The Guardian is startled by Trump’s news.

Extraordinary news emerging from the White House – the president has mentioned that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine. This is the dubious treatment for coronavirus that Trump had fiercely touted in the past but which was found to have a very mixed effect on patients.

Mixed, perhaps, but also non-coronavirus-preventing. I think there’s no more reason to think hydroxychloroquine will prevent the virus than there is to think marshmallow fluff will, or varnish, or gypsum, or brine, or the urine of a rabid bat.

The US Food and Drug Administration cautions against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for Covid-19 outside of a hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems.

Yes but what have you got to lose? Can’t answer that, can you.

But the FDA can.

The FDA has warned against using hydroxychloroquine or a related compound, chloroquine, for treating or preventing Covid-19 without medical supervision in a hospital, or as part of a clinical trial.

“While clinical trials are ongoing to determine the safety and effectiveness of these drugs for Covid-19, there are known side effects of these medications that should be considered,” the FDA commissioner, Stephen M Hahn, said in a statement issued in late April. “The FDA will continue to monitor and investigate these potential risks and will communicate publicly when more information is available.”

Blah blah blah, but Trump knows better.

FOUR TIMES he says he has the right; two of those times he says “the absolute right.”

He also insists that it’s just normal to fire IGs hired by The Other Guy, just normal and good sense. That’s not the case.

He also thinks it’s perfectly fine for Pompeo to make his staffers do household chores for him.

“Here’s a man that is supposed to be negotiating war and peace with major, major countries with weaponry like the world has never seen before,” Trump told reporters. “And the Democrats and the fake news media, they are interested in a man who is walking their dog.”

Trump fired the State Department’s inspector general, Steve Linick, on Friday. According to NBC, Linick has been investigating whether Pompeo and his wide made a staffer walk their dog, pick up dry cleaning and make them dinner reservations, as well as the circumstances of Pompeo’s sale of US weapons to Saudi Araba despite a congressional ban.

“I would rather have [Pompeo] on the phone with some world leader than have him wash dishes because maybe his wife isn’t there or his kids aren’t,” Trump said.

Of course, a third option would have been for the Pompeo family to hire dogwalkers and other helpers, rather than relying on State Department employees to do their personal errands.

It’s not a binary choice. “Either you wash my dishes, or I have to go home and wash them myself, leaving the Saudi ambassador waiting in my office.” No. Federal employees are not the only people available to do household chores for Mike Pompeo.

Reaction is…intense.

I tried to listen to that whole clip but I got too bored. Seriously? Yes. Even now, even on this subject – he drones on and on like The Most Boring Man in the World and at “we had a rePORT” I just couldn’t take it any more. I can’t take it when it’s that guy on the bus and I can’t take it when it’s Donnie Dimwit. The fruity raspy juicy speeded-up voice of the town bore, who talks fast and loud so that no one can interrupt him – EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT VOICE.

Also, what do you have to lose? Well, life, health, function, stuff like that.

A doctor sent him a letter. A letter! Wudja liketa see it? He’ll have Molly make you a copy. A letter! The doctor didn’t want anything, he didn’t say can I come have dinner with you mister president. He just sent the letter! So naturally who wouldn’t take it, based on that? So far he’s still here, he tells us.

That’s a bit of a thunderbolt.

Unless he’s lying of course. I don’t think he is though – the way he tells it looks like his way of bouncing himself into saying something outrageous, which is different from his way of lying.

Trump is determined to nail Obama for his crimes, if only he can find out what they are.

President Donald Trump headed into the weekend appearing convinced his predecessor committed a crime worthy of investigation — despite being unable to name the crime or provide any evidence for it. By Sunday, he emerged prepared to wage wholesale political war with the last person who held his office.

It was always about Obama. Mediocre white guys are one thing, but a not so mediocre black guy as president – that’s a personal insult to Trump himself and must be avenged.

