Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • On the cusp of attending higher education

    The Guardian on the A-levels mess:

    Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds have been worst hit by the controversial standardisation process used to award A-level grades in England this year, while pupils at private schools benefited the most.

    What are A-levels? They’re national exams in the UK that function like a turnstile for admission to higher education. They were canceled this year because of the virus, so instead teacher evaluations were used, but with the Authorities applying a “controversial standardisation process” to the evaluations with the result that a lot of students were downgraded, which amounts to saying “Soz no higher ed for you, off to the factory you go.” There’s a lot of anger.

    Private schools increased the proportion of students achieving top grades – A* and A – twice as much as pupils at comprehensives, official data showed.

    Gee, what a funny coincidence.

    According to detailed analysis published by exam regulator Ofqual, the pattern in England has been similar to but less dramatic than in Scotland, where pupils and schools in disadvantaged areas were marked down the most harshly by the statistical model used to replace exams.

    Pupils in lower socioeconomic backgrounds were most likely to have the grades proposed by their teachers overruled, while those in wealthier areas were less likely to be downgraded, according to the analysis.

    I don’t know, maybe they have stats that indicate pupils in lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to mess up in those final months, but then maybe that should tell them something about the finality of that turnstile.

    For students from disadvantaged backgrounds on the cusp of attending higher education, more than one in 10 of those assessed as receiving C grades by their teachers had their final result lowered by at least one grade, compared with 8% for those from non-disadvantaged backgrounds.

    Which translates to a lot of students abruptly shut out of higher education without having had the chance to try. It’s a gruesome situation.

    Headteachers and pupils reacted with anger and disappointment, while the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said “something has obviously gone horribly wrong with this year’s exam results” and suggested a Scotland-style U-turn – accepting all teachers’ recommended grades – should not be ruled out.

    Thursday’s results confirm that 39% of teacher recommendations in England were downgraded.

    “Parents, teachers and young people are rightly upset, frustrated and angry about this injustice. The system has fundamentally failed them. The government needs to urgently rethink,” Starmer said.

    If you’re going to slam the door in people’s faces at least give them the chance to say their piece first.

  • But where were her great-great-grandparents born?

    Oh fabulous, we get to have the birther thing all over again.

    Axios has more:

    Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis on Thursday shared a Newsweek op-ed that baselessly claims Sen. Kamala Harris may be ineligible for the vice presidency because both of her parents were not naturalized citizens at her birth.

    Harris was born in Oakland, Calif. She is an American citizen and is eligible for the office. Critics, including many Republicans, denounced the piece as a new attempt at “birtherism” — the conspiracy theory that President Obama was not actually born in the U.S. — targeting the first woman of color on a presidential ticket.

    Not that it looks the slightest bit racist to keep saying black Americans are not citizens.

    The op-ed, penned by conservative law professor John Eastman and published Wednesday, argues that Harris might not be considered a natural-born citizen because a clause in the 14th Amendment — “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof [the U.S.]” — could preclude her given her parents’ citizenship.

    Eastman’s view on birthright citizenship and presidential eligibility is not accepted by constitutional law scholars.

    But hey let’s just throw it out there anyway because this kind of thing is such fun.

    Ellis doubled down on her retweet, telling ABC News’ Will Steakin that she believes Harris’ citizenship is “an open question, and one I think Harris should answer so the American people know for sure she is eligible.”

    Right because that’s how it worked for Obama, he produced his birth certificate because Trump was doing such a bang-up job of promoting the Not Borrn Heer bullshit and Trump went right on promoting the Not Borrn Heer bullshit just the same.

  • He’s warming up

    Trump is cheering himself up by talking sexist shit about women.

    In an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump referred to Harris as “sort of a mad woman”, criticizing her questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his heated confirmation hearing in September 2018. “She was the angriest of the group and they were all angry,” he said of the Democrats.

    Earlier this morning, Trump tweeted that the media has given Harris a “free pass”, saying there was “nobody meaner or more condescending” to Biden during the primaries.

    Trump’s tirade on Fox Business also including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying that she “is not even a smart person” and that she “goes out and yaps”. Trump also described House speaker Nancy Pelosi as “stone-cold crazy”.

  • List-making

    About that “Whiteness” chart again…

    One thing to note is that it was compiled by Judith Katz in 1990, and it’s copyrighted by a “consulting group.”

