Pink News arrives at peak misogyny.

The BBC is live-updating news on the virus.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US’s top public health agency, has warned Americans to brace themselves for a spread of coronavirus within the country.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen,” Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), said.

And it will be bad.

In Iran however they’re saying don’t worry, it’s all good.

Amid fears around Iran’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, President Hassan Rouhani has appealed for calm, saying he expects the situation to be “normal” by this Saturday.

He was addressing the first meeting of the National HQ for Combating Corona, which was broadcast live by Iran’s rolling news channel IRINN.

“From Saturday onwards, all processes would be as per normal in the country,” he said. “If there is any special case, which the national HQ itself declares, then it would do so.”

So that’s where Trump is getting his information.

President Rouhani then urged people to go about their business and work as usual, and warned against listening to “conspiracies and fear-mongering of our enemies”, which he said were being spread in an attempt to bring Iran to a standstill.

JUST IGNORE IT AND IT WILL GO AWAY.

Wait maybe Trump isn’t getting his cues from Iran.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said he’s “deeply concerned” that Iran’s government may have suppressed vital details about the outbreak in the country.

“The United States is deeply concerned by information indicating the Iranian regime may have suppressed vital details about the outbreak in that country,” he told reporters today.

“All nations, including Iran, should tell the truth about the coronavirus and co-operate with international aid organisations.”

Does that apply to Trump? Or no?

The CDC says look out, it will be bad. Trump says he’s got everything totally under control.

The CDC says:

New outbreaks in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are renewing fears of a coming global pandemic, even as the spread in China appears to be slowing.

RIGHT NOW “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad,” a C.D.C. official said.

Trump:

He thinks his words are magic.

Now Trump is pretending to think the sane Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves.

President Trump criticized remarks by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as “inappropriate” and said the Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves from cases involving the president.

“I just don’t know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything Trump or Trump related,” Trump said Tuesday in a wide-ranging news conference in New Delhi.

It seems very rude to prattle about something so parochial when he’s in India. But…theory of mind again. He’s not capable of stopping to think that people in New Delhi have other concerns.

He then had the gall to say Sotomayor said something “highly inappropriate.” Dude.

The remarks are an apparent reference to a recent Sotomayor dissent in which she wrote that the administration had made a habit of turning to the Supreme Court after losses in lower courts.

“Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each,” Sotomayor wrote. “And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow.” She added that the Supreme Court was “partly to blame” because it “has been all too quick to grant the government’s” requests.

In other words her point is that Trump’s administration is doing something “highly inappropriate” and in violation of precedent, so naturally his response is “No YOU are.”

Meanwhile in another (yet related) part of the forest, Mhairi Black MP is defending her decision to take a drag queen to one of those children’s story time gigs we hear so much about. The thing is, the drag queen is on Twitter, with photos, and…well I’ll let a reporter tell the story:

Renfrewshire MP Mhairi Black has defended a decision to invite a drag queen into a primary school to read to pupils, despite an outcry from parents over sexually-explicit social media posts.

Drag queen FlowJob was invited into Glencoats Primary, in Paisley, last week to speak to pupils about the notorious Section 28 Act, which was later repealed.

Flowjob. Erm…is that really a necessary part of the primary school curriculum?

The event was attended by Paisley and Renfrewshire South MP Ms Black, who is a vocal activist for LGBT rights.

After parents voiced concern that sexually-explicit images were on FlowJob’s social media profile, Renfrewshire Council has said it would never have invited the performer had it been aware of the posts.

Oops.

But Ms Black slated critics and accused them of homophobia.

She did.

As many many people are pointing out in replies, this isn’t a drag queen as in panto dame, this is a sexualized drag queen. Andy Lewis made a compelling point.

It’s like bringing a pole dancer to a primary school to “teach children to overcome stereotypes” or some such shit – the pole dancer part is a stereotype. So is “Flowjob.”

This is a sinister plot cooked up by people who understand how things work better than Trump but are no less deranged in their paranoia and anti-democracy leanings. Unlike Trump, they get that personnel IS policy. Like Trump, they are paranoid weirdos. /1 https://t.co/j76jSfdoHT

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) February 24, 2020

Can we move to Greenland?

This again. Again. Rewire News:

Across the country, the anti-abortion movement continues to shame, pressure, and punish people who understand that abortion is a human right.

No, it doesn’t. It continues to shame, pressure, and punish women. The anti-abortion movement is about as far from being gender-neutral as it’s possible to be.

For nearly two decades, nearly three million people have ended their pregnancy with medication abortion.

Nope. Not people. Women. It’s not people who end their pregnancies, it’s women.

