Another Pronouns War:

A debate about the gender identity of Dr James Barry, the pioneering Victorian who adopted a male persona to become the UK’s first female-born doctor, has erupted after the award-winning author EJ Levy was accused of disrespecting Barry’s legacy by using female pronouns in a forthcoming novel.

Levy announced last week that she had sold a novel about the “true story” of Barry, titled The Cape Doctor. The forthcoming book, which will be released by Little, Brown, will trace Barry’s life story: born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Ireland, the future doctor became Barry at the age of 20 and left for Edinburgh to study medicine as a man. Barry joined the army after graduation, the start of a distinguished career as a military surgeon that spanned Cape Town, St Helena and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1865, Barry returned to the UK with dysentery, and died. A maid discovered the doctor’s biological gender after the death.

When Levy, winner of the Flannery O’Connor award, announced the news of her novel by describing Barry as “a heroine for our time, for all time”, other authors began to question Levy’s reference to Barry as “she”, including novelist Celeste Ng, who told Levy: “I’m now seeing you use she/her pronouns for Barry even as many are telling you Barry himself used and wanted he/him pronouns. I hope you and L,B will listen to these concerns and take them into account.”

But Barry “used and wanted he/him pronouns” at a time when people with she/her pronouns were not welcome to study medicine in Edinburgh and become doctors, and then to practice medicine. There were a few pioneers but it was a very uphill battle. Given that, we can’t know whether Barry really “wanted” male pronouns or simply resorted to them in order to get the freedom and the work she/he wanted to do.  Barry didn’t leave a collection of tweets taking a position on pronouns.

Barry’s gender identity has been overwhelmingly framed as female by writers over the past 150 years, said Cardiff University professor Ann Heilmann, author of Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre, exceptions being Patricia Duncker’s 1999 novel James Miranda Barry and Rachel Holmes’s 2002 biography The Secret Life of Dr James Barry.

…

“While I understand that emotions run very high (understandably so, given the difficulties trans people face and in light of ongoing tensions between feminism and the trans community), I don’t think that Barry can be that easily mapped on to contemporary trans thought,” she said. “Though of course there have always been trans people, the lived and felt gender identity of an 18th and early 19th-century person would have been very different from our contemporary identity politics.”

And that person would not have called it a “gender identity” or understood what you were talking about if you used it.

Jeremy Dronfield, co-author of Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time, said: “In my biography, I used male pronouns for Barry. He was, at least outwardly, a man. But whether Barry qualifies as transgender in modern terms is complicated. When Margaret became James, it wasn’t primarily because she wanted to be a man. She wanted to live the kind of life which in 1809 was impossible for a woman. Once the persona had served its purpose, Margaret intended to discard it. Circumstances prevented that. There’s evidence that Barry missed being a woman. But we also know that he relished being a man, his behaviour exceeding what was necessary for disguise. However, the claim made online that Barry left a will asking to be remembered as a man is false. He left no statement of identity.

“If Margaret had been born in 1989 instead of 1789, free to be a surgeon and soldier, would she have chosen to become a man? On balance, I don’t think so, but Margaret might have identified as non-binary. I have no argument with seeing James Barry as a transgender icon, or Margaret as a feminist role model. I do take issue with those who insist on recognising one and erasing the other.”

And bullying people who refuse to comply.

Ok the Republicans are the minority and they’re hostile, while the Democrats are the majority and…not friendly, not affectionate, but not hostile in the sense of hostile to Cohen’s presence and testimony. Grant all that. It’s Democrats versus Republicans, with all that follows from that.

But if the two were reversed would Democrats be this assholish? This challenging, this stern, yes, but it’s more than that – there’s also taunting, sneering, raging, screeching. Do Republicans give themselves permission to be Trump-like in the era of Trump in a way they wouldn’t have before?

Update: Rep. Carol Miller, R-West Virginia, thinks it’s “a game” to establish whether or not Trump is a criminal.

It’s not a game, Representative Miller. It couldn’t possibly be more serious.

Update: Oh, Miller is angry that they have postponed hearings on child separation to do this one. Well who does she think is behind the child separation policy?!

