So I just listened to this and sure enough – Sally Hines does not come out of it well.

If you've seen the obnoxious things that Sally Hines has been saying about Kathleen Stock today you may want to remind yourself of the time that she made a tit of herself and got a trouncing from Kathleen on the radio. https://t.co/wpLsggkFJC

— FeministRoar (@FeministRoar) October 15, 2021

The link is to the clip, not the whole hour, so no searching is needed.… Read the rest

Speaking of “Stonewall language” as opposed to BBC language or ordinary language or non-drunk language, here’s economist Frances Coppola using it in a blog post bashing Maya Forstater a couple of weeks ago:

Forstater and her supporters aggressively promote their beliefs on Twitter, hijacking threads to grandstand their agenda, forcing their opinions on people who have not invited them, misrepresenting what people have said then gaslighting them when they object, using emotionally-loaded language to short-circuit rational argument, resorting to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority, insulting people who disagree with them, sealioning people who try to disengage. In short, behaving just like all the other cults that infest this increasingly toxic space. The effect of their behaviour is to

… Read the rest

Four years in prison for having a miscarriage.

On Tuesday, October 5, Brittney Poolaw, a 20-year-old Oklahoma woman, was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree for experiencing a miscarriage at 17 weeks and sentenced to 4 years in state prison.

Last year, Ms. Poolaw experienced a miscarriage and went to Comanche County Hospital for medical help. On March 17, 2020, she was charged with Manslaughter in the First Degree, arrested and incarcerated. The court set a $20,000 bond, an amount she could not afford. Ms. Poolaw has been incarcerated since her arrest over 18 months ago.

…

Contrary to all medical science, the prosecutor blamed the miscarriage on Ms. Poolaw’s alleged use of controlled substances. Not even the

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Rob on Concealing a rape for social justice.

The saddest thing of all is that a young girl has been raped. The manner of her rape, the fact it was in a place where she was vulnerable and should have been safe just makes things worse.

The whole awful saga gives us a lot to unpick about the current state of American society especially, but I suspect about all societies.

The fact that the rape was a non-story at all until the father being arrested became a right-wing cause. The fact that the school and Board administrations either attempted a cover-up and/or didn’t properly communicate something so seriously between them. The fact that the Board … Read the rest

The Guardian says the climate disaster is here. Not on the way, but here.

“We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.

The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.

Until now, human civilization has operated within a narrow, stable band of temperature. Through the burning of fossil fuels,

… Read the rest

Nolan Investigates Stonewall is now available In Your Area so I’m listening. It starts with how can the BBC possibly claim to be impartial when it’s part of the Stonewall Says We’re Awesome scheme? Will it move down the league table because of this podcast?

And then a very important question: is the language they use when reporting on trans issues BBC language or Stonewall language?

Aha, thought I. Stonewall language. That’s why we keep seeing these stupid platitudes with their stupid wording. Of course it is. That’s why people keep babbling about “trans rights” without ever explaining what rights trans people have that the rest of us don’t. That’s why there’s all this Most Oppressed Most Marginalized Most Excluded … Read the rest

Cristina Beltrán in the Washington Post:

To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness

Or we could just recognize that conservatism is not exclusively white. We know this already. “The Hispanic community” in Florida is highly conservative, because of the flight from Castro’s Cuba. That’s not “whiteness,” it’s politics. I don’t see what’s gained by calling it Whiteness.

Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as

… Read the rest

What he said.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1448652677437530113 https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1448654850196066318

Never mind that privileged cis girl who got raped, worry about the trans girls instead!

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1448662669771227141 https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1448663620942905357

It’s funny, because I don’t remember the mainstream media ever being this attentive to feminist concerns.… Read the rest

Finally, a non-Fox-adjacent source: Newsweek:

Several parents have demanded that Loudoun County school board’s superintendent resign over allegations that the school district covered up two sexual assaults alleged to have occurred on school grounds.

…

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Scott Smith—a father who was arrested at a previous Loudoun County School Board meeting on June 22 after a debate over a draft policy on transgender and nonbinary students’ rights escalated— alleged that his daughter was sexually assaulted at Stone Bridge High School by a student allegedly dressed with a skirt on May 28.

During the June 22 meeting in which Smith was arrested after being dragged out, superintendent Scott Ziegler dismissed any concerns about

… Read the rest

At the Glinner update, ripx4nutmeg tells us of a story that the left-of-Fox news media so far refuse to touch.

First, a little history. In August, the Loudoun County School Board, a group of nine people who manage 94 public schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, passed a gender identity policy to allow boys to use facilities for girls, such as restrooms, if they identify as girls, and for sex-based protections for girls in sports to be removed. Seven of the nine members of the board voted for the policy.

Team Fox reported on it, Team Left of Fox ignored it. Lefty feminists have nowhere to go these days. The last 50 years might as well not have happened.

Now … Read the rest

Susanna Rustin at the Guardian was thinking the feminism-transism standoff was starting to ease a little, but now she isn’t. The mainstream types are too close to the loonies for that to be the case.

