Judith Butler has a crappy predictable abusive piece in the Guardian complaining of a “backlash” over sacred Gender.

The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive rightwing Catholic and evangelical organizations. Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.

Meanwhile, in the real world, feminist women object to being shoved aside and told to shut up by men who claim to be women.

It is not easy to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence. 

That’s just a quite vulgar lie. She’s choosing to treat conservative anti-feminists as in the same “movement” as gender critical feminists, which she has to know perfectly well is a lie.

They assemble and launch incendiary claims in order to defeat what they see as “gender ideology” or “gender studies” by any rhetorical means necessary. For instance, they object to “gender” because it putatively denies biological sex or because it undermines the natural or divine character of the heteronormative family.

Well yes “or” as in those are completely different sets of people. Speaking of any rhetorical means necessary. She has no shame.

lthough nationalist, transphobic, misogynist, and homophobic, the principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements.

Another lie.

Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims.

A whole crowd of lies there.

In his well-known list of the elements of fascism, Umberto Eco writes, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” for fascism is “a collage … a beehive of contradictions”. Indeed, this perfectly describes anti-gender ideology today. It is a reactionary incitement, an incendiary bundle of contradictory and incoherent claims and accusations.

She says, inciting people to think feminist women are fascists.

There are three more paragraphs of bullshit about fascism, concluding with “The time for anti-fascist solidarity is now.” What a revolting lying fraud she is.

Remember Charles Clymer the “male feminist” who was always talking over women? Then declared he was “Charlotte” and it all made sense? As Charlotte he gets to talk over everyone.

And Charles is a man. He is not a woman. Being a woman is not his experience (7 years in the army azza man) and he is not qualified to talk about what is and isn’t offensive and intrusive and misogynist to the female community. Stay in your lane Charles.

Let’s have a campaign against spiking women’s drinks in order to rape them and let’s make sure our campaign is incloosiv of men.

The campaign started on Instagram, and that’s also where it was interrupted and hijacked and bullied into including men, thus making it a completely meaningless campaign to stop people doing something to people.

We’re sorry!!! We’re sorry we’re sorry we’re sorry – we’re so sorry we said it was about girls, we’ll never do it again, please don’t hit us, please don’t drug us and rape us, please, we promise we’ll be good, please please please please

Originally a comment by As the smoke rises upward on A long-awaited judgment.

One can make the same argument for selling organs. There are thousands of desperately poor people in rural India suffering from the lifelong health effects of having one kidney because they—ostensibly voluntarily—sold the other one.

Here’s another, more obscure analogy: midget bowling. If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it’s the practice of tossing a little person down a bowling lane in place of a bowling ball, which is apparently high comedy to certain crass fratboy types. Some little people rent themselves out to would-be midget bowlers, but some state legislatures have passed laws prohibiting the practice, on the grounds that it is inherently hazardous to the person selling the service (being tossed around like a literal ball is dangerous for anyone, but especially dangerous to little people, who tend to have fragile spines). Simply put, laws against midget bowling boil down to the conviction that it’s not okay for a bunch of dudes to have a good time by putting other people at real risk of serious harm, even if the people taking the risk have agreed to do so in exchange for money.

Of course, one can take the extreme libertarian position that any transaction should be permissible as long as there is the appearance of consent; the exchange of money sanctifies anything that the payer might do to the payee. Sweatshop workers, diamond miners, gestational surrogates, organ sellers, midget bowling balls, prostitutes—they all knew the work and the wages and they chose to accept. If it’s all right for me to grind away at my tedious and stressful white-collar job because I need the money, then it must also be all right for a homeless eighteen-year-old girl to allow strange men to ejaculate in her orifices because she needs the money. Really, what’s the difference? Everyone hates their job.

But I’m less interested in abstract questions than I am in concrete realities. Overwhelmingly, the women and girls (and the smaller number of men and boys) who are in prostitution are harmed by it and do not want to be there. Many of them are trafficked, many of them are drug addicted, many of them come from abusive backgrounds, many of them are being exploited by pimps, and many of them develop PTSD. The large majority of prostitutes—around 90%—interviewed in several countries say that they would leave the sex industry immediately if they could. As one study (from 2006, but I doubt much has changed since then) dispassionately concludes, “Sex work is associated with excess mortality and morbidity including the sequelae of STI, mental health problems, and substance misuse.” In plainer terms, buyers of sex do very real damage, both physical and psychological, to the people (mostly women and girls) whose bodies they buy.

