A press release from Seattle’s congressional representative Pramila Jayapal:

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, member of the House Judiciary Committee, issued the following statement after demanding and being given access to the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, Washington to look at conditions and speak with 174 immigrant women detained inside:

“What I heard from the women today being held at the detention center was heartbreaking. They are there only because of the Trump administration’s cruel new ‘zero tolerance’ policies of family separation. They spoke of fleeing threats of rape, gang violence and political persecution. They spoke of their children who have been killed by gangs and their fear of being raped. The mothers could not stop crying when they spoke about their children – young girls and boys who were taken from them with no chance to say goodbye and no plan for reunification.

“Of the 206 immigrants being held there, 174 are women. I spent almost three hours meeting with the women, almost all of whom are asylum seekers. They come from 16 different countries with the largest numbers from Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Over a third of the women were mothers who had been forcibly separated from their children, who range in age from 1-year-old to teenagers. The vast majority of the mothers have not spoken with their children in weeks and they have no idea where they are. Most have been held in detention for more than two weeks and many for over a month.

“They should not be held in federal prison, but the women I spoke to said SeaTac is the first place they feel they’ve been treated as human beings – thanks to the standards in place at government-owned and operated facilities, rather than the privately contracted facilities of DHS.

“The women talked of being held in Border Patrol facilities that they termed the ‘dog pound,’ because of inhumane fenced cages, and the ‘ice box,’ because temperatures are frigid and detainees are given no blankets or mats. They also spoke of lack of access to food and water, and said they suffered humiliation and verbal abuse from border agents who called them ‘filthy’ and ‘stinky,’ and told them that their ‘families would not exist anymore’ and that they would “never see their children again.’

“Also extremely troubling were the accounts of mass prosecutions, where individuals were processed through the court system in groups of up to 100 at a time with no ability to speak individually to a judge.

“I call on the Trump administration to release all of these individuals immediately, to give them access to attorneys to quickly process their asylum claims, and for them to be immediately reunited with their children. It is outrageous that Department of Homeland Security is violating human rights and our international legal obligations under human rights law to swiftly and humanely process asylum seekers. I will also continue to push to defund ICE, to completely reform the immigration detention system and end mass prosecutions by the Department of Justice, and defund any Department of Homeland Security programs that break up families.

“What I saw today is simply not who, we, as a country should be. This is cruel and inhumane treatment and we cannot allow it to continue on our watch.”

Helen Rosner in the New Yorker yesterday:

Bourdain’s fame wasn’t the distant, lacquered type of an actor or a musician, bundled and sold with a life-style newsletter. Bourdain felt like your brother, your rad uncle, your impossibly cool dad—your realest, smartest friend, who wandered outside after beers at the local one night and ended up in front of some TV cameras and decided to stay there. As a writer himself, he was always looking out for other writers, always saying yes, always available for interviews and comments. You had to fight through a wall of skeptical P.R. to get to someone like Guy Fieri, but Bourdain was right there, for everyone, in equal measure. He remembered names. He took every question seriously. He was twenty minutes early to every appointment, to the minute. Every newspaper, every magazine, every Web site that asked got its Bourdain quotes—and good ones, too! Not pre-scripted pablum but potent missiles of cultural commentary—bombastic wisdom, grand pronouncements, eviscerations of celebrities, flagrantly named names.

(I have to say, why would anyone want to get Guy Fieri? The boredom is profound.)

As Bourdain’s career grew, the truths he was positioned to tell grew, too. He was never able to shake off his association with the now pedestrian revelations of “Kitchen Confidential”—the cook’s antipathy toward brunch, the daily special as a dumping ground for leftover ingredients, the questionable integrity of Monday’s fish. But his Food Network show, “A Cook’s Tour,” his Travel Channel show, “No Reservations,” and his CNN show, “Parts Unknown” (which remains in production; at the time of his death, Bourdain was filming in France for the show’s twelfth season), allowed him to acknowledge that the point of his journeys—and of sharing them with his massive, ever-growing audience—was not a gastronomic fluency but a broader cultural one. In what is likely the most famous episode of “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain sat on low plastic stools at an unadorned noodle shop in Hanoi, Vietnam, eating bún chả with Barack Obama—at the time a sitting President. The meeting, which Patrick Radden Keefe chronicled in a Profile for the magazine, was momentous for both men—both had grown up in the shadow of the Vietnam War, and that conflict, its long shadow, and its human costs suffused the hour-long episode. Bourdain ended the episode on a brutal note, with an infamous quote from William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, a reminder of America’s racist dehumanization of the culture we at home had just spent an hour celebrating.