Escaping the White House for another weekend at Camp David, Trump appeared “highly focused” on Obama over the course of Saturday and Sunday, a person familiar with the matter said.

“Highly focused”=weirdly obsessed.

As he huddled in the mountainside retreat’s rustic cabins with a roster of Republican lawmakers — many of whom forged national profiles defending Trump during his impeachment proceedings — Trump discussed ways to advance the baseless conspiracy about the former president, the person said.

Guys, how can we advance this baseless conspiracy? Will you join me in shouting about it on Twitter?

At Camp David this weekend, Trump was joined by several lawmakers who gained prominence by their aggressive support of him during House impeachment hearings — including Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin of New York, Devin Nunes of California, and Matt Gaetz of Florida, along with his new chief of staff Mark Meadows and his wife Debbie.

Your basic liars for Trump.

Same old same old same old – we’re told about the desperate need to respect trans rights, while we’re not told what, exactly, trans rights are meant to be, and whether they’re the same basic rights we should respect in all cases (cf the “Universal” in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) or special rights particular to trans people, and if it’s the latter, whether those putative rights are compatible with everyone else’s rights.

Amnesty press release:

UK human rights organisations speak out for trans equality amidst growing threats to trans rights

But what is “trans equality”? Is there anyone anywhere who claims that trans people are not “equal” to everyone else? I sure don’t know of any such claim.

But what does “live freely as themselves” mean?

Drawing up declarations of human rights takes some thought and care, because if you’re sloppy about it you find you’ve said we can all ride roughshod over each other, and goodbye to human rights in that world. The slogan in the image is like that. Do we want to say that pedophile priests must be able to “live freely as themselves”? Do we want to say that of murderers, frauds, gang bosses, CEOs of corporations that trash the planet or poison the consumers or exploit the workers or all of those?

And then the sign hiding behind the slogan – “I am who I say I am.” You may be, whoever you are, but does it follow that everyone is? Is it the case that everyone is who she says she is? Is it true that all people are who they say they are?

Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it’s not, and it would be massively less so if that became a Human Right and a general law. I could say I’m the boss of Amazon so please send all the checks to me, but I would be telling a falsehood.

And it’s not just fraud and crime; it’s also life more broadly. People don’t know everything there is to know about who they are. People take an optimistic view of themselves, which could often benefit from a more detached view from outside. The puff adder in the White House is a glaring example – do we want to agree that he is who he says he is? Or that Kushner is, or Princess Ivanka, or Kayleigh McEnany?

Also depressed people have a distorted view of themselves, as do anorexic people; correction from the outside can help them. “I am who I say I am” just isn’t a general truth, and it makes a rotten slogan.

Today a joint statement has been released from some of the UK’s leading human rights organisations in support of trans equality to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexphobia and Transphobia (17 May). 

See above. Who opposes trans equality? No one that I know of.

Amnesty International, Liberty and Human Rights Watch joined to send a message that trans rights are human rights:

“Human rights are universal and belong to everyone. Yet too often in the UK trans people are spoken about and treated as though their rights don’t matter.“

No they’re not. The claims that some trans activists make are challenged on the grounds that they are too sweeping and/or conflict with the rights of girls and women. Nobody says the rights of trans people don’t matter; we question the new bizarre special rights that are in tensions with the rights of female people.

The toxic media coverage about trans people has recently spiked. At times of crisis and political change, marginalised groups are often singled out for abuse and hate. History has shown us time and time again the dangers of setting the rights of one marginalised group up for debate. But we know that our rights and freedoms are bound together.

That sounds nice, but the reality is that some of the claimed rights of men who say they are trans are not at all bound together with the rights and freedoms of women.

What’s more, this isn’t an equal conversation or level playing field. Key voices are missing – trans and non-binary people, and in particular young trans people. They are so often spoken about, not listened to. As a society, we need to make space so they can be finally heard without having to defend who they are.