Addendum/clarification: apparently, midget bowling is less common than the closely related “sport” of dwarf tossing, which involves tossing the little person against a velcro wall rather than down a bowling lane.

We’re not confused.

I’m not confused, but I’ll have a look.

Beyond these clinical technicalities, for many people pregnancy also starts before conception in a figurative sense.

I’m definitely not confused, I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re pandering to a stupid fad for pretending that we don’t know which sex does the baby-having.

…two medical centers in the US, Baylor University Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, are now offering uterus transplants to allow XX-carrying people lacking a functional uterus to gestate their own children after all…

…The OB/GYNs I saw during that time seemed to be focused more on the people having babies than on those who were unable to. And for women requiring other sorts of remedies for infertility, from IVF to uterus transplantation, costs are often paid from their own pockets. 

Whoops! Missed one.

A note from the EIC regarding the language used in this issue

I happily turned over the editorial pen to The Scientist’s managing editor, Jef Akst, for this special issue on pregnancy. But the TS editorial team had such a rigorous conversation surrounding the language we used in these stories that we thought it was necessary to include a brief mention of this facet of creating this body of work. Specifically, we wanted to be mindful of using inclusive language in discussing the science of pregnancy. From my own perspective, considering pregnancy as a phenomenon that extends beyond “women” did not occur automatically. But as we got down into the nitty-gritty of the subject matter at hand, I was made aware (via the thoughtful input of my colleagues) that we risked excluding nonbinary and transgender individuals from the discussion if we did not carefully consider our words.

So they decided to exclude women instead.

… other studies of pregnancy simply recorded that subjects were female. Where possible, we included these types of specifics in discussing particular studies (see the mention of “XX individuals” above). In other spots that considered the broader applications or impacts of research or healthcare involving pregnancy, we referred to “people” rather than “women.”

Go us! We veiled women with our words!

The mindset.

What letters? The usual suspects.

And while he’s got your attention, he’d also like you to take his directions on what people it’s permitted to follow on Twitter.

Nine acquaintances, and he’s telling them he’d “appreciate it” if they stopped following someone because he says so. I might as well tweet that I’d appreciate it if Jeff Bezos ran his friends past me for approval.

Pompous little dictators everywhere.

Updating to add:

The Come Out of Stonewall protest:

That’s our mate latsot in the wheelchair in front.

It’s good that there are always dinosaurs now.

Ceri Black (Ceri pronounced like Kerry) spoke at a Belfast protest today.

I’m here to stand against the protection racket that is the diversity champion’s scheme, and to call for employers to join the flood of others who have left it.

But I hope you don’t mind if I take this opportunity to speak about what’s been happening to me over the last 48 hours instead of the speech I originally prepared.

You may know this already, but a man has managed to persuade the police to invite me to an interview, under caution, regarding my twitter account, @femmeloves.

I did know it already. It’s That Man Again.

If it were not prohibited by the twitter terms of service, I would tweet out the plain fact that men cannot be women.

Perhaps naively, when I first joined this fight, I thought that the police would protect every day working families like mine, talking on topics like these. So when I faced a wall of death threats, rape threats, threats of sectarian violence, violent pornographic photographs and videos, homophobic abuse, and calls to “go back where you came from,” on my twitter account, I reported them to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. They took no action.

So death threats are ok. The police have no objection to death threats.

But one phone call from a man who has a history of using the police service as his own personal enforcement arm against women he disagrees with, and the PSNI have threatened me with arrest if I don’t attend voluntarily to be interviewed under caution.

She has a solicitor, who is confident it will never go to court, though the interview will have to happen. Ceri says this isn’t about her.

This is about the dirty tactics of a movement which delights in intimidating and bulling their opponents into silence, using fair means or foul.

Like Owen Jones for instance, saying the LGB Alliance is opposed to trans rights when it isn’t.

Enough.

This has gone far enough now.

The complainant cannot be allowed to continue to weaponize police forces across the country, to silence voices he disagrees with, whilst he capers and gloats and feigns terror because he’s triggered by tweets.

He is a bully. I do not pander to bullies. I do not cower before bullies. I put them on notice, and I employ all legal means to have them stopped.

My solicitor informs me that there are various channels open to me, so the complainant can expect to hear from me in due course.

Oh I look forward to that.

