Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Vote for the guy who abuses women

    News from Hartlepool:

    A registered sex offender has been confirmed as a candidate in the upcoming Hartlepool by-elections.

    Christopher Killick, who is on the ballot for the May 6 vote, was sentenced for voyeurism last year for filming a naked woman in a hotel room while she was asleep.

    “Sex offender” doesn’t even cover it. That offends privacy, safety, women’s ability to leave the house and exist in public space, the ability to feel like a person among other persons – it turns a woman into a masturbation prop for men, a thing, an object, a tool. It’s funny how the purported feelings of men who say they are women are all-important while the unavoidable feelings of violated women are worth nothing at all.

    Police dropped the rape charge due to a lack of evidence, but during their investigation they discovered a 62-second video of the woman lying naked on the hotel bed which Killick admitted to having taken for his later sexual gratification.

    Prosecutors told the victim that his filming was not illegal multiple times, which led to her crowdfunding for a judicial review.

    …

    Asked whether he intended to tell the electorate about his convictions, he said: “I started this process planning to tell everyone, but I got a bit frightened.

    “I do understand how it will be difficult for some people, perhaps everyone, to trust me.”

    Especially when they learn that he tried to campaign for this office while keeping his disgusting violation of a woman’s privacy and safety secret.

  • The politics of privilege

    Leya makes a point I wish people would make more often, and much louder.

    See, identities are so much more fun than wages and benefits and hours. So much more sexy, so much more ersatz-clever, so much more about dressing up and haircuts.

    Leya goes on:

    It is a politics of privilege. It is wholly lacking any reality based analysis re changes that would make a difference to the lives of those facing real hardships & injustices.

    The only structural changes arising from woke politics is that institutions can ignore addressing the hard issues in practical & informed ways, & instead perform the right language & forms of signalling & pretend this is making progress.

    It is how we are in the position where generally working class people are ignored as marginalised by the very bodies & decision makers who should be working to lessen & address that marginalisation, despite working class people being the most economically & politically marginalised class of people.

    This is why I fight the woke takeover of our governments & institutions. It offers no challenge to actual material oppression, patriarchy, or neoliberalism. And @janeclarejones points out, it is so, very American.

    It is. We’ve been crap at the labor part and the class part and the genuine, class- and money-based inequality part for generations.

    I think a lot of the worked-up unconvincing fake-seeming fervor around the trans thing has to do with envy of the real lefty politics of all those generations ago. Then again I also think it’s to do with our fundamental frivolity and self-obsession. We should harness angry Twitter to talk about that for a few years instead of Who Is the Transphobe of the Week This Time Lulubelle?

  • Guest post: If the questions are so terrible

    Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on In understanding and analyzing any claim.

    I think TRAs have kind of weaponised a lot of the shortcut memes which the rest of the left didn’t realise were bad ideas at the time.

    I mean “JAQing off”, was originally a criticism of anti-feminists wasting everyone’s time, by asking questions which were unproductive and which had been answered repeatedly over a course of decades.

    I think what we didn’t realise was that we had created an ideology which had this neat out from having to answer those questions at all, where asking those questions was an immediate marker of an enemy.

    To JAQ off should be to ask questions without reading the basic easily findable FAQ, it should not be to ask questions for which there are no comfortable answers.

    There really is no way to answer “What is female” without either endorsing sexist ideology or going with blunt biology. If there was a way of doing this, I think we’d have seen it by now.

    And the whole trans issue is fundamentally a matter of semantics, what do you mean by woman? What exactly are you talking about when you call someone a man?

    We can talk about how gender is socially constructed. Great. Lots of things are socially constructed that we don’t really get a say in – they’re things that society decided to label us with.

    Which means there is room for acceptance of trans ideology in all of this. That includes trans racial ideology.

    But it isn’t undisputed room, because the damage done by these labels aren’t things that people chose to have done to them. The social roles that come with these labels are not good.

    And dealing with the injustices to these labels requires figuring out who the injustices are being done to, and there are questions around whether the damage was chosen. There are a lot of definitional questions that need to be asked.

    With examples of trans racial individuals, we understand that by making race a matter of choice, we undermine the fight for racial equality by giving the impression that say, a black man who is being oppressed could just decide to be white. We build the impression that being black is something that white people may well choose to be in order gain some sort of benefit.

