But the lawyer who says we should throw turkeys at the Aunt Karens who fail to agree that men are women if they say they are can stop fretting: soon Aunt Karen’s failure to agree will be a crime, at least it will if she doesn’t keep her damn karen mouth shut.

Activists who promote the view that a trans woman is not a woman will be breaking the law if a court rules their campaign was intended to stir up hatred, the justice secretary has confirmed.

Humza Yousaf said it would not be a crime to express the opinion that sex is immutable unless it was accompanied by behaviour that was intended to stir up hatred, which could include aggressive campaigning.

And aggressive campaigning could include…what? Saying so on Facebook and Twitter maybe? Saying so in blog posts or opinion pieces? Saying so at dinner tables?

It’s just Scotland for now, but it could spread.

Some people love it:

Becky Kaufmann says she has been the target of hate crime in the past. She works as a policy officer for the Scottish Trans Alliance, one of several organisations that back the bill.

“All laws are authoritarian, by definition,” she said.

“Laws that tell you what you have to do are constraining your behaviour. In a civil, decent society we have laws that truly recognise what is abusive and offensive behaviour and we don’t criminalise what is not.

She added: “Unfortunately, in this day and age, we have behaviour that climbs above that threshold, and when the behaviour climbs above that threshold, and any reasonable observer could look it and say ‘that’s not on’, then that should be criminalised.”

Ah yes, that clears things up beautifully. If any reasonable observer could look it and say “that’s not on” then there’s your case, open and shut, no room for doubt.

It’s not just a Twitter thread, it’s also an article at Rewire News.

At Rewire News Group, we hope you’re able to safely enjoy the holiday away from toxic relatives, but we also know that might not be possible. Toxic relatives come in many forms: the Trump supporter, the devil’s advocate, the COVID-19 denier.

There’s also the TERF: the trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Let’s back up. Let’s think about this unargued assertion that Trump supporters and devil’s advocates and COVID-19 deniers are “toxic.” Let’s think about it and decide that it’s self-righteous adolescent garbage, and that it is, ironically, dehumanizing in just the way much of Trump’s rhetoric is. The views of the listed groups may or may not be toxic, figuratively speaking, but that doesn’t make the people who hold the views toxic. Calling people “toxic” is itself very trumpish.

The author of this venomous article and the venomous tweets is Caroline Reilly.

Caroline Reilly is a legal fellow with Rewire News Group. She is a writer and a reproductive justice advocate. She holds a JD from Boston College Law school. 

You’d think she’d be adult enough to eschew the flippant “throw a turkey at the woman” pseudo-jokes, but apparently not.

Back to her “throw a turkey” article:

TERFs are transphobes who wrongly believe transgender women are not women, and they think feminists shouldn’t include trans women in their advocacy. But the reality is that trans women are women, and you cannot separate feminism from advocacy for trans rights. Feminism that does not include trans people is just bigotry dressed up to look like something else.

No, the reality is that trans women are men who say they are women, men who identify as women, men who explain that they “feel like” women, men who claim that they have a woman’s brain in a male body. None of that changes the physical reality that they are men. That’s what “trans woman” means – a man who identifies as a woman.

So it’s not truthful or fair or reasonable to say that “TERFs are transphobes who wrongly believe transgender women are not women,” because they believe that rightly, not wrongly.

Sometimes TERFyness is loud and obnoxious in its bigotry, tweeting away about how trans women are dangerous and letting them privately pee in a stall next to a cis women is akin to letting Ted Bundy into a women’s locker room—truly unhinged stuff. You’ll often find TERFs on Twitter yelling about young people’s genitals or some other completely invasive and inappropriate thing that would have them banished from Earth if it was about young cis people.

Speaking of loud and obnoxious, and truly unhinged stuff – that’s not a very careful or fair description.

Sometimes, though, TERFs are a little more insidious in their approach, as they scaremonger about women’s rights and children’s safety—cloaking obviously bigoted viewpoints in false concerns about the welfare of women and children.

And why are the concerns false? What makes the viewpoints so obviously bigoted? Why is it insidious to talk about women’s rights? The lawyer doesn’t explain or elaborate, she just asserts.

