This again. Farking birtherism.

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

Kamala was raised in Canada

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) January 22, 2019

And before you worthless leftist trolls call me a "birther", read the confirmation that Barack Hussein Obama was indeed raised in Jakarta, Indonesia https://t.co/0pHxLkt2dI

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) January 22, 2019

I've been getting emails/tweets about the (completely false, utterly racist) "Kamala Harris isn't a natural-born American" narrative for weeks, but it seems to be ramping up up on the fringes of the right now that she's said she's running. pic.twitter.com/PuBTMSkSxy

— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc) January 22, 2019

Helen Saxby takes a look at the idea of Gender Dysphoria:

There is an argument around the meaning and relevance of the term gender dysphoria since it has replaced ‘gender identity disorder’ in the medical literature. On the one hand there is a push to remove gender dysphoria from the list of necessary conditions to being assessed as transgender in law, but on the other hand the diagnosis is being jealously guarded by trans activists and allies. In summary the attitude seems to be ‘We may not need gender dysphoria anymore but you sure as hell aren’t going to have it either’. This plays out in the outrage shown towards two main groups of women: those who were tomboys as children and who therefore can see the dangers of extreme trans ideology in schools; and those who have teenage daughters who have suddenly become trans-identified with no warning, and who therefore can see the dangers of an ideology which is subject to social contagion.

So who is qualified or entitled to make a diagnosis of gender dysphoria? Gender dysphoria is defined on the NHS website as being ‘…a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity’.

Yes it is, and it’s been nagging at me ever since I posted it the other day. It’s been nagging at me because since when is “discomfort or distress” at some part of reality seen as a medical condition? That is what the NHS is calling it, remember: the definition is in an entry under Conditions. People who want to be athletes or ballet dancers can feel massive distress at not having the right body type for what they want to do, but that’s not seen as a medical Condition. Why is just this one thing being conceptualized this way?

So who is qualified or entitled to make a diagnosis of gender dysphoria? Gender dysphoria is defined on the NHS website as being ‘…a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity’. This is sufficiently open to interpretation for many people to take a view on it. On Twitter recently, trans ally Dr Adrian Harrop admonished a woman for calling her early childhood experience ‘gender dysphoria’:

I saw that at the time – Gia’s tweet first, and later Harrop’s magisterial dismissal – and gaped in astonishment. How in hell does Adrian Harrop think he can possibly know that? How can he possibly know that what Gia describes is radically different from what Authentic trans people describe even though the wording is identical?

Helen tells a similar story in much more detail.

Trans activists seem to be very angry at the notion that any old tomboy back in the day might have identified as trans given half a chance. This is especially odd considering the current push for self-ID, a notion that the only criteria for a trans identification should be self-declaration. Alongside the claim that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria should no longer be a pre-requisite for trans status, it is strange to see trans activists gatekeeping so furiously. But still, if a doctor can tell a woman she is wrong about her own self-diagnosis on the basis of a couple of tweets, self-ID is obviously not for everyone.

I often see trans activists and allies dismissing the views of women because they are not trans: saying that women who are mothers or lesbians or who used to be tomboys, can have no insight into what the trans experience feels like. But if experiential knowledge is so revered, then my area of expertise tells me a lot about the pitfalls of growing up female in a male-centred world: about body dysmorphia, eating disorders, risk-taking, addiction, self-harming, depression. Teenage coping strategies such as these are being dismissed and minimised if a confusion with gender identity is also present, and it is the trans lobby groups that have successfully pushed for this. My problems as a teenage girl and young adult would have all been swept up as one under gender ideology, much like consolidating a loan. Neat and tidy. One problem instead of six. I would have loved that. It is often said that you can’t make a child trans, as if the concept of being born in the wrong body is a benign idea with no potential to influence or inform. I disagree: I think you can make a child believe they are trans, and that it’s quite simple to do: just make sure all the adults in a child’s world are singing from the same hymn sheet, and ensure there is no access to a different viewpoint. Again, the trans lobby groups have been quite successful at this.

But I did not suffer from gender dysphoria as a child. (Am I allowed to say that?)

What I believe I did suffer from was the confusion that comes from heavily proscribed gender roles and an inability to escape them. Without any consciousness of the larger patterns at work, I was attempting, like many girls, to shift huge weighty blocks of patriarchy all by myself, without any tools. Forcing a way around one block would only ensure another one would heave into view. A good example is culture: it wasn’t much use to me to reject the messages of the popular culture of the time and run full-tilt from Benny Hill, only to find myself slap bang in the middle of the literary clutches of Henry Miller. When gendered expectations are shored up and policed by both individual men and wider institutions, they become nearly impossible to escape. I didn’t know this when I was young. I just thought I was a bit shit.

