BBC “LGBT & Identity Reporter” reports:

An American who wanted to be formally recognised as non-binary in the UK has been told by the Court of Appeal their gender identity does not legally exist in this country.

So much drivel in that one sentence. What is it to be “formally recognized”? What is “non-binary”? What is genner idenniny? What kind of damn fool goes to court to demand to be “recognized” as something nonsensical?

The Beeb includes a winsome photo of him. Wannabe winsome anyway. Pronounced head tilt, so that we’ll perceive his Special Idenniny instantly. He has head-tilt genner, aka broken neck genner.

Ryan Castellucci previously lost a High Court challenge to have their gender recorded as non-binary on a gender recognition certificate – a document which changes someone’s legal sex – after moving to the UK in 2019.

They had obtained legal recognition as non-binary in California in 2021, and were issued an American passport in 2022 listing their sex as ‘X’.

He had. He was. He’s just one guy, not a they.

At an earlier hearing, the court heard how Castellucci, a cyber security expert from California, uses the title “Mx” and refers to themselves using they/them pronouns.

Really? Instead of “I” and “me”? That must be massively confusing.

Non-binary is an umbrella term for those those who do not identify as exclusively male or female.

Talk gibberish, end up repeating your words words. It doesn’t matter what people “identify as” when it comes to brute facts. “Identify as” is for fictions and abstractions, not for humdrum bio realities like what sex you are.

Nope.

More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.

It’s tricky doing a tech-driven purge without engineers and data scientists.

The staffers who resigned worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service, an office established during President Barack Obama’s administration after the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans use to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrat’s signature health care law.

All had previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service.

I think we can be pretty confident it doesn’t pay more. Or as much.

Trump’s empowerment of Musk upended that. The day after Trump’s inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk’s’ Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.

And the ideology in question is the rather crude Spending Taxpayer Money Bad. We can’t all build our own roads or power plants or airports.

“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”

All sent by Musk who doesn’t even have a government job and is not even from here. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Trump regime people are quarreling over who can be most absurd.

Donald Trump has stepped in to defend Elon Musk from a mounting backlash in his own administration after some cabinet members told US federal workers to ignore the billionaire entrepreneur’s demand that they write an email justifying their work.

…

Newly confirmed cabinet officials, including the FBI director, Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, the national intelligence director, told underlings not to comply with a weekend order from Musk for all staff to send an email detailing their past week’s work by midnight on Monday or face termination.

Uh oh uh oh – if underlings can just disobey Musk then what’s next?

With his wealthiest and most high-profile lieutenant threatened with loss of face and authority, Trump used a meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron at the White House on Monday to deliver a vote of confidence.

Of course he did, because that’s totally the point of meetings with foreign heads of state.

A more audacious sign of dissent was on display at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud), where television monitors played what appeared to be AI-generated false images of Trump sucking Musk’s toes in a loop, with “long live the real king” written over the footage, according to the Washington Post, citing people working at the department.

Musk doesn’t take hints though.

Despite the backlash, Musk took Trump’s comments as a signal to again threaten workers with the sack.

“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” he posted on his own social media platform, Twitter/X, on Monday.

A later post mocked the resistance to his original email. “Absurd that a 5 min email generates this level of concern!” he wrote. “Something is deeply wrong.”

Wut? You can send a 5 min email that orders the military to install Trump as dictator and kill anyone who resists. What difference does the brevity of the email make?

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing about 800,000 of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce, said Musk’s original email was a cynical ploy aimed at intimidating workers into resigning.

“If we took the time to comment on each and every ridiculous thing that Elon Musk tweets out, we’d never get any work done,” Brittany Holder, a union spokesperson said.

He does tweet a lot. Those five minutes add up.

Never mind, at least Russia is happy. (Same article; part 2.)

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, acknowledged what he said were “constructive changes” in the US position on the conflict. US allies in Europe on the 15-member council – France, Britain, Denmark, Greece and Slovenia – abstained from the vote.

Ya “constructive changes” to side with Russia instead of Ukraine and most of Europe.

The UK’s ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, said after the vote that while London shared the “ambition to find a lasting end to this war”, there should be “no equivalence between Russia and Ukraine in how this council refers to this war”.

She added the UK regretted “our proposals making these points clear were not taken onboard, and as such we could not support this resolution”.

In other words the US is now the enemy of the liberal democracies.

It was the first security council resolution to pass during the war. The council had been unable to take any action because Russia holds a veto.

Russia did not veto the Trump administration’s resolution.

In contrast, and highlighting the US and Russia’s global isolation, the 193-member UN general assembly earlier backed a resolution drafted by Ukraine and the EU condemning Russia.

