Stonewall thinks two-year-olds can be trans.

Your tweet said 2-year-olds can recognise their trans identity. Are you now withdrawing that claim? Your statement today doesn’t refer to it at all, but you haven’t deleted your original tweet. The only lack of clarity is in your present clarification https://t.co/oEdvPb42Vp pic.twitter.com/6iQPxjCK1R

— Simon Edge (@simonjedge) July 25, 2022

Ok let’s read their statement.

On Friday we put out a tweet that was unclear, relating to gender stereotypes and nursery age children, leading some supporters to ask us what we meant.

And others to say they’re dangerous loonies.

We were commenting on an article written by a parent reflecting on how their child was being cared for at nursery. The parent was

The left is split over sophie graces, the right is split over trump: hero or tyrant?

The Jan. 6 House select committee’s revelations have grown so overwhelmingly powerful that even some right-wing media figures have begun acknowledging their seriousness. This is fracturing conservative media: A few high-profile personalities and institutions are admitting the obvious, while many other outlets continue running outright propaganda on Trump’s behalf.

That’s been true all along, what with The Lincoln Project and George Conway and similar. But now some of the more rabid trumpies are wobbling.

This split became more visible over the weekend when Fox News anchor Bret Baier — unlike most Fox personalities — sharply denounced Trump over new revelations that Trump

Julian expands on his brief interview with “Sophie Grace” Chappell:

The published profile is short and allows Chappell to speak for herself with no criticism and minimal eyebrow-raising from me. The source interview, however, left me worried that mutual comprehension between the main actors this fight (for that is what is has become) is now almost impossible. (Supporters can listen to the entire interview here.) 

Mutual comprehension is indeed very difficult. I for one find it impossible to understand how so many otherwise reasonable people can believe (or at least constantly repeat) the core claim.

Listening to Chappell, you would think that the gender critical feminists – derogatorily called TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminist) – are almost always malign,

Julian Baggini talks to fellow philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell at Prospect:

Eight years ago, Sophie Grace Chappell came out as the UK’s first trans philosopher.

Well, not trans philosopher. Real philosopher in the sense of having the right academic credentials; no “identifying as” required. Trans woman, i.e. man who identifies as a woman. His self-renaming is interesting. He started out as Timothy David John Chappell, which is a lot of male names to have to deal with. For his transformation he chose two female names that are also flattery names – I wonder if he and Sophie LaBelle are friends or rivals. (If you’re wondering why “Sophie” is flattering, it’s because “sophia” in Greek means wisdom. Philosophers of … Read the rest

Judith Butler blows up her own argument in the middle of a sentence – and doesn’t correct it, even though it’s not a live conversation but an email exchange with a New Statesman writer.

When Justice Ginsburg established “sex” discrimination as a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed right to be treated equally, she underscored that equality was the basis for feminist legal victories. What if access to certain kinds of healthcare, including abortion, is a matter of equality? If men have adequate healthcare, and women do not, then women, or those who are pregnant, suffer discrimination. 

No, you can’t flip your own argument mid-sentence like that. You end up with gibberish. “If men have adequate healthcare, and women do … Read the rest

Texas lawmakers test just how much they can punish women for being women.

Republican lawmakers have sent legal threats to Texas organizations that offer to fund out-of-state travel for abortions, potentially setting up a showdown between abortion law and long-held constitutional rights such as freedom of association and freedom of travel.

The Texas Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction of Republicans in the state legislature, sent a letter on 7 July to a law firm that offered to cover employees’ expenses if they travelled for abortion. It threatened Sidley LLP with felony charges, claiming Texas can criminalize anyone who “furnishes the means” for an abortion, regardless of where the abortion occurs. The letter cites a 1925 law which was not formally

Ominous:

To those who track anti-democratic movements there is a chilling familiarity to this rich evocation of a president descending into an abyss of fantasy, fury and possible illegality. “The picture that the hearings depict is of a coup leader,” said the Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky. “This is a guy who was unwilling to accept defeat and was prepared to use virtually any means to try to stay illegally in power.”

Levitsky is co-author of the influential book How Democracies Die which traces the collapse of once-proud democratic nations – in some cases through wrenching upheavals, but more often in modern times through a tip-toeing into authoritarianism. Levitsky is also an authority on Latin America, a region from

Local residents astonished that desert basin is desert basin.

The few who live along the shores of Mono Lake are accustomed to the peculiarities of this high desert basin.

Famously strange limestone spires known as tufa towers rise from the water. The lake contains so much salt that it’s barren of fish. In the arid sands beyond, sagebrush thrives, and that’s about it.