But make no mistake. A TERF is a TERF is a TERF—whether they’re transparent about their motives and bigotry, or whether they’re stoking fears about violence and discrimination to make their overt hatred for trans people seem well intentioned. It is not.

Again – it’s just assertion. There’s not a trace of argument anywhere to be seen. All this is in aid of advocating violence against female relatives who have a political view the lawyer dislikes.

And then she gets to the remedies.

Throw the turkey at them. If you do not have the upper-body strength to throw the turkey, you can opt for something slightly easier to lift like a handful of mashed potatoes or some stuffing. A pie also works, and offers an added comedic effect.

If you do not want to turn your Thanksgiving dinner into a food fight, you can consider a more passive (or passive agressive) approach. Ignoring them works; so does repeating everything they say back to them in a mocking tone. Think: What would your most annoying little cousin do?

You need not feel obligated to entertain a bigot with reasoned debate, but if you want to, it helps to have some talking points handy. Like—the gender binary isn’t real. And violent men can actually just walk into women’s bathrooms whenever they want, irrespective of whether we allow trans women to pee in peace there. You can also talk about how gender-affirming care is necessary and lifesaving treatment, and trans people should be entitled to it the same way you’re entitled to your colonoscopy, Aunt Karen. And you can explain to your relatives that whether or not someone has medically transitioned, and regardless of how they look, their gender is still valid.

Aunt Karen. Cue Jolyon Maugham telling us how much wiser the younger generation is than all those millions of evil feminist Aunt Karens.

If you’ve got a TERF in your holiday midst, you have a couple options. You can engage; you can ignore; or you can, as we’ve stated, launch assorted foods across the table until they retreat. What you do not have to do is make yourself feel unsafe or uncomfortable in order to entertain their bigotry. You also bear no obligation to sit quietly and politely as someone spews hatred simply because it’s the holidays and you’re supposed to get along like family—whatever that means.

It’s funny because right under that (the end of the article) is the box with the explanation of why we should support Rewire News:

We’re glad you’re here! Our work is written for readers like you—folks who care about reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice, and understand how critical independent media is to a democratic society.

Ah yes reproductive rights and justice…except for TERFs and Karens.

Golly. Last I knew Rewire News was focused on abortion rights. My mistake; it turns it it’s all about the violence-encouraging misogyny.

Yet again, I’m surprised. Yet again I blink and stare and wonder. How did it become hip and woke and right on and funny to stir up hatred of women, including violence against them?

Oh but it’s a joke, pies in the face are a joke, yadda yadda. Right. Do we see lefty white people tweeting “jokes” of this kind with black people as the targets? Or asylum seekers? Or people with disabilities?

Like hell we do.

Updating to add the rest of the sequence:

Oh hey, the grownups are back.

It’s a very minimal thing to rejoice at, but that’s where we are.

Avril Haines, who is set to be the new director of national intelligence, has taken the podium.

‘I will never shy away from speaking truth to power,” she said.

She promised to tell the president whatever is “inconvenient and difficult”. She said the intelligence community is indispensable to America to address threats that come not just from terrorism, cyber hacking or other traditional directions.

“Also the challenges that will define the next generation – climate change, pandemics and corruption,” she said.

Adults. Serious people. Not corrupt greedy clowns.

Antony Blinken has come to the podium to speak, just after Joe Biden said of his new team: “They will tell me what I need to know, not what I want to know” and added “they will make us proud to be American”.

Blinken, who if confirmed by the Senate will be Biden’s new secretary of state, is telling the public of the story of his family. He has relatives who variously escaped communism in Hungary and survived the Holocaust.

He just told of his late stepfather who survived the camps and fled a death march, hiding in the woods in Bavaria until he stumbled on an American tank and, when a Black GI popped out of the top, the man sank to his knees and said the only three words he knew in English, Blinken said: “God bless America”.

Makes a change from Pompeo.

Gee, he noticed?

Trump is sweating over his campaign lawyers’ dismal and often outlandish efforts to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s projected electoral victory.

Trump is worried that his campaign’s legal team, which is being led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is composed of “fools that are making him look bad,” NBC News reported Monday.

He can stop worrying. Of course they’re fools who are making him look even worse (which is not easy to do).