While security council resolutions are considered binding, general assembly resolutions are not. However, general assembly resolutions carry diplomatic and political gravity as they illuminate the global consensus on issues.

The US, Russia, Israel, Belarus and North Korea all voted against the EU-Ukrainian resolution, underlining an extraordinary shift since the election of Donald Trump, who has largely absolved Vladimir Putin of responsibility for the invasion.

North fucking Korea.

Yeah sometimes you don’t want “balance.” Some things are worse than other things, and there’s no need to take a more “balanced” view of the matter.

Kremlin welcomes ‘more balanced’ US stance on Ukraine after UN vote

Or to put it more honestly, Kremlin welcomes pro-Kremlin stance on Ukraine after UN vote. What the invaders call “balance” is in fact pro-invasion. No doubt the Nazis would have welcomed a more “balanced” stance on genocide; no doubt slaveowners in Georgia and Alabama would have welcome a more “balanced” stance on enslavement.

Moscow praises Washington for siding with it at UN, as European countries abstain in sign of deepening rift with US.

Good Washington [pat pat pat] Good boy [pat pat pat]

The Kremlin has welcomed what it said was a “much more balanced” US stance on Ukraine after the Trump administration pushed through a UN security council resolution on the war that included no criticism of Russia.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the move was evidence of Washington’s willingness to try to find a peaceful settlement. Moscow backed the resolution, which was passed late on Monday, although European countries abstained, in a sign of a deepening rift with Washington.

In a simple three-paragraph motion on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, the US took a neutral position on the war and called for a “swift end” to the conflict and “lasting peace”. It presented a sharply different tone to that of the Biden administration, which had supported Ukraine throughout.

Bullies and thieves hang together.

Well, they’re getting one thing right. Only one, but it’s That one.

Stonewall could be forced to cut up to half of its staff after President Trump’s decision to freeze foreign aid, The Times understands. Workers at the LGBTQ+ charity were told on Thursday that restructuring would take place, and that only roles with dedicated funding would be safe.

Simon Blake, the chief executive of Stonewall, made the announcement in an office-wide Teams call, which was said to have left its 114 staff “shellshocked”.

Sources said they believed up to half of the workforce could be made redundant in the move, which they were told would “secure the future of Stonewall for the long term as a significant LGBTQ+ organisation able to deliver impactful campaigns and legislative change across the UK and further afield”.

Of course they use silly (and American!) jargon like “impactful,” the dorks. “Campaigns that have an impact” will do just fine thank you.

Funding from the US came to Stonewall through the Global Equality Fund (GEF), administered by the US state department, which has given the charity more than half a million pounds in the past three years. The GEF focuses on “advancing LGBTI rights around the world” and is a pooled fund with contributions from numerous countries and private businesses, but it has not published accounts since 2015.

Plus it duct-taped the T to the LGB. Never duct-tape the T to the LGB.

There aren’t enough planks in the world to measure how thick Ash Sarkar is.

And I’ll tell you the sort of classic example of this, which I’ll go into some detail, you know that whole can a woman have a penis thing. [compliant host says yes] Right [hands up in dramatic gesture] fuuuucckkkin hell, can a woman have a penis – overnight it became theeeee preferred line of questioning for basically every political interviewer on British television – and I wondered where had this come from – like where had this line of questioning emerged from.

Golly gee, yes, where on earth could such a question possibly come from????

I will suggest, with all due respect, that it came from the sudden flood of men announcing that they were women and the flood of people cheering them on. It came from an effort to understand how people could believe such absurdity, and much more, how they could try to bully other people into saying we believe it too.

That’s where.

The scorching shame of it.

The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday on a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for its occupied territory to be returned that passed overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly.

The stench will never go away.

The U.S. delegation also abstained on its own separate resolution that called simply for a negotiated end to the war after European-sponsored amendments inserting new anti-Russian language also passed the 193-member body by a wide margin.

No anti-Russian language for us, no sirree. We love our Vlad.

Mike Bendzela asks:

I’m toying with a semi-autobiographical piece that I would like to publish at 3 Quarks Daily. It’s a “what-if” look at a kinda-effeminate boy (me) who grew up in the 1960s and what would happen if he were transplanted into the present with its trans mania: Would he be allowed to grow up to be a normal gay male adult?

I suspect many of these young “trans girls” are effeminate gay boys so full of internalized homophobia that they would do anything (with the support of parents and churches, of course) to avoid the dreaded fate of growing up to be gay.