    JudithH.Katz © 1990. The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

    The thing that’s so bizarre and stupid about it is that it’s not about “whiteness” at all, it’s just about a grab bag of tastes, habits, practices, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, fashions and the like, few if any of which are genuinely specific and exclusive to white people. It mixes up class, hierarchy, status, consumerism, and some just plain randomness.

    For instance –

    Rugged Individualism

    Self-reliance

    Individual is primary unit

    Independence and autonomy highly valued and rewarded

    Individuals assumed to be in control of their environment – “You get what you deserve”

    But that’s not a racial list. It’s a mix of philosophical and political and sociological, but not racial. And pretty much the whole list is like that – a giant category error, or string of category errors.

    The idea seems to be that majoritarian habits and ways of thinking=white habits and ways of thinking…which in a majority-white country is sort of tautological, and not interesting.

    Some items on the list are conservative shibboleths, and some are just “you don’t say.” Under religion, “Christianity is the norm” – in other words Christianity is the majority religion in the US. You don’t say! That doesn’t make it white. Also hello? There’s quite a deep tradition of African-American Christianity; do we have to call that part of “whiteness”?

    In short it’s just so damn silly, along with all its other faults, that I wonder why anybody ever paid any attention to it.

  • The what voices?

  • In plain sight

    Trump and co are openly moving to steal the election. This is a violation of several laws.

    The head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union alleged Tuesday that mail sorting machines are “being removed” from Post Offices in her state due to new policies imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump whose operational changes have resulted in dramatic mail slowdowns across the nation.

    Mail sorting machines are being removed. What will that do? Sabotage voting by mail, of course.

    Asked by NPR‘s Noel King whether she has felt the impact of DeJoy’s changes, Iowa Postal Workers Union President Kimberly Karol—a 30-year Postal Service veteran—answered in the affirmative, saying “mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we’re seeing equipment being removed.”

    Karol went on to specify that “equipment that we use to process mail for delivery”—including sorting machines—is being removed from Postal Service facilities in Iowa as DeJoy rushes ahead with policies that, according to critics, are sabotaging the Postal Service’s day-to-day operations less than 90 days before an election that could hinge on mail-in ballots.

    Observers reacted with alarm to Karol’s comments, viewing them as further confirmation that DeJoy is deliberately attempting to damage the Postal Service with the goal of helping Trump win reelection in November.

    Ya think? What else would removal of sorting machines be?

    Karol’s remarks come as members of Congress and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans are demanding DeJoy’s immediate resignation or removal in the wake of his displacement of nearly two dozen top Postal Service officials late last week—a major leadership overhaul that critics dubbed a “Friday Night Massacre.”

    According to internal Postal Service memos obtained by Reuters, DeJoy—a former logistics executive with tens of millions invested in USPS competitors—was aware his operational changes would lead to mail delays. As Reuters reported:

    The reorganization, introduced in July, has resulted in thousands of delayed letters in southern Maine, as delivery drivers follow a new directive to leave on time, even if the mail has not been loaded.

    Delays have also been reported in at least 18 other states, according to media reports.

    “One aspect of these changes that may be difficult for employees is that—temporarily—we may see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor or docks,” says one memo, dated July 10. The plan hopes to eliminate 64 million working hours nationally to reduce personnel costs, according to another memo.

    And to steal the election and to destroy the Postal Service so that the for-profit outfits can make more profit.

    In a statement over the weekend, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) warned that Dejoy’s “nefarious collective efforts will suppress millions of mail-in ballots and threaten the voting rights of millions of Americans, setting the stage for breach of our Constitution.”

    “It is imperative that we remove him from his post,” said DeFazio, “and immediately replace him with an experienced leader who is committed to sustaining a critical service for all Americans.”

    Do it.

  • Proudly support

    Stonewall wants us to know that oh yes it definitely does support the swift and easy prescription of puberty blockers.

    Sterility and arrested brain development, rock on!

  • Voting rights not their thing

    Trump is telling us right out in the open that he’s carefully kneecapping our ability to vote by mail, i.e. rigging the election so that he can keep destroying everything while piling up more money for himself.

    Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network on Thursday morning, Trump appeared to confirm that he opposes Democrats’ proposed funding for mail-in balloting and the U.S. Postal Service in order to make it more difficult to expand voting by mail.

    “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

    And he doesn’t want “them” to have it because “they” will vote his sorry ass back to Queens.

