Another letter.

With anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ hate rising in the UK and across the world, we’ve joined 38 LGBTQ+ organisations calling on the @EHRC to step up for our communities. #TogtherWithTrans

Read our open letter here: https://t.co/v7fjZV5IcY pic.twitter.com/f6PrAiJUTd

— Stonewall (@stonewalluk) May 18, 2021

The letter contains no surprises.

As leaders of trans and LGBTQ+ organisations we are writing to express our frustration and disappointment at the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) recent record on LGBTQ+ people’s rights and trans people’s rights specifically.

The emphasis is always on trans people. Why?

Probably because people are so easily bored. Lesbian, gay, that’s so last week – let’s have something fresher!

We are disappointed that, despite the realms of possibility to

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Brilliant: another mosque in India demolished in defiance of the law. That will turn out well.

A local administration in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has defied a state high court order and bulldozed a mosque, in one of the most inflammatory actions taken against a Muslim place of worship since the demolition of the Babri Mosque by a mob of Hindu nationalist rioters in 1992.

That did not go well.

On Monday, police and security services moved into the area and cleared it of people, then brought in bulldozers and demolished the mosque buildings. Debris was then thrown into a river, according to images and local accounts. Security services have been deployed to prevent anyone coming within

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The University of Melbourne.

The student union.

The women’s department of the student union of the University of Melbourne PRESENTS

Menstruation Beyond the Binary.

Oh goody I cannot wait. I am so sick of those selfish bitches – women – keeping menstruation all for themselves. There’s no privilege like cramps privilege! Feeling that uterus contract to expel the sludge is just the best damn thing, second only to the sheer fun of catching the sludge and then disposing of it without attracting attention or flies or anything else untoward.

You think I’m joking. No such luck. It’s two days from now.

The gendering of menstruation needs to stop, periodt.

I don’t know if “periodt” is a typo or some … Read the rest

Oh, one of those. Jeff gave Bill advice on how to get away from That Woman.

Bachelor sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein gave Bill Gates advice on ending his marriage with Melinda after the Microsoft co-founder complained about her during a series of meetings at the money manager’s mansion, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Gates used the gatherings at Epstein’s $77 million New York townhouse as an escape from what he told Epstein was a “toxic” marriage, a topic both men found humorous, a person who attended the meetings told The Daily Beast.

Bros before hos.

The people familiar with the matter said Gates found freedom in Epstein’s lair, where he met a rotating cast of bold-faced

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Matt Gaetz’s buddy pleaded guilty.

Joel Greenberg, a former Florida tax collector and close confidant of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, formally pleaded guilty on Monday morning to six federal charges in a court hearing, admitting to a federal judge that he had knowingly solicited and paid a minor for sex.

…

The guilty plea from Greenberg, a former Seminole County, Florida, tax commissioner, comes after he struck a deal with federal prosecutors to avoid some of the other 33 federal charges he had faced that ranged from identity theft to fraud and bribery allegations.

He sounds nice.

As part of the plea, Greenberg has agreed to give “substantial assistance” to prosecutors as part of their sprawling investigation, including

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Foxkiller giving us our orders again.

Employers have a duty to protect their staff against bigotry. Replace "trans" with "gay" or "disabled" if you can't see why Maya's views are a problem. pic.twitter.com/eT3qxvGTQN

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) May 9, 2021

Employers should protect staff from bigotry, yes, but what are we defining as “bigotry”? Foxie of course is defining not believing that men are women as “bigotry,” which is just silly. He doesn’t expect us to believe he’s a woman, so why does he expect us to believe other men are women simply because they say they are? He’s a lawyer ffs: surely lawyers are sharply aware that people often say things that are not true.

And no, replacing “trans” … Read the rest

Deborah Cameron has an interesting post about “a longstanding feminist bone of contention: the use of the terms ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ to address teachers in UK schools.”

You can see where the contention comes in: “Sir” ain’t comparable to “Miss.”

