This would be funny if it weren’t so sickening – lately Trump has been complaining that Prince Jared is too much of a lefty and he Trump isn’t going to take his lefty advice any more.

President Trump has told people in recent days that he regrets following some of son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner’s political advice — including supporting criminal justice reform — and will stick closer to his own instincts, three people with direct knowledge of the president’s thinking tell Axios.

Behind the scenes: One person who spoke with the president interpreted his thinking this way: “No more of Jared’s woke shit.” Another said Trump has indicated that following Kushner’s advice has harmed him politically.

Aw yeah, woke Jared.

The sources said the president has resolved to stick to his instincts and jettison any policies that go against them, including ambitious police reform.

…

Trump has made clear he wants to support law enforcement unequivocally, and he won’t do anything that could be seen as undercutting police.

Trump loves force. It’s tough, it’s simple, it’s easy to understand, it’s violent, it’s exciting, it’s fun to watch. He loves it. He’s a simple man.

Axios goes on to say the disagreement with Prince J may be just a passing mood, though.

Trump’s mood this morning:

Badness alert. There will be badness. It will be bad. Prepare for bad. It will definitely be bad, repeat, definitely bad.

Top disease researcher Dr Anthony Fauci has told the US Senate that he “would not be surprised” if new virus cases in the country reach 100,000 per day.

“Clearly we are not in control right now,” he testified, warning that not enough Americans are wearing masks or social distancing.

And that’s not because we can’t, it’s because we stupidly stubbornly won’t. In large part it’s because of our stupid reckless infantile “president.”

Testifying to a Senate committee on the effort to reopen schools and businesses, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases criticised states for “skipping over” benchmarks required for reopening, and said cases will rise as a result.

“I can’t make an accurate prediction, but it is going to be very disturbing, I will guarantee you that,” he told Senator Elizabeth Warren.

And by “disturbing” he means “bad.” That’s the “it will definitely be bad” part.

“Because when you have an outbreak in one part of the country even though in other parts of the country they’re doing well, they are vulnerable.”

“We can’t just focus on those areas that are having the surge. It puts the entire country at risk,” he added.

Can we put up roadblocks everywhere?

Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican, said it would help if Trump wore a mask now and then.

It probably would, but will he do it? Of course not. He doesn’t care if millions of people die because of his refusal to wear a mask. A minor scratch on the back of his leg is a bigger tragedy to him than the death of tens of thousands from the virus. Of course he’s not going to wear a mask just to save millions of lives.

We don’t always even notice the racist symbols, and that’s kind of the point.

Aspirational depictions of a city upon a hill and liberty and justice for all lose their luster when they’re juxtaposed against the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples, or an intricate slave-based economy rubber-stamped by revolutionaries fighting for their own freedom. But more dated history textbooks rarely provide that level of insight around how minority communities were treated during the country’s early years, and slavery gets all but erased – “there’s no discussion of what life was like in the United States prior to 1860, or if it is, it’s just African Americans were enslaved in this country, and the civil war freed them,” said Berry.

A lot of people – white people mostly – roll their eyes at this kind of thing, but…to belabor the obvious, they (we) shouldn’t. It’s all too easy to ignore oppression and exploitation in daily life because it’s hidden away. We don’t go looking for it, most of us, so we don’t see it, so we don’t realize it exists, so when we’re told it does we bristle or yawn and say it’s not true or it’s in the past or it’s a step on the way to prosperity.

It’s this inconsistent retelling that has allowed for the veneration of deeply flawed characters, whose biographies are often cherry-picked for effect. Many of the founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders, despite waxing poetic about how the institution was a “moral depravity”. Even Benjamin Franklin, revered as an early abolitionist, owned enslaved people for much of his life and ran ads selling others in his newspaper.

Champions of these men often attribute their moral failings to the sociopolitical environment in which they lived. But “just because slavery was accepted among white elites or even the broader white population at the time does not mean it was accepted by everybody, because everybody includes Black people who were enslaved, indigenous people who were pushed off their lands in order to expand plantation slavery,” said Akiboh.

That’s a very important point. It’s all too easy to think “People didn’t realize,” but the people who didn’t realize were the people it didn’t happen to.

That’s one reason artifacts like Gone With the Wind are so insidious: generations of Americans got the impression from that novel and film that slaves were happy and like members of the family, and that’s before we even get to the part about the KKK and lynchings.

When earlier this month Nascar hosted the first major sporting event with fans since the coronavirus pandemic, a plane with a gargantuan Confederate battle flag flew across the skyline to protest against the new ban.