That group, which has unironically called itself an “elite strike force team,” to date has failed to win any legal victories that would invalidate votes for Biden, the former Democratic vice president, even as they tout wildly broad claims of fraud for which they have offered no convincing evidence.

But other than that, and the melting hair dye, they’re impressive.

Trump has complained to White House aides and outside allies about how Giuliani and Powell conducted themselves at that event, NBC reported.

Whaddya bet it was the hair dye.

Giuliani, who was once a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also presided over the press conference at RNC headquarters, where he stood and watched Powell promote the campaign’s most far-fetched vote fraud allegations to date.

At that event, Giuliani perspired so heavily that sweat apparently blackened from hair dye conspicuously ran down his cheeks as he made baseless allegations of electoral skullduggery.

Trump, who is obsessed with television and the personal appearances of people on it, was not happy with Giuliani’s look at the press conference, a person familiar with the president’s reaction told NBC News.

Toldja! Crimes and sedition are fine, but hair dye running down the face cannot be tolerated.

Emily Murphy’s letter is getting shredded for being petty, unprofessional, egotistical, and rude.

She wants him to feel her pain.

Trump of course is pretending it’s totally his doing.

Just to nitpick…it’s not dedication and loyalty to the country to help a lying cheating criminal steal the election. More the opposite.

It’s about fucking time.

ABOUT DAMN TIME I SAY.

Whiny letter though.

Embiggening:

That article by Tina Traster dropped by Psychology Today and picked up by Transgender Trend:

Tina Traster is a socially-conscious, award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker. She is the director of the award-winning documentary Catnip Nation and author of the award-winning memoir Rescuing Julia Twice: A Mother’s Tale of Russian Adoption and Overcoming Reactive Attachment Disorder. She has written about the transgender trend for Psychology Today. We are happy to re-publish her post here.

Traster notes that a lot of LGBQT teenagers are in foster care.

Let’s talk about trans kids. The generally accepted narrative among activists, the therapeutic community, and the media is that many trans kids are living with parents who reject them based on morality or intolerance. However, there are legions of parents who themselves are being rejected because they have not picked up a pair of pom poms to cheer their tween or teen through cross-dressing, name-changing, hormone-treatment and life-altering surgeries.

Parents who detected signs of gender dysphoria in their very young or prepubescent children might feel more comfortable in accepting that their child really has been disordered for a long time. But a different cohort – those grappling with a sudden “coming out” as trans at 13, 14 or even through their 20s, remain skeptical. That skepticism guided a study done by researcher Dr. Lisa Littman, who looked at why a sudden spate of teen girls were announcing themselves as trans.

Remember being a teenager? The way I remember it it involved a lot of reacting to the examples of one’s peers – sometimes against, sometimes for.

Littman’s ground-breaking but controversial research focused on feedback from parents who largely said their daughter’s decision to become “trans” came out of nowhere or appeared to be related to social contagion within a friend group. Littman coined the term “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” which is threatening to those who believe any self-diagnosed trans-declared person deserves to be affirmed as such and should have access to any medical care to achieve transition.

And, more profoundly, that being trans is existential, is an absolute and incontrovertible truth, is as basic and true as being human, being alive, being conscious. (There are philosophical disputes over how true it is that we are conscious, but they don’t influence teenagers much.)

In today’s culture, children spend more time with Tik Tok, Reddit, and Instagram than they do with their parents. Children believe every question can be answered on Google. If they’re looking for role models, social media influencers are there to cheerfully guide any journey, particularly for children who are led to believe they may be trans. It’s a strong suction, the internet. One that parents can hardly compete with. Add to that the new normal – a world where the policies of schools, summer camps, therapists, doctors, and social communities – reinforce the notion that being trans is cool and normal and should be supported no matter what.

There’s a bit of a tension there, an interesting one. Being cool isn’t the same as being normal, and sometimes carefully deviates from it. Being cool is often a matter of rejecting the normal in favor of something more interesting or attention-getting. It’s true though that trans activism promotes both. This could help to explain some of the…peculiarity of the rhetoric.

