Part of a response from Amnesty International to a complaint:

First…

For example, the letter asks for media and politicians to not give legitimacy to those spreading vitriol or misinformation. This is being framed as a call to take away their political representation, which anyone reading the letter will clearly see is not what it means.

Ahem. Cough cough cough. FROM THE LETTER:

We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation for those that share bigoted beliefs, that are aligned with far right ideologies and seek nothing but harm and division.

See? I’ll repeat, with emphasis added.

We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation

The letter SAID “legitimate representation.” It did not say “to not give legitimacy.” It said what it said, not what it did not say, yet this “Charlie” says it said what it did not say and blames the complainant for complaining of what it DID SAY. That takes quite a lot of gall, or just plain stupidity. What “Charlie” meant was: “Amnesty was talking about legitimacy as opposed to literal representation, we apologize for wording it so badly.” Wording things badly is just a mistake, and easy to apologize for, but instead “Charlie” lied about what Amnesty said and rebuked the complainer for objecting to what Amnesty did in fact say. This is not what one might call acting in good faith.

Second.

Allowing self-determination of our bodies is a basic principle of feminism and human rights.

No it isn’t.

Not least it isn’t because it’s not clear what that even means. In general, sure, it’s nobody else’s business what people do with their bodies, but there are limits. We can’t use our bodies to beat people up (except in self-defense). People who are delirious due to fever or cocaine may be protected from themselves if they start to saw a finger off. But more to the point, that’s not even the issue – the issue is forcing everyone else to agree that our bodies are those of the opposite sex even though they aren’t. That’s not “self-determination of our bodies,” it’s interference with the minds of everyone but us. Sure, decide your body is a woman’s body, knock yourself out, but you can’t force me to agree with you, and you can’t force anyone else to agree with you.

And finally of course the claim that genitals have nothing to do with a person’s sex aka “gender” is just childish.

Amnesty has been taken over by children, children besotted by fatuous ideas about sex and gender, which they’re forcing on all of us. It’s a mess.

Bad.

A teenager has been taken into care in Australia’s first known case of parents being judged abusive and potentially harmful for failing to consent to their child’s self-declared transgender identity and wish for irreversible cross-sex hormone treatment.

In other words the state is telling parents “You have to let your child take cross-sex hormones or we will take the child away from you.”

A state children’s court magistrate cited the risk of self-harm when making the protection order in October — almost a year after the teenager, who was born female and cannot be named for legal reasons — was removed from the family by police at 15 after discussing suicide online.

How do we know the teenager won’t be discussing suicide again in 5 years, this time because of the irreversible hormones?

The parents said they knew their daughter had been depressed and in need of help, but they wanted an independent psychologist to consider all possible underlying causes, not just gender issues, and to look into non-invasive treatment options.

But the state knows better?

Queensland University’s dean of law Patrick Parkinson, speaking in a personal capacity as a family law expert and critic of “gender affirming” medical treatment for young people diagnosed with distressing “gender dysphoria”, said he believed the child removal was the first of its kind and “a very troubling development”.

…

Stuart Lindsay, a former Federal Circuit Court judge and critic of how the Family Court has handled gender treatment cases, said the request for a Supreme Court appeal was “an opportunity for a fresh look at this hotly contested area of medicine”.

But lawyers acting for the teenager have filed separate action — on November 7 they applied for approval to begin hormone therapy, with a preliminary hearing on Tuesday in the Family Court. It will be the first such case in which both parents oppose treatment.

It’s outrageous.

Another big No for Donny Tinydesk.

President Donald Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat in court Friday as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.

Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court despite the judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit.”

I think that assessment means the Supremes are likely to decline to take the case.

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” 3rd Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel.

Giuliani’s sweat and Trump’s tantrums don’t count.

The three judges on the panel were all appointed by Republican presidents. including Bibas, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor appointed by Trump. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sat on the court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.

“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” Bibas said in the opinion, which also denied the campaign’s request to stop the state from certifying its results, a demand he called “breathtaking.”

In fact, Pennsylvania officials had announced Tuesday that they had certified their vote count for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and running mate Kamala Harris garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in U.S. presidential elections.

Fake news.

Joan Smith reminds us that footballers and movie stars can also be men who punch women in the face.

