Even…wait for it…Science-based Medicine.

Two days ago:

This is a very welcome, honest and brave review by Harriet Hall at @ScienceBasedMed on @AbigailShrier ‘s book Irreversible Damage. I am quite sure a lot of her colleagues on this site will not be happy. https://t.co/eCvtDopTpC

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) June 15, 2021

Yesterday:

https://twitter.com/dvank_van/status/1405431198160199686

SBM:

Book Review: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier

According to Harriet Hall, Abigail Shrier’s book describes a disturbing trend: an increasing number of adolescent girls who suddenly self-identify as transgender and demand puberty blockers and gender surgeries. We have no data on how many of them will suffer irreversible damage and regret their decision, and it appears that at least

… Read the rest

Oh look, the Royal Academy wants us to draw something we would think but not say.

All this week #RASketchClub tutor Jake Garfield is setting our #RADailyDoodle challenges.

Day 3: "Draw something you would think but not say."

— Royal Academy (@royalacademy) June 16, 2021

People are hastening to oblige.

#RADailyDoodle I also doodled Royal Academician Georg Baselitz telling a group of female artists that “women can’t paint”.

Again, you seem happy with this belief of his, but not with women defending their sex-based rights. Why is that? pic.twitter.com/ICJMgkuOEL

— Bill Moon (@BigBillMoon) June 17, 2021

I hope you like my contribution. pic.twitter.com/jXSuA6ADp7

— Delyth Rennie (@Lammysaurus) June 17, 2021

https://twitter.com/context_outside/status/1405484801658953736

#IStandWithJessDeWahls pic.twitter.com/ap2Q88iwse

— Rachel Edney: Thoroughly Indecent Woman (@redney71)

… Read the rest

The Telegraph reports:

The Royal Academy of Arts has pulled an artist’s work from its gift shop following claims she expressed “transphobic” views.

And it has issued a crawling apology.

Jess de Wahls was found to be in “conflict” with the values of the institution over opinions expressed in a 2019 blog [post] criticising “gender identity ideology” and the LGBT charity Stonewall.

Really. So the Royal Academy of Arts requires total agreement with everything an artist is known to have said or written or embroidered before they sell that artist’s work in its gift shop? Really? It must take weeks to go through it all for just one artist, so how do they keep up?

No, of course … Read the rest

Here’s how it’s done.

https://twitter.com/aptstitches/status/1405171920534913025

“gina” is an embroidery artist too, but a more obscure one. I’m sure that has nothing to do with this bullying attempt to destroy someone else’s work.… Read the rest

The stupid is out of control.

An apology regarding transphobia and a speaker listed for the 'It's Up To Us' rally on June 19. https://t.co/VHjbGsJ2Ee

— Labour Nexus (@NexusLabour) June 16, 2021

Look look look we’re apologizing please don’t hurt us please please please

THE APOLOGETIC APOLOGIZING APOLOGY

Written by Kerry Stapleton – Chair of Labour Nexus.

Earlier this evening, Labour Nexus messed up, and we announced that a transphobic Labour councillor would be speaking at our rally. We are sorry. The rally organisation team only vetted Laurie three weeks before we announced that he would be speaking before he had outed himself as a transphobe and did not check his timeline again before linking to his profile.

Laurie? Who … Read the rest

Another target selected.

.@royalacademy this is absolutely craven. @JessDeWahls is a brilliant artist and a proud, brave feminist. Which other female artists will you banish for being the wrong type of feminist? Who’s next for the stocks?

Women won’t forget this.

I stand with Jess. pic.twitter.com/1xotGjP0zq

— Girls To The Front (@obsolete__units) June 16, 2021

Just like that. One inquisitor tells the Royal Academy that an artist is (or has been) “expressing transphobic views” and bam, the Royal Academy goes belly-up and says please don’t hurt us – and throws the artist to the wolves and stops selling her work. Just like that.

