The Scotsman reported on reaction to Edinburgh University’s publication of an amateurish tendentious article about “transphobia” as part of its official guidance on inclusion.

ForWomenScot posted: “We are deeply troubled to see this from @EdinburghUni. Female lecturers are routinely harassed & put in fear on campus for arguing for legal rights. However, the university have chosen to publish a deeply political piece, misrepresenting women’s concerns.”

Susan Smith, a spokeswoman for the group, said the article, which appears on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion section of the university’s website, was “hugely biased” and much of it was “a low-grade attempt at a smear campaign”.

The article treats the nonsensical doctrine that men can magically become women just by “feeling like women inside” as not a childish fantasy but settled fact. A university shouldn’t do that.

Ms Smith said: “One of the silliest things is this idea that safety and privacy for women are not compromised if you allow people to self-ID into women’s spaces. That’s clearly a nonsense and it shouldn’t even be a point of contention.”

That is, if you allow men to self-ID into women’s spaces. It has been made incredibly difficult to hang onto the language of reality.

A university spokesman said: “The University of Edinburgh is a safe place for difficult conversations. We are committed to defending freedom of speech and expression, as long as it is carried out within the law and in a respectful manner.

“The web-page in question was designed as a resource to support students, inform discussion, and help promote a respectful, diverse and inclusive community.”

How can it do any of that by posting what look like dispassionate factual explanations but are in fact the tenets of a new and ridiculous ideology? How can it do that by asserting that men are women if they identify as such?

“Given the size of our community, it is inevitable that the ideas of different members will often and, quite naturally, conflict. We encourage members of our community to use their judgement and openly contest ideas that they oppose, and feel protected in doing so.”

But the article in question asserted the claims of trans ideology as if they were simple facts, similar to saying Edinburgh is 47 miles from Glasgow. The claims of trans ideology are magical, and childish, and silly. Students aren’t going to “feel protected” in that situation, except maybe the trans ones.

I’d forgotten about Katie Hill.

Arwa Mahdawi points out that we’re probably stuck with Marjorie Greene:

What do you do with someone like Greene? Like Donald Trump she’s desperate for the limelight: giving her any kind of attention is giving her exactly what she wants. Not to mention, when you amplify her beliefs you risk spreading them. At the same time you can’t just ignore Greene. The woman is dangerous and should not be in Congress. On Wednesday, the Democratic California congressman Jimmy Gomez announced he was drafting a resolution to expel Greene from the House of Representatives, noting: “Her very presence in office represents a direct threat against the elected officials and staff who serve our government.”

Direct meaning literal, physical, blood spilled threat. She carries a gun and we can’t be confident that she wouldn’t open fire on her colleagues.

It’s unlikely that Gomez’s resolution to expel Greene from the House will be successful: expelling a democratically elected member of Congress is a rare step that sets an uncomfortable precedent. It would need the support of all the Democrats and about 70 Republicans to succeed. But Gomez’s resolution shouldn’t even be necessary: the Republican party ought to be forcing Greene to resign. If Greene [were] a Democrat who had endorsed political violence the Republicans would have demanded her resignation already. I mean, Katie Hill, a Democrat, was forced to resign after she was accused of having a relationship with a staffer and nude pictures of her were published online.

That’s what I’d forgotten – the forced resignation of Katie Hill.

Mind you she wasn’t literally forced, but her life was being made such hell that she felt forced. Nobody is making Marjorie Greene feel that way. On the one hand a Democrat’s ex-husband gives naked photos of her to the press; on the other hand a Republican abuses shooting victims and colleagues while bragging about how heavily armed she is.

Can we throw out “Karen” and replace it with “Marjorie”?

A solidarity too many.

Of course it’s vital that every child receive good health care, but good health care isn’t cutting off the breasts of teenage girls who say they feel like boys. Good health care is not putting such girls on puberty blockers. Good health care is not understanding the child’s needs exactly the way the child does, but rather understanding those needs the way an adult with medical training and experience does.

