"She lied about her lie to people who knew she was lying." https://t.co/hCEzAi57OE

— David Frum (@davidfrum) April 20, 2019

“She lied about her lie to people who knew she was lying. That, truly, is pathological lying.”

Jonah Mix has an absolute stemwinder of a piece on the hot fashion of guys lolling around on Twitter explaining how complicated biology is. I stashed a couple of sentences to remember and then I gave up because it was all that good.

It’s so easy to get sucked into this debate, to get that hot indignation in your stomach that comes when a foolish claim is so proudly asserted. And I don’t even have skin in the game — binary or not, my sex will still land me squarely in the “paid more, raped less” category.

That’s the first one I stashed, that second sentence.

The point is, debating “what is a woman, really?” is a luxury, given the facts.

Isn’t it odd that sex was never so complicated before? There was nothing ethereal about biology when it came to allocating the right to vote, or own property, or walk down the street at night without fear. We knew perfectly well what made someone female when that female-ness guaranteed a life of subservience and pain. Only when women began to say no did their bodies become a concept.

That’s the second bit I stashed, and it’s where I stopped stashing because it’s all like that to the end.

So many feminists have made this point, over and over again. I see them say it. I know you read it. Did you listen? If not, why? And why do you always respond when I say it? It seems you do know who has a female body, when it comes to deciding which perspective gets ignored.

Don’t they though.

Sex is such a mystery to you when women want shelters for themselves, meetings for themselves, words for themselves. Pardon me for asking, but is it equally mysterious when you log off Twitter and move over to Pornhub? The true nature of a female body is so complex when you lecture. Does it become simple again when you masturbate? Who does the laundry in your house? Were you somehow able to navigate an inchoate soup of X’s and Y’s to saddle your girlfriend with the dishes?

As a friend said on Twitter, scorching.

As long as pimps, priests, and politicians know what a female body is, I do too. The moment they’re confused — the moment they hesitate, the moment they qualify, the moment they adopt the restraint and caution you demand from the targets of their abuse— then I’ll happily open myself up to ambiguity. Until then, I beg you. Reserve your philosopher’s curiosity, your scientific rigor, for the ten thousand other questions that don’t make a thought experiment out of an atrocity.

Bam.

Good grief. She’s still at it. She announces in this that Comey is “a dirty cop.” I despise the way Comey handled the emails issue, but needless to say that’s not what Sanders is talking about.

Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation notes several instances where Pres. Trump pressured his top aides to lie or mislead. One day after the president fired FBI Director James Comey, @PressSec told reporters Comey no longer had the confidence of Trump and other people. pic.twitter.com/8EiLL2Dn5E

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) April 19, 2019

I suppose I shouldn’t bother being surprised. Stephanopoulos explained it this morning: she was under oath when she admitted lying to Mueller’s people (admitted to Mueller’s people that she lied); she’s not under oath on tv news shows. Lying to reporters and to us won’t get her a felony conviction.

What do we mean by “above the law”?

I’m reading an Atlantic piece on the Mueller report as impeachment referral, and I stop at this paragraph:

But there is another, simpler way to understand Mueller’s report. A footnote spells out that a criminal investigation could ultimately result in charges being brought either after a president has been removed from office by the process of impeachment or after he has left office. Mueller explicitly rejected the argument of Trump’s lawyers that a president could not be guilty of obstruction of justice for the conduct in question: “The protection of the criminal justice system from corrupt acts by any person—including the President—accords with the fundamental principle of our government that ‘[n]o [person] in this country is so high that he is above the law.’”

It’s a weird idea, that (figurative) height could place someone “above” the law. (The statement is that it doesn’t, but that requires the concept to exist first.) Lots of people think it is or should be the case, of course, but it’s still a weird idea. It’s the other way around, really: the more power and status and clout you have, the more constrained by the law you should be, because you have more power to do massive harm.

A slide from a talk at a recent European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Rome:

Notice anything?

