Many people clearly pride themselves on being unpleasant.

No she doesn’t. That’s Joan Smith, and no she doesn’t. “pol” is short for political, and in any case “pol” doesn’t mean pale in the first place. But being told that wasn’t going to stop the snide pissy Zakaria.

How dare the white feminists point out a dishonest smear of the feminist author of Misogynies?

What a crude vulgar childish brat. I won’t be following her work.

Psychologist Ellyn Kaschak on the trans dogma:

… there is a deafening silence on the part of most individual psychologists and an enthusiastic, unquestioning and unresearched explosion of support for transgender motives, actions and people by others. I too want to offer support for human rights, but uninformed and unquestioning support may actually involve harm, so instead, I am asking for psychology to step up and take on its responsibilities in this regard.

Not only the conferences, but the classroom and the laboratory are appropriate places to be asking important questions. Yet the inhabitants of these venues are being silenced in the name of human rights and a purported bias named “transphobia.” Academics have been censored and in some cases, lost their positions for just using language deemed unacceptable by the transgender movement, words such as “women.” Yes, “women” is considered hate speech and this purported transphobic hate speech is being aggressively monitored and eliminated in our very universities.

It’s not just a personal preference or psychology now, she notes, but a movement, enforced by threats and punishment.

You are bound to have a relative, a friend or a co-worker bring this issue from the abstract to the personal, as proclaimed gender defiers are inventing more and more genders rather than attempting to abolish this social construction, as did feminists before them. More perniciously, their wordplay includes substituting the term “gender” for the sex change that they are attempting. The reason for this substitution is simply that sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality rather than a socially constructed idea. Sex is currently immutable; gender is not. The conflation of these human characteristics can and does lead to confusion at best and irreversible physical damage at worst.

This formerly personal psychological issue, which affected only 0.1% of the population, has exploded into a social movement with all the characteristics of social contagion.

Along with righteous fury and sadistic love of punishment.

The diagnostic of “gender dysphoria” actually came into existence as “gender identity disorder” and replaced the pathologizing of homosexuality (eliminated in 1973) in the DSM, the psychiatric bible. These diagnoses are adopted by popular vote of the American Psychiatric Association members, democratic rather than scientific. They have the strongest investment in construing psychology in terms of health and pathology. The association members had been convinced by lobbying groups and research, to vote to “normalize” homosexuality. In doing so, they wanted to leave a diagnostic possibility for those who remained conflicted about their sexual orientation. Diagnosis permits treatment via the official approval of the insurance companies, who today control the professions to a frightening extent. Thus was born “gender identity,” seemingly a harmless and even generous compromise.

I don’t think I knew that. The compromise outgrew its cradle and has started devouring the world.

Proponents of the transgender movement actually hijacked this diagnosis, along with the 50 years of feminist theory, practice and discoveries about the social construction and contextual nature of gender and spun them into a human rights movement, but not one for women. In fact, this movement actually infringes on many of the hard-won rights of women, including not only the right to assemble as a sex-based group but the right to call ourselves women, mothers and daughters. It even attempts to destroy the very concept of sex by conflating sex and gender, but make no mistake, lifetimes of research support unequivocally the difference between sex and gender. They may influence each other, but they are not the same thing. And sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality.

Quick, bring out the guillotine.

Here are some more important questions. If psychologists and psychiatrists are going to pathologize and diagnose, a questionable practice at best, then shouldn’t they diagnose carefully, as lives depend upon it? Are they then considering and eliminating such diagnoses as narcissism or sociopathic disorders, sexual fetishes, dissociative disorders or even delusional disorders? Is transitioning more like self-cutting or eating disorders than like homosexuality?

And if so is it really all that brave and stunning?

The usual complete indifference to the needs of women. Me first me me me me me me me me me.

By “women like me” he means men. He’s calling Labour MP Rosie Duffield “awful” (calling her thread awful, but you know we’re meant to think she’s awful for tweeting it) for saying that abused women need women-only services. It’s all about him and zero about the thousands of women who need such services.

You can’t build a progressive movement on this kind of blind relentless egotism and selfishness.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist:

Legal Feminist tweeted a short thread starting like this the other day:  

Cunningham first notes that the tweet hasn’t been verified, she doesn’t know who Mother Cecily is, she doesn’t know the story is true. But as a hypothetical, it’s what not to do.

