “identify as” Joe Biden; now what?

No. Just no. A “stated identity” that contradicts our perceptions can’t be imposed on us by law and bullying.

Several Sussex colleagues publicly denounced her on social media, although strangely, she says, not to her face. “No peer ever said to me: ‘Look, I really object to what you’re saying and I’d like to discuss it with you.’ They immediately went to Defcon 1: ‘She’s a bigot… arguing for single-sex spaces is like the Jim Crow laws [that historically enforced racial segregation in the American south].’” She remains fascinated by the performative aspects of social media debate. “The important thing is to show your tribe that you have the right morals and you could show that by saying, ‘I’m not with her.’”

Yes but why is that the way you could show it now? Why is it that and not other, better things? Why can’t you show your tribe you have the right morals by saying feminist things instead of reality-denying anti-feminist things? Why has this become the New, Improved, More Sensitive filter?

Festive.

On one level it’s obvious enough: it’s a big fuck you to everyone who doesn’t want to live in a weaponized social world.

Ok, noted, message received, but going beyond that – it’s a very odd piece of iconography. The massive guns don’t harmonize well with the big cheery grins. What are those people so happy about? They’re apparently at war with someone (or perhaps everyone), and that’s not a situation that generally causes people to sit down wreathed in smiles to get a photo taken.

What are all these guns for? Besides “fuck you”? Rep Thomas Massie is a Rep, i.e. a member of the House of Representatives, for a district in Kentucky. Does that translate to needing all those guns? Are his constituents trying to kill him and his family? (I’m assuming the other people in the photo are his family.) Is that why they have all that firepower?

Or is it the other way around? Has Thomas Massie declared war on the people in his district, or in Kentucky, or in the US?

Many wags are pointing out that he might as well have posed them all with giant dildos instead.

They just can’t get it right.

“Misandry” ffs. Have they been hanging out on shock jock Twitter or what? Women get killed by abusive husbands or partners. Women get raped with impunity because the rates of arrest are abysmal, of prosecution worse, of conviction worse again. Women get bullied and assaulted, women have their sports and prizes taken away, women are told to obey or be punished. “Misandry” is not a thing and men are not at risk from women, with very very few exceptions. West Yorkshire Police have had grooming gangs under their noses for years, but here they are whining about non-existent “misandry.” It’s embarrassing.

This was a Facebook post yesterday because it’s just personal and kind of chit-chatty, but actually the subject matter is of broader interest so what the hell, I’m reposting it here. Everybody should know about Chuck Pilling.

For a few years in the late 80s and early 90s I lived in north Seattle, and in my neighborhood lived a guy I knew of from working at the zoo, a self-taught bird man, who had a pond with all kinds of ducks on his property. It was about a 20 minute walk from me and I went there often to admire the ducks and the world he’d made for them. Then I moved, and that was that.

Today I took Cooper out exploring as usual, and ended up in my old nabe, at a tiny but mighty park called Licton Springs…which got me thinking about the bird man, and trying to remember his last name, which I couldn’t do. Chuck _____?? And I wasn’t sure exactly where the pond had been. He was a geezer in the 80s so I knew he wouldn’t be around still, but I thought maybe I’d read somewhere that his place was still there. I thought I would try Googling later, so we went back to Cooper’s car and I went toward that general area just in case, and at a corner where I thought it might be there was a great concrete emptiness in front of a huge new building…but then beyond the emptiness was a massive solid wall of trees and bamboo and I yelled “I think that’s it!” So I parked (and left Cooper, who was tired), and hustled down the block – the new building is a primary school – and the closer I got to the wall of trees the more I thought I recognized it, and I passed the wall of trees and there was a pond and an outbuilding and THE DUCKS.

IT IS STILL THERE.

I can’t explain how happy that made me, but it did.There’s an information graphic now, explaining the whole history. Chuck Pilling was the FIRST to breed hooded mergansers in captivity, also two other ducks. He got awards for it. He was a legend. He helped design the waterfowl exhibit at the zoo (which is a very fine one). I got teary as hell reading it.

Wikipedia on Pilling’s Pond.

The infographic that made me want to blub:

Add billions and egomania and what do you get? Egomaniacal billionaire paying part of the cost for a student dormitory in which most of the rooms have no windows.

