The Daily Mail (sorry) reviews Abigail Shrier’s book on the fad for girls to decide they are boys:

The picture that emerges is something much more complex than the familiar narrative of ‘born in the wrong body’. None of these girls appeared to be trans until their teenage years. Some are lesbians – but as one young woman explains to Shrier, being a lesbian is ‘just not very cool… it’s a porn category’, whereas being trans is celebrated. Others have eating disorders or issues with self-harm: for them, taking male hormones and having surgery to remove their breasts seems like another way to attack the body.

Lesbian is a porn category? Says it all, doesn’t it.

Shrier argues that this is being driven by social contagion. Trans identification spreads through schools, through friendship groups, through ‘influencer’ videos that offer a rose-tinted take on transition. But the medical pathway is not something to be taken lightly. Hormone treatments lead to lifelong infertility alongside other health problems. What’s euphemistically called ‘top surgery’ is actually an elective double mastectomy, while ‘bottom surgery’ to masculinise genitals is rarely undertaken and subject to heinous complications.

Not to mention all the rest of it. It just seems so much more trouble than simply being yourself without worrying about gender rules.

There was no clip when I first posted this, only the statement of fact. I wanted to see and hear how he said it – whether with a pretense of regret and mention of a full schedule, or not. Now I know. Look at how this evil pig said it.

Of course he won’t.

Right now:

Oh goody, another private “militia” is born.

The Utah Citizens’ Alarm is only a month old, and yet it already boasts 15,000-plus members.

The citizen militia’s recruits wear military fatigues and carry assault rifles. Their short-term goal, they say, is to act as a physical presence of intimidation to deter protesters from becoming violent and destroying the state of Utah. Their long-term goal: to arm and prepare the state of Utah against underground movements they believe will incite civil war.

But the physical presence of a “militia” wearing military fatigues and carrying assault rifles would not merely deter protesters from becoming violent and destroying Utah, it would deter them/us/me from protesting at all. If I saw a bunch of guys in fatigues carrying assault rifles at a protest I’d be out of there before I’d drawn another breath. I don’t see random self-appointed guys with guns as protective or safeguarding, I see them as a terrifying threat. I see the cops that way too, to a considerable extent (the guns have always made me nervous, my whole life), but at least I know they are answerable to higher ups and the organization and the courts. Volunteer cops carrying assault rifles, not so much.

The group was conceived in reaction to a Black Lives Matter protest against police brutality organized by different groups in Provo, Utah, on 29 June. That day, a white protester pulled out a gun and shot another white man, who was not protesting but driving his vehicle into the protest route. Two shots were fired, and one hit the driver in the arm. Protesters claim the shooting was in self-defence because the driver was hitting marchers; the police found this claim to be unsubstantiated.

When Casey Robertson, 47, watched a video of the incident, he felt outraged that this could happen in his “little town of Provo”.

…

Utah Citizens’ Alarm has since organized regular military-style trainings for its members. Robertson says he has been tipped off “by secret sources within the government and law enforcement” that underground organizations like antifa are being funded by Isis, and are using groups like BLM to wreak havoc in the community to destroy American cities and ideals. Even if none of these theories stand up to scrutiny, he is dead set on not letting it happen.

That is, he has been told a pack of lies by people who claim to be law enforcement, or he claims he has, but never mind that it’s a pack of lies, he is dead set on threatening protesters. Brilliant. Wonderful arrangement.

This already has a chilling effect on protests: organizers have begun cancelling protests out of fear of Utah Citizens’ Alarm coming and escalating the already heated emotions. So far, militia members remain unchallenged, using their second amendment rights to openly bear arms in public throughout the state.

What I’m saying. Of course it has a chilling effect.

Jason Stevens, of Utah’s American Civil Liberties Union, stressed the importance of the historical context in what happened in the civil rights movement of the 1960s when armed groups, militias, local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, white citizens councils, organizations both official and unofficial took it upon themselves to defend what they saw as their rights and property with violent and systemic intimidation and threats to African Americans and others in those areas.

Yes, that is important. Timothy McVeigh is another important item in this list. Heavily armed right-wing terrorizers have a long history in the US, and no, of course we don’t see them as there to “protect” us.

