Women who are academics can’t really rely on their union, because its secretary is Jo Grady, who…

He feels it in his very BONES.

“You don’t even have bones.”

Well that could change things.

Police forces have been threatened with legal action over their links to Stonewall, amid concerns the controversial charity’s transgender training is impacting their impartiality.

Campaigners have written to chief constables warning they will begin legal proceedings against any force that remains part of the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme beyond a “period of consideration”.

I wonder if Police Scotland is having second thoughts.

Some 250 public authorities, including about half of police forces in England and Wales, pay at least £2,500 a year for advice on gender-neutral facilities and pronouns, which leading barristers have said “misrepresents” the 2010 Equality Act.

It’s an odd thing when you think about it. Who are Stonewall to be giving this “advice”? They’re a campaign group, not a collection of legal experts. Campaign groups are a good thing, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily have a kind of expertise that police forces should be paying for.

I also wonder if any women’s group has ever had this kind of ability to tell the police what’s what.

Now in a letter to police chiefs, seen by The Telegraph, former constable Harry Miller has warned forces that their affiliation with Stonewall breaches police rules on political activity and association with groups that could create a conflict of interest.

That’s another way of saying the above. Stonewall aren’t experts but activists; why do cops get training from activists rather than experts? What’s the thinking here?

The Telegraph understands that two forces are currently investigating officers’ use of Twitter accounts to push Stonewall’s trans stance, including one tweet that said it had “reported” users’ comments deemed “hateful” towards trans and non-binary people.

Finally! We’ve been objecting to this pattern for months and months.

The pressure comes as the Ministry of Justice is leading an “exodus” of Government departments from Stonewall, with Justice Secretary Robert Buckland understood to be concerned about its “dubious” training and approach to free speech.

A Stonewall spokesperson said that “organisations come and go” from their Diversity Champions programme, but it is “continuing to grow” with 30 organisations joining in the past year.

They said they are “confident in our advice on the Equality Act” and “very proud” of their work with member companies.

But who made them the boss of anything? Are they accountable to anyone?

Karen Ingala Smith has a more detailed transcript of Benjamin Cohen’s disinformation about what Stonewall is advocating.

Justin Webb: Just on the point about abolishing legal provisions for single sex spaces, do you not accept that it is perfectly acceptable for women to campaign for those single sex spaces and to say that those who have changes sex should not be in them?

Benjamin Cohen…..[Evades question and talks about something else for a few moments]   and goes on to say, over again, it’s a debate about trans issues without a single trans voice being heard

Justin Webb: Hang on, number one, you don’t know anything about me; number two, I asked you a question, would you answer it?

Benjamin Cohen: Sure but, I just, I’ve made a statement, is this a debate about trans issues with no trans voice?

Justin Webb: Yeah, you’ve made your statement, now could you answer the question?

Benjamin Cohen: You made the statement which is that the provisions around who gets access to single sex spaces has changed, that hasn’t changed, the Equality Act was passed in 2010, there’s been no changes to that

Justin Webb: Yeah, hang on, what I’m suggesting is that Stonewall would like to change it, and a lot of women are worried about

Benjamin Cohen: Sorry, you just claimed that but that’s not actually true. So, Stonewall supports self-ID  (Justin Webb : Exactly) which is about, simply about paperwork, so you’ve been able to self-ID for practical purposes for the Equality Act, since 2010,

Justin Webb:  But not for instance to go to a safe space for women, like a women’s refuge, those are protected aren’t they

Benjamin Cohen: (speaking over Justin Webb): yeah, and they continue to be protected.

Justin Webb: And does Stonewall …

Benjamin Cohen: Can you answer me a question, Justin, has Stonewall said that those spaces should be open to trans people, I don’t believe they have

Justin Webb: Well, exactly

Benjamin Cohen: this is the problem,

Justin Webb:  But hang on, I think we agree on this

Benjamin Cohen: It’s such misinformation

Justin Webb:  Hang on,  I think we agree on this in that case because, is it the case, or is it not the case that Stonewall, is campaigning for those safe spaces not to be women only?

Benjamin Cohen: They aren’t campaigning for that, that’s just misinformation being spread by a homophobic and transphobic media, I’m afraid.