I’m wondering if there are any clear, citable instances of young gay boys who were either transed or partially transed much to their regret and who learned late (perhaps too late) that they are simply normal gay boys?? These would give my speculative autobiography more authority, I think.

Thanks!

Doc Stock is on fire here:

When a doctor announces to colleagues that he wishes henceforth to be known as the opposite sex, it seems he is offered a new GMC number to go with the new name and pronouns, wiping out his past. Wes Streeting has raised concerns that this could be hiding the adverse findings of any previous disciplinaries from the public, supposed to be traceable via the same number.

In other words that’s part of the purpose of the GMC number, so it should be obvious that it should stay the same throughout a doctor’s career regardless of adjectival changes.

The health secretary’s point about safeguarding is so blindingly obvious you’d think it might have been raised when number switching was first mooted among GMC bigwigs — except, of course, that we are talking about an ineffable but highly potent substance, gender identity, known to paralyse even high-functioning minds upon first contact. 

As I said: on fire. “an ineffable but highly potent substance” is genius.

A belief in miraculous transformations also continues to bewitch the brains of some at the BBC hell-bent on using the preferred “she/her” pronouns of violent males no matter how lurid or criminal their back story. Last week on the corporation’s news website, the newly arrested leader of an allegedly murderous “vegan cult” in the US, Jack LaSota, was referred to as “she” throughout, despite the fact he is listed as male in the local sheriff’s database.

I missed that one. Gotta wonder how people manage to combine veganism and murder.

It has long been obvious that a declaration of a sex-mismatched gender identity will make trusting souls act as if a whole new person has suddenly been born — even better for public rehabilitation than being ritually humiliated in a jungle. Under normal circumstances it would be quite unusual for a woman who was also a former Ukip candidate, had admitted to strangling her wife and said publicly that Camden had “too many gays” to get onto Woman’s Hour or Celebrity MasterChef, but exceptions were happily made for the boxing promoter turned LGBT ambassador Kellie Maloney after transition.

…

We are not as naive as we once were, and the taste for Hollywood-style redemption arcs about finding your inner womanhood somewhere between arrest and the prison cell is dissipating. The public doesn’t seem as misty-eyed as back when a man putting on a dress was generally treated as a kind of secular canonisation.

On fire, I tells ya.

Still, there remains a general reluctance in polite society to spell out a point that grows more obvious with every news story about a “woman” arrested for paedophilia, voyeurism or sex attacks. So I’ll say it. We need to responsibly face the fact that certain men are attracted to identifying as women because they are already psychologically unstable; and the stories about how any subsequent predatory behaviour or aggression comes only from “societal transphobia” or “repressing who I really was” is a load of, well, balls.

It’s almost a tautology to say that people who identify as the sex they’re not are psychologically unstable.

I was going to run with this but then I paused. It could be fake. I think it might be fake. It’s just that little bit too much.

It’s that very last bit that overdoes it. Asking them to limit their own concerns to one day out of three or four a week so that he can feel happy is just that little bit too much. Just that little bit too Wally Smith, if you remember him.

USAID still being wiped off the map.

The Trump administration said Sunday that it was placing all but a fraction of staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave worldwide and eliminating at least 1,600 U.S.-based jobs.

The move was the latest and one of the biggest steps yet toward what President Donald Trump and cost-cutting ally Elon Musk say is their goal of gutting the six-decade-old aid and development agency in a broader campaign to slash the size of the federal government.

The move comes after a federal judge on Friday allowed the administration to move forward with its plan to pull thousands of USAID staffers off the job in the United States and around the world. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols rejected pleas in a lawsuit from employees to keep temporarily blocking the government’s plan.

“As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally,” according to the notices sent to USAID workers that were viewed by The Associated Press.

They’re keeping on a few people to arrange the plane trips home for the others, then it’s byebye to them too.

The move escalates a monthlong push to dismantle the agency, which has included closing its headquarters in Washington and shutting down thousands of aid and development programs worldwide following a freeze on all foreign assistance. A judge later temporarily blocked the funding freeze. Trump and Musk contend that USAID’s work is wasteful and furthers a liberal agenda.

But is it really a liberal agenda to buy global good will? However pricey it is it’s nowhere near as expensive as world wars.

How lucky for Musk that he just happens to be in a position to fire federal employees at will.

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is eliminating jobs at the vehicle safety agency that oversees his Tesla Inc., regulates the autonomous vehicles he says represents its future and has launched investigations into deadly crashes involving the Texas-based company’s cars.

Deadly crashes are the price we pay for other people having dangerous cars. Aren’t we lucky?

