All entries by this author

Guest post: Pronoun usage v environmental issues

Mar 11th, 2023 6:04 am | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Would risk a backlash.

Certainly, one might examine certain propositions more carefully because of their provenance, but I hardly think it true or sensible to say that ‘nobody has any reason to believe anything you have to say’ on a particular issue on the grounds that ‘you’ are sadly wrong on other issues.

Yeah, I get that on an intellectual level, but I’m looking at this from the point of view of someone who wants the Green Party (when it actually is green and not pink and baby blue) to do better and have a greater influence on the policy positions of more mainstream parties. In going all in on … Read the rest



Would risk a backlash

Mar 10th, 2023 11:28 am | By

Don’t mention the war climate disaster.

The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of David Sir Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.

The BBC says not true, not true, they never planned to broadcast that episode. But…

Senior sources at the BBC told the Guardian that the decision not to show the sixth episode was made to fend off potential critique from the political right. This week the Telegraph newspaper attacked the BBC for creating the series and for taking funding from “two charities previously criticised for their political lobbying”

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Nobody was called a laborphobe

Mar 10th, 2023 10:54 am | By

Mike Haubrich on being a Democrat and a gender skeptic:

I am the local party unit secretary in Minnesota for the DFL, which is an anachronistic reference to a 1940’s merger of the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor parties. Very few farmers in Minnesota belong to the DFL anymore as Minnesota is as reflective as the rest of the country in the rural-urban divide between Democrats and Republicans. Most labor unions work with the DFL, but I think that fewer members of the rank and file follow along with it. There are conflicts between environmentalists and labor, especially up on the Iron Range, as many people depend on iron ore extraction and refining for their livelihood.

Nothing is absolute, of

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Norway

Mar 10th, 2023 10:05 am | By

News from the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine:

The UKOM report asserts that future guidelines must rely on a systematic review of evidence rather than cherry-picking studies, and that all hormonal and surgical interventions must be restricted to research settings to ensure clear protocols, safeguarding & adequate follow-up./2

The existing Norwegian treatment guidelines for gender-dysphoric youth, based on a 2015 report ”The Right to the Right Sex,” closely mirror WPATH SOC7 “gender-affirming” model. Medical gender affirmation is widely available to youth,

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Woman man person indictment

Mar 10th, 2023 8:09 am | By

The net might be tightening around Trump. Then again they might all chicken out again.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office recently signaled to Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges for his role in the payment of hush money to a porn star, the strongest indication yet that prosecutors are nearing an indictment of the former president, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

The prosecutors offered Mr. Trump the chance to testify next week before the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the potential case, the people said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, to notify a

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In depth exploration of fzzwrbl

Mar 10th, 2023 5:22 am | By

Gaby Hinsliff reviews Time to Think for the Guardian, very very cautiously and queasily, and laced with questionable assumptions.

BBC journalist Hannah Barnes’s densely reported account of events inside the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) in London, the country’s only specialist clinic for transgender children…

The book traces Gids’s evolution from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity…

The first two paragraphs and already we can see the assumptions doing their work – there definitely is such a thing as “transgender children” and there also definitely is such a thing as “gender identity” and we all know what they are and that they are definitely real. It’s called reification, and … Read the rest



The almost empty chamber

Mar 9th, 2023 5:34 pm | By

Karen Ingala Smith on reading the names and not getting distracted:

Today, for the eighth year running, in the Parliamentary International Women’s Day debate, MP Jess Phillips read out the names of women in the UK who have been killed since the previous years IWD debate and where a man or men are principal suspects. This year the list contained the names of 107 women, the youngest, Holly Newton was just 15 years old, the oldest, Anne Woodbridge was 92.

I have been collating and commemorating UK women killed by men for 11 years, since the murder of 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar on the 2nd January 2012.

I am grateful to Jess Phillips for amplifying my work and for

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LGBT=mostly T

Mar 9th, 2023 12:01 pm | By

The Telegraph on The Lesbian Project:

“I could never have imagined,” says [Kathleen] Stock, who today is launching – along with [Martina] Navratilova (who[m] she has never met in person) and writer Julie Bindel – the Lesbian Project, a group that intends to champion UK women who are same-sex attracted.

[I]ts existence will infuriate those who see her and Bindel, along with their ally – and heterosexual – JK Rowling, as a trio of arch-Terfs (trans exclusionary revolutionary feminists), largely because of the animosity between some trans activists who object to lesbians refusing to have sex with transgender women who have male genitalia.  

The reporter must have been writing in haste. It’s a quartet, not a trio, … Read the rest



Sold out or under the counter?

Mar 9th, 2023 11:37 am | By

Waterstones says it’s not true it’s not it’s not it’s NOT.