And what does it actually have to do with Amnesty anyway?

What is Amnesty UK?

We are Amnesty International UK. We work to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.

As a global movement of over seven million people, Amnesty International is the world’s largest grassroots human rights organisation.

We investigate and expose abuses, educate and mobilise the public, and help transform societies to create a safer, more just world. We received the Nobel Peace Prize for our life-saving work.

It’s a human rights organization.

Ok so is there a human right to get invasive surgery that includes amputation of healthy body parts? Is there a human right to lifelong cross-sex hormones? Is that the only relevant right? If you think those are rights, and unquestionable absolute rights at that, is there perhaps also a competing right to medical information and advice that’s not shaped by campaign groups like Stonewall and/or furious advocates on Twitter? Is it really a right to get medical interventions that are based on a new and eccentric and hotly disputed dogma about people who are in “the wrong body”? Really really? Are they sure they’ve thought about it carefully enough? Are they sure there can be no harm done? (They can’t be, really, when there are people like Keira Bell.)

There were a lot of regrets when the Recovered Memory craze fizzled out. My guess is that there will be a lot of regrets about this craze eventually. It’s sad about all the people who will be messed up before that happens.

Time to repair the court system.

President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats are vetting civil rights lawyers and public defenders to nominate as judges, embarking on a mission to shape the courts after Republicans overhauled them in the last four years, according to senior party officials and activists.

They’ve got two years, because the pattern is that Congress flips after one party collars everything. (It’s unfortunate that the Senate ignored that pattern in 2018.)

In addition to forming a new commission to study structural changes to the judiciary, the Biden White House has asked senators to recruit civil rights attorneys and defense lawyers for judgeships. Officials who work on the issue say they’ve seen an outpouring of interest and have begun holding sessions to offer information and advice on navigating the confirmation gauntlet.

“We’ll see the proof of this in President Biden’s first set of nominees. I expect they’re going to look very different than the kind of judges that Democratic presidents have put forward in the past,” said Chris Kang, co-founder of the progressive group Demand Justice and former deputy counsel in the Obama White House. “Their backgrounds will be radically different, overall, and that will make a huge difference in our courts.”

For decades, Republicans have prioritized the courts in elections to stir up their base. Democrats have all but ignored the issue on the campaign trail and are now playing catch-up after their voters watched in horror as former President Donald Trump and Republicans filled up more than one-fourth of the U.S. judiciary with predominantly young conservatives.

You have to wonder why Dems ignored the issue.

White House counsel Dana Remus told senators in a recent letter to recommend candidates for district court vacancies within 45 days of a vacancy, so they can “expeditiously” be considered.

“With respect to U.S. District Court positions, we are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life,” Remus wrote in the letter, which was obtained by NBC News.

That means fewer prosecutors and “big corporate lawyers,” who Whitehouse said tend to have a “high-speed lane” to the judiciary. He said plaintiff’s lawyers will get pushback from groups like the Chamber of Commerce, but praised Biden for seeking “professional diversity” along with demographic diversity.

This kind of thing is one reason I so often despair of the Democrats. Big corporate lawyers already have a friendly party, they don’t get to have both parties. I hate the way the Dems are always snuggling up to the rich and powerful instead of acting on behalf of the people who need more help.

Originally a comment by Arnaud on A couple of markers.

In 1957/1958, a flu pandemic (the Hong Kong flu) caused up to 3 million deaths worldwide, 100,000 in France alone. It circled the world in less than six months and caused untold misery. Like COVID19, most of the death occurred among older people (over 65) but, at a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, that didn’t shock that much, maybe. How to explain that the devastation was so quickly forgotten?

So quickly forgotten that when what was pretty much the same virus came back in 1968, the same mistakes were made, the same complacency prevailed and the same results were seen: a worldwide death toll of between 1 and 4 million.