The 11-story, 159-foot-tall Munger Hall dormitory was designed by 97-year-old billionaire Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the approximately $1.4 billion project under the condition that his designs would be followed exactly.

He’s not an architect. He’s not a designer.

Cramming thousands of students into a residence hall where only 6% of the rooms have windows to some seems like a social experiment, but a similar concept has been executed at the University of Michigan with the Munger Graduate Residences.

Munger Graduate Residences opened in 2015 at the University of Michigan, housing up to 630 graduate students in an eight-story 380,000-square-foot building. Munger, a Berkshire Hathaway vice chair who donated $110 million towards the $155 million project, wanted to bring a “transdisciplinary” living experience to graduate students.

A transdisciplinary windowless experience.

Janice Turner on the UK’s proposed ban on conversion therapy:

That young people were once tortured, raped, drugged and subjected to exorcism-like religious rites to make them heterosexual seems not just abhorrent but absurd. How could our hardwired desires be changed? Indeed, such practices in Britain are now, thankfully, vanishingly rare and, as the consultation states, “physical violence in the name of conversion therapy” is illegal already.

Yet the proposed ban applies to both sexuality and the more nebulous concept of gender identity. This has led to grave concerns, not from social conservatives but liberal, compassionate therapists, some LGBT themselves, who for a decade have noted a drastic rise in young female clients, typically same-sex attracted, mostly with profound mental problems such as depression, anxiety, undiagnosed autism or self harm. Many have suffered homophobic bullying, some sexual abuse. Now 75 per cent of referrals to the Tavistock GIDS clinic are female, a phenomenon reported worldwide.

There is good reason to think this phenomenon is socially influenced, but it can be risky to say so.

But therapists are already impeded by their own professional bodies, including the NHS, who have signed a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) prohibiting therapy that challenges a client’s avowed gender identity. Rather, they must only “affirm” their belief and help to facilitate transition, via referral for hormones and perhaps surgery.

There are at least two reasons that’s profoundly mistaken. One is that sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing or the same kind of thing. Another is that affirming sexual orientation requires zero further action, while affirming gender identity, as Turner says, leads on to transition and drastic physical interventions.

A group called Thoughtful Therapists fears the government conversion ban will enshrine this MOU in law. Proposals state law shouldn’t “override the independence of clinicians to support those who may be questioning their LGBT status”. Yet often, distressed 13-year-old girls are not “questioning”: rather they are categoric they are trans. Will the gentlest unpicking of their feelings be classed as conversion therapy and thus criminalised?

And being categoric about being trans is surely at least partly a product of the rabidly absolutist dogma around all things trans, especially “being” trans. Ambivalence isn’t allowed, uncertainty isn’t allowed, doubt isn’t allowed. If you think you might be trans then you are trans and woe betide you if you take it back.

The absence of rigorous gender therapy has been condemned by a growing number of detransitioners, mainly women, including Keira Bell, who brought a judicial review against the Tavistock. Why, they ask, were their mental health and family problems briskly brushed aside in favour of propelling them towards irreversible hormones and double mastectomies they now regret?

Why indeed? When it’s such a drastic thing to do?

It is seldom acknowledged that transitioning is more physically dangerous for girls than boys. Not only does breast-binding damage growing tissue and cause breathing problems, but testosterone’s effect on the female body is far more damaging than oestrogen for males. A girl will have a permanently deepened voice, facial hair, vaginal atrophy, probable infertility and uterine problems that often end in hysterectomy. Transition will be necessary for some but any girl embarking on this path should be fully informed and utterly certain.

And fully informing while asking about certainty is not conversion therapy.

This is fine, this is healthy. A woman who calls herself a man says radical feminists have no place in abortion rights.

Men don’t have abortions; men don’t need abortions; men are not the sex that is oppressed and punished precisely because it is the sex that gestates humans.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Any observable and consistent pattern?

So which other patterns exist in humans? Name one.

I copied this a while back:

Woman: “ A rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity. Also: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category. There isn’t one definition.” — PZMyers

I suppose we could use that a possible answer, but it’s still not specific. Suspiciously so. Because giving a list of those “cultural cues” would involve things like long hair, dresses, loving shopping and pretending to be shy. He wouldn’t want to imply that, though I don’t see how it could be avoided.

