Good news I think, Biden’s choice. He’s such a lousy choice himself, he needs an exciting companion on the ticket. I know people have qualms about some of Harris’s work as a prosecutor, but I think she’ll rock it anyway.

Once a rival for the top job, the California senator of Indian-Jamaican heritage had long been considered the front-runner for the number two slot.

The former California attorney general has been urging police reform amid nationwide anti-racism protests.

…

Mr Biden had faced mounting calls to pick a black woman as his running mate in recent months as the nation was convulsed by social unrest over racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans, a key voting bloc to the Democratic Party.

What a good thing there were several highly qualified black women with relevant experience to choose from.

I’m chuffed. It’s nice to have a bit of good news for a change.

Now that I’ve calmed down a little I’ll tackle another chunk of Terfwarsanintro.

By positioning (cis, white) ‘females’ as a category uniquely vulnerable to the threat of ‘male’ violence (and especially ‘biological’ male sexual violence), trans-exclusionary arguments around toilet access – including those advanced by self-proclaimed feminist groups – lend support to the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men).

These discourses have racist undertones, as the implicit whiteness of the women who are the subject of protection means that racialised and especially Black women and non-binary people are more likely to be considered dangerously masculine (Patel, 2017).

It would be funny if it weren’t so infuriating, the sleight of hand of it. They arbitrarily slap down this “(white)” card and then use it for yet more arbitrary “implicit” bullshit – they build assumption on assumption on assumption, none of it backed up by anything more than parentheses or the word “implicit.” It’s such obvious bullshit. “The implicit whiteness of the women” – but who says the whiteness is implicit?? Or explicit or relevant at all? And by the way what color are you?

Moreover, discourses that position trans women and non-binary people as a ‘threat’ to cis women elude how (white) cis women’s ability to claim a position of vulnerability in this context is, itself, a reflection of the power that (white) cis women have over trans women (as well as racialised subjects of all genders).

Karen, I tell you. Karen Karen Karen. No other argument is needed.

Women don’t have power over men. Women don’t rape men, women don’t assault men in the street, women don’t kill men and then get away with it because they call it “rough sex.” Women as a class don’t have power over men as a class. Women as a class therefore don’t have power over trans women as a class (if trans women even are a class).

One’s ability to be recognised or awarded a position as ‘vulnerable’ is conditioned by whiteness and gender normativity.

Yes it’s such a privilege to be (and thus “awarded a position as”) vulnerable. The stats on violence against women make our favorite bedtime reading.

I think that’ll be enough.

David Kaufman in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago:

Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.

By “create a family” he doesn’t mean adoption or step-parenthood, he means gestation. But of course the ability to gestate is determined by biology and by sex (not gender). It’s not something men can do. One can “envision a future” in which that’s not the case all one likes, but as of now that’s how it is. People burble about “uterus transplants” but it’s not that simple, to put it mildly.

“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers L.G.B.T.s face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”

Like for instance renting women.

Mr. Poole-Dayan and others believe infertility should not be defined as a physical condition but a social one. They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making.

Rather, their specific life circumstances, like being a man with a same-sex partner, have rendered them unable to conceive or carry a child to term without medical intervention. A category of “social infertility” would provide those biologically unable to form families with the legal and medical mechanisms to do so.

Er, no. Men are unable to conceive or carry a child to term no matter what. It’s not only if they have a same-sex partner, it’s no matter what partner they have – men don’t do the conceiving and carrying part. They can’t. This valuable talent and arduous labor is something only women can do, which is, ironically, probably the foundational reason for male dominance. “I need her to do this thing for me so I gotta control her or else.”

Fertility equality activists are asking, at a minimum, for insurance companies to cover reproductive procedures like sperm retrieval, egg donation and embryo creation for all prospective parents, including gay couples who use surrogates. Ideally, activists would also like to see insurance cover embryo transfers and surrogacy fees. This would include gay men who would transfer benefits directly to their surrogate.

Their rented woman’s body.

“But what about gay men?” Captain Aguilera said. “Why aren’t we on equal footing? The whole process made me feel like giving up my dream of becoming a parent.”

Gay men aren’t on equal footing because they are men – men don’t have the bodies that gestate babies.

Women are not machines to rent for baby-making purposes.

Reading the intro part 2.

 Organisations resisting self-determination discursively position it as ‘dangerous’, arguing that it enables ‘men’ (a category frequently presumed to encompass trans women and non-binary people assigned male at birth) unfettered access to women-only spaces. Trans people and allies often describe proponents of this approach as ‘TERFs’ because they tend to support trans women’s/girls’ exclusion from spaces such as women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, shelters and feminist groups.