    Trump also alluded to this idea at a news conference on Wednesday evening, noting that Democrats are now asking for $3.5 billion for universal mail-in voting and an additional $25 billion for the Postal Service.

    “They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Trump said. “Are they going to do it even if they don’t have the money?”

    He added: “But therefore they don’t have it. They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in votes.”

    And: “Therefore, they can’t do the universal mail-in vote. It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”

    He does love to repeat himself.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last year suggested that Democrats’ proposal to make Election Day a federal holiday — something that would logically increase turnout — was “a power grab that’s smelling more and more like exactly what it is.”

    “A power grab,” meaning grabbing the power of getting elected via full voting rights. Republicans want to make it difficult to vote – so what does that tell you? Who is really “grabbing” power here? Isn’t it more of a “grab” to suppress the vote among people who would vote you out?

  • One of his trademark fits of pique

    So of course we get this:

    Thanks What a Maroon for alerting us to that.

    “So what?!” says Tucker Carlson in fake fox anger.

    Margaret Sullivan in the Post:

    Not only did Carlson mispronounce it, but when a guest went out of his way to politely correct him, Carlson had one of his trademark fits of pique.

    The exchange went like this:

    “Tucker, can I just say one thing?” said Richard Goodstein, an adviser to Democratic campaigns.

    Carlson: “Of course.”

    Goodstein: “Because this will serve you and your fellow hosts on Fox. Her name is pronounced ‘comma’ — like the punctuation mark — ‘la.’ Comma-la.”

    He went on: “Seriously, I’ve heard every sort of bastardization of her —,” and then Carlson broke in: “Okay, so what?”

    With his familiar mocking laugh, Carlson demanded to know what difference it made if he pronounced it KAM-a-la, with the first syllable like “camera.” Or Ka-MILL-a. Or, properly, Comma-la.

    The difference it makes is it’s just basic. Get people’s names right. Oh and while we’re at it, get the adjectival form right too – it’s not “Democrat party” and “Democrat senator,” the adjective is Democratic. British news media please note.

    In Carlson’s case, he used his guest’s correction to begin one of his typical rants. Making a fuss over her name, he argued, only proves how Democrats don’t want Harris challenged in any way at any time.

    You don’t “challenge” political figures by getting their names wrong. You do it by making substantive criticisms of their actions and/or policies – not their looks, not their clothes, not their accessories: their actions and/or policies. You can do that and pronounce their names correctly both at once.

  • Coded language

    Of course Trump is calling Kamala Harris the N word.

    President Trump has called magazines, pharmaceutical advertisements and questions “nasty.” He has called rumors, numbers and one unnamed TV columnist who gave “The Apprentice” a bad review “nasty.” He has called men “nasty,” and he has called women “nasty.”

    So of course he wasted no time in using it on a woman who is more intelligent and impressive than he is.

    Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the president described Harris’s questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as “extraordinarily nasty” — “nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing.” He also said she was “the meanest” and “the most horrible” in pressing Kavanaugh. And Trump said her debate stage attacks against Biden during the Democratic primaries were “very, very nasty.”

    Which, as I’ve mentioned before, is just absurd coming from the most foul-mouthed abusive insulting vulgar piece of shit who’s ever polluted the Oval Office by breathing in it.

    Calling a woman nasty, say many experts and women in politics, is another way to deliberately dismiss and demean female politicians.

    “It really has become coded language for a woman, and it tries to put her in a place that is unacceptable to society,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women across the country. “Our society allows for poor behavior by men but has little acceptance for anything but perfection by women, and so a term like ‘nasty’ really is just coded language, at least for a certain piece of the population.”

    It’s also belittling though. It sounds feeble; mean but feeble. Especially in Trump’s Queens accent. (That’s me being nassssty.)

    Aparna Thomas, a professor of politics and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Cornell College in Iowa, said the descriptor is “dismissive” and signifies that “women are not to be taken seriously.” She said it was significant that “nasty” was the inaugural attack Trump hurled at Harris once she became Biden’s running mate.

    “That’s the first thing that comes to the president’s mind, is that she’s to be dismissed and that she’s a nasty woman,” Thomas said. “We’re now back to 2016, where we have a vice-presidential candidate who is female and is still being judged by a different set of standards set by men.”

    We never left it.