It’s an extraordinarily bad idea. Any HR director tempted to organise training with this kind of content needs to catch up with the implications of the judgment of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Forstater. Gender critical beliefs are capable of being protected under the Equality Act: that means that someone with gender critical beliefs is entitled not to suffer discrimination on grounds of those beliefs, or harassment related to them. That protection works in the same way as protection from discrimination on grounds of other protected characteristics: sex, race, disability etc. If you want to make this real – well, run the thought experiment, substituting in groups defined by other protected characteristics for “TERF” in “Be less TERF.”  It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? 

What’s the difference here? It’s that “TERF”ism isn’t like racism or sexism or homophobia or exclusion of disabled people. It’s simply the formerly obvious view that men are not women. Employers shouldn’t be holding women who don’t believe men can be women up for rebuke and exclusion.

Anecdotally, it seems that large numbers of gender critical employees are suffering various kinds of discrimination and harassment at work because of these beliefs, or even being disciplined by regulators and professional associations for expressing them. A rash of employment tribunal claims following in the wake of Forstater seems inevitable. 

Punishment for not believing that men can be women. It still seems too grotesque to believe, yet it’s true.

But harassing your gender critical staff through the medium of your diversity training is taking things to another level. It has various snazzy features as compared to common-or-garden workplace harassment. 

First, it’s exceptionally efficient. You don’t have to bother to harass your gender critical staff individually. Instead, with a single document or training event, you can harass all your gender critical employees at once…

Bulk-harassment, as Legal Feminist called it.

The example given above is an extreme case, but employers should think seriously even about what may seem to them to be innocuous exhortations to “allyship,” like encouraging staff to wear a rainbow lanyard, or give their pronouns at the start of meetings or in their email sign-off, etc. The problem, in a nutshell, with pronouns and similar observances is that they are a public profession of belief. If you “encourage” your staff to profess a belief, you are in effect forcing them either to say a creed they may not believe (and which some may find profoundly menacing; for more on that, read this powerful blog),  or else to decline to say it, and thus to confess their unbelief in an environment where unbelievers may be unpopular. 

And it’s especially unpleasant to have your employer leaning on you to profess belief in a creed you consider absolute bullshit.

You say “being less trans-exclusionary, and more trans inclusive seems a reasonable viewpoint to be presented to employees.” That would be fine if “trans inclusive” just meant not discriminating against trans people. But gender critical people are slurred as “trans exclusionary” not because they want to exclude trans people from work or public life, etc. – which obviously would be terrible – but because they don’t accept that trans-identifying males are included within the definition of the word “woman.” So if HR say “be less trans-exclusionary”, they are making a demand that their staff believe something.

And the something in question is a crock of shit.

Meanwhile, if we get tired of banal formulaic denunciations of “white feminism” by white women who write columns for the Independent, we can turn to Ex-Muslims of North America for some real oppression.

The Islamist organization is Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the theocrat who answers the question says: “The ruling of apostasy of Islam is clear, again that’s one of the things the west doesn’t like and seeks to change the ruling of apostasy. As such in Islam it is clear that apostates do attract capital punishment and we don’t shy away from that.”

It’s telling that he shifts the agency onto the victim – it’s the “apostate” who “attracts” murder for leaving the religion. Islam is not to blame, enforcers are not to blame, the apostate is to blame.

There’s also, of course, the fact that it doesn’t matter what “the ruling of Islam” may be in countries that have laws against murder. Islam can “rule” what it likes but murder remains murder even if the perp is an Islamist fanatic like the guy at the mic.

There’s also the fact that it’s not ok to make laws mandating death for changing one’s mind.

Katie Edwards in the Independent:

Over 30 years ago now, Judith Butler wrote the gender studies classic Gender Trouble. Today, Butler expounded on those ideas in an interview with The Guardian.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her progressive approach over the decades, Butler suggested that we should rethink the category of “woman”. 

Progressive? What’s progressive about her “approach”? What’s progressive about suggesting that we should rethink the category of “woman”? Especially when what she means by that is “to include men”?

Butler advocates for trans women and their inclusion in the sisterhood.

Which is ridiculous at best, because trans women are men.

Although the “sisterhood” seems to have become something of an exclusive members’ club. Feminism, or more accurately, white feminism, has gone a bit Mean Girls – in the worst possible way.