Starmer’s recent comments on the Andrew Marr Show, along with remarks by the new Green party co-leader Carla Denyer, make it clear that they too believe that gender-critical feminists’ ideas are beyond the pale. Asked by Marr whether it is transphobic to say that only women have a cervix, a reference to a comment made by Labour MP Rosie Duffield last year, Starmer replied: “It is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.” Not only does Starmer disagree with Duffield’s use of

… Read the rest

Continuing with Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe:

Pius XI – formerly Achille Ratti, librarian, mountain-climber and admirer of Mark Twain – was elected Pope in February 1922, eight months before Mussolini bullied his way to the Italian premiership. For 17 years the two men held sway over their separate spheres in Rome.

They met only once, but there was a huge amount of back-channel communication.

Mussolini saw that he could use the church to legitimise his power, so he set about wooing the clergy. He had his wife and children baptised. He gave money for the restoration of churches. After two

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Lucy Hughes-Hallett at the Guardian in 2014 reviews a book on the pope’s sinister pact with Mussolini.

In 1938, Pope Pius XI addressed a group of visitors to the Vatican. There were some people, he said, who argued that the state should be all-powerful – “totalitarian”. Such an idea, he went on, was absurd, not because individual liberty was too precious to be surrendered, but because “if there is a totalitarian regime – in fact and by right – it is the regime of the church, because man belongs totally to the church”.

Attaboy, that’s putting it out there.

The Pope told Mussolini that the church had long seen the need to “rein in the children of Israel”

… Read the rest

Much proud of TheySelf.

new "How to spot TERF ideology" guide just dropped https://t.co/UewdGgcpgB pic.twitter.com/qgGyJyMhDu

— Rosie Cambridge SU (@SU_Womens) October 11, 2021

Oh good, wot’s it say?

Introduction

Trans liberation is part of feminism.

Ooh bad start. No it isn’t. Feminism is about fem – i.e. women. Trans liberation is a completely different issue, and in practice vehemently hostile to women, especially feminist women.

Fighting for autonomy and freedom must be a fight for everyone, and there should be no room for transphobia or TERFs in feminist organising.

Bad second sentence, in fact lousy rotten second sentence. Fighting for women’s autonomy and freedom is women’s fight, and we’re not required to staple other fights onto ours. Also, autonomy and … Read the rest

I remember when I liked Feminist Philosophers.

I guess there are a lot of fabulous U.K. philosophers I need to tell you about, because I know a bunch of them who did not sign this.

— Jenny Saul (@JennySaul1) October 13, 2021

How fabulous of them.… Read the rest

Abigail Shrier’s article on the two doctors of transgender medicine who aren’t so sure any more has been getting attention, and in light of the WPATH and USPATH announcement that only doctors should be talking about the subject, the article is helpful. (H/t Sackbut)

For nearly a decade, the vanguard of the transgender-rights movement — doctors, activists, celebrities and transgender influencers  — has defined the boundaries of the new orthodoxy surrounding transgender medical care: What’s true, what’s false, which questions can and cannot be asked. 

They said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of

… Read the rest

How very convenient.

The Vatican has sovereign immunity that protects it from being sued in local courts over sexual abuse cases, the European Court of Human Rights said in a chamber ruling on Tuesday.

Why? Why does the Vatican have sovereign immunity?

It dismissed a case brought by 24 French, Belgian and Dutch nationals, who said they were sexually abused by Catholic priests when they were children.

The class-action suit sought €10,000 compensation for each victim but the Ghent Court of First Instance said in 2013 that it did not have jurisdiction over the Holy See. The applicants had argued that they had been deprived of access to a court.

The European court agreed with the Belgian court that

… Read the rest

This is a medical issue, a scientific issue, all these outsider non-medical people shouldn’t be talking about it because they don’t have the expertise. WPATH says so.

The United States Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH) and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) stand behind the appropriate care of transgender and gender diverse youth, which includes, when indicated, the use of “puberty blockers” such as gonadotropin releasing hormone analogs and other medications to delay puberty, and, when indicated, the use of gender- affirming hormones such as estrogen or testosterone. Guidelines for the assessment of transgender and gender diverse youth, as well as for the use of pubertal delay and gender affirming hormone medications have been published by

… Read the rest

What’s awesome about that?

Foundation Beyond Belief on Facebook:

Volunteer network team Atheists United just shared these awesome pics with us of their members participating in the October Women’s March for Reproductive Rights!

Awesome? Men demanding “inclusion” in women’s marches for reproductive rights, yet again?

Really not seeing the awesome.

H/t Sackbut… Read the rest

Kathleen has closed her Twitter, I hope temporarily, and the Sussex UCU has deleted its statement, but Kiri Tunks hasn’t.

Trade unions also defend members who are unfairly targeted or persecuted because of their beliefs or political views – unless you are in the UCU, in which case they will accuse you of ‘instrumentalising your employment rights’ and throw you to the wolves. 2/3 pic.twitter.com/zBxWNbgHkv

— Kiri Tunks (@kiritunks) October 12, 2021

Let’s look at that first sentence in the third paragraph again.

Public discourses regularly devalue the lives of trans and nonbinary people and appeals to both employment rights and academic freedom are often instrumentalised in this context

That’s a very remarkable thing for a union to say. It … Read the rest