  • Steak and potatoes; “bland is best”

    Jonathan Chait wrote a thing in New York magazine last month, about anti-racism training and some eccentric ideas some such trainers (or entrepreneurs) have embraced. In Googling for more I saw that National Review and Don Junior were also interested, so keep that in mind – but even National Review and Don Junior aren’t wrong about everything. (Nearly everything, in Junior’s case, but not quite everything.)

    The star of anti-racism training is Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame. What Chait focuses on is the whiteness studies part.

    The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation. The museum’s page summarizes what it calls “white culture” in this astonishing graphic:

    What’s the problem? The problem is ascribing things like “emphasis on scientific method” to whiteness ffs! Bam, with one blow of their fist they declare black people uninterested in science. That will work out well! I guess Katherine Johnson was just mistakenly trying to be “white” with all that math skill she had? Neil Tyson should have played basketball instead?

    And by the way this dreck was created by white people, for…anti-racism training. What would pro-racism training look like?

    Also the graphic is full of baby talk. In the second item on the list, Family Structure, it says “father, mother, 2.3 children is the ideal social unit.” It is? White people think 2.3 children is the ideal? What do they do with the .3 of a child?

    It’s confused, it’s dopy, it’s talking about different things at different times, it’s a grab bag, it’s silly. The section labeled “history” – what is that even supposed to mean? History as taught in school, history as scholarship, history as museum gift shops, what? And it’s not true.

    But the worst part is including various instrumental virtues and treating them as part of whiteness when what they are part of is what it takes to get shit done. Oh no, planning for the future! Paying attention to time! How hideously pale, everyone must do the opposite!

    Chait comments:

    “White” values include things like “objective, rational thinking”; “cause and effect relationships”; “hard work is the key to success”; “plan for the future”; and “delayed gratification.” The source for this chart is another, less-artistic chart written by Judith Katz in 1990. Katz has a doctorate in education and moved into the corporate consulting world in 1985, where, according to her rĂ©sumĂ©, she has “led many transformational change initiatives.” It is not clear what in Katz’s field of study allowed her to establish such sweeping conclusions about the innate culture of white people versus other groups.

    Also: she is white. It’s almost as if it’s a cunning plan by actual racists.

    The African-American History Museum took the page down after all this hostile attention. Good move.

  • $36 million, or maybe $157 million

    Meanwhile we mustn’t lose sight of the filthy corruption of “senior adviser” Ivanka Trump. (Her brothers are just as filthy but they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House, they don’t insert themselves into conversations among heads of state at international meetings, they don’t take Daddy’s place at the table at international meetings, they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House.)

    Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, earned at least $36 million in income outside their White House roles in 2019, according to financial disclosure forms released on Friday. 

    The income, first reported by The Washington Post, is from the businesses, properties, and other assets owned by the couple.

    “Conflicts of interest?” [giggle, simper] “What are those?”

    According to the Post, the amount is about $7 million higher than their earnings in 2018, and the real amount may be as high as $157 million, as the Office for Government Ethics does not require officials to submit exact but only approximate income figures. 

    …

    Ivanka Trump closed her fashion business in 2018, a year after after taking a role in the White House. The business had been subjected to a boycott campaign when she initially refused to close it despite working in a government role. She continues to own a stake in her father’s business, the Trump Organization, and has a wide range of other assets.

    According to the disclosure forms filed to the Office of Government Ethics, she received $4 million in income from the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC.   

    The one that foreign officials and others seeking favors from Trump lavish money on. Massive throbbing conflict of interest.

    Kushner decided earlier this year not to divest of stocks in a real estate tech start-up, Cadre, he co-founded, despite being advised by government ethics lawyers to do so, government ethics nonprofit CREW reported in July. 

    The company has received $90 million in investment from foreign sources, according to The Guardian. 

    “That’s unethical, Junior.”

    “MmmmmmI don’t care, gonna keep it anyway.”

    Filthy filthy filthy.

  • New medical advice: let’em all die

    Donnie Disaster has added a quack to his pandemic team. Donnie D introduced him yesterday at the “press briefing.”

    The man Trump was pointing to was Dr. Scott Atlas, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who frequently appears on Fox News and has advised Republicans in the past. And crucially, unlike the government’s medical experts who have advised Trump until now, has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to Trump’s — including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as “hysteria” and pushing for the resumption of college sports.

    Just what we need – even more murderous denialism about the pandemic.

    “He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus,” Trump said. “And he has many great ideas. And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.”

    “And and and he thinks I’m a really good boy and and he said I could have ice cream and and and you’re not the boss of me shut up bang bang I have to go potty now.”