If “who they are” is men who claim to be women, then there are situations in which women need to be able to say no.

Teen Vogue has an op-ed by a boy who wants to compete against girls instead of boys:

Growing up, I never felt like I fit in. I was trying to be this cool, masculine, teenage boy, but I felt like I was faking it. In high school, I secretly shopped for girls’ clothes at Goodwill and would put them on after school. But when I looked in the mirror, I was so disappointed. I didn’t understand it at the time, but what I was experiencing was gender dysphoria, a deeply painful feeling that comes from knowing that your sex assigned at birth and your body do not reflect your true gender.

He didn’t know it at the time, but what he was experiencing was something socially constructed under the label “gender dysphoria.” It’s not a newly named disease or chronic condition or disability, it’s a politically named discomfort with the social rules for how the two sexes are supposed to look and dress and act. It’s not a medical decision that it’s “gender dysphoria” as opposed to discomfort with puberty, it’s a political decision.

One solace during this confusing time was running. Running was always my passion, but it was only after I joined the cross-country team that I found a community. The four years I spent on my high school track-and-field team and the three years I spent on the cross-country team were the best part of high school. My teammates became my whole friend group, my coaches were my mentors, and the discipline of group practices helped me focus better on my schoolwork. Running with a team gave me confidence, made me feel good, and also helped me forget about my sadness and internal struggles.

Great! Happy ending. Lots of puberty struggles are like that, because mostly It Gets Better. We get used to our adult bodies and get on with life.

But alas, no, in this case it’s not a happy ending, because the new received wisdom is that if you have “Gender Dysphoria” then you have to “come out as” the sex you’re not.

When I started college last fall at Boise State University I took solo runs, but I didn’t try out for track or cross-country. I needed some time to become comfortable with my new identity and college life.

Besides, I couldn’t have tried out even if I’d wanted to. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) requires women who are transgender like me to complete 12 months of hormone therapy to suppress testosterone as part of their gender transition before competing. I was already doing this because I needed it for my health, and I knew that by the start of my sophomore year I would be ready to compete again when eligible in the fall of 2020.

He was looking forward to beating all the women this fall, but then – a hitch!

Earlier this year, Idaho legislators introduced HB 500, which not only banned trans girls and women athletes from competing on their school teams, but exposed all girls and women to invasive, intrusive genital testing if anyone challenges their gender. I joined activists and community members in speaking out against the bill at the statehouse, but it passed anyway. On the eve of March 31, Trans Visibility Day, Governor Brad Little signed the bill into law. That meant I could no longer try out for the Boise State track or cross-country teams or participate on any of my university’s sports teams — even club or intramural ones.

No it didn’t, it meant only that he couldn’t do all that on the women’s teams, because he’s not a woman.

It’s interesting that he can tell us how much running did for him, how it improved his life and his studies and everything, while at the same time he’s wholly indifferent to what it might do for girls. The unfair advantage he would have if he could run against women doesn’t seem to cross his mind, or at least he knows he has to ignore it if he wants to fool us into thinking he’s the victim here.

There is so much misinformation and misunderstanding about trans people and trans athletes, particularly the misconception that we are men and somehow taking spots away from women. But trans women are women. We have been competing in high school, college, and elite competition consistent with our gender identity for years and there is no evidence of dominance by transgender athletes at any level of sport.

But it’s not a “misconception” that male people are men. They are taking spots away from women if they compete on women’s teams. Trans women are not women, they are men who say they are women. “Gender identity” is a meaningless neologism. Of course there is evidence of dominance by men who say they are women who compete against women. The issue isn’t whether “transgender athletes” dominate, it’s whether transgender men who claim to be women dominate, and of course they do, and yes there’s evidence.

I, like all athletes, participate in sports for the same reasons as my peers: to challenge myself, to improve my fitness, to engage socially, and to be a part of a team. Under Idaho’s new law, I can no longer do that. By crushing my goal of competing on my college running team, it sends a message that as a transgender person I’m not worthy of fully participating in public life and social engagement.