Then, THAT pandemic was in its turn swiftly forgotten. I myself was born in 1970 and I must admit, I’d never heard of it until a couple of months ago. That’s two pandemics that the people experienced and didn’t care to remember.

So there is, definitely, a pattern of forgetting, of erasement of these events from our collective memories. It doesn’t have to be so, the memory can be kept alive: one of the reasons a lot of Asian countries did much better in fighting COVID was their own memories of SARS nearly 20 years but the effects can be perverse. While governments and people who lived through it in China, Hong Kong, Viet Nam remembered it vividly, the rest of the world, who never was affected much thanks to stringent security measures, dismissed it too easily as scaremongering. (The same thing happened with the 2K bug!)

I don’t know why this happens to be honest, this forgetting. You could say there is a certain fatalism, a tendency to accept epidemics as a fact of life but surely that cannot be entirely the case, how can you accept as a fact of life something you refuse to remember? Maybe because, as OB hints, there are no great stories, no great deeds and derring-dos or at least none that the entertainment industry care to commemorate?

As an aside, I remember the 1918 flu epidemic (not personally of course!) and so do a lot of people here in Europe. I cannot speak about the US but in my opinion this one left an imprint. Mind you, it was particularly awful.

Why are universities letting angry teenagers write their policies?

Naturally I was curious so I went to read it, and again found the familiar combination of aggressive ignorance and baseless assertion, rather than something composed by informed academics.

Then I went back a category, to the Learn More section of Edinburgh’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion whatever this is – instruction book, explanation, authoritative setting out of the facts – and found the all too predictable Forgotten Item indeed not there.

Nothing about women then? No need to worry about including women? Women not a subordinated set of people at all? Nobody hates women? Nobody disbelieves them? Nobody mistrusts them?

Why weren’t we told?

The Telegraph:

Psychiatrists fear that transgender children are being “coached” into giving rehearsed answers when trying to access puberty blockers, the Court of Appeal has heard.

Dr David Bell, a former governor at a gender identity NHS trust, expressed concern that children may be pressured by parents, friends or websites when trying to address feelings of gender dysphoria. 

How could children not be at least influenced by friends or websites or both when trying to address feelings of gender dysphoria in this climate? When the whole subject is so saturated with bullying and righteous fury and social pressure that would get juice out of a brick?

Dr Bell, who was a psychiatrist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust from 1996 until earlier this month, was granted permission on Friday by two senior judges to intervene in a landmark case examining whether transgender children can legally take puberty blockers.

He feels that he can speak more freely now because he’s retired from the Trust.

In legal papers lodged before the Court, Dr Bell is described as a “high profile whistleblower” after he published a report in August 2018 which “investigated serious concerns” raised by ten clinicians working at the Tavistock. 

The report found that the Tavistock’s gender identity clinic, GIDS, “is not fit for purpose” and some young patients “will live on with the damaging consequences.”

After the report he felt that the Trust victimized him, which is why he didn’t want to participate in the Keira Bell case. But he retired earlier this month, so…

He was afraid to talk, so maybe others there are afraid too.

Maybe all of them are. Maybe none of them believe the dogma but they’re all afraid of each other.

How did that happen? How did what should be a medical/psychiatric issue become so political and so coercive?

“There is evidence that staff members may be frightened of coming forwards,” the documents continued. “Dr Bell, a highly eminent psychiatrist who until recently occupied a senior position with the Appellant, is now free from his employment and able to describe the concerns, which he investigated in some detail.” 

Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Dingemans granted his application to intervene in the appeal, which will be heard over two days in April, while other groups, including the LGBT charity Stonewall, had their application denied. 

Good. That’s part of the answer to my question right there – Stonewall. Stonewall made what should be a medical/psychiatric issue so political and so coercive, along with Pink News and Twitter and a thousand blogs.

Another one.