Imagine a man hitting his partner. The picture that comes to mind probably involves a scruffy individual, his hand raised and his face contorted with fury. We can all condemn that, can’t we? But what if the angry face is familiar, seen thousands of times in a very different context? If it belongs, say, to the world’s most famous and admired footballer, Diego Maradona?

He was very good at getting the ball into the net, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a violent bully. That’s a very complicated thought, I know, but it’s true.

Domestic abuse is routinely overlooked or rendered invisible, especially if the alleged perpetrator is an elite sportsman or famous actor. When the Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius shot dead his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, commentators initially bought his story that he believed she was an intruder. It was only much later, and after protracted legal proceedings, that Pistorius was found guilty of murder.

…

Last month glowing tributes were paid to the Scottish actor Sean Connery – recipient of a knighthood, among other honours – who had died at the age of 90. Like Maradona’s, his biography had an irresistible rags-to-riches element, with lots of references to the fact that he left school at 14 and did manual labour before becoming a hugely successful actor. “Our nation is today mourning one of our best-loved sons,” said Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon.

Predictably, most of the accounts of his life glossed over allegations that Connery was violent towards his first wife, the Australian actress Diane Cilento, leaving her bruised and battered. In her autobiography, published in 2006, Cilento described locking herself in a bathroom for protection after Connery hit her in the face, knocking her to the floor, and a second blow “sent me flying”.

It’s not even as if he was a repentant abuser. “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman – although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man,” he said in an interview with Playboy in 1965. “An open-handed slap is justified, if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning.”

Nothing particularly wrong with that, eh what?

Another sarcastic photo and caption:

Caption:

Donald Trump speaks with members of the military via videoconference on Thursday.

Heeheeheeheeheehee

Pathetically, it’s news that Trump was pushed into admitting that at some point he will have to get out.

Donald Trump has said that he will leave the White House in January if the electoral college votes for Democratic president-elect Joe Biden, in the closest the outgoing president has come to conceding defeat.

Which is not very close, because he said it in reply to a very narrow question, and he instantly qualified it and undercut it with more shouting about fake votes blah blah blah.

Speaking to reporters on the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump said if Biden – who is due to be sworn in on 20 January – was certified the election winner by the electoral college, he would depart the White House.

Not exactly. He started by saying: “This election was a fraud.” He then elaborated on the fact that Biden won states that Trump won in 2016, as if that were somehow impossible and an obvious indicator of fraud. “So, no, I can’t say that at all,” he earnestly admits. In other words he says no I can’t say that I will admit Biden won.

Then he throws the “Don’t talk to me that way” tantrum, then he calls on a different reporter who asks the same question all over again – “So, if the electoral college does elect President-elect Joe Biden, are you not going to leave this building?” Seeing as how he had just said that – “So, no, I can’t say that at all.” This time he rears back, throwing up tiny hands, and says “Just so you – certainly I will. And you know that,” he adds, with the “come on” tilt of the head. So Trump. He says he won’t, he pitches a fit at the reporter who presses for confirmation, he calls on a different reporter, he says certainly he will and rebukes her for pretending she doesn’t know that.

Trump’s administration has already given the green light for a formal transition to get underway. But Trump took issue with Biden moving forward.

“I think it’s not right that he’s trying to pick a Cabinet,” Trump said, even though officials from both teams are already working together to get Biden’s team up to speed.

But he’s totally going to leave and we all know that and it’s just rude and rebellious of us to pretend we don’t.

Trump won’t like it that news outlets are reporting on his tiny desk and tiny hands and big diapers.

For a US president obsessed by size – his hands, his wealth, his crowds – Donald Trump made something of a bold U-turn on Thursday night by addressing the country from a desk seemingly designed for a leprechaun.

Or a very naughty boy.

The hashtag #DiaperDon swiftly trended on Twitter, with people mocking the president as an infant banished to the children’s table for Thanksgiving.

The headline for today is Trump Tantrum.

Nah, Spanky, we’re gonna talk to you as the angry greedy self-centered goon you are. You reap what you sow, blowfish-lips.

Also he looked funny.

Narcissist meets masochist, hilarity ensues.