    Although Monday was Trump’s first public introduction of Atlas, multiple sources with knowledge of the relationship told CNN that Atlas has been informally advising Trump for weeks. Trump first noticed Atlas on Fox News, where he asserted it doesn’t matter “how many cases” there are in the US, wrongly claimed those under 18 years old have “essentially no risk of dying,” implied teachers who are at high risk for contracting Covid-19 should “know how to protect themselves,” baselessly claimed “children almost never transmit the disease” and without evidence blamed a rise in cases in southern states on protests and border crossings.

    A reckless hack, in other words. Fabulous. Trump has almost 3 months left to kill us all; do you think he can manage it? (He has another almost 3 after that but I think lame-duck killing is a little more difficult.)

  • Delete delete

    Mermaids? Mermaids who? I think you must have the wrong number.

    https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1293508438903918592

    Maybe the same reason the BBC did.

    https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1293569715428884482

    Along with the non-stop bullying of women.

  • Seeking support

    Oh have they now.

    The BBC has quietly dropped four LGBT+ charities from an information page for transgender people seeking support.

    The LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, The Gender Trust, and The Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) are all registered British charities that provide vital support and advice for trans, non-binary and gender-questioning people.

    “Support” in the form of eager encouragement of delusional thinking.

    As recently as June 29, they were all listed on a page on the BBC website called “Information and Support: Gender Identity”.

    Pages such as this are often linked to under BBC articles or videos covering topics people may need further support or information about, including gender identity, sexual or mental health, and addiction issues.

    But signposting to the four charities on the transgender support page has been stripped away with no explanation, leaving behind no information for those seeking help.

    Innnnteresting. The truth is emerging so the BBC is carefully backing away?

    Mermaids, a charity that supports trans and gender-questioning children and their families, said it was concerned to learn that the BBC had removed trans charities from its trans help page, and called for an immediate explanation.

    Yes WHY is the BBC no longer sending people to “charities” that encourage mutilation and/or life on puberty blockers?

    Before and after:

    Mermaids had better start looking for lawyers.

  • Actually, be extremely careful

    From The Australian:

    Australia’s psychiatrists have been urged to be very cautious about giving official backing to gender clinic treatments for under-18s after an international scandal over false claims of mental health benefits for transgender surgery.

    The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists should be “extremely careful” before endorsing so-called “gender affirming” hormonal treatment and surgery for minors, according to Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists whose members look after patients in the private and public sector.

    In other words don’t cut crucial bits off people or give them dangerous hormones, or both, unless you’re very sure it will be beneficial. (Shorter: first, do no harm.) You’d think that would be self-evident, but it hasn’t been.

    The country’s biggest gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne has asked for more public money to start double mastectomies on girls under 17 who identify as male, with director Michelle Telfer claiming in July 2019 that “chest reconstructive surgery” improves mental health.

    Chest reconstructive surgery probably does improve mental health where it’s needed, but the issue here is cutting healthy breasts off.

    This month, the prestigious Journal of American Psychiatry had to publish an extraordinary correction to an October 2019 US-Swedish paper hailed as a global breakthrough in a field where even gender affirming clinicians admit the evidence is short-term and low-quality.

    The peer-reviewed paper was the first to use official Swedish data, which is unusually comprehensive, to claim that surgery such as mastectomy or genital reconstruction reduced the need for mental health treatment by 8 per cent a year over the ensuing decade.

    “No longer can we say that we lack high-quality evidence of the benefits of providing gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them,” said study co-author John Pachankis, who directs the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative at Yale University.

    Newsweek touted the finding and claimed that scientists said “such (surgical) interventions must be as easy as possible to access.” Yeah deffo, girls should be able to walk in off the street and get their breasts lopped off just by asking. What could go wrong?

    On August 1, the American journal published a correction, an editorial and letters from a dozen psychiatrists, clinicians and researchers in four countries identifying multiple flaws in the 2019 paper, with the conclusion that the data showed no improvement in mental health after surgery or hormonal treatment.

    Oops. Sorry, everyone who had bits cut off in the intervening ten months.

    “It has great international significance,” said Paul McHugh, one of America’s most distinguished practitioners, former chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and co-author of one of the letters run by the journal.

    He said the correction would make gender affirming advocates “a lot more cautious” when making scientific claims because “they’ll know people are watching”.