Self-managing an abortion consists of two sets of pills to be taken at or under ten weeks after the first day of a person’s last period: The first, mifepristone, blocks the hormone essential to advancing pregnancy. In the following 24 to 48 hours, the person takes the second medication, misoprostol, to empty the uterus.

The woman. Not the person, the woman.

Research demonstrates that with pills from reliable sources, accurate information and back-up care in the rare circumstances it is needed, people can self-manage their abortion—empowering individuals to make autonomous choices about their own reproductive health and increasing access to safe, effective abortion care options that fit their personal circumstances.

It’s not “people” who need to self-manage their abortion, it’s women.

The biggest risk to people who self-manage their abortions using medication abortion is not a threat to their health or safety from the abortion itself, but the threat of prosecution as a result of over-policing in communities, systemic racism, and outdated laws. 

The risk is to women. Refusing to call women “women” is insulting and minimizing.

Indeed, since 1973, at least 21 people in the United States have been arrested, investigated, and jailed for ending their own pregnancies. Instead of prosecuting people and providers, our communities should be ensuring that anyone who needs or wants to, can end their pregnancy safely, effectively, with dignity and respect.

Women. It was at least 21 women who were arrested, investigated, and jailed for ending their own pregnancies. Stop erasing them. It’s women and providers who should not be prosecuted. Stop erasing them.

We must pressure the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to get rid of the medically unnecessary regulations that make it hard for people to access medication abortion pills. And we must hold our lawmakers accountable and demand they repeal laws that could be used to criminalize people who self-manage their abortions.

Women. Women.

I’ve never understood the point of Chris Matthews anyway: he seems to me to be just what you don’t want in a tv pundit – a loud unmodulated screamy voice saying stupid things without pausing for breath. Now people are saying he should go away because too ignorant for primetime.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is facing calls to resign after he compared Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucus to the Nazi invasion of France. Sanders won the Nevada Democratic caucuses with 47 percent of the vote, the Associated Press reported.

As the results came in and Sanders took an early lead on Saturday night, Hardball host Matthews claimed Republicans would release opposition research on Sanders that would “kill him” if he became the Democratic nominee for president. But Matthews said it was “too late” to stop him, at one point comparing Sanders’ victory over other top Democratic contenders to Hitler’s invasion of France.

“I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940 and the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says, ‘How can that be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.'”

People are reacting to the Nazi bit, but it looks to me as if Matthews was talking about the blitzkrieg bit. Nazi ideology is one thing and German military technique is another. The fall of France amazed everyone because it was so swift and unexpected. It’s still a ridiculous analogy though, but that’s the trouble with being a tv pundit whose chief skill is screaming.

I don’t want Sanders to win the nomination though. Over 80 and post-heart-attack? Bad idea. He shouldn’t be running at all.

We don’t seem to be able to do anything right.

Oh it gave her pause. Well that’s all right then.

Lisa Nandy has said she was given “pause for thought” about signing a pledge card from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights.

The one about expelling feminists who don’t lie down so that trans women can walk on them.

The pledge calls on candidates in the Labour leadership race to back the expulsion of party members who hold “bigoted, transphobic views”.

It also describes Woman’s Place UK, a group that backs biological sex to be acknowledged as part of maintaining women’s rights, as a “trans-exclusionist hate group”.

Nandy was on a tv chat show today, and that’s where she admitted to the pause.

“I have to say, that was the part of the pledge that gave me pause for thought about whether to sign it,” said Nandy. “I decided to sign it in the end because I think that the sentiment of the pledge about protecting trans rights and about accepting that trans men are men and trans women are women is really important, especially at the moment with the level of discrimination that people face.”

So if next year we’re told to “accept” that humans are lions if they say they are, will that be “really important” too? Do we have to “accept” all such claims? Or is it just sex that is such a trivial and easy-to-swap category?

Also, about that “level of discrimination that people face”…she does still realize that women face discrimination? Or does she?

“I think that the question for us is always about individual behaviour and it’s right to recognise that there are women who have fought for generations in order to create safe spaces for women who want to have a proper debate about how we best protect that in an era where we’ve recognised that trans men are men, trans women are women, and we’ve got to do far more to protect trans women from harm as well.”

But we haven’t “recognised.” We can’t recognize it, because it isn’t true. We can say it, claim it, announce it, but we can’t know it or acknowledge it or recognize it, because it isn’t true.

Asked whether she would be happy for people who identify as women to stand on all-women shortlists, the Wigan MP said: “Yeah, I think that you have to walk the walk in the Labour party and that means that we have to do two things – one is that we have to accept that people are who they say they are. I’ve never believed that politicians or even me as an individual should interfere or dictate to people who they are.”