Additionally, lines between the second and first amendment are complicated, especially as open-carry laws in Utah make it legal for groups of heavily armed individuals to gather in places where the first amendment is being honored, such as protests.

“If the right to bear arms is overriding the right to free speech, that may be cause for concern,” said Dr RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. “Our constitutional doctrine hasn’t yet had the chance to really tussle with the question of what the presence of guns does to a free speech event. Short of more overt threats of violence, we usually protect protesters with guns in the same ways we protect protesters without them. But if the express goal of the armed individuals is to intimidate people who might otherwise share their views, that’s especially troubling.”

I don’t bother with that purported distinctions. If there are random freelancers with guns on the scene, I’m not staying. I assume I’m far from the only person who sees it that way. Yes, guys with guns will shut down free speech. You can count on it.

Dan Froomkin points out that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to make the people at the NY Times very nervous.

So rather than report on how Ocasio-Cortez’s riveting, viral speech on the House floor on Thursday was a signal moment in the fight against abusive sexism, Times congressional reporters Luke Broadwater and Catie Edmondson filed a story full of sexist double standards and embraced the framing of her critics by casting her as a rule-breaker trying to “amplify her brand.”

Here’s her speech in case you need a refresher.

Then consider that the Times described the speech as “her most norm-shattering moment yet,” leading with the fact that “she took to the House floor to read into the Congressional Record a sexist vulgarity that Representative Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, had used to refer to her.”

The point is not that it’s a vulgarity. The point is that it’s misogynist, and it’s meant to intimidate. Men don’t call women fucking bitches for the hell of it, they do it to express intimidating rage and hatred. Vulgarity is completely beside the point.

A critical “tell” in the Times’s coverage – something perhaps only fellow journalists would fully appreciate at first – was how the paper had previously avoided directly quoting Yoho’s particular words, but did so now:

“In front of reporters, Representative Yoho called me, and I quote: ‘A fucking bitch,’” she said, punching each syllable in the vulgarity.

You’d think the whole thing was her idea. It’s Yoho who said it; she was quoting him. It’s as if they decided to say she punched every syllable to make her sound like the aggressor. She did not in fact punch anything, nor did she call anyone insulting names.

In the first Times article on the matter, on Tuesday, Broadwater described Yoho’s words as “a pair of expletives” – noting that Ocasio-Cortez “sought to turn the insult to her advantage.”

Oh yes, what a whore she is, trying to make money from being called a fucking bitch by an adult man who works alongside her in Congress.

James Fallows, the renowned Atlantic national correspondent, asked in a tweet: “WHY should these words appear in a quote from AOC, at whom they were hatefully directed, rather than one from Rep. Yoho, who actually said them?”

Um…to make her look bad? To shame her? Am I close?

The Times reporters wrote that after her speech, “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who excels at using her detractors to amplify her own political brand, invited a group of Democratic women in the House to come forward to express solidarity with her.”

The whore. How dare she invite a group of Democratic women colleagues to come forward to express solidarity with her? That’s so brand-amplifying. A decent modest woman would say nothing about it and pretend it never happened, and nice Mr. Yoho could get away without so much as a whispered rebuke. Maybe if they put her in a burqa they would feel less anxious?

Hamza Shaban, a business reporter for the Washington Post, called attention to the similarities between the Times’s framing of the story and the story’s own description, toward the end, of how Republicans have demonized Ocasio-Cortez.

She should just put up with it, like a nice prim quiet woman from 1955.

In fact, the double standards were everywhere. New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister, responding to Harris’s tweet, noted: “Women’s anger at male power abuse [is] regularly presented as path to self-advancement for the women. Voicing fury at systemic degradation is read as opportunistic. Whereas men’s abusive behavior rarely understood as fundamental to how they attained & maintain THEIR power. But it is!”

Read the whole thing.

H/t Tim Harris

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, ya know?

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Cotton, widely seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, made the comment in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published on Sunday.

He was speaking in support of legislation he introduced on Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around August 1619 and the arrival of slave ships on American shores for the first time.