And what are these “transphobic views”? What is their content? Just that women are women, and … Read the rest

Southampton Antifascists warns of an impending outrage:

Portsmouth Guildhall will be hosting an event for the Transphobic group Filia on the 16th – 17th October.

Filia have openly called for conversion therapy for those in the Trans community and openly act as gate keepers of womanhood.

Can you imagine?? Women are actually having the brass neck to act as gate keepers of womanhood. Who the hell do they think they are?

Filia are a hate group masquerading as a feminist charity and should not be able to hold events unchallenged.

In fact they shouldn’t be able to hold events at all, or go outside without supervision, or have jobs, or vote, or go to school.… Read the rest

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote an essay.

In a lengthy essay published on her website on Tuesday, Adichie accused a former student of publicly attacking her after a 2017 interview in which Adichie said, among other things, “I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women.” Adichie held up the personal feud as a cautionary tale about how social media has been used by “certain young people” as an ideological battering ram rather than a place to communicate and seek understanding.

Let’s read some of what she said:

After the workshop, I welcomed her into my life. I very rarely do this, because my past experiences

… Read the rest

Ah yes both sides. Thank god there is someone to wade in at this late date to bemoan the “cruelty” on “both sides.”

I’ve been attacked for not having the courage to wade in on the trans debate. Well time to fess up! I was & am terrified because the voices can be so cruel on both sides. Here are some thoughts on the need for more moderate voices. If you need me, I’ll be hiding all afternoon. https://t.co/lxpYooxZ3v

— Ayesha Hazarika (@ayeshahazarika) June 16, 2021

She’s a columnist for the Evening Standard and a board member of the Fawcett Society.

And right on cue… https://t.co/aFJwwUshPD

— Ayesha Hazarika (@ayeshahazarika) June 16, 2021

Right on cue what? Disagreement? Is that … Read the rest

No you’re the ones who are weak on Russia.

President Joe Biden sat down in Geneva this morning with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as part of an important summit that’s expected to last several hours. As the meeting got underway, the Republican National Committee issued a press statement, letting reporters know the party’s takeaway from the international gathering.

“Giving Putin a meeting is just the latest win that Joe Biden has handed Russia,” the RNC said.

It is? So what was it when Trump gave Putin a meeting? And when he left his own table and went to hang with Putin with no US officials present that one time? And when he met with Putin in Helsinki alone … Read the rest

Biden and Putin have been having their chat.

Biden gave Putin a list of Don’t You Dares.

A reporter asked Joe Biden if he outlined for Vladimir Putin how his administration would respond if there were a Russian cyberattack on critical US infrastructure.

“I pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability, and he knows it,” Biden said. “I pointed out, if they violate basic norms, we will respond.”

Biden noted he gave the Russian president a list of 16 critical infrastructure entities that should be off limits for attacks, whether cyber or otherwise.

So he’s saying everything else is fair game. Okaaaaaaay…

Putin went the “you’re just as bad” route.

Joe Biden was asked

… Read the rest

Come on now. Don’t be silly.

https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1405080248564211712 https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1405219215347486722

Silly. Just plain silly. “Trans” means “not” in this context, which “tall” and similar descriptive adjectives of course don’t. A trans man is a woman who identifies as a man, so the word “trans” in this context is not comparable to “tall.” Obviously. It’s just silly to attempt such a feeble ploy. I know it’s an old favorite, but it’s still silly.

https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1404873195405066243

He says, a man telling women what to think.

You couldn’t make it up.… Read the rest

It’s interesting when legislators make laws to ban things without knowing what the things are.

There’s been a lot of talk about critical race theory lately, and I’ve felt at a loss. I’ve heard so many conflicting things about critical race theory, I’ve gotten more and more confused.

So I did what middle-aged white men are prone to do — I asked another middle-aged white man. But not just any. I called an Alabama lawmaker, state Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, who wants to make it illegal to teach critical race theory in Alabama.

