Lawyers are laughing at Jolyon’s lawyering.

See, if you’re defending free speech, that’s what you’re doing. You’re not supposed to say “I think it’s a crock of shit but” first. You can say that in the pub, but not if you’re a university actually defending free speech. Jolyon wants them to scream “WE HATE TERFS” and then mutter “but yes yes free speech” and depart in haste.

Also…Jolyon has been saying he wishes a transphobe would agree to debate him, but it turns out he doesn’t want to.

And yet…and yet…and yet he said he wanted to.

This is not good.

Quoting the rest.

One of the women already had pronouns displayed in her username. The effect of this was to create a really odd sense that the women had made a submissive gesture and the men had not.

In discussions at work about pronouns, the solution proposed to this has often been to ‘normalize declaring pronouns’ so that everyone feels they should comply with the request. So the women are attempting to ‘model’ this compliance. So far, so gendered.

When I have been in meetings where a man does declare he/him-ness, it simply exacerbates this sense of domination vs compliance. You have a woman underlining that she is a woman & a man announcing that he is a man. It underscores disparities & does nothing to dispel them.

I still do not comply, but this particular meeting was the first time I had felt the swivel of curious eyes on me for not announcing that I was a woman, while there were none scrutinizing the men who felt free to disregard the silly request.

It spoke chillingly to me about how pronoun culture is a tool that reinforces sexism and inequality. The men still spoke over the women and dominated the discussion too. So it was just like any other mixed sex meeting, except the women had signalled their submission first.

Indeed. That and more – the women look submissive and also credulous. The men look independent and also appropriately skeptical. What a godawful set of oppositions.

Selina Todd wrote to the Times:

Sir, The role of a university should be to pursue truth, via careful research and active debate. The recent treatment of Professor Kathleen Stock suggests this is now secondary to attracting and pacifying student consumers (“Students demand firing of ‘transphobe’ professor”, News, Oct 8). Sussex University did not take “immediate action” to stop the bullying she faced this week. Offensive posters and stickers were visible by Tuesday, October 5. Only after public pressure was applied did the university remove these and (on Thursday, October 7) make a public statement, which paid lip service to academic freedom while assuring students of the university’s “inclusivity”.

Any scholar engaged in researching women or gender-identity ideology is vulnerable to bullying and intimidation. Yet the Universities and Colleges Union, and the professional associations for humanities scholars, remain silent. I hope Professor Stock’s bravery and integrity will inspire more concerned academics to speak out.
Selina Todd

So did the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission:

Sir, The attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock and the campaign to have her fired are disgraceful. Sussex University is right to investigate these attacks and to defend academic freedom of speech. Trans rights must be protected but university is a place where we are exposed to ideas and learn to debate with each other. This involves hearing about, and challenging, opposing perspectives. It is not a place where people bully and harass professionals and berate institutions because they disagree with someone’s entirely lawful expert views. Other institutions faced with the same problems should follow Sussex University’s lead to stop these attacks on freedom of speech.

Tougher regulation of social media is needed so hatred cannot be spread. We will be considering this through our work on the Online Safety Bill and as part of our new strategic plan covering the next three years.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine
Chairwoman, Equality and Human Rights Commission

The trade union UCU Edinburgh says: “A reminder of UCU’s strong position in support of trans inclusion…Liberation cannot be built on exclusion.”

A union says liberation cannot be built on exclusion. Really? So unions have to include bosses and owners? Black liberation movements have to include white people? Free speech organizations have to include censors? Atheist groups have to include believers? Consumer groups have to include advertisers and PR firms? Democrats have to include Republicans and vice versa?

Horse shit. We get to organize, and campaign, and agitate, via particular parties and groups and institutions, which necessarily exclude people who don’t match the “particular” bit. Socialists don’t have to be inclusive of capitalists, and vice versa.

What does “trans inclusion” really mean? That women are required to include men as women upon being ordered to. (Also men are required to include women ditto? No, not really. It’s nearly always women who have to be bullied over this. For some reason it’s not so urgent to bully men over it.)

Well, we won’t. The more you push us to the angrier we get. You want dinosaurs? You’ll get dinosaurs.

Says Jolyon Maugham, who never stops giving away women’s rights.

Laurie Penny had a brief moment of partial spine and said in a tweet that the bullying of Kathleen Stock was a little over the top. Then she deleted the tweet.

She left a reply up though.