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has cut a “modest” amount of positions at the agency, which is tasked with ensuring safety on U.S. roads, it said in a statement Saturday.

The loss of three of the seven members of the specialized unit overseeing autonomous vehicles is part of a 10% overall workforce reduction at the agency enacted by Musk’s advisory group on shrinking the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.

Almost half the people overseeing autonomous vehicles are no longer overseeing automated vehicles. Fancy that.

The Tesla CEO has accused the agency of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations into crashes and recalls of vehicles. 

You are holding back PROGRESS with your pesky investigations into crashes, you filthy Marxists. Go get a job at Pizza Hut.

On Friday, Tesla recalled more than 375,000 vehicles due to a power steering issue. The safety administration said a circuit board may become overstressed, causing a loss of steering assist after a stop.

Ah, just a loss of steering, so nothing dangerous at all.

It turns out Trump doesn’t actually have the power to do what he’s doing. It looks as if nobody’s going to stop him all the same. I have to wonder why there are no enforcement mechanisms built in to all these rules and limits.

President Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government.

If Congress established the regulatory agencies as independent from direct White House control then Trump should be unable to get greater authority over them. Why are there no guardrails?

The order requires independent agencies to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review, asserts a power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects or efforts that conflict with presidential priorities, and declares that they must accept the president’s and the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law as binding.

“This is a power move over independent agencies, a structure of administration that Congress has used for various functions going back to the 1880s,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law.

It’s as if everyone has been bribed to stand back and let him do whatever he wants all the time.

The order follows Mr. Trump’s summary firings of leaders of independent agencies in defiance of statutes that bar their removal without cause before their terms are up. Collectively, the moves constitute a major front in the president’s assault on the basic shape of the American government and his effort to seize some of Congress’s constitutional power over it.

Or to put it another way, the moves constitute a coup. Not a metaphorical coup or a rhetorical coup but a real one.

Oh come ON.

How trans rights took over Scottish politics — and aren’t going away

Henceforth, no medical diagnosis would be needed and a person would be required to “live in” their acquired identity for only three months before becoming eligible for a GRC. The age at which such certificates could be gained would also be lowered to 16. In effect, a person could “self-identify” as a man or a woman as they saw fit and the system, the nuts and bolts of officialdom, would accept this as a manifestation of their true selves. The proposals would “make the lives of trans people in this country that little bit better and easier”, Sturgeon said, “and I think that is something to be proud of”.

Sturgeon’s supporters — and the former first minister herself — note that the government’s proposals were the subject of not one but two consultations over five years and claimed that the bill was “the most scrutinised” piece of legislation in the history of Holyrood. Speaking to the United Nations in 2019, Sturgeon insisted that “as an ardent, passionate feminist […] I don’t see the greater recognition of transgender rights as a threat to me as a woman or to my feminism”.

If that’s true it just means she doesn’t know how to think. If men can “identify as” women and then help themselves to everything that belongs to women, that is in fact a threat to any woman “as a woman.” Men get to help themselves to everything that belongs to us. How is it not obvious that’s a threat to women as women?

“The way it was handled is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the party,” said Joanna Cherry, the former MP and long-standing critic of Sturgeon’s leadership.“There was never actually any proper vote or debate on the concept of self-ID at any SNP conference. It was tagged on to other things. There was no proper conference debate. There was no chance for anybody to go, ‘You know, I think there is a problem here’, and no matter how reasonably it was said — you were shot down.”

Isn’t it fascinating that it’s women’s rights that get brushed aside this way?

“It’s completely baffling to us that it’s become such a big issue,” said Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens. “We don’t really understand what all the fuss is about, in the sense that the Gender Recognition Act allows a trans person to change the gender marker on their birth certificate. That’s it.”

Oh come on. Nobody can be that stupid. That’s not “it” – there’s a lot more that’s “it.” Men invading women’s spaces, prizes, awards, political organizations, groups, clubs, marches, protests, campaigns, toilets, dressing rooms, jobs – all that is also “it.” Very much it. All that is it and it’s what we object to. Now do you really understand?

According to Slater: “Somehow gender and the gender recognition act has become conflated with safety for women and girls, or how the police handle prisoners — they start wrapping up all these issues together when what they’re really expressing is discrimination against trans people.”

Not “conflated with.” Understood to be a threat to. We “wrap up all these issues together” for the brutally simple reason that they are connected. (It’s hard not to scream in all italics at this much willful performative idiocy.)