I posted the other day about an open letter that purports to be “from the Irish LGBTQ+ community” and against “transphobia.” There’s more to say about it.

Let us say unequivocally that the statements of newly launched organisations that seek to defend biology or fight gender identity and expression do not represent the wider LGBTI+ community nor feminists in Ireland. More importantly, they are not organisations at all, they have no governance, no accountability, and are simply Twitter accounts. Further, they are not supported by the wider Irish community.

On the one hand there are newly launched organizations that say things, on the other hand the newly launched organizations are not organizations at all, but just Twitter accounts. But you just said…

In addressing these accounts it is simple enough to refute them by stating they are not radical, they are not inclusive, and they are not feminists. They are simply misinformed and transphobic. The vitriol and disinformation these accounts and people share does not represent the beliefs of the legitimate organisations and signers of this letter, and together we repudiate their beliefs, and call for an end in giving airtime to their despicable brand of harassment. In Ireland we exist as a strong coalition of intersectional solidarity. As LGBTI+ and feminist organisations we stand together, we march together, we advocate together. We will not allow transphobia to grow and our history of work together will only continue to propel us to a more equal future for all marginalised people.

Apparently the open letter is calling for these unspecified Twitter accounts to be…erm…deprived of air time. Meaning what? Not invited to talk on tv or radio or podcasts? Suffocated? Either way, since they’re not named or otherwise specified…it’s hard to know what action is being sought.

But then it gets a little clearer.

We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation for those that share bigoted beliefs, that are aligned with far right ideologies and seek nothing but harm and division. These fringe internet accounts stand against affirmative medical care of transgender people, and they stand against the right to self-identification of transgender people in this country. In summation they stand against trans, women’s and gay rights by aligning themselves with far right tropes and stances. They have attacked LGBT+ education in school, attacked anti-bullying campaigns, and attack access to medical services. They stand to remove equality, and cause a legacy of damaging discrimination.

They want media and politicians to stop providing legitimate representation? What can that mean? That this enemy population should be made stateless? It’s an extraordinary demand.

And the things they say after that are just lies – nasty, destructive, reckless lies.

And Amnesty Ireland and Amnesty International signed that open letter.

Amnesty Ireland has a pinned tweet endorsing that nasty dishonest abusive letter.

Institutional capture.

Downright embarrassing.

Whoops, what happened?

Remember when feminists had that kind of power? No, neither do I; we never have. We’ve never had the clout to extract sobbing apologies and bunches of tulips from men who…promoted a webinar.

We blew it.

Perhaps no hospital in the United States was better prepared for a pandemic than the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. The people on staff had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Barack Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases. There’s a reason many of the Americans who were airlifted from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February were sent to UNMC.

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

They’re full, and cases are still surging. It’s that simple. Hospitals are filling up and it’s only going to get worse. It’s going to get nightmare.

During the spring, most of UNMC’s COVID-19 patients were either elderly people from nursing homes or workers in meatpacking plants and factories. But with the third national surge, “all the trends have gone out the window,” Sarah Swistak, a staff nurse, told me. “From the 90-year-old with every comorbidity listed to the 30-year-old who is the picture of perfect health, they’re all requiring oxygen because they’re so short of breath.”

This lack of pattern is a pattern in itself, and suggests that there’s no single explanation for the current surge. Nebraska reopened too early, “when we didn’t have enough control, and in the absence of a mask mandate,” Cawcutt says. Pandemic fatigue set in. Weddings that were postponed from the spring took place in the fall. Customers packed into indoor spaces, like bars and restaurants, where the virus most easily finds new hosts. Colleges resumed in-person classes. UNMC is struggling not because of any one super-spreading event, but because of the cumulative toll of millions of bad decisions.

When the hospital first faced the pandemic in the spring, “I was buoyed by the realization that everyone in America was doing their part to slow down the spread,”  Johnson says. “Now I know friends of mine are going about their normal lives, having parties and dinners, and playing sports indoors. It’s very difficult to do this work when we know so many people are not doing their part.” The drive home from the packed hospital takes him past rows of packed restaurants, sporting venues, and parking lots.

