Trump did his West Point event today, the one that meant 1107 graduates had to leave isolation and return to West Point so that Bumbling Don could bumble through some words in front of them. As always when he reads a speech he sounded exhausted, clogged, sniffy, drunk.

Plus what he said was of course garbage.

“that many people have never even heard of,” he says with a tired sneer. He means he’s never heard of them, because he’s an ignorant lump of flesh. The ignorance of people who don’t care about anything outside of North Dakota says nothing whatever about the significance of a country or the people who live in it. It’s typical of Trump to think it does though.

Oops.

And it got worse.

People are speculating on the exact nature of his physical deterioration. Maybe it’s all the evil, maybe it’s poisoned his bloodstream.

Gender Heretic went to a reproductive rights panel at a progressive conference early in Trump’s dictatorship.

Donald Trump had just been sworn in, Roe v Wade faced its greatest threat since 1973, and activist friends were writing how-to books about home abortion, but the panel discussion was taking place in an entirely different universe.

There were no new strategies for activism on display. Instead, I heard lectures on the importance of pronouns.

Which is odd, because what could be less important in that context than pronouns? Every woman in the country could say her pronouns are he/him, it wouldn’t do a thing to protect abortion rights.

“Inclusiveness” and “intersectionalism” and validation exercises were vital things we all needed to learn and practice and be mindful about in everything we did to advance the cause of abortion rights.

Huh?

The only alternative was right wing bigotry, I was told. Abortion rights could be saved, and the larger progressive agenda succeed, only if activists spoke the cant correctly, in ritual format.

“Gender neutral” language would now replace the staid, second wave language of our foremothers in the new rituals of social justice purity. This meant changing our words and what we meant when we said them.

And what will happen then? We will no longer be able to talk about women’s rights when we talk about abortion! Hooray!

Reminds me of this:

And then it struck me: nobody was talking about women.

The word had not been erased, exactly. It had simply changed its meaning. “Woman” was no longer a kind of biology that is subject to patriarchal oppression because of its role in human reproduction.

The entire premise of reproductive rights activism had become unmentionable once again.

I was learning that “woman” now included men who say they are women, and that I needed to remember that not all people with female bodies identified as women, because avoiding “triggers” is more important than clear communication with someone about their own medical care.

I feel very avant garde, having been “reminded” of all that way back in 2014.

Again.

Do we see a lot of “The last thing the world needs right now is another rich black entitled man doing his learning out loud”?

No, because it would jar, because the other adjectives convey privilege, but black doesn’t.

But somehow we’ve decided it’s fitting to use privilege adjectives to pick out uppity women who dare to say things. Even when we are such women ourselves.

Also when did Rowling ever say that black lives don’t matter? Or that all lives matter or that white lives matter? When did she ever say that indigenous lives don’t matter?

I don’t know, but I’m betting never. I’m betting Gadsby just threw those in there to imply things without spelling them out. Shitty behavior.

Rowling must be punished for knowing the difference between sex and gender:

 The indiscretion for which she must be punished is saying that sex is real.

That’s sex as in male and female, not as in the activity. What kind of body a person has, not what they might plan to do with it in a “social bubble” (an England-only social bubble, it should be stressed). Sex as in the real, observable, and immutable difference between men and women.

Fortunately for her own sanity, the woman who made up muggles and quidditch and death eaters knows the difference between things that are real and things that are the product of human imaginations. She knows that sex is determined by chromosomes whereas gender is a made-up set of rules about how men and women ought to be.

Another important difference between things is the difference between ideas in the head and brute facts of the body. We can all imagine our bodies any way we like, and we can also change them in some fairly minor ways through makeup, piercing, exercise, surgery and the like…but we can’t change them too radically if we want to stay alive to enjoy the changes. One thing we can’t change is our bodies’ histories. We can do a lot to resemble the sex we’re not but we can’t change what we were when we first tasted the air.

Unfortunately, she also knows what it’s like to experience both domestic abuse and sexual assault, which is one of several reasons why discussions about sex and gender are personally important to her. She, like so many women, has a very specific dog in the fight about who should be included in the definition of “woman”, and how laws and policies should protect women’s rights.

And guess what: so do most women. So, in fact, do nearly all women. A few may be so sheltered that they never experience domestic abuse or sexual assault, but even they probably still experience knee-jerk contempt and dismissal.

With Wednesday’s post she has made it crystal clear where she stands. Yesterday’s headlines focused on the disclosures she has made about her personal experiences, not her challenge to the Scottish Government to reconsider its plans to reform the law around gender recognition. Those who stick to secondary sources will have read about the darkest parts of the author’s life, but will likely have little grasp of why she has decided to write about them now.

Those in the outraged online echo chambers might try their best to drown out voices who want to talk about sex, but telling people not to read the world’s most famous author feels like a losing strategy. This discussion cannot be ignored. We cannot vaccinate women and girls against male violence, so we have a duty to listen to survivors.