    “Peer review is not going to God, it’s going to the common thought of the day, which in psychiatry is usually good, but every 10-15 years it gets lost in some misadventure,” Professor McHugh told The Australian.

    He predicted the excesses of gender affirming treatment — like the 1990s “enthusiasm” over repressed memory and multiple personality — would be reined in by the courts, not by the psychiatric profession.

    That 1990s enthusiasm is what this cult always reminds me of. It’s just as enthusiastic, in fact more so, and it’s even more wacko.

    Media outlets which reported the 2019 study’s result have yet to cover the journal’s correction.

    Too busy reporting on the evil doings of TERFs.

    H/t Lady Mondegreen

  • No YOU’RE the empty signifiers

    The Kamala Harris news has given me a second wind so I’ll go back to TERF wars an intro for a bit.

    The next theme, after the “cis women and white fragility” bullshit, is “what do they mean it’s an ideology??”

    The language of ‘gender ideology’ originates in anti-feminist and anti-trans discourses among right-wing Christians, with the Catholic Church acting as a major nucleating agent (Careaga-PĂ©rez, 2016; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). In the last decade the concept has been increasingly adopted by far-right organisations and politicians in numerous American, European and African states. They position gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’, as represented by multinational corporations and international bodies such as the United Nations…

    Here they’re mashing together lesbian and gay rights with trans activism, and calling it “gender egalitarianism” – but that’s not what it is. It wouldn’t be “racial egalitarianism” for white people to insist they “identify as” black and then bully the crap out of any black people who didn’t agree. That would be an insult, and nothing to do with egalitarianism. Same with the “gender is realer than sex” move.

    Yet, what is actually meant by ‘gender ideology’ (along with anti-feminist uses of terms such as ‘genderism’ and ‘gender theory’) has not been clearly defined: as ElĆŒbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff (2018, p. 799) argue, ‘these terms have become empty signifiers, flexible synonyms for demoralization, abortion, non-normative sexuality, and sex confusion’.

    Now they’re mixing it up with feminism. No, “gender ideology” or “trans ideology” is nothing to do with abortion, it’s to do with men insisting, with menaces, that they can become women just by saying so, and that women have to embrace them as such or be punished to the fullest extent of the bully’s energy.

    Ultimately, the growing social acceptance of trans and non-binary people has challenged immutable, biologically derived conceptualisations of both ‘femaleness’ and ‘womanhood’.

    No it hasn’t. It’s feminism that does that. Trans ideology is undoing the work of feminism, not continuing it.

    About that word “TERF” – it’s a tool of the powerless.

    Certainly, TERF (like ‘cis’) is often used in angry commentaries online by both cis and trans feminists, either as an accusation (e.g. ‘you’re a TERF’) or an insult (e.g. ‘fuck off TERF’). Yet, it is important to understand and account for the power dynamic at play here. In examples such as those above, members of a marginalised group and their allies seek to identify, and express anger or frustration at, a harmful ideology that is promoted primarily by and in the interests of those who are systemically privileged as cis…

    Definitely. Men who say they are women are the tragic marginalised group, persecuted by the domineering all-powerful women, as has been true since the beginning of time. Also “TERF” is not a slur, because TERFs choose to be TERFs.

    This does not, however, mean that ‘TERF’ actually functions as a slur. Christopher Davis and Elin McCready (2020), for example, have argued that while the acronym can be used to denigrate a particular group, this group is defined by chosen ideology rather than an intrinsic property (in contrast to trans people for instance, or women). It is this denigration of a group defined by an intrinsic property that is necessary to constitute a slur. Moreover, in the case of ‘TERF’ the act of denigration does not function to subordinate within some structure of power relations (in contrast to acts such as misgendering, and sexist slurs such as ‘bitch’).

    These three goons are sociologists, don’t forget. Marvelous what a grasp they have of power relations, isn’t it.

    Furthermore gender critical feminists just don’t get it.

    As noted above, ‘gender critical’ feminists’ arguments often run against (and ignore) decades of feminist theorising on the ontological and epistemic status of ‘womanhood’ and ‘femaleness’ (see also Hines, 2019). Gender scholars (e.g. Butler, 1990; Laqueur, 1990; Snorton, 2017; Warren, 2017) have shown how biological conceptualisations of sex are mediated by wider gendered as well as colonial and racialised norms that direct the social positions ascribed to different women and men, including one’s ability to claim a position as a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ in the first place. Western colonial narratives have not only constituted colonised racialised subjects as less than human, but also framed ‘womanhood’ and ‘manhood’ (defined in terms of white, European heteronorms) as characteristic of human culture, which colonised subjects were seen as unable to replicate due to their ‘primitive’ status. They thus remained female and male, at best, but were not granted the status of women and men (McClintock, 2013).