Do tell feminist women they’re wrong wrong wrong but don’t use smoke flairs and giant signs.

No mention of women being harmed of course.

She doesn’t bother to remove Kathleen from these conversations, which would have been a touch more thoughtful than sending her yet more abuse via the furious replies.

The bit where she takes it back:

So she reflects, and reverts to joining the team in bullying Kathleen some more. At the behest of one of the bullies.

Then tweet after tweet after tweet, most of them also going to Kathleen, in which Laurie Penny apologizes and withdraws it all and apologizes some more. It’s contemptible.

The Telegraph reports:

Women prisoners who call transgender inmates by the wrong pronoun could face extra time in jail under equality rules, says a justice minister.

Female inmates who deliberately call a transgender woman “he” or “him” could be punished under rules barring “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”.

So…in that scenario why is it the woman who is being “threatening” or “abusive”? Why isn’t it the man? Why are women being treated as a threat to men when the reality is the other way around?

That’s before we even get to “are you fucking kidding me, women will be punished for not repeating a lie?”

This summer, the High Court rejected a legal challenge to prevent transgender inmates with convictions for sexual or violent offences against women being imprisoned alongside other women.

So, women in prison have to put up with men convicted of violent or sexual crimes being locked up with them, and they have to pretend those men are women, on pain of further punishment.

How do the people in charge manage to stay blind to how grotesque this is?

Lord Wolfson added: “The Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service are committed to advancing equality, eliminating discrimination, harassment and victimisation.”

No they’re not. They’re not advancing women’s equality, nor are they eliminating discrimination, harassment and victimisation of women.

Finally.

President Joe Biden will restore the boundaries of three American nature reserves, known as national monuments, that were reduced in size by former President Donald Trump to allow commercial activity, the White House said on Thursday.

The restoration will protect more than 3.2 million acres (1.3 million hectares) in Southern Utah known as the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, as well as the nearly 5,000 square mile (8,000 sq km) Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New England.

This is good.

Ix-nay on the executive privilege ploy. Dude you don’t even go to this school.

Joe Biden has blocked an attempt by former US president Donald Trump to withhold documents from Congress related to the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol.

There’s no “executive privilege” that lets you try to overthrow the government and then hide your homework.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Biden authorized the National Archives, a government agency that holds records from Trump’s time in office, to turn over an initial batch of documents requested by a House of Representatives select committee investigating the riot.

“The president’s dedicated to ensuring that something like that could never happen again, which is why the administration is cooperating with ongoing investigations,” Psaki told reporters. “The president has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not warranted for the first set of documents from the Trump White House that have been provided to us by the National Archives.”

…

The decision, which affects only the initial batch of documents reviewed by the White House, sets up a potential showdown with Trump, who has repeatedly downplayed the events of 6 January and sought to recast the rioters as “patriots”. The Guardian reported that he plans to sue to prevent release of the documents if necessary.

“Showdown.” Come on. He’s out of office, he’s in debt, he’s looking stupid. This isn’t the OK Corral.

Is it possible?

The healthline item is from 2018. I think I’ve seen it before, and probably written about it here, but I haven’t been able to find anything here. Apologies if I repeat myself.

The trick turns out to be easy.

Yes, it’s possible for men to become pregnant and give birth to children of their own. In fact, it’s probably a lot more common than you might think. In order to explain, we’ll need to break down some common misconceptions about how we understand the term “man.”

Oh, that. They mean women who call themselves men can get pregnant. Yes no kidding, we know that already.

Many AFAB folks who identify as men or who don’t identify as women have the reproductive organs necessary to carry a child.

Duh. All of them do unless they have a serious abnormality. This isn’t some crapshoot that nobody can really predict, it’s what everybody already knows.

Yes, pigs can fly, if you define eagles as pigs. Yes, frogs can teach physics, if you define frogs as humans who have learned physics. Yes, jumbo jets can be submarines if you define submarines as jumbo jets.

Another disaster:

There’s never a good time for an oil spill. But the most recent ones — in the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Ida last month, and then this past weekend, in the ocean off Huntington Beach, Calif. — have come right in the heart of the fall migration of hundreds of millions of birds.

…

These journeys are perilous, even in the best of times. Flying thousands of miles requires vast amounts of food and protected habitats. But more and more of the wetlands, marshes, forests and fields needed to support migrating birds have been filled in, cut down and paved over. As a result, the remaining refuges are few and far between, overcrowded and vulnerable to even slight disruptions.