More accurately how? Does she think it’s only white feminists who understand that only women are women? Because that would be awfully racist. And as for who is being mean…

White feminism already has a bad rep for being exclusive, divisive, and for deflecting attention away from its more insidious attitudes by targeting vulnerable groups for criticism.

She says, repeating and amplifying the stupid epithet, doing her bit to solidify the “bad rep” that is such a handy stick for misogynists to beat feminism with.

Whenever I write something critical of whiteness, I receive derisive responses from other white women, accusing me of self-flagellation.

No, I don’t think she’s flagellating herself, I think she’s flagellating other feminist women because misogyny has never gone out of style and she wants to be one of the popular kids. Talking about Karens and white feminists and terfs is the way to suck up to the bullies.

We’re all guilty of it – even if we’re trying really, really hard, and we’ve had horrible things happen to us in our lives, so we’re victims too, and we definitely think of ourselves as allies, and we’re actually very nice people and terribly misunderstood, so please don’t call us Terfs or racists or Karens because you’re hurting our fragile little white-woman feelings. Yup. We’ve heard it all before. Ad nauseam.

I’ve read this column before ad nauseam.

Another woman bullied out of attending:

Elected in April 2020, Starmer will be hoping his initial year and a half leading his party will be enough to ensure a standing ovation.

One person who won’t be in that audience however is the MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffield. A poster girl for Labour’s surprise successes in the 2017 election, Duffield has attracted both praise and opprobrium for her views on transgender issues. Back in August last year, LGBT+ Labour demanded Starmer ‘take action’ against Duffield after she wrote on Twitter that ‘only women have a cervix.’

How does one go about “taking action” against an MP who states an anatomical fact? And why does one attempt such a thing? Why does anyone think it’s desirable and progressive to take revenge on a woman who says men don’t have a cervix?

More rows have followed since, with a member of Duffield’s staff resigning over what they called her ‘openly transphobic’ views and LGBT+ Labour criticising her Twitter activity. For her part, Duffield has insisted that she continues to support to trans rights and believes that ‘people have the right to live with dignity and be treated with respect in an equal and inclusive society.’

Why isn’t that enough? Why is there a requirement to buy into the absolute nonsense of the Gender Dogma?

Steerpike understands that Duffield will be missing her own party’s conference over concerns about the threat to her personal security. It comes just a day after the MP complained on Twitter about the ‘mostly male aggression and verbal abuse’ which ‘has resulted in changes to my personal safety and security arrangements.’

Like missing her own party’s conference. Very progressive.

Craig McLean promoted the open access copy of his paper on July 27, apparently to universal indifference; the turphs found it on September 4. They all say what we all say – the paper is remarkably bad for a working academic and it’s mystifying that it was accepted.

From the abstract of an academic article by a sociologist…

This article examines the development of anti-transgender debates within the United Kingdom, which have gained traction due to proposed amendments to the country’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA). A group of determined lobby groups, taking their lead from like-minded organizations in the United States, has protested vigorously against the proposed changes to the GRA, especially with respect to “single-sex spaces”. As a result of this furor, the lives of transgender people have become the subject of open debate.

“The lives of transgender people have become the subject of open debate”? Is that academic language? Is it the language of sociology? Surely “the lives of” various categories of people is a core subject in sociology? And thus a subject of open debate? That sentence sounds more like a Twitter blurt than an academic truth-claim.

And anyway, of course they have, because changing the meaning of “single-sex spaces” to “not-single-sex spaces” is naturally subject to open debate. Why wouldn’t it be?

Trans people now see their legitimacy questioned, and their ability to access services increasingly being placed under the microscope.

What does “their legitimacy” mean? What does it mean within the discipline of sociology? Going back a step, what does “trans” mean?

This article argues that the literature on radicalization – developed in response to domestic terrorism – can explain these developments. UK lobby groups are successfully pushing a radical agenda to deny the basic rights of trans people…

It’s not a “basic right” for men to be in women’s spaces. It’s the other way around – the basic right is that of women to be away from men when they need privacy. Women are vulnerable to men in ways that men are not vulnerable to women. It’s repellent for some smug academic to pretend otherwise in order to berate women for wanting to be safe.

Aw yeah, coupla men who beat up women.

