I saw this on Twitter.

Apparently it’s from Edinburgh Pride. I’d love to know what the rest of the “BRICKS NOT” sign says, but the “NO MORE TERFS” sign with the picture of a woman’s mouth talking and the “fuck TERFs” are informative on their own. Pride is about hating feminist women now. Whoopdydoo.

What Gordon Ramsay has to do with it I don’t know.

Updating to add: MP Joanna Cherry also saw it.

Several women have drawn my attention to this photo taken at #PrideEdinburgh today. It makes me very sad. #Pride was never about #Hate. I marched on my first #Pride in London 30 years ago. It was diverse. Inclusive. This #misogyny is destroying our movement pic.twitter.com/ZP5XCXb7uv

— Joanna Cherry QC MP (@joannaccherry) June 22, 2019

If you knew…

If you knew of a child who was being forced by a parent or guardian to sleep on a cold concrete floor, in overcrowded surroundings, with screaming lights always on overhead that made it hard to sleep, with limited access to a bathroom, no way to brush their teeth, no soap and no towel — would you do something?

Of course you would. You would dial 911 (in the US) and report the circumstances and location.

But if the child is a migrant, it’s government policy to do that to them.

In 2014 — during the Obama administration, it should be noted — several young immigrants caught along the border said they had been given dirty water to drink and kept in crowded, frigid cells.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee of Los Angeles ruled that children taken into federal immigration custody must be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.

The judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, upheld Judge Gee’s ruling two years ago. But this week, Sarah Fabian, senior litigation counsel for the Department of Justice, told the three-judge panel she thought the phrase was vague.

It’s not all that vague. “Safe” includes not unhealthy, so it rules out sleeping on a concrete floor, sleeping with lights on all night, sleeping in the cold…and so on.

Judge Marsha Berzon asked Fabian: “You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of ‘safe and sanitary’ conditions?”

Judge William Fletcher said, “Cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket? I find it inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

“It may be they don’t get super-thread-count Egyptian linen, I get that,” he added, and said the soap provided didn’t have to be perfumed. But plain soap, he said, “sounds like it’s part of ‘safe and sanitary.’ “

Judge A. Wallace Tashima said, “If you don’t have a toothbrush, if you don’t have soap, if you don’t have a blanket, it’s not safe and sanitary. Wouldn’t everybody agree to that?”

Everybody except people who take orders from Trump.

Matthew Miller points out that they aren’t forced to.

She is a career official, not a political appointee. She didn’t come up with the policy, & I’m sure was under a lot of pressure. But many career lawyers at DOJ have chosen not to sign briefs in this admin that they didn’t believe they could justify. You always have a choice. https://t.co/QnX0ToioXJ

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) June 22, 2019

Jeffrey Toobin tells us what Clarence Thomas has been up to lately, starting with a grotesque case out of Mississippi:

A Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine.

That’s the message of an astonishing decision today from the Supreme Court. The facts of the case, known as Flowers v. Mississippi, are straightforward. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, in his admirably blunt opinion for the Court, “In 1996, Curtis Flowers allegedly murdered four people in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers is black. He has been tried six separate times before a jury for murder. The same lead prosecutor represented the State in all six trials.” Flowers was convicted in the first three trials, and sentenced to death. On each occasion, his conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court, on the grounds of misconduct by the prosecutor, Doug Evans, mostly in the form of keeping African-Americans off the juries. Trials four and five ended in hung juries. In the sixth trial, the one that was before the Supreme Court, Flowers was convicted, but the Justices found that Evans had again discriminated against black people, and thus Flowers, in jury selection, and they overturned his conviction.

I’m confused by this, because it sounds like double jeopardy over and over again. It also sounds odd that the same prosecutor was on all the cases even though the convictions kept getting overturned.

As Kavanaugh recounted in his opinion, Evans’s actions were almost cartoonishly racist. To wit: in the six trials, the State employed its peremptory challenges (that is, challenges for which no reason need be given) to strike forty-one out of forty-two African-American prospective jurors. In the most recent trial, the State exercised peremptory strikes against five of six black prospective jurors. In addition, Evans questioned black prospective jurors a great deal more closely than he questioned whites. As Kavanaugh observed, with considerable understatement, “A court confronting that kind of pattern cannot ignore it.“

However much it would like to.

Yet Thomas, the one black person on the court, says yes this is awesome, let’s have more of this.