No. This is such a beginner’s error. The words are “something we created” but the underlying reality is not. Calling the moon the moon is social, but that rocky roundish object is not. Naming is human and cultural, but not everything we name is a human artifact.

Only people who lived near it knew about what we now call the Grand Canyon until well into the 19th century, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

David Hogg isn’t the only Parkland survivor that Marjorie Greene harassed and abused.

Another student activist who was present that day said Greene’s behavior had been “scary” and had left her shaken. Linnea Stanton, a college student and March for Our Lives activist from Wisconsin, recalled that Greene had first confronted the students as they delivered letters to lawmakers inside a Senate office building.

“All of a sudden, this blonde woman was yelling, and someone was recording us with an iPhone,” Stanton said.

After the students started chanting to get the Capitol police to intervene, Greene left, but she waited for the group outside the building, where she continued to harass and film them once they exited, Stanton said.

Stanton said she had only learned on Wednesday that the woman who had harassed her group in 2019 was now an elected member of Congress. “It’s just kind of horrifying,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that someone who can act like that towards another human being, much less towards a teenager who survived a mass shooting, is allowed to hold power.

Horrifying is exactly what it is. This isn’t just different politics, it isn’t policy versus policy, it isn’t meritocracy or safety net, it’s unashamed cruelty and malevolence versus basic minimal giving a shit about others. It’s horrifying that that’s where we’ve arrived.

Jonathan Freedland wonders why did the 1918 Flu disappear from the collective memory so swiftly?

Look around almost any British town or village and you will see a war memorial, usually first built to honour the fallen of 1914 to 1918. But scour this country and the rest of the world, and you will struggle to find more than a couple of markers for the event that, globally and at the time of the war’s end, took many more lives. The first world war killed some 17 million people, but the “Spanish” flu that struck in 1918 infected one in three people on the planet – a total of 500 million – leaving between 50 million and 100 million dead. The number of dead was so much greater and yet, as the leading historian of that pandemic, Laura Spinney, writes, “there is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow or Washington DC” for any of them. The great writers of the age, the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, all but ignored the plague that had descended.

Think of all the war movies there are and then about the comparatively small number of flu movies. By comparatively small I mean zero.

Why is that? An explanation begins in the novelist Graham Swift’s conception of man as “the storytelling animal”. Wars offer a compelling, linear story. There are causes and consequences, battles, surrenders and treaties, all taking place in a defined space and time. Pandemics are not like that. They sprawl the entire globe. And the facts can take decades to emerge. For many years, the 1918-20 pandemic was thought to have cost 20 million lives. Only relatively recently has the truer, more deadly picture emerged.

Crucially, a pandemic lacks the essential ingredients of a story: clear heroes and villains with intent and motive. The Covid enemy is, despite our best efforts to anthropomorphise it, an invisible and faceless virus.

That’s only one kind of story though. Clear villains aren’t an essential ingredient of all stories. (There’s also the fact that bumbling or outright criminally negligent people at the top could step right up for those villain roles.) You’d think heroic nurses and doctors would make plenty of good story.

We are practised in the collective memory of war, but with pandemics we do something different. “We remember them individually, not collectively,” says Spinney. “Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.”

That’s what the precedent of 1918 suggests we’ll do this time, and yet I can’t help but hope that’s wrong. When this is over, I hope we take each other’s hands and remember this strange, dark period together – even if we spent so much of it apart, so much of it alone.

I think we’ll remember it, but whether we’ll pass the memory on or not – I have my doubts.

There’s this village in France that has a history of taking in people who are fleeing persecution or genocide.

An Austrian man who fled the Nazis with his family during the second world war has bequeathed a large part of his fortune to the French village whose residents hid them from persecution for years.

Eric Schwam, who died aged 90 on 25 December, wrote the surprise gift into his will for Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, located on a remote mountain plateau in south-east France that historically has a large Protestant community known for offering shelter to those in need.

…

Schwam and his family arrived in 1943 and were hidden in a school for the duration of the war, and remained until 1950.