That’s because trans women and girls are not literally women and girls, they are men and boys who have adopted the label “trans.” The label is just a label. It’s just a word. It’s not magic. I could say I’m a trans house or giraffe or oak tree, and I wouldn’t literally be any of those things. Feminist women want to “exclude” male people from women’s shelters and rape crisis centers because they are male people, whatever label they apply to themselves. This isn’t such an eccentric view that it requires a pejorative name.

Proponents of anti-trans ‘bathroom bills’ argued that they were required to protect the safety of cis⁴ women, who could supposedly become victims of harm committed by trans women and non-binary people, who, in turn, were (implicitly or explicitly) positioned as ‘men’ who ‘identify as’ women.

The scorn in “supposedly” is interesting. Do the authors genuinely think that trans women can’t possibly ever do harm to women in private closed spaces? If so I have to wonder how they line that up with the known facts.

Yet, this notion of toilet ‘safety’ is part of a wider protectionist politics around (cis) women’s bodies that function to protect idealised notions of white female vulnerability (Patel, 2017; see also Koyama, this collection).

White? What’s “white” doing there? Nothing; it’s just another rock to throw.

The cultural positioning of trans women as dangerous to cis women relies on gendered conceptualisations of (cis, implicitly white) women as necessarily fragile in relation to (cis) men, who in turn are conceptualised as having superior physical (and sexual) prowess.

Oh implicitly white – of course. Implicitly according to whom? Well, the person who typed the word, and what more do you want?! This is top professional academic sociology right here so have some respect. Karens, white fragility, implicitly white, cis, boop boop beep beep.

Also, by the way, kindly just throw overboard everything we’ve ever known about male strength compared to female strength and the connection to sexual violence – that is all ancient cis history now…except when we’re talking about Jeffrey Epstein, at which point the clock reverses for as long as it takes.

By positioning (cis, white) ‘females’ as a category uniquely vulnerable to the threat of ‘male’ violence (and especially ‘biological’ male sexual violence), trans-exclusionary arguments around toilet access – including those advanced by self-proclaimed feminist groups – lend support to the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men).

Just look at that shit. The parenthetical (white)s proliferate like fleas on a sweaty dog. This, my friends, this is appropriation – theft of anti-racism for the purpose of throwing shit at feminist women who won’t obey the orders to call men “women.”

It’s pissed me off enough that I’m pausing it for now.

Reading the intro part one.

Intense debates over trans issues, feminism, anti-trans ideologies, and the very language employed by various agents in these debates are not just terminological disputes or about how sex and gender should be conceptualised. They are also debates about information, and how people relate to it in a time of information overload; they are debates about truth, and how people relate to truth in a ‘post-truth era’. The trans/feminist conflicts we refer to as the ‘TERF wars’ reflect the current conditions of our time in which public discourse is dominated by political polarisation, deepened by the proliferation of misinformation and distrust in ‘experts’ whose knowledge may not speak to individuals’ cultural common sense. These are contemporary phenomena with deep historical roots, which must be interrogated to make sense of the current landscape.

Analyses of trans-exclusionary rhetoric provide an important contribution to sociology. This is not only because they offer an insight into the production of ideologically ossified, anti-evidential politics (including within academic environments), but also because of what can be learned about power relations. Questions of whose voices are heard, who is found to be convincing, what is considered a ‘reasonable concern’ and by who, and how these discourses impact marginalised groups are key elements of sociological enquiry.

So we can see how this is going to go. We already knew, thanks to the title of the intro for a start, but this makes it all that much clearer. It’s the Bad feminists – the TERFS as they so technically put it – who use rhetoric, which we the Good feminists will analyse from our position of goodness and correctitude. We the Good feminists of course don’t use rhetoric, we use that other stuff, that is not rhetoric. The TERFS are ideologically ossified and anti-evidence, while we are ideologically organic and pro-evidence (like, for instance, what people tell us about their souls). Bad feminists by the way are not marginalised. They have all the power and privilege. Make a note of it.

They say there’s a backlash, and give a quick history of it.

To understand the nature of the backlash, two important points are worth unpacking regarding what, exactly, is being opposed and espoused by groups like WPUK and FPFW. The first concerns how sex and gender are being operationalised: a central concept mobilised by these organisations is ‘women’s sex-based rights’, and this concept is used in ways that emphasise the distinction of sex (as ‘biological’ or material reality) from gender (as social role or ideology).

In other words the physical body as opposed to the thoughts in the head.