Amid this pull, parents are experiencing parenting dysphoria, as they fight to preserve their relationships with children who are often taught to treat them as if they are the toxic ones. Parents tell their trans declared children that they are worried about them, that they don’t think they should make life-altering decisions, that they’re young and they should explore slowly. In return, trans children will recite what they’ve learned to parrot from internet influencers and activists. They will call these parents transphobes. They treat parents like the enemy. They will demand total buy-in or the gig is over.

And Jolyon Maugham QC, full-fledged adult, will come galloping over the horizon on his purple trans-horse to tell them they’re totally right and the oldies are wrong except for him, Jolyon Maugham QC.

JL at the Glinner Update reports on another successful “REMOVE THAT ARTICLE!!!” campaign.

On Friday, leading psychology journal, Psychology Today, published an article by one of its regular contributors, award-winning journalist and documentary maker, Tina Traster. It was called “Trans Kids May Reject Family, Not the Other Way Around”.

…

Parents responded to the article with gratitude and by sharing their own experiences, stories which reflect just what Traster has written about.

Until.

… the voices of concerned parents were drowned out by a barrage of abuse from trans rights activists in what looked like a co-ordinated campaign to get the article shut down. These comments all seemed to follow a particular pattern ie the article is irresponsible, the author is transphobic, parents are transphobic…

So, hours later, Psychology Today pulled the article, saying it was “more problematic than needed.” Oh really? Who decides such questions? Who measures the quantity of problematicality, and the amount of needed? Besides shouty incognito loons on Twitter?

Luckily, Transgender Trend have a far sturdier backbone and are happy to host this important piece on their site.

Because the safety and wellbeing of children depends on having this discussion.

Psychology Today has a much bigger audience though.

But never mind, the kids are fine with all this, and they must know better.

A variation on the Whig theory of history:

“The younger generations are always right” is the foundational belief and claim here. But is that true? Plenty of younger generations (it’s not clear how many Maugham thinks there are) belong to neo-Nazi groups, white power groups, Islamist groups, Brexit groups, pro-Trump groups.

And more generally and abstractly, what about the fact that people have time to learn more as they get older? What about the accumulation of experience and knowledge and information over time? Doesn’t that count for something? Of course that’s only as good as it is – one can accumulate bad information as well as good, but still, it’s not strictly a one-way process of becoming ever stupider and more wrong as one ages.

Ah yes. If you are a man, be sure to discount the views of that pesky stupid woman who lives with you and gets stuck with all the domestic work. What the hell does she know?! Bitch.

Ah yes, listening and learning, which he is so good at…unless it’s women talking. Also notice that his list of the ways his tribe is privileged doesn’t include “male.”

It seems that Emily Murphy was supposed to talk to a House committee today to explain why tf she is refusing to ascertain Biden as president.

Cool. So when is this happening exactly?

Oh.

Ok I do not understand. What do they mean an underling will “brief” i.e. answer the questions of the Committee next week? The committee summoned Emily Murphy, not an underling, and the time was today, not next week. What is this shit? Besides a coup? Maybe nothing; maybe it just is a coup.

Anne Applebaum notes that there are rules, and Trump and his rabble are breaking them in ways that no predecessor ever has.

Murphy is the head of the General Services Administration, the unglamorous bit of the federal government that actually runs the federal government. Part of her job—a part that no one has ever before considered controversial or even noteworthy—is to “ascertain” who has won the U.S. presidential election, and then to release the congressionally mandated funds that allow the winner to begin his transition. Usually, that process also unlocks cooperation between incoming and outgoing officials. Before leaving office in 2017, aides to Barack Obama had prepared elaborate explanations of the state of the world, including a 69-page playbook for how to manage a pandemic. They handed the documents over to Donald Trump’s transition team, which ignored them.

But the decision to bungle his own transition was Trump’s. The Obama team did not hinder him in any way, and the GSA certainly did not. Of course, many people were upset about Trump’s election at the time, and many suspected Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Those suspicions were more than justified: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would eventually show how Russian-controlled social-media accounts, coupled with the Russian security-service hack of the Democratic National Committee, sought to affect voters’ perceptions of Hillary Clinton. But they did not render the voting fake or the voting machines dysfunctional, and nobody in any senior post ever claimed that they had. Nobody—no civil servant, no political appointee, no politician—tried to stop the transition either. The rules were the rules.