That second sentence looks to me like the transgender version of “God is the Ground of Being.” It sounds like it’s saying something deep and profound, but it’s empty.

Mostly, I see the acceptance of sex categories immediately followed by dismissing them as irrelevant as a form of Equivocation. “Yes, ‘female’ is a reproductive category but a WOMAN is MORE than someone who can have babies.” There’s a sudden switch from biological classifications to personal choices. It reminds me of creationists denying reductive physics because a PERSON is MORE than a bunch of atoms. “ We can’t get meaning from a blind process of evolution. “ It’s a category error an atheist should be familiar with.

Those who argue against creationism also ought to be familiar with the strategy employed by the Intelligent Design folks: pick little holes in the Theory of Evolution in order to convince others (and yourself) that it’s hopelessly inadequate, and then wheel in something with BIG holes as the satisfying replacement. All biology is fuzzy at the borders, but if there were no such things as species, evolution couldn’t take place. PZ doesn’t deny sex differences. Creationists agree that there’s “change over time.” After that, it gets murky.

Urgh. The parents were asked to remove the kid from the school that day and they refused.

The parents of the teenager accused of killing four people in a Michigan high school shooting were taken into custody early Saturday after a manhunt, Detroit police said.

They tried to flee yesterday and it didn’t work out.

The county sheriff has said that James Crumbley purchased the gun used in the violence just days before the school shooting. McDonald said the pair were made aware of disturbing, violent images on the day of the shooting and were urged to get him counseling.

“James and Jennifer Crumbley resisted the idea of their son leaving the school at that time,” she said during a news conference Friday. “Instead, James and Jennifer Crumbley left the high school without their son. He was returned to the high school.” 

Images that officials said were drawn by the teenager included a gun with the words “the thoughts won’t stop, help me,” and a bullet with the words “blood everywhere,” McDonald said.

It was the day before that a teacher spotted him searching for ammunition on line, and his mother said lol not mad at you.

They were urged to take him out of school and they didn’t so he killed four people and injured more.

The prosecutor told MSNBC on Friday that the teen’s parents “had reason to believe he was dangerous. … I believe they should be held accountable.”

She reiterated that prosecutors believe the gun used in the attack was purchased for the teenager.

“We have parents who bought a weapon for their son,” McDonald said. “They posted on social that it was his gun. He posted on social media that it was his gun.”

The couple did not tell school officials Tuesday, when they were informed about the images, that their son had a weapon, the prosecutor said. Authorities believe he brought it to school that day in a backpack, McDonald said.

lol not mad at them?

People have lost their fucking minds.

“for anyone who feels comfortable” she says blithely – but of course no girls will “feel comfortable” in that arrangement.

Lost their fucking minds.

Trans person explains why you are required to want to have sex with trans people.

So, how did we get here? How did not wanting to have sex with human beings from one community in particular become a legitimate preference?

By “one community in particular” they mean trans people. “Community” can mean anything though. It can mean “particularly smelly unwashed unsavory people.” It can mean rapists, murderers, Trump fans, anything. I think we should be free to not want to have sex with Trump fans or rapists. Hauling in the sacred word “community” doesn’t change that.

The othering of transgender people in sexual contexts is not only in the context of dating or intimacy. It’s systemic and as such it bleeds into most interactions and environments — dating and sex is no exception.

So we’re not only not allowed to have sexual preferences, we’re also not allowed to have social preferences? We can’t just like people we like and leave the others behind?

Ah well. Reading ahead it gets even more boring, too boring to argue with. What an arid pointless empty little world this person lives in, obsessing over being trans and daydreaming about forcing everyone to center trans people, and leaving everything else there is to think about unexplored.

When biologists clash:

Trans eggs or cis eggs?

Yes but what are their pronouns?

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on You don’t get to.

The idea of Schrödinger’s Rapist is a funny old one, at least in its implications for logical consistency. The premises are undoubtedly true, as far as it goes — other things equal, asking a vulnerable person to treat the unknown as benign is asking for them to become a victim of some kind of predator. That is likely the very reason fear evolved in animals in the first place, possibly even in single-celled organisms, for an organism that feels no fear is an organism that will be eaten before its fearful brethren.