Heritage, yeah?

Rand Paul says don’t pay attention to experts on technical subjects like viral contagion.

Rand Paul is the genius who tested positive for the virus back in March, to the fury of colleagues who had been up close and personal with him in recent days. Mind you they still seem to be ok so maybe that means Rand Paul knows better than Anthony Fauci?

Wow.

I know, I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.

Jeff Sessions had a chat with the Times and…

Former Attorney General and current US Senate candidate Jeff Sessions referred to Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., one the nation’s most famous Black scholars, as “some criminal” in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. 

He was bragging about bigging up the police when he was Attorney General.

“Back to the men and women in blue,” Sessions told The Times’ Elaina Plott of his guiding principle on policing while leading the DOJ. “The police had been demoralized. There was all the Obama — there’s a riot, and he has a beer at the White House with some criminal, to listen to him. Wasn’t having a beer with the police officers. So we said, ‘We’re on your side. We’ve got your back, you got our thanks.'” 

So, yeah, wow. You have got to be kidding. Gates was arrested for going into his own house. The arrest was a mistake, to put it mildly. And Obama was “having a beer with the police officers”: he had the beer with Gates and the cop who arrested him.

So racist piece of shit former Attorney General of the United States is so profoundly racist that he managed to translate that incident into Gates was “some criminal” and Obama didn’t invite the cop Obama did invite.

“President Obama made an innocent comment that the arrest was stupid, which it was. Then all of a sudden all these racists are beating up on him,” Gates recalled in a February 2020 interview with The Times. “My whole attitude was channeled through the desire to protect our first black president. But there was another motivation. I thought that it would be hubristic and dishonest if I compared what happened to me to what happens to black people in the inner city.”

Sessions didn’t bother with all that, Sessions just translated the black academic arrested for entering his own house into “some criminal” and Obama into a guy who hangs with “some criminal” and shuns a cop.

Some criminal. Some racist. Some pig.

So we screwed that up completely.

The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.

The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S. 

But that peak wasn’t bad enough, so we decided to make it much worse.

“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,” she said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.”

We’re a failed state. A big, floppy, clumsy, blundering failed state. We put our shoes on upside down.

Household work? Children? Oh that’s for other people to do.

The fact is, though, Covid-19 has taken women’s roles back to the 50s. Women are home schooling, working and doing huge amounts of domestic work. The answer to 50s-style problems may be some 70s-style consciousness raising about gender roles.

It’s really quite simple. There is nothing about being female that equates to special skill at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers, and there is nothing about being male that equates to special ineptitude at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers. People who live in households should share the work equitably and fairly.

But, instead of discussing how gender roles are regressing; how the virus has derailed women’s careers; how childcare is falling apart; how female workers will be hit hardest by the recession; how female academics have turned in far fewer papers than their male counterparts; how, at the end of furlough, redundancy will affect more women; how the gender pay gap is rising – in other words, all the pre-existing inequalities that have been exacerbated by Covid-19 – what do we talk about?

Two things. We continue to have a conversation around gender, which emphasises it as a set of feelings rather than being about often mundane lived experience; and we have, on social media, a ridiculous row over cleaners. Various bright young things declare their sainthood. Either they don’t have cleaners or they pay them the GDP of Venezuela. Only bad women, Karens, boomers, like me, have cleaners, whom we probably abuse. Some of us have been cleaners, but no matter. Working women pay others to look after our children and to do some of the domestic work or we could not do it. Just as men do. And always have done. But men are not attacked for this. Ever.

That’s how belief in Gender works. Men don’t do toilets; women do little else.

But the serious part of domestic labour being invisible and somehow personal has huge implications. The absolute tragedy of this crisis is that underpaid care workers in homes have died because care in our own homes is not valued. We are run by people who don’t respect those who do such care in our society, because this is the lowest-status job. Women do it. Immigrants do it. Childcare and the opening of schools has not been a priority because, well, like the laundry, other people do that.

Other people here means lesser people, obscure people, people we can ignore.

It is terribly old-fashioned to talk about the domestic labour debate I know, the part about how unpaid work keeps capitalism functioning. Well, it keeps us all functioning. This is why a former prime minister can joke about never having to do it. It’s a sign of power.

How we laugh as we lie back and think of descaling the kettle. How many prime ministers does it take to change a lightbulb? Don’t ask me. How many prime ministers does it take to change the reality of women’s lives? We were on the double shift: work and housework. Now many are on the triple shift: work, housework and schooling. The lightbulbs went out some time ago, and, if we are not to go back to the dark ages, then someone better get some bright ideas and replace the duds quickly.