Karen then comments:

The thing is, Benjamin, you’re the one that’s not telling the truth here. The extract below shows that Stonewall are campaigning or did campaign for the removal of the protection of women’s single sex spaces. This is from Stonewall’s  submission to Women & Equalities Select Committee Inquiry on Transgender Equality submitted on 27 August 2015. Stonewall’s recommendations included:

““A review of the Equality Act 2010 to include ‘gender identity’ rather than ‘gender reassignment’ as a protected characteristic and to remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces”

She has the screenshot to prove it.

On Radio 4 this morning –

Three men talk about the way Stonewall’s conception of trans rights affects women’s rights.

At 6:35 Benjamin Cohen, CEO of Pink News, says emphatically that Stonewall is not campaigning for women’s safe spaces “not to be women-only.”

“They aren’t campaigning for that,” he says, “that’s just misinformation being spread by a homophobic and transphobic media.”

The hell it is.

Of course in the through the looking-glass world of trans dogma, what he said is true because transwomenarewomen. But in the real world where real women have to live and survive, trans women are men, and women have no way of knowing which ones are a threat, which is why women-only spaces are needed in the first place.

Another crack in the ice.

His own law firm:

During the presidential campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the Democratic candidate, slammed his opponent, Donald J. Trump, for a highly unusual legal move: bringing in the Justice Department to represent him in a defamation lawsuit stemming from a decades-old rape allegation.

At one of their debates, Mr. Biden accused Mr. Trump of treating the Justice Department like his “own law firm” in the suit, filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. “What’s that all about?” he sarcastically asked.

But now…his DoJ is defending Trump against Carroll.

But on Monday night, nearly eight months after Mr. Biden’s attack, his own Justice Department essentially adopted Mr. Trump’s position, arguing that he could not be sued for defamation because he had made the supposedly offending statements as part of his official duties as president.

In a brief filed with a federal appeals court in New York, the Justice Department acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s remarks about Ms. Carroll were “crude and disrespectful,” but the department also claimed that the Trump administration’s arguments were correct — a position that could lead to Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit being dismissed.

How can it be part of the official duties of a president to make defamatory remarks about a woman he sexually assaulted? I’m not seeing the duties part, or the official part. He was having a tantrum, and fending off a personal threat – that’s not his “official duties.” That’s personal.

I’m not the only one who thinks so, either.

last September, one month after a state judge issued a ruling that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump sitting for a deposition before the election, the attorney general, William P. Barr, stepped into the case. In a highly unusual move, Mr. Barr transferred the case to federal court and substituted the federal government for Mr. Trump as the defendant.

Federal law forbids government employees from being sued for defamation, meaning that if the move was successful, Ms. Carroll’s claim would be dismissed.

Mr. Barr’s move raised the question of whether Mr. Trump had in fact made his comments about Ms. Carroll as a government employee — a position that Ms. Carroll’s lawyers roundly rejected. “There is not a single person in the United States — not the president and not anyone else — whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted,” the lawyers said in a filing last year.

What I’m saying. Not official duties. Personal time; off the clock; extracurricular.

The brief filed on Monday night was the first time the Biden administration’s Justice Department, now led by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, weighed in on the issue. In the brief, department lawyers said that when Mr. Trump had denied raping Ms. Carroll, through the White House press office or in statements to reporters in the Oval Office and on the White House lawn, he was acting within the scope of his office.

No, it’s the other way around. The filthy sleazebag used that “office” to defend his own personal worthless hide. Defaming the woman he assaulted doesn’t become an official duty just because he does it inside the building.

California is doomed.

Just two years after California celebrated the end of its last devastating drought, the state is facing another one. Snowpack has dwindled to nearly nothing, the state’s 1,500 reservoirs are at only 50% of their average levels, and federal and local agencies have begun to issue water restrictions.

Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a drought emergency in 41 of the state’s 58 counties. Meanwhile, temperatures are surging as the region braces for what is expected to be another record-breaking fire season, and scientists are sounding the alarm about the state’s readiness.

From the selfish point of view I’m dreading that fire season, because it makes the air poisonous up here in the north.

That’s no good.