But we don’t have to accept that people are who they say they are. We don’t. She knows that herself if she thinks about it. We don’t accept mere say-so on all occasions, and on many occasions we’d be damn fools to do so.

Even if you skip over obvious things like having to show ID for many things and just look at the profundities of accepting people’s explanations of themselves, we still don’t have to. People aren’t all that good at knowing and explaining themselves. We have all sorts of biases that make it tricky. It’s not “dictating to people who they are” to see a man when a man is in front of you. In some senses it’s true that we don’t have the right to tell people who they are, but it’s also true that people don’t have a right to tell us how to perceive them.

Sarah Chayes points out that Trump’s corruption is very public for a reason.

In Kabul, Western officials scratched their heads as to why Karzai would want to confess, in an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, to meddling in judicial affairs. The U.S. and other donor nations on which he depended for his very survival would certainly be displeased. So he must have a very good reason, I thought at the time. And then I realized that he was broadcasting a message to his network: Don’t worry. I stand by the deal.

Even a cursory look at the list of Trump’s February 19 beneficiaries suggests that his aim was not to right the wrong of prosecutorial overreach, but to send a similar message to his network—to reinforce and perhaps expand it. More than 2 million people are incarcerated across the United States. By a very rough estimate extrapolated from federal numbers (statistics of any kind on this topic are hard to find), well less than 7 percent of them were convicted of corruption or significant white-collar crimes. Yet no fewer than eight of Trump’s 11 boons went to perpetrators of this stripe: committers of tax fraud, of orchestrating a giant scheme to cheat Medicare, of multiple violations of securities law while creating a speculative bubble in junk bonds (which crashed in 1989 to widespread devastation), or of extorting a children’s hospital and trying to sell the Senate seat Barack Obama left vacant when he was elected president.

Another tell is that Trump’s clemency came not at the end of his time in office, as is sometimes the case with such favors bestowed on cronies and swindlers, but well before that—indeed, ahead of an election in which he is running. The gesture was not a guilty half-secret, but a promise. It was meant to show that the guarantee of impunity for choice members of America’s corrupt networks is an ongoing principle.

I’m guessing that there’s also a less pragmatic reason for doing it openly, which is the joy of rubbing our noses in it. “Haha you can’t touch me, Mitch won’t let you, haha, I can do anything I want to, I can smear poo on my face and you can’t stop me.” But that’s just a parenthesis. The pragmatic reason is far more important.

For this message to be delivered with the utmost clarity, the pardons and commutations had to be seen as the work of Trump himself. They could not result or even appear to result from a formal process carried out by the Department of Justice and the White House, as is normally the case. Pay attention is the point being driven home: The network and its chief are what counts, not the government as an impartial institution.

…

As egregious as Trump’s moves to bolster impunity for a certain type of criminality are, however, the phenomenon predates him, though in subtler guises. Prior presidential pardons have also disproportionately favored white-collar criminals. Thanks to a concerted campaign that lasted decades and several Supreme Court decisions (most unanimous), the definition of public corruption and bribery has been narrowed to the point that an official would almost have to make an effort to commit the infractions. Prosecutions of white-collar crime have been plummeting for decades.

I didn’t know that about the campaign and the Supreme Court rulings.

What a colossal mess.

The jokes write themselves.

Presumably “land a great guy” means “capture the affections of a man for purposes of marriage or commitment or a rewarding temporary relationship”…but isn’t the list kind of bare bones? Even putting feminism aside for a moment, is that really what Great Guys want? Someone sweet and not annoying? That’s it?

On the upside, I guess women in the market for a Great Guy can feel relieved, because meeting the criteria would be a doddle. No need to be thoughtful or curious or clever or widely read or funny or surprising or…anything, really. Just sweet; just not annoying.

I say it’s simpler to get a blow-up doll and a chef.

A Labour Party aide explains that women over 39 are just stupid and clueless:

One senior campaign aide said that the issue was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and could do long-term damage to the party in an area where it has traditionally been strong.

“I think we are all in a bit of a bind,” the aide said. “We want to be the party of equality but there is a risk that we are seen to be obsessed by this and are tearing ourselves apart. The tone on both sides has been blown out of all proportion.”

Be the party of equality by all means, but you have to be clear that “equality” doesn’t mean “everything I like.”

The aide added that the argument was, in part, born out of a “generational divide” on the left. “On one side you have women in their forties, fifties and sixties who identify with the feminist movement. They find the idea of self-identification very challenging. On the other you have women in their twenties and thirties who are much more relaxed about this and for whom it is an equalities issue.