And a duty to refuse to let trans ideologues shut them up.

What is UN Women?

UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.

That doesn’t work if women no longer means women but instead means women and men who call themselves women. Men who call themselves women are not subject to the kinds of contempt and neglect and dismissal that women are.

Gender equality is not only a basic human right, but its achievement has enormous socio-economic ramifications. Empowering women fuels thriving economies, spurring productivity and growth. Yet gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in every society. Women lack access to decent work and face occupational segregation and gender wage gaps. They are too often denied access to basic education and health care. Women in all parts of the world suffer violence and discrimination. They are under-represented in political and economic decision-making processes. 

All of that applies to real women and girls, “natal” women and girls, literal women and girls, not men and boys who decide they too are female despite having male bodies.

This shit isn’t a game. This isn’t dress-up. This isn’t a pantomime or a drag act or cosplay or let’s pretend. This is reality, hard messy painful physical reality. This is girls who miss school several days a month because they don’t have access to menstrual pads or tampons. This is girls who are married off at age 16 or 14 or 12, with all the future life prospects that implies. This is girls who are impregnated at 16 or 14 or 12 and who are left with fistulas after the birth, and are exiled to a shed for the rest of their lives. This is rape jokes. This is not letting women talk. This is always hiring the man. This is always promoting the man. This is not a game.

For many years, the United Nations faced serious challenges in its efforts to promote gender equality globally, including inadequate funding and no single recognized driver to direct UN activities on gender equality issues. In July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly created UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, to address such challenges. In doing so, UN Member States took an historic step in accelerating the Organization’s goals on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

But now its Twitter account is promoting the words of a misogynist young man rebuking a woman for saying that women are women.

Talk about institutional capture…

UN Women quoting a male movie star publicly attacking the woman author who made him rich and famous. UN Women saying men who think of themselves as women literally are women. UN Women throwing women overboard with a boulder chained to their neck.

Another man does a pratfall by misusing that Simone deBeauvoir line.

Applause for Nigel Warburton there.

But Pullman went off the rails.

She didn’t mean by men saying they are women. Nope, that’s not what she was saying.

So now The Body Shop is telling us what to think – and in fact telling us to think lies are truth. The Body Shop, for god’s sake. Hey has anybody asked Pizza Hut what it thinks?

we stand with ALL menstruators.

What for? And how? What do they do, summon all menstruators so that they can stand with them? What if the menstruators would rather sit, or run, or not be anywhere near The Body Shop?

But then the serene confident way they tell a woman that men menstruate.

People have periods – women, men and non-binary people.

They don’t though. Men don’t have periods. Commercial enterprises that sell lotion or shoes or chainsaws or dog food don’t get to tell us that men menstruate any more than they get to tell us that Donald Trump is a decent thoughtful compassionate man.

And then blah blah blah – it’s Pride month, conversations, educate ourselves, be inclusive, stand together (what is all this standing?). It’s a product, not an ideology. And men are not women.

Another treacherous ungrateful shit joins the pack.

Rupert Grint has become the latest Harry Potter cast member to speak out in response to author JK Rowling’s recent comments on transgender issues.

In a statement, the actor – Ron Weasley in the Potter films – said “I firmly stand with the trans community”.

What a treacherous self-serving shit. By saying that he implies that Rowling stands against “the trans community.” By saying it he implies that she’s malevolent and harmful and bad, and needs to be ostracized and monstered by shits like him and Radcliffe and Watson.

“Trans women are women. Trans men are men. We should all be entitled to live with love and without judgment.”

But they’re not. Trans women are not women; that’s what “trans” means. Trans men are not men; that’s what “trans” means. It’s a lying bullying slogan worthy of 1984 and people should stop robotically repeating it on command.

As for being entitled to live with love and without judgement – that’s bullshit too. No we should not all be entitled to that. Love is relational, and it’s not subject to command or coercion. Judgement is inevitable in life, and nobody is entitled to say “Judge all those other types of people but not my type – I get to be immune from judgement.”

Grint, now 31, told The Times: “I firmly stand with the trans community and echo the sentiments expressed by many of my peers.”

Yeah exactly – it’s a creed, and you recite it obediently just like your peers. High five.

The BBC ends the article with

A school in West Sussex has dropped plans to name a house after Rowling, saying it did “not wish to be associated” with her views.

Her views that women are women and men are not women.

The Guardian cautiously mentions that inciting violence against women may not be entirely admirable.

The government’s lead adviser on domestic abuse has written to the editor of the Sun to condemn the newspaper’s decision to publish a front page interview with JK Rowling’s first husband, under the headline: “I slapped JK and I’m not sorry.”