There’s a lot more. Read the whole thing.

And then there’s Alex Sharpe writing at Diva:

Are some feminists asking the wrong question about who counts as a “lesbian”?

Why are there scare quotes on the word “lesbian”? Are we treating that as some sort of “problematic” or tendentious or confusing or reactionary word now? Are we holding it out with tongs because lesbians say no to penis?

Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University, and enfant terrible of gender critical feminism, has recently asked: “can a biological male be a lesbian?” Of course, framing the question in this way tends to suggest a particular conclusion, one Stock wants us to draw, which is that trans women cannot be lesbians.

And framing the question as “Are some feminists asking the wrong question about who counts as a ‘lesbian’?” also tends to suggest a particular conclusion.

Yet, this conclusion only follows if we accept the proposition that “woman” must be defined by reference to reproductive biology alone (Stock does not insist on “reproductive capacity” for obvious reasons), so that “lesbian” desire becomes the desire of two women who share reproductive body parts…

But we know better, right? We know it’s all in the feelings, it’s all in how we “identify,” it’s all in the Lived Experience (of feeling like a woman in our heads). We know that if a man pretends he’s a woman hard enough for a long enough time (a week? two weeks?) then he is a woman, and gets to call himself a lesbian from that time forth. We also know that mere in-the-body women don’t get to resist this, and mere in-the-body lesbian women don’t get to say no to dick, and mere in-the-body lesbian women don’t get to say who counts as lesbian. They have to be Inclusive of superior in-the-head women, on pain of shunning and non-stop threats of violence. Ah brave new world, that hath such creatures in it.

[A] more inclusive definition is open to us and we should embrace it. Not because of scientific or metaphysical “truths”, but because the question of who counts as a “woman” is, as feminist philosophers Lorna Finlayson, Katharine Jenkins and Rosie Worsdale rightly note, “a political or ethical question”.

One that should be decided by men superior in-the-head women.

Before turning to a more inclusive definition of “woman”, let us be clear about what is at stake in the “woman” question and for whom.

Can someone point me to the literature on more inclusive definitions of “man”? I can’t seem to find anything. Surely it can’t be only “woman” that needs a more inclusive definition…can it? Wouldn’t that seem kind of sexist? One rule for the boys and an opposite rule for the not-boys?

Women’s March London…

Dear all, please see the attached statement clarifying our position on the use of the term 'menstruators' and reiterate that we are a fully inclusive, intersectional feminist movement. pic.twitter.com/asHYl23rWT

— Women's March London (@womensmarchlon) January 21, 2019

“A fully inclusive intersectional feminist movement”…meaning, they include people who aren’t women, and they avoid the word “women.” You can’t have feminism while treating the word “women” as if it has political cooties, and you can’t have feminism while trying to bully women into being “inclusive” of people who aren’t women. Just like other people, women are allowed to organize around the concerns of women; they are under no obligation to be “inclusive” of people who have different concerns. Feminism is allowed to be about women – and if it isn’t about women it isn’t feminism.

Trans issues are separate from feminism; non-binary issues are separate from feminism; feminism has enough to deal with, it shouldn’t be pushed and pressed and bullied into being about trans and non-binary issues along with (and more and more instead of) women’s issues. Go make your own movement. Feminism is about women, and that’s that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Exactly.

H/t Katrina

Of course they did.

Without fanfare or even notice, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women made significant changes to its definition of domestic violence in April. The Obama-era definition was expansive, vetted by experts including the National Center for Victims of Crime and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. The Trump administration’s definition is substantially more limited and less informed, effectively denying the experiences of victims of abuse by attempting to cast domestic violence as an exclusively criminal concern.

The previous definition included critical components of the phenomenon that experts recognize as domestic abuse—a pattern of deliberate behavior, the dynamics of power and control, and behaviors that encompass physical or sexual violence as well as forms of emotional, economic, or psychological abuse. But in the Trump Justice Department, only harms that constitute a felony or misdemeanor crime may be called domestic violence. So, for example, a woman whose partner isolates her from her family and friends, monitors her every move, belittles and berates her, or denies her access to money to support herself and her children is not a victim of domestic violence in the eyes of Trump’s Department of Justice. This makes no sense for an office charged with funding and implementing solutions to the problem of domestic violence rather than merely prosecuting individual abusers.

But it makes a lot of sense for an administration that has contempt for women.

