Yes but what does “identity” mean?

A tweet by Jameela Jamil:

This is a perfect display of how a worrying amount (not all) of cis-women essentially characterize trans women as nothing more than men playing dress up. It’s a complete denial of their identity. I personally see transwomen as strength in numbers in the fight against oppression❤️

First: no, not nothing more than men playing dress up. It’s not that simple. If it were there wouldn’t be all this to-do about it. If it were just men playing dress up no one would care. But I, for instance, do think trans women are not literally women, but rather have a fantasy about being a woman which they want to live out. A fantasy which people live out is a lot more complicated and consequential than just playing dress up.

Second: what does “identity” mean in the sentence “It’s a complete denial of their identity”? What does it mean to deny someone’s identity? What does it mean to treat “denial” of someone’s “identity” as a shocking outrage? Is identity brute facts about a person? Or is it like a soul? Or is it some magical third thing that no one can quite define?

Men don’t get to have an “identity” as women, because they’re men. Being a woman or a man is just a physical fact, and you can’t think or dream or project or fantasize your way out of it. You can break the social rules about being it, and you can decide to obey the rules that generally apply to the other sex, but you still can’t actually become what you’re not.

Third – it would be nice if trans women were strength in numbers in the fight against oppression, but things haven’t turned out that way. At all. Trans women have turned out to be furiously hostile to women and especially to feminists, so no, they’re not allies against oppression, they are themselves oppression.

How do we decide who belongs where?

I talked about this yesterday already, in reference to Laurie Penny’s “There is no LGB without the T,” but there’s always more to say. Stonewall preached the “all stand together” line in response to the debut of the LGB Alliance:

The LGBT community is at its strongest when we stand together 🏳️‍🌈 Let’s raise each other up today and every day. We are one #LGBTQFamily

That’s a lot of colors though – are they all one community and one family? And how do they know? How do we know, how does anyone know? How do we know who belongs in and who belongs out?

We know it’s not everyone. It’s a specific group, set, tribe, “community” – it’s not all humans. But then what makes it a community and family while the rest of the humans are not part of it? Why are trans women in while feminist women are out, for instance? What exactly is the commonality? And how does anyone know?

I suppose the truth is it’s a silly question, because they don’t mean it that way. It’s not meant as a statement of fact but as a demand for obedience.

You know that photo of Obama and others watching the raid that got Osama bin Laden?

This one?

Trump is jealous of it. His people tried to fake one up for him but they didn’t try very hard.

The chief official White House photographer for former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama suggested the Trump administration was posing for Saturday’s stern-faced Situation Room picture in the wake of a U.S. military raid that resulted in the death of a major ISIS figurehead.

Pete Souza, the former director of the White House Photography Office, called the timestamp of the Situation Room picture into question Sunday morning. Souza inferred that it’s very unlikely President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and several top administration officials and generals were actively monitoring the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s compound when the photograph was taken Saturday in Washington.

They mean implied, not inferred, but anyway, let’s see it.

Oh no no, I’m sure that’s not posed at all, everyone looks completely natural and unaware of the camera and just intent on…on…on that random bunch of wires not attached to anything, and on looking into the lens.

“The raid, as reported, took place at 3:30PM Washington time. The photo, as shown in the camera IPTC data, was taken at ’17:05:24,'” Souza remarked on Twitter Sunday. He was replying to a tweet from White House Director of Social Media and Assistant to the President, Dan Scavino Jr.

Well, sure, because Trump was playing golf at 3:30, but the photo taken at 5:05 is totally real.

The al-Baghdadi Situation Room photo Saturday showed Trump; Pence; National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien; Secretary of Defense Mark Esper; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army General Mark A. Milley; and Brig. Gen. Marcus Evans, Deputy Director for Special Operations on the Joint Staff. All six men are shown in stiff, postured stances, giving squinted glares toward the camera.

The Trump photo is far more symmetrical and organized than the Obama White House Situation Room picture taken during the bin Laden compound raid in 2011.

That’s because Trump’s people have discipline while Obama’s people were all slobs! It’s not at all because the Trump picture was posed.

The hideous bullies at Gendered Intelligence are doing their bit:

We would encourage everyone to write a letter of to GCC expressing your concern about the barrister in question and the new group.

Yeah! Everybody get together to get the black lesbian barrister fired! Social justice, maaaaan.

Jane Clare Jones retorts:

Stop trying to bully women who don’t agree with your ideology you jumped up totalitarians.