In the letter seen by the Guardian, Nicole Jacobs, the independent domestic abuse commissioner, said it was “unacceptable that the Sun has chosen to repeat and magnify the voice of someone who openly admits to violence against a partner”.

Of someone? A partner? It was a man who openly brags of hitting a woman and saying he would do it again. It’s not a gender-neutral someone who brags of hitting and it’s not a gender-neutral partner he does it to. It’s a man doing it to a woman. If we can’t name these specifics we don’t even know what we’re talking about – everything becomes random and mystifying and unfixable.

“The media can play a vital role in shining a light on this issue and bringing it out of the shadows, but articles such as this one instead feed the shame that so many survivors will feel every day, minimising their experiences and allowing perpetrators to continue to abuse without fear of consequence,” Jacobs wrote to Victoria Newton, who was appointed the Sun’s editor in February.

“I am troubled knowing that this article comes at a particularly difficult and dangerous time for victims and survivors, many of whom are being forced to stay under lockdown conditions with their perpetrator. The huge increases in calls to helplines is testament to that.”

Still all gender-neutral language – thus drawing a tactful veil over the fact that this is overwhelmingly a crime against women by men, on account of how men have a large physical advantage and a bigger supply of available aggression.

Domestic abuse claims the lives of around 100 people every year, and last year there were 2.4 million adult victims.

The Guardian too: gender-neutral.

Don’t say “women.” It never pays.

Finally, someone does say it.

Jane Keeper, the director of operations at Refuge, said: “The front page of the Sun this morning is as irresponsible as it is disappointing.

“It would ordinarily be troubling for such an editorial decision to be made – but to run with this during lockdown, when demand to Refuge’s national domestic abuse helpline have increased by 66%, is shocking. What this has done is give national media coverage to a perpetrator of domestic abuse to attempt to justify his actions.

“It is never acceptable to hit a woman. The first ‘slap’ can lead to a pattern of violence – and domestic abuse is against the law.”

And it’s evil and wrong.

Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, tweeted that the Sun headline was “awful”.

Gillian Martin, a member of the Scottish parliament, wrote on Twitter that the article would be “beyond triggering for many abuse survivors, and enabling to abusers”.

“It is irresponsible and dangerous. I could weep for the way women are treated by the tabloid press – still – in 2020,” she said.

Tabloids on the one hand and Guardianists on the other. Women can’t catch a break.

Barr and Trump and Pompeo see the ICC the way the surviving Nazi command saw the Nuremberg trials…and they’re not even embarrassed to say so.

The Trump administration has launched an economic and legal offensive on the international criminal court in response to the court’s decision to open an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan carried out by all sides, including the US.

The US will not just sanction ICC officials involved in the investigation of alleged war crimes by the US and its allies, it will also impose visa restrictions on the families of those officials. Additionally, the administration declared on Thursday that it was launching a counter-investigation into the ICC, for alleged corruption.

The most corrupt administration in US history is calling the ICC corrupt.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, defence secretary, Mark Esper and attorney general, William Barr, gave a presentation on the decision at the state department, but then left without taking any questions.

Barr made clear that this was the beginning of a sustained campaign against the ICC, and that Thursday’s measures were just an “important first step in holding the ICC accountable for exceeding its mandate and violating the sovereignty of the United States”.

That is, an important first step in holding the ICC accountable for attempting to hold the US accountable. How dare anyone question anything we decide to do? Even if we do have a brain-rotted corrupt moral vacuum spinning the dials?

“The US government has reason to doubt the honesty of the ICC. The Department of Justice has received substantial credible information that raises serious concerns about a long history of financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor,” Barr said.

That’s interesting because the US population and the population of the world has reason to doubt the honesty of Barr and Trump and Pompeo and the whole administration they front. Financial corruption? Only every day. Malfeasance? Only every single feasance.

He referred to the ICC as “little more than a political tool employed by unaccountable international elites”.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Da Jooooz? Or what? They’re so brazen about the wannabe-Nazism.

The ICC was set up in 2002, as an attempt to extend the effort to impose international humanitarian law for war crimes and crimes against humanity begun by the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Over 120 countries, including Washington’s closest allies in Europe, are party to the Rome statute, the founding document of the ICC. Bill Clinton signed for the US in 2000, but said the statute would not be sent to the Senate for ratification until the US had assessed the court’s operations.

George W Bush informed the UN in 2002 that the US would not join the court.

The US sides with the perps not the victims.

It’s not ok to threaten women with death or rape, yes yes, blah blah, but what’s really not ok is to have “gender critical views” i.e. to have the view that women are women and men are not women.

Having such a “view” is not just view-having, in Jamil’s [cough] view, it’s rhetoric, meaning it could well be utter bullshit deployed for nefarious reasons. Having the “view” that women are women and men are not women “is what contributes to” [meaning, is the sole source of? the wording is meant to be precise but is actually confused and confusing] i.e. causes the actual rape and actual murder of trans women, not just threats. Not just threats.

