Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, thought she had a gotcha on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this. https://t.co/NX5KPPb2Hl

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) June 18, 2019

It’s Cheney who needs to learn some history. The Nazis didn’t go from zero to Auschwitz in 30 seconds; it took them years to get to Auschwitz. It was a process, with stages. Herding people into camps was an early stage. Trump is putting us at that stage. There is no magic mechanism guaranteeing that we won’t go on to further stages. That’s AOC’s point, and it’s dishonest and malevolent of Cheney to pretend not to get it.

It’s strange how men who assault women, or defend other men who assault women, keep turning up in Trump’s administration. The acting secretary of defense just resigned.

The Washington Post pressed the button to launch this story at 12.58PM ET today, one minute ahead of the time logged when Donald Trump announced Shanahan’s withdrawal from the process to find his forever home at the Pentagon.

It’s pretty raw, beginning:

In the months that he has served as President Trump’s acting secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan has worked to keep domestic violence incidents within his family private. His wife was arrested after punching him in the face, and his son was arrested after a separate incident in which he hit his mother with a baseball bat. Public disclosure of the nearly decade-old episodes would re-traumatize his young adult children, Shanahan said.

The son hit his mother in the head with a baseball bat, and fractured her skull. Shanahan defended the son.

Welcome to Club Trump.

A philosopher sent Brian Leiter a guide to Philosophical Discussion of Trans Identity.

Members of the profession have doubtless seen the recent letter from MAP, objecting to the participation of Kathleen Stock at a recent meeting of the Aristotelian Society. As the letter writers thoughtfully advised: “scepticism about the rights of marginalised groups and individuals, where issues of life and death are at stake, are not up for debate. The existence and validity of transgender and non-binary people, and the right of trans and non-binary people to identify their own genders and sexualities, fall within the range of such indisputable topics”.

Junior members of the profession may be wondering what sorts ideas may be discussed and debated by philosophers, and which may not. Which may be subject to skeptical inquiry and which may not.  Which may be discussed at the Aristotelian Society and which may not. Following is a helpful guide.

You MAY question whether race exists and whether gender exists, you may question whether social kinds exist.  For that matter, you may question whether any kinds at all exist, and for the measure, whether abstract objects or even whether the external world exists.  You may NOT, however question whether people can identify their own genders.

You MAY question whether other minds exist, or whether anything at all exists except for yourself.  You may even question whether time exists and space exists.  You may ask whether all change is illusion.  You may NOT, however, question whether people can identify their own genders.

You MAY also question whether you yourself exist or are a social construct.  You may question the existence of the Cartesian ego and you may even wonder if there are such things as Cartesian egos.  You may reject them or endorse them.  However, you may NOT question whether people can identify their own genders.

The same for God, God and evil, mathematics…

You MAY feel free to argue that everything is made of water or air or apeiron or numbers or soul stuff or mind or matter or whatever.  You may ask whether cats are robots from mars, whether there are zombies, whether everyone you know is a zombie, whether you might be a swamp man and if so whether you have any thoughts at all, but you may NOT question whether people can identify their own genders.

You get the idea. You can argue about the ontology of anything and everything…except gender.

But you can argue about how we know that? Yes?

No.

I hope you agree with me that you ought not question whether people can identify their own genders.  It is, after all, just an indisputable fact and not up for debate!  But you might think it is an apt philosophical exercise to ask how we how we came to have this knowledge that people can identify their own genders.  This would be an error.  You may not query the source of this knowledge.

You may ask how we know we are not brains in vats, or how we know there isn’t an evil deceiver or how we know we are not in the Matrix with Neo and Morpheus.  You may ask if we are in Plato’s cave, not really seeing things as they are.  You may ask how we know that we don’t live in a land of fake barns and how we know that the zebras in our zoos are really zebras.  You may NOT ask, however, how we came to know that people can identify their own genders.

You can argue about the epistemology of anything and everything…except gender.

Hopefully you agree that one should not question whether people can identify their own genders.  It is just an indisputable fact after all.  And hopefully you are also thinking that it is wrong to question how we came to KNOW that people can identify their own genders.  But perhaps you are thinking it is your job as a pedagogue to teach material that considers these obviously harmful questions.  Well, wrong again.