Along with wildfire risks, short water supply is putting immense pressure on the state’s agricultural industry, which grows over a third of the country’s vegetables and supplies two-thirds of the fruits and nuts in the US. Already farmers are culling crops and fallowing fields in anticipation of water shortages. Karen Ross, California’s food and agriculture secretary, told the California Chamber of Commerce that she expected 500,000 acres would have to sit idle this year.

No good.

Oh good, now we’re going the “treat miscarriage as child murder” route.

In March, a woman miscarried in a Spokane hotel. Police investigated. They searched her room, told her they’d meet her at the hospital and found it suspicious when she did not show up. They filed a search warrant in hopes of finding her.

Considering the fetus her dependent, officers suspected that the woman could be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child if she did not call 911 soon enough to potentially save her pregnancy, according to a warrant filed at the time.

A fetus is not a child. Abortion is still legal.

Sara Ainsworth, a Seattle attorney with national nonprofit IfWhenHow, which focuses on reproductive law, said she could not find any reason to suspect a crime in the warrant filed in Spokane County Superior Court.

“Under Washington law, everything about this is discriminatory and potentially violating of constitutional rights,” Ainsworth said.

…

The case arises as reproductive freedoms have been restricted in Republican-led Legislatures from Texas to Idaho, and with the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly poised to curtail or even overturn the abortion rights enshrined in the landmark Roe v. Wade case. While abortion remains legal in all 50 states, Ainsworth said under Washington’s Equal Rights Amendment, investigating pregnancy losses could be discriminatory as such investigations are necessarily biased against women, Ainsworth said.

…

On March 24, a woman in her early 20s miscarried in a hotel room in downtown Spokane. A 911 caller, unidentified in the warrant, told a dispatcher that the fetus was about five weeks along.

EMTs who arrived at the hotel room were all men and the miscarrying woman refused to let them in, asking for a female medic instead, according to the warrant. When the woman EMT arrived, she saw a dead fetus in the room’s toilet. She estimated the fetus to be about five months along, according to the warrant.

The EMT urged the bleeding woman to go to the hospital and the woman resisted before texting a friend who she said could drive her there, the warrant said.

In the meantime, three police officers arrived. According to the warrant, EMTs called police “due to the fact that they believed the female needed to get medical attention and that something needed to be done with the fetus which was still in the toilet.”

After knocking on the hotel room door to no answer, the three officers decided to enter the room to ensure “nobody was inside destroying evidence,” the warrant said.

Don’t call the police on a woman who’s had a miscarriage.

H/t takshak

Ah yes, this is very intelligent.

Yes indeed, feminism is just so old-fashioned, so yesterday, so uncool. The passage of time negates everything we knew and we have to start entirely over every…ten years? Thirty? You’ll notice her arithmetic isn’t great, since she thinks 2021 is “over 2 decades” past 1988. But anyway point is, if it’s one or two or three decades old it’s wrong. It’s wrong, it’s lame, it’s uncool. Those stupid women who kicked over the traces in 1968 and after were right then, but time passed and so they became wrong. Now it’s now, and we have to believe the New Truths, or be sneered at by Sally Hines.

What a fucking twerp she is.

Canada’s answer to Dylan Roof:

A 20-year-old man was charged Monday with four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder in a hit and run Sunday involving a pickup truck, in what London, Ont., police believe was a targeted attack on a Muslim family of five.

Evidence indicates it was premeditated.

The family members who died are: 

• a 74-year-old woman.
• a 46-year-old man.
• a 44-year-old woman.
• a 15-year-old girl.

The youngest, a 9-year-old boy, is in the hospital with serious injuries.

Police say that at 8:40 p.m. ET, the family was walking along Hyde Park Road and were waiting to cross the intersection, in northwest London, when the truck mounted the curb and struck them. 

Horrible.

Via YNnB

Sonia Sodha’s piece on Stonewall has been much discussed. I had one problem with it, in the conclusion.

Two of Stonewall’s founders have accused the charity of losing its way. An independent review by a barrister into the unlawful no-platforming of two female academics found that Essex University’s policy on supporting trans staff, reviewed by Stonewall, misrepresented the law “as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than as it is”, to the detriment of women. And following the Equality and Human Rights Commission leaving Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme, the equalities minister, Liz Truss, has reportedly pushed for government departments to follow suit.

Stonewall pretends it’s all right-wingers who object, which is just another example of how shamelessly they bully feminist women and related critics.