But Thomas can, and he did. Indeed, he filed a dissenting opinion that was genuinely outraged—not by the prosecutor but by his fellow-Justices, who dared to grant relief to Flowers, who has spent more than two decades in solitary confinement at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison. Thomas said that the prosecutor’s behavior was blameless, and he practically sneered at his colleagues, asserting that the majority had decided the Flowers case to “boost its self-esteem.”

Aka “virtue-signalling.” I guess it’s better to have evil-signalling? Evil racism-signalling?

Despite Thomas’s usual silence on the bench (he did ask a question during the Flowers argument), he is clearly feeling ideologically aggressive these days. In his Flowers dissent, Thomas all but called for the overturning of the Court’s landmark decision in Batson v. Kentucky, from 1986, which prohibits prosecutors from using their peremptory challenges in racially discriminatory ways.

Gotta let those prosecutors do their racist thing, because…let’s see…because anything else is just political correctness? Do I have that right?

The Post reports on the childish chaos of Trump Playing War all day and then telling the world that he’s a Big Boy and he can Change His Mind.

The plans had been drawn, the targets set, and a single word from the commander in chief would have activated the U.S. military to strike a foreign adversary. But President Trump was having second thoughts.

After giving his top Pentagon officials permission to prepare for U.S. military strikes against Iran, Trump convened his top advisers in the Oval Office on Thursday evening and began asking crucial questions just minutes before the operation was set to commence, according to officials familiar with the episode.

Cool that he asks crucial questions, but the trouble is, the questions had already been asked and answered. This isn’t somebody marshaling all the reasons on both sides and then making a judgement, this is somebody playing dress-up.

What are the potential risks, he asked. How many people could be killed? What could go wrong?

Trump had already been briefed in detail on such questions earlier in the day, including a Pentagon estimate of up to 150 Iranian casualties.

But hey, why not ask them all over again at the last minute, so that you can tell dramatic stories about yourself the next day? I mean why not?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing he’d gone ahead. I’m wishing he weren’t a childish idiot with no clue what he’s doing.

“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die,” Trump wrote Friday on Twitter, embellishing several of the events in question. “150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it.”

The whole thing is so that he could get that “sir” in there. He’s so excited that he gets to tell us that generals call him sir. (I bet they swallow quite a lot of vomit as they do it, too.)

Trump’s reversal was the culmination of 24 frenzied and frenetic hours marked by public inconsistencies, congressional bewilderment and palpable concern among national security experts that the administration might inadvertently stumble into the kind of bloody Middle East conflict that the president had campaigned so vigorously against.

Simply because the president’s brain might as well be cream of wheat for all the use it is.

The administration’s debate over how to respond to the drone attack played out over the course of four meetings at the White House on Thursday beginning at 7 a.m. Trump was supportive of military action throughout the day as Pentagon officials, lawmakers and national security officials made their cases for or against escalation, making his sudden change of mind all the more striking to those inside the administration.

He just loves surprises!

He didn’t bother to tell Congress that strikes were planned.

Later in the afternoon, the Pentagon was gearing up to announce a strike. Around 6 p.m., defense officials including Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist huddled with Shanahan in his office overlooking the Potomac River.

That’s when Trump started to ask key questions, as he huddled in the Oval Office with top advisers, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

The president was especially interested in the number of potential casualties, noting that Iran’s downing of a drone hadn’t killed any Americans. He was told again that as many as 150 Iranians could be killed.

“I thought about it for a second, and I said, ‘You know what? They shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it. And here we are sitting with 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead.’ ” Trump said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Friday. “And I didn’t like it . . . I didn’t think it was proportionate.”

Light goes on in trumpian brain. “Ohhhhhh, people will be killed. Well why didn’t somebody say so?!”

Trump’s decision to call off the strikes, citing the potential casualties, came as a surprise to Pentagon officials who had spent the late afternoon gearing up for the operation. Some Defense Department officials had privately expressed concerns because they saw it as a major escalation, officials said.

Trump’s cancellation at about 7 p.m. came about two hours before the strikes were supposed to occur.

Whatever. Two hours, two seconds, who cares – hey is there any ice cream left?

Trump told advisers Friday morning that he was glad he didn’t go forward with the strikes.

He also claimed on Twitter that new sanctions had been imposed on Iran on Thursday night. But officials said later Friday that no new measures had been imposed.

The whipsaw approach left some in Congress concerned that the president didn’t have a clear strategy for managing relations with Iran.