Maybe this answers my question about would the Democrats carry on so grotesquely if they were in the hot seat.

https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1100824186182881283

Good lord.

Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) February 26, 2019

I seem to follow a lot of lawyers.

See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1512(b), 1515(a)(1)(B).

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) February 26, 2019

1st q asked by @NicolleDWallace about this despicable tweet was "is this illegal?" Answer is it's likely witness threat, but q should be why is MOC allowed to act this way even if it wasn't a crime.

— Jill Wine-Banks (@JillWineBanks) February 26, 2019

Aaron Blake at the Post:

A Republican member of Congress on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Michael Cohen engaged in affairs with multiple “girlfriends” and suggested his wife might cheat on him while he’s in prison — all on the eve of Cohen’s public testimony.

President Trump and his allies have camped out in a whole host of gray areas when it comes to obstruction of justice and witness tampering over the last two years. But this one from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) doesn’t appear to be nearly so gray.

…

We’re about to find out what Mueller’s thresholds are for obstruction of justice and witness tampering. But whatever they are, Trump is insulated because Justice Department rules say a sitting president can’t be indicted. That means Congress is the arbiter, and even if Trump would be convicted of witness tampering in a court of law, he could survive.

But Gaetz has no such insulation, and you can make a pretty convincing argument that his witness-related tweet is far less veiled that Trump’s have ever have been.

I wonder what he hopes to get out of it.

Trump told an audience of governors yesterday that Princess Ivanka has created millions of jobs. Of course she hasn’t. She and Daddy got some corporations to sign something saying they would offer lots of training – but they were doing that anyway, and signing something isn’t the same as actual jobs. Daddy was telling a whopper as usual.

In July of last year, Trump signed an executive order creating the National Council for the American Worker, co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. One of the council’s priorities is asking companies across the US to sign the Pledge to America’s Workers. The pledge involves “committing to expand programs that educate, train, and reskill American workers from high-school age to near-retirement,” according to the White House.

Two hundred companies have agreed to the pledge, with each providing different numbers of training opportunities. This brings the total number of opportunities pledged to just over 6.5 million. (See the full list.)

Programs that educate, train, and reskill≠jobs.

First, the pledge does not translate to millions of immediate training opportunities. In a press release from the administration, the pledge is described as a commitment to “new opportunities over the next five years.”

Secondly, these are better understood as training opportunities, not necessarily “jobs.” In the same press release last year, the White House described these opportunities as “apprenticeships and work-based learning, continuing education, on-the-job training, and reskilling.” These opportunities can be for current employees.

Lastly, many of these opportunities pledged were already planned by the companies. As CNN previously reported, Walmart’s pledged amount over five years would just about match the rate that its program Walmart Academies has trained since it started in 2016. The Associated Builders and Contractors provides a similar example as it pledged to provide roughly as many opportunities in five years as it trains in one year.

Oh that’s where all the anti-vaxxing is coming from.

In 2008, Vaccinate Your Family, the nation’s largest nonprofit dedicated to advocating for vaccinations, had to stop posting videos to YouTube.

Then known as Every Child By Two, the organization had used its channel on the massive video platform to post interviews with doctors, public service announcements and testimonials from parents of children who had died of vaccine-preventable diseases.

But those messages were quickly sabotaged. YouTube’s recommendation system, which appears alongside videos and suggests what users should watch next, would direct viewers to anti-vaccination videos, according to Amy Pisani, executive director of Vaccinate Your Family.

Yes, it’s The American Way. You’ve read /listened to /watched something reasonable and evidence-based, now wouldn’t you like to read or watch something cracked and evidence-free and just made up out of somebody’s empty head? Of course you would! Here are four to choose from.

Pisani’s story offers a window into the struggle that public health officials and advocates face as they attempt to provide information on vaccinations on social media, where anti-vaccination proponents have spent more than a decade building audiences and developing strategies that ensure they appear high in search results and automated recommendations.

Because when in doubt, try to get epidemics going again!

After more than a decade and facing mounting pressure, YouTube announced a change in its recommendation algorithm this month, saying it would stop suggesting conspiracy videos like the ones that followed Vaccinate Your Family’s. YouTube also stopped some anti-vaccine videos from showing ads and earning money, and started providing more information about the threat of vaccine hesitancy in a window below anti-vaccine videos.