Gender-critical feminists believe that in a patriarchal society women’s bodies and their role in sex and reproduction play a major role in their oppression. Gender identity – the feeling of being a man or a woman regardless of one’s biological sex – can therefore never wholly replace sex as a protected characteristic in equalities law and women have the right to organise on the basis of their sex and to access single-sex spaces.

Gender identity not only can’t wholly replace sex as a protected characteristic, it can’t partly replace it either. Sex as a protected characteristic must not be replaced at all, not even a little bit.

[M]y feminism has matured into the understanding that male violence is a more important tool of oppression in a patriarchal society than board appointments. In case you think I’m exaggerating, almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime, a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every four days in the UK and seven in 10 of us have been sexually harassed in public spaces.

I’m surprised that three out of ten women haven’t been sexually harassed in public spaces.

Women must be free to express the view that it is risky to allow men who self-identify as women to access female-only spaces as default. It’s not theoretical: abusive men go to great lengths to access female victims and we have never been able to rely on institutions such as the police and prisons to protect us. Karen White, a trans woman who committed indecent assault, gross indecency involving children and two rapes while a man, was placed in a women’s prison where she sexually assaulted female prisoners.

Shrugging this off as of no account is not the best way to convince us 1. that they’re women and 2. that they give a rat’s ass about our concerns.

By equating gender-critical views with racism, Stonewall is losing the opportunity to win the argument and build solidarity via compromise: we understand why some women want safeguards for certain single-sex spaces; can you see why in many other circumstances there’s no reason why trans women should be treated differently from those born female?

It depends on what you mean by “many other circumstances.” If you mean basically in private, among friends, and so on, then sure. If you mean in many parts of public life, then no. Same old same old. We’re still working hard to get a fraction of the time and attention and promotions and rewards that men get, so no, we don’t want to make that fraction even smaller by sharing it with men who call themselves women. No. We get to fight for our own rights just like everyone else.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Catching them early.

Kids are more likely to understand a wide spectrum of gender…

Kids are more likely to “understand” that if you put a dress on a Ken doll he becomes a girl. Children are notoriously sexist in that they learn what they think are rules about what the sexes can and can’t do and apply them strictly.

I read one of those “gender guides” aimed at the elementary grades — with the teacher’s notes — and the first few lessons were exemplary basic feminism. Boys can play with dolls and they’re still boys; girls can roughhouse and they’re still girls. Reject gender roles and assumptions! Teachers were warned how children are already prejudiced and judgmental about what makes a real girl or real boy. Let’s help them to be free to be themselves!

Then it took a sudden swing to “gender identity” and now kids were pure, uncontaminated, and completely trustworthy in knowing whether they’re a boy, girl, both, or neither. It’s not at all about stereotypes they’ve picked up culturally. It’s about knowing who you are, absent any of that. Let’s help them be free to be themselves!

If they do the first part, they’ve taken care to distance Gender Identity Theory from children being so rigid when it comes to sex and gender.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Catching them early.

I didn’t realize I needed before I started using “them,”

Rare moment of honesty. I didn’t realize I needed…until…the need was created. Until I insisted. Why didn’t she know she needed these pronouns? Because she didn’t need them. It is a need created by media hype, trans activists, and societal contagion.

What is this need? Not the need to be non-binary; we are all pretty much that, if you talk about gender stereotypes (and in spite of all their denial, that is exactly what they are talking about). The need is to be special, to be noticed, to have everyone else paying attention to her, catering to her fragility, taking care of her “need”.

Pronouns not only are not part of a full identity (I ignore any pronouns in reference to me except I or you, because with the other ones, they are not talking to me, but about me, and I am usually not there.) They are not part of a full identity, and they are not part of you. They are not yours. They belong to the user. My name isn’t that much a part of my identity; it is used by others to identify who I am. I don’t refer to myself that way unless identifying for another person. If my name (the noun) is not a part of my full identity, then the substitute for my name (the pronoun) is not, either.