Ya think?

Trump has (of course) put out a disgusting “statement” (that reads as if written in crayon on a cereal box) saying nuh-uh he never did.

Wow. The White House issues a statement from President Trump denying writer E. Jean Carroll's claim that he assaulted her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman 20 years ago. "I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book…"https://t.co/z2pFp8X9Ni pic.twitter.com/iNu6SGDq7G

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) June 21, 2019

CNBC has the text:

Regarding the “story” by E. Jean Carroll, claiming she once encountered me at Bergdorf Goodman 23 years ago. I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book—that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.

So presidential.

Shame on those who make up false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves, or sell a book, or carry out a political agenda—like Julie Swetnick who falsely accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It’s just as bad for people to believe it, particularly when there is zero evidence. Worse still for a dying publication to try to prop itself up by peddling fake news—it’s an epidemic.

Ms. Carroll & New York Magazine: No pictures? No surveillance? No video? No reports? No sales attendants around?? I would like to thank Bergdorf Goodman for confirming they have no video footage of any such incident, because it never happened.

Bergdorf Goodman didn’t “confirm” anything, nor did they do it as a favor to Trump. They said they no longer have any tape from that period, which is not surprising – stores don’t keep surveillance tapes for decades just for the hell of it.

False accusations diminish the severity of real assault. All should condemn false accusations and any actual assault in the strongest possible terms.

If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms. Carroll or New York Magazine, please notify us as soon as possible. The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.

He wrote that pile of dung himself, with a little cleanup from the professionals. It’s all Donald, lying and DARVOing and threatening and flattering.

This is the guy who brags about grabbing women by the pussy, so yes, I’m going to believe her story before I believe his bullying bluster.

Oliver Burkeman points out that we can’t actually know what “the right side of history” is going to be.

Earlier this month, as the bundle of disordered impulses currently serving as president of the US prepared to fly to London, the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, argued in this newspaper that the visit would put Britain on “the wrong side of history”. I tend to agree the trip shouldn’t have happened, if only to guard against the risk of a national cheeseburger shortage, but it’s time we dropped that “wrong side of history” argument. Like the crevice down the back of a sofa, full of coins and old bits of Play-Doh, the Wrong Side of History has become a crowded place in recent years. Among those consigned to it have been Brexiteers, anti-vaxxers, vaccine proponents, feminists who don’t accept the idea of gender as an innate essence, the leftwing Somali-American politician Ilhan Omar, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Owen Jones is one who is fond of locating feminists on the wrong side of history. If it turns out to be OJ who is on the wrong side in say 30 years (assuming there’s any history left on a baking planet), I hope he’s fully aware of it…but doubt he will be.

Appealing to the judgment of history involves consulting a bunch of imaginary people from the future, so it’s hardly a surprise when they turn out to agree with whoever is doing the consulting.

In other words it’s a laughably easy claim to make, because who can demonstrate that you’re wrong?

The real hazard, though, comes when the idea is used by contemporary pontificators to avoid confronting the possibility that they, themselves, might be wrong. Once you’re confident of history’s position, you needn’t ask whether your critics might have a point; you can dismiss them as anachronistic fuddy-duddies who haven’t caught up with the latest advance toward moral truth. The irony is that it is a good idea to reflect on the judgment of history – not to reinforce your opinions, but rather to unsettle them, and infuse them with a dose of humility. The past is full of periods when people endorsed ridiculous or horrifying views, but they evidently didn’t think so at the time. Why should any of us be immune, just because our time happens to be now?

The not thinking so at the time is permanently interesting to me. Slavery, in particular, is always a nagging open question – how was it possible, how was it possible for so long in a nation that bragged about its own love of liberty and rights. Samuel Johnson pointed out that discrepancy crisply:  “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” He wasn’t keen on yelps for liberty himself, but all the same he wasn’t wrong about the mismatch.

News from London:

Mark Field has been suspended as a Foreign Office minister after a video showed him pushing a female Greenpeace activist against a pillar and grabbing her neck while she protested at the chancellor’s Mansion House speech.

Police are investigating third-party reports of assault made against Field, who has since apologised to the protester. The MP for the Cities of London and Westminster said he had felt threatened when the protester walked past him and was worried she might have been armed.

I watched the video several times yesterday afternoon. It’s pretty shocking.