That’s why Parts Unknown was interesting, certainly – there was cooking and eating but there was also exploration of various kinds. And there was appreciation…I think the reason I got to like Bourdain as a person (as opposed to a shadow on tv) was because of the respect and gratitude he expressed toward the people doing the cooking, who were often ancient peasant women.

A year and a half ago, just after the Presidential election, I interviewed Bourdain for a profile in Eater, where I was an editor at the time. We sat for a few hours at a yakitori restaurant in midtown, eating chicken hearts and drinking beer. The Rome episode of “Parts Unknown” had just aired, and, as we settled into our conversation, I jokingly mentioned his obvious crush on the Italian actor and filmmaker Asia Argento, who had been featured in the episode. At the mention of her name, Bourdain’s large, tanned hand swept over the microphone of the recorder. “What do you mean, my crush on Asia?” he said, and I laughed, telling him his puppy-dog eyes were in every frame—not to mention his Twitter posts about the episode, which fairly breathed with infatuation. He took his phone out and scrolled through his recent tweets, asking me to point out specific evidence. “We’re trying to keep it under wraps,” he said.

Toward the end of that conversation—which had jumped around from the global rise of the far right to the responsibilities of celebrity to the frustrating futility of protest—I asked him, point blank, if he considered himself a feminist. His answer was long and circuitous, what I’d come to think of as classic Bourdain: more of a story than a statement, eminently quotable, never quite landing on the reveal. He talked about his sympathy for the plight of women and gay men, his formative years as a student at Vassar, his forceful resentment of the “bro food” movement with which he remained entwined, and his unwavering support for reproductive rights. “I don’t know if that makes me a feminist,” he said. “It makes me a New Yorker. Doesn’t it?”

In October of that year, Ronan Farrow published a story in The New Yorker detailing multiple women’s allegations of sexual harassment and assault by Harvey Weinstein. Asia Argento was a central figure in that story, detailing the effect that Weinstein’s predation had on her creative and personal life. Bourdain, whose public identity had been built for decades on a focussed, auteurish individualism, seemed to find in his relationship with Argento a transformative creative and political partnership. She consulted on “Parts Unknown” and stepped in to direct a recent episode set in Hong Kong. In turn, Bourdain’s sterling credentials as a man’s man and a taker of no guff served as a bolster of the #MeToo movement at large. His unwavering support of Argento—as well as his ardent rejection of so much as a quantum of sympathy for famous chefs accused of transgression—brought him a new sort of celebrity as an activist, a revered elder statesman, an overt and uncompromising figure of moral authority.

The last time I saw Bourdain was a few months ago, at a party in New York, for one of the books released by his imprint at the publishing house Ecco—of his many projects, his late-career role as a media rainmaker was one he assumed with an almost boyish delight. At the bar, where I’d just picked up my drink, he came up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Remember when you asked me if I was a feminist, and I was afraid to say yes?” he said, in that growling, companionable voice. “Write this down: I’m a fuckin’ feminist.”

I wish we could drag him back.

Kathleen Stock posted some comments, with permission and without names attached, to her two articles on sex, gender, and philosophy. They hold no surprises for anyone who has been following how these discussions go. Disciplines are named.

I really don’t have a settled view on any of the many issues here, but the lack of conversation and the hounding and bullying of anyone who expresses a thought (not even opinion!) that isn’t popular . . . all that is depressing and distressing. Predictably enough, I won’t be saying any of that in a public post, because I’m a precariously employed person and a lot of folk who might make significant decisions about my future career prospects have very strong opinions. A little cowardly, but also prudent, sadly. (Philosophy)

And to make it even more disgusting, it’s not a matter of disagreeing over rights or equality or how people should be treated – it’s a matter of bullying people into denying reality. Nobody I know of is arguing that trans people should be persecuted or denied rights. It’s not a “right” to demand that the world believe and echo personal claims that defy obvious reality. The crime is simply seeing trans women as trans women instead of seeing trans women as women – and it’s a deeply bizarre situation when that can be seen as a crime.

The whole thing makes me despair. I genuinely worry I can no longer tell first year students gender is a made up social construct. I just try to use sex where relevant not gender, and correct it in essays, and hope I don’t get into trouble.. last year I was doing gender with first years, and getting them to think about the constructedness of gender etc — and I asked ‘if we had a few years where, for example, the well-behaved girls in primary school weren’t seated next to the challenging boys to ‘socialise’ them, and where women weren’t told by strangers in the street to smile, and knowing a fetus was female didn’t mean a pink ‘gender reveal’ and everything that goes with it…. do you think as many people would feel they were in the wrong body, if your body only meant a) you can get pregnant or b) you can impregnate, and no other signifiers?’ And, genuinely, they went quiet and one of them said ‘I’m really confused now because I thought there was only one way to think about this, but there isn’t’. (English)

There isn’t, but there might as well be.