The Southern California spill is the worst sort of disruption. It tarred beaches and fouled a rare, fragile coastal wetland. And it happened at the peak of fall migration, in a spot especially important to the Pacific Flyway.

Southern California’s beaches and remnant marshes offer sanctuary for thousands of migrating birds, including threatened and endangered species. Oil from the spill penetrated these marshes before adequate protective barriers could be put in place, raising the prospect of long-term damage. Birds are already dying.

Oh look, a cruise ship.

Trump identifies as not broke, but…

Former President Donald Trump provided “misleading information about the financial situation” of his hotel in Washington while he was in office, according to the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

The committee, which recently obtained documents from the General Services Administration, found that Trump reported his hotel in downtown D.C. brought in $150 million in income while he served in the White House, but the hotel actually incurred more than $70 million in losses.

It depends on who’s asking. If it’s the IRS, losses losses losses. If it’s potential dupes, profits profits profits.

“By filing these misleading public disclosures, President Trump grossly exaggerated the financial health of the Trump Hotel,” the committee said Friday in a news release.

When Trump first applied to lease the Old Post Office Building in 2011 for his hotel, he also provided the federal government with information that the committee said “appeared to conceal certain debts.” Records show Trump specifically didn’t show outstanding balances for properties he owned in other major cities like New York, Chicago and Las Vegas, the panel said.

And why is that? Because the outstanding balances would make him a bad bet. Kind of like if anyone else is seeking a mortgage and doesn’t tell the lending bank about some large debts.

The committee also said the newly obtained documents show that from 2017 through 2020, the Trump International Hotel in D.C. received about $3.7 million in payments from foreign governments, which it said raises “concerns about possible violations of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.”

While he served in the White House, Trump also received “a significant financial benefit” from Deutsche Bank that allowed him to postpone making payments on the $170 million loan for the hotel, the committee said.

“Mr. Trump did not publicly disclose this significant benefit from a foreign bank while he was president,” the committee said.

But he made up for it by throwing candy at Angela Merkel.

Now there’s an easy challenge.

Yes, of course I believe that trans women are not really women, because that’s what “trans women” means. I’ve been coming out and saying it for years. This is not “like” lesbians and women of other marginalized groups, because those women are all women, but trans women are (by definition) men.

There’s no need to beg, no need to say please, I’m perfectly happy to say trans women are not really women. Just ask.

I was going to say that to Serano instead of here but he’s locked his account. I guess other women have been saying it to him.

As another citizen of Twitter said, well done those women.

Also in Trans Activists Hell Bent On Expelling Everyone Who Fails To Endorse The Dogma:

Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special is facing a wave of intense backlash after the comedian once again made jokes directed toward the LGBTQ+ community and defended the author JK Rowling, who has been previously accused of transphobia.

“Who has been previously accused,” says Maya Yang sanctimoniously.

Journalism needs to do a better job on this. Lots of people have been “previously accused of transphobia,” because journalists and others don’t hold these accusers to account. They don’t insist on a clear and exact definition of “transphobia,” so what they get is just 17 trillion venomous accusations which don’t mean anything. We’re all accused of “transphobia” as long as we don’t echo every stupid syllable of the Tranz Gospel while putting money in the plate. The reality is that none of it is “transphobia”; what it is is a rejection of the idiotic new dogma and the commands to forget all about sex because now it’s only “gender” that counts, and what gender is is whatever you want it to be, darling, provided you’re not one of those horrible transphobes we need to exclude for the sake of inclusion.

In The Closer, which premiered on Tuesday on Netflix, Chappelle declared himself a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (Terf) alongside Rowling. “They canceled JK Rowling – my God. Effectually she said gender was fact, the trans community got mad as shit, they started calling her a Terf … I’m team Terf,” the comedian said in the special, which is one of the most watched pieces of content on the streaming site.

“Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. This is a fact,” Chappelle added, before saying that “trans women’s” genitalia are “not quite what it is”.

He means sex is a fact, but anyway, yes. Gender shmender blender, but women do the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping the supply of humans going.

Netflix subscribers have urged the streaming platform to take down the special, with the National Black Justice Coalition saying, “With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States … Netflix should know better. Perpetuating transphobia perpetuates violence.”

See? It’s the magic expanding suitcase of “transphobia.” Saying that men don’t gestate human beings isn’t transphobia, it’s reality.