There are many much more worthy doctrines to teach.  For example, you should feel free to teach Aristotle, who said that women are “more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive … more compassionate … more easily moved to tears … more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike … more prone to despondency and less hopeful … more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive.”  You may write papers about this idea and you may teach the passage to your students.  You may name your prestigious societies after Aristotle.  You may NOT, however, teach Kathleen Stock on the subject of whether people can identify their own genders.  You may not invite her to conferences. Especially not to meetings of The Aristotelian society.  Professor Stock is to be deplatformed.

For that matter, please do not informally question the source of our knowledge that people can identify their own genders. If a philosophy blog should raise these issues it is to be shunned.  Do not link to such a blog.  It must go dark. It is a fact that people can identify their own genders, and it is not to be interrogated, or discussed, and the source of such knowledge is not to be queried, challenged, or in any way shape or form investigated or discussed as an act of pedagogy or as a matter of curiosity amongst philosophical peers.  Doing so would constitute an act of violence against trans people.  I’m sure it is clear why.

I trust that this has been helpful.

Can we discuss the meta question of why there is this one exception?

Don’t be silly.

The NY Times is still normalizing breast-mutilation.

A recent Times article on chest binding prompted a discussion among readers about the practice, which some transgender and gender-nonconforming people use to compress their breasts and treat body dysphoria, as well as how we covered it.

I bet it did.

So the Times asked readers to report on their adventures in binding. They got more than 200 responses, mostly from very young people (of course – this wasn’t a fashion ten years ago).

I am 31 and have been wearing constrictive sports bras since I developed breasts in high school. I didn’t know about binders until well into my 20s. I wish I had. Without the availability of binders, many people like me spent years wearing Ace bandages around our chests. This practice was harmful and made it difficult to breathe. Now that binders are more widely available, I wear one most days.

I’m currently training to run the New York marathon for the second year in a row, and I’m starting graduate school at Columbia University in the fall. These are things that I would not have been able to do without a binder.

— R.J. Russell, 31

Eh? I wonder why Russell would not have been able to start grad school at Columbia without a binder.

I first had a desire to bind toward the end of middle school, when I came out as non-binary. Because of online articles that said binders would mutilate your body, my mother firmly decided against getting me one. It was only when I had my doctor and therapist assure her binding was safe that I was able to get my first binder, which drastically improved my self-image and mental health without any sacrifices to my physical health.

Binders tend to be used as a temporary solution to the problem of having breasts and cannot be worn at all times. During exercise they can restrict breathing, and back and chest pain can come from wearing them for more than about eight hours at a time. You should also never sleep with a binder on.

Erin Hurst, 17

So, binders are safe, but they cannot be worn at all times, during exercise they can restrict breathing, and back and chest pain can come from wearing them for more than about eight hours or to sleep in. How are we defining “safe” here?

I have been binding for four years, starting at age 16. I discovered binding through the internet as I began following more transgender individuals and navigating my own gender identity.

When I slipped on my first binder, well, it didn’t slip on. Despite my small frame, I could not fit into a medium. I ended up returning it and ordering a size up. Even that was still extremely difficult to put on. You get used to it, though. The tightness is a double-edged sword — sometimes you feel like you’re being suffocated, but at other times a binder feels like a close hug.

The longer I used binding, the more I could feel my body deteriorating. The physical pain got worse but so did the emotional. Slowly I began living a life where I couldn’t not bind. The initial euphoria of flatness turned into never being able to get flat enough. My body aches every day, I no longer have the lung capacity I once had, and my ribs have inverted. I fear breaking one when I sneeze. I am getting surgery this year and it can’t come soon enough.

— Caleb B. Sanders, 20

This must all be the fault of TERFs, right?

There’s a counter-letter to yesterday’s letter to the Times. Of course there is.

The title is “University support for LGBTQIA+ people”…as if the letter to the Times were about refusing to support people.

The letter is bad. It’s bad the way these things are always bad – it’s all buzzwords and rote phrases that are abstract and not defined. Academics shouldn’t be writing bad letters of that kind.

As academics and other colleagues working in higher education, we are writing to register our support for policies and practices which are inclusive and supportive of our trans colleagues and students.

What does that mean? Inclusive in what sense? Supportive how?