Correct me if I'm wrong:
Mansion House is the home of the Lord Mayor of London & regularly hosts the PM. Security would have checked people on entry.
So I don't buy the "The Greenpeace lady might have a machine gun tucked in her dress" defence, Mark Field.pic.twitter.com/f62KI6UBSk

— Femi (@Femi_Sorry) June 21, 2019

The activist, Janet Barker, said on Friday that she was incredulous at his reaction and welcomed the suspension but would not press criminal charges. “I think it is something best dealt with in the court of opinion,” she said.

Barker said Field had pushed her so hard as they reached the door that she had almost fallen. She said he should take anger management classes. “I want him to think about what he did, why he did it and address his behaviour.”

She said she had made no sudden movements or behaved in any way that could have been construed as physically threatening. “I had a phone and a tiny handbag, which was open and full of leaflets,” she said. “The only thing I was armed with was peer-reviewed science.”

…

Philip Hammond was preparing to deliver his set-piece address in the City of London when dozens of Greenpeace activists interrupted him to give an alternative speech about the climate crisis, video footage shows.

In a statement released in the early hours of Friday before his suspension, Field said he had reacted “instinctively”. He said he “grasped the intruder firmly in order to remove her from the room as swiftly as possible.

“I deeply regret this episode and unreservedly apologise to the lady concerned for grabbing her but in the current climate I felt I needed to act decisively to close down the threat to the safety of those present.”

Yeah. She could have had a missile in that tiny purse.

Yet another petition saying ignore those uppity women. This one is strikingly crude and badly written for purported academics. It’s also of course a crock of shit.

As academics, researchers, teachers, professional staff, and practitioners in the Higher Education sector, we are compelled to write to rebut the arguments put forward in the article published in the Sunday Times on 16th June.

Compelled? Really? Who is compelling them? What are the sanctions?

They don’t mean are compelled, of course, they mean feel compelled – which is where this whole disagreement started. Feeling isn’t necessarily being. Adults really are supposed to know the difference.

The article cited a letter signed by a group of about thirty academics who claim that Stonewall is stifling academic freedom. We entirely reject the position taken in the letter that promoting an educational environment free from harassment and bullying via the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme contradicts the principles of academic freedom.

Ahhhhh but that’s not the position taken in the letter, now is it. Naughty. Of course the letter doesn’t advocate an educational environment full of harassment and bullying.

The letter muddles the distinction between the concept of academic freedom, and the statutory public sector equality duties of higher education institutions. For the former, the right to conduct academic debates, research, and publish activities without fear of retribution by those in power, is the cornerstone of the academy. Whilst the latter relates to the institutional duties towards legally protected groups to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation, promote equality of opportunity and foster good relations through the practices of higher education institutions. Debating gender pronouns within an academic context is part of academic freedom whereas the refusal to respect the gender pronouns of an individual to be used in class is not.

But the right to force people to refer to an individual as the sex that individual is not is an absolute right? Why is it? Who says it is? Why don’t we get to resist this move to compel us – literally compel this time – to counteract our own perceptions every time we mention This One Special Person?

Calling it “the refusal to respect the gender pronouns of an individual” reverses the agency at issue here. Respecting the gender pronouns of an individual isn’t a real thing; it’s a political invention and a way to force unwilling people to pay extra attention to narcissists. In ordinary life we don’t “respect” people’s pronouns, we just use them as a convenience to avoid having to repeat people’s names every time we mention them. That’s it. It’s just a convention of grammar. “Respect” has nothing to do with it. A politics that is all about trying to ruin the lives of academic women over pronouns is a politics that needs to be shot into the sun.

Stonewall provides a holistic and systematic approach for Diversity Champions to assess their policies and practice against each other through the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index (WEI). Participation in the WEI is voluntary but enables public, private and third sector organisations to evaluate and share good practice. This benefits not just members of the LGBT+ communities but all staff and students by fostering a more inclusive organisational culture. We are deeply concerned that a false claim of victimhood, under the guise of academic freedom, risks being legitimised to discredit universities and Stonewall when recent news and data about the experiences of LGBT+ communities show increasing levels of reported homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime, harassment and discrimination.

And the solution is pronouns? Get a grip.

We unapologetically advocate for an academy where debates are intellectual and ethical, where everybody can be authentic to be who they are, and where everyone treats each other with respect and dignity.