One of the things I find interesting about some of those who initially championed the concept of Schrödinger’s Rapist, such as Reverend Myers, is how they condemned Sam Harris’ (yes, yes, Sam Harris, boo, hiss; let’s take the eye-rolling on either side at the mere mention or reaction to the mention of his name as read and move on) musings over profiling during airport security screenings as rank bigotry. I recall the two phenomena occurring relatively closely in time, and though I didn’t really connect the issues then, it occurs to me now that one might refer to unattached young men as Schrödinger’s Terrorist, and profiling after the Harris method as a way of collapsing that uncertainty without pretending that it doesn’t exist.

Though I do not wish to drag us back to 2011 and recapitulate that particular argument, it is indicative, I believe, of how we got here. Reverend Myers and Brother Dillahnunty would likely still give a full-throated defence of Schrödinger’s Rapist as an instructional concept, even as they scaffold the entire concept of gender with gobbledygook and moral pieties that allow them to dismiss the entire conceptual framework which led to the articulation of Schrödinger’s Rapist in the first place. This articulation, in fact, contains within it a fundamental pillar of gender critical thought; it is not a wonder that the priests and the laymen of the trans church have done away with it in all but name.

It is quite likely that Rebecca Watson would make similar noises; she might well throw out a bunch of rapid-fire nonsense out about how it only applies to cis men, and how cis men would never invade a woman’s space under the guise of being a trans woman, and how trans women are supposedly always and everywhere the victims of the worst kinds of violence and bigotry imaginable.

And, in the end, they will have all talked themselves into the abolition of sex-segregated spaces while still claiming to uphold the notion of Schrödinger’s Rapist, all the while.

Some sophisticated theology, that.

Big protest in Salford:

So a…fly is their mascot? A fly? What, because flies are so unpleasant, especially in large numbers? Because flies are attracted by rot? Because they have iridescent wings?

Anyway they done riz up.

We’re way more like the Axis than we are like the Allies.

The parents of Michigan school shooting suspect Ethan Crumbley have each been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter connected to the horrific Nov. 30 attack that left four teens dead and seven people injured, including a teacher.

It’s unusual to hold parents of “school shooters” (how lovely that we have a file name for it) responsible; there are reasons.

“Any individual that had the opportunity to stop this tragedy should have done so. The question is what did they know, and when did they know it,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said Friday.

McDonald said that on Nov. 21, a teacher at Oxford High observed Ethan searching for ammunition on his cell phone during class, and reported it to school officials. Administrators left a voicemail for Jennifer Crumbley and followed up with an email, but received no response. Jennifer then texted Ethan, saying, “lol I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught,” McDonald said.

On the morning of the shooting, Ethan’s teacher was “alarmed” by a drawing he made of a handgun, with the text: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” He had also had drawn a bullet with the words: “Blood everywhere.”

When alerts went out about a possible active shooter at Oxford High School, Jennifer texted her son, “Ethan, don’t do it,” McDonald said.

“Upon hearing there was an active shooter that day, James Crumbley went straight to his home to look for his gun,” she explained.

He didn’t find it, so he called 911 to say his son could be the shooter.

James Crumbley purchased the 9mm Sig Sauer handgun on Black Friday, four days before the shooting, and Ethan had flaunted it on his social media profiles, authorities said.

As if “Black Friday” were some official or meaningful label as opposed to a marketing ploy. Eat that turkey, spend that money, shoot that gun.

The police found two videos in which the kid talked about shooting up the school, and a journal in which he wrote about it. Organized and helpful.

He pleaded not guilty though.

Solidarity with those creepy guys on the subway and the bus and next to you at the movies and in a doorway and in a quiet corner of the library and all the other places they frequent! Visible dicks for the people! Get ’em out boys!

Andrew Tettenborn at The Critic tells us about a significant ruling at the ECHR on Tuesday:

Rita Pal is an ex-NHS psychiatrist, activist and journalist writing mainly on medical matters for the leftish press, such as the Huffington Post; for a time she also ran her own online paper, the World Medical Times. About ten years ago she had an argument with barrister and ex-journalist Andrew Bousfield, a supporter of Patients First (another NHS pressure group) and sometime Private Eye stringer who on occasion questioned her accuracy and objectivity.