To a degree, Johnson sympathizes. “I don’t think people in Omaha thought we could ever have something that resembles New York,” he told me. “To be honest, in the spring, I would have thought it extremely unlikely.” But he adds that the Midwest has taken entirely the wrong lesson from the Northeast’s ordeal. Instead of learning that the pandemic is controllable, and that physical distancing works, people instead internalized “a mistaken belief that every curve that goes up must come down,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that if we don’t change anything about how we’re conducting ourselves, the curve can go up and up.”

And there are too many people in charge who are not helping.

Speaking on Tuesday afternoon, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts once again refused to issue a statewide mask mandate. He promised to tighten restrictions once a quarter of the state’s beds are filled with COVID-19 patients, but even then, some restaurants will still offer indoor dining; gyms and churches will remain open; and groups of 10 people will still be able to gather in enclosed spaces. Ricketts urged Nebraskans to avoid close contact, confined areas, and crowds, but his policies nullify his pleas. “People have the mistaken belief that if the government allows them to do something, it is safe to do,” Johnson said.

That’s that bargaining with the virus thing again. Boris Johnson said it’s ok to visit family during this five days, so that means it really is ok. Johnson must have reached an agreement with the virus, and the same for Ricketts.

This is a problem.

Jane Clare Jones is also infuriated by the interruption.

Shut up about women, we have to talk about trans women whenever anyone tries to talk about women. It’s imperative.

Olivia Colman, Jameela Jamil and Paloma Faith have signed an open letter condemning “hostility and violence” against trans women, joining a chorus of voices to do so on International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and Girls.

Right, because we can’t talk about women and girls any more, it’s not allowed, if we try we will be interrupted and told to talk about trans women instead. Shut up about women and instead talk about men who say they feel like women in their heads.

The letter, which pledges solidarity with trans women, who experience significantly higher levels of violence, was also signed by Labour MPs Nadia Whittome and Zarah Sultana.

But they don’t. They don’t experience significantly higher levels of violence. They experience lower levels of violence.

Two in five trans people (41 per cent) have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last 12 months, Stonewall’s 2018 Trans Report found.

But “incident” covers a lot of territory…including failure to agree that men are women if they say they are. Also Stonewall is not known for its honesty on this subject.

The open letter says: “We are feminists and we write, on international day for the elimination of violence against women and girls, to express our solidarity with trans women, particularly trans women of colour, who experience violence and hostility so frequently it is almost a way of life.

“Trans women are more likely to be murdered, more likely to be victims of violent attacks in their own homes, and more likely to be homeless, again increasing the risk of violence, than their cis sisters.” 

Not true, and in any case, it’s a change of subject. Women have not suddenly become a privileged invincible set of people, let alone the sex with all the power, so we need to be able to talk about women without being constantly interrupted by shouts of “TRANS WOMEN.” Glosswitch says it sharply, as always.

Theocracy tightens its grip and gives a giant boost to COVID-19.

In a 5-4 ruling, the US Supreme Court sided with religious organizations in a dispute over Covid-19 restrictions put in place by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo limiting the number of people attending religious services.

The case is the latest pitting religious groups against city and state officials seeking to stop the spread of Covid-19, and it highlights the impact of Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court. The decision comes as coronavirus cases surge across the country.

This could be a very wise move if we lived in a world where viruses do what a god tells them to do. We don’t live in that world, though; viruses do what viruses do, and going to church or temple or mosque just helps them spread.

The ruling, released just before midnight on Thanksgiving eve, contains several separate opinions and some unusually critical language.

In the main, unsigned opinion, the majority ruled in favor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America that argued that the restrictions violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment because the regulations treated the houses of worship more harshly than comparable secular facilities.

What comparable secular facilities are there? In what secular facilities do people sit close together and stand close together to sing or pray or both? Sport facilities are a big one, but aren’t they closed for that very reason?

“Members of this Court are not public health experts, and we should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area,” the court said. “But even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.”

The court said that even though Cuomo had lifted some restrictions, the houses of worship “remain under a constant threat” because the restrictions could always be reinstated.

Lower courts had sided with Cuomo.

It was 5-4, remember. This is our future – religious fanatics in charge.

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, said that the regulations were designed to “fight the rapidly spreading — and, in many cases, fatal — COVID-19 virus,” and that they allowed the governor to identity hot spots where the virus had spiked. Breyer noted the grisly statistics concerning the virus that has infected more than 12 million Americans and is currently surging. “The Constitution principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,” Breyer wrote.