But that’s not true. He can. The law doesn’t bar him from competing on his college running team, it bars him only from running on the girls’ team. It may be that transitioning has given him a disadvantage compared to the boys, but that does not translate to a right to transfer his disadvantage to all the girls on their team. It may be that he’s now not good enough to make the boys’ team, but that’s not the fault or the responsibility of the girls.

From the police blotter:

Headline: Woman who ‘bragged about being a paedophile’ approached boys at Remembrance event

Subhead: Recently-released prisoner Leah Harvey showed ‘sheer arrogance’ by talking to the boys in front of police officers. She later approached two girls in a takeaway

Story:

Leah Harvey breached her sexual harm prevention order twice by approaching two boys at a Remembrance Day event and two girls working in a takeaway.

…

The second breach occurred between November 4 and November 26 and involved two teenage girls working at a takeaway in the Caerphilly area.

Ms Yeo [the prosecutor] said she went into the takeaway and made the girl feel “uncomfortable”.  

The defendant returned on November 22 and tried to talk to the girl, who ignored her. Harvey threw a piece of food at her.

And so on and so on, and a few days later she did it to a second girl.

Leah Harvey, formerly Joshua Harvey, 25, who is in HM Parc Prison in Bridgend, admitted two breaches of a sexual harm prevention order.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh, formerly Joshua is it. Now they tell us. Over and over, sentence after sentence, most of the way through the story, they tell us a woman did all this, she she she did all this…and then finally, very late, they admit that this creepy guy is a creepy guy.

Muh pronouns! Muh right to be accepted for who I really am! Don’t deadname me! Don’t misgender me! Plus all those kids were just asking for it.

No you are.

Donald Trump has hit back at Barack Obama’s criticism of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, accusing the former US president of being “grossly incompetent” during his time in office.

It is rare for a former president to rebuke a successor, but Obama did so during an online speech to graduating university and high school students yesterday, although he did not name Trump in his comments.

It’s also rare for a selfish malevolent corrupt greedy racist sexist lazy brainless monster to be president, too.

“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge,” Obama said during an online commencement address to graduates of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on Saturday.

On Sunday, Trump said he had not seen Obama’s comments, but added: “Look, he was an incompetent president, that’s all I can say. Grossly incompetent.”

Says the child-man who advised us to administer disinfectant internally and told us the virus would disappear like a miracle.

Trump has faced widespread criticism for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed almost 90,000 people in the US, far higher than any other country in the world. 

Picky picky picky.

“So I think we had a great weekend. We did a lot of terrific meetings. Tremendous progress is being made on many fronts, including coming up with a cure for this horrible plague that has beset our country,” said Trump on Sunday. “It was a working weekend, it was a good weekend. A lot of very good things have happened.”

There’s your incompetence right there. That blather of empty adjectives leaves us no way to know if he’s just saying what he thinks will sound good or really telling us a true fact about “coming up with a cure.”

“Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy – that’s how little kids think,” Obama said in a second virtual speech on Saturday evening for graduating US high school students. “Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way – which is why things are so screwed up.”

Does that not describe Trump? Is there a mistake here?

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The same rights as others.

As someone who doesn’t think or feel in any of the ways required to qualify as either “man” or “woman” according to gender ideology, what I want to know is this:

• Which toilet am I allowed to use if there are only two and both are reserved for people who think or feel in ways that I don’t?

• Which sporting events am I allowed to participate in if they’re all reserved for people who think or feel in ways that I don’t?

• How am I supposed to fill out all those forms that require me to tick off a box for either “F” or “M” if this is for all relevant purposes equivalent to asking an atheist to tick off for either “Mormon” or “Sikh”?