There is reasonable inclusion, which means not excluding people from events, institutions, lectures, classes, and the like that are meant for everyone. Then there’s unreasonable inclusion, which means not excluding people from events and institutions and the like that are intended for a specific category of people, not in order to “exclude” or “discriminate against” people not in that category, but for an array of other reasons, which can include an opportunity to talk freely without having to struggle to be heard. The powerless sometimes need to gather away from the powerful in order to organize and discuss. Women are a powerless group, and they sometimes need to organize with other women, and they may not want to “include” trans women in that category, and no one should force them to.

Workers don’t have to be “inclusive” of bosses when organizing. The Sioux don’t have to be “inclusive” of oil company executives when they’re organizing against a pipeline on tribal land. Atheists don’t have to be “inclusive” of Catholic bishops when organizing against the bishops’ efforts to force women to continue pregnancies they don’t want to continue. Universal blanket no-exceptions “inclusion” is not an ideal, and the damn fools who wrote this stupid letter should understand that.

Criticism and critique of policies and programmes that promote inclusiveness, such as Stonewall Diversity Champions, is not in and of itself unwelcome.

See above. See it as many times as it takes to get the point.

Such things are products of dialogue and discussion, and they evolve over the course of this dialogue. However, the primary concern must be with the wellbeing of the people subject to those policies. The vulnerability of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially young people and those who are transgender or gender-diverse, is well documented.

Is it? Is it well documented in any sense other than the sense that letters like this keep repeating it? And even if it is, does it follow that other “communities” are not vulnerable? No it does not. The “LGBTQIA+ community” does not have a monopoly on vulnerability.

As educators, we have a duty of care to our students and colleagues. Respect for their gender identity and/or sexuality is an integral aspect of that duty of care.

Why? How? In what sense? Meaning what? Why that rather than anything else? Is respect for their taste in music an integral aspect of that duty of care? Why should we buy into this notion of the special sacred status of a fictional gender identity? Why do we have to pay any attention to it at all?

It is inconceivable that this duty should be considered antithetical to “academic freedom”. Rather, ignoring or denying it precludes our fellow academics and colleagues — be they undergraduate students, postgraduate candidates, early career researchers, lecturers, professional-services staff or innumerable others — from experiencing a secure and supportive environment safely to pursue their own freedom.

Blah blah blah wuff wuff wuff – it’s all just tedious boilerplate, that doesn’t mean anything but sounds like what the commissars want them to say.

I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

Ok ok yes I know I can’t force people to believe ridiculous things…but I sure as hell can bully them into pretending to believe them!

i know, but i can apply social pressure to at least make them act like they believe it, which is good enough for now

— David Nagy (@davidanagy3) June 17, 2019

Useful, in a way, to see one of them admit it. “Come here, bitch, I need to apply some social pressure to you.”

false comparison. by denying trans people's identities, you are materially and emotionally hurting them.

— David Nagy (@davidanagy3) June 17, 2019

Well, by claiming that sex/gender is an identity, trans dogmatists are intellectually and politically harming feminists. Impasse? How about we call it based on which claim is more fucking ludicrous.

He’s a philosophy grad student, by the way, which seems kind of sad.

The Natural History Museum – the one in South Kensington, next to the V&A –  has lost its mind.

The opening shot was June 1.

https://twitter.com/NHM_London/status/1134746531955916800

A rebellious member of the public asked what they were talking about.

'Queer' is used to refer to every aspect of LGBT+, and is predominantly used by the LGBTQ community to stake a contrast from the mainstream or heteronormative. We believe it best fits the scope of our discussion as one celebrating the full diversity of sexuality, sex & gender.

— Natural History Museum (@NHM_London) June 17, 2019

So “we” have suddenly stopped being the Natural History Museum and become a branch of Pink News instead?

https://twitter.com/NHM_London/status/1134766763852357633

Gorillas don’t know from “queer.”

The Red Beryl sums it up.

Our intention is not to validate anyone's existence, but to highlight the diversity of the natural world that has often been over looked. Queer is a term that encompasses the full diversity of sexuality & gender, and we believe it's one that best fits the scope of our discussion.

— Natural History Museum (@NHM_London) June 17, 2019

Bollocks. “Queer” is a political term, and it’s increasingly seen as one that’s antagonistic to women.

The museum shop has fabulous natural history postcards though.

This is great. Mere human dares to cough while Trump is talking.