There are in fact reasons for not losing sight of the fact that male bodies exist, and are different from female bodies, and have ways of harming female bodies no matter what the thoughts in the head are. A huge man in a dress remains a huge man, and huge men can be dangerous to women. We’re expected to pretend that’s not true if the huge man says he’s a woman, but see above – there are reasons for not pretending in that way.

Organisations opposed to gender self-determination have argued not only that there is a clear distinction between sex and gender, but also that UK laws such as the GRA and the Equality Act 2010 should be interpreted in such a way that trans women are understood as ‘male’, trans men as ‘female’, and non-binary people as implicitly delusional (Fair Play for Women, 2017). That is to say, the view of these organisations is that while ‘gender’ may be subject to change, ‘sex’ is immutable. Notably, this position ignores decades of feminist scholarship which argue that gender and sex are discursively co-constituted…

Ahhhhhhhh discursively co-constituted – well that changes everything, doesn’t it.

Doesn’t it.

No.

That’s the whole point. No. No, it doesn’t.

Talk about institutional capture…

Table of contents.

“Sex wars and (trans) gender panics” by Sally Hines.

“Whose feminism is it anyway? The unspoken racism of the trans inclusion debate” – I bet we can guess which side of the “debate” is riddled with unspoken racism.

“Feminism will be trans-inclusive or it will not be: Why do two cis-hetero woman educators support trans feminism?”

“Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ’embodiment fantasies’ model” – by Julia Serano.

“A critical commentary on ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria'”

And more.

Excuse me, I gotta read “TERF wars: An introduction,” which is open access.

A publisher – in fact Hachette, which publishes JK Rowling – asked the trans-cult group Mermaids to check an article for thought crime. The Times reports:

JK Rowling’s publisher invited the transgender activist group Mermaids to review an article in a magazine for A-level law students, which summarised a High Court test case on freedom of expression.

To review an article! Mermaids! Why??!!

The case made headlines in February when the judge likened police to the Gestapo or the Stasi for the way they responded to Harry Miller, 55, a businessman accused of sending transphobic tweets on social media.

Humberside police visited Miller’s place of work and told him his tweets would be recorded as a “non-crime hate incident”. They included a poem about transgender people and one saying: “I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me.”

Not a police matter, we thought at the time and still think. Not even close to being a police matter. Also, about all those actual threats that are tweeted at women day in and day out? That the police cheerfully ignore from one decade to the next?

Management at Hodder Education, part of Hachette UK, referred the article on the ruling to Mermaids, asking it to suggest “examples we can use to counteract the tone and opinions in the piece” and to suggest changes to “anything you feel is untrue, unfair and/or offensive”.

…

In response to the invitation to suggest changes, the head of legal and policy at Mermaids sent four closely typed pages, including a comment that the article “doesn’t come over as balanced”.

Even before this, Hodder had heavily edited the court report, removing two-thirds of the original, explaining: “We also have to be very careful how we present certain views.”

Publishers and cops have never carried on like this about women or immigrants or the working class – why are the rules so different for trans people?

The author, Ian Yule, protested to the publisher that he had not introduced personal opinions in the article, which was intended to update A-level pupils and their teachers on the court ruling.

“This article contained little or no commentary by me, and no comments whatsoever on the issue of transgenderism,” he said. “My article did not express my own thoughts or beliefs but was a straightforward and accurate report of a High Court judgment.”

He added: “If the judgment of a respected High Court judge is likely to upset such students and their teachers, they have no business studying or teaching this subject.”

In its justification for the intervention, a Hodder editor told him: “The claimant’s [Harry Miller’s] views and the judge’s [Mr Justice Julian Knowles’s] comments about transgender issues would be offensive to most of our readers and our staff.”

Why? Why are people’s offensOmeters set to go off so easily on this subject and this subject alone? Why? Why? Why?

The publisher’s behaviour so angered Yule that he resigned as chairman of the editorial board of A-Level Law Review. He wrote to colleagues: “In the process of ‘reviewing’ my article [Mermaids] effectively destroyed it.”

And what business Mermaids had reviewing it in the first place is unfathomable.

 James Benefield, a senior executive at Hodder, had sent Yule the Mermaids review and told him: “Mermaids have requested quite a few changes here. It is important we do follow all of the attached advice — not only is it from a trans-specialist organisation, it is also from the company lawyer who felt they were best placed to review the piece.”

What exactly is a “trans-specialist organisation”? Mermaids is a fanatical activist organization, one that energetically encourages people to get mutilated to match their fantasies about being the other gender. It’s ludicrous to treat them as some sort of experts who need to vet articles on court rulings.