The whole thing strikes me as just old-fashioned misogyny presented as something new and worthy. Which I think might even make it more pernicious. If the interests of one group clash with the interests of another on some issue, it is usually accepted that we need to take both kinds of interests seriously in debate about how to resolve the clash. But in this case, even entertaining the hypothesis that the interests of (non-trans) women might be negatively affected by some of the proposals that are being put forward is routinely taken to be off-limits. Let alone taking those interests seriously. (e.g. everyone conveniently forgetting that there were ever any arguments for having women-only spaces). What an effective tool for oppression — make it verboten to even entertain the question of how women’s interests might be affected!

There’s something peculiarly sneaky (and peculiarly insulting) about the fact that the tool that’s being used to oppress women in this case is right-on-ness. Like the view is that it’s because we really ought to be caring and considerate and aware of how bad it is to oppress people that women should shut the f*** up and stop getting in the way of what other people want. (Philosophy)

There was a tweet I saw this morning…

I utterly reject the colonisation of women’s space by TERFs and call upon our cis allies to do the same. Women’s space belongs to all women, cis and trans. TERFs have no right to plant their flag on it and start remaking it in their own image like some sort of gender gentrifiers.

A man who “identifies as” a woman accusing feminist women of the “colonisation” of women’s space. You couldn’t make it up.

There are more comments. They are of interest.

From Kathleen Stock’s piece What I believe about sex and gender (and what I don’t):

I am also asked, more generally, what I think being a woman is. I’m fairly sure it isn’t a feeling in the head, or a set of ‘feminised’ preferences and behaviours. I don’t feel like a woman, particularly, and most of my preferences and behaviours are not remotely feminised. I am nonetheless a woman. For the rest, I am still thinking about it. I severely regret the list of restricted options available in the academic literature. Philosophers who in other contexts are highly creative in theorising about ontological matters tend in this area to state certain rather simplistic mantras dogmatically, no doubt partly out of fear of criticism. (Indeed it is not clear that any other sort of claim would be published).

The fear of criticism has another aspect, which is fear that the criticism would be justified because saying something other than the simplistic mantras would be in some hard-to-specify way damaging to trans people. In other words there’s self-regarding or self-protective fear and then there’s also altruistic or solidarity-based fear. That’s part of what’s going on: the unease that maybe one is wrong, maybe doubts about the power of “identifying as” are as cruel and harmful as the angriest activists say.

There is a strong strain of misogyny running through this discussion, which automatically treats the experiences of transwomen as more worthy of attention than the other, much bigger set of women who are materially affected by the expansion of the legal and political category to which they belong. This is fuelled by the popular media and press, which knows that transwomen are more attention-grabbing than boring old non-transwomen, on the whole (after all, there are so many of the latter! They are not in the least ‘exotic’ or ‘interesting’).

And that’s a problem.

Moreover, if you capitulate to the easy sentiment that all Gender Critical views are transphobic, you are automatically going to rule out properly talking about what many non-transwomen are concerned about, since it will then constitute a social taboo to do so.

You are going to and you do, every day, every hour.

I don’t usually join the mourning when a famous person dies because…I don’t know, I guess because non-famous people die too and there isn’t a big public fuss (naturally: that’s what “famous” means), so I at least keep mum unless it really gets to me. Oliver Sacks was one. Anthony Bourdain is another. I watched his show occasionally (I rarely have access to cable), and I learned stuff from it and I liked his way with the people he met. Just the other day there was one where he talked to guys in Nagorno-Karabakh ffs. Twitter is full of stories about what a mensch he was.

Frank Bruni remembers him:

Anthony Bourdain devoured the world. That’s not hyperbole. It’s not even metaphor. There was no place that he wasn’t curious to explore, no food that he wasn’t determined to try, no cap on his hunger and no ceiling, or so it always seemed, on his joy.

In his writing and especially on his TV shows, most recently CNN’s “Parts Unknown,” he exhorted the rest of us to follow his lead and open our eyes and our guts to the wondrous smorgasbord of life. He insisted that we savor every last morsel of it.

It turns out that he himself could not. Bourdain, 61, was found dead on Friday in a hotel room near Strasbourg, France, where he was shooting an episode of that CNN show. The cause, according to the network, was suicide.

His death ends a blazing career that contributed as much as anybody else’s to Americans’ increased fascination with, and knowledge about, food in all its multiethnic splendor. If we’re savvier to the ways of banh mi, bo ssam and dim sum than we were two decades ago, we have Bourdain in large measure to thank. With television cameras in tow, he showed us Asia, Australia, Africa — and he tasted all of them for us.