Well that’s certainly urgent at this time of a pandemic, massive job loss, people on the edge of being unable to pay their rents or mortgages, children unable to go to school, and oh by the way climate change hasn’t paused to wait for all this to go by.

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.

“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

On the proposition, yes, but on the reality, obviously not. It’s easy to say noble things, but they count for less if you are at the same time paying for your luxuries out of the forced unpaid labor of other people.

In June, the Times was forced to issue a mea culpa after publishing an op-ed written by Cotton and entitled “Send in the troops”. The article, which drew widespread criticism, advocated for the deployment of the military to protests against police brutality toward black Americans.

Times publisher AG Sulzberger initially defended the decision, saying the paper was committed to representing “views from across the spectrum”.

Yeah? Like kill all the Jews for instance? Like invade a small impoverished country and torture most of its population to death and steal all its wealth? Views like that? Especially from serving US senators, who could actually attempt to put such “views” into action?

I’m thinking no, Sulzberger didn’t mean that. Let’s come up with a rule: the no-Cotton rule. Works for me.

What we now say when we mean “shut up, bitch.”

Updating: Oh look there’s more.

Very adult, very thoughtful, very progressive and feminist and reasonable and fair-minded.

Also the other David.

Than “Ok Karen” and an eyeroll. Yes, I think so too.

Updating 2:

Skepticism done well, yes indeed – you can’t get much better skepticism than “Ok, Karen” and an eyeroll emoji.

No, actually, we approve of violence against women.

Poland is to withdraw from a European treaty aimed at preventing violence against women, the country’s justice minister announced on Saturday.

Zbigniew Ziobro said the document, known as the Istanbul Convention, was “harmful” because it required schools to teach children about gender.

Meaning what? That there are two sexes? That one of the sexes is on average bigger and stronger than the other? That the stronger one has historically dominated the other one? That it takes one of each to make a baby? Aren’t they going to learn all that in any case?

He added that reforms introduced in the country in recent years provided sufficient protection for women.

Easy for him to say.

Mr Ziobro said the government would formally begin the process of withdrawing from the treaty, which was ratified in 2015, on Monday.

He argued that the convention violated the rights of parents and “contains elements of an ideological nature”.

The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and its coalition partners are closely aligned to the Catholic Church, and the government has promised to promote traditional family values.

Traditional family values like men dominating women? Like enforcing the dominance with violence? Those traditional family values?

Thousands of people, mostly women, took to the streets of the capital Warsaw on Friday to campaign against the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.

“The aim is to legalise domestic violence,” Marta Lempart, an organiser of a march in the city, told Reuters news agency.

Trad fam vals, you know.

No comment necessary.

But St Bernards are supposed to rescue people in the mountains…

A mountain rescue team has said its members “didn’t need to think twice” when they were called to help a 121lb (55kg) St Bernard dog that had collapsed while descending England’s highest peak.

Sixteen volunteers from Wasdale mountain rescue team spent nearly five hours rescuing Daisy from Scafell Pike after receiving a call from Cumbria police.

Her back legs were hurting and she couldn’t keep going. (Descending a steep hill can be hella painful, more so than climbing.)

They sought advice from vets before beginning the rescue operation and were able to assess Daisy’s condition and administer pain relief before lifting her off the mountain on a stretcher. The team said: “After a little persuasion and a bit of arranging the stretcher to become dog-friendly, and of course plenty more treats, the 55kg Daisy very quickly settled down with her chin resting on the head guard, having realised that we were trying to help her.

She’ll be reet.

Speaking of men who treat women like underlings…

A nonpartisan Christian organisation that seeks to end hunger says it has asked for and received the resignation of Republican congressman Ted Yoho from its board of directors, following what it called his “verbal attack” on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

That’s especially interesting because what was Yoho abusing Ocasio-Cortez about? Her argument that an increase in crime is related to an increase in poverty – i.e. that poverty can lead to increased crime. Poverty is also very intimately linked to hunger. Ocasio-Cortez and this Christian organization are on Team End Poverty while Yoho is on Team Poverty Is the Fault of the Poor Person. It was never a good fit.