But it isn’t just the complainant I’m putting on notice. It is the police service of Northern Ireland, it’s Stonewall, and it’s the massive fraud they call the Diversity Champions Scheme.

The police have questions for me? Good. I have questions for them.

Questions like, “What influence does being a member of the Stonewall diversity champions scheme have on the way you police this issue?”

Questions like, “When I reported death and rape threats to you, you told me to withdraw from the debate and stop tweeting, so did you offer the same advice to the man who complained against me?”

Questions like “what underpinned your decision to interview me under caution for tweets about child protection, whilst you completely ignored direct threats on my life.”

I have a long list of other questions for the PSNI, and they can expect to hear them from me in the form of Freedom of information requests in the coming days.

My solicitor is helping me explore other possible actions, including a complaint to the ombudsman.

In the meantime, I have a message for the PSNI.

I’m politely declining your invitation to be interviewed voluntarily under caution at the station.

Come and arrest me if you want to ask me your questions. Here I am.

Come and arrest a lesbian woman, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a campaigner for women and children, for the crime of tweeting about how to protect children from grooming and sexual predation. Put this survivor in handcuffs and put me in a room. Go ahead. Ask your questions. Make yourselves the tools of a man who, with his army of vindictive and spiteful followers, has terrorised women across the nation, all the while making claims about his own victimhood.

Read the whole thing.

She was on the latest Mess We’re In too, and was equally crystal clear there.

Define the rights you’re talking about, OJ.

If this piece were a proper piece of journalism – the counter-factual subjunctive exists for a reason. (Of course, the piece is a proper piece of journalism, but OJ is claiming it isn’t, but doing it badly, because he doesn’t write well.)

But the substantive point here is that the LGB Alliance is not “anti-trans rights” and that OJ is smuggling the claim in by not spelling out what trans rights are. Nobody wants to take human rights away from trans people. What new rights, specific to trans people, does Owen Jones think there are? On what grounds does he think they are rights? Has he given any thought to questions about the effects of such rights on other people’s rights? Especially women’s rights? All that matters, but OJ never discusses it.

Love is not a human right and neither is sex. (Remember when Amnesty International decided it is? I do. How can you make sex a human right without implying a requirement? Who are the people who would be most subject to that requirement?)

This morning the Court of Appeal handed down a long-awaited judgment in the case of Re C, a legal case fraught with tension due to the sensitive and complex nature of what lay at its heart.

In short, C, a learning-disabled man, wished to seek out the “services” of a prostituted woman to pay her for sexual access, but he lacked the mental capacity to make such arrangements for himself.

One of several legal issues at hand was the fact that, if such a care worker was permitted to make such arrangements, they may be committing an offence under s.39 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which prohibits care workers from “causing or inciting sexual activity”.

To cut a long legal story short, the Court of Appeal overturned the original ruling of the Court of Protection, and stated that in this instance C’s care workers were categorically not permitted to facilitate the purchasing of sexual access on behalf of their learning-disabled client.

Access to a vagina is not a human right. It can’t be. If it is treated as a human right, women become tools for other people.

Amnesty UK has a stupid mealy-mouthed blamey “statement” distancing itself from the “suck my dick you cunts”- type activism at the FiLiA event.

We have a long history of campaigning against violence against women and this continues to be a vital part of our work.

But they’ve forgotten who women are, and which people are women.

We are equally committed to campaigning for the rights of transgender people to live freely, authentically, and openly, and to have their gender legally recognised without having to go through a dehumanising, long and costly procedure. 

But the “right” of transgender people to live “authentically” entails requiring everyone to agree with them that they are their new gender in every possible sense, in other words that they have changed their sex along with their gender. This intrudes quite dramatically on the rights of women. That means it’s not a legitimate right at all. Amnesty is trashing women’s rights by leaning so heavily on new and unworkable “rights” for trans people.

We were approached by the organisers of a Fly the Flag event in Portsmouth at the weekend, who requested that we supply materials which reflect Amnesty International UK’s campaigning positions on the LGBTQ human rights.  Two sets of placards were sent.  One set of signs stated the slogan “I AM WHO I SAY I AM: Amnesty International”.  The second set of signs stated the slogan “LOVE IS A HUMAN RIGHT: Amnesty International”.

Both of those slogans are a crock of shit.