A domestic violence relationship rarely begins with physical violence, much less violence that rises to the level of a crime. If you were punched on a first date, odds are there wouldn’t be a second. Intimate partner abuse is insidious: Emotional and psychological abuse escalates to physical violence as an abuser’s need and/or ability to exert power and control increases. In the United States today, more than half of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner. If we do not acknowledge the “small” things—yelling or screaming, name-calling, and controlling or monitoring communication and social media—victims may not realize they are in danger until it is too late.

It is too early to assess the full impact of the Trump administration’s definitional change. The Office on Violence Against Women engages in a broad array of activities in its implementation of the Violence Against Women Act. Perhaps grants that support community efforts to combat domestic and sexual abuse will be restricted to agencies serving victims of crime, leaving survivors without critical resources. If OVW’s training, education, and technical assistance curriculum is revised to adhere to the new definition, those experiencing “mere” emotional, economic, or psychological harms may no longer be considered victims. (It is further noteworthy that OVW simultaneously altered the definition of sexual assault, with the new definition containing a similar criminal justice focus.) What is clear is that these seemingly semantic changes, even if not yet embodied in official law or policy, are part of a broader trend toward the devaluation of women by this administration and this president.

Only those crazy libbruls value women.

President Trump made no remarks about Martin Luther King during a very brief visit to the memorial built in the great leader’s honor.

He laid a wreath, thanked the press for coming and ignored shouted questions as he departed. pic.twitter.com/oGloYOYjia

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) January 21, 2019

Very brief. How brief?

Two minutes.

About the time it took for Pence to make that wildly obnoxious claim.

Pence quotes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech to argue for Trump's latest pitch for wall money: "Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy." pic.twitter.com/oJPZEG59BQ

— Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) January 20, 2019

Most of us don’t think King considered a massive wall built to keep brown people out of White Man’s Country anything to do with the promises of democracy, to put it mildly.

Priests will be priests:

Across India, the nuns talk of priests who pushed into their bedrooms and of priests who pressured them to turn close friendships into sex. They talk about being groped and kissed, of hands pressed against them by men they were raised to believe were representatives of Jesus Christ.

“He was drunk,” said one nun, beginning her story. “You don’t know how to say no,” said another.

At its most grim, the nuns speak of repeated rapes, and of a Catholic hierarchy that did little to protect them.

Well it’s a male hierarchy, isn’t it, organized around a male god and another male god and a bird-thing representing a male Spirit. It’s all about the males. Women are a mistake, and a sex implement.

The Vatican has long been aware of nuns sexually abused by priests and bishops in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa, but it has done very little to stop it, The Associated Press reported last year.

Because it’s only women. From Covington Catholic High to Georgetown Prep to the Vatican, women are trivial, secondary creatures who owe men sexual access.

No, I don’t think so.

Today we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear, that no matter what the color of our skin or the place of our birth, we are all created equal by God. #MLKDay https://t.co/pEaVpCB8M4

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 21, 2019

Originally a comment by latsot on A fate worse than.

It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. We shouldn’t be altogether surprised when a Grue turns up.

I have tremendous sympathy for people who feel alone, unloved and unrepresented. We have systematically failed those people for as long as we’ve been people and we don’t appear to have learned much along the way. People are feeling desperate about gender identity? I sympathise. Heaven fucking forbid that we try to fix societal expectations, though. It’s obviously far better to reinforce that gender bullshit by mutilating children and.. well… what then?

Seriously. Many of the things I do for a living require that I keep really quite complex and usually inconsistent models in my mind and then reason about them. I’m quite good at it. I’ve written papers about it in fancy journals and everything. But I cannot keep track of this shit. I can not follow any path of reasoning through this mess, regardless of any conceits, fudge-factors or straight up dimwitted logic blindness. There is just no way to render this position in a tractable number of dimensions.

I know we know this and my frustration is kind of abstract. But there are children who are being THE OPPOSITE OF HELPED. I don’t know what to do about it because every attempt is scooted into the TERF bin before anyone has bothered thinking about it.

We didn’t have this problem when we were complaining about religion or homeopathy, did we? There was always a bloc of people who couldn’t be turned, a bunch of (as we leaned, mostly obnoxious) people on our side, a few fence-sitters who could occasionally be turned and a lot of places to feel smug about our skepticism.

We knew where we were in those days. We skeptics turned out to be proper arseholes for the most part but we could probably do with a bit more old-skool randi-ish skepticism about the place. Only without the misogyny. And the bullying.

Ah fuck it, I have no idea what to do. But I hate it that children are becoming weapons in a battleground absolutely nobody understands.