They weren’t the only ones.

About 2,500 Jews were taken in and protected during the war by Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, whose residents were honoured as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre.

Over the centuries the village has taken in a wide range of people fleeing religious or political persecution, from priests driven into hiding during the French Revolution to Spanish republicans during the civil war of the 1930s, and more recently migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa.

Righteous among the nations indeed.

It’s Jewish space lasers now.

In November 2018, California was hit with the worst wildfire in the state’s history. At the time, future Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote a bizarre Facebook post that echoed QAnon conspiracy theorists and falsely claimed that the real and hidden culprit behind the disaster was a laser from space triggered by some nefarious group of people. 

A LASER from SPACE. Cue ominous theme music.

Greene’s post, which hasn’t previously been reported, is just the latest example to be unearthed of her embracing conspiracy theories about tragedies during her time as a right-wing commentator. In addition to being a QAnon supporter, Greene has pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11, the Parkland and Sandy Hook school shootings, the Las Vegas shooting, and the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich, among others. 

Not to mention all the death threats aimed at Democrats.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the Republican Party have done little to stop Greene’s rising profile. During the 2020 campaign, the National Republican Congressional Committee added her to its “Young Guns” fundraising and recruitment program. In November, after Greene was elected, McCarthy defended her by falsely claiming that she’d denounced her QAnon views. And Republicans have selected Greene to be a member of the House Budget Committee and the House Committee on Education and Labor. (A spokesperson for McCarthy recently told Axios: “These comments are deeply disturbing and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them.”) One of Greene’s conspiracy theories directly targets McCarthy’s state. 

…

Rep. Greene is a proponent of the Camp Fire laser beam conspiracy theory. She wrote a November 17, 2018, Facebook post — which is no longer available online — in which she said that she was speculating “because there are too many coincidences to ignore” regarding the fire, including that then-California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) wanted to build the high-speed rail project and “oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.” She also speculated that a vice chairman at “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm” was somehow involved, and suggested the fire was caused by a beam from “space solar generators.” 

We can conclude that she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but she is violent and racist, so by god she’s welcome in the Republican Congress.

No actually let’s not spend months looking at their records.

The Pentagon has suspended the processing of a number of former President Donald Trump’s last-minute appointees to defense advisory boards as the new administration looks to weed out loyalists to the former president.

He shouldn’t have been making last-minute appointments. He should have been packing up.

The move effectively prevents a number of Trump allies, including his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy campaign manager David Bossie, from actually serving on panels tasked with providing advice to the defense secretary, at least for the time being.

Make it permanent.

The freeze announced on Wednesday pertains only to appointees who have not yet been sworn in or have [not] completed all the required paperwork, the people said. Several new board members, including Earl Matthews and Anthony Tata, were sworn in on Jan. 19 after pressure from the White House to push through as many appointees as possible before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. But others, including Lewandowski and Bossie, were still undergoing a lengthy financial disclosure and security clearance process that normally takes weeks or months, according to the people familiar.

Sworn in on January 19, one day before the criminal had to be out.

It was not immediately clear whether the Pentagon planned to take any action against those who have been onboarded, but the Biden team is looking into whether it can replace dozens of Trump’s last-minute appointments to boards and commissions across the U.S. government.

There’s a lot of muck to shovel out of there.

This is so. weird.

The gun, first of all, but by no means last. The nail polish. The wedding ring. The 45 cap. The…crotch. I didn’t notice at first but the camera is zeroed in on her crotch, and she’s all but pointing at it.

Is it just me or is that some bizarre semiotics?

The fascism (the literal kind) ratchets up by the day.

Labour issued this in 2018, but it’s grabbed people’s attention today.

What does Labour’s Statement on All Women Shortlists, women’s officers, and minimum quotes for women say?

Labour has a proud record of championing equality for women of all backgrounds, including BAME women, LGBT+ women, disabled women and working class women. The use of All Women Shortlists, women’s officers and minimum quotas for women is a key aspect of this.