The more you bully us, the more people can see that this is not just about asking for compassion, it’s about asking for complete and total compliance.

We. Will. Not. Comply.

Seriously.

Any political project that decides a Black lesbian human rights lawyer is the enemy is not on the right side of damn history at all.

Unless Magic Idenninny trumps all.

From the Sunday Times:

A lesbian barrister who is under investigation for her stance on transgender ideology has said her chambers bowed to the “hate mob”.

Allison Bailey is being investigated by Garden Court Chambers after she hailed the launch of the LGB Alliance pressure group, of which she is a founding member.

Bailey was subjected to a torrent of abuse and death threats after she posted on social media: “Gender extremism is about to meet its match.”

The LGB Alliance has said its mission is “asserting the right of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men to define themselves as same-sex attracted”. Its stance that “gender is a social construct” faced immediate opposition from trans groups.

Garden Court said on Twitter that it was “investigating concerns” raised about the comments in line with Bar Standards Board policies. “We take these concerns v seriously & will take appropriate action.”

It did indeed.

Garden Court Chambers @gardencourtlaw Oct 24
We are investigating concerns raised about Allison Bailey’s comments in line with our complaints/Bar policies. We take these concerns v seriously & will take all appropriate action. Her views are expressed in a personal capacity & do not represent a position adopted by Garden Ct

My reply:

If her views are expressed in a personal capacity then why are you investigating them, and not only that but announcing the fact on Twitter?

I thought it was revolting that they disavowed her in public like that.

Bailey said her chambers had “simply gone along with what the hate mob want” and were “offering me no support whatsoever”.

She pointed out that Garden Court, which handles many transgender cases, had signed up as a Stonewall “diversity champion”.

“The bigger picture,” she added, “is that Stonewall have signed up many companies, public bodies, voluntary sector organisation and government departments to their manifesto and their value system regarding trans rights. What we call Stonewall law. Without most of the public realising it, a large swathe of British employers have signed up to the Stonewall value system.”

The LGB Alliance has written to the Equality and Human Rights Commission to complain that Stonewall is using public funds to promote gender identity rather than gender reassignment as a protected characteristic. “So successful has ‘Stonewall law’ been that the planned compulsory education in primary and secondary schools from 2020 will tell children that ‘gender identity’ is a reality which they need to understand.”

Which is horrifying, given that it is in fact a fantasy and thus the opposite of a reality, and children don’t need to “understand” i.e. accept and believe a lie like that.

The usual shits are lining up to urge Gardencourt to fire Bailey.

No you may NOT leave, the doors are all locked, the windows are barred, no one can hear your screams.

Laurie Penny:

There is no LGB without the T. It’s deeply disappointing that a vocal minority has devoted its misguided energies to persecuting its vulnerable trans siblings instead of building a better world together. Transphobia is shameful and has no place in any progressive movement.

But there is LGB without the T, of course. How could there not be? They’re not the same thing, so why have people become so convinced so quickly that there is no one without the other? In one direction, that is – T is allowed to caucus by itself, but LGB is not. But why?

We got an answer of sorts. Alessandra Asteriti asked:

There was until 2015. Are you saying Stonewall was transphobic until 2015? Are you saying that while the T can have its own organisations, the LGB cannot? Are you even listening to your own little fascist homophobic voice?

LP answered:

1)a little bit, yes. They’re doing much better now! 2) There’s a difference when a group is organising specifically to exclude another marginalised group 3) don’t be silly

The answer is that LGB is not allowed to have its own organization because it’s doing so “specifically to exclude another marginalised group.”

That’s not a very compelling reason. The only reason it can even be said to be doing it to exclude another marge group is because T was arbitrarily and not very reasonably added to the LGB. If the T hadn’t been randomly tacked onto the LGB a few years ago there would be no need to pull the tacks out now.

And this word “exclude” is wildly overused, and unfair. “Exclusion” implies shutting people out who should be there – shutting them out for bad invidious reasons. Because it implies that, it should be used with care. I’m sitting here at my desk – just me. I’m not “excluding” the billions of people who aren’t sitting here at my desk too, I’m just not inviting them all in. I don’t have to invite them all in. Some facilities and organizations do have to let everyone in: specifically, public facilities like buses and schools and parks; that doesn’t mean they all do.

Activist groups can’t invite everyone in without instantly ceasing to be activist groups, because activism is about something, something specific, and so it “excludes” people who oppose that something, and it also “excludes” people who don’t oppose the something but do have a different something they are activist about. Feminist groups are not required to “include” environmentalists in their groups, even if they are environmentalists themselves. People are allowed to organize around their own concerns, and are not required to include people who want to organize around different concerns.