Just over 20 seconds into this clip Trump gruffly asks Mick Mulvaney to leave the room because he coughed. No, seriously. Watch it for yourself.

Well adjusted people with a shred of empathy simply don’t behave this way. pic.twitter.com/5aKfTVruRK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2019

Sean Ingle at the Guardian:

The International Olympic Committee’s guidelines for transgender athletes are unfair on female athletes and should be suspended while more research is carried out, according to a group of former and current Team GB athletes surveyed by an academic.

In the survey of 15 female British Olympians, most of them answering anonymously, 11 also agreed with the view that “it can never be fair for transgender athletes who have been through male puberty to compete in female sport”, with another declining to answer.

…

Among those questioned – who came from track and field, swimming, rowing and modern pentathlon – were Tessa Sanderson, the 1984 Olympic javelin gold medallist, and Sharron Davies, who won a swimming silver in 1980, both of whom have already made their views known.

Devine also found widespread frustration among athletes with the IOC over a perceived lack of consultation before it published its latest transgender guidelines in 2015. The guidelines allow any transgender athlete to compete as a woman without undergoing surgery provided they have reduced their serum testosterone to 10nmols/L for at least 12 months.

Gee, why would female athletes find that frustrating?

The transgender academic Joanna Harper, who advises the IOC, accepts more research is needed. However, she argued: “Transgender women after hormone therapy are taller, bigger and stronger on average than cisgender women. But that does not necessarily make it unfair. In high levels of sport, transgender women are substantially underrepresented. That indicates that whatever physical advantages transgender women have – and they certainly exist – they are not nearly as large as the sociological disadvantages.”

Got that, kids? It’s magic! Transgender women are taller, bigger and stronger but they totally won’t win all the prizes or break women’s bones, because they have sociological disadvantages. Trans academic Joanna Harper knows this for sure and has no bias of any kind whatsoever, and the reporter Sean Ingle is also completely impartial and uninfluenced by his testicular investment in the subject. Women on the other hand can never be objective. That’s a scientific fact.

Trump is firing his pollsters because he doesn’t like the numbers. Attaboy Don! That’ll work! Get more loyal pollsters, and they’ll make the numbers come out better, and that way you’ll win.

President Trump’s re-election campaign is letting go of some of its own pollsters after leaked internal polling showed the president behind Joe Biden in critical states, NBC News reports. Parts of the president’s expansive March polling was made public in recent days. The polls reportedly showed the president trailing across 2020 swing states, as well as in reliably red states that haven’t been competitive for decades in national elections. In states where Trump edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by narrow margins in 2016—such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan—Trump currently trails Biden by double-digits. Trump is also behind the former vice president by 7 points in the battleground state of Iowa, but is holding a small lead in Texas. A person close to the Trump re-election team told NBC News that the campaign was would no longer be working with certain pollsters in response to the leaks.

Uh huh, definitely because of the leaks, not at all because they show him looooooozing.

It turns out it was our fault that Mermaids posted all those private emails online. We turn the milk sour when we feel like it, too.

Mermaids UK stated it had notified the Information Commissioner’s Office, the data protection watchdog, and contacted those affected.

The Charity Commission had also been notified, it said, and an independent investigation into the breach would be launched.

“We’re going to be employing a third party to oversee processes and advise on how we can improve internal practice,” the spokesperson told the BBC.

“I think it’s important to note that this dates back some two years when Mermaids was a smaller charity dealing with the first aggressive onslaught from those who are opposed to giving vulnerable transgender children and young people the safe spaces they need.”

There you go – they were dealing with an aggressive onslaught, so obviously they couldn’t help posting all those private emails online. Mind you, I don’t think we’re opposed to giving vulnerable transgender children and young people the safe spaces they need. I’m certainly not. I’m not opposed to giving any people the safe spaces they need – why would I? What kind of monster opposes giving people what they need? No, the issue isn’t giving people safe spaces, it’s cutting their breasts or penises off. Different thing.

A new town in occupied territory named “Trump Heights” – it makes a certain kind of sense.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a plaque marking the location of the newest settlement in the Golan Heights on Sunday.

The marker proclaims the settlement will be known as “Trump Heights.” Netanyahu said the name was chosen to thank President Donald Trump for breaking decades of US tradition and recognizing the Golan Heights as part of Israel in March. Prior to that point, the US observed the international custom of considering it occupied territory.