But now it is 2020. For four years, the White House has been occupied by a team of people who do not care about the rules. The president and his family have disregarded rules about security clearances, rules about the use of private email for public purposes, rules about the intersection of political and government business. They have profited financially from the presidency while still in the White House. They have sought to use American foreign-policy tools for personal and political gain. While they did so, they accustomed everyone around them to accept new standards. Slowly, members of the Trump administration got used to tolerating blatant, bold-faced lies. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of lies—important lies, stupid lies, insignificant lies, lies about attendance at the inauguration, lies about economic growth, lies about a hurricane forecast in Alabama.

So people who work for Trump have had four years to get used to lying from the top. They’ve done a bang-up job of it, most of them. Chris Krebs refused and got fired for it last week, but most of them have become adepts.

But not everybody is Chris Krebs. Clearly, Emily Murphy is not Chris Krebs. Confronted with the reality of Joe Biden’s victory, and with the predictably mendacious reaction of the president, Murphy, along with an astonishing number of elected and appointed Republican officials, has chosen to stand by him too. “Friends” are now speaking to the national media on her behalf. One of these “friends” told CNN that Murphy is distressed: “She’s doing what she believes is her honest duty as someone who has sworn true allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and the laws that govern her position.”

Well, no. She is not doing her honest duty. She is behaving badly, dishonestly, unfairly. She is violating the Constitution of the United States of America by refusing to recognize that the election is over, that Trump’s lawsuits and legal games are frivolous, and that the transition has begun. But she, like so many others in the White House, seems to believe the exact opposite: that it is part of her job to support radical, norm-breaking, democracy-destroying lies. Like so many others in the Republican Party, she appears to think that election results do not need to be accepted; that legal votes can be challenged; that courts and political pressure can be used to change the result.

All for Donald Trump, a transparently rotten human being.

But she sounds perfect for Trump.

[Sidney] Powell had made headlines in recent weeks for her increasingly outrageous and unsupported claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, repeatedly vowing to “release the kraken” of evidence, only to refuse to produce it when asked by reporters. She has accused election officials in multiple states of committing crimes, and in recent days turned on Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who on Friday helped certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Her attack on Kemp, which also included the threat of a “biblical” lawsuit, appeared to unsettle some of Trump’s allies.

It seems ethically questionable for lawyers to accuse people of crimes without offering any evidence. I’m being polite; I think it’s a good deal worse than “ethically questionable.”

“Sidney Powell accusing Governor Brian Kemp of a crime on television yet being unwilling to go on TV and defend and lay out the evidence that she supposedly has, this is outrageous conduct,” former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Sunday.

And if Chris Christie thinks so…

It’s all quite melancholy, really, because the thing is, she was going to release the Kraken, at least she said she was. Newsweek November 17:

Sidney Powell, one of the attorneys on Donald Trump‘s legal team contesting the election results, has been on the media circuit lately. She visited The Rush Limbaugh Show yesterday and Mario Bartiromo on Fox News the day before. The appearance that’s really gained traction, though, happened days before on Lou Dobbs Tonight on the Fox Business Network. During that conversation, Powell repurposed a popular phrase that has since taken off on Twitter as a clarion call for the right while a source of mockery for the left.

“I’m going to release the Kraken,” Powell declared defiantly while saying she would expose [the fact that] the deck was stacked against Trump in the election by “Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media and even the media companies.”

And the Kraken is………………………….

a bunch of florid lies told by a hack lawyer who has now been disavowed by the very crooks she was hacking for.

On the one hand it’s funny, on the other hand it’s about as funny as the Reichstag fire.

One minute Sidney Powell is at a Trump team press conference spouting deranged conspiracy theories about the election, the next minute Giuliani is issuing a statement saying she’s not part of the Trump team. Probably the next item is Trump will do a presser holding Giuliani’s dripping head aloft.

President Trump’s campaign said in a Sunday statement that Sidney Powell is neither a member of its legal team nor a lawyer for Trump in his personal capacity.