    We can see how it is problematic when it comes to making arguments against racism.

    Trans, when it comes to sex, has the same problem.

    Just what does it mean to identify with your gender? If it means fitting the gender role assigned to you at birth, is trans ideology validating those roles, if not how they are assigned in the first place?

    These aren’t comfortable questions, and they aren’t being answered. Rather than answering these questions, there are accusations of denying people their humanity, as if a he or a her isn’t human. So far as I can see, the trans think they’re the only humans and that the rest of us are something else.

    I have a developed a big problem with “dog whistles” – in that I am not a dog. I do not think people engaged in these discussions are dogs. The TRAs seem to think they are arguing with canines, and frankly it is a losing argument because they do not answer the questions being posed to them.

    Instead of answering the questions, the TRAs attack the motives of the questioners, and it slowly turns into a situation where those of us who don’t particularly care about sports, aren’t really het up over bathrooms, and who honestly don’t give a damn about your pronouns and thus are happy to use whatever you prefer, we look at it and we increasingly find ourselves on the other side of the debate.

    Because if the questions are so terrible, the answers must be worse.

  • ALL women

    Another one.

    They say “to view the full category criteria” but they don’t mean it – if you follow the link you don’t find the full category criteria. You have to ask – if you ask they admit it: they don’t mean women.

    So not an award for women after all.

  • Bad teeth and eating soap

    But apparently many do.

    Ew. You hafta rinse them.

    Ew.

  • That grim relationship

    Darkly interesting.

    In other words Trump and Fox leadership are urging their fans to get COVID.

    Ah well, why am I surprised.

  • Guest post: Identity and its complications

    Originally a comment by Sackbut in Miscellany Room 6.

    The various discussions about transracialism and transgender ideology spurred some thoughts that I couldn’t quite fit anywhere, so I thought I’d put them here. It’s possible I’ve already related this story before, but it came to mind again.

    My father was black, my mother was white, and I am one of those light-skinned people who might be considered black by the One Drop Rule. When I was in high school, decades ago, before all this “identity politics” and postmodern Critical Theory stuff became current, I was considering applying for an Achievement Scholarship, an award from the same outfit that does the National Merit Scholarship, but reserved for black students. The criteria for qualifying as “black” were not about measuring ancestry, nor were they specifically about any internal sense of identity, but rather “perceived as black by one’s peers”.

    I often said I was black, and I have been accepted as black in certain circles, but I never really lived as black. I didn’t have a large number of black friends; I didn’t follow black musicians; I didn’t use black vernacular or slang; I didn’t wear clothing or hair styles popular among black people my age. In contrast, I knew other light-skinned people for whom being black and immersing themselves in black culture was an important aspect of their lives; that was very much not me.

    I mentioned the possible scholarship application to some friends, and they obligingly agreed to refer to me as black if asked.

    It occurred to me to compare this with transgenderism. Someone who has light skin and has little or no experience dealing with life as a black person suddenly decides to declare he is black and to take resources set aside for black people, and he asks people suddenly to acknowledge him as black, because he was born black and has always known, despite not living that way. This strikes me as somewhat parallel to the case of man who grew up male, lived with all the attributes of being male in modern society, suddenly “discovering” he is female, always has been, and demanding both resources set aside for women and acknowledgment that he is now a woman. The big difference is, of course, that I have a genuine factual basis for my claim, and this other man doesn’t.

    But this other man demands society cater to his declaration, counterfactual as it is, and society bends over backwards to oblige, including changing policies and laws. People who even question his claim get called bigots and risk losing their platforms, jobs, children, friends. It makes no difference that he grew up and lived a male life, and it doesn’t matter if he changed his living pattern to mimic the stereotypical situations of women; the declaration is sufficient.

    But someone like Dolezal gets excoriated and shunned for making her parallel claim. Dolezal was actually living as black. She was working for the advancement of black people. She would meet the criteria for the scholarship on that basis, despite the pesky factual issue. I, on the other hand, did none of these things. My great-grandfather was one of the founders of the NAACP, but I was never a member and I never worked with them. I just had the right bloodline. My biology was correct, but the scholarship required more than that.