    Therefore, Caitlyn Jenner really is a woman so shut up.

    Then they explain away the issue of men taking over women’s sport to their own satisfaction.

     Sport regulators have a long history of anti-feminist stances and excluding women, including via implicitly ascribing inferiority to (all) women’s bodies for over a century (Erikainen, 2020). This exclusion has, however, disproportionately impacted racialised women from the Global South, in many ways because of the enduring discourses in the West that pre-position racialised (and especially Black) women and their bodies as unfeminine, failing to manifest normative ‘womanhood’ of the Western, white and middle-class form (Erikainen, 2020). Despite this, an alliance has emerged between powerful sport governing bodies and some ‘gender critical’ women’s rights advocates. The effect is that new iterations of older, gendered as well as racialised boundaries between ‘biological’ femaleness and ‘social’ womanhood are being drawn. Yet, it is women’s rights advocates such as Coleman herself who erase a deeply significant reality that has long been recognised in feminist (and especially Black feminist) politics: there is no single shared experience of female embodiment or ‘womanhood’ (Combahee River Collective, 1983; Koyama, this collection) – and neither chromosomes nor hormones ‘determine’ sex (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).

    So it’s fine for a white man to steal a wrestling medal from a Samoan woman.

    Sums it all up if you ask me.

  • Ketamine Don

    Trump can barely get the words out.

    He also says Harris was “very disrespectful” to Biden. Trump says that. Trump is the rudest person on the planet, and he says that. Also…

  • Hot ticket

    Good news I think, Biden’s choice. He’s such a lousy choice himself, he needs an exciting companion on the ticket. I know people have qualms about some of Harris’s work as a prosecutor, but I think she’ll rock it anyway.

    Once a rival for the top job, the California senator of Indian-Jamaican heritage had long been considered the front-runner for the number two slot.

    The former California attorney general has been urging police reform amid nationwide anti-racism protests.

    …

    Mr Biden had faced mounting calls to pick a black woman as his running mate in recent months as the nation was convulsed by social unrest over racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans, a key voting bloc to the Democratic Party.

    What a good thing there were several highly qualified black women with relevant experience to choose from.

    I’m chuffed. It’s nice to have a bit of good news for a change.

  • Parentheses do all the work

    Now that I’ve calmed down a little I’ll tackle another chunk of Terfwarsanintro.

    By positioning (cis, white) ‘females’ as a category uniquely vulnerable to the threat of ‘male’ violence (and especially ‘biological’ male sexual violence), trans-exclusionary arguments around toilet access – including those advanced by self-proclaimed feminist groups – lend support to the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men).

    These discourses have racist undertones, as the implicit whiteness of the women who are the subject of protection means that racialised and especially Black women and non-binary people are more likely to be considered dangerously masculine (Patel, 2017).

    It would be funny if it weren’t so infuriating, the sleight of hand of it. They arbitrarily slap down this “(white)” card and then use it for yet more arbitrary “implicit” bullshit – they build assumption on assumption on assumption, none of it backed up by anything more than parentheses or the word “implicit.” It’s such obvious bullshit. “The implicit whiteness of the women” – but who says the whiteness is implicit?? Or explicit or relevant at all? And by the way what color are you?

    Moreover, discourses that position trans women and non-binary people as a ‘threat’ to cis women elude how (white) cis women’s ability to claim a position of vulnerability in this context is, itself, a reflection of the power that (white) cis women have over trans women (as well as racialised subjects of all genders).

    Karen, I tell you. Karen Karen Karen. No other argument is needed.

    Women don’t have power over men. Women don’t rape men, women don’t assault men in the street, women don’t kill men and then get away with it because they call it “rough sex.” Women as a class don’t have power over men as a class. Women as a class therefore don’t have power over trans women as a class (if trans women even are a class).

    One’s ability to be recognised or awarded a position as ‘vulnerable’ is conditioned by whiteness and gender normativity.

    Yes it’s such a privilege to be (and thus “awarded a position as”) vulnerable. The stats on violence against women make our favorite bedtime reading.

    I think that’ll be enough.