We couldn’t taste it with him, or smell it, but we could watch the preparation and hear the sounds and witness Bourdain’s enthusiasm.

Bourdain’s image, as conveyed through his epicurean odysseys, combined flavors of daring, irreverence and supreme confidence. He was appetite incarnate. He was wanderlust with a lavishly stamped passport and an impish, irresistible grin.

“If I am an advocate for anything, it is to move,” he once mused. “As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. It’s a plus for everybody.”

But also he did things like this, from the Grand Forks Herald:

Bourdain worked across the globe exploring cuisine and culture, but he also worked with our own local celebrity, Grand Forks Herald columnist Marilyn Hagerty.

When Hagerty’s 2012 review of the Grand Forks Olive Garden went viral, Bourdain defended her column and praised her work ethic when the review was targeted by online mockery. In no time, much of the internet joined his embrace of her writing.

Bourdain also was instrumental in helping Hagerty publish “Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 100 Reviews.” In an article published by the Herald in 2013, Bourdain called the book a “history of Hagerty,” and complimented her on her hard work ethic.

Grand Forks, North Dakota is not one of the glamour spots of the world, much as Nagorno-Karabakh is not.

Updating to add this tweet that has more details about how Bourdain reached out to Marilyn Hagerty:

An octogenarian columnist who’d written a review about a new Olive Garden in her small city was ripped to shreds by pretentious assholes in the food blogging community and beyond.

Anthony Bourdain flew her to New York for a meal at Per Se. Then he wrote the forward to her book.

— Zac Echola (@celiasojourn) June 8, 2018

An octogenarian columnist who’d written a review about a new Olive Garden in her small city was ripped to shreds by pretentious assholes in the food blogging community and beyond.

Anthony Bourdain flew her to New York for a meal at Per Se. Then he wrote the forward to her book.

Trump hired Heather Nauert from Fox News to be a spokesperson for the State Department. Maybe it would have been better if he’d chosen someone a little more educated about Forrin Stuff.

“We have a very strong relationship with the government of Germany,” Heather Nauert said.

“Looking back in the history books, today is the 71st anniversary of the speech that announced the Marshall Plan. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship with the government of Germany.”

Yeah, boy, the D-Day invasion just wouldn’t have been the same without our warm relationship with Germany.

The State Department spokeswoman was defending remarks made by the new US ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, which drew condemnation from across Germany’s political spectrum.

Mr Grenell, a former US spokesman at the United Nations and a strong supporter of Donald Trump, told the far-right Breitbart News he “absolutely wants to empower” European conservatives who are “experiencing an awakening from the silent majority”.

He was referring to recent elections which have launched conservative parties in Germany, Italy, Hungary and Austria, which he said showed “a groundswell of conservative policies that are taking hold because of the failed policies of the left. There’s no question about that, and it’s an exciting time for me”.

Mr Grenell’s comments drew criticism from German politicians, including warnings against interfering in domestic politics.

When she was asked whether it is State Department policy for US ambassadors to advocate for particular political parties, Ms Nauert responded: ”Ambassadors have a right to express their opinion. They’re representatives of the White House, whether it’s this administration or other administrations.”

Anybody else think she had no idea whether it was State Department policy or not? And cared even less?

So let’s take a closer look at what Audrey Yap is saying in that comment, which followed several comments about the epithet “TERF” and whether it’s a pejorative or not.

I don’t happen to find the term problematic, personally, but I also don’t share views with anti-trans feminists about these issues, which means it doesn’t apply to me so I don’t have much of a stake in it. So I’m fine with not using it.

So setting aside the question of terminology, what I do have a serious problem, with, are people who are happy to speculate about gender identity, and whether trans women are really women, as though it were an abstract philosophical puzzle to be solved, and not something that is about actual living people. When taking one side of an argument involves the invalidation of a lot of people’s identity and lived experience I think it’s right that we be extremely hesitant to take it. That’s not to say it’s entirely off limits to talk about gender identity or to disagree with trans folks or other feminist philosophers. Not all trans folks or feminist philosophers agree with each other on these issues anyway. But cis people and trans people have a different stake in the matter.

What I wonder is whether the grave concern about “the invalidation of a lot of people’s identity and lived experience” applies everywhere or only to the identity and lived experience of trans people (aka folks).

“Identity” covers a lot of territory – so much that it can become all but meaningless. Is it a general expectation that we should accept people’s accounts of their “identities” as true simply because they are their accounts? Is there never any reason to decline to be quite that trusting? Is there never any reason to be skeptical? What if someone claims to be a historian but appears to know nothing about the subject, for instance? Are you allowed to be doubtful?