But the hell with all that, instead let’s turn it all over to a non-existent god.

Speaking of Ash Sarkar…PBS here is running a BBC series called The Rise of the Nazis, which I watched a bit of last week. It includes historians explaining things, including Richard Evans, so I settled in expecting good things…and then suddenly there was Ash Sarkar, giving her thoughts on the rise of the Nazis. Ash Sarkar??? I thought. Alongside real historians?? Wtf??? What she said was of course vapid and of no interest. I turned the tv off.

Later I consulted Google to see if anyone else had noticed, and anyone else had. There seems to have been a slight uproar. One article is titled Ash Sarkar is not an expert on Nazism. And the BBC should not treat her as one. My thoughts exactly.

So, here’s a question. You are making a three-part documentary series about the rise of the Nazis. You have lined up a terrific cast of German and British historians, including Richard J. Evans and RJ Overy. You have shot some first-rate drama sequences in Lithuania and commissioned some fine graphics. The narrative is a bit GCSE. Nothing very original or exciting and lots of big gaps. But you have found a couple of very interesting human interest stories, about two lawyers who stood up against the Nazis.

So, what induces you, and the BBC Commissioning Editor, to pretend that Ash Sarkar, one of the interviewees, is some kind of “expert” about Nazism?

What followed her appearance last night was entirely predictable. There was a tsunami of protest on social media. Not just because Sarkar doesn’t know anything worth knowing about Nazism or German Communism. Her contribution to last night’s episode consisted of a handful of ten or fifteen-second soundbites which managed to be both unilluminating and annoying. She described the leader of the KPD as “definitely a charismatic guy” and “red as Hell”. The scale of the Nazi attack on the KPD, she said, was “insane”. Not one soundbite was longer than fifteen seconds. This was not BBC2. This was history as a banal mix of BBC3 and Radio 1. 

But it’s ok, the BBC had an explanation.

“As well as featuring interviews with some of the world’s leading experts on pre-war Germany, this series asks recognised contemporary figures from different professional fields, amongst them historians and journalists, to examine in detail the motives and experiences of individual historical figures from this period. Ash Sarkar is one of a number of current public figures who feature, alongside representatives from military and legal backgrounds.”

But it would make more sense to grab someone at random off the Tube platform.

So, apparently, Sarkar was chosen because she’s a “contemporary figure” or a “current public figure”. This is completely vacuous. And what makes Sarkar, a Left-wing self-publicist, “a contemporary figure”? The BBC, in a moment of panic that they are not watched by enough young people, have started filling up many of their current affairs programmes with Left-wing activists in their 20s. And that makes her a “contemporary figure”, who can be interviewed in a BBC2 historical documentary programme alongside Professor Sir Richard Evans, author of almost thirty history books, including a 2000-page trilogy on the history of Nazism. No one at the BBC has come up with a remotely plausible argument for her inclusion.  

That was exactly my reaction. Richard Evans is the real deal, and Ash Sarkar is…irrelevant.

This one spells it out – no you cannot have a single day to yourselves to talk about violence against women, yes you do have to include men who say they are women in your protests of violence against women.

Ash Sarkar shouldn’t be proud of that letter, she should be ashamed of it.

That Suzanne Moore essay:

It is March 2020. For several months now I have been trying to write something — anything — about the so-called “trans debate” in my Guardian column. But if I ever slip a line in about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out. It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: “It didn’t really add to the argument”, or it is a “distraction” from the argument.

I wouldn’t like to have editors like that. I like having editors who let me decide what my argument is, since I’m the one writing the column after all.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Well ok but besides winning the Orwell Prize what makes you think you’re any good at writing political columns?

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

What she says is literally true, I think. Trying to write something you don’t want to write and don’t believe deadens your prose. Readers know dead writing when they see it, at least readers with the sense to read people like Moore do.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

Because too many people have oatmeal where their brains should be.

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

And since the orthodoxy is deeply stupid…a lot of deeply stupid people got together to whine at her.

To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” This person went on to say that I felt insecure “because a new generation of younger leftists have caught the public mood”. 