Yousaf’s handling of the crisis might have been inept but it was a further demonstration of just how dangerous, and even toxic, the issue had become. “The public instinctively don’t like this, they don’t get it,” said an SNP insider who supported both Sturgeon and Yousaf. “It makes them hugely uncomfortable. It damaged Nicola and Humza.” Even many of those who backed the bill without reservation now admit it was “badly handled”. Some insist that an undue amount of attention has been devoted to an issue “that affects such a small group of people”.

The bill’s opponents consider that concern an example of the myopia that has bedevilled the process all along. In their view, women can hardly be considered a “small group of people”.

And it’s so tellingly hilariously enragingly weird that so many people think that’s exactly what women are – just some tiny boring sniveling group of eccentrics.

Crude boy asks crude question, makes crude threat.

Elon Musk said Saturday that federal employees must detail their accomplishments at work or risk losing their jobs, the latest move by the Trump administration to overhaul the government that prompted confusion among the workforce.

“Consistent with President [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk posted on X.

The email created confusion across the federal government. One senior government official said some federal employees started checking with their own legal advisers about how best to respond. One Justice Department official sent out an email asking their staff members to hold off on responding until management could provide further guidance. And one OPM employee questioned whether the agency is allowed to give work orders to employees in other agencies.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union representing thousands of federal employees, said in a statement that it would “challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees across the country.”

…

The move by Musk, whom Trump has tasked with overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency, comes after the president earlier Saturday posted on social media that he wants the Tesla CEO to “get more aggressive” with his role. Trump also has previously said he is authorizing everything Musk is doing as one of his advisers.

Yes if only Musk were more aggressive.

Twitter summary:

Maine Governor Defies Trump on Transgender Sports Ban

Last updated 21 minutes ago

Maine Governor Janet Mills has publicly opposed an executive order by President Donald Trump that aims to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. The dispute escalated after Governor Mills challenged Trump’s threat to cut federal funding to Maine, leading to a commitment to legal action. This confrontation has sparked a broader conversation on transgender rights in sports, highlighted by social media reactions from various figures, including a notable appearance of Mills at a drag show in Portland, which has stirred both support and criticism.

This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.

The summary repeats the ubiquitous lie because of course it does because the lie is ubiquitous. The issue is men in women’s sports. Women who think they are men are not an issue because of course why would they want to play in women’s sports when they think they are men? The issue is men in women’s sports, but the media uniformly lie about it, because if they said “men in women’s sports” it would be all too obvious why we oppose it.

It’s so dishonest and so manipulative and yet they all do it. And in aid of what? In aid of men systematically ruining sports for women. How very progressive.

Adam Serwer in the Atlantic:

Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “[who] protect employees’ civil rights and others [who] investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms.

…

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

…

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

Well that certainly puts it out there for all to see. It sounds like a dopy social media blurt, but it comes from a State Department official. Who knew that only white men are competent? That guy for one.

Other MAGA figureheads have promoted similar ideas. In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revoked “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.” Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Ahhhhh right, white people built this country and black people did not…except of course for all the slaves who created vast wealth for their “owners” who were thus freed up to prance around the landscape bragging about how valuable they were.

This ideology is apparent in the rote blaming of diversity by some conservatives for every catastrophic event—as they did following a midair collision over the Potomac River. Or a freighter crashing into a bridge in Baltimore. Or doors flying off Boeing planes.The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.

But no doubt a supremely competent reality-tv star.

H/t Tim Harris

The wording is interesting.

Schools following Scottish Government gender guidance could be next in line for a Sandie Peggie-style legal case, John Swinney has been warned. For Women Scotland described First Minister John Swinney’s stance on single-sex spaces as “very cowardly” as the group used a Scottish Labour fringe event to call on councillors to reject national guidance.

The Scottish Labour conference rejected a motion calling for the Scottish Government to have single-sex spaces for boys and girls based on biology. It said current Scottish Government guidance “relies on the necessity of unquestioning affirmation” of transgender identity from a school pupil.

The wording is interesting because it’s so obviously nuts. How can unquestioning affirmation of anything a school pupil says be a necessity? Schools don’t exist to affirm without question what children say, they exist to teach them how to choose which things to say, and why, and how, and on what occasions, and whether or not with apologies or caution or skepticism.

Unquestioning affirmation is not necessarily a good thing. It’s dumb and destructive to teach children that it is. Schools of all institutions should be sharply aware of that fact.

Schools have rules, and they teach basics about how to treat each other, and it’s ok for that to be not up for debate, at least not when the rules are being broken. Other than that, though, questions are a core part of teaching.

Anyway gender ideology, of course, is just about the last thing anyone should accept without question.

O what a noble university is here o’erthrown.

(Also why do they put a glass of water right next to the laptop? I’d bump into it 4 seconds in.)