Sonia Sodha on the “cotton ceiling” issue:

If policing people’s sexual preferences through the lens of race feels deeply unpleasant, when it comes to sexual orientation, it is wrong and dangerous. Yet we are in the extraordinary position where lesbians are now being told by some activists that it is bigoted for them to say they are not attracted to trans women who are biologically male. This is not a fringe belief: the chief executive of LGBT charity Stonewall recently said in relation to a BBC story about lesbians feeling pressured into dropping their boundaries: “Sexuality is personal… but if, when dating, you are writing off entire groups like people of colour or trans people, it’s worth considering how

Stella Creasy continues to disappoint (and that’s putting it politely).

But of course she didn’t meet “with a number of women involved in all your groups.” There are no such women. The People’s Front of Judea part is insulting. She’s being dismissive and contemptuous and hostile…to feminist women, when she claims to be a feminist woman herself.

Would she like to hear from some gender critical women now?

No.

Not really tbh – am happy to do a meeting but not going to do multiple ones. Realise this will lead to more grumpiness on here from you but being honest and not unfair to ask you all to work together as do with other issues.

— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) May

More genius thinking from Billy Bragg.

That’s not about trans women, it’s about violence against women!

How the hell does he think he knows the difference? How does he think anyone does? How does he think women do?

We can’t. That’s the point. That’s why all this self-ID nonsense is such bullshit – because it’s an open door the size of Texas for predators. There doesn’t happen to be any Magic Filter Device that turns purple when a “male predator” disguised as an innocent Trans Lady enters the women’s toilets. There’s nothing. We can’t tell, and we don’t want to be forced to have to try to tell. It shouldn’t be dumped on us. The end.… Read the rest

Piers Morgan says he did not either censor Kate Smurthwaite on his tv chat show. Kate says he did.

On the list of alleged subjects to avoid was Morgan’s “vindictive obsession” with Meghan Markle, according to comedian and political activist Kate Smurthwaite…Smurthwaite continued: “They didn’t want me to get ‘too personal’ with Morgan. They didn’t want me criticising or seeking to explain his ‘vindictive obsession’ with [Meghan Markle].

“The main thing they didn’t want me to say was: ‘You know that no matter how many hours you spend slagging her off, she’s still not going to shag you?’. True. Funny. Insightful. What’s not to love?”

Not a thing.… Read the rest

Stella Creasy says she met with the groups; the groups say we’d be happy to meet with you Stella, just name the date.

actually I have done so- am not sure why you feel the need to be unpleasant (accusing me of seeking applause etc) and so denying my agency to hold a different view. I'm asking what you think the impact will be. I'm listening to what you have to say yourself?

— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) May 29, 2022

Oh she has done so?

Hi Stella @stellacreasy, I am a director of Sex Matters and a Labour Party member. I and my colleagues at @SexMattersOrg would be happy to sit down with you.

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) May 29,

Another one.

The theft of Title IX:

Equality for women in sports followed decades of struggle. Fifty years ago, President Nixon signed Title IX, which banned discrimination in higher education. This opened doors to previously all-male classes and led to many more female teams and scholarships.

The result is a massive increase in women’s sports.

Some trans activists are challenging aspects of Title IX, specifically its implicit acknowledgment of biological difference. And supporters, not least the Biden administration, say transgender girls should be permitted on girls’ sports teams. They have pushed for a federal Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, education, employment and credit.

Only that’s not equality, it’s something else. Forced … Read the rest

Today in the NY Times:

The women on the Princeton University swim team spoke of collective frustration edging into anger. They had watched Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who swam for the University of Pennsylvania, win meet after meet, beating Olympians and breaking records.

So we’re going to talk about this now? In the Times? At long last?

The team met with the executive director of the Ivy League athletic conference, Robin Harris. They enumerated the physical advantages males have. Harris said she wasn’t going to change the rules in the middle of the season.

The battle over whether to let female transgender athletes compete in women’s elite sports has reached an angry pitch, a collision of competing principles:

So the Telegraph gets to report that Labour doesn’t know what women are.

Stella Creasy was wrong to assert that a woman can have a penis, a Labour minister has said, as the party continues to flounder with the issue of defining womanhood. 

What oh what is a woman? We just don’t know…except when we want to know which people to catcall on the street, which people to pay less, which people to forget to promote, which people to rape, which people to boss around.

Anneliese Dodds, the Labour Party chairman, was asked on Sunday if she agreed with Stella Creasy, her fellow Labour MP, that a woman can be someone who was born with a penis. 

Ms

Stella Creasy continues to…do whatever this is.

Hello julie, why does it have to be an either or? You can throw the word salad of insults at me or we could get prison reform back on agenda together as surely that’s something we can agree on? I said I disagreed with people – I haven’t used terms like virtue signalling etc.

— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) May 29, 2022

How can “we” work on prison reform when Creasy insists that men are women if they say they are? That claim has major implications for how prisons operate, so no, we can’t work “together,” because we have a fundamental disagreement on who and what women are.

system than I would Billy Bragg. I

Ratcheting the rhetoric up and up and up.

I’m in Hamburg atm In the pavements are small brass plaques bearing the names of Jews who lived in the building opposite the plaque who were murdered by the Nazis. That began with people deciding they could define someone by their biology alone. https://t.co/8Ih5wx5Bwb

— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) May 28, 2022

He’s comparing people who don’t accept the claim that men can become or be or transition into women, to Nazi genociders. Nazi genociders.