On a more positive note, I guess I can’t go to any jail…

Seriously, though, I think the best way to deal with these people is to take them at their word and point out that by their own criteria they are pretty much the only “people of gender” around while pretty much everyone else would have to be classified as agender. After all, the whole point of redefining “man” and “woman” in terms of thoughts and feeling is to justify putting biological males who get some kick out of imagining themselves as the opposite sex in the same box as biological females. If the biological females are taken out of the box, they are back to square one.

Also, is it left wing to insist that the discrimination biological females face specifically as biological females go forever unaddressed and unopposed because even acknowledging biological females as an oppressed group in its own right with its own specific issues that are not entirely reducible to those faced by biological males who prefer to be called “woman”/”she” is a hate-crime?

This is not spin by the way. There simply isn’t an identifiable way of thinking or feeling that “cis women” and “trans women” have in common while being different from the ways of thinking and feeling common to “cis men” and “trans men”. Also notice the double standard: If biological sex is messy and not everybody falls neatly into either the “biological male” or “biological female” category (as You’d expect when dealing with physical reality rather than pure mathematics and idealized Platonic forms), that pretty much invalidates biological sex as a category. But if the supposed “gender” differences they’re talking about are so vacuous and ill defined that most “genderists” don’t even try to come up with a non-circular definition, that makes them more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics.

Well, no.

It’s not a sign of a healthy movement for social justice when all it can offer is repetition of dud slogans. By “dud” I mean slogans that don’t even work as slogans, independent of how often they get repeated.

Like so:

That’s just stupid. You can’t force people to “know” something just by typing it six times on Twitter. You can type any old nonsense six times on Twitter; you can do it six times or six thousand times; it still won’t become true.

And the slogan is a very bad slogan, as I’ve pointed way too many times (sorry). Of course trans rights are human rights if they mean the human rights we all have in common. Of course they are not if they mean special trans rights like the “right” to compel people to agree that men are women if they say they are.

Shouting it at us

in

six

lines

won’t convince us.

Pink News is worse than ever.

Meet the powerful international cabal of…lesbians.

“TERF is hate speech and it’s time to condemn it,” gender-critical writer Amy Dyess announced in October 2018 – words she now regrets.

Hmm. Amy Dyess has, shall we say, picked quite a few fights with various women – fights that came out of nowhere and escalated the way a rocket escalates. I’m one of those women and I had barely interacted with her.

“TERF is a slur used to sexually harass, threaten, and silence lesbians,” continued Amy’s viral Medium post, which was liked more than 4,300 times.

Back then, Amy was connected to an international network of powerful lesbians.

Ah yes the famous international network of powerful lesbians! The one that’s secretly taking over all the things! Connected to Soros, right? Also the Illuminati? And the Freemasons? And the international communist conspiracy to infiltrate our water supply?

After a quick rundown of her former terfy beliefs, we get:

Amy, who is based in Seattle, doesn’t believe those things any more. Looking back on her time in the “gender critical” feminist movement, she is unequivocal: it’s a cult.

A cult that groomed her when she was vulnerable and sleeping in her car; a cult that sought to control her, keeping tabs on her movements and dictating what she could and couldn’t say; a cult that was emotionally and sexually abusive towards her.

Er…at that point wouldn’t you think that Vic Parsons, the author of the piece, would have brought the interview to a close and self-spiked the story? Wouldn’t you think Parsons would notice what that paragraph reeks of?

There’s a great deal more of the same, and it gets more and more horrifying in the way it exposes her. The people who thought this was a good idea should feel bad.

Eric Trump says Democrats are exploiting the pandemic to Defeat Donnie the Good.

He told the geniuses at Fox yesterday:

They think they are taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time. You watch, they’ll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3. And guess what, after Nov. 3 coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.

Ah yes, we’re all milking it. We just love not being able to get on a bus or take our time deciding which ice cream to get. We also love watching people die in agony.

As of Sunday morning, the U.S. has reported more than 1.4 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and more than 88,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins.

Milk it, baby.