It’s…everything. It’s a long list of feelings and behaviors that most people experience or perform at least occasionally (diagnosed conditions apart). Feeling lonely, feeling guilty, feeling of not fitting in – all could be gender dysphoria! Or, could be normal ups and downs of life. It’s like saying having two feet could be a sign of gender dysphoria.

This is not about helping people who feel acute discomfort with their gender or their sex, it’s about recruiting more people into a Movement. It’s about promoting and encouraging and bigging up a fashion. It’s a branch of advertising – got bad breath? Try our new Breffoclean. Got bad moods? Try our new GenderDysphoriaParty.

Note in particular the last item. Gender dysphoria may present as feelings of uncertainty/decreased gender dysphoria. Decreased gender dysphoria.

Whatever; get in there with the hormones, the sooner the better.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

The report paints an ugly picture.

The White House that emerges from more than 400 pages of Mr. Mueller’s report is a hotbed of conflict infused by a culture of dishonesty — defined by a president who lies to the public and his own staff, then tries to get his aides to lie for him. Mr. Trump repeatedly threatened to fire lieutenants who did not carry out his wishes while they repeatedly threatened to resign rather than cross lines of propriety or law.

At one juncture after another, Mr. Trump made his troubles worse, giving in to anger and grievance and lashing out in ways that turned advisers into witnesses against him. He was saved from an accusation of obstruction of justice, the report makes clear, in part because aides saw danger and stopped him from following his own instincts. Based on contemporaneous notes, emails, texts and F.B.I. interviews, the report draws out scene after scene of a White House on the edge.

At one point, Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff, said the president’s attacks on his own attorney general meant that he had “D.O.J. by the throat.” At another, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, complained to Mr. Priebus that the president was trying to get him to “do crazy shit.” Mr. Trump was equally unhappy with Mr. McGahn, calling him a “lying bastard.”

Project much?

He pitched a screaming fit at McGahn after Sessions recused himself.

The president asked Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, if he could do anything to rebut news stories on the Russia matter. The admiral’s deputy, Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, considered it the most unusual experience of his 40 years in government and prepared a memo describing the call that he and Admiral Rogers signed and put in a safe.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Comey was writing his memos about interactions with Trump.

The Guardian is excited about a new movie.

Watch the trailer for Seahorse, a new feature-length documentary produced in association with the Guardian, about one trans man’s pioneering quest to start his own family. This is the story of the dad who gave birth.

Freddy is 30 and yearns to start a family but for him this ordinary desire comes with unique challenges. He is a gay transgender man. Deciding to carry his own baby took years of soul searching, but nothing could prepare him for the reality of pregnancy, as both a physical experience and one that challenges society’s fundamental understanding of gender, parenthood and family.

In other words, a woman had a baby. Stop the presses!

It’s a thing that happens every day all over the planet without making the news…but when it’s a woman who claims to be a man doing it, then it challenges society’s fundamental understanding of gender, parenthood and family.

Except it doesn’t, you know. It’s still a woman having a baby. The fact that Freddy claims to be a man doesn’t change that. Words don’t change physical realities that easily. Words can change emotional realities, legal realities, social realities, but they can’t change material reality.

Made with unprecedented access and collaboration over three years, the film follows Freddy from preparing to conceive right through to birth. The film, directed by Jeanie Finlay, premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival at the end of April, and will play in the UK later this year.

And what about the baby? What about the hormones Freddy is taking and their effect on the baby? No doubt that’s too boring and routine to bother talking about.

Guest post by Claire Ramsey.

I have not been able to reconcile the competing ideas, feelings, and pieces of knowledge in my mind since the fire at Notre Dame in Paris was in the news.