What does “where everybody can be authentic to be who they are” mean? Can white people who feel a strong affinity for black culture demand to be treated as black because that’s the only way they can be authentic to be who they are? No. They’d be slapped down hard if they tried. Can white people who have one Sioux or Cherokee ancestor five generations back demand to be treated as Native American because that’s the only way they can be authentic to be who they are? Nope. In both cases, the rest of the world would say no, that’s not authentic, that’s the very opposite of authentic, so cut it out. But a man who says he’s a woman? Oh that’s completely different, because [insert something here]. “Authentic” my ass.

We also encourage our colleagues in the sector to challenge prejudice and aggression towards trans and all other minoritised groups. We stand in solidarity with trans staff and students and will continue to challenge views that run counter to our goal of an inclusive academy.

Not inclusive of people who disagree with us though. Of course not.

Daniel Kaufman at the Electric Agora tries to figure out this “feeling like a ___” puzzle. He too starts from Alice Roberts’s Twitter claim yesterday –

If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female – I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?

What if someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels like a manatee, or a potato peeler, or a street lamp, or Lake Louise? Would I tell him he is ‘wrong’? I don’t know, it depends on the nature of the conversation, in what context it takes place, how free I am to escape, and similar contingent facts. But all things being equal, escape being readily available, and he asked my opinion? I probably wouldn’t tell him he’s wrong right off the bat, I’d ask him what he meant. If he meant it literally and never giggled even once, I’d just say he might think he felt like one of those items (or any other) but that doesn’t mean he is one.

Anyway, feeling like is one thing, and identifying as is another.

The use of ‘identify’ in the context of sex and gender is odd.  A judge can order that a plaintiff not be identified, meaning that the person’s identity should be kept a secret. One can identify oneself with a political movement, by which one means that one should be associated with it.  One can identify with the plight of a people, meaning that one has sympathy for – or even empathizes with – them.  A doctor can identify the cause of a cough, meaning that he has found the bacterial or viral or other thing that is responsible for it.  A suspect can be identified by the police, meaning that they have determined who he is.

But what could it mean to “identify as a man/woman”?  From what I can discern from gender self-ID theorists and activists, it could mean one of two things, both of which strike me as untenable.

The first is reflected in the Alice Roberts quote, above: for me to identify as a man/woman is to feel like I am one.

But, he explains, there is no such thing.

…one is male or female, but one doesn’t feel male or female, just as one is a mammal, but one doesn’t “feel like a mammal.”

I can sort of get a grip on the idea of feeling like a mammal if I get to add “as opposed to a bird/reptile/fish.” I’m squishy like a mammal, earthbound like a mammal, unable to breathe under water like a mammal. I even have mammaries! But that’s a very attenuated sense of feeling like a mammal, and it’s certainly not the kind of thing one would bellow at people during Twitter arguments. It’s not political. It’s not what the dogmatists mean when they talk about feeling like/identifying as a woman.

The second pursues the line of gender: to feel like a man/woman is to feel masculine or feminine; manly or womanly.

And guess what that is. No prizes; it’s stereotype city, and no we don’t want to go there.

It would be regressive, then, to take this tack in trying to make sense of “identifying as” a man/woman and even worse to suggest that meeting these sexist expectations makes a person one or the other. For decades, feminists and other forward-thinking people have been fighting against precisely these sorts of expectations and rejecting the idea that such notions of manliness or womanliness should determine what one is or what one should do.

Or even how one should dress. No, putting on a dear little skirt and some red silk shoes won’t make you a woman if you’re not in fact a woman. Clothes are just clothes. You could put them on a horse, or a manatee, or a street lamp (not so much a potato peeler or Lake Louise); they don’t make you into anything (other than someone who is wearing those clothes for the moment).

The notion of “identifying as” a man/woman, then, is either incoherent or retrograde. It is the farthest thing from being liberatory or progressive, and I find it hard to understand why anyone interested in advancing the cause of trans people would want to have anything to do with it, let alone plant their flag in it. As I have argued many times, everything required to make a complete and compelling case for trans civil rights is already contained within the liberal tradition. And beyond the advantage of being grounded in a stronger, more rigorous, more universal set of principles, to pursue such a course would avoid the sexist logic and tropes that have done so much to put trans activism in conflict with its feminist and gay/lesbian counterparts.

Wouldn’t it be nice if people listened.

CFI on the Supreme Court ruling on the Bladensburg cross:

Today’s ruling on the constitutionality of the Bladensburg cross makes plain the Supreme Court’s allegiance to the religious right and its contempt for the separation of church from state, said the Center for Inquiry.