Probably because that’s what it is.

H/t Rob

BBC News in 2014:

The Paedophile Information Exchange was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties – now Liberty – in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But how did pro-paedophile campaigners operate so openly?

A gay rights conference backs a motion in favour of paedophilia. The story is written up by a national newspaper as “Child-lovers win fight for role in Gay Lib”.

It sounds like a nightmarish plotline from dystopian fiction. But this happened in the UK. The conference took place in Sheffield and the newspaper was the Guardian. The year was 1975.

Child rapists were trying to go mainstream.

The group behind the attempt – the Paedophile Information Exchange – is back in the news because of a series of stories run by the Daily Mail about Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman.

The Daily Mail has revisited the story of PIE to ask how much Harman and her husband the MP Jack Dromey knew about the group during their time working at the National Council for Civil Liberties, now Liberty, in the late 1970s. PIE was affiliated to the NCCL from the late 1970s to early 1980s.

I guess paedophiles were Identifying As liberators of children.

PIE was formed in 1974. It campaigned for “children’s sexuality”. It wanted the government to axe or lower the age of consent. It offered support to adults “in legal difficulties concerning sexual acts with consenting ‘under age’ partners”. The real aim was to normalise sex with children.

Journalist Christian Wolmar remembers their tactics. “They didn’t emphasise that this was 50-year-old men wanting to have sex with five-year-olds. They presented it as the sexual liberation of children, that children should have the right to sex,” he says.

I guessed correctly. “Won’t somebody please think of the sex-starved children?”

It’s an ideology that seems chilling now. But PIE managed to gain support from some professional bodies and progressive groups. It received invitations from student unions, won sympathetic media coverage and found academics willing to push its message.

It’s wrong to say that PIE was tolerated during the 1970s, says Times columnist Matthew Parris. “I remember a lot of indignation about it [PIE]. It was considered outrageous.”

I don’t think there was any equivalent in the US.

One of PIE’s key tactics was to try to conflate its cause with gay rights. On at least two occasions the Campaign for Homosexual Equality conference passed motions in PIE’s favour.

Lemme just repeat that.

One of PIE’s key tactics was to try to conflate its cause with gay rights. On at least two occasions the Campaign for Homosexual Equality conference passed motions in PIE’s favour.

Sound familiar at all?

Most gay people were horrified by any conflation of homosexuality and a sexual interest in children, says Parris. But PIE used the idea of sexual liberation to win over more radical elements. “If there was anything with the word ‘liberation’ in the name you were automatically in favour of it if you were young and cool in the 1970s. It seemed like PIE had slipped through the net.”

That sounds so quaint, doesn’t it? Now the magic word is “identity” – so much more sensible and reality-based than “liberation.”

When Polly Toynbee interviewed O’Carroll and Hose in the Guardian in September 1977 she heard men incredulous at the lack of support from the press. They seemed genuinely aggrieved at what they called a “Fleet Street conspiracy”. One of them told her: “We would expect the Guardian, a decent liberal newspaper to support us.”

Again, so very familiar. All right-thinking people agree with us, and dissenters are terfs prudes.

There were divisions within progressive circles. In 1977 the Campaign for Homosexual Equality passed by a large majority a resolution condemning “the harassment of the Paedophile Information Exchange by the press”.

…

A Guardian article in 1977 noted with dismay how the group was growing. By its second birthday in October 1976, it had 200 members. There was a London group, a Middlesex group being planned, and with regional branches to follow. The article speaks of PIE’s hopes to widen the membership to include women and heterosexual men.

Toynbee talked of her “disgust, aversion and anger” at the group but added that she had “a sinking feeling that in another five years or so, their aims would eventually be incorporated into the general liberal credo, and we would all find them acceptable”.

Familiar at all? Yeah?

I found the BBC article via a thread of Debbie Hayton’s.

https://twitter.com/DebbieHayton/status/1139961332034392065

https://twitter.com/DebbieHayton/status/1139966499362410496

Et tu Natural History Museum?

https://twitter.com/NHM_London/status/1140263163247636480

Joan was assigned Jonathan at birth.