He stated that it was “an issue of balance rather than of censorship or freedom of speech” and made a mysterious reference to “various occurrences in other things we’ve published”.

Balance? Balance? So we can’t just have X’s take and Y’s take and leave it at that, we have to make them “balanced” so that they say the same thing?

Hodder said: “In editorial disputes, it is good practice to go to an external body for a second opinion. We approached a couple of organisations for this. [Yule] chose not to engage with the Mermaids review or, for the most part, our edits. We work with many different organisations and individuals to review content, including authors, academics, charities and special interest groups.”

What was the dispute? Was there a dispute before management at Hodder decided to let the wackos at Mermaids “review” an article about a court ruling in case Mermaids thought it was icky?

People have lost their damn minds.

Sir has his wars mixed up (also the 1918 flu was in 1918, not 1917).

LGBT+ Labour has put out a stupid bullying “statement” on Labour MP Rosie Duffield who had the unmitigated temerity to say that it’s only women who have a cervix.

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community, and the trans people, and trans individuals, and all trans people, and trans groups, and trans collectives, and each and every trans person, and all the trans people, and every single trans person, and have we said it enough ways yet?

But solidarity never with women. Fuck women; women are the enemy. Karens.

It is with great sadness that we have decided to put out this Statement on Rosie Duffield.

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community.

LGBT+ Labour would like to express our deep disappointment in the actions of Rosie Duffield. We believe that her previous tweets and lack of apology is absolutely unacceptable.

Rosie Duffield’s initial comments which sparked concern claimed, “only women have a cervix”. This statement is very troubling as it ignores both trans men and numerous non-binary people’s existence. Many Labour activists, especially from the trans community, raised their anxieties over this exclusionary language and were met with hostility. With already rising levels of hatred towards the trans community, the bare minimum to expect from Labour MPs is full solidarity and support.

Furthermore, Rosie Duffield then shared a Spectator article that referred to the “trangender thought police” and described the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights as “authoritarian… petulant youngsters”. It is clear that this has contributed towards a situation where our party has become a space where trans and non-binary members do not feel as safe and protected as they should.

The cause for trans rights should be integral to the Labour Party, as the party of equality in our country. Trans rights are human rights, and are workers’ rights, and LGBT+ Labour will always defend our members.

We have spent the past few days reaching out to Rosie Duffield and her office to attempt to initiate steps towards an apology and reparations. Since we have approached Rosie Duffield, she has continued to like and share tweets from people known by the trans community as hostile to their rights. Unfortunately we have not reached a conclusion that our committee sees as an adequate response for her repeated actions.

We are deeply disappointed, and know that in order to regain trust in our party from the trans community, we must now publicly call on the leadership of the party to take measurable action on this situation. We will be writing to Keir Starmer on behalf of our members to ask for a response.

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community.

These people are such sniveling sniffing creeping pointing whining demanding poking prodding oily creeps I wouldn’t want anything to do with a party that has them in it. If this is Putin’s work he’s a genius.

Originally a comment by iknklast on In middle-of-nowhere Arizona.

Omar, as someone who is a higher education faculty member, I feel the answer to the question of what is the product is of utmost importance. As you said, many see the diploma/graduate as the product. It is not. You said the experience. I think that is important, giving the student experiences that no other setting offers; they may or may not enhance their future career, but they add richness to life.

But the most important product of education is…education. Learning how to think. Learning some facts so you can think about things. Learning how to learn. Learning how to work with others

The product is education; the diploma/degree/certificate is just a certificate of authenticity, verifying that said student learned (or was able to fake learning well enough to fool the faculty, all too easy with some faculty) what the paper says the learned.

Because we get this wrong – the product misidentified – we make huge mistakes in how we approach education. We approach it toward a goal of success, but we identify success as the paper, not as what lies behind the paper. A student who does not complete the degree, but learns tons, is more use than one that completes the degree but learns nothing. (Trump comes to mind for the last; Dubya, too.)

Many of the studies I see on “effective” education seem to interpret success as ‘student is happy’, because few of them that I have seen have actually shown any improvement in learning with the new methods. Those that do, the effect size is so small, and they get significance by generating a larger n, it isn’t worth throwing out things that are working as well and remaking the entire system around a nebulous maybe.

Try telling administrators that. Their eyes gleam at significance, and they never notice small effect. They get to start new projects, hire new administrators, and torture educators, so they will jump on board the newest, latest bandwagon. A year later, that will be declared “ancient” methods and they will move on to the latest shiny squirrel.

People outside the US are surprised that we’re doing such a staggeringly bad job of preventing the virus from exploding.

With confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hitting 5 million Sunday, by far the highest of any country, the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.

We’ve always been crap on the social justice, equality, fairness side, but we were good on the techy side. Now? We’re Major Kong riding the nuke down, waving his hat and hollerin’.

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn’t have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units.

… “We Italians always saw America as a model,” said Massimo Franco, a columnist with daily Corriere della Sera. “But with this virus we’ve discovered a country that is very fragile, with bad infrastructure and a public health system that is nonexistent.”

Yup! That’s how we roll!

Trump’s frequent complaints about Dr. Anthony Fauci have regularly made headlines in Europe, where the U.S. infectious-disease expert is a respected figure. Italy’s leading COVID-19 hospital offered Fauci a job if Trump fired him.

It’s a good thing Trump can’t fire him, or we can be confident he would have.

This is what Rebecca Solnit ignored in her perky reference to the last night of the last lesbian bar in San Francisco and what a lot of “trans men” were present:

Today I grabbed a latte at my local Starbucks. There’s no drive-thru there, and I found myself darting into the premises with a feeling of dread. The young lesbian on testosterone was at the counter again. Two other servers are also transing lesbians. I’ve seen them before.

I can tell they would have been young butch lesbians in any other era. I can tell because I was a young butch lesbian in this hating world once. The only difference between them and me is time – I was just one of the lucky ones to not be around at the time of the transcult.

…

The horror of knowing they are lesbians who think they are men due to the current contagion of transactivism makes it hard to be there. I look around as I leave and three of their transing lesbian friends are sitting at a booth.

…

Every butch lesbian who is critical about this horrific trans. movement—a movement that would push young lesbians into believing they are male and amputating their healthy breasts and taking cross-hormones—every butch knows what they are seeing. It’s like looking into a mirror and recalling all of the angst, hatred, parental and peer rejection all over again.

It’s a horrific experience to sit in a room full of my sisters and know this. It’s like being one of the last butch survivors in a complete eradication. I can’t think of any other way to state the horror I feel at progressives actually thinking that the surgical violation of these young lesbians is somehow a brave and courageous thing.

They are telling these girls that they are not okay being who they are and wearing what they want to wear. These are girls like I once was. They sometimes have short hair, and that way of carrying themselves that is strong and independent. They don’t care about boys and when they were kids, they played with trucks and things other girls don’t really like. They liked collecting rocks and they didn’t giggle around the boys like the other girls did. They were never like the other girls.

And now they’re being told they’re men.

They call it ‘gender non-conforming.’ That’s a fancy word for butch lesbian. What is happening is that tomboys are pushed to transition and the trans. net captures all the future butches. This is not mere speculation. Physicians who work in gender clinics are saying that homosexuality is the first ‘step’ to transing. This is gruesome.

…

Our lesbian spaces are already dead. Our bookstores, our dances. Everything we built is dead and taken over by the trans nightmare. I was there when we had it all. Don’t think I don’t have at least a modicum of hope that this madness will end. Because I do. But that’s not today.

That’s what Solnit left out.

H/t Papito

Rebecca Solnit ffs. I’d expect better from her.

She grew up in San Francisco. It was “in its heyday the loudest, proudest queer town around.” It was all about kindness and liberation.

As I’ve watched transphobia explode in the American right and the British whatever, I’ve thought over my own experience. San Francisco has been for a century or so a sanctuary city for dissident, rebel and queer people, so I suspect I have lived my whole adult life in a place with more trans people per capita than almost anyplace else. Transphobes are always warning us that if trans people live in peace and legal recognition and even have rights, there will be terrible consequences, but I assume that we here have long realized, at least to some extent, that dreaded future, and we’re all fine.

No, that’s not what gender critical people say. That’s the usual stupid caricature of what we say, which should be beneath Rebecca Solnit. We’re not saying trans people should not live in peace or have rights, obviously. And we’re not “all fine.” Female athletes who have lost medals, spots on a team, scholarships because a trans woman or girl took them are not “all fine,” they have been harmed, their rights have been violated, they have not been allowed to live in peace.

Despite this, people – many of whom are supposed to be feminists – keep coming up with lurid “what ifs”. My response to them is: trans women do not pose a threat to cis-gender women, and feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy, which means, sorry, you can’t be a feminist if you’re not for everyone’s human rights, notably other women’s rights.