In a statement on Saturday, Bread for the World said its board met Friday with Yoho and sought his resignation “as an action that reaffirms our commitment to coming alongside women and people of colour, nationally and globally, as they continue to lead us to a more racially inclusive and equitable world”.

See what I mean? Not a good fit. Those words are not words a Republican would ever say.

“As a bipartisan Christian organization committed to alleviating hunger and poverty through sound public policies, Bread for the World upholds the values of respect, dignity, and compassion that Jesus calls us to when engaging decision makers from across the political spectrum,” the statement said.

“We believe that Rep. Ted Yoho’s recent actions and words as reported in the media are not reflective of the ethical standards expected of members of our Board of Directors.”

As Christian organizations go, this sounds like a decent one.

Jolyon Maugham QC says he would love to discuss it with a gender critical feminist, so a GC feminist says I’d love to discuss it with you Jolyon, so…

He says it.

Privately. For their privacy only. So we don’t know who they are or what they said or why his offer was “without success.” We don’t even know whether we should believe him or not. We do know he has carefully hidden the evidence and offered an explanation for the hiding of the evidence, one that seems a bit implausible on its face. If they’re high profile why would they be so bashful?

Jolyon? Anything?

Ah there he is at last.

So he will only discuss it with a select list of GC feminists, ones Kathleen Stock will know but he can’t name because [something something], on the basis of their shared belief in light as opposed to heat. So apparently he thinks Stock doesn’t belong to that category? But that’s absurd – she’s famous for being reasonable and fair and not shouty.

Maugham left it there, as far as I can tell (Twitter loves to hide the replies you’re looking for and show you the ones you aren’t). LetterWike stepped up.

Jolyon? Anything?

Just call her Bitch?

In Afghanistan, family members often force women to keep their name a secret from people outside the family, even doctors. Using a woman’s name in public is frowned upon and can be considered an insult. Many Afghan men are reluctant to say the names of their sisters, wives or mothers in public. Women are generally only referred to as the mother, daughter or sister of the eldest male in their family, and Afghan law dictates that only the father’s name should be recorded on a birth certificate.

Of course that’s not completely strange to us in the so much more progressive part of the world. Not many decades ago it was pretty normal to refer to a woman as Mrs Charles Dudeguy and leave it at that. It wasn’t taboo to know her first name, and informally it was ok to call her Jane Dudeguy, but it was quite possible to read a news story (for instance) that referred to a woman solely as Mrs Man’s Name.

But it’s even worse in Afghanistan. It’s as if societies compete to see which ones can most completely obliterate and conceal women. Here we’ve given up on the niqabs and no names approach, and instead we replace women with men who say they are women – they do it much better. (Except for the sex part. Since that’s by far the most important use for women, that’s a bit of a problem, but technology will probably come up with a fix soon.)

But some Afghan women are now campaigning to use their names freely, with the slogan “Where Is My Name?” The campaign began three years ago when Laleh Osmany realised she was fed up with women being denied what she thought was a “basic right”.

Well, yes, because if you’re only ever referred to as Man’s Possession you begin to wonder if you’re just an object, like a kettle.

Oh good, the tv machine is training kids in how to lecture medical staff.

The first clip is merely stupid and cloying, but the second is infuriating. The lecturing kid is what, 12? Maybe 13? And she’s lecturing two medically-trained adults as if they were puppies who had eaten the carpet. And they look grief-stricken and horrified, as if they’d torn the patients limbs off by mistake. Also the clip is teaching the world that it’s a fabulous righteous thing to do to give medical staff false information about patients, like for instance getting the sex wrong.

It’s as if everybody is trying to out-stupid Trump.

A play in three acts. WITS is Women In Technology & Science.

Act one:

Good choice. Caroline Criado-Perez is brilliant, as any fule kno.

Act two scene one:

In other words, don’t read this book that you chose, read some other book that someone else will choose from this list of names provided by me.

Act two scene two:

Act three:

Curtain.

Veterans challenge illegal orders:

The Black Lives Matter protest in Portland looked to be winding down last Saturday night when US marine corps veteran Duston Obermeyer noticed a phalanx of federal officers emerge from the federal courthouse.

They shot teargas at the crowd and pushed a protester to the ground with such force that, Obermeyer said, she slid 6ft across the pavement.