The smiling kid in the video has given a statement about what happened, one which I gather is corroborated by other, longer videos.

I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.

When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.

They are apparently part of a group well known to people in DC, kind of the way Hari Krishna people used to be well known, only less benign.

The protestors said hateful things. They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.

Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events.

Ok – but a lot of them were wearing the god damn MAGA caps. Those things stand for something, and it’s not a benign something. School spirit chants in MAGA caps give off a different vibe from school spirit chants not in MAGA caps. That probably has a lot to do with why his smile looked provocative. But, yes, gullibility probably also has something to do with it.

At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants. I did not witness or hear any students chant “build that wall” or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.

After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protestors, who I hadn’t previously noticed, approached our group. The Native American protestors had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.

The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.

I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.

I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation. I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.

Fair enough, but it’s also true that he and his (all male) classmates were there to advocate for taking away women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies. They’re not all that benevolent. I realize they’ve been trained into it, but still, that’s what they were there for.

I cannot speak for everyone, only for myself. But I can tell you my experience with Covington Catholic is that students are respectful of all races and cultures. We also support everyone’s right to free speech.

But they don’t respect women’s rights over their own bodies.

On the other hand if he’s telling the truth then Nathan Phillips lied when he (NP) said the kid blocked his escape. Not cool.

Oh go put your head under a truck wheel, Pence.

In a Sunday interview with CBS News, Vice President Mike Pence likened President Donald Trump to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sure, don’t you remember how King clamored for a Wall? A Wall keeping black kids out of white schools? A Wall keeping black people from sitting at the Woolworth’s lunch counter? A Wall keeping black people out of white neighborhoods? A Wall keeping all the good jobs for white people and the ones that promise hard labor at low pay for black people? Wasn’t that a time.

“And honestly,” he opined, “the hearts and minds of the American people are thinking a lot today about [this] being the weekend we remember the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

“One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy,’” Pence continued. “You think of how he changed America, he inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do, come to the table in a spirit of good faith.”

And agree to build a giant Wall to keep brown people out of White Man’s Country.

This seems strange. It’s an entry on the NHS website, under the subhead Conditions, for Gender Dysphoria. Most of the conditions under that subhead are quite medical – you know, sciencey. The GD one isn’t so much.

Gender dysphoria is a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity. It’s sometimes known as gender incongruence.

Biological sex is assigned at birth, depending on the appearance of the genitals. Gender identity is the gender that a person “identifies” with or feels themselves to be.

That, for instance. Notice the scare quotes on “identifies” – yes quite, so why use it? Identifying with something isn’t a medical term. What it means to identify with a gender is hotly contested and not a settled scientific or technical description.

This mismatch between sex and gender identity can lead to distressing and uncomfortable feelings that are called gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a recognised medical condition, for which treatment is sometimes appropriate. It’s not a mental illness.

Recognised by whom? Medical condition in what sense? How can it be confirmed or falsified? How is it not a mental illness? How is “identifying as” anything but mental?

It’s just…weird, seeing all this politicized, contentious, dubious stuff on a governmental information site.

The first signs of gender dysphoria can appear at a very young age. For example, a child may refuse to wear typical boys’ or girls’ clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys’ or girls’ games and activities.

Well there you go then. Little Sally likes to climb trees and hates dresses, therefore she has a medical condition called Gender Dysphoria. They’re from the government and they’re here to help.

Andy Lewis, Le canard noir, tweeted an interesting letter:

Actually untested, unknown issues,

But hey? Who cares? pic.twitter.com/JFisZfc5r6

— Andy Lewis (@lecanardnoir) January 20, 2019

Can you read it? Don’t forget to zoom in if it’s difficult.

The first point is that puberty blockers leave the young person in developmental limbo, without the pubertal hormones or secondary sexual characteristic that would tend to consolidate gender identity. One particular puberty blocker “promotes a continued desire to identify with the non-birth sex” while 73 to 88% of GD patients who don’t get blockers “eventually lose their desire to identify with the non-birth sex.”

What caught my attention there is the fact that that loss of desire to identify with the non-birth sex is seen by trans activists as a surrender, a loss, a cop-out, a capitulation to…some equivalent of The Bosses, The Man, The Power. But…why? Why is it seen as more woke to cling to GD than to wait a few years to see if it wouldn’t be easier and simpler just to go with it and fight the sexist stereotypes without surgery and lifelong meds?

It seems like dysphoria at existing at all, or at maturing. There are difficulties in all that, obviously, but Resistance is Futile. We can’t stay 15 or 20 forever, so what about accepting that and moving on and doing something useful? Just a thought.