Thank you Suzanne Moore.

CNN says it’s really that bad:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

Oh. Well, great. Unprepared, kissy-kissy with Putin and Erdogan, abusive to allies – so that’s wonderful. It’s what you’d expect from a failed casino huckster and vulgar creep, but so then…how did we end up with him?

The calls made his top people think he was delusional. (Of course he’s delusional. He thinks he’s hot stuff.)

The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

This is the Trump we all see all the time, so why would anyone think he would be different on the phone to Merkel or Macron or Trudeau?

By far the greatest number of Trump’s telephone discussions with an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump, according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America’s principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was “stupid.”

Erm…that takes even my breath away.

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia’s autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, “great” accomplishments as President, and the “idiocy” of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

So he talks to them the way he talks to all of us on Twitter. Of course he does: the way he talks on Twitter is the best he can do. It’s not as if he has another register for serious purposes. With him what you see is what you get.

He especially loved talking about how much better he is than Bush2 and Obama.

The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN’s sources of Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book, “The Room Where It Happened.” But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period than Bolton’s tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning — in their sweep.

…

The insidious effect of the conversations comes from Trump’s tone, his raging outbursts at allies while fawning over authoritarian strongmen, his ignorance of history and lack of preparation as much as it does from the troubling substance, according to the sources.

Two sources compared many of the President’s conversations with foreign leaders to Trump’s recent press “briefings” on the coronavirus pandemic: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation.

The performance of a very chaotic very undisciplined very stupid blob of flesh.

In addition to Merkel and May, the sources said, Trump regularly bullied and disparaged other leaders of the western alliance during his phone conversations — including French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison — in the same hostile and aggressive way he discussed the coronavirus with some of America’s governors.

He shouted at Macron a lot, but he saved his best bullying for the women.

In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as “near-sadistic” by one of the sources and confirmed by others. “Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her ‘stupid,’ and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians … He’s toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with.”

The calls “are so unusual,” confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump’s behavior with Merkel in the calls as “very aggressive” and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel’s calls with Trump has shrunk: “It’s just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic.”

Trump’s conversations with May, the UK Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, were described as “humiliating and bullying,” with Trump attacking her as “a fool” and spineless in her approach to Brexit, NATO and immigration matters.

“He’d get agitated about something with Theresa May, then he’d get nasty with her on the phone call,” One source said. “It’s the same interaction in every setting — coronavirus or Brexit — with just no filter applied.”

Merkel remained calm and outwardly unruffled in the face of Trump’s attacks —”like water off a duck’s back,” in the words of one source — and she regularly countered his bluster with recitations of fact. The German official quoted above said that during Merkel’s visit to the White House two years ago, Trump displayed “very questionable behavior” that “was quite aggressive … [T]he Chancellor indeed stayed calm, and that’s what she does on the phone.”

Prime Minister May, in contrast, became “flustered and nervous” in her conversations with the President. “He clearly intimidated her and meant to,” said one of CNN’s sources.

I wish I could grab his arm and pinch a fold of flesh with pliers right now. Pinch it hard, and not stop. With his people watching and smiling.

Reddit shut down the gender critical group today.

Let’s look at that page:

Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability

Interesting choice of words. We are told often and relentlessly that trans women are “vulnerable,” including (or indeed especially) vulnerable to women. If trans women are vulnerable to women…well naturally feminist women can’t be permitted to dispute the claims of trans women to one, be women, and two, be vulnerable to women. That would be most unfair, because trans women are vulnerable to women, which we know because they keep saying so.

And we can’t reply that no they’re not because they are men, not women, and men are not vulnerable to women. Why can’t we? Because that would be promoting hate based on identity. They identify as women, so that makes them women, and it also makes them vulnerable to “cis” women.

While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate. 

See? That’s women. There are more women than there are trans women, so trans women get to win every time. Hahaha, go home bitches, you’ve lost.

There’s a penalty for insisting on being actively stupid and uninformed. Unfortunately the penalty is paid by everyone, not just the people insisting on being actively stupid and uninformed.

The US is “unlikely” to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus even with a vaccine, according to the country’s leading public health expert, who warned that a “general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling” is likely to thwart vaccination efforts.

In an interview with CNN, Dr Anthony Fauci also said people not wearing masks was “a recipe for disaster” and said of the Trump administration’s attempts at contact tracing: “I don’t think we’re doing very well.”

Oh well, it’s just a lethal pandemic.