Bina Shah tweeted on September 8:

I just really need to know how Judith Butler’s definition of women applies to Afghan women who are being beaten on the streets by the Taliban. Have you ever considered that your academics really don’t fit the lives of women in the global South?

And if they don’t fit in the lives of those women (which they don’t), how well do they fit women anywhere?

She expanded on her thoughts the next day:

But it was Judith Butler’s statement that “we need to rethink the category of women” that got me going. It coalesced from quite a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about gender identity theory as it is being adopted in Western countries. And it comes at the same time as I’ve been watching Afghan women getting beaten by the Taliban as they protest for their rights, for safety and security and for inclusion in the government, and for the freedom to work and study.

The Taliban don’t beat women because the women “identify as” women. The women the Taliban beat can’t escape the beating by saying they “identify” as men. They can’t even escape it by saying they are non-binary.

Taliban: Hahaha nice try.

Bina was asked (or, probably, told) to clarify her thinking.

In Afghanistan (extreme example) but also in Pakistan, where I live, in India, in Nepal, Bangladesh, Middle Eastern countries, North Africa, women (or people with female bodies) are being abused, harassed, assaulted and killed not just because they have female bodies, but because they refuse to hand those bodies over to men to do with as they please.

Nigeria, too, also Indonesia…The list is long.

Because this possession and ownership of female bodies is absolutely tied to female biology and the production of children and sexual comfort for those men, separating sex from gender completely negates this form of oppression which is hugely insulting to all of us who are still fighting to end sex-based discrimination in our countries and regions. 

It’s insulting and it’s damaging to that fight against sex-based discrimination. It’s a lose-lose.

I’m afraid the trans rights activists are acting like Western colonisers and imperialists all over again, imposing their ideas of gender and sexuality on us the same way their Empire was imposed on us for a good part of the 20th century. I don’t really want gender colonialism in the 21st century. Do you?

Thank you for coming to my TERF Talk.

Thank you for giving it.

Another exciting first – a man beats a woman in mixed martial arts.

Transgender mixed martial arts fighter Alana McLaughlin made a successful start to her career by choking out her opponent in the second round last night.

McLaughlin, who was born a man, was the first openly-transgender MMA athlete to compete in the US since 2014.

And having been rocked by opponent Celine Provost in the first of three scheduled rounds, McLaughlin fought back the second session to submit Provost by rear-naked choke.

In stepping into the cage, McLaughlin, 38, became just the second transgender woman to compete in the sport, following in the footsteps of Fallon Fox who was cageside in Miami.

Ah yes the footsteps of Fallon Fox, who broke a woman’s skull.

Before her bout, McLaughlin, a former member of the US Army Special Forces, said: “I want to pick up the mantle that Fallon put down.

“Right now, I’m following in Fallon’s footsteps. I’m just another step along the way and it’s my great hope that there are more to follow behind me.”

More more MORE men breaking women’s skulls. How progress we are.

Are books just clutter you should get rid of or an essential or something in between? Julian Baggini leans toward the first.

Having recently put everything into boxes for the less terminal adventure of a house move, we decided to strictly limit how much came out of them at the other end. However, we knew that there is one kind of object that defiantly resists the cardboard coffin: books. Like so many, we would happily decimate our wardrobes, clear out our cupboards and gut our garages, but would struggle to liberate our libraries. Why is it so hard?

For a lot of reasons. We want to read a lot more books than we get around to reading. Some books merit re-reading, some multiple times. It’s good to have a wide choice. Reading actual books as opposed to articles (or ahem blog posts) is a good workout for the brain…even if you do swiftly forget what you’ve read, at least I hope so.

But more than that – more, and vaguer. A deflating reason Julian talks about is showing off, displaying how clever you are, trying to impress. Maybe, but I think there’s also a less tacky version of that, which is an actual love of books, and what they stand for (not just in the sense of flattering your vanity). They look right – they look more right than a wall filled with a screen. If you grew up on books, and remember your first trips to the public library and finding great heaps of book that you took home and devoured, you like having a wall of them even if no one ever sees it.

This doesn’t apply to books as books, though; they have to be books you care about, books you want to read or re-read. Acquiring 10 boxes of books you have no interest in from a garage sale is no use at all.

This is clearly what Julian meant too, since he didn’t get rid of all of them, but just thinned them out.