Powell was a part of the campaign’s wild, conspiratorial Thursday press conference and baselessly floated unfounded conspiracy theories that included a claim that President-elect Biden won the 2020 presidential election thanks to “communist money” from the Venezuelan regime.

Which sounds funny, but we need to keep in mind that millions of damn fools believe all this shit. If Trump says it they believe it, and that’s scary.

As for the truth of the statement…

Ah. Eight days ago Sidney Powell was part of the “truly great team.”

They’re gluttons for punishment.

More from the “individualism run amok” file:

Yeah yeah yeah, we’re all impressed, but the point you’re missing here is that your house FULL of people is a risk to other people, people who are not you and not part of your “we.” It’s not tough or self-reliant or brave or clever to take risks that endanger other people as well as you.

It shouldn’t be a “liberal” monopoly to want to avoid spreading a lethal virus. Why do conservatives want to wave that particular flag?

Is Trump finally running out of road?

Donald Trump faced growing pressure from Republicans on Sunday to drop his chaotic, last-ditch fight to overturn the US presidential election, as victor Joe Biden prepared to start naming his cabinet and a Pennsylvania judge compared Trump’s legal case there to “Frankenstein’s monster”.

Despite Republican leadership in Washington standing behind the president’s claims that the 3 November election was stolen from him by nationwide voter fraud, other prominent figures, including two of his former national security advisers, were blunt.

So, in other words, no, Trump is still marching up that road with Republican “leadership” right beside him. John Bolton said things on tv, but who cares.

And another former Trump administration national security adviser, HR McMaster, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Trump’s efforts were “very corrosive” and warned that his actions were sowing doubt among the electorate.

“It’s playing into the hands of our adversaries,” he said, warning that Russia, for example, “doesn’t care who wins” as long as many Americans doubt the result, undermining US democracy.

But, again, Trump doesn’t care, Pompeo doesn’t care, Pence doesn’t care, the Republican senators and reps mostly don’t care.

Well whaddya know, Tory equality commissioner has a Tory idea of what equality is.

(Spoiler: it’s to stop whining and find some way to “circumvent” the obstacles that discrimination puts in place.)

Jessica Butcher, a successful digital entrepreneur, was last week appointed as one of four new commissioners at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) by Liz Truss, the minister for women and equalities.

The EHRC’s role is to enforce the Equality Act, Britain’s key equality law, and to reduce inequality and tackle discrimination. Commissioners help set the body’s strategic direction.

But in a series of speeches, interviews and articles, Butcher – who describes herself as an “old-school feminist” – has criticised many recent feminist campaigns, including on issues in which the EHRC plays a significant role.

Nah she’s not an old-school feminist, she’s just a Tory.

Butcher has also criticised a feminist “narrative of discrimination” for reducing women’s confidence in pursuing careers. She does not deny that gender discrimination exists, but in an interview last year, she suggested that women who think they have been discriminated against should find a way around it rather than complaining.

“Even if it was due to discrimination, the most productive reaction to that is not wounded insecurity, go cry to someone about how you might have been gender-discriminated against,” she said, “but it’s to actually go ‘well come on then, I’ll show you’ and take the onus to circumvent the situation in some way.

“You know, resilience, it should be about resilience, and I feel that the narrative of discrimination and victimhood undermines both that confidence and that resilience and also the individual onus to take ownership of how you put yourself forward, and to mould yourself, change yourself to the circumstances as required.”

No. Of course that’s what Tories think, but it’s not any kind of feminism, it’s Ignore Inequality and Just Work Harder conservatism. Here’s why it’s crap:

One, it’s unjust. Why should women have to make extra efforts to overcome sexist barriers? Why should anyone have to make extra efforts to overcome any form of “you’re not one of us” barriers?

Two, it leaves the system untouched. Why should “you’re not one of us” barriers remain in place forever, forcing all the underling groups to expend more effort and time just to get an interview or hired or promoted?

Conservatives like the system that way, because they’re conservative, but no one else does.

Sam Smethers, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said: “With these appointments one can only conclude the government is more interested in undermining the credibility of the EHRC rather than ensuring we have an independent and effective statutory body with a strong understanding of structural inequalities. There are some experienced people working at the commission doing important work. They need commissioners who can be effective champions.”

Tories gonna Tory.