The result was a bitter e-mail exchange. Bousfield went to the police alleging harassment, and in 2011 the Met sent Pal a so-called “prevention of harassment letter”, essentially putting her on notice of that complaint. Three years later Pal wrote an article attacking Bousfield’s competence and followed it with a number of vitriolic tweets which, while not naming Bousfield, could be read as referring to him. On this occasion the Met had had enough. It sent two officers to Pal’s house in Sutton Coldfield, arrested and handcuffed her, drove her to London and interviewed her for some hours before charging her with harassment and releasing her on bail on condition she wrote nothing referring to Bousfield. Eight months later the CPS dropped the case, on the grounds that Pal had said nothing not protected under Article 10 (the free speech provision) of the ECHR.

Pal tried suing the Met for wrongful arrest but failed. She then went to Strasbourg, saying that even though the actual charges had been dropped, her arrest itself had had a chilling effect on her freedom of speech. Here she succeeded. In the absence of clear evidence that the Met had thought seriously about protecting Pal’s freedom of speech, they had no business arresting her in such a way as would clearly discourage her from exercising her speech rights.

So does the same apply to Marion Millar? Ceri Black? Possibly.

… the days of the non-crime hate incident may now be numbered. This, readers may remember, refers to the practice of the police in recording against a person’s name anything said by that person if anyone else perceives it as motivated by hate, without ever asking whether this characterisation is actually plausible. The Free Speech Union and others have campaigned against this for some time, thus far with no noticeable commitment from the government. But since recording such incidents can cause real harms (if it appears on an enhanced CRB check, for example, it may prevent a person gaining employment in a sensitive field), one suspects the government may feel itself on thin legal ice in preserving the system.

May, or may just go right on sending Plod to drop a heavy hand on the shoulder of some evil feminist at her laptop.

Mississippi’s Attorney General Lynn Fitch pretends to think that overturning Roe v Wade will “empower” women.

In the opening brief she submitted in July, Fitch asked the Supreme Court to use Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade. She argued that abortion prevents women from reaching their full potential. When Roe was decided in 1973, she wrote, the justices maintained that an unwanted pregnancy would doom women to “a distressful life and future.” But nearly 50 years later, Fitch claims “sweeping policy advances” now allow women to fully pursue motherhood and a career, stamping out the need for abortion.

One, like hell they do, but even if they did, it doesn’t follow that there is no reason left to end a pregnancy. Some women just don’t want to, and it’s not a kind of thing anyone else should force them to do.

With this Supreme Court case, Fitch said in a television interview, God has presented women with an opportunity. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dreams and goals,” she said, addressing the women of America. “And you can have those beautiful children as well.”

But what if you just don’t want those beautiful children as well?

One of the economists who countered Fitch’s argument in the amicus brief points out that most U.S. mothers don’t have access to that kind of child care. “People from privilege experience a social safety net they imagine everyone else experiences,” said Kelly Jones, a professor of economics at American University who focuses on gender equality and welfare. When high-income people get pregnant unexpectedly, they can turn to family members or other members of their community, she said — or they can fly out of state to get an abortion. But many pregnant people have no one to fall back on and no money to pay for child care.

Oops. There are the pregnant people again – twice. If it were people who got pregnant we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

To Jennifer Riley Collins, the Democrat who ran against Fitch in the 2019 attorney general race, Fitch’s argument is “absurd.”

“You want to empower women?” Collins said. “Put in place systems that support women. You don’t take away from women that which is their freedom.”

The freedom to decide whether or not to house a human being inside your body is a pretty basic freedom.

Dillahunty is turning out to be quite a rich source of fatuities. Sinister fatuities.

We “don’t get” to treat men as a [potential] threat, so that means we don’t get to have any kind of refuge away from men at all, no matter the circumstances or history. We “don’t get” to be aware of the statistics, we “don’t get” to know how many sexual assaults there are and how few of them lead to an arrest and how few of those go to trial and how few of those get a conviction. We don’t get to know what we have known since puberty, which is that adult males are much stronger than we are and can batter us any time they want to. We don’t get to know that some men do want to. We don’t get to take precautions of any kind.

We have “no right” to exclude men. That’s it then. Open season.