We still have more than enough books left, though maybe not enough to impress a true library-builder. But nearly 500 books have been boxed, and I am already feeling lighter. As my better half said, before there were so many books it was as though you couldn’t see the trees for the wood. We couldn’t delight in any of them because we were overwhelmed by all of them.

Ah, a mere 500, ones he didn’t actually want to read. That’s another matter.

Freedom! Private enterprise! The boss is always right! Innovation!

Except when…

Texas has made it illegal for social media platforms to ban users “based on their political viewpoints”.

Prominent Republican politicians have accused Facebook, Twitter and others of censoring conservative views. Former US president Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after a group of his supporters attacked the Capitol in January.

The social networks have all denied stifling conservative views. However, they do enforce terms of service which prohibit content such as incitement to violence and co-ordinated disinformation.

Well no wonder Greg Abbott doesn’t like that.

(What about jurisdiction though? Can states pass laws that restrict global communications? I wouldn’t have thought Texas has the power to tell Twitter and Facebook what to do.)

Critics say the law does not respect the constitutional right of private businesses to decide what sort of content is allowed on their platforms.

“This bill abandons conservative values, violates the First Amendment, and forces websites to host obscene, anti-semitic, racist, hateful and otherwise awful content,” said Steve DelBianco, president of NetChoice trade association.

“Moderation of user posts is crucial to keeping the internet safe for Texas families, but this bill would put the Texas government in charge of content policies.”

Along with obscene, anti-semitic, racist, and hateful, social media content is often threatening, stalkerish, bullying, intimidating.

Texas is just showing off at this point.

When Republicans take credit for the civil rights movement…

Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who previously served as Donald Trump’s press secretary, has released her first television ad, which is entitled “Who We Are”.

“I’ll never forget being a student at Little Rock Central High and watching my dad – a Republican governor – and Bill Clinton – a Democrat[IC] president – hold open the doors for the Little Rock Nine, doors that forty years earlier had been closed to them because they’re Black,” Sanders says in the ad.

…

“Good triumphed over evil,” Sanders says of the Little Rock Nine in her ad. “That is who we are. The radical left wants to teach our kids America is a racist and evil country, but Arkansans are generous, hard-working people.”

What does she mean “that is who we are”? Does she think the people who resisted the desegregation of Little Rock Central High were Martians? Those people were Arkansans and Americans too, and there are millions more like them right now. They are the ones who will be voting for her.

What does she mean “that is who we are”? Does she think the 52 years that Little Rock Central High was all-white never happened? Does she think those years were simply nullified the day the Nine made it through the doors? Does she think the mob in the streets screaming at them were not “who we are”?

If she does think that she’s dead wrong. “Who we are” still includes a huge contingent of proud racists, including the evil ignorant racist man she worked for when he was squatting in the presidential mansion.

I have a feeling that’s not what Labour said.

Barnard says in her letter to NEC members that the letter gave her notice that she’s “under investigation for challenging transphobia online.” Again, it seems unlikely that that’s what the letter said.

The trouble is that activists of the Owen Jones/Jess Barnard type treat the word “transphobia” as self-evident and universally understood, when in fact it’s a recently invented pejorative for anyone who doesn’t believe and enforce every article of trans dogma, including the ones that contradict each other.

The Joneses and Barnards can see themselves as “challenging transphobia” when in fact they’re bullying and shaming women for defending women’s rights.

So it would be interesting to know what the investigation really is, but we probably never will.

It isn’t my womb that makes me a woman, Natasha Devon writes

Because it’s the large non-motile gametes?

Hahaha no don’t be silly.

Trans people have always been present in human society. Famously Marsha P Johnson, an American activist and trans woman, threw the first brick during the Stonewall riots in June 1969.

“Famously” inaccurate. Johnson was a drag queen.

Binary notions of gender – the idea that there are only men and women and everyone fits neatly into one of those two categories – are also a Christian invention, which spread across the globe as Christian countries colonised it.

Huh. So how were there humans before Christianity? If they had no idea which was which how did they reproduce?

Yet, there is an additional layer of complexity when it comes to the trans discussion, which is confusing even some people who would consider themselves liberal and progressive – Namely, that trans women are erasing the rights of cis women (people who were born with a girl’s body).