In other contexts the female address term analogous to ‘Sir’ is not ‘Miss’ but ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’: though ‘madam’ has undergone some semantic derogation (it has acquired the specialised meaning ‘woman in charge of a brothel’), as an address term it retains a higher degree of formality and gravitas than ‘Miss’. That’s presumably why the related form ‘Ma’am’ has become the standard address term for senior female officers in the armed forces and the police. ‘Miss’ does not suggest deference

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Bad.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider a major rollback of abortion rights, saying it will decide whether states can ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The court’s order sets up a showdown over abortion, probably in the fall, with a more conservative court seemingly ready to dramatically alter nearly 50 years of rulings on abortion rights.

The court first announced a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and reaffirmed it 19 years later.

The case involves a Mississippi law that would prohibit abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The state’s ban had been blocked by lower courts as inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent that protects

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Brenda Brooks at Feminist Current on the Oprah interview with Ellen “Elliott” Page:

I watched the Oprah interview with interest, hoping that Page might be encouraged to discuss the nature of the compelling urge that led to such a seminal modification in herself. I wondered: what were the specifics that define a woman or a man so clearly that altering one’s body to eliminate one set of discrepancies, and confirm others, made sense? A clear definition between the two would be required, wouldn’t it, in order to choose to go forward in life as one sex, rather than the other? Was transition a mostly psychological event, or primarily physical? I wondered what changes would occur in future relationships. Would

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Trust Ash Sarkar for that. Woman’s Hour talks to a couple of women and Sarkar intervenes to tell it to talk to different people instead. Self-hating woman rebukes Woman’s Hour for not being as self-hating as she is.

Any chance of hearing from transgender and non-binary people on this issue, @BBCWomansHour? https://t.co/BGPJLq5TjB

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) May 17, 2021

Right, because we never hear from “trans and nonbinary” people, apart from all the fucking time. It’s mandatory to interrupt women who are talking about how something affects women to say shut up about women when are you going to talk about “trans and nonbinary” people instead? Women don’t matter, women are old news, women are Mommy and we … Read the rest

Some warped legal reasoning here from a University of Alabama law guy:

Laws that prohibit physicians from providing treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy to minors are bad public policy. Their advocates claim that these are efforts to protect kids, who they argue may later change their mind, from medical treatments they characterize as irreversible. But these arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny: The laws—such as the one Arkansas just passed and those that more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, are actively considering—will certainly harm transgender children, denying them medical care that they need and causing them psychological pain. That should be reason enough to oppose these laws.

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Trans identifying Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir is shocked shocked that anyone thinks people have a right to say that men are not women.

Last week a court in the UK heard an appeal from a tax researcher called Maya Forstater who lost an employment tribunal in 2019 – she was sacked after tweeting that transgender women can’t change their biological sex.

…

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) saw reason to intervene. In my view it is bizarre that they found it important to speak up for someone who clearly holds hostile views towards a vulnerable minority. 

It’s not “hostile” to say that men are not women. It’s also not a mere “view” that men are not women. It’s … Read the rest

Alan Sokal points out (not for the first time) a certain insouciance about the difference between facts and fantasies.

For millennia—since at least ancient Greece—philosophers have debated what constitutes knowledge and how one can legitimately acquire it. But when philosophers returned from their seminars back into the real world, even the most ardent anti-realists generally adopted the common-sense view that there do exist objective facts—situations in the external world that are independent of our beliefs—and that, sometimes at least, we can obtain reasonably reliable knowledge of those objective facts, through evidence and reasoning.

But, starting about 40 years ago, a small coterie of social-constructivist sociologists of science began to break this consensus, with radical claims like:

-The validity of theoretical

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Antisemitic and antifemale, too.

A police investigation has been launched after a video was circulated on social media showing antisemitic chants being shouted from a convoy of cars in north London.