The Labour Party’s All Women Shortlists are open to all women, including self-identifying trans women. Similarly, women’s officers and minimum quotas for women in the Labour Party are open to all women, including self-identifying trans women.

So actual women can lose places to men who claim to be women. If Labour decides to really be “proactive” about it their shortlists and quotas could be all men who claim to be women instead of actual women.

Also, next paragraph –

The Labour Party is committed to upholding the principle of affirmative action for women. Anyone attempting to breach Labour Party rules and subvert the intention of All Women Shortlists, women’s officers or minimum quotas for women will be dealt with via our established safeguards, selection procedures and disciplinary measures.

I don’t understand what they mean by that. Are they talking about women attempting to breach Labour Party rules and subvert the intention of All Women Shortlists, women’s officers or minimum quotas for women? Or are they talking about men doing so by pretending to be trans? The inability to know which it is just underlines how incoherent the ideology is.

Incoherent and extremely coercive; brilliant combination.

Pelosi tells the Republicans they shouldn’t be looking fixedly in the other direction when Marjorie Taylor Greene is out there threatening and gun-carrying and threatening some more.

“What I’m concerned about is the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, who is willing to overlook, ignore those statements,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference, days after CNN reported Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians — including Pelosi — in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress…

Greene is also facing criticism for a video of her confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to Congress went viral Wednesday. And last week, other students who survived the Parkland, Florida, school shooting and families of the victims are[sic] calling for Greene’s resignation, after comments surfaced that showed her agreeing with people who said the 2018 shooting was a “false flag” operation, remarks Pelosi called special attention to Thursday. The California Democrat also criticized Greene’s placement on the House Committee on Education and Labor.

“Assigning her to the Education Committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when she has mocked the killing of teenagers in high school at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school — what could they be thinking?” Pelosi asked Thursday. “Or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be doing? It’s absolutely appalling, and I think the focus has to be on the Republican leadership of this House of Representatives for the disregard they have for the death of those children.”

They should put her on the Sedition and Insurrection Committee. I can’t think of anywhere else she would fit.

The “Feminist” Library’s statement on “transphobia” and accountability:

… we feel it important to note that we come from different political histories as well as cultural and class backgrounds. However, while the Library has historically sought to encompass a wide variety of different perspectives, priorities, politics and stances, a by-product of this has been that we as a collective have failed to present a united and unequivocal stance on certain issues where it has been most needed. 

Like, for instance, whether feminism should stop being about women and be about men who call themselves women instead. Talk about most needed!

We understand that in an increasingly hostile conversation regarding trans inclusion from in the mainstream press and certain sects of feminism, it is important for us to reiterate that we are a trans-inclusive organisation and that we stand in solidarity with all trans people in the face of mockery, denigration, humiliation and discrimination with regards to accessing healthcare and other legal rights. We wish to reiterate as members of the collective that we believe that feminism is a political project that works in service of all of us.

Emphasis theirs.

It’s a feminist organization but somehow the really urgent issue, the one that requires bold type, is the one about men who claim to be women. That pesky of the earth earthy stuff that concerns women just doesn’t matter all that much. The bolded issue is so important that it requires redefining feminism so that it’s about all of us. Women: the sex that doesn’t get to have anything for itself.

At the Feminist Library, we believe that feminism is a political framework that we can use to end all gendered violence and transform the world for everyone.

Then why call it feminist at all? Why not call it humanist? “Gendered” violence would include male on male violence, so that’s not feminism any more, it’s everyoneism. Opposing all violence is a fine thing, but women still need specifically feminist organizations and analysis, because of that power imbalance between the two sexes.

We wholeheartedly reject any feminist framework that seeks to define womanhood solely using biological essentialism or any feminism that seeks to re-inscribe rigid ideas of sex.

A feminist collective rejects any feminist framework that is for women.