In a statement to NBC News, a YouTube spokesman called misinformation around medical topics “a difficult challenge,” and referred to their recent policy changes, adding, “like many algorithmic changes, these efforts will be gradual and will get more and more accurate over time.”

No worries. It’s not as avoiding epidemics is a big deal or anything.

And on social media, the anti-vaccination proponents seem to be winning.

Vaccinate Your Family’s Facebook page has nearly 200,000 likes and followers, but nowhere near the visibility or engagement of anti-vaccine pages and private groups, where hundreds of thousands of users post articles from fringe health websites, trade tips on avoiding state-mandated vaccinations, and share memes bashing parents who vaccinate.

But Team Anti-epidemics is getting better at pushing back.

Stephan Neidenbach, 38, a middle-school technology teacher from Annapolis, Maryland, runs “We Love GMOs and Vaccines,” a Facebook page he started in 2014, he said, to combat growing misinformation on Facebook.

At first Neidenbach said he was just anonymously replying to anti-vaccine content, but soon scientists, farmers and doctors started following the page and sharing.

The page — now with with 194,000 followers — is one of several on Facebook that respond directly and in-kind to anti-vaccination pages. Users share news reports about vaccine outbreaks, and post memes and screenshots of posts from anti-vaccine groups, which they ridicule in the comments.

One recent post read, “If you’re antivaxx and you see me making fun of antivaxx people, I just want to say that I am talking about you personally and I hope you’re offended because you’re fucking stupid.”

“That’s what separates me from other organizations,” Neidenbach said. “I’m not an organization, and I’m not trying to run a nonprofit. I’m just a school teacher. And I don’t have to be as nice as I do in the classroom.”

“They have to worry about being professional,” he said. “But we can do more inflammatory stuff that the World Health organization can’t do. And the inflammatory stuff, as you can tell by the anti-vaxxers, does well on Facebook.”

When it’s anti-epidemic it’s in a good cause.

I wrote a thing for The Freethinker about the ludicrous arguments the pope has to resort to when he and his cronies gather to talk about the long history of child-rape by priests.

So now that we’re properly cowed and humbled by the Procession of Ecclesiastical Nomenclature, let’s look at how Frank presents this worrying puzzle of how Mister God let all this rape of children by priests go on for decades and, it seems safe to assume, centuries.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As I thank the Lord who has accompanied us during these days, I would like to thank all of you for the ecclesial spirit and concrete commitment that you have so generously demonstrated.

Problem. We have a problem already. It’s sweet that the Lord accompanied them during those days, but where was the Lord the rest of the time? Where was the Lord during all those rapes of children? If the Lord accompanies them now as they try to deal with the fact that they can’t hide the rapes any longer, why didn’t the Lord accompany them as they pulled down the children’s pants?

It’s a trick question, I suppose. The Lord wasn’t anywhere, because the Lord is a fictional character that the church makes its living from.

You could take it metaphorically though. “The Lord”=their consciences, their compassion, their inner resistance to causing pain and fear and distress to other people, especially people too young and small and unformed to resist. Where was that “the Lord” when they pulled down the children’s pants?

In some cases, maybe many, that Lord too was nowhere, because the priests in question became priests precisely because it was such an excellent setup for raping children. Conscience and compassion were never in the picture.

But Frank can’t admit that, can he.

There’s a lot that Frank can’t admit.

Glinner (Graham Linehan) is seeking anecdotes.

I'd like to collect some anecdotes about when and why you first became involved in the debate about gender ideology/activism. If you don’t feel you can talk about it, you can simply say that. Otherwise, I’d like to hear your stories.

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) February 26, 2019

Lots of interesting replies, as you’d expect.

When women were told to stop talking about their periods or pregnancies because "not all women" can have either of those things.

— Carrie (@polskibyproxy) February 26, 2019

I recognize that one! In my case it was abortion rights, and my response was No. PZ’s goon squad took copious notes.