In other words her response to us is just an assertion, and it’s an assertion that is not true. She doesn’t get to announce that “trans women do not pose a threat to cis-gender women” as if it were an obvious and universal truth just like that. Some trans women do pose a threat to women; some have already been violent toward women. Solnit can’t know that all trans women without exception are and always will be no threat to women, so it’s fatuous and also rude to announce it in that confident way. Solnit can’t even know that all trans women really are trans women as opposed to men consciously faking it in order to be housed in the women’s prison or compete against women in sport or be given a position such as Women’s Officer.

Saying all this and more is not a matter of being opposed to “everyone’s human rights,” it’s a matter of rejecting lies and fantasies and attempts to bully us into accepting lies and fantasies.

Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You.

Then don’t call us “cis.” You’ll have seen that she did call us “cis-gender” in that second quoted passage. And would she say that about Rachel Dolezal? Would she say that about white people who claimed to be black or brown? Suppose Eric Trump had a sudden conversion, and told the world he’s discovered he’s a Cherokee in his soul, no matter what he looks like on the outside – would Solnit tell us we don’t get to “define” him? Would she tell people who really are Cherokee that they don’t get to “define” him?

As a young woman dealing with endless street harassment and menace from straight men, I used to breathe a sigh of relief when I got to the Castro District, because that was the only place I was confident I would be safe. Reflecting back on these four decades, I figure I must have spent a ton of time around trans people in bars and clubs and street parties and protests (and yeah, public restrooms) without really noticing, which is maybe the point. OK, in 2015, at the last night at the Lexington Club, San Francisco’s last lesbian bar, I did gradually realize that the many nice young men in the crowd were trans men.

Uh…yes? And? She missed it, didn’t she. Why was there a last night for San Francisco’s last lesbian bar? In 2015? Why is she apparently cheering that fact? Does she actually think it’s an improvement that lesbians have disappeared into “trans men”?

It’s an embarrassing performance altogether.

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed:

Like many academic debates, one currently rocking the music theory world is esoteric. But the controversy — about the legacy of the late Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker — has grown legs because it involves accusations of anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and, now, censorship.

…

Late last year, when conferences still happened in person, [Philip] Ewell delivered a plenary address at the society’s annual conference. Ewell, who is Black, argued that Schenker’s known white supremacist views informed his hierarchical approach to music theory. The talk, in which Ewell referred to Schenker as “an ardent racist and German nationalist,” was part of a much longer, since-published paper on the “white racial frame” in music theory.

Ewell argued that music theory will only diversify through “deframing and reframing” that “structural and institutionalized” framework that Schenker helped build. He also pushed for a more diverse music theory curriculum. The talk was generally well received: Ewell enjoyed a standing ovation.

Soon after the talk, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, housed at North Texas, put out a call for papers responding to Ewell’s plenary. Music theory is a traditionally white, male-dominated field and Ewell’s comments — underneath the applause — apparently ruffled feathers.

Some of the articles were favorable, others were critical or outright hostile.

One by Timothy Jackson, distinguished university research professor of theory at North Texas and a co-editor of Studies, was arguably the most critical of all: in it, Jackson seemed to accuse Ewell of anti-Semitism. Ewell in his talk did not discuss Schenker’s Jewishness. But Schenker’s wife was killed by Nazis and he likely would have ended up in their clutches if he’d lived past 1935.

… Beginning a series of sweeping statements about Black values, culture and families, Jackson said Ewell “is uninterested in bringing Blacks up to ‘standard’ so they can compete. On the contrary, he is claiming that those very standards are in themselves racist.” African Americans “have the right to embrace their own culture as precious — i.e. rap music, hip hop, etc. — and study and teach it in universities,” he added, “so that the products of the ‘defective,’ ‘racist’ White culture — i.e. classical music — be shunted aside.”

…

Finding the symposium disturbing, a group of music graduate students at North Texas petitioned their dean to publicly condemn the issue and investigate its editorial process, due to the apparent “horrendous lack of peer review, publication of an anonymous response and clear lack of academic rigor.”

Going forward, the students also asked the dean and the greater university to dissolve the journal and discipline and potentially remove faculty members who used the journal “to promote racism.”

Another one of these, in short.

H/t Sackbut

One for the “that’s just embarrassing” file:

White House aides reached out to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem last year about the process of adding additional presidents to Mount Rushmore, the New York Times reported.

Meaning, Trump hacks asked South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem if she would please add Donald Trump’s face to the four faces carved into that slab of rock to make the world’s tackiest whatever-that-is.

According to a person familiar who spoke with the Times, Noem then greeted Trump when he arrived in the state for his July Fourth celebrations at the monument with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included his face.