He’d gone there to see what was happening, but at that point he decided to participate.

In a Pokémon hat and Superman T-shirt, and with a cotton mask protecting his face, the 6ft 4in, 275lb man walked up to the officers and asked whether they understood their oath to defend the constitution.

Defending the constitution is not abruptly without warning teargassing a group of protesters.

“They are not supposed to be coming and attacking protesters,” Obermeyer told the Guardian. “They didn’t even give any warning, there was no ‘hey you need to move’, ‘hey back up’. There was basically them walking out and assaulting a protester just to prove that they could.”

There was a navy veteran a few feet away asking the same kind of questions.

“I’m not a big believer in coincidence,” said Obermeyer. “I believe that we both have similar feelings because we come from similar places and we truly believe in the constitution as it’s currently written and as it’s taught in grade school. And this is a violation of constitutional rights.”

David, who came dressed in a Naval Academy sweatshirt and Navy wrestling hat, told the Guardian he believes they both came out that day because of their time at the naval academy, which instills “a deep level of integrity” in graduates. But also, he said, for perhaps an even simpler reason.

“We have the ability to see what is right and what is wrong. And what we both saw was wrong and we wanted to go out there and talk to those officers.”

Obermeyer also asked the officers whether they understand what an illegal order is, referencing the fact that military officers are required by law to disobey illegal or unconstitutional orders.

“Assaulting an unarmed protester who is exercising their first amendment rights is illegal, that’s an illegal order,” he said.

Crucial point. Remember My Lai? Illegal orders. Illegal acts.

That’s when teargas was fired on the two men. When that didn’t deter them, Obermeyer said an officer tried to hit him with a baton, but he caught it and quickly pushed him back. Another officer repeatedly beat David with a baton, breaking his hand in two places, an injury that will require surgery on Monday. He was also sprayed in the face with a white chemical irritant that he said “felt like flaming gasoline.”

This is for asking questions of soldiers who are committing unprovoked violence against protesters. This is Trump’s United States.

Obermeyer recalls an officer sticking an automatic weapon in his face, while another shot him at point-blank range with an orange chemical irritant.

Orange. The stuff sprayed on the medical equipment we saw yesterday was also orange.

After serving in the marine corps for over a decade, including as an officer, Obermeyer has experienced being gassed many times. In this case, he wasn’t sure what they had used because, he said: “I’ve never felt worse than I did that night after being sprayed in the face.”

His eyes and nose almost immediately closed up, and he started having a difficult time breathing. His clothes were drenched, and he said it felt like his skin was on fire. Others in the crowd guided him a block away and helped him flush out his eyes. It took him three days to recover.

All this is against the repeatedly expressed will of the mayor and governor.

Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court against DHS, the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protection Service, alleging their behavior violated state citizens’ right to peacefully protest.

…

The DHS said in a statement Wednesday that federal law enforcement officers are working “diligently and honorably to enforce federal law by defending federal property and the lives of their fellow officers” as “violent anarchists continue to riot on the streets of Portland”. The DHS and Portland police did not respond to a request for comment.

Lying shits. What are they doing, hiring Fox News to write their statements?

Good luck watching this unmoved.

The chant is: our streets.

It appears that the Feds committed a war crime in Portland.

Federal authorities have been accused of violating the Geneva Convention after apparently destroying medical equipment during protests in Portland.

Reporter Sergio Olmos shared a video on Twitter Tuesday night showing medical supplies and protective gear covered in an orange liquid.

“It appears that federal officers, during dispersal, pepper sprayed the medical supplies in the tents,” Olmos wrote.

And The Enemy is…protesters. Not soldiers for the Nazis but protesters.

An article in the 1998 International Criminal Court Statute says “[i]ntentionally directing attacks against … hospitals and places where the sick and the wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives” constitutes a war crime in both international and non-international armed conflicts.

…

It comes after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the DHS, U.S. Marshals Service and the city of Portland on behalf of volunteer medics who have been attending to injured protesters.

The lawsuit alleges that federal agents have “brutally attacked” volunteer medics with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, flash bangs and batons in violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

But but but graffiti.