Perhaps the difference is when many (and steadily more as time goes on) people make one particular claim about their identities, so that the rule doesn’t apply to one person but to several or quite a few or many?

Would that work with race? At present Rachel Dolezal is still seen as a bad joke and a self-aggrandizer, but what if a lot of white people started to “identify as” black? Would Audrey Yap then see it as a serious problem that some black people continued to be skeptical of such identifying, giving their reasons and (as she put it) “taking one side of an argument” that opposed the side that insisted those white people really are black?

Or what if a lot of Americans started identifying as undocumented immigrants from countries Trump considers shitholes? Not changing their lives or giving up the privileges of citizenship, but just “identifying as.” Would Yap see it as a serious problem if thoughtful people asked how that worked, what it meant, how “identity” was being defined?

I really do wonder. I wonder what the talismanic words “identity” and “lived experience” are construed as meaning, and if they apply broadly or narrowly, and how we can find out if there are people calling it a serious problem when we try to ask.

There was this today:

Two male-bodied trans gender runners came first and second. What do you say to the girls who train so hard but can never win? Yet can’t even say: this is not fair. https://t.co/P3KKNL4unZ

— Janice Turner (@VictoriaPeckham) June 7, 2018

Terry Miller of Bulkeley wins the 100m girls dash i. 11.72 (meet record). Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell 2nd, RHAM’s Bridget Lalonde 3rd #cttrack pic.twitter.com/4GmLRyicDI

— GameTimeCT (@GameTimeCT) June 4, 2018

And there was a piece by Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed with the subhead

Is philosophy really ignoring important questions about transgender identity, specifically what it means to be a woman?

As last year’s Hypatia debate revealed, writing philosophy about being transgender is tricky. There are outstanding debates about which questions actually matter and who is best situated to philosophize about transgender identity, along with pitfalls to avoid — arguably facile comparisons among them. (As you may recall, Hypatia’s editors and associate editorial board split over an essay comparing being transgender to being transracial).

So Flaherty implies that comparing transgender to transracial is facile, but why is it facile? She doesn’t say.

In a new, talked-about series of essays, Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, in Britain, brings another set of tricky question to the fore: If there are inherent differences in interests between cisgender women and trans women, why aren’t academics debating them?

“Something is afoot in academic philosophy,” Stock wrote in one essay she published on Medium. “Beyond the academy, there’s a huge and impassioned discussion going on, around the apparent conflict between women-who-are-not-transwomen’s rights and interests, and transwomen’s rights and interests. And yet nearly all academic philosophers – including, surprisingly, feminist philosophers – are ignoring it.”

It’s not surprising at all though. Last year’s Hypatia “debate” revealed why – it’s because of the colossal amount of bullying, shaming, dogpiling, ostracizing, and backstabbing that goes on if a feminist philosopher doesn’t ignore it. It’s not a genuine debate; it’s a highly dogmatic and pugnaciously enforced doctrine.

Stock suggests that part of the problem may be fear of being labeled transphobic for asserting that there are important differences between cisgender women and trans women — what is called the “gender-critical” position.

“May be”? Get serious.

Jenny Saul, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield in Britain and a moderator of Feminist Philosophers, borrowed a comment Audrey Yap had posted about another article on “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs, as cisgender women who don’t count trans women among their ranks are sometimes called. Saul said Yap, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria in Canada, did a “great job of explaining why many of us [are] very hesitant to have these discussions.”

Here’s what Yap said: “What I do have a serious problem with are people who are happy to speculate about gender identity, and whether trans women are really women, as though it were an abstract philosophical puzzle to be solved, and not something that is about actual living people. When taking one side of an argument involves the invalidation of a lot of people’s identity and lived experience I think it’s right that we be extremely hesitant to take it.”

These are philosophers, remember. Philosophy as a discipline is generally quite rigorous about defining terms, especially the terms that are at the core of what is being analyzed. Given that fact, I think it’s bizarre that Saul finds Yap’s comment “a great job of explaining.” To make sense of her comment we need to know what she means by “identity” and “lived experience” and how either or both can be “invalidated” by one side of an argument.

That is, after all, the pulsating spitting third rail of the whole thing – you may not try to figure out what all this means and how people back it up because if you do you are doing something very wicked to people’s “identity.” But what does that even mean? And in what sense is it political? Why is it a political absolute that “identity” must be respected? And is it even the case that identity in general must be respected or is it only this one kind, and if so, on what grounds? But don’t ask, because that invalidates…and around the circle we go again.