In 2012 an act of white terrorism drove me to engage in anti-racism learning and action, when Trayvon Martin was murdered in cold blood by a domestic terrorist merely because he was Black. I could not go on living with the hatred and violence generated by white supremacy. Studying, reading, and learning have all offered compelling evidence that white people in the US, and particularly white women, are the only ones who can dismantle racism. We need to listen to Black voices, we need to believe Black people, we need to accept Black women as our teachers, and we need to invest money in groups and individuals we trust to lead us away from white supremacy. I paced, screamed and cried when a white terrorist murdered innocent people at church in Charleston. I am filled with rage at the white asshole criminal who destroyed those three churches in Louisiana. Each police murder of an unarmed innocent Black person looks to me like domestic white terrorism. I still have a lot to learn and a long, long walk ahead of me.

I am sad but not very sad about Notre Dame the building. Nor do I mourn the religious site at Notre Dame. I am not a fan of organized religion, ill-gotten ecclesiastical wealth, popes, pedophilia, or priests. The Notre Dame fire on April 15 was an accident waiting to happen – dry old wood and plenty of oxygen. It’s amazing that no one was killed in that fire. The structure’s insides will be rebuilt. Lots of big medieval buildings have been destroyed by various forces, and many have been rebuilt.

When I think of Notre Dame I think about the stone masons and draftsmen in 1163 who figured out how to start building such a huge structure with the limestone that was right under their feet. They knew they would never see their project completed. I think about those flying buttresses and the miracle of the human brains that imagined making them and analyzed how they would work. I try to imagine what that huge structure looked like to people when there were no other buildings around it. And I think about kilometer zero, a marker embedded in the concrete near Notre Dame. Parts of the structure that we, in the 21st century, prize were not ancient – the spire was 150 years old. The colored glass windows were replacement windows and not original. The stone was already crumbling from acid rain and other pollutants. Gargoyles’ noses had crumbled off.

I think we were struck by the images from Paris because we have a primal human terror of smoke and flames. I felt a similar primal fear on 9/11/2001 and on the day Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980 – events I observed in real time, from very close locations. I feel similar fear and shock at forest fires, prairie fires, towns in Eastern Washington burning down from out of control fires. I couldn’t not look. But I didn’t want to look and have those images in my mind. Natural events, a terrorist attack, a construction accident – the flames and smoke are what they have in common to our primitive brains. The media exploits what they know we are drawn to. We can be smarter than the media though, and we can easily outsmart the media with our own ability to think.

I am struck – and confounded – by the public moral instruction posted on the internet in the last 24 hours. They suggest that it is wrong to be sad about the fire at Notre Dame because human beings have committed worse crimes against other human beings, last month, last year, and over history. The moral instruction takes the form of “You are sad about Notre Dame but. . . you did not cry when XXXXX.” Or “You mourn a building in France but where were you when XXXX?” This a rhetorical move that I do not have the knowledge to really understand. But it rankles and it feels slightly fallacious, as did advertising for a Christian children’s fund in the 1970s, that pitched: “You can turn the page or you can save a child.” I asked around, and this rhetorical move is an example of the fallacy of relative privation – Wikipedia defines it “dismissing an argument or complaint due to the existence of more important problems in the world, regardless of whether those problems bear relevance to the initial argument.” Others call the move “whataboutery.”

The moral instruction via the fallacy of relative privation prompted a lot of thinking, about what I know and what I don’t know, about how to think. In particular, I was asking myself

“What shall I be concerned about?
How can I distribute my many feels about the world over the many bad situations in the world? Am I required to justify my worrying priorities?
How are they justifiable?
Specifically, are my worrying/sadnesses/shames/guilts merely the output of my white privilege? Am I a bigger racist asshole than I thought I was? (Because all of white people are, no matter what you think).”

I know a lot about the US, white supremacy, racism, the lives of Black Americans today and in the past, and white terrorism, far more than I did in the past. Most of this knowledge is new because it wasn’t in my history books in high school and I have a huge amount of privilege, so did not have to develop that knowledge to survive.