It’s pretty simple, and used to be taken for granted, but the Laurie Pennys and Owen Joneses are very invested in not seeing it.

Kate Manne’s next in the series is even loopier. To recap, the first was

Cis women confusing “erasure” with not being at the center of a discourse is fast becoming one of my pet peeves. Why not be inclusive of everyone who menstruates? There is no good reason. Obviously.

Next is

Same when it comes to pregnancy and breast/chestfeeding. The truth is, we *all* gain when these activities aren’t essentialized and made into part of some gross, reductive, naturalizing MIC (maternal industrial complex).

Gain? Gain what? What do I gain from being told that it’s not only women who menstruate, get pregnant, and breast feed? What, exactly, do I gain from that? All I’m conscious of gaining is fury and disgust, and I’m already well supplied in that department, between Trump and Brexit and DOCTOR Rachel McKinnon.

And why is it “gross”? Why is Kate Manne, author of Down Girl, calling it “gross” to point out that women are the people who do all the hard graft of making human beings? She sounds like a snotty little boy on the playground. It’s not “gross” that women (and women only) get pregnant, and it’s not gross to say that women (and women only) get pregnant.

That’s one infuriating byproduct of the trans nonsense: it’s training women, even feminist women, to echo that kind of disgust at the female.

It’s better, she says, without argument.

Being inclusive around all procreative activities is better for trans men and non-binary folks who participate in them; it’s better for cis women who don’t or can’t; it’s better for trans women who typically can’t; and it’s better for cis women who do, absent bad ideology.

Better how? Better why? How is it even possible to be “inclusive around all procreative activities”? Women can’t inseminate and men can’t gestate. It doesn’t matter how “inclusive” we all are; we still can’t swap all the repro jobs back and forth at will. And as for bad ideology…look in the mirror, pal.

Replies are scathing.

Kate Manne again:

Cis women confusing “erasure” with not being at the center of a discourse is fast becoming one of my pet peeves. Why not be inclusive of everyone who menstruates? There is no good reason. Obviously.

Women who purport to be feminists who talk contemptuously about “cis women” have been one of my pet peeves for years now.

You cannot do that and be a feminist – it makes no sense. Women are subordinated and dominated and treated with contempt because they are women, so using a hostile neo-label for them that means actual women as opposed to men pretending to be women cannot possibly be combined with advocating an end to that subordination and domination. Women do not derive “privilege” from being actual women as opposed to pretend women; women derive second-class status and misogyny and violence from being actual women as opposed to pretend women.

The people who menstruate are women and girls. Women and girls are shunned and persecuted still, to this day, in many parts of the world because and when they menstruate. Menstruation is part of the reproductive equipment that so many people think has to be harshly controlled and monitored, and thus part of why women are kept out of school and work, in concealing garments and purdah, from making their own decisions and deciding how to live their own lives. If some women decide they want to escape all that by “identifying as” men, let them, but that’s not a reason to start pretending that menstruation is an issue for men and boys as well as girls and women. It isn’t.

Remember last May when Naomi Wolf was informed on live radio that she was wrong on some of her facts?

A couple of days ago her US publisher just threw the whole book out.

The US publisher of a new book by Naomi Wolf has cancelled its release after accuracy concerns were raised.

Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love details the persecution of homosexuality in Victorian Britain.

But during a BBC radio interview in May, it came to light that the author had misunderstood key 19th Century English legal terms within the book.

Legal terms that were crucial to her whole argument. She thought they recorded executions when they did the opposite.

Following the BBC radio interview, Wolf admitted there were “misinterpretations” in her book.

Her UK publisher, Virago, had already published the book by the time the interview was broadcast, but said it would make “necessary corrections” to future reprints.

However, US publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt delayed publication, and has now cancelled it altogether, according to the New York Times.

You can’t blame them after this:

Dr Wolf alleged she had discovered that “several dozen” men were executed for having homosexual sex during the 19th Century.

“I don’t think you’re right about this,” Sweet replied, before detailing the term “death recorded” in fact meant that judges had abstained from handing down a death sentence.

“I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened,” he said.

In one particular case, he pointed out a 14-year-old boy had been discharged and not executed as she had detailed.

Oops.

Today Emilia Decaudin tweets:

It’s absolutely hilarious how many transphobic people from other parts of the world feel the need to jump on every tweet coming out of this account.