    I noted, too, that the scholarship required outside validation of blackness, that this was important. We know that, for people who identify as trans, this outside validation of their “identity” is of paramount personal importance, hence all the emphasis on pronouns and all the policies and laws that require people to validate a trans-identified person’s “identity”. I can’t imagine a similar set of draconian rules requiring validation of declared racial “identity”.

  • Precisely the confused thinking

    My Discuss: of course they do, because they can’t do anything else, because the confused thinking is baked in, because the whole idea is confused and absurd and solipsistic.

    Or maybe not? Maybe it’s all just gloriously simple.

    Ohhhhhhh…now I get it. A woman pretending to be black is not the same as a man pretending to be a woman. Cool! We can all go home now.

    https://twitter.com/sjzara/status/1384881164377276416

    But the two are not the same. Claiming that gay men are not men is not the same as saying that men are not women. I suppose I would be annoyed if someone I respected called me broccoli or Albania or Ted Cruz, but that’s not the same as saying that men are not women. One of these things IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER.

  • You must be a woman (some restrictions apply)

    Scottish Women’s Aid is recruiting:

    Do you want to get involved in making Scotland a happier, safer place for young women? Are you interested in learning more about feminist research? Would you like to a shape an exciting national digital campaign? If yes, this advisory panel opportunity is for you!

    We want to understand where young women and girls look for support and advice when they are faced with abuse from someone they are in an intimate relationship with, and how Women’s Aid can help them in that situation.

    And by “abuse from someone they are in an intimate relationship with” they mostly mean someone male. Lesbians can be abusive too, of course, but the power dynamics are different, plus there are more straight young women and girls than there are lesbians. Mostly the abuser is going to be male.

    So, next paragraph –

    Who can apply: You must be a woman (cisgender, transwoman, gender non-binary or gender non-fluid person) between the ages of 16 and 25. We would particularly love to hear from young BAME women, young LGBTQI women, disabled young women, young women living in rural areas, and young women from other minoritised groups.

    You must be a woman (a woman, a man, perhaps a man or perhaps a man). In other words when we say you must be a woman we’re only joking, because you can be a man who identifies as a woman or you can be “non-binary” or “gender fluid.” Your options are many. If you’re a man abusing a woman you’re in a relationship with, just say you’re a trans woman and apply to be on our advisory panel and maybe you will get to shape our policy on violence against women and girls.

  • Steps to expunge the award

    He burned them.

    Professor Richard Dawkins has been stripped of an award by the American Humanist Association, after the organisation said his statements on transgender rights “demean marginalised groups”.

    Voting to withdraw a 1996 “humanist of the year award”, the AHA said that the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion was no longer “an exemplar of humanist values” after his tweets appeared to question whether people can choose their gender.

    Or, rather, their sex.

    Dawkins, 80, claimed that the loss of the award would have little practical effect on him because he had never used it. “Apparently the honour hadn’t meant enough to me to be worth recording in my CV,” he said.

    That’s the burn. Not bad.

    “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black,” he said on April 11. “Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”

    See? He didn’t say “gender.” He also didn’t say “sex,” but he didn’t need to. His point is that “identifying as” something is different from actually being that something. It’s not a magic phrase that can transform anyone into anything. We see the absurdity if an adult says “I identify as an excessively large container ship,” but we’re supposed to pretend we don’t see it if an adult claims to “identify as” the other sex. (Unless of course the adult in question is a TERF. They are not allowed to avail themselves of identifying as privilege.)

    Dawkins said that he had accepted the decision of the AHA and taken steps to expunge the award. “Thinking to do my duty by deleting the entry, I opened up my CV,” he said. “Only to discover that there was nothing to delete.”

    Slap some ice on that burn.

  • On all charges

    That’s a relief, anyway.

    Relief is all it is. The horror remains.

  • Serial trolling from 2014

    Heh this one is funny to me if no one else.

    I had to look up the dates to make sure: that July 28 1914 2014 pair is the one he perpetrated two days after he co-signed with me that truce-thing saying let’s agree to disagree without abusing each other. He co-signed it with me and posted it on his blog. I wrote it and asked him to co-sign it with me because a hell of a lot of aggressively misogynist men had been exercising their aggression on women and a lot of those men were big fans of his. I had to laugh when he tweeted “go away and learn how to think” just two days later. Not exactly in the spirit of let’s decide to disagree without being abusive.