Today in the Times:

Letter to Editor in Sunday Times today, by me and other academics, expressing grave concern over close ties between @stonewalluk and UK Universities, threatening academic freedom. pic.twitter.com/M4WM0BxAzP

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) June 16, 2019

Mick Hartley shares the letter:

The LGBT charity Stonewall has a Diversity Champions programme, which UK universities are rushing to associate themselves with, thereby demonstrating their commitment to inclusivity and the battle against transphobia. Hidden away near the bottom of the Sunday Times letters page today, a large number of academics – mostly women – express their concerns:

As academics we are writing to register our disquiet over the inappropriately close relationship between the LGBT charity Stonewall and UK universities, via the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme.

The membership requirements of this programme are in tension with academic freedom. For instance, university members must instigate specialist trans policies, in addition to general equality policies, which outlaw “transphobic” teaching and research material but offer no clear definition of what would count as such.

“Transphobic” and “transphobia” never are clearly defined, are they, probably because if the definition were clearly spelled out, too many people would see how bonkers it is. It’s considered “transphobic” to say [write, teach] that men are not women.

Alongside Stonewall’s definition of transphobia as including any “denial/refusal to accept . . . gender identity”, this leaves academics unable to question the contested notion of “gender identity” without fear of sanction.

That’s no accident. They don’t want us to question the contested notion of “gender identity”; they don’t want “gender identity” to be called a contested notion, we’re supposed to call it an absolute and unquestioned fact.

Equally, Stonewall’s guidance advises against inviting any speaker to a university who would deny “that trans people are the gender they say they are”. This is a further unacceptable restriction upon free academic debate.

You know…this item is one of the things I hate about the dogma the absolute most, this idiotic insistence that what people say they are should never be questioned. That is bullshit. Of course we can question what people say they are! They can get it wrong, and they can lie; they can even do both. They can, we can, everybody can – we can all be wrong about what we are.

People can’t just show up at universities and “say they are” professors and hijack the nearest lecture room. People can’t show up at your house and “say they are” your best friend and invited to dinner. People can’t “say they are” stable geniuses and expect to be listened to with attention and reverence. The whole idea that this is some core principle of enlightened political thinking is a massive con game.

The programme requires staff to undergo “trans awareness training”, during which tendentious and anti-scientific claims are presented to academics as objective fact, without the opportunity for scrutiny: for instance, that “gender is how people interpret and view themselves” and that “1 in 100 are born with an intersex trait”. In our teaching, we’re exhorted to “ask the pronouns” of students. Yet many of us would deny that pronouns refer to an inner feeling of gender identity, and wish to say so.

There are other areas that some of us wish to explore and question, such as the ramifications of Stonewall’s new doctrine that female-attracted trans women, with penises, are “lesbians”; an “affirmation model” for gender-questioning children; and the social changes caused by opening up women-only spaces to self-identified women. It is imperative to interrogate the radical shifts in thinking that all this implies, but we feel inhibited from doing so in the intimidating atmosphere produced by Stonewall’s influence.

We therefore urge Stonewall to clarify that it fully supports academic freedom of thought. Failing this, we ask universities to sever their links with this organisation altogether.

Signed by:

Prof Kathleen Stock, University of Sussex; Dr Katie Alcock, Lancaster University; Dr Sophie Allen, Keele University; Prof Rosemary Auchmuty, University of Reading; Dr Michael Biggs, University of Oxford; Prof John Collins, University of East Anglia; Dr Madeleine Davies, University of Reading; Sarah Davies, University of Salford; Prof Catharine Edwards, Birkbeck; Prof Debbie Epstein, Roehampton University; Prof Rosa Freedman, University of Reading; Prof Leslie Green, University of Oxford; Sarah Honeychurch, University of Glasgow; Sian Hindle, Birmingham City University; Dr Chloe Houston, University of Reading; Dr Susan Matthews, Roehampton University; Dr Ruth McGinity, University College London; Michele Moore, University of Essex; Dr Kath Murray, University of Edinburgh; Dr Deirdre O’Neill, Brunel University; Christine Peacock, University of Salford; Dr Marian Peacock, Edge Hill University; Prof Jo Phoenix, Open University; Dr Laetitia Pichevin, University of Edinburgh; Dr Jon Pike, The Open University; Dr Eva Poen, University of Exeter; Kathleen Richardson, De Montfort University; Prof Sophie Scott, University College London; Dr Holly Smith, University College London; Prof Judith Suissa, University College London; Prof Alice Sullivan, University College London; Selina Todd, University of Oxford; Dr Mary Turner, University of Huddersfield; Dr Stuart Waiton, Abertay University; Professor David Pilgrim, University of Liverpool