As I’ve pointed out what feels like a billion times, it’s not true that people always or necessarily “are who they say they are.” Look at Trump. He claims to be a great many things that he’s not. Look at frauds and cheats and tricksters, look at narcissists and egomaniacs, look at cops who say they are a cop arresting a woman for violating Covid rules when really they’re a cop abducting a woman to rape and murder her.

As I’ve pointed out not quite so many times but still many, of course love is not a human right. Those 5 words are a rapist’s charter.

Photographs of the threatening and aggressive language and images displayed by other protestors present at the Guildhall have been shared with us and we are shocked by it.  We recognise that the FiLiA conference was attended by a number of women who have been the victims of violence and harassment.  Amnesty International UK believes there should have been absolutely no place for the use of any threatening or aggressive language or imagery towards any of the attendees of that conference, or indeed towards any women.

In other words Amnesty wishes it hadn’t been linked to those images, but as for the women at the FiLiA conference, they are bad women and Amnesty hates them.

Updating to add: the photo is probably (or certainly?) a fake. Just look at it as a pretty imagining.

A snapshot from the International Space Station. That’s a little item called South America.

I had no idea the moon looked like that from the ISS.

I hope they lock him up.

 The House voted Thursday to hold Steve Bannon, a longtime ally and aide to former President Donald Trump, in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

…

The House vote sends the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, where it will now be up to prosecutors in that office to decide whether to present the case to a grand jury for possible criminal charges. It’s still uncertain whether they will pursue the case — Attorney General Merrick Garland would only say at a House hearing on Thursday that they plan to “make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution.”

Lock him up.

“Mr. Bannon’s own public statements make clear he knew what was going to happen before it did, and thus he must have been aware of — and may well have been involved in — the planning of everything that played out on that day,” [Liz] Cheney said ahead of the vote. “The American people deserve to know what he knew and what he did.”

…

The lingering acrimony over the insurrection, and the Bannon subpoena, flared Wednesday at a House Rules Committee hearing held to set the parameters of Thursday’s debate. Under intense questioning from Raskin, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican who defended Trump and opposed the Bannon contempt effort, said he accepted that Biden is the president but would not say that Biden won the election.

Yes the lingering acrimony over that incident where Trump goons were roaming the Capitol looking for Democrats to murder. How odd that there’s still acrimony eight whole months later.

Update on that rape on the train story:

Passengers did not sit around and record cellphone video of a rape aboard a SEPTA train for their own gratification without contacting authorities, Delaware County’s top prosecutor said Thursday.

The revelation from District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer runs counter to the police narrative of the rape on a SEPTA Market-Frankford elevated train at the 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby. Police said in that case that passengers took cellphone video without calling 911 before a SEPTA employee called police.

“There is a narrative out there that people sat there on the El train and watched this transpire and took videos of it for their own gratification,” Stollsteimer said using the nickname for the Market-Frankford line. “That is simply not true. It did not happen. We have security video from SEPTA that shows that is not the true narrative.”

In fact, Stollsteimer said, SEPTA security video shows that a “handful” of people who were getting on and off the train as it traveled from Philadelphia to the 69th Street Terminal had observed different parts of the rape, possibly without knowing what exactly was happening.

…

Two people may have recorded video of the attack on their cellphone, one of whom “probably” alerted SEPTA of the attack, Stollsteimer said.

H/t Screechy Monkey

Gaby Hinsliff on yet another way to keep women down:

Yet reports of so-called “spiking by needle” – young women on a night out allegedly being injected by unseen strangers with something that knocks them out – are being taken seriously by police in cities including Nottingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Heartbreakingly, there have been reports of nervous women going out in thick, needle-proof jeans and leather jackets. However rare these incidents may turn out to be, they fit a pattern of behaviour that for many feels horribly familiar.

Emphasis on the horrible. The pattern is that women aren’t real people, women don’t matter, women have no rights, women are walking cunts who exist to receive men’s penises. Women are something to trick or force into allowing a man to poke them between the legs because he enjoys it. Men are the people in this story, and women are the inconvenient bitches placed in charge of those nice holes the men want to poke. Those holes are for men! Not women! Women have no right to gatekeep the holes, so whether they get punched or drugged, they deserve it.