Oh so that’s which movie it is. I’ve never seen it (and have no desire to).

A few hours after taunt-tweeting at Laurence O’Donnell, suggesting the MSNBC anchor cried when forced to admit that, yes, the President made a lot of money on The Apprentice (a dubious claim that has been debunked before), but a few hours before he retweeted a pic of new Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany done up like Supergirl, Trump shared a “deep fake” video in which his own head was superimposed on Pullman’s as he gave the St. Crispin’s Day-esque speech from the Roland Emmerich’s 1996 film Independence Day.

In which The Enemy was From Space, so not really all that applicable, but whatevs.

The White House itself did not create this video. It appears to be the work of the “@mad_liberals” Twitter account, one of Trump’s recently applauded “keyboard warriors.” However, the fact that the video is embedded within Trump’s tweet, and not a simple retweet or quote tweet, means that somebody (not likely Trump) took a moment to monkey with the code before blasting it to 80 million followers.

Because it’s totally appropriate for a president to let us all know that he fantasizes himself as a younger handsomer slimmer movie star confronting An Enemy From Space. There’s nothing at all pathetic and risible about it.

The Beeb reports:

Two teenage girls have been murdered in a so-called “honour killing” in north-west Pakistan following a video circulated on the internet.

They are said to have been shot dead by a family member earlier this week in a village on the border of the North and South Waziristan tribal districts.

The killing occurred after a short mobile video of them with a young man surfaced on social media, police said.

Totally understandable. Female people are a commodity, whose value rests on the purity (as opposed to filth) of their genitals. They belond to the men in their family, and if their genitals are rendered impure, they become not just worthless but a liability. Their filth equals shame to the real people – the men – in their family. The only way to excise the shame is to excise the filthy females. Impurity is achieved via any interaction with unrelated men in the absence of a sufficient number of fathers brothers uncles male cousins to guard the genitals.

The incident is said to have taken place on Thursday afternoon at Shaam Plain Garyom, a border village of North and South Waziristan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a police report quoted by Pakistani daily Dawn.

It said the reason behind the killings of the two girls, aged 16 and 18, was believed to be a video, provided to Dawn, which shows a young man recording himself with three young girls in a secluded area outdoors.

Two of the three filth-vectors have been eliminated. The third is still at large.

I have to return to this absurdity, because there’s just so much absurdity in it.

It’s the fact that he tweeted it that’s so grotesque – that it’s right there for all to see.

You know, a normal person wouldn’t see it as flattering in the first place. A normal person wouldn’t see a clip with her head perched awkwardly on someone else’s body as a compliment. It’s not a compliment, is it. It’s a statement that Trump’s body is not all that glorious, along with a statement that his general self-presentation is not all that great. The alternative body is relaxed, comfortable, cool – not herky-jerky and flailing like Trump’s body. The alternative body doesn’t flap its hands up and down and back and forth the way Trump flaps his. The alternative body doesn’t lean forward to hide its gut so that it looks like a teetering clown-doll the way Trump’s body does. The alternative body is an improvement on Trump’s in every way, and a normal person would notice the implied insult. Trump has apparently received it as an artistic and very welcome enhancement of his glory.

Amusingly, the alternative body is an improvement in much the way Obama’s would be. It’s the body of someone who gets some exercise and doesn’t eternally sit on his bum watching tv and screaming insults on Twitter. Trump moves awkwardly and slowly when he does move, and his body seems to hinder him. The guy in the bomber jacket not so much.

So it’s weird that he would tweet it as if it were a compliment as opposed to the other thing.

It’s also weird that he would tweet it without realizing that most people are going to think “Does he seriously think that represents him???”

And it’s weird that he would tweet it at all, even if it were unambiguously flattering. It’s weird for a president to spend time tweeting “he’s so hot and strong and manly” flattery of himself that way. It wouldn’t be weird if he were 5, maybe 6, but no older than that. He turns 74 next month.