For me it was your posts, together with @lecanardnoir and @zeno001 (the three of you had always posted sensible stuff) that made me start properly thinking about this, and it just suddenly clicked, how absurd some of this whole ideology was…

— crispis (@DelcCris) February 26, 2019

Sweaters for elephants. That’s right, sweaters for elephants.

Winters get chilly in Northern India, so volunteers at the the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center decided to knit giant sweaters for its rescued elephants.

It takes around 4 weeks to make one sweater, and it does not come as a surprise knowing that elephants are the largest land mammals on the planet. Still, the volunteers make sure that the knits are not only warm and cozy, they are also colorful , and even fashionable.

I hope they’re also washable, because elephants love coating themselves with dirt.

“It is important to keep our elephants protected from the bitter cold during this extreme winter, as they are weak and vulnerable having suffered so much abuse making them susceptible to ailments such as pneumonia,” cofounder Kartick Satyanarayan said in a release. “The cold also aggravates their arthritis which is a common issue that our rescued elephants have to deal with.” Thank goodness the abuse those sweet babies had to face is in the past, with bright – and stylish – future ahead of them.

They look pretty happy about it.

H/t James

The BBC shared a graph last year after the Oscars:

Pretty stunning, isn’t it. Chicago is the only one in which women speak more.

Just think how that seeps into all of our consciousnesses, without our even noticing it. Just think how it’s been seeping in our whole lives, and the implications for how absolutely everyone sees and understands and thinks about women. What does all that silence and absence suggest? That women are an afterthought, an oddity, an exception, a deviation from the normal; that women live in the shadows, doing their weird spooky womany thing, and emerge only occasionally, to say “thanks honey” or cuddle a baby or be raped or murdered or both. That women are helpless and incompetent and feeble.

Also, that men are the real people, that men do all the real work, that everything that matters in life is done by men and planned by men and talked about by men, that only what men do is interesting or important or heroic or effective.

I look forward to hearing more about the cis privilege women have.

Well, if Barr won’t and Mueller can’t and the Senate won’t, the House can and will.

House Democrats are planning to cross one of President Donald Trump’s red lines: investigating his personal finances.

With special counsel Robert Mueller expected to wind up his work soon, Democrats are launching an investigation to discover why Deutsche Bank was willing to lend the Trump Organization money when other banks wouldn’t and whether Russia was involved.

For more than two years we’ve known there was this Deutsche Bank issue but it’s been buried because the Republicans successfully stole everything.

The House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees have been staffing up for their probes into the bank and Trump’s Russia ties. Democrats on the panels say that with Deutsche Bank they are willing to pursue a key area that Mueller may have avoided — crossing what Trump sees as a “red line” into his personal finances.

Who cares what Trump “sees” as a “red line”? Trump wants to keep his crimes hidden; no shit. Can we move on now?

Democrats won’t be confined by boundaries set by the president as they ramp up their probes, so any perceived omissions by Mueller will be prime targets for House committees.

It’s ridiculous that Trump has been able to “set boundaries” that prevent investigation of his many apparent crimes. Ridiculous, shameful, and a disgrace.

I don’t usually link to the Washington Times, but there are exceptions to (almost) everything. Andraya Yearwood is a junior at Cromwell High School in Connecticut, and is trans.

She recently finished second in the 55-meter dash at the state open indoor track championships. The winner, Terry Miller of Bloomfield High, is also transgender and set a girls state indoor record of 6.95 seconds. Yearwood finished in 7.01 seconds and the third-place competitor, who is not transgender, finished in 7.23 seconds.

In short, they have a physical advantage and they’re not ashamed to exploit it. They should be, but they’re not.

(Imagine you felt like a child in an adult’s body. Set aside the problems with that idea [what is it to “feel like” a child?] for the moment and just imagine. Would you join children in their games, including physical games, and feel quite entitled to throw them to the ground, bloody their noses, wrench their arms? The correct answer is “No, of course not.” The same applies to 17-year-old boys who “feel like” girls and so compete in girls’ races, thus shutting out girls who would otherwise win or be eligible for more races.)

Miller and Yearwood also topped the 100-meter state championships last year, and Miller won the 300 this season.