Now arguably saying it with irritation (as I just did) is a kind of transphobia, but it’s a narrow kind that also needs to be spelled out as opposed to assumed. A lot of us do say it with irritation, it’s true, but that’s because it’s 1. bullshit and 2. harmful, and because we’re not allowed to say so. It’s bullshit the way religion is bullshit, the way reincarnation is bullshit, the way the claim that there’s a magical race of beings hiding behind a planet is bullshit, the way recovered memory is bullshit. Claiming that physical sex is trivial and meaningless and that what determines who is a woman and who is a man is what’s inside each person’s head is peak bullshit, and if we can’t tell irritable jokes about it…well then we’ll just tell more irritable jokes about it.

Yang goes on to report more complaints and protests and argle bargle, while not saying anything about objections to the complaints etc etc, merely quoting Chapelle complaining about them and then giving another complainer the last word. Not exactly a balanced piece of reporting.

Oh yes, of course there’s another aspect to this business of Trump’s determination to stop people testifying and producing evidence now that he’s out of office. What is that aspect? Four little words.

Ohhh right! Obstruction of justice! That’s what he’s doing, and it’s a no-no. Witness tampering: no no, not allowed, put the phone down.

Of course that means nothing if the Justice Department looks the other way out of politeness or some such shit.

Dennis Kavanagh says the tide has turned.

Note the “empathy, compassion.” Not for the likes of Kathleen Stock of course.

But it didn’t work out the way he expected.

Some “women’s officer.”

Trump’s goons plan to ignore the subpoenas, because he told them to. Telling them to equals telling them to invite prosecution and conviction and a sentence, but whatevs, that’s their problem.

All four Trump aides targeted by the select committee – [Mark] Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel – are expected to resist the orders because Trump is preparing to direct them to do so, the source said.

It’s not clear how Trump can “direct” them to do anything. He’s not their boss and he’s not god of the universe. They don’t have to do what he tells them to do.

But increasingly concerned with the far-reaching nature of the 6 January investigation, Trump and his legal team, led by the ex-Trump campaign lawyer Justin Clark the former deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin, are moving to instruct the attorneys for the subpoenaed aides to defy the orders.

So the ex-boss’s attorneys are “moving to instruct” the underlings’ attorneys to protect the boss at their own expense. But the underlings’ attorneys are the underlings’ attorneys, not the boss’s. I don’t see how the boss’s lawyers get to “instruct” the underlings’ lawyers to throw their own case. I hope they send a message back instructing Trump to go fuck himself.

Trump’s strategy mirrors the playbook he used to prevent House Democrats from deposing his top advisers during his presidency. The former White House counsel Don McGahn, for instance, only testified to Congress about the Mueller inquiry once Trump left office.

Yes but the key difference there is during his presidency. This isn’t that.

House select committee investigators had demanded that the four Trump aides turn over emails, call records and other documents related to the Capitol attack by Thursday and then appear before the panel for closed-door depositions next week.

But with the former president expected to insist to Philbin that Meadows, Scavino, Bannon and Patel mount blanket refusals against the subpoenas, the source said, the select committee at present appears likely to see none of the requests fulfilled.

Again – what force does Trump’s “insisting” have? Who cares what he insists? He’s just some guy who cheats at golf.

Brighton and Hove News reports:

A targeted campaign against a philosophy professor accused of transphobia has been condemned as harassment by the University of Sussex.

Posters demanding the university fire Kathleen Stock appeared on campus this morning, and smoke bombs were set off as a masked protester held a banner saying Stock Out at the entrance to campus.

The protesters say Professor Stock seeks to exclude and endanger trans people by, for example, supporting female-only spaces and sport and questioning the safety of puberty blocking drugs prescribed to minors.

In other words she seeks to support the safety of women and of minors who want to harm themselves by halting puberty. She doesn’t seek to endanger anyone, and she seeks to “exclude” men from women’s spaces, because women need some spaces away from men. Some kinds of exclusion are permissible and necessary.

This latest campaign today posted a “mission statement” on its Instagram page which said: “Stock is one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes, espousing a bastardized variation of ‘radical feminism’ that excludes and endangers trans people.

Yo, radical feminism is about women. It’s not about trans people, nor should it be.

It concludes: “Our demand is simple: fire Kathleen Stock. Until then, you’ll see us around.”

A University of Sussex spokesperson said: “We were extremely concerned to see the harassment towards our staff member and took immediate action in response to this, which we continue to do.”