Got that, women? Yes yes threats are bad, men shouldn’t threaten women with violence and rape and murder, BUT – the real bad, the bad that counts, the bad that matters, is women who say that women are women and men are not women – that actually gets trans women (i.e. men who say they are women) raped and killed.

I mean which would you choose? Just bratty privileged cis white Karens whining about threats? Or heroic stunning brave men who say they are women who face actual rape and actual death because of those bratty privileged cis white Karens who think that women are women and that men who say they are women are men?

Be logical.

It’s making it so obvious how intensely misogynist the trans movement is.

This terrible terrible man.

The Sun had to have its two cents and it makes me so livid I can hardly see straight. A lot of my friends on Twitter are saying the same thing.

Glenn Greenwald thinks Rowling has no right to say she was abused.

The man is scum.

They are such shameless liars.

At Trump’s roundtable, attorney general Bill Barr says, “We’ve never had a president who’s more committed to reforming law enforcement.”

Fact check: The Trump administration abandoned Obama-era police reform efforts, which had included civil rights investigations into local police agencies with documented records of abuse and problems. “Police departments are not investigated under this administration,” Christy Lopez, who led the justice department group investigating police departments under Obama, recently told the Washington Post.

The roll-back of Obama’s efforts began under attorney general Jeff Sessions.

Let’s make the police worse again, guys.

See?

This is what his Tulsa “speech on race” (if that is what he’s doing in Tulsa next week) will be like. He’ll read it haltingly and clumsily, tilting his head back and forth for no reason, in a flat croaking voice that makes it clear that he has no idea what he’s saying or why he’s saying it. And he’ll say “it” will go very easily and quickly and easily. Yes, certainly, and that’s why we haven’t done it all this time.

There’s much buzz about Trump’s oh so tactful selection of Tulsa, famous for a race riot, and Juneteenth, famous for the end of slavery, as the place and time for his first rally in months.

The selection of Tulsa as the place where Trump returns to the stump and the date on which he is choosing to do it both suggest that Trump’s long-whispered-about race speech — in the wake of ongoing protests and unrest following the death of George Floyd — will happen next Friday, and at a campaign rally no less.

A “race speech” by Trump. Dear god. It makes me want to solder my ears shut.

Tulsa was the site of one of the most vicious acts of racial violence in American history when, in 1921, a mob of white people attacked a section of the city known as Greenwood or “Black Wall Street” and murdered hundreds of African Americans…And June 19, which has become commonly known and celebrated as Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day, commemorates the anniversary of the reading of the General Orders, No. 3, which officially informed slaves that they were free.

What can Trump possibly say, what finger can he possibly point, what invisible accordion can he possibly play, that will be of any interest or value? We already know he has nothing but simmering resentment at best toward black people, and we already know that his self-presentation is that of a bad insult comic. We know he has no knowledge or understanding of the history or the issues. We know he doesn’t give a shit. We know he’s repeatedly gone out of his way to express his animosity toward black people and anti-racism. What can he say that anyone but the boogaloo crowd wants to hear?

Maybe that’s not his plan, maybe I’m overestimating his advisors – maybe his plan is to go there to shout racist slurs and start the second Tulsa Race Riot.

“The African American community is very near and dear to his heart,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday of Trump’s planned Tulsa rally on Juneteenth. “He’s working on rectifying injustices. … So it’s a meaningful day to him and it’s a day where wants to share some of the progress that’s been made as we look forward and more that needs to be done.”

And goats can fly and cars can be milked and Jared Kushner is a genius.

Classic.

Come to my rally during a pandemic to gratify my ego and help my effort to get another four years to destroy this country and maybe the world, and also sign this waiver saying that if the pandemic gets you at my rally it will bye YOUR FAULT and not mine.

Who could resist an offer like that?

Milley says that walk with Trump was wrong.

The top US military officer says he was wrong to have joined President Donald Trump during his controversial walk to a damaged church near the White House.

The 1 June event created “a perception of the military involved in domestic politics”, Gen Mark Milley said.

It sure as hell did, and that’s what fake-warrior Trump intended. Captain Bone Spurs wanted to walk his sorry cheeseburger ass up to that church with some SOJERS so that everyone would think he’s a warrior too instead of the blathering whining two scoops of ice cream couch potato he is.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was speaking in a video for a National Defense University commencement ceremony.

Oh was he! That’ll sting. That’ll get Captain Bone Spurs really mad.

He said: “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”

Gen Milley added: “We must hold dear the principle of an apolitical military that is so deeply rooted in the very essence of our republic.”

…

The general was wearing battle uniform as he walked with the president and critics said this suggested his support for the deployment of the military against protesters.

Just a tad.