And even though I know that the moral instruction via the fallacy of relative privation IS A DAMN FALLACY, still I am compelled to ask:

Is there a way to reconcile what I know about white supremacy in the US/my own privilege with the images from France of French people in sad shock about Notre Dame?
Am I really only allowed to pick one tragedy to be sad about?
Can I think about the wonder of medieval engineering and be sad for French people?
Can being sad for French people coexist with my disgust at the pedophilia, murder, and violence of the Catholic Church?
(It feels to me like it can).

I am not French. I know that I am unable to genuinely understand what the fire in Notre Dame means to French people. I will not judge their response – that structure symbolizes French-ness to them, something outsiders can’t understand. Symbols are crucial. As a species, humans are symbol users and manipulators, for good and for bad. I am not the person who is going to chide French people about their response simply because I know about worse fires or worse events in the world. I am not going to tell French people how to be sad or what they should be sad about. By the same token I do not want to be told what to think or how to think. I am a white supremacist on a par with other white women. But I don’t think merely holding several ideas or several pieces of knowledge is a reliable marker of white privilege, or that it proves I am a thoughtless white woman.

I think racism and all of its evils now and in the past in the US is the most serious issue we face. it is the most dangerous part of American life. It is the most damaging part of American life. I say this despite the fact that I know about horrors taking place all over the world that hurt and kill people, and that world history is violent, bloody, and greedy. White privilege is reality. To deny it is racist and deluded.

Like all of us, I can consider two or three ideas or facts at the same time without upsetting my mental balance. I do not like the push to pick one over the other. But the public moral instruction offered on the internet leads to the conclusion – and sometimes to explicit critique – that it is wrong to see images of sad and shocked French people and feel sad for them, while simultaneously holding knowledge of the racism in the US and my role in it. That it is perpetuating racism to attempt to reconcile them in my mind.

I alway turned the page, so I guess I starved quite a few a children. Fallaciously, via relative privation. Sorry children. You said I only had two choices. I guess I picked the wrong one.

The footage of the race is shocking. How people can cheer this on confounds me.

Mir Sabbir reports from Dhaka:

Nusrat Jahan Rafi was doused with kerosene and set on fire at her school in Bangladesh. Less than two weeks earlier, she had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her headmaster.

Her courage in speaking out against sexual assault, her death five days after being set alight and everything that happened in-between has gripped Bangladesh and brought attention to the vulnerability of sexual harassment victims in this conservative South Asian country.

The vulnerability of female people in general.

“Conservative” isn’t really the right word for setting a woman on fire because she reported sexual abuse. (I’m going out on a limb here and surmising that “harassment” also doesn’t quite cover what the headmaster did.) Setting people on fire isn’t really a conservative versus progressive issue.

Nusrat, who was 19, was from Feni, a small town 100 miles (160km) south of Dhaka. She was studying at a madrassa, or Islamic school. On 27 March, she said the headmaster called her into his office and repeatedly touched her in an inappropriate manner. Before things could go any further she ran out.

Then she and her family went to the police to report it, a brave move and her death sentence.

At the local police station she gave a statement. She should have been provided with a safe environment to recall her traumatic experiences. Instead she was filmed by the officer in charge on his phone as she described the ordeal.

In the video Nusrat is visibly distressed and tries to hide her face with her hands. The policeman is heard calling the complaint “no big deal” and telling her to move her hands from her face. The video was later leaked to local media.

The headmaster was arrested.

Things then got worse for Nusrat. A group of people gathered in the streets demanding his release. The protest had been arranged by two male students and local politicians were allegedly in attendance. People began to blame Nusrat. Her family say they started to worry about her safety.

We see milder forms of this here, of course – men working together to defend sexual abusers and revile accusers. It’s not “conservative,” it’s just hatred of women.

Nevertheless, on 6 April, 11 days after the alleged sexual assault, Nusrat went to her school to sit her final exams.

Her brother tried to go with her but he was kept out.