Waterstones has refuted [rejected] accusations made on social media this week that it is failing to stock certain titles about gender, saying the claims are “of course… untrue”. 

Twitter users had claimed that Waterstones branches were refusing to stock Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (Swift Press), with similar suggestions made about Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith (Fleet). 

Not so much refusing to as failing to. I saw no claims that Watersones staff were stupid enough to say “We refuse to stock it!” when asked. The claims are that it’s extremely difficult … Read the rest



So destructive

Mar 9th, 2023 10:49 am | By
So destructive

The Washington Post shares more of Tucker Carlson’s texts that reveal what whoppers he tells on Fox News every night.

Like:

It’s so interesting that Carlson knows that about Trump and that it’s never stopped him helping Trump and harming Trump critics and opponents. What Trump is good at is destroying things so here we are helping him destroy the US, democracy, the climate, the rest of the world…

He knows but does it anyway. What a guy.… Read the rest



Not even the list

Mar 9th, 2023 7:57 am | By

Jess Phillips read the list of murdered women in Parliament today but…

You know what comes next.

Brianna Ghey was a trans girl.… Read the rest



Something special

Mar 9th, 2023 7:31 am | By

Family values:

Anti-abortion Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert has said that her 17-year-old son will make her a grandmother in April.

Isn’t that sweet. She had a baby when she was a teenager and now her son is following her lead.

“There’s something special about rural conservative communities,” Boebert continued. “They value life. If you look at teen pregnancy rates throughout the nation, well, they’re the same, [in] rural and urban areas. However, abortion rates are higher in urban areas. Teen moms’ rates are higher in rural conservative areas, because they understand the preciousness of a life that it’s about to be born.”

Or they’re lower in urban areas because people with better access to schools and libraries and higher … Read the rest



Intruding on women gives him all the feels

Mar 8th, 2023 4:22 pm | By

He’s just loving it.

He’s only twice their size.

And still a man.… Read the rest



And one more thing

Mar 8th, 2023 4:18 pm | By

Trudeau pretends to express solidarity on International Women’s Day and then promptly says haha fooled you, I don’t mean a word of it.

Hooray for women’s day and also you women sit down and shut up while the men talk for you.

Piss off Justin.… Read the rest



No escape

Mar 8th, 2023 3:49 pm | By

Eva Kurilova on The Man Who Speaks for Canadian Women, Even on International Women’s Day.

Marni Panas, born Marcel Panas, is an Alberta man who claims to be a woman and likes to talk about how authentic he is. Recently, he was also invited to speak on a panel at an International Women’s Day event called “She Is” organized by Discovery House, a Calgary-based women’s charity.

A women’s charity that doesn’t know what a woman is. I remember the days when everyone learned this in very early childhood.

Two real women were invited to join Panas on the panel of “women leaders and change-makers across a variety of sectors”: Mandy Stobo, an “artist, entrepreneur, actor and mother,”

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Look at that beautiful statue!

Mar 8th, 2023 11:08 am | By

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The myth of the talking woman

Mar 8th, 2023 10:53 am | By

About this idea that women are attention-hogs while men modestly stand aside and let us blather – Deborah Tannen has written about this misperception:

I do say, in my just-published book about women’s friendships, that women friends, as compared to men, tend to talk more — more often, at greater length and about more personal topics. But that’s private speaking — conversations that negotiate and strengthen personal relationships. Research, my own and others’, has also shown that men tend to talk far more than women in what might be called public speaking — formal business-focused contexts, like meetings. In a now-classic study, Barbara and Gene Eakins recorded seven university faculty meetings.

They found that, with one exception,

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Tucker Carlson not wetting his pants

Mar 8th, 2023 10:11 am | By

I wonder if Tucker Carlson drew a line under his own career with that stunt.

(It won’t signify much to him – he’s been paid a lotta dollas over the past x years.)

Anyway I love the way Anderson Cooper says this.

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“Especially trans women”

Mar 8th, 2023 8:49 am | By

Oxfam orders us to amplify trans women on International Women’s Day, and Women’s Voices reminds us of Oxfam’s history.

H/t latsot… Read the rest



Cynicism and lies

Mar 8th, 2023 8:38 am | By

Now here’s a poignant pairing of articles on the BBC front page (and probably a lot of other front pages, unless they’re mashed into one article):

Tucker Carlson slammed by Republicans for sharing and lying about the riot footage

Tucker Carlson said he passionately hates Trump

We knew he was cynical and in it for himself, but…

First the slam:

Senate Republicans and Capitol police have criticised Fox News after one of its hosts aired previously unseen clips of the riot two years ago at Congress, and played down the violent disorder.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday it had been a “mistake for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with

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