And you know what Jolyon says – the younger generation is always right.

So there we have it. Here comes the “new generation”: the new Left, same as the old Left. Full of misogyny, utter pricks and those with the emotional intelligence of whelks. Misogyny in the name of socialism. Again.

Not so much socialism as Ideninny.

Eventually, I was allowed by a great editor to write about how gender critical women wanted to assert their basic rights. A professor of working-class history at Oxford, Selina Todd, was disinvited from an event. I noted, referring to this incident, that it is women again, never men, who were losing jobs, incomes and public platforms if they spoke up. Many of them were emailing me: not on one side or another, but generally worried. I wrote that I believed biological sex to be real and that it’s not transphobic to understand basic science. To my mind the column was fairly mild.

We all think that.

It was published. The next thing I know there are loads of people on social media thanking me for saying what needed to be said. And then another lot: the “die in a ditch terf” lot, amazingly telling me to die in a ditch. Again.

…

The censorship continues and I cannot abide it. Every day another woman loses her job and a witch-burning occurs on Twitter. My fear is not about trans people but an ideology that means the erasure of women — not just the word, but of our ability to name and describe our experience. We are now cervix-havers, birthing parents, people who menstruate. On Amnesty’s latest posters to support the women’s strike in Poland, the literal translation from Polish for the thousands of women who were protesting the awful tightening of abortion laws was: “I stand with people in Poland”. Which people? Women forced to give birth on a plastic sheet to a dead baby with foetal defects? Say it.

Nor do I buy the idea that all of this is a purely generational issue. In part it is, sure, but it can at times be an issue of unfettered misogyny and a failure to understand that many women’s rights are fairly recent and always contested.

…

All this is then just a little story about being given a warning to shut up. And refusing to. I have had a lifetime of such warnings. Class will out. This is just something I wanted to tell you about a woman saying no. And the ways we say no.

No in thunder.

Trump pardoned Flynn.

House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler issued a statement:

“This pardon is undeserved, unprincipled, and one more stain on President Trump’s rapidly diminishing legacy.

“Michael Flynn was fired from the White house for lying to senior officials.  He pleaded guilty—twice—to lying to federal investigators about his communications with a foreign adversary. Flynn’s agreement to cooperate with the government in exchange for those guilty pleas seemed light to some, given reports that Flynn and his son had engaged in far more disturbing criminal activity. 

“It is important to talk about why the President pardoned Flynn.  President Trump dangled this pardon to encourage Flynn to backtrack on his pledge to cooperate with federal investigators—cooperation that might have exposed the President’s own wrongdoing.  And it worked.  Flynn broke his deal, recanted his plea, received the backing of the Attorney General over the objections of career prosecutors, and now has secured a pardon from the President of the United States. 

“This pardon is part of a pattern.  We saw it before, in the Roger Stone case—where President Trump granted clemency to protect an individual who might have implicated the President in criminal misconduct.  We may see it again before President Trump finally leaves office.  These actions are an abuse of power and fundamentally undermine the rule of law.

“The President’s enablers have constructed an elaborate narrative in which Trump and Flynn are victims and the Constitution is subject to the whims of the President.  Americans soundly rejected this nonsense when they voted out President Trump.  President-Elect Biden will soon take office and restore a measure of honor to the Office of the President.  Between now and then, we must be vigilant to additional abuses of power, even as we look with hope to days to come.”

Another woman-hating creep who works for Pink News.

But what is this “relentless targeting”? The opening of Moore’s article:

It is March 2020. For several months now I have been trying to write something — anything — about the so-called “trans debate” in my Guardian column. But if I ever slip a line in about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out. It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: “It didn’t really add to the argument”, or it is a “distraction” from the argument.

Shock-horror she tried to talk about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, but the Guardian wouldn’t let her.

(I have to say, I was shocked by the subbing out and the patronizing explanations. It’s her damn column, she gets to make her argument the way she wants to.)

So Ryan John Butcher is in a towering rage at Suzanne Moore because she wanted to talk about the significance of female experience. So much for solidarity eh? Intersection of Me and Me, and don’t you forget it, laydeez.

She didn’t lie, she didn’t bully anyone. The 338 colleagues who signed that open letter trashing her on the other hand…