Critics say their gender identity amounts to an unfair advantage, expressing a familiar argument in a complex debate for transgender athletes as they break barriers across sports around the world from high school to the pros.

“I have learned a lot about myself and about other people through this transition. I always try to focus most on all of the positive encouragement that I have received from family, friends and supporters,” Yearwood said. “I use the negativity to fuel myself to run faster.”

Well, that’s psychopathic. Yearwood should be paying attention to the “negativity,” that is, to the entirely reasonable objection that people with male bodies shouldn’t compete in girls’ races, no matter how sure they are that on the inside they are girls. They should realize it’s not fair and thus not sporting, and not race or else race on the boys’ teams.

One of their competitors, Selina Soule, says the issue is about fairness on the track with wider implications. The Glastonbury High School junior finished eighth in the 55, missing out on qualifying for the New England regionals by two spots.

Soule believes that had Miller and Yearwood not run, she would be on her way to race in Boston in front of more college coaches.

It’s not really a belief, it’s an obvious fact: she missed out by two spots and Miller and Yearwood are in those two spots.

The Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs high school sports in Connecticut, says its policy follows a state anti-discrimination law that says students must be treated in school by the gender with which they identify.

“This is about someone’s right to compete,” executive director Glenn Lungarini said. “I don’t think this is that different from other classes of people, who, in the not too distant past, were not allowed to compete. I think it’s going to take education and understanding to get to that point on this issue.”

Well think again. It’s not about the right to compete, it’s about the right for male-bodied people to race against female people in sex-segregated competitions. It is very different from other classes of people, who, in the not too distant past, were not allowed to compete, because it’s not about preventing them from competing.

The Times is barely concealing its laughter.

President Trump has talked for years about hosting a patriotic parade in Washington, and on Sunday he announced that something of the sort would take place in a Fourth of July “gathering” at the Lincoln Memorial.

“HOLD THE DATE!” Mr. Trump said in a tweet about the event, which he said would be called “A Salute to America.”

The president, who is also fond of hosting rallies for his supporters, added that the celebration would include a “major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!”

Very po-faced, very solemn.

Mr. Trump said at a meeting of his cabinet at the White House this month that he was envisioning “a gathering, as opposed to a parade, I guess you’d have to say.”

He enlisted David Bernhardt, the acting secretary of the interior, whose department oversees the National Park Service, to help plan it. “David, you’re taking care of that, and we’ll see how it works out with schedules and everything else,” Mr. Trump said at the meeting.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump indicated that the event would take place, but few details were available. In a statement on Sunday, the Interior Department said the National Park Service was “working diligently to provide the president with a plan for Salute to America,” adding, “At this time, everything is pre-decisional.”

Nice one! Totally stealing that.

Mr. Trump has seemed smitten with the idea of a military parade since the early days of his presidency. The committee planning his inaugural ceremony reportedly explored, but rejected, using military equipment in the traditional parade from the Capitol to the White House.

In July 2017, Mr. Trump witnessed the grandeur of a military parade at the annual Bastille Day celebration in Paris. He could be seen gesticulating and whispering at the elaborate display of tanks, soldiers on horseback and military jets flying overhead.

Beautiful punch line. It’s so Trump, so embarrassing, so hilarious.

Oh look, a poll.

Graham Linehan has threatened to sue me for calling him a bigot. It is a view many would agree with. I am going to do a poll, if I lose I will retract my tweets & apologise. Is @Glinner a bigot for his transphobic views YES or NO?

— Anthony Watson (@AnthonyWatson) February 23, 2019

Hahaha I’m kidding, of course; a question on Twitter is not a real poll because the respondents are not randomized. It’s a poll-within-a-set, if you like, but it doesn’t demonstrate anything.

And yet…

Please help @AnthonyWatson with his research poll … it’s important. https://t.co/JpIqYtjYRs

— Jan Gooding (@Jan_Gooding) February 24, 2019

His research poll. His research poll. Come on. It’s Twitter. The people who see your tweets are not a random sample of the population. You can’t do a research poll on Twitter!

There is also of course the highly tendentious, loaded wording of the question.

Who is Jan Gooding? The chair of Stonewall UK.