I feel sorry for people who have such a fragile sense of self that they must be constantly humored. In the case of this woman, though, I feel angry because she is passing her fragility and her need for special treatment on to children too young to evaluate the bullshit claims and too young to easily reject a message coming from an adult presented as an authority. Sex education needs to be taught at a young age, with age appropriate teaching each year; if we did that right, maybe the gender ideologists would have learned what sex is, what gender is, and which one is a social construct. Not to mention, if it is done right, maybe they would realize feeling “right” with your body is more the exception than the rule in youngsters, and would realize they aren’t really that damn special. they’re just people, like all the rest of us.

This is so infuriating.

…almost two thirds of people haven’t yet terminated their pregnancy.

…people must wait 72hrs between initial visit and the actual abortion.

On the other hand –

But then –

…incarcerated individuals.

It’s permitted to talk about women being pushed out of a profession, but it’s not permitted to talk about women menstruating or being pregnant.

Maybe Jameela Jamil will see the point now?

I won’t hold my breath though.

Exactly. EXACTLY. This is what we’ve been telling you for months.

Notice that in this instance she’s done better than 19th News, which talks of “people” realizing they’re pregnant and a person’s last period and many people having irregular periods.

Even TIME is issuing Gender Instructions.

It’s only been a week since Katherine Locke’s newest book was published, and they’ve already received messages from parents of trans and nonbinary children saying how much it spoke to them.

The very first sentence, and already we see what a dog’s breakfast bespoke pronouns can create. Who is the first they? Who is the second? You’ll just have to guess!

The book, What Are Your Words?, tells the story of a kid named Ari, who is gender fluid and nonbinary and tries out different pronouns depending on how they feel on different days.

Why is this kid both gender fluid and nonbinary? And why is TIME repeating this nonsense with a straight face? Why are they telling us people have different pronouns depending on how they feel on different days?

Aimed at readers aged 4 to 8, the book follows Ari and his nonbinary uncle Lior as they try to figure out what words fit them.

How can uncle Lior be nonbinary when he’s an uncle? Or, to put it another way, how can uncle Lior be an uncle when he’s nonbinary? Also whoops TIME slipped up and said “Ari and his nonbinary uncle” – whoops whoops whoops ten years in the gulag for TIME.

With colorful illustrations by Anne Passchier, the book emphasizes that pronouns are one part of a full identity, as Ari introduces Lior to their neighbors and shares each person’s pronouns, occupation and adjectives to describe them. Locke was keen to highlight the bigger picture of people’s full humanity beyond gender identity as well as focus on Ari’s words and feelings about their words, rather than labeling their gender on the page.

Pronouns are not “part of a full identity,” whatever that is.

How are so many adults toppling for this childish blither when it took years and years for civil rights and feminism to get even a toehold in the mainstream?

These new releases, as well as Locke’s latest title, come amid a record year of anti-transgender legislation across the U.S., with 33 states introducing more than 100 bills largely targeted at rolling back the rights of trans youth.

That’s a lie.

TIME asks the author why now.

Locke: It felt like the right time to start having these conversations for a younger audience. I really wanted to tell it through a narrative with a character, versus something that was more teaching. I wanted to give kids the opportunity to see themselves in Ari, or to see Ari as a friend. I use they/them, I’m nonbinary. Anne Passchier, who is the illustrator, is also nonbinary and uses they/them, so it was a really personal project for the two of us. We’re really proud to be sharing our story with everybody.

Don’t be. Be embarrassed, instead.

She goes on:

I think that the growth of gender identity books for kids is really great. Kids are more likely to understand a wide spectrum of gender, whereas we as adults kind of lose that skill as we grow up.

No, that’s not what that is. It’s the other way around. Kids are new to the world, so they’re learning everything from scratch, so you can tell them any old bullshit. Adults have more cognitive tools for recognizing bullshit when we see it. We don’t lose a skill of believing whatever people tell us, we develop a skill of being cautious about what people tell us. “Nonbinary” Katherine Locke’s book is an effort to brainwash children.

It’s really important that we normalize asking about pronouns because some people pass, some people’s presentation may not match your idea of what their presentation is, may not match their gender identity and their pronouns. I have really long hair right now, and lots of people use she/her for me, but she/her are not my pronouns.

Oh get over yourself.

Misgendering is a really painful experience, and it’s hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it. There’s a tightness that comes to it. I tried to get that across in the book, when Ari describes how different pronouns feel, they just don’t feel right, they feel tight, and they feel itchy, and they just don’t feel good to them in that moment.