But the alkali flats that are emerging from the lake’s surface, ghost white, aren’t just another nod to the uniqueness of this ancient place. They’re a sign of trouble. Amid a third year of drought, the sprawling lake on the remote east side of the Sierra Nevada is sharply receding, and the small towns and wildlife

So this is what it looks like when you build ever more new houses in a desert and the water dries up.

As the Southwest enters its second decade of megadrought, and the Colorado River sinks to alarmingly low levels, Rio Verde, a largely upscale community that real-estate agents bill as North Scottsdale, though it is a thirty-mile drive from Scottsdale proper, is finding itself on the front lines of the water wars. Some homeowners’ wells are drying up, while others who get water delivered have recently been told that their source will be cut off on January 1st. 

Because it’s a desert. Did anyone mention that it’s a desert before you bought new houses there? Did you look … Read the rest

Melted brains.

In the months before she started nursery, my four-year-old daughter would often say she was a boy. 

Little kids say they’re lots of things.

It came unprompted, bubbling up from somewhere pure and certain inside her.

Little kids can be certain of all kinds of things that aren’t true. Certainly is almost always a bad thing, and in a child of four it means nothing.

But the obstacles to her sense of self have started looming, ever since she started nursery in September 2021. 

After she’d been attending for a few weeks, she said to me again she was a boy. But then she looked troubled and added that her teacher told her she’s a girl, that

Another direct insult, as direct and insulting as nominating William “Lia” Thomas Woman of the Year:

The National Women’s History Museum’s current Biography page:

All three are men.… Read the rest

The pope “apologized” about the residential schools, but not really. (“About” rather than “for” is deliberate.)

Pope Francis made a public statement today to the delegations of Indigenous people who met with him this week to discuss personal experiences in residential schools or their harmful legacies.

His statement included the words “I am very sorry,” and is being reported as an apology for residential schools.

Journalism is so deferential to the popes. Why is that? The Vatican is a religious version of the Mafia; it’s not something to defer to.

There are several kinds of wrongs associated with residential schools. There were abusive and often criminal actions by individuals who worked in these institutions. Those in authority 

Yay let’s trans toddlers! What could go wrong?!

Originally a comment by Catwhisperer on Does Dwight Schrute write tweets for Tampax?

Radio 4 has a 28-part series about the menstrual cycle (28ish Days Later, if anyone wants to check it out) which I thought was an impressive amount of time to dedicate to the subject. I’m most of the way through but struggling a bit now – it started off with the interesting detailed biology stuff and then went off into New Age Moon Goddess hippy dippy territory. Anyway. The presenter explains right at the start that they will be mostly saying “women” but of course not everyone who has a menstrual cycle identifies as a woman blah blah blah but they stay reasonably on track … Read the rest

The Guardian on that stealth deletion of women’s rights from an already signed statement I mentioned the other day:

The UK government is coming under growing pressure from European countries and human rights groups to explain why commitments to abortion and sexual health rights have been removed from an official statement on gender equality.

The question shouldn’t be why so much as when are you going to put them back.

Norway and Denmark have approached the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) “to protest against the substantive changes” that were made to a paper that resulted from a UK-hosted conference on freedom of religion and belief, opened by Liz Truss earlier this month, the Guardian has learned.

More than 20

You don’t get to blow off a subpoena just because you once worked for Trump.

A federal jury has found former Trump adviser Steve Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

The verdict: After nearly two days of hearing evidence and witness testimony, the jury reached a unanimous verdict on the two contempt charges in less than three hours.

Bannon smiled as the verdict was read, looking back and forth between the courtroom deputy and the foreperson. Bannon’s team did not mount a defense during the trial, and he did not take the stand. Speaking to reporters after the conviction, his attorney David Schoen said they planned

Jon Pike tweeted a link to an interesting study.

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials

Abstract

Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.

Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

…

Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.

Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of

I missed this one from September last year.

Not a fact. All people with periods are women. (Some are girls, but by some definitions once they have periods they’re women, and anyway this stupid tweet didn’t mean “Because some are girls!!”) No men have periods. We don’t need to “celebrate” the sexual “diversity” of “people who bleed.”

Also everyone bleeds – see Shylock: If you prick us, do we not bleed?

But men don’t menstruate. Men don’t gestate babies so they don’t need a place to gestate babies so they don’t need a uterus, and they also don’t need to feed gestating babies so they don’t need an endometrium so they don’t need to shed part of it once … Read the rest

Liz Cheney was talking to her fellow Republicans:

“The case against Donald Trump in these hearings is not made by witnesses who were his political enemies,” said Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and the committee’s vice chair. “It is instead a series of confessions by Donald Trump’s own appointees, his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for him for years, and his own family.”

Some of those people quit their Trump administration jobs on January 6.

The hearing on Thursday detailed Trump’s repeated refusal to quell the deadly mob, even when he knew that some of them were armed and that Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger. Cheney suggested the former President’s supporters should view