The Bladensburg Peace Cross is a 40-foot concrete Latin Cross located on state land in Maryland and maintained at taxpayer expense.

“Rather than uphold the Establishment Clause, the bedrock principle of liberal democracy that bars the state from endorsing religion, this Supreme Court is clearly determined to see it ripped from the Constitution and thrown in the trash,” said Nick Little, CFI’s Vice President and General Counsel. “The very suggestion that a gigantic cross, maintained by taxpayers, and looming ominously over the landscape does not imply an endorsement of Christianity is utter madness. That this Orwellian redefinition of facts and language has been sanctified by the highest court in the land is simply frightening.”

The Bladensburg Cross was dedicated in 1925, and initially stood on private land. However, in 1961 the land was turned over to the state, and the cross has been maintained at tax payer expense since then. It stands on a traffic circle in the middle of a busy public road, illuminated at night.

“No symbol represents Christianity more fully and obviously than the Latin cross,” continued Little. “To those driving in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs, this cross stands stark and alone as a public declaration of the Christian nature of government. It dismisses the equal citizenship not only of those Marylanders who hold a different faith or none at all, but also callously ignores the sacrifice of countless military personnel who were atheist or non-Christian. The wall of separation now has a 40-foot cross-shaped hole in it.”

…

In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg correctly addressed the sectarian nature of this ruling and its disrespect for both non-believers and followers of non- Christian religions, writing, “Today the Court erodes that neutrality commitment, diminishing precedent designed to preserve individual liberty and civic harmony in favor of a ‘presumption of constitutionality for longstanding monuments, symbols, and practices.’” The display of the Latin cross, “the ‘defining symbol’ of Christianity,” conveys “a message of exclusion” to non-believers. Justice Ginsburg is correct in observing that the “principal symbol of Christianity around the world should not loom over public thoroughfares, suggesting official recognition of that religion’s paramountcy.”

Now this is interesting. I was just wibbling on about what we mean by “exclusion” a few hours ago, pointing out that some kinds of exclusion are desirable and necessary. Some are, and some are not. I think government sponsorship of religion in general, and especially of one religion in particular, is neither desirable nor necessary.

The Telegraph reports:

A pharmacist working for LloydsPharmacy refused to give a woman the morning after pill, because it went against her “personal beliefs”.

The customer, named only as Siani, 41, had paid £30 for the emergency contraception online before going to collect it from the Brighton branch of Lloyds, located inside a Sainsbury’s.

She reportedly called the pharmacy from her car to check that it was ready, and was told by the on-duty female pharmacist that she would not dispense the pill as it went against her “personal beliefs.”

Siani was told to come back the next day, or travel to the next nearest branch – 10 miles away. As it was a Sunday, most other local chemists were closed.

Come back next day for a morning after pill. Let’s see if we can spot the problem here.

“I’m old and stroppy enough to make a fuss, but what if I was a teenager?” Siani, who has a son, told Metro.

“I don’t think it’s remotely acceptable that Lloyds Pharmacy created a situation where they discriminate against women by having the only branch in the city that is open on a Sunday staffed by a lone pharmacist who will not dispense women’s services. And I don’t think it’s acceptable that they will sell a service that their staff refuse to deliver after accepting payment.”

It’s not. If the pharmacist doesn’t want to dispense a particular medication, that pharmacist should go into a different line of work.

“I’m a mum in my 40s, I have very little shame left, but there will be girls having the same experience who have nothing like the resources I do. You expect that sort of nonsense in America, but not here,” Siani added.

It’s no better here! We don’t accept it! We know it happens, but we don’t accept it!

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has a more reasonable, less vituperative dissenting response to the letter to the Times.

Last Sunday at letter appeared in the Sunday Times attacking the LGBT charity Stonewall for its work with British universities as a threat to academic freedom.

That’s why I had to say “less vituperative” as opposed to “non-vituperative.” The letter doesn’t attack Stonewall.

The letter was signed by some reasonably prominent figures, such as Kathleen Stock (Sussex) and Leslie Green (Oxford) as well as motley others (including a Brexit Party candidate). It is no accident that the letter appeared in the Sunday Times, which together with its companion paper the Times has, for at least a year, maintained an almost daily campaign against transgender people and the organizations and individuals who support them and which has also been to the fore in attacking universities around largely spurious concerns about “free speech”.