According to a statement given by Nusrat, a fellow female student took her to the roof of the school, saying one of her friends was being beaten up. When Nusrat reached the rooftop four or five people, wearing burqas, surrounded her and allegedly pressured her to withdraw the case against the headmaster. When she refused, they set her on fire.

She managed to give a statement before she died.

Nusrat’s death has sparked protests and thousands have used social media to express their anger about both her case and the treatment of sexual assault victims in Bangladesh.

“Many girls don’t protest out of fear after such incidents. Burqas, even dresses made of iron cannot stop rapists,” said Anowar Sheikh on BBC Bengali’s Facebook page.

“I wanted a daughter my whole life, but now I am afraid. Giving birth to a daughter in this country means a life of fear and worry,” wrote Lopa Hossain in her Facebook post.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

On a different part of the planet:

One of four women who was recently subjected to a brutal public lashing by armed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan has spoken about her experience, amid an increase of violent punishments given to those violating its strict interpretation of religious law.

Aziza, who like many other Afghan women only uses one name, was rounded up by the Taliban’s shadow police for being out of her house without her husband and not being fully veiled. She was beaten so badly she lost consciousness.

Not punishments and not any kind of police, just a group of criminal men committing extreme violence against a woman.

Aziza said she was arrested by armed Taliban fighters after they entered a local market. She was wearing a burqa without mesh covering her face.

“Women in our area have no identity and they are considered incomplete without men. Sometimes men are not available and many women died in the remote areas as they were unable to reach hospital,” she said.

Not only are they considered incomplete without men, they’re violently assaulted for being outside without men.

Describing the incident, Aziza said: “There was a rush in the market when suddenly the Taliban came. Everyone tried to run away but I was unable to escape and they came and asked why I was not wearing a veil with a face mesh.”

She said she lost consciousness during the flogging and that no one came to help her.

“I am afraid of the Taliban now and feel they will be more violent against women. I am still unable to get over what happened.

“The Taliban teach us about our roles under sharia. They told us to serve our husbands with food and roles in the kitchen, and that you don’t have permission to go outside for shopping or to the doctor without a mahram [male guardian]. This is not the way to treat women.”

No it is not.

Eugene Scott at the Post points out that Trump tweeted about Notre Dame twice but had said nothing about the three Louisiana black churches that burned down.

On Tuesday, state authorities charged Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old white man and the son of the local police deputy, with hate crimes in the Louisiana church attacks. He was earlier charged with arson.

Of course, the churches in Louisiana are significantly younger than Notre Dame. But they also have a rich history and played a significant role in St. Landry Parish’s black community. At least one hosts a cemetery containing graves of black people enslaved in Louisiana.

“My church has a lot of history,” the Rev. Gerald Toussaint of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, which is more than 140 years old, told the Daily Advertiser. “I don’t understand it. What could make a person do that to a church?”

Greater Union Baptist Church is also more than 100 years old, according to Pastor Harry Richard, whose grandfather was one of the congregation’s founders.

Their histories are relatively short because the potential parishioners were otherwise engaged and couldn’t get away, if you know what I mean.

The burning of black churches was a common intimidation tactic during the Jim Crow era. “For decades, African-American churches have served as the epicenter of survival and a symbol of hope for many in the African-American community,” Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said last week in a statement condemning the fires. “As a consequence, these houses of faith have historically been the targets of violence.”

The houses and sometimes the people in them.

The church fires have, of course, drawn wide coverage and attention. The Louisiana governor mentioned it in his recent state of the state. But top Trump administration officials have not spoken out on or condemned the violence.

Good people on both sides, both sides.

As we hold Paris in our thoughts today, let’s also send some love to our neighbors in Louisiana. Three historically black churches have burned in recent weeks, charring buildings and scattering communities. If you can, contribute to rebuilding funds here: https://t.co/OSteYWzU9v

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 16, 2019

It’s at $1,529,669 as of this moment.