One bullet dodged in the war on abortion rights.

Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal justices on the Supreme Court on Monday to block a controversial Louisiana abortion law that critics said would have closed nearly every clinic in the state.

The 5-4 ruling is a win for supporters of abortion rights who argued that the law was not medically necessary and amounted to a veiled attempt to restrict abortion. The law barred doctors from performing the procedure unless they had admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Not really veiled, is it – everyone knows it’s about killing abortion rights.

About UN Women – what is it? I found myself wondering if it was just one of those fake-official outfits that are nothing but a Twitter account and a person, so I looked it up. It’s a genuine part of the UN – called a UN “entity”…and I don’t really know what that means, but at least it’s not another “Catholic League” which is really just Bill Donohue. It was established by the UN General Assembly in 2010.

It says it’s there for the women and girls.

UN Women is the global champion for gender equality, working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her human rights and live up to her full potential.

Great, but that’s not what it’s doing. It’s pretty much doing the opposite right now.

Today for instance.

They asked no women. None. Zero. The link is to a piece on Medium:

Every June, the world unites to celebrate Pride Month and to promote equality and visibility of the LGBTIQ+ community.

So UN Women could do that by talking to four lesbians, yeah?

But that’s not what they did here.

Geena Rocero (she/her) is a Filipino American supermodel, transgender advocate and founder of Gender Proud, a media production company that tells stories of the transgender community worldwide to elevate justice and equality, based in the United States of America.

Rocero is the photo second from left.

Imara Jones (she/her) is a journalist and Founder and Creator of TransLash Media in the United States of America, which tells the stories of trans lives. In 2019 she moderated UN Women’s High-Level meeting on gender diversity beyond binary identities.

Photo first from left.

Amanda Bosco (she/her) is a transgender youth activist from Uganda, advocating for LGBTI rights.

Photo four.

Tarek Zeidan (he/his) is a sexual and bodily rights activist from Beirut, Lebanon, advocating for the rights and protection of LGBTIQ+ individuals and groups in the Middle East and North Africa region, and is the President and Executive Director of Helem, the first LGBT rights organization in the Arab World, founded in Beirut in 2001.

Photo three.

Sorry, wims, it turns out nobody gives a shit about you.

Very progressive.

None of this can work unless everyone carefully changes the meaning of core words, and why should we agree to do that in such a fatuous delusional cause?

The Guardian solemnly explains about these genius new young people who think you can change material reality by changing the vocabulary.

Who decides your gender?

Don’t be silly. You mean “sex,” and no one decides. The question makes no more sense than “Who decides your species?”

A growing number of kids say it is up to them – and are rejecting the traditional markers of “male” or “female” in favor of identifying as “genderqueer”, which refers to people who don’t fall squarely within the gender binary. Stars like Indya Moore have come out as non-binary and use they/them pronouns, and non-binary characters are increasingly featured in breakout TV shows, such as Asia Kate Dillon’s role in Billions.

Don’t be silly. You mean a growing number of kids are confused about what is material reality and what is human convention. If you can’t grasp that distinction then nothing you say is going to make any sense…and of course that’s how the rest of the article goes.

Yet non-binary kids say they are widely misunderstood, and they face prejudice. Donald Trump, for instance, recently decreed that protections against healthcare discrimination were to be applied based exclusively on biology rather than one’s inner sense of gender.

Meaning…what? Healthcare should be based on “one’s inner sense of gender” and not on biology? So boys should get pap smears if their “inner sense of gender” tells them they are girls? You might want to warn them that that will hurt.

After that there’s a lot of self-obsessed drivel from four of these enthralling “non-binary” kids. I don’t recommend it.

Trump says he never heard a word about it.

President Trump is denying a New York Times report that he was briefed on an alleged Russian effort to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill Western forces — including U.S. troops — in Afghanistan.

Please. He was briefed. Maybe he didn’t read it, maybe he didn’t listen, maybe he was too busy tweeting, maybe he instantly forgot it because he doesn’t give a shit – but he was briefed.

Citing unnamed officials, the Times report, published Friday, details how U.S. intelligence officials reached the conclusion about the secret payments and then briefed the president in March. The White House National Security Council conferred an interagency meeting that same month to discuss the matter, according to the report. The finding was also included in the President’s Daily Brief, according to the Times.

According to the Times, U.S. officials have concluded that the bounty operation was orchestrated by the GRU, an arm of Russian military intelligence that has been linked to assassination attempts and other cloak-and-dagger operations, including the 2018 nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England.

The GRU is the same unit that U.S. intelligence has implicated in efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election.