That’s why I had to say “more reasonable” as opposed to “very reasonable.” It’s not true or reasonable to say that the Times has “maintained an almost daily campaign against transgender people,” because the campaign (or series of related articles, which I think are pretty far from daily) is not against transgender people, it’s in disagreement with some of the claims made by the transgender movement.

The letter to the Sunday Times was framed in terms of supposed threats to academic freedom posed by Stonewall guidance and training to universities. Of course, freedom of speech, inquiry and opinion within the academic community is of great importance. Stonewall too recognize that in their documents. But it is also vital that universities as places of education and as workplaces function as environments where everyone is able to participate and work together with dignity, rather than places where some are excluded or humiliated because of their race, sex, sexuality or gender identity.

Well, sure, depending on what we mean by certain words within that statement. Universities should be places where no one is humiliated; it’s pretty easy to assent to that. It’s not quite as easy to agree to the “excluded” part because (as I keep saying to the point of tedium) it depends what you mean. Universities do exclude lots of people – most people in fact. Universities have entrance requirements, and they charge tuition. Exclusion is key to their functioning in many ways. That’s not what Chris is talking about, but that’s just it – the words “inclusion” and “exclusion” are used more as slogans than as usefully accurate labels. I don’t know of anyone who wants to exclude transgender people from universities or disciplines or classes, and I don’t think simply declining to agree that transgender people are literally and in every sense the sex (gender) they identify as counts as unjust “exclusion.” I think Chris is saying, somewhat too indirectly, that trans people are excluded and humiliated unless everyone agrees that they are literally and in every sense the sex (gender) they identify as. I think that’s saying more than can be demonstrated.

The authors of the letter to the Times are, at best, cavalier in their attitude to the effects that this “debate” is having on trans people, who experience the very validity of their standing within society as put in question by the discourse around transgender.

I don’t really know what that means.

I wonder if it’s Chris who is being somewhat cavalier? I wonder if he’s considered the possibility that the validity of trans people’s standing within society depends much less on the compliance of the authors of the letter to the Times than it does on the population at large – people on the bus, people on the street, people at the pub, people at Waitrose, people at parties, and on and on.

Maybe the idea is that if academics “validate” trans people and their “standing within society” then the rest of the population will follow? But I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s that easy.

 The letter alleges that Stonewall seeks to ban from universities any outside speaker who questions “that trans people are the gender they say they are” but I see a factual claim — and a true one — about the effect of outside speakers who hold a range of views (including advocating conversion therapy) namely that such speakers “cause LGBT people to feel deeply unsafe”.

So it’s a true factual claim that outside speakers who hold a range of views (including advocating conversion therapy) “cause LGBT people to feel deeply unsafe”. So all the views of these outside speakers, no matter which views they are, cause LGBT people to feel deeply unsafe. That’s quite a large claim, and not a very fair one.

Just as the effect of speakers preaching hate against other groups may reasonably be take into account by universities in deciding to invite them onto campus, so trans people are entitled to similar protections.

But first you have to agree that the Outside Speakers are preaching hate, and they and we their friends or allies or both don’t agree to that. Kathleen Stock doesn’t preach hate. None of the gender critical philosophers I know preaches hate.

Comments are turned off on the post, which is a pity. I’d be interested to see what other philosophers think.

Helen Christophi at Courthouse News:

The Trump administration argued in front of a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells, despite a settlement agreement that requires detainees be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.

All three judges appeared incredulous during the hearing in San Francisco, in which the Trump administration challenged previous legal findings that it is violating a landmark class action settlement by mistreating undocumented immigrant children at U.S. detention facilities.

Tell us again that these are not concentration camps, that they’re nothing like concentration camps, that they have nothing to do with concentration camps.

“You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of safe and sanitary conditions?’” U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon asked the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian Tuesday.

U.S. Circuit Judge William Fletcher also questioned the government’s interpretation of the settlement agreement.

“Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you to do anything other than what I just described: cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket?” Fletcher asked Fabian. “I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

We get a useful explainer of the Flores settlement, which governs this:

The settlement at issue came out of Jenny Lisette Flores v. Edwin Meese, filed in 1985 on behalf of a class of unaccompanied minors fleeing torture and abuse in Central America.

Finally agreed upon in 1997, the settlement established guidelines for the humane detention, treatment and release of minors taken into federal immigration custody. The guidelines include the right to a bond hearing and requirements that immigration authorities timely release children to parents or guardians and place those not released in facilities that meet certain standards. The facilities are supposed to be “safe and sanitary.”