    Here it is:

    It’s not news that allies can’t always agree on everything. People who rely on reason rather than dogma to think about the world are bound to disagree about some things.

    Disagreement is inevitable, but bullying and harassment are not. If we want secularism and atheism to gain respect, we have to be able to disagree with each other without trying to destroy each other.

    In other words we have to be able to manage disagreement ethically, like reasonable adults, as opposed to brawling like enraged children who need a nap. It should go without saying, but this means no death threats, rape threats, attacks on people’s appearance, age, race, sex, size, haircut; no photoshopping people into demeaning images, no vulgar epithets.

    Richard adds: I’m told that some people think I tacitly endorse such things even if I don’t indulge in them. Needless to say, I’m horrified by that suggestion. Any person who tries to intimidate members of our community with threats or harassment is in no way my ally and is only weakening the atheist movement by silencing its voices and driving away support. 

    I had to laugh, but it was frustrating, too.

    But the American Humanist Association is dead wrong. I’m not going to send them rape threats or photoshop them into demeaning images, but I am going to say they’re wrong.

  • Speaking of reputation damage…

    People are losing their shit because this happened.

    This creepy guy for instance:

    Creepy guy four days ago:

    In other words, according to him, we need to bully and harass and ostracize women MORE for not agreeing that men can be women by saying so.

    It’s not a hate group though.

  • Guest post: In understanding and analyzing any claim

    Originally a comment by Sastra on You may not question.

    Are you anti questions?

    Yes.

    What is “gender?” What is the meaning of the word “gender” in the phrase “gender identity?”

    How are you defining “man” and “woman?” What is the difference between a man and woman?

    What would falsify the existence of an innate gender identity present from birth?

    Why does gender identity outweigh the cumulative effect of DNA, chromosomes, gametes, genitals, and hormones in the womb?

    What would change your mind?

    I consider these type of questions to be critical in understanding and analyzing any claim, including the claims TRAs are making. They’re basic to both philosophy and science. But the above are known as “JAQing off” — “Just Asking Questions” in a way designed to obscure and detract from the real issue. The real issue, you see, is PEOPLE JUST TRYING TO LIVE THEIR LIVES WHY DO YOU HATE THEM SO MUCH????

    Ironically, the major complaint made against Richard Dawkins wasn’t Dear Muslima, Clockboy, or anti-trans statements which Removed the Humanity of Marginalized People. . It was that he was trying to prevent people from getting the meaning and comfort of religion. He didn’t understand theology; he didn’t realize how belief in God is a key component of the identity of the religious; he really needed to just sit down and talk to Believers, so he might understand that understanding religion wasn’t about o-so-clever arguments and questions, but how the religious find meaning and purpose and understanding in their lives. Dawkins the atheist needed to Educate Himself.

    Till then, he was just being ignorant and mean.

  • Not July

    It turned abruptly abnormally hot and dry here a week ago. And…

    It’s another sunny cloudless smoggy day out there.

  • You may not question

    Reactions to the American Humanist Association’s shunning of Dawkins are not universally admiring.

    https://twitter.com/HackneyReSiste2/status/1384408736748523521
    https://twitter.com/RustySoF/status/1384437256367353856

  • Aurat Azadi

    Al Jazeera reports:

    Pakistani police have registered a blasphemy case against organisers of the feminist Aurat Azadi [Women’s Freedom] March in a northwestern city, while a court in the country’s second city dismissed the same charges as having no grounds.

    Police in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar registered the First Information Report (FIR) under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, which can carry a mandatory death penalty, on Thursday.

    So Pakistan may kill some women for organizing a women’s march. That’s a pretty thought.

    In a statement, organisers of the march, which is held annually to mark International Women’s Day on March 8, condemned the allegations as “baseless and false”.

    “Since the March, women marchers have been met with countless death and rape threats including a leading newspaper, Daily Ummat, referring to [feminist] marchers as prostitutes and whores,” said the statement.

    Because women are basically just vaginas, so if they step out of line, the only thing to call them is whores. They don’t have minds, hopes, dreams, plans, ideas, thoughts, sorrows, needs, projects – they just have holes, there for the use of men. If they try to use any other part of their bodies they must be called whores.