Following a long tradition of writings and activism from black feminism, trans feminists and working-class women – we believe that there is not a singular, universal origin point for all women’s oppression across the globe nor should we attempt to find one. Our time is better spent remaining attentive to the dire social, political and economic conditions we experience as women and using feminism as a tool to end these conditions.

Yes, conditions we experience as women, not as men claiming to be women. It’s just hand-waving to pretend that working class women and men who say they are women are Just Another Subset of Women.

As a collective, we want to make clear our internal commitments to tackling transphobia. They are as follows:

…

– Not to feature trans-exclusionary groups on our panels or other events at the Library, or allow them to book the Library for their own events. By “trans-exclusionary” we mean groups that promote or implicitly/explicitly support policy changes that directly restrict trans people’s access to resources, groups that do not allow trans people to access their services, groups who use “sex-based rights” as a means of querying and questioning trans people’s right to exist or to access resources.

Emphasis theirs, again. So this feminist library is barring women who want to talk about sex-based rights, while casually pretending that such women “question [anyone’s] right to exist.”

The ideology makes people stupid, but it also makes them shockingly malicious. We don’t question anyone’s right to exist. If you say you’re an emissary from planet Neptune I won’t question your right to exist but I will decline to endorse your account of yourself. The two are not the same thing.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, we are always open to comments and feedback on our efforts.

Or at least they identify as always open to comments and feedback on their efforts.

Originally a comment by KBPlayer on Round and round we go.

Nicola Sturgeon is in a lot of trouble at the moment, because of an inquiry into how the Scottish government handled the sexual assault allegations against the former First Minister, Alex Salmond, who was cleared of the charges in court. It’s a very murky story, and shows bad mismanagement on her part, or downright conspiracy (which I find very hard to believe though plenty do). The Scottish government has been obstructing this inquiry in any way they can.

Sturgeon likes to appear as the progressive wing of the party and so adopted the transgender cause, which had cross-party support. The trans activists got posts on the National Executive Committee of the Scottish National Party. However there has been more and more disquiet about the transgender issue, and how it ties in with a new Hate Crime bill, which the Gender Critical feminists say will make it impossible to discuss women’s issues vis-a-vis transgender “rights”. There’s a clause in the bill about “stirring up hatred” – vague and stupid and could mean any discussion about eg biology could be classed as that.

So an opposing wing has grown, the most prominent voice being Joanna Cherry, who is a lesbian and a feminist and also a strong supporter on the ultra Nationalist wing whereas Sturgeon is more of a gradualist. Cherry is a contender for grabbing the leadership if Sturgeon resigns. The trans activists lost their posts on the National Executive Committee and quite a few have resigned from the party. They are accused of not being interested in Scottish independence, but of being entryists pushing the transgender issue. Those on the Cherry wing say it’s a bit rich of Sturgeon to complain of “transphobia” and not mention the kind of vile abuse chucked at her lesbian, feminist colleague. The two of them hate each other.

It’s all very complicated and murky, not to mention virulent. For an anti-SNPer like me it’s a pleasure to watch them fighting like rats in a sack, though I doubt if it will upset the majority the SNP will gain at the next election to Holyrood.

On other issues Sturgeon is great at making resounding statements which are not followed up by actual policies or budgets.

The Feminist Library, not detectably feminist at all, at least not on Twitter.

The Feminist Library @feministlibrary

Celebrating 45 years of archiving & activism. Community space & library. Trans-inclusive & welcomes visitors of all genders. We’ve moved to a new Peckham home!

Notice anything? No mention of women. No mention of women’s rights. No mention of the struggle for women’s rights. What does “feminism” mean then? Apparently it means being trans-inclusive and welcoming visitors of all genders.

To ram the point home (and I do mean ram), they make a Statement.

So there you go. Men who “identify as” women are welcome, feminist women are not. Feminism is now for men who appropriate the category “women,” while genuinely feminist women are kicked to the curb.