Finchley Road, to be exact.

https://twitter.com/GarfieldJudith/status/1393950639512858636

Politicians condemned the footage, which was posted on Twitter and showed the cars travelling through the St John’s Wood area of north London on Sunday afternoon. The cars were covered in Palestinian flags with a speaker blasting out antisemitic slurs and threats against Jews.

Threats against Jews and “their daughters” – which is a telltale way of putting it.

The Metropolitan police said of the incident in Finchley Road:. “We are aware of a video appearing to show antisemitic language being

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Fair Play for Women on the fad for putting a few men in women’s prisons:

In July 2019 a specialist unit was opened on the Downview women’s prison estate to house high-risk transgender prisoners. We obtained the Equality Impact assessment through a Freedom of Information Request. The document is now available to view here: Equality Analysis Document E Wing Version 16.0 for publication.

…

‘E-wing’ was the solution to a problem of where to accommodate high-risk male prisoners who have acquired a GRC and so need to be treated as “female for all purposes”. Some of these prisoners are dangerous sex offenders who under normal circumstance would be considered too high-risk to mix with women. But the MOJ

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Parody? Must be? But apparently not.

Don't ask about my Genitals by #Bangor's @OwenJHurcum is challenging, informative & groundbreaking. A must read for anyone interested in expanding their knowledge & understanding of the #trans & non-binary community.
Pre-order from Paned o Gê @panedogehttps://t.co/ArxzIh0Sk2 pic.twitter.com/zbXsDUuVeb

— BlackBeeBooks (@BlackBeeBooks) May 9, 2021

As if anybody wants to ask this fool about anything.

(The underlying message, on the other hand, is the usual absurdity. “Don’t interpret my genitals as determining my sex. I have Magic Gender so I’m Special, and you have to genuflect.”)… Read the rest

Trump is chewing the wallpaper.

Trump Mon: “Greatest Election Fraud in the history of our Country”

McCarthy Wed: “I don't think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election”

Trump Thurs: “Corrupt, third world election”

Trump Fri: “Rigged and stolen”

Trump Sat: “CRIME OF THE CENTURY!”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 15, 2021

The thing about the Republican Party is that @GOPLeader can say things like "I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election" and then three days later Trump will send out a release calling it the crime of the century pic.twitter.com/mgAieJHQ8Q

— Brandon Wall (@Walldo) May 15, 2021

It’s telling that Trump is whining about the “crime of the century” now that he

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mole at the counter is hilarious.

https://twitter.com/moleatthedoor/status/1393658807016898571

OUT OF DATE BUFFET CAR SAUSAGE ROLL FILMS hahahahahahaha

https://twitter.com/moleatthedoor/status/1393667847855951876… Read the rest

The AP isn’t altogether happy about the bombing that demolished an office block almost on their heads.

An Israeli airstrike destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets on Saturday. All AP employees and freelancers evacuated the building safely.

Al Jazeera was another tenant.

Israel gave the media organizations one hour to evacuate, but reportedly refused to allow journalists to take their equipment.

Targeting journalists is a war crime.

— AJ+ (@ajplus) May 15, 2021

It is utterly unacceptable for Israel to bomb and destroy the offices of media outlets and endanger the lives of journalists. Israeli authorities know where media outlets are housed. https://t.co/BnIhS8DA3b

— Committee to Protect

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Don’t you know there’s a war on?!

No, wait, not a war, a closing of pubs. Same thing though! All must do their duty.

Pubs and bars will be allowed to serve customers indoors from Monday (17th May) after a long third lockdown which has seen many pubs struggle to survive.

According to the latest estimates some 2,500 pubs have already shut during lockdown, with many others facing an uphill battle to recoup losses as the economy opens up.

Campaigners have produced a ‘Your Local Pub Needs You’ poster urging revellers to get their hands in their pockets to save the UK’s 40,000 boozers.

In other words, pour more alcohol down your throats, it’s a public good!

They are

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