In an interesting plot twist, the Obama administration tried to tweak it:

The settlement landed back in court in 2015, when class members moved to enforce it following the Obama administration’s announcement that it would scrap bond hearings because they conflicted with newer immigration laws. In legal filings, the class contended the elimination of bond hearings and dirty and dangerous conditions at short-term holding facilities operated by the Border Patrol violated the agreement.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles granted the class’ motion and ordered the appointment of an independent monitor to ensure government compliance with Flores.

Gee said the administration had breached Flores by failing to provide detainees with adequate food and clean drinking water, or with hygiene items like soap, toothbrushes and towels. She also concluded that the children were being deprived of sleep and access to bathrooms, and were subjected to near-freezing temperatures.

So that wasn’t on Trump’s watch, it was on Obama’s watch.

Trump’s people argued that soap wasn’t included in Flores, the judges retorted that it was too obvious to be spelled out.

Interesting.

He’s an academic himself – a historian – so he’s in one of those other fields.

I do have a theory for why it's such a thing in the UK–it's bc the US is more religious so it's easier for Americans to buy into the problematic-but-perhaps-useful-first-step narrative of "trans = X soul in Y body" (note popularity of transphobia among British "sceptics")

— Bill Black (@williamrblack) June 18, 2019

By “transphobia” he of course means just not buying all the wack truth claims, and his theory for why there is less skepticism about the wack truth claims in the US is the fact that we buy other wack truth claims more easily so we also buy the truth claims of trans dogma more easily. That’s quite an admission for a transdogmaphile.

He ended up with this bit of wisdom:

I'm not saying philosophers are uniquely transphobic–I'm guessing philosophy gives folks a language they can use to make transphobia sound reasonable, in a way that history etc don't

— Bill Black (@williamrblack) June 18, 2019

Or to put it another way, philosophers are trained to analyze truth claims to see how well they stand up, so they’ve become well familiar with how quickly and thoroughly the truth claims of trans dogma go splat.

But that’s transphobia, so it must be bullied out of existence.

Oh yes, that weirdo type of feminism that is only for women, not women plus men who say they are women. So unreasonable.

Another brand of feminism that only includes ‘some’ women. Even your hashtag tells its own story. Btw I’m pleased to say my views on trans women are the views of our collective party and shadow cabinet including my boss Jeremy. #LoveAllMySisters https://t.co/IWsJFnzlQr

— Angela Rayner (@AngelaRayner) June 18, 2019

Imagine talking smack about a brand of anti-racism that only includes people of color instead of being for people of color and white people who say they are people of color.

But that wouldn’t happen, because it’s only women who are seen as accommodating enough and supine enough and fucking stupid enough to accept this crap.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Feeling≠being.

Practically speaking, in most situations, I wouldn’t say anything, for the same reasons I generally don’t get into discussions about very personal matters.

But if this were one of those conversations that is an exception for some reason: no, I wouldn’t say “you’re wrong.” But I would ask — with genuine curiosity — “how do you know? What does being a woman FEEL like to you?”

Because frankly, I wouldn’t know how to answer the question “what does it feel like to be a man?” [Insert jokes about my inadequacies here. You can’t ask for a better setup.] I could tell you a bit about how it feels to be treated as a man in society, or to interact with others on that basis. I suppose I could come up with an answer about what it feels like to have male genitalia. But those are different questions, as I would think trans people would be quick to point out. I don’t have some internal sense that tells me I’m male, or have a “male brain,” or anything like that, and I can’t even imagine what that would mean. As with pretty much everyone, I conform to some of our culture’s gender stereotypes and not to others.

I think I can wrap my head around gender-related body dysphoria, meaning that I can grasp the notion of having some feeling that your body should be different than it is. But again, we’re told that being trans doesn’t necessarily entail that. So I’m back to being flummoxed.

It’s like that claim that humans have a “sensus divinitatis” that gives (most) people a knowledge of god. I mean, I assume that people who claim to have a sense of god, in their brain or their heart or whatever, to be speaking truthfully of their subjective experience. And I’ve never had any interest in trying to talk someone out of a religious belief that is essentially “well, I feel it/Him/Her in my heart.” But I do insist on my right to object to a claim that a sensus divinitatis is an actual objective thing, and that therefore God exists because your subjective experiences tell you so. (To say nothing of the rather offensive related implication that atheists are either lying or brain-damaged.)