Was what I posted last night uncouth? Probably. Was I also out with good friends having a good time while being reminded of transphobic violence every time I scrolled through my feeds on my phone? Yes. Was every reply to my tweet ultimately transphobic in nature? Yes.

Uncouth? Not quite the right word, I think. He seems to have deleted the tweet but some of those naughty “transphobic people” kept the record.

Radical feminists can suck this guy’s dick. That’s not really “uncouth,” it’s more like rapey. It doesn’t mean radical feminists have his permission to suck his girldick, it means he’d like to force them to suck his girldick as punishment for not agreeing with him that he’s a woman.

But why was anyone paying attention to him in the first place? There’s a reason.

New York Democrats are preparing to change the way the party approaches gender.

The State Democratic Committee will vote Tuesday on a resolution amending party rules to be more inclusive of people who don’t identify as male or female.

Emilia Decaudin, the party’s youngest and first openly transgender member, pitched the shift as a way of leveling the playing field for gender nonbinary members or those thinking of getting involved in politics.

…

The resolution specifies that each district that elects two members of the state committee will choose a pair of people of “different” genders, rather than “one male and one female.” It also changes the language of certain bylaws and other party rules in order to remove explicit references to gender.

In other words a pair could be a man and Emilia Decaudin.

The Dems passed the new rules.

If we don’t like it we can suck his girldick.

Originally a comment by Sastra on YOU become responsible.

I just don’t get it.

One of the things therapists are trained to be aware of is what’s called the “Werther Effect,” named for an 18th century fictional character who killed himself, thereby setting off a rash of nonfictional suicides inspired by the romantic depiction. Suicide is in a sense contagious, and telling vulnerable populations that there’s a good chance they will die by their own hand is verboten. Even portraying victims as somehow noble or beset upon is risky — good intentions can backfire. You wouldn’t want to set up a program in high schools warning teens that the most popular reason for teen suicide is breaking up, for example. It would lead to an increase in teens killing themselves after a breakup. When Netflix put out a series called “13 Reasons Why” they were strongly criticized by people who work with adolescents.

And yet somehow telling and saying and explaining over and over again that TRANS PEOPLE WILL KILL THEMSELVES if they aren’t VALIDATED is just a dandy thing to say, sensitive and caring and valiant. The fact that pretty much everyone from psychologists to the media sets up the expectation in every trans person— particularly the young — somehow isn’t considered a grave lapse of responsibility and good sense. No, it’s now a good idea. And when they trot it out themselves, jump.

Another thing most therapists are taught is that it’s important to help people establish an inner locus of control, the strength and resilience to be able to live life happily without being dependent on what other people say or do. And again, this cardinal principle of psychology is thrown on the floor and danced upon when it comes to transgender. Not “I don’t need the approval of other people, I am sufficient in myself “ but “look what YOU MADE ME DO!!!!”

Seriously, wtf.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on More carefully, this time.

I can tell you how I understood trans to be part of the Pride rainbow, and I suspect it’s the same for many others:

I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on. In my mind, I always had a vague discomfort with transsexualism’s connection to gender stereotypes, but told myself not to think too much about it because I didn’t know what their experience felt like and I couldn’t judge, analogous to how homophobes don’t know what being gay feels like and don’t understand that it’s not a choice. And besides, these people were gender-role outsiders like us but only more so, coping with homophobia in their own way: very butch lesbians and very effeminate gay — and disproportionately nonwhite — men. (E.g., ’80s drag ball “vogue dancing” culture from the movie Paris is Burning or the TV series POSE.) So I had a rough sense that it was about being not just gay but doubleplus gay and also often discriminated along another axis to boot (woman; ethnic minority). These were very vulnerable people pushed to the furthest edges of society who often couldn’t find work outside of prostitution. And people like that absolutely exist — some trans people do fit that description.

From there it was kind of a boiling frog effect as my understanding of trans slowly broadened to include heterosexuals and not-particularly-gender-nonconforming-seeming males (e.g., Caitlyn Jenner; the dad in Transparent) and it never occurred to me that they weren’t any less oppressed than the first group of trans people even though they weren’t gay or women or nonwhite or poor or homeless or prostituted. Slowly the sympathy I had for the first group transferred to the latter, and I started to see trans people as oppressed simply because they are trans — because of the clothes and pronouns they prefer, and not because of underlying things like being extremely gender-nonconforming while female or nonwhite — and I didn’t readjust my thinking about whether or why this group of people is automatically more vulnerable than me. Their demands got louder (eg “trans women are women, period”) and the frog slowly boiled. Now I was expected to train myself to picture trans people as visibly more-or-less indistinguishable from “cis” people — anyone around you might or might not be trans and how would you even know if you haven’t asked them or seen their genitals! — but at the same time they were still the most oppressed people in the world. (But if they’re indistinguishable from everyone else, how are they oppressed, a little voice said. The answer: because a group of radical feminists won’t accept them as their adopted sex even if they’re indistinguishable from their “cis” counterparts. These feminists are working to unmask innocent, covertly trans people and force them back into their natal sex roles. Or something. I didn’t really bother to check.)