Ah yes – we old bats are too rigid and unrelaxed to just lie back and enjoy it. That is what feminism has always been about, right? Relaxing?

Also, we don’t “identify with the feminist movement” – we are feminists. Not everything is about identifying as or with.

Also, we don’t find the idea of self-identification very challenging, we find it very wrong and stupid. We’re old enough to know that obfuscation and gibberish are worthless tools in any fight for equality or justice or rights. We’re also old enough to know that people sometimes lie about who they are, and sometimes get it wrong.

Also, if these relaxed young women do think men’s claims to be women are “an equalities issue” in the sense that we have to agree with those men, then they’re way too relaxed and not paying attention.

News from Sweden:

For several days this week the veteran Swedish journalist Malou von Sivers will cover the same topic in every episode of her nightly TV chat show: the extraordinary rise in diagnoses of gender dysphoria among teenage girls.

…

The immediate trigger for Von Sivers’s themed week is a report from Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare which confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.

But it also reflects a rapid change in public opinion. Just a year ago, there seemed few official obstacles left in the way of young people who wanted gender reassignment treatment.

Which is to say, puberty blockers, aka an uncontrolled medical experiment on children.

In the autumn of 2018, the Social Democrat-led government, under pressure from the gay, lesbian and transgender group RFSL, proposed a new law which would reduce the minimum age for sex reassignment medical care from 18 to 15, remove all need for parental consent, and allow children as young as 12 to change their legal gender.

Then in March last year, the backlash started. Christopher Gillberg, a psychiatrist at Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Academy, wrote an article in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper warning that hormone treatment and surgery on children was “a big experiment” which risked becoming one of the country’s worst medical scandals.

And the big experiment rests on the premise that children will reliably continue to want what they say they want right now, for the rest of their lives. That seems like a very shaky premise to base such a drastic experiment on. When I was 11 the closest I could get to having an idea of what I wanted to do with my life was a fantasy of driving around the western US having adventures. I’m glad nobody gave me a car and waved goodbye.

In April, Uppdrag Granskning, an investigative TV programme, followed up with a documentary profiling a former trans man, Sametti, who regretted her irreversible treatment.

In October, the programme turned its fire on the team at Stockholm’s Karolinska University hospital, which specialises in treating minors with gender dysphoria. The unit has been criticised for carrying out double mastectomies on children as young as 14, and accused of rushing through treatment and failing to consider adequately whether patients’ other psychiatric or developmental issues might better explain their unhappiness with their bodies. The Karolinska disputed the claim, saying it carefully assessed each case.

But who is assessing what “carefully” means?

On 20 December, the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment, which the government had asked to review the scientific research into the recent surge in teenagers reporting gender dysphoria, reported that there was very little research either into the reason for the increase or the risks or benefits of hormone treatment and surgery.

First, do no harm.

Originally a comment by Papito on The child deals with life by wearing pink and flowers.

The kids with dysphoria or gender confusion almost always grew up to be homosexual adults, not transsexual adults. Transsexual adult males usually weren’t dysphoric when they were kids….

I think they were all gender dysphoric as kids in a retrospective sense. You know, like all of a sudden, as adults, they discovered that they were always gender dysphoric and that’s what their problem was. But you’re right. All of the guys I know who transitioned were nebbishes who weren’t the least bit feminine before transition. Meanwhile, I knew other guys who were seriously swishy as kids and they mostly turned out gay. The idea that someone wants to intervene with these boys and recruit them into this trans cult and castrate them is nothing short of horrifying to me.

It’s not enough to shut down all the lesbian bars and force adult lesbians out of their own spaces. It’s not enough to screw up women’s sports, and try to get rapists into women’s prisons. They have to meddle with the kids. All those little teenage butches being convinced to mutilate themselves, destroy their voices, destroy their health. All those femme boys being sold a fantasy bill of goods. This magic bean will make you into a woman. No, no it won’t. It will only make you into a eunuch. Has the age of castrati returned?

I’m an ecumenical sort of guy. I’m fine with letting all the kinks have their place to play. I’ll even call some bony geek in a skirt “miss” if it makes him happy. But this TRA crap makes everybody else’s life worse. I’m not a lesbian. I’m not a gay man. I’m not a child. I’m not one of the people whose life is most directly threatened by TRA nonsense. But it makes life harder for parents, which I am, and it makes life harder too for people who just don’t want to play the gender game as hard as others seem to. I find it pretentious and twee to refer to oneself as “gender non-conforming,” but I have always looked forward to a future of loosening gender role strictures, where fewer and fewer people care that women are supposed to do or be X, and men are supposed to do or be Y, and this TRA crap is a giant step back from that.