A stranger’s hand unceremoniously shoved up your skirt on a night out has become almost routine for young women. Street harassment – not just catcalling but crude propositioning and being followed by men who may get aggressive if rejected – is normalised. Young women are sick of being told to stick together, or to watch their drinks, when the problem is male violence, not female vigilance. Why should they tie themselves in ever more anxious knots trying to stay safe, while the perpetrators carry on regardless? What depresses many older women, meanwhile, is that, if anything, this kind of everyday harassment seems to have got worse – creepier and more aggressive – over the years, even as the world opens up for younger women in so many ways.

And closes down in so many others, for instance via being bullied and silenced for not agreeing that men are women if they say they are.

Then there was dancing with our extinct friends.

Get down.

Today in “I wish I could teleport to London” –

Oh, man, look at all that infrastructure. No wonder they’re getting sexual threats.

Finally.

Finally.

H/t J.A.

Ah yes, if the science says fossil fuels are cooking the planet the thing to do is…lobby to change what the science says.

A huge leak of documents seen by BBC News shows how countries are trying to change a crucial scientific report on how to tackle climate change.

The leak reveals [that] Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels.

Similarly, if your house is on fire, the thing to do is take the phone away from the damn fool who is calling the fire department and call for pizza instead.

The leaked documents consist of more than 32,000 submissions made by governments, companies and other interested parties to the team of scientists compiling a UN report designed to bring together the best scientific evidence on how to tackle climate change.

“Dear Science Talkers, please say coal and oil are good for us, thank you very much, The Coal and Oil Interests.”

The leak shows a number of countries and organisations arguing that the world does not need to reduce the use of fossil fuels as quickly as the current draft of the report recommends.

An adviser to the Saudi oil ministry demands “phrases like ‘the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales…’ should be eliminated from the report”.

One senior Australian government official rejects the conclusion that closing coal-fired power plants is necessary, even though ending the use of coal is one of the stated objectives the COP26 conference.

Saudi Arabia is the one of the largest oil producers in the world and Australia is a major coal exporter.

It’s like driving at top speed toward a cliff saying “We’re fine!”

Australia asks IPCC scientists to delete a reference to analysis of the role played by fossil fuel lobbyists in watering down action on climate in Australia and the US.

“Hello, we’re here to lobby you to remove insulting references to lobbying.”

I started re-reading Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye last night and there’s a very resonant passage about girls and puberty in chapter 17. The adult narrator starts with her childhood friend [it’s complicated] Cordelia:

Breasts fascinate Cordelia, and fill her with scorn. Both of her older sisters have them by now. Perdie and Mirrie sit in their room with its twin beds and sprigged-muslin flounces, filing their nails, laughing softly; or they heat brown wax in little pots in the kitchen and take it upstairs to spread on their legs. They look into their mirrors, making sad faces – “I look like Haggis McBaggis! It’s the curse!” Their wastebaskets smell of decaying flowers.

They tell Cordelia there are some things she’s too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway. Cordelia, her voice lowered, her eyes big, passes on the truth: the curse is when blood comes out between your legs. We don’t believe her. She produces evidence: a sanitary pad, filched from Perdie’s wastebasket. On it is a brown crust, like dried gravy. “That’s not blood,” Grace says with disgust, and she’s right, it’s nothing like when you cut your finger. Cordelia is indignant. But she can prove nothing.

I haven’t thought much about grown-up women’s bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous. We hang around outside the room where Perdie and Mirrie are peeling the wax off their legs while they utter yelps of pain, trying to see through the keyhole, giggling: they embarrass us, although we don’t know why. They know they’re being laughed at and come to the door to shoo us away. “Cordelia, why don’t you and your little friends bug off!” They smile a little ominously, as if they know already what is in store for us. “Just wait and see,” they say.

This frightens us. Whatever has happened to them, bulging them, softening them, causing them to walk rather than run, as if there’s some invisible leash around their necks, holding them in check – whatever it is, it may happen to us too. We look surreptitiously at the breasts of women on the street, of our teachers; though not of our mothers, that would be too close for comfort. We examine our legs and underarms for sprouting hairs, our chests for swellings. But nothing is happening: so far we are safe.

That all sounds kind of familiar to me, although I don’t remember that time with anything like the clarity and detail Atwood gives. I don’t remember much but I do remember that it felt alien and strange and sometimes repulsive.

The writing is brilliant, obviously (I think this is perhaps her best novel), and I think it’s relevant to the gender dysphoria issue. The onset of puberty is ook, at least for some (apparently some girls await it impatiently and are delighted when it arrives), but mostly you get used to it. You don’t feel hairy, squashy, monstrous forever.