Trump doesn’t care. Trump has tweets to send and golf balls to move when no one’s looking and pussies to grab and lies to tell.

That’s better.

What’s one of the very best ways to spread COVID-19? Singing in a choir. Great! Let’s have a great big choir sing today when Pence is giving a speech. That will put us on the map!

A choir of more than 100 people performed without masks at a robustly attended event in Texas at the First Baptist Church on Sunday that featured a speech by Vice President Mike Pence.

Nearly 2,200 people attended the “Celebrate Freedom Rally,” in the Lone Star State, according to rally organizers, which has seen a severe surge in coronavirus cases since easing restrictions. The venue capacity for the indoor event was close to 3,000 attendees, organizers say.

Throughout the service, the members of the choir sang at full volume, behind an orchestra. Between songs, the choir members put their masks back on when they sat down, according to pool reports from the event. The members of the choir had space between them, but it was not clear if it was the recommended six feet.

Singing at full volume while packed close together – that’s several of the very worst things you can do. I read a thing about it a couple of days ago. Talking loudly is bad, singing is worse.

Face masks at the event were “strongly encouraged,” with signs posted around the venue signaling the suggestion. According to pool reports from the event, at least half of the crowd was wearing a face covering, an act which experts say can reduce the transmission of Covid-19 by as much as 50%.

But the members of the choir are doomed, and they will infect others.

Choir rehearsals and performances became a focal point early in the course of the coronavirus pandemic, with an outbreak within a 122-member choir in Washington state becoming the subject of a in-depth report out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the report, 87% of singers that attended rehearsal contracted the deadly virus.

It was in Snohomish County, the next county north of here. Two people died.

I wrote a column for The Freethinker about this confusion over contagion and FreeDom.

About that Stephen King retweet…never mind.

About this whole issue of men just not seeing women as a class of people who face systematic unequal treatment, a class of people who are dismissed and ignored and ridiculed because they are that class of people. There really are a lot of men who just don’t see that, who don’t believe it’s true, who don’t think it matters. Who see us as “Karens” or potential “Karens” and who feel no embarrassment about dismissing women as “Karens.” Harvey Jeni points out that Lloyd Russell-Moyle is one such man.

Russell-Moyle has since apologised, but it is worth noting he is not alone in his point of view. The idea that women are cynically using their experiences of domestic and sexual abuse as justification for the supposedly unspeakable belief that sex based exemptions currently contained within the Equality Act ought to be upheld, is gathering apace. The Guardian columnist Owen Jones made a similar accusation when he tweeted a thread in condemnation of JK Rowling, attacking her apparent portrayal of herself as a “martyr”.

How have Jones and Russell-Moyle and so many other men (and women) managed to convince themselves that a man’s desire to role-play being a woman is the real subordination and martyrdom while merely being a woman is just the precondition for being a Karen?

… according to men such as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Owen Jones, women best not dare imagine that being traumatised by male violence is any kind of excuse for rejecting mixed sex spaces. We are to accept them without murmur, and if we don’t we are oppressive bigots. They couldn’t give a shit what we’ve been through, nor do they want to hear any more of our manipulative whining about it. So there, shut up.

They couldn’t give a shit about it and quite frankly they don’t believe it.

Still many women have taken the brave step of speaking out in an effort to explain why an end to single sex spaces will curtail their freedom further. We want others to understand why we might be reluctant to access support services if we cannot be guaranteed a female service provider. We are trying to explain why we might feel too frightened to use a public toilet situated down the end of a dark deserted corridor if any male person claiming a female gender identity (and with no gatekeeping literally any male person can claim one) has a right to be there. We are trying to show why it is not unreasonable for us to ask that the person performing our cervical smear, or any other type of intimate care, be female.

But rather than listening, we instead have men in positions of power accuse us of deliberately and calculatingly using these experiences to hurt and oppress others. Of course. Women are scheming like that. Ha! We are not really upset, we’re just pretending — and anyway, the crime of recognising trans women as biologically male is far greater than any triviality we might have endured.

Women are privileged at best and oppressors at worst. It’s only men who say they feel like women who are truly oppressed and disprivileged.

How did we get here? I don’t know. Massive bullying is certainly part of it, but how did the belief get so entrenched that the massive bullying happened? I don’t know. I don’t understand it. The belief is so silly and so counter to reality that I just don’t get how it dug itself in so fast.

Noteworthy.

When JK Rowling quotes Andrea Dworkin and Stephen King retweets her doing so…we may be seeing some fissures widening.