There’s a very simple explanation.

Melania Trump, perhaps the most private first lady in modern history, has retreated more and more from the spotlight since departing Washington last January.

…She views her husband’s continued impact on the GOP landscape as his job, not hers. “You’re not going to see her at rallies or campaign events, even if he ‘officially’ says he’s running again,” said another person aware of the disinterest Trump has shown in supporting the former President.

Lack of interest, not disinterest.

…so often was the answer “no” when Trump was asked by then-candidate Donald Trump’s staff to appear at events that eventually, “We just stopped asking altogether,” said a political operative who worked on team Trump in

Alex Massie points out the familiar inconsistency:

This Scottish government has no time for those who deny the reality of climate change but it is an administration busy enthusiastically denying the reality of biological sex. We must follow the science on one matter but abandon it on the other.

I can see doing that in some contexts – there are some where science is beside the point. Moral conflicts for instance aren’t a scientific issue, although science may be able to bolster a case. But when the core issue is as brutally physical as this one, just drawing a big X through the science is stupid.

Nicola Sturgeon, of course, is “a feminist to her fingertips”, which makes one wonder

This starts out seeming to be a serious and interesting analysis of a familiar slogan:

I’m a philosopher and bioethicist. My research suggests “my body, my choice” was a crucial idea at the time of Roe to emphasize ownership over bodily and health care decisions. But I believe the debate has since moved on – reproductive justice is about more than owning your body and your choice; it is about a right to health care.

I was interested because I got into a brief wrangle on Facebook by saying I’ve always thought the slogan was stupid, because it’s not true. Choices about one’s body are not always solely personal. A couple of men replied to call me stupid with no … Read the rest

Hilary Mantel:

Mantel also waded into the controversy surrounding Rowling’s beliefs on transgender rights which have divided the literary world.

The Harry Potter author wrote a personal essay last year which included examples of where she believes demands by transgender activists were dangerous to women, which were described by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups as divisive and transphobic.

Later Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood and others wrote an open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” was leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.

Mantel said the online attacks on Rowling after her essay were “unjustified and shameful”.

She added: “It is barbaric that a tiny minority should take command of public

To go all nostalgic for a moment…again Trump is padding the books by paying himself out of his PAC.

Tenants at Trump Tower have been floundering, which means he’s not collecting those high high rents.

But through all that — as Trump Tower has dealt with imploding tenants, political backlash and a broader, pandemic-related slump in Manhattan office leasing since last year — it has been able to count on one reliable, high-paying tenant: former president Donald Trump’s own political operation.

Starting in March, one of his committees, Make America Great Again PAC, paid $37,541.67 per month to rent office space on the 15th floor of Trump Tower — a space previously rented by his campaign — according

Glosswitch on abortion and pregnancy and women:

Whenever I try to write about abortion, I feel one thing is holding me back: the absence of the perfect analogy. It’s similar to the way I used to think that if only I tried hard enough and spent enough time on social media, I’d conjure up The Tweet That Stops Brexit.

As always with Victoria I had to pause to savor that before I could read on.

The trouble is, pregnancy is not like anything else. If it was, the whole edifice of patriarchy wouldn’t exist. There would be no singling out and controlling of one half of the human race by the other, because we wouldn’t have something that couldn’t

Always bring your zip ties with you.

Police arrested a 40-year-old Arizona [father] after he stormed into an elementary school principal’s office with a friend wielding plastic handcuffs, insisting the administration broke the law by asking his child and six others to wear a mask and quarantine after being in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

Ya know, even if he’d been right about the administration’s breaking the law, it’s not his job to do the arresting.

“I can tell you the end result of that incident was we did make one arrest for trespassing,” Sgt. Richard Gradillas of the Tucson, Arizona, Police Department told The Daily Beast, identifying the dad arrested as Rishi Rambaran.

Oh god maybe we haven’t sufficiently taken into account the role of sheer stupidity.

Pink News headline:

Trans adults twice as likely to die as cis adults, eye-opening study finds

Very eye-opening.

The author of this howler is the reliable Vic Parsons.

Trans adults are twice as likely to die as cis adults, according to an analysis of almost 50 years of medical records from an Amsterdam gender clinic.

The headline you could “meh” because headlines are notoriously prone to error (and are usually composed by an editor), but now we’re in the subhead and still saying it. And all the way into the article…

Trans women had particularly high risks of death, and are nearly three times more

A win for safeguarding:

A whistleblower who claims she was “vilified” by an NHS gender identity clinic after raising concerns about the safety of children undergoing treatment has been awarded £20,000 in damages.

Sonia Appleby, 62, a social worker and psychotherapist, was “seen as hostile” and subjected to “quasi-disciplinary” proceedings after raising issues with managers at the Tavistock and Portman Trust, a tribunal ruled.

Appleby, who started working at the trust in 2004 and is the safeguarding lead for children, was awarded damages for “significant” injury to her feelings in a judgment handed down by a central London employment tribunal on Friday.

A few more cracks in the edifice.

Appleby had raised concerns about what the Gender Identity Development … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on False marketing.