    This week, the far-right Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) party has held days of violent protests across Pakistan on the issue of blasphemy, demanding the French ambassador be expelled over comments by French President Emmanuel Macron last year that were perceived to be “blasphemous”.

    Allah is a fiction and Mohammed has been dead for 14 centuries. Move the fuck on already.

  • An important aspect of advancing the cause of humanism

    The American Humanist Association has put Dawkins on the naughty step.

    Established in 1953, the Humanist of the Year Award is conferred annually by the American Humanist Association (AHA), recognizing the awardee as an exemplar of humanist values. Communication of scientific concepts to the public is an important aspect of advancing the cause of humanism. Richard Dawkins was honored in 1996 by the AHA as Humanist of the Year for his significant contributions in this area.

    Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values.

    Like women for instance? Dear Muslima? Like the schoolboy from a family of Muslim immigrants he taunted as “Clock Boy”? Or…?

    His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.

    Women, meh, powerless schoolboys, meh, but identities – now that’s some serious shit.

    Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA, and has voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award.

    I’m not sure I think that’s a good move, but if I did, I would still wonder why women and schoolkids don’t merit such a move but identities do.

  • Vaccination cetacean

    Aww I’m jealous.

    I can’t complain though. Where I got mine is normally a sitting area with a coffee/snack bar (closed for vax days), with a two-story glass wall on one side, so not at all a bad place for the 15 minute wait afterwards.

    Still…Under the Whale…

  • The real Margaret Sanger

    I might have known – Katha Pollitt was already on it, way back last August.

    I admit I took it a bit personally when Planned Parenthood of Greater New York took the name of the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, off its flagship clinic in Manhattan in July. It will now be called Manhattan Health Center. What am I supposed to do now with the two Planned Parenthood Maggie Awards I’ve won for articles on reproductive rights?

    Call herself Karen, I guess.

    Whether erasing Sanger was an olive branch to Black staffers or part of a deeper self-investigation, there’s no question that the main winners here are abortion opponents. For decades, they’ve claimed that Sanger was a racist bent on Black genocide and that Planned Parenthood is carrying out that mission today. In 2016, Planned Parenthood released a historically accurate, fair, and complex statement refuting that absurd claim, but why would anyone pay attention to that now?

    Never mind that the anti-choice movement has never done a thing for Black people and, like Sanger’s old enemy the Catholic hierarchy, is closely allied with racist institutions like the Republican Party and white evangelical Protestantism. The bogus anti-racism of the self-described pro-life movement was on full display in 2011, when billboards appeared picturing an adorable Black child with the caption “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” In other words: The biggest danger to Black people is pregnant Black women. It is truly painful that this canard about Sanger has now been given a stamp of approval by the very organization she founded.

    For the record, Margaret Sanger was not a racist, as PPGNY board chairman Karen Seltzer asserts. As her biographer Ellen Chesler told me, she was a progressive who believed in racial integration. She voted for Norman Thomas. She worked with progressive Black people—W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, who along with Mary McCleod Bethune and Adam Clayton Powell Sr. served on the board of the Negro Project, a network of birth control and maternal health clinics Sanger established in Harlem and the South. In 1966, Martin Luther King accepted Planned Parenthood’s first Margaret Sanger Award, and in his statement offered a vigorous endorsement of voluntary birth control.

    Funny how Alexis McGill Johnson didn’t mention all that in her Times op ed trashing Sanger.

    I’ll just come right out and say it: Margaret Sanger did more good for American women than any other individual in the entire 20th century. She is the person who connected birth control not just to women’s health—something the Catholic Church has yet to grasp, although it controls one in seven US hospital beds—but also to our self-determination and sexual freedom. She was the key leader who really grasped the fact that without the ability to control our own bodies, women would never be free or equal or even just happy and well. She was more than a writer, an activist, a health provider, and an organizer, though she was all those things. She was a whirlwind of energy who changed our understanding of womanhood, sex, and marriage so fundamentally, we can barely picture what life was like before her.

    There are so many ways of forgetting where we have been. Planned Parenthood has just made doing so a little easier.

    Thank you Katha.