Noem has noted before Trump’s “dream” to have his face on Mount Rushmore, the Coolidge-era sculpture that features the 60-foot-tall faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

It’s ugly, it’s tacky, it’s silly, it’s inappropriate, it’s yet another theft from Native Americans, and did I mention it’s ugly? It’s so ludicrous that Trump bothers to think about it, let alone thinking he’s MonuMental.

According to a 2018 interview with Noem, the two struck up a conversation about the sculpture in the Oval Office during their first meeting, where she initially thought he was joking. “I started laughing,” she said. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.”

Because he’s that stupid and that vain. Yes. There is no limit to his stupidity and vanity.

Donnie’s never going to be on a monument. Donnie will be lucky to avoid prison (and I hope he doesn’t avoid it).

We’ve hit 5 million cases in the US, which is more than any other country. Aren’t we clever. The midwest is going to be swamped.

Health specialists predict a sharp increase in deaths across the region in the coming weeks that will be made significantly worse in some states by the politicians who followed Donald Trump’s lead in undermining medical advice and in questioning the value of masks.

Anthony Fauci, the president’s lead coronavirus expert, recently warned the midwest’s political leaders to follow the science.

“Some states are not doing that,” he said. “We would hope that they all now rethink what happens when you don’t adhere to that. We’ve seen it in plain sight in the southern states that surged.”

Don’t be cute. Don’t be a rebel. Don’t be a trumpy. Just listen to the medical people and wear the damn mask.

Alarmed by rising infections, Wisconsin’s governor last week declared a public health emergency and required masks to be worn indoors. But that immediately fell victim to the politics of coronavirus as at least 16 county sheriffs said they would not enforce the order.

The Florence County Sheriff’s Office told residents: “Wear a mask if you want, if you don’t want to, that is fine also”. In Oneida county, the sheriff said the governor’s order “is in violation of the constitution” while the sheriff of Racine county called the order “government overreach”.

Freedomfreedomfreedomfreedom.

The University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has warned that the refusal of Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds, to require masks in public spaces will cost 700 additional lives over the next three months. It predicted the number of coronavirus deaths at about 13 a day in Iowa by the end of October with the present policy compared to fewer than two if 95% of people used face coverings.

A small price to pay for freedomfreedomfreedomfreedomfreedomfreedom freedomfreedomfreedom.

A first! A milestone! A barrier broken down! Eyes on the prize!

Ooooooooooooh the first openly non-binary person. Think of all the trembling non-binary persons in their closets, feeling newly empowered.

Only…what is it that’s “openly,” exactly? What is it about Tom Pashby that makes him “non-binary”? Is that supposed to mean neither female nor male but a pleasing mix of both? If so, how can we confirm? How do we know? What does he mean? What does Pink News mean?

In other words…what we’ve been presented with here is a man, who is claiming to have done something significant and Firstish, by calling himself not a man but instead non-binary, yet there is no detectable difference between this man and any other man, of a kind that would prompt us to put him in the “Neither” column. In short he looks like a man, a common or garden man, nothing to see here folks. Why are we being told to gape in amazement at his groundbreaking First?

It seems like a good wheeze if you’re brazen enough. Can rich people do it? Can a billionaire claim to be non-binary, neither rich nor poor but a mix of both? Can white people do it? Neither white nor brown but non-binary and thus more special than either brown or white? Can anti-immigrationists do it? Neither native nor foreign-born but non-binary? Can bosses do it? Neither a boss nor a worker but non-binary?

It’s all so…deep.

Too easy.

People. That’s all. Just people, Chase. We want you to call women women and men men. That’s all. It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s routine.

You’re creating a problem where there is no problem. No one needs a special label to distinguish between women and men who say they are women. Women are just women; men who say they are women are just men.

The whole ideology pretty much rests on Word Magic, doesn’t it. If we say “trans woman” often enough people will come to believe that trans women literally are women? That’s how the trick is done, right? If we pitch huge fits about “misgendering” until people are terrorized into saying “she” when they mean “he” then we’ve gone a long way toward conditioning everyone into believing the switch, right?

And so with this tweet. Pretend complete bewilderment about what one can possibly call people who are not trans if the word “cis” is rejected, as if there were some actual need to add an adjective to “women” and “men” to indicate that they are…women and men. There is no such need; it’s just more of the coercive Word Magic to fool people into believing the upside down dogma.

The trumpies have a lot of nerve.

France and Germany have quit talks on reforming the World Health Organization in frustration at attempts by the United States to lead the negotiations, despite its decision to leave the WHO, three officials told Reuters.

“We quit but we still get to boss you.”

That’s not how that works.