That is indeed a complication; good that she admits it.

As a cis woman, I am supposed believe trans women are a threat to my rights to sex-specific healthcare, as well as being terrified that men wearing dresses are going to invade my private spaces (like toilets and changing rooms) to assault me. I’m also meant to worry transwomen might beat me at sports with inherent superior ability.

Oh I see, she wasn’t admitting it, but she’s too bad at writing to say that.

All very well to be glib about these obvious drawbacks to trans ideology, but the facts remain what they are.

Which, amusingly, she goes on to admit, while waving it away with “but surely we can figure out some way to have everything we want.”

Trans people in sports is more of a nuanced discussion in my opinion, particularly when considering physical education in schools. Pre-puberty, it shouldn’t be too much bother to just let anyone of any gender play any sport they like, with anyone they like.

Yes, we know.

However, factors such as male bodies having (on average) stronger skeletal structures post-puberty, larger lung capacity and of course the impact of testosterone all make this more complex with teenagers.

And adults. Laurel Hubbard is 43.

I don’t think it’s unresolvable, however, if we really put our thinking caps on.

Ohhhhhhhh cool, that’s that fixed then. If only we’d thought of that!

I think we’ll never reach satisfactory conclusions if we allow ourselves to be side-tracked by a combination of blatant transphobia and the fabricated notion that cis and trans women’s rights are at odds.

She says, having just admitted that in at least one area they are.

After all, that’s not how right’s work: They aren’t a zero-sum game and we should always be cautious when we’re led to believe that showing humanity towards one demographic comes at the expense of another.

She says, having just admitted one area where “showing humanity” to men who say they are women decidedly does come at the expense of women.

There is zero thought or argument or effort here, it’s just repetition of three or four stupid mantras plus oops an admission that even she knows they’re not true.

But LBC thought it worth posting.

Katie makes a good point.

Well it’s not helpful to trans people but it’s very helpful to the rabid “allies” in whipping other “allies” into a frenzy of rage at those evil radical feminists.

Peter Boghossian has quit his job at Portland State University and published his resignation letter on Bari Weiss’s Substack.

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.

He’s taught it even though it’s not his field. He has an EdD, a doctorate in education. I’ve never really understood why he gets to teach philosophy at a university without the usual advanced degree.

Anyway, his point is, he’s dedicated to free inquiry and he likes to invite speakers with all kinds of views to his classes so that the students can learn to think and question.

But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly. 

There’s probably a lot of truth in that, but Boghossian isn’t just a Socratic asker of provocative questions.

Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined. 

As an aside, it’s funny that he calls Christina Hoff Sommers an “author” when she, unlike him, has an actual PhD in philosophy. Much more centrally, calling Carl Benjamin “popular cultural critic” is highly misleading. Benjamin is better known as Sargon of Akkad, a misogynist Twitter bully. He’s the one who “jokingly” threatened to rape MP Jess Phillips. He’s basically a professional misogynist, and the fact that Boghossian covered that up with “popular cultural critic” tells me he doesn’t believe his own self-advertising.

In short the story isn’t quite as simple as he says.

Originally a comment by Sastra on To promote well-being.

Phoenix has regular counselling with the psychologist, who judges that Phoenix’s distress is significant and enduring, and is not a symptom of an underlying psychopathology.

No, it appears that the psychopathology is draped right over the top, holding sparklers and dancing the Can-can.

I remember when the goal of enlightened feminism was for women, and the society they lived in, to minimize the significance of their sex and emphasize instead the importance of their character.. Yes, you are a woman, but that says little to nothing about your interests, capacities, talents, and goals, which constitute who you are. To constantly worry about whether you are WOMAN ENOUGH in the way WOMEN SHOULD BE was unhealthy. That’s a restrictive box. Be yourself.

Yet here is Phoenix, barely able to function if they don’t get into the RIGHT BOX and look the RIGHT WAY and get the rest of the world’s approval and recognition that they’re doing it RIGHT so they can finally relax and maybe start to think about developing a personality. Assuming there’s any room left for one.

“Tell us 5 interesting things about yourself.”

“1.) I’m nonbinary 2.) I need to look nonbinary 3.) This is all I think about 4.) The distress is significant and enduring 5.) nonbinary means neither male nor female, but not in a intersex way, more like being neither describes my personality.”