Nothing like using the memory of murdered Jews to bolster one’s ideological argument on Twitter

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) May 28, 2022

So you’re happy to insult lesbians for asserting our boundaries. And even though we are

Truth.

Vulnerable and traumatised women pay the highest price for luxury beliefs. These are the real world consequences of redefining woman to include the penised.

“We feel like we are part of some sick joke. This is a nightmare that we can’t wake up from.”https://t.co/EdM4Sa9qU9

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 28, 2022

From the Reduxx article Rowling links to:

An inmate at New Jersey’s Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCFW) is speaking out against the transfer of trans-identifying male convicts into the facility.

Speaking with Reduxx, incarcerated woman Miseka Diggs explained that the female inmates in EMCFW are “scared to death” of the men. Under the current policy, the men do not need to undergo any surgery,

It’s the elites. That’s the problem. Not fanatical gun-worship, not psychopathic gun marketing, not copycat massacres by gun, but elites – and not your old-fashioned elites who are rich and powerful but those new elites who are elite in the sense of not agreeing with people like Ted Cruz.

Continuing where I left off –

The GOP speakers shifted blame for the latest tragedy from the availability of high-powered weapons to an array of other culprits, such as declining church attendance, physical and social media bullying, weak families, violent video games, opioid abuse, lack of mental health services, multiple points of entry at schools and unlocked doors.

The speakers also pivoted from condemning the evil of the Uvalde school

Trump, naturally, chose the Go All-in Option on the guns question at the NRA festivities yesterday. Why not after all? Clearly the proliferation of automatic weapons is being nothing but beneficial.

Former president Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), among other speakers, broadly rejected proposals for new restrictions [on guns] and called instead for more school security or mental health screenings, while issuing dark warnings of alleged Democratic plots to take weapons.

“We all know they want total gun confiscation, know that this would be a first step,” Trump told the crowd in an auditorium about 300 miles from the site of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex. “Once they get the first step,

They’re busy stealing the next election.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is now signaling he won’t comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee examining Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his presidential reelection loss. The California Republican will be joined in this defiance by other colleagues who played important roles in the attempted subversion.

The same Kevin McCarthy very well may be House speaker in 2024. If Congress doesn’t revise the antiquated process that governs how Congress counts presidential electors, he could play a critical role influencing which electors get tallied, potentially swinging the outcome.

If he can, he will. I think that’s all too obvious.

“McCarthy and his allies in Congress are actively concealing the plot

Blurgh urgh urgh urgh what do words mean let’s just pretend we have no idea and never have had. The Telegraph:

Stella Creasy is clarifying her position on the word ‘woman’. “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes”, she declares. “But they are now women and I respect that.”

What other words shall we ask people to clarify their positions on? How about “pear”? Shall we decide it means “vegetable similar to broccoli”? Or “ocean”? Can we clarify that it refers to an amount of water that could fit in a thimble? Or “night”? Should we alert the world that it means the time starting with sunrise and ending at sunset?

Zero women were born with penises. … Read the rest

John Pavlovitz talked about the cult of the gun back in 2017.

Enter the seductive cowboy fantasy of “the good guy with a gun.”

It’s the deadly lie that men have been led to believe; that the world is in grave danger, and that we’re all poised to be the steel-jawed hero—riding in, packing heat, and saving the day by gunning down the bad guys and getting the girl.

It is the perpetuation of a dangerously antiquated gender trope, where men all want to save and women all just want to be saved; that misogynistic myth sold by Hollywood, Republicans, and Bible Belt Evangelicals. This fantasy is incredibly persuasive and undeniably effective—but it is not reality. 

I think it’s not … Read the rest

Peter is telling feminists what we’re allowed to do and think again. I’m increasingly tired of it.

Nobody’s talking about “blanket bans on trans women.” That’s a dopey, prejudicial way to put it. It’s not “banning” men to have women-only spaces. Women want and need women-only spaces and we have a right to them, end of story. Trans women continue to exist even if women have women-only spaces. No one is banned.

“Trans women are not a threat” is a ludicrous claim. He doesn’t know that – he can’t know it. It’s entirely possible that some trans women are a threat, in fact it would be odd if none of them were. In any case trans women are men, … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on Celebrating.

Warning: graphic. Brutally, necessarily, truthfully graphic.

It’s the smell. That’s what forces its way into my thoughts every time there’s another mass shooting. I guess it’s part of the PTSD associated with 25 plus years of trauma surgery trying to undo extremes of violence. It’s left its mark. Iron. Metallic. If you are winning the fight, that’s what you smell. If you’re losing it shifts to an indescribable stench of corruption as cells begin to die and normal organ barriers begin to fail. In the OR you smell death well before the monitors slow and the EKG begins to widen. Still you try. Last night I couldn’t sleep because … Read the rest

What about crime and punishment? What do we do? What about Restorative Justice? Julie Bindel looks at the details:

Restorative justice (RJ) is described as an alternative to prison; it is a non-punitive response to criminal behaviour. The idea is to bring together the person who inflicted the harm (the “responsible person”, in RJ terminology) and the victim, often in the presence of community representatives. The perpetrator is supposed to accept responsibility for the harm inflicted and reach an agreement with the victim about how to make amends.

I think one problem leaps off the page at this juncture: what if the victim doesn’t want to be brought together with the responsible person? Like, suppose the crime was violent and … Read the rest