European governments have also criticised the WHO but do not go as far as the United States in their criticism, and the decision by Paris and Berlin to leave the talks follows tensions over what they say are Washington’s attempts to dominate the negotiations.

“Nobody wants to be dragged into a reform process and getting an outline for it from a country which itself just left the WHO,” a senior European official involved in the talks said.

More precisely, from people who have bought or crimed their way into a job under the criminal who stole the election, and want to boss the WHO and abandon it simultaneously.

This is so sad (and scary and unfair and unreasonable). A school superintendent in Arizona tells a Washington Post reporter what that’s like now:

The governor has told us we have to open our schools to students on August 17th, or else we miss out on five percent of our funding. I run a high-needs district in middle-of-nowhere Arizona. We’re 90 percent Hispanic and more than 90 percent free-and-reduced lunch. These kids need every dollar we can get. But covid is spreading all over this area and hitting my staff, and now it feels like there’s a gun to my head. I already lost one teacher to this virus. Do I risk opening back up even if it’s going to cost us more lives? Or do we run school remotely and end up depriving these kids?

This is your classic one-horse town. Picture John Wayne riding through cactuses and all that. I’m superintendent, high school principal and sometimes the basketball referee during recess. This is a skeleton staff, and we pay an average salary of about 40,000 a year. I’ve got nothing to cut. We’re buying new programs for virtual learning and trying to get hotspots and iPads for all our kids. Five percent of our budget is hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where’s that going to come from? I might lose teaching positions or basic curriculum unless we somehow get up and running.

I’ve been in the building every day, sanitizing doors and measuring out space in classrooms. We still haven’t received our order of Plexiglas barriers, so we’re cutting up shower curtains and trying to make do with that. It’s one obstacle after the next. Just last week I found out we had another staff member who tested positive, so I went through the guidance from OSHA and the CDC and tried to figure out the protocols. I’m not an expert at any of this, but I did my best with the contact tracing. I called 10 people on staff and told them they’d had a possible exposure. I arranged separate cars and got us all to the testing site. Some of my staff members were crying. They’ve seen what can happen, and they’re coming to me with questions I can’t always answer. “Does my whole family need to get tested?” “How long do I have to quarantine?” “What if this virus hits me like it did Mrs. Byrd?”

Mrs. Byrd is the teacher who died of it.

We got back two of those tests already — both positive. We’re still waiting on eight more. That makes 11 percent of my staff that’s gotten covid, and we haven’t had a single student in our buildings since March. Part of our facility is closed down for decontamination, but we don’t have anyone left to decontaminate it unless I want to put on my hazmat suit and go in there. We’ve seen the impacts of this virus on our maintenance department, on transportation, on food service, on faculty. It’s like this district is shutting down case by case. I don’t understand how anyone could expect us to reopen the building this month in a way that feels safe.

He knows the kids need the school; he knows that better than anyone.

These kids are hurting right now. I don’t need a politician to tell me that. We only have 300 students in this district, and they’re like family. My wife is a teacher here, and we had four kids go through these schools. I know whose parents are laid off from the copper mine and who doesn’t have enough to eat. We delivered breakfast and lunches this summer, and we gave out more meals each day than we have students. I get phone calls from families dealing with poverty issues, depression, loneliness, boredom. Some of these kids are out in the wilderness right now, and school is the best place for them. We all agree on that. But every time I start to play out what that looks like on August 17th, I get sick to my stomach. More than a quarter of our students live with grandparents. These kids could very easily catch this virus, spread it and bring it back home. It’s not safe. There’s no way it can be safe.

He knows from experience.

Mrs. Byrd did everything right. She followed all the protocols. If there’s such a thing as a safe, controlled environment inside a classroom during a pandemic, that was it. We had three teachers sharing a room so they could teach a virtual summer school. They were so careful. This was back in June, when cases here were starting to spike. The kids were at home, but the teachers wanted to be together in the classroom so they could team up on the new technology. I thought that was a good idea. It’s a big room. They could watch and learn from each other. Mrs. Byrd was a master teacher. She’d been here since 1982, and she was always coming up with creative ideas. They delivered care packages to the elementary students so they could sprout beans for something hands-on at home, and then the teachers all took turns in front of the camera. All three of them wore masks. They checked their temperatures. They taught on their own devices and didn’t share anything, not even a pencil.

But she caught it anyway.

I’ve gone over it in my head a thousand times. What precautions did we miss? What more could I have done? I don’t have an answer. These were three responsible adults in an otherwise empty classroom, and they worked hard to protect each other. We still couldn’t control it. That’s what scares me.

But the authorities are telling him he has to open the school.

It’s a nightmare.