It’s fair enough to say that a single incident (or a small number of incidents) doesn’t change one’s overall view of what the optimal policy should be to a given issue. We don’t accept the anti-vaxxer argument that a single death from a vaccine means that vaccines are dangerous and should not be approved or mandated. We don’t think that men should be banned from leaving their homes at night, even if it might prevent some violent crimes. The “if it saves ONE life (or avoids ONE assault, etc.) then it’s worth it” argument doesn’t hold water.

But Penny really should be re-evaluating her position here, because this isn’t just … Read the rest

Democracy Now is all the way on board with erasing women.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn to a major setback for reproductive rights. As of midnight last night, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to go into effect that bans abortion after six weeks. No other six-week ban has ever gone into effect in the United States. At six weeks, many people don’t even know they’re pregnant.

If it were “people” the law wouldn’t exist. It’s not “people” who are controlled and bullied and sadistically punished in this way, it’s a specific subset of “people” who are. Amy Goodman is one herself so you’d think she’d get … Read the rest

Heather Cox Richardson on Texas and the Supreme Court and civil rights:

The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right.

Since World War II, the Supreme Court has defended civil rights from state laws that threaten them. During the Great Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to use the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net—this is when we got Social Security—and promote infrastructure. But racist Democrats from the South balked at racial equality under this new government.

After

The Times talks to Graham Linehan:

Over the past four years he has lost almost everything, campaigning obsessively, not against trans rights, he insists — “I know more trans people than the people who call me transphobic” — but for women’s rights.

Of course he insists, because it’s true. The defense of women’s rights is framed as an attack on trans rights via the expedient of never bothering to explain what “trans rights” are and who says so and why we have to defend them at the expense of women’s rights. There is no “right” to force the world to pretend to believe your fantasy about yourself.

With his wife he was part of the writing team behind the

No, I don’t think that’s right.

Rape doesn’t have to (and it mostly doesn’t) include violence. It’s often a mundane practice. It often goes unrecognised and brushed off as bad sex. It can be hugely traumatic and/or an annoyance. It happens in and out of ‘relationships’ and across sexualities and genders.

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) September 3, 2021

If it doesn’t include violence in some form, including the form of a permanent inescapable situation/relationship in which the woman does not have the option of saying no, then it’s not rape. But a relationship in which the woman can’t say no is a rape-relationship, for sure. And they’re not rare, of course – arranged marriages with no consent for the woman … Read the rest

Slate’s trans guru Evan Urquhart had to correct a sleazy piece she wrote for Slate in July about the Wi spa exhibitionist.

Update, Sept. 2, 2021: The New York Post reports that on Aug. 30, “charges of indecent exposure were discreetly filed against a serial sex offender for the Wi Spa incident, following an investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department.” The accused, Darren Agee Merager, denied the allegations in an interview with the Post, but indicated that she plans to turn herself in to authorities.

“She” is a man – a man who preys on women.

Urquhart tells us in the July piece that the police were treating the Wi spa incident as a hoax.

Soon after the

Person charged.

If you’re wondering if the Guardian journalists who amplified the Wi-Spa-is-a-hoax-hoax will do any kind of soul searching after being so thoroughly wrong, the answer is right here and it’s no https://t.co/OXd7720PzS

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) September 3, 2021

They not only do no soul-searching, they do more evasion and obfuscation and changing of the subject. They’re not journalists at all.

And then there’s trans journalist Evan Urquhart:

The following tweets are a great example of why activist journalists can never be a thing. These people are so righteous that they could never fathom a retraction or correction to their work, and asking them to be honest in their stories is almost an insult to them. pic.twitter.com/yE8P3RnH4q

—

The Guardian really seems to be having a Lie About Trans Issues day.

They are not “protesting against trans rights.” That’s such a malicious and incendiary lie it’s startling. What they’re protesting is the invention of new fictitious rights about being “validated” and “included” as something you’re not. That’s not a right. As I’ve said some 9 billion times by now, it doesn’t take much effort to see why that can’t possibly be a right: reasons to do with fraud, competence, safety, relationships, everyday functioning, and the like. If women have to agree that men are women just because they say so, then women can never have safety or privacy again.

I’m not the only one infuriated by … Read the rest

Dahlia Lithwick wonders why the fanatical conservatives on the Supreme Court opted to do it in such a sloppy and late-night haha sucks to be you way.

[A] careful look at the shoddy, contemptuous jurisdictional reasoning of the five justices in the majority suggests something even darker. It’s not just that the majority of the Supreme Court functionally ended abortion rights for most women in Texas last night merely because they could. And it’s not just that they did so because—as is so often the case with impressionistic, frayed shadow docket reasoning—their personal feelings about the constitutional right to abortion are quite robust. It’s almost impossible to not go one further and declare that the court opted to end virtually

Dave Hewitt is also unimpressed by that dishonest Guardian news story on the Wi spa predator.

This piece contains new information that was first revealed by right-wing outlets, and serves to demonstrate how The Guardian – by doggedly pursuing a specific ideological angle and denigrating anything that does not fit – has become wedded to a pernicious false consciousness that prevented them from breaking this news themselves.

These two reporters, specifically. They’ve been on the story all along. I’m wondering if they have any editorial supervision at all, and if their editor is afraid of them, because surely it’s not good journalistic practice to refuse to specify the sex of the Wi spa predator when it’s the core of the … Read the rest