It was gender-neutral bathrooms that started me questioning things. At my workplace it didn’t make sense that we had to get rid of the women’s washroom altogether to accommodate transwomen. Surely we all agreed that women need separate spaces from men — surely the “woke” activists believed in feminism — and surely there were better ways to let (innocent, undetectable or minimally detectable, or more like suspectedly-but-we-dare-not-ask) trans women know we’re not going to challenge them if they use the women’s washroom. Surely if trans women were women, they’d be just as uncomfortable with men in their washrooms as “cis” women would be. Surely they’d be just as opposed to gender-neutral washrooms as any other women would be. But they aren’t — because they are not women. This is where I climbed out of the boiling water and my comrades kept cooking. For them, gender-neutral washrooms were just the beginning of gender-jumbling everything. The less trans activism made sense the more the kids started dismantling everything else in order to accommodate it. Now the very idea of distinguishing women from men is suspect. Now I’ve got female colleagues responding to my issues about the gender-neutral bathrooms with, “Well, I don’t have a problem with men in the women’s washroom.” (Implying that any woman who does is somehow inferior or wrong and not doing her duty to make room for transpeople.)

The behaviour of the bloggers at a certain supposedly progressive website (wink-wink) floored me, and then I really started looking into things and was shocked at the naked misogyny and male-entitled behaviour in trans activism. And the mass trans hysteria surrounding children and adolescents terrifies me. And now I’m watching more and more people begin to peak-trans as the whole thing starts to spin apart.

A striking headline:

Florida woman sets person on fire in Taco Bell, and then may have gone on arson spree, cops say

Underneath is, I guess, a mugshot of the Florida woman:

A Tallahassee woman may have went on a arson spree Wednesday and Thursday, starting at a Taco Bell where a woman was set on fire, cops say.

So apparently the Miami Herald has illiterate reporters and no editors, but more to the point, I’m puzzled as to why in the headline the beardy guy in the photo is called a woman while the woman he doused in gas and set on fire is called a person.

On Wednesday, Mia Williams, a 32-year-old who was born male but identifies as female, walked into a Taco Bell, doused a woman with gasoline and then set them on fire, Tallahassee police said.

Them? Why them? Mia Williams set HER on fire.

Williams ran away and the victim was taken to a hospital by helicopter with serious injuries. As of Friday, the victim was still being treated, police said.

But at the end of the article we are told Williams was charged with homicide so it appears the woman person died of her horrific burns. But don’t misgender Williams! Feel free to misgender the victim, but DO NOT misgender the male perp who killed the woman.

After Williams fled the Taco Bell there was a string of fires and a police pursuit.

At around 6:40 a.m., a Tallahassee fire truck spotted Williams on a bike and began following her. When an officer arrived, he tried to stop Williams by tazing her twice, but both shots weren’t effective, police said.

As Williams continued to ride away, the officer decided to drive his patrol car over a curb and pin the front tire of Williams’ bike to fence because “[she] was a serious risk to public safety.”

Ah thank god for “[she].” The cops must have referred to Her as “he” and thank god the alert reporter or editor caught it and fixed it in brackets. Too bad they didn’t catch and fix “may have went” and the other solecisms, but obviously rightgendering Williams is by far the most urgent thing about this story.

Police eventually arrested Williams and found a cigarette lighter in her pocket.

Williams was only charged in relation to setting the person ablaze at the Taco Bell, not with the fires that followed.

Tallahassee police say the car and church fires are still being investigated by fire officials.

Williams was charged with premeditated homicide, resisting an officer with violence and aggravated on an officer.

I wonder what it is that is causing this huge surge in women committing violent crimes.

Updating to add: the reporter is on Twitter (and getting quite a few critical comments), so I asked him about the being treated/homicide charge conflict and he said last he knew the victim was being treated and the police charge was what it was. Doesn’t really change anything but at least it wasn’t a typo.