Because they’ve been trained to feel that way – by credulous fools like Katherine Nonbinary.

To hear people use they/them for me, despite the octave of my voice, and the length of my hair, feels like someone is really seeing me and understands me, and respects me in a way that I didn’t realize I needed before I started using “them,” which was about three or four years ago now. It’s a very welcoming feeling, it releases this anxiety, and it allows people to be the most creative, productive and mentally well that they can be.

Great, now imagine how creative and productive they could be if we called them Your Royal Highness.

TIME includes suicide information at the end of the piece.

H/t GW

On the one hand “anyone with a cervix,” on the other hand drop your pants. Insult in ALL the ways.

Why not “Spread’em, honey”?

Libby Purves isn’t taking Stonewall’s instructions.

The lobbying charity Stonewall has advised that the M-word is not “inclusive” and should not be used by the bodies it advises and lists on its “Workplace Equality Index”.

…

It’s been going on for a while, the pious new word-world that cannot content itself with mangling a plural pronoun into singlehood but calls biological females “menstruators” and coins the insulting word “chestfeeding”. That was a Brighton maternity department, as keen as any Victorian divine to avoid the wicked word “breast” . It spoke of distress at the way “biological essentialism” was polluting the “mainstream birth narrative”. Makes one feel quite guilty at the reckless and rather messy essentialism of having given birth twice oneself, through the usual channels so unfairly denied to both natal males and transwomen.

The usual channels – that’s very good.

Stonewall, 32 years after its bold, simple-hearted and principled fight against Mrs Thatcher’s opportunist “Section 28” of the Local Government Act, needs to see these limits and learn humility. As some of its very founders, such as Matthew Parris, have said, it didn’t need to get “tangled up in the trans issue” at all, let alone twist ordinary tolerance to intolerant extremes. Yet now, with a bitter irony it cannot see, Stonewall eerily echoes the bullying attitude of Section 28 itself.

The parallel is striking. Section 28, remember, was basically a denial of emotional and personal reality, with local authorities forbidden to “promote the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”…

Yet now Stonewall, pivoting into power like the pigs in Animal Farm, displays a Thatcherite self-confidence and considers itself the only arbiter of what is compassionate and correct: now at the extreme asking officialdom to replace the ancient and honourable word “Mother” with a laborious “parent-who-gave-birth”. As if the visceral reality of biological motherhood, painful and arduous and frightening and tender and fraught with animal instinct, is unmentionable or “pretended”.

Not to mention – and it suddenly strikes me that it doesn’t get mentioned all that much – as if that particular bond just doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter enough to be mentioned.

The sad joke is, without mothers, there would be no humans at all. Zero. (I’m leaving other species out because they cheerfully ignore Stonewall’s rules.) Stonewall and the other language policers are like a cartoon character erasing herself.

That Times piece by Michael Powell on the ACLU, part 2.

Less than two months after that terrible day in Charlottesville, Claire Gastanaga, then the executive director of the A.C.L.U. chapter in Virginia, drove to the College of William & Mary to talk about free speech. One of her board members had resigned after Charlottesville, tweeting, “When a free speech claim is the only thing standing in the way of Nazis killing people, maybe don’t take the case.”

Ms. Gastanaga planned to argue that by defending the rights of the objectionable, the A.C.L.U. preserved the rights of all.

Does it though? Is that how it worked in Charlottesville?

She walked onstage and dozens of students who proclaimed themselves allied with Black Lives Matter approached with signs.

“Good, I like this,” Ms. Gastanaga said. “This illustrates very well ——”

Those were the last of her words that could be heard.

She walked onstage and dozens of students who proclaimed themselves allied with Black Lives Matter approached with signs.

And they stayed there, and after half an hour she gave up and left.

The debate inside the A.C.L.U. proved scarcely less charged. “People were rubbed raw,” said Mr. Parker, who directed its racial justice project and took part in these impassioned discussions. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A decade earlier, Mr. Parker, who is Black, debated before taking a job at the A.C.L.U. He had worried about representing white fascists of the sort who paraded about in Charlottesville. “I have a predisposition to be less concerned about the rights of people who would like to see me dead, and that did complicate my decision.”

This is what I’m saying. It’s not just offense, it’s wanting to see you dead, and working toward that goal.