This one is soooooooooooooo pathEtic…………………..

Maya Forstater notes how confused about human rights some core human rights organizations are:

Stonewall was set up to defend the rights of gay and lesbian (and later bisexual) people. Its charitable objects are to promote human rights as set out in the Human Rights Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the laws which protect everyone’s rights. But in 2015 it adopted the “trans rights” cause and since then has been enthusiastic about ignoring and undermining women’s rights.

Stonewall has called for ‘gender identity’ to replace ‘gender reassignment’ (the idea of transition) as a protected characteristic in equality law and to “remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces”. In other words it has argued for women to be denied female-only spaces to wash, change or use the toilet at work, in school, hospitals or public places (as well as female-only specialist services like women’s refuges, hostels and prisons).

It has surprised quite a few women how quickly and easily, in fact eagerly, much of the left has simply dumped women’s rights overboard, as if we and we alone were sinking the ship.

Stonewall has explicitly refused to acknowledge a conflict between trans rights and women’s rights.

Stonewall argued to do so “would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others.”

But that’s bullshit. The rights that trans activists demand are not the same rights as others, they’re new and peculiar versions of “rights” that require stomping other people’s rights into the mud. Trans “rights” are such items as the “right” to be validated as who you say you are, which of course can’t be a right because it would license fraud and theft and every kind of absurdity. Another claimed trans “right” is the right to force other people to treat you as what you are not, which again is a “right” that is in tension with the rights of other people to trust their own senses and judgement.

None of these human rights experts say what they mean by “trans rights”. And the weird thing about their responses is that conflicts of rights are commonplace. They are part of the human rights framework, and human rights experts all know this.

That makes sense, because trans activists seem to be experts in nothing but trans activism.

When there is a conflict of rights we don’t normally throw up our hands and say that no one must speak of it. It might have to go to courts to decide, but we can also talk in more general terms about what the rights are and how organisations can balance everyone’s rights. This is the role of human rights organisations and official bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

It used to be. Now it’s all decided by trans activists. That is their right.

When Stonewall first included transgender people in its mandate it talked about “trans equality”. Trans people have equal human rights with everyone else. I agree with Stonewall on this. But more recently the call mutated into a demand for “trans rights”. Stonewall, Amnesty and Liberty never quite spell out what “trans rights” are. But their idea seems to include:

The “right” to compel others to pretend to share your belief that you are a member of the opposite sex

The “right” to share intimate spaces with members of the opposite sex without their consent.

Of course these are not “rights”. They are demands.

Peremptory demands, backed up with threats and ostracism.

Late Friday night – oh hey Nancy by the way I’ve gotten rid of another one of those pesky General Inspector losers who kept getting in my way.

President Donald Trump has removed State Department Inspector General Steve Linick and replaced him with an ally of Vice President Mike Pence — the latest in a series of moves against independent government watchdogs in recent months.

Ah yes, one of those “independent” government watchdogs who are allies of the badmaddogs.

Trump informed Congress of his intent to oust Linick, a Justice Department veteran appointed to the role in 2013 by then President Barack Obama, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday night.

As one does. Not during the day, not during the day during the week, but at night on Friday, to maximize the number of hours that will elapse before officials can officially respond.

“The president’s late-night, weekend firing of the State Department inspector general has accelerated his dangerous pattern of retaliation against the patriotic public servants charged with conducting oversight on behalf of the American people,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Inspector General Linick was punished for honorably performing his duty to protect the Constitution and our national security, as required by the law and by his oath.”

Fuck all that, the point is to protect Trump. Pass the ice cream.

Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called Linick’s dismissal an “outrageous act of a president trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of State, from accountability.”

Engel claimed: “I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo. Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”

Oh no. No no. It’s not retaliation, it’s prevention.

Trump has removed a number of federal watchdogs in the last few months, including Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, who issued a report critical of the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; and the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

Housekeeping.