Janice Turner in the Times:

In 2005, when WH Smith sold Playboy-branded pencil cases, parents argued that little girls were being groomed into porn culture; in 2011, when the Playboy club reopened in Mayfair, it was picketed by feminists who, like Gloria Steinem, saw it as a “gendered version of a minstrel show”; in 2017, Hugh Hefner’s obituaries catalogued the misogyny of his porn empire and sordid mansion. But in 2019, posing for Playboy is “empowering” and qualifies you to be hired as a role model for Britain’s most vulnerable children.

What did I miss? Despite PR spin by Hefner’s son Cooper, men still don’t read it for the articles.

When I saw that Munroe Bergdorf, whose day job is modelling for Playboy, fetish and lingerie shoots, had been made an “ambassador” for Childline, I asked the NSPCC why.

A single tweet.

For which I’ve been vilified by, among others, The Independent, The Guardian and the BBC. None of which contacted me for comment, since this issue is uniquely exempt from fair reporting codes.

Because Bergdorf is trans, you see, so Bergdorf must not be questioned in any way.

So I must say it here. That Munroe Bergdorf is transgender is immaterial.

If the NSPCC hired any woman who’d augmented herself into a hyper-sexualised persona — Katie Price perhaps — I’d ask the same. What about the page three girl Melinda Messenger at Barnardo’s, some said?

Yes, given the world’s gazillion accomplished women, she too is a dismal choice.

Looking like a blow-up doll isn’t the same thing as being accomplished.

Besides, although everyone loves a witch-burning, it was not, as Bergdorf claims, my tweet that caused the NSPCC to sack her. (Which they did unkindly and for which they have rightly apologised.)

It was because “her statements on the public record . . . [were] in breach of our own risk assessments. These statements are specific to safeguarding and equality.”

If your charitable mission is to protect children, your spokesperson cannot — as Bergdorf does — invite kids on social media to contact you privately. This violates online protocols since it encourages children to entrust adult strangers with secrets.

But Bergdorf still says it’s no problem.

Recently Ruth Hunt, outgoing head of Stonewall, was asked in The Observer about fears that gender self-ID could be exploited by male abusers. Hunt replied: “Men are always going to rape women.” It was a revealing statement.

Men will always rape women, so why try to stop them with our hard-won protections like single-sex changing rooms, refuges or prisons. Women may end up as collateral, but then what’s new?

This dismantling of safeguards by extreme trans activists is building a reluctant mass movement. Women are forming new organisations, mustering legal challenges, lobbying politicians.

These are not modern Mary Whitehouses but Labour members, Greens, lesbians; progressive, humane women — including trans women — who marched against Section 28, who’d defend to the death rights of trans people to live and work free from harassment and discrimination.

They don’t want this fight, just as I don’t want to write about it, given the hideous abuse, and the risk to careers and even physical safety it engenders.

They’d rather be running book clubs or the PTA or walking their dogs. But fight they must. Because their inner sirens are screaming.

A guide leader wonders why male-bodied trans teenagers are now allowed to sleep in girls’ tents without parents being told, and is sacked.

The NSPCC tells a concerned parent: “Should the child or adult identity as female then they are female and there are no safeguarding concerns.”

How does the NSPCC know that no man will every claim to “identity as female” in order to be able to sleep (and stay awake) in girls’ tents? It doesn’t know that, it can’t know that – yet it talks as if it can and does. What kind of safeguarding is that?

But women see what is happening.

We know what battering down our boundaries with insults and threats can allow in.

Not, to be clear, from trans people, but potential abusive chancers looking for open doors. Peter Bright, a left-wing US tech writer, argued endlessly with feminists on Twitter about gender self-ID.

As a proud trans ally, he decried “TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] fear-mongering about public restrooms” as “fact free drivel”, asking “Is that a great disaster? That a girl sees a penis?”

Following an FBI sting in which he believed he was grooming a mother into allowing him to have sex with her children, Bright has confessed to discussing “engaging in sexual activity with minors”.

But don’t worry, girls, everything will be fine. We magically know this because we say so.