I think it’s a cop-out to keep putting it in terms of offense.

The ACLU has changed.

At a celebratory lunch in 2017 Daniel Goldberger, one of its star lawyers, found the speeches disconcerting.

A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U. and that Black people experienced offensive speech far more viscerally than white allies. In the hallway outside, an A.C.L.U. official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.

Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged.

I find reporting and commentary on this issue frustrating, because it always (at least so it seems) evades the real issue. The issue isn’t really “offensive” speech and it isn’t really what views we find “repugnant.” It would be nice if it were, because it would make the conflict so much easier. It’s not just about bad feelings, it’s about people getting killed…or disenfranchised or deprived of rights or confined to ghettos and so on.

“I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”

But what is principle? Is free speech obviously more a principle than preventing racist violence (for example)?

I get the ACLU’s point, I think, but I also think there’s a real tension, much realer than mere repugnance or offense.

[T]he organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.

Its national and state staff members debate, often hotly, whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police.

Those debates mirror those of the larger culture, where a belief in the centrality of free speech to American democracy contends with ever more forceful progressive arguments that hate speech is a form of psychological and even physical violence. These conflicts are unsettling to many of the crusading lawyers who helped build the A.C.L.U.

I don’t argue that speech is physical violence, but I do say that some speech can lead to physical violence. Look at January 6 for one glaring example. Look at Charlottesville for another.

A tragedy also haunts the A.C.L.U.’s wrenching debates over free speech.

In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core.

The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown. 

And that turned out well.

This is what I’m saying. The far right groups in Charlottesville (and in DC on January 6) weren’t just offensive and repugnant, they were murderous. People got beaten up, and some got killed. I think the ACLU’S intervention was an intervention too many.

Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”

There it is again – even the people arguing for balance are weakening their own case by making it about “giving offense.” Offense is survivable; insurrectionist violence is not.

A.C.L.U. leaders asserted that nothing substantive had changed. “We should recognize the cost to our allies but we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant,” Mr. Cole said in an interview with The New York Times.

Never mind repugnant; will the views get people killed? At least tell the truth about what you’re defending. (I think the tension is real. I don’t 100% agree with the ACLU but I don’t oppose it either. I’m conflicted.)

When Brett M. Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, the A.C.L.U. surprised longtime supporters by entering the fray, broadcasting a commercial that strongly suggested the judge was guilty of sexual assault. When a book argued that the increase in the number of teenage girls identifying as transgender was a “craze” caused by social contagion, a transgender A.C.L.U. lawyer sent a tweet that startled traditional backers, who remembered its many fights against book censorship and banning: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

That of course is Chase Strangio.

Mr. Romero insisted he oversaw no retreat from the fight for free speech and points to key cases to underscore that. In recent years the A.C.L.U. argued that the attempt by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to deny the National Rifle Association access to financial services infringed on freedom of speech; defended motorists’ right to put the Confederate flag on specialty license plates; and criticized Facebook and Twitter for banning Mr. Trump.

“I recall a conversation with a Planned Parenthood leader after we defended the right of protesters to stand outside clinics,” Mr. Romero said. “She was annoyed and told me, ‘When you lie down with wolves, you wake up with fleas.’ I replied, ‘If I have fleas, I wash them off in the morning.’”

Yeah that’s cute but meanwhile women are being intimidated and bullied by those “protesters.” I think the ACLU is dead wrong on this one.

The money that flooded into the A.C.L.U. after Mr. Trump’s election allowed Mr. Romero to flex the organization’s progressive muscles and greatly increase the size of its staff. Many of the new employees, however, were not nearly as supportive of the A.C.L.U.’s traditional civil liberties work. They worked inside their policy silos, focused on issues like immigration, transgender rights and racial justice.

Not women’s rights though. I guess those are so last century. Women are Karens who deserve to be intimidated outside Planned Parenthood clinics.

[I]n interviews, several younger lawyers suggested a toll taken. Their generational cohort, they said, placed less value on free speech, making it uncomfortable for them to express views internally that diverged from progressive orthodoxy.

I bet I know what kind of views.

The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s. After Skokie, a leader of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild complained of its “poisonous evenhandedness.”

It’s a tension.

H/t Screechy Monkey