Pringle recently pre-filed a bill for the next legislative session (eight months away…) and he’s been bragging about it on talk radio. Please tell us what … Read the rest

Trump is pretending he’s being besieged with offers from top-class publishers longing to publish his “memoir” but publishers aren’t doing any besieging.

Their reluctance is driven by several factors, though the underlying fear is that whatever Trump would write wouldn’t be truthful.

“[I]t would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate, actually,” said one major figure in the book publishing industry, explaining their reluctance to publish Trump. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?”

By labeling it a novel?

Trump has insisted that he has suitors for a book too. In a statement last Friday, he said he had received two offers

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Tough times for Scarlett.

In connexion with Iknklast’s remark at #1 about ‘systemic racism’, I wrote the following e-mail to Andrew Sullivan, who in one of his blog-posts had, while invoking Orwell, presented a case for plain writing, quoted a horrid example of bad writing (which was genuinely horrid) and listed a number of terms that he considered pretentious, ambiguous & obfuscating, amongst which was ‘systemic racism’:

Dear Mr Sullivan,

It did not, alas, altogether surprise me when you listed ‘systemic racism’ in your collection of ‘horrid examples’ of obfuscating terms. I honestly feel it is disingenuous of you to do so. The term really is not difficult to understand. It derives … Read the rest

I don’t even know this guy.

You mean "women." Women get pregnant. "Women" is not a dirty or blasphemous word. Don't erase the word "women." https://t.co/a4JpxQuNy0

— Ophelia Benson (@OpheliaBenson) June 14, 2021

https://twitter.com/KTKeith/status/1404587169562365953

I don’t even know him. Have never talked to him before – but he marches right up and calls me a bigot. For saying that women get pregnant.

Then he calls me idiotic…while he pretends that “only women get pregnant” is “all women get pregnant” and then says it’s “simple observational fact” that men get pregnant.

https://twitter.com/KTKeith/status/1404835625753366533 https://twitter.com/KTKeith/status/1404911254754541575

Loudly? Wishes? Bigoted?

I don’t even know this guy.

Updating to add: I guess it’s all over between us. I still have no idea who he is or … Read the rest

Stonewall is doing what now?

https://twitter.com/ATraschel186/status/1404796882182979595

It turns out NHS Rainbow Badge is not NHS but…Stonewall.

https://twitter.com/ATraschel186/status/1404878926304972806 Tweets by RainbowNHSBadge

Why does Stonewall have this kind of power and authority in the NHS?

Never mind, I’m sure people trapped in NHS hospitals are thrilled to have Rainbow Badge people asking what their pronouns are and chastising them for not wearing Rainbow pins on their johnnies.… Read the rest

From George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” courtesy of Project Gutenberg:

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.  But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species.  The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of

… Read the rest

Berkeley News headline:

Truly changing sex is possible, says Berkeley trans scholar Grace Lavery

No it isn’t. Next?

An associate professor of Victorian literature, Lavery first became interested in trans studies after reading the work of George Eliot, a 19th-century writer — born Mary Ann Evans, who went by a masculine pseudonym.

“There was this thread that I couldn’t stop pulling on,” said Lavery. “We know that Eliot was read as a male writer by many, many people and wanted to be read as a male writer. Those things are interesting and important. It was something that I thought very deeply about.”

She didn’t “want to be read as a male writer” as such, she wanted not to be … Read the rest

The Times defends Nikole Hannah-Jones’s work again.

"Legislation that attempts to censor school curricula violates principles of free thought and free expression and is at its core un-American."
— American Society of Magazine Editors statement about The 1619 Project and @nhannahjones https://t.co/jRaX7aIZOg pic.twitter.com/rXOA4J2yLF

— Cliff Levy (@cliffordlevy) June 15, 2021

I don’t actually agree with the principle as they state it. I don’t think schools should be free to teach, say, that Emmett Till deserved what he got. Is the 1619 Project the obverse of that? I don’t think so.… Read the rest