Ruth Smeeth, CEO of Index on Censorship, complains of polarization…a complaint I always find rather dull and beside the point. “X is for torture and Y is against it; oh no the polarization!” It seems especially beside the point for an organization whose title and purpose is to oppose censorship. It’s not literal censorship to say stop being so polar, but it is a form of pressure to say different things in a different way.

Of course, the reality is this has always been part of our political discourse. There is a healthy tradition of challenge in our public space. But…my concern is it is no longer on the fringes of our national conversations, it now dominates and the

… Read the rest

Young Americans for Freedom made the mistake of sneering at the observation that racism is built into many US highways, thus giving a lot of people the opportunity to educate onlookers about the well-documented fact that racism is built into many US highways. Own goal.

This is not parody. pic.twitter.com/bzbplAnfqO

— YAF (@yaf) April 10, 2021

No, they’re right, it’s not parody, and it’s true.

Not just in NYC. In Denver, I-70 cut off a community called Swansea from the rest of the city

— Amy H (@TheRufusFiles) April 11, 2021

That thing about roads designed not to allow buses? That’s closely tied to voter suppression, too. The suppressionist bills that limit voting places are helped along by extra difficulty … Read the rest

He’s still alive, but it was a near thing.

A second lieutenant in the US army is suing two Virginia police officers over a traffic stop last December in which the officers drew their guns, pointed them at him and used a slang term to suggest he was facing execution before pepper-spraying him and knocking him to the ground.

Body camera footage shows Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, dressed in uniform and with his hands held in the air outside the driver’s window as he tells the armed officers he is “honestly afraid to get out” of his SUV.

But they must have had a good reason for the traffic stop, right?

No.

Daniel Crocker, a Windsor

… Read the rest

At A Blog of One’s Own:

On 11 March, Legal Feminist (a collective of feminist lawyers, of which I am a member: tweeting from @legalfeminist and blogging at legalfeminst.org.uk) tweeted this:

Torrey Peters, who identifies as a woman, has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Peters wrote this: pic.twitter.com/cguNCJX9a2

— Legal Feminist (@legalfeminist) March 11, 2021

That’s from a pre-prize novella Peters wrote called The Masker.

The Masker isn’t a one-off: there’s a genre. It’s called “sissy porn,” and “forced feminisation” is a popular trope among aficionados^[2]. It is a manifestation of a phenomenon known as autogynephilia: a tendency in some heterosexual males to be aroused by the thought or image of themselves as

… Read the rest

They just will not report on this subject honestly.

A protest against trans health-care scheduled this weekend in downtown Vancouver has reignited a debate pitting the protection of vulnerable youth against the right to free speech.

It’s not a “protest against trans health-care.” Nobody is campaigning to prevent trans people from getting health care. The issue is not health care at all, it’s health-compromising body modifications to match the sex one is not. It’s also not a matter of trying to block the protection of vulnerable youth. Nobody is demanding the free speech right to keep vulnerable youth from being protected.

Vancouver social justice lawyer Adrienne Smith fears the April 10 event will include transphobic rhetoric that contributes

… Read the rest

Andy Lewis on confusion between ontology and epistemology of sex

Much confusion appears to exist in popular discussion about the nature of sex. This has political importance at the moment, most visibly in recognition of people with trans identities in law and society. Confusions abound around conflations of the terms sex and gender, but, most fundamentally, about what a sex is, and what it means for an organism, animal or human, to have a sex. What is a sexed body? How can we tell what sex an organism is? Clear responses to these questions are so often lacking. And without that, policy, law and social arrangements are likely to be incoherent and unjust.

Much of that lack of clarity is … Read the rest

McKinnon did his CNN bit. He’s highly excited.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380896144801341441

CNN calls him Associate Professor of Philosophy at College of Charleston, which is misleading since he’s “quit” [or been told to quit or be fired, or just plain been fired] and will be gone as of May 15 and has been on sabbatical and then medical leave all this year.

His fans are gloating at his…erm…whatever this is.

https://twitter.com/DaniD2021/status/1380897441025814534

Anyway. Point is, things have to be arranged to suit McKinnon. That’s all you need to understand about trans women in sport.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380903237277077505

There you go. If transgender people had their own sports then McKinnon would literally have no one to race against, and we can’t have that, so all of … Read the rest

Oh look, a provocation from Dawkins that doesn’t make me roll my eyes.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 10, 2021

Been discussing for several years now. Progress slow.

"the argument that we cannot say what an adult is because of the difference between a biological and legal definition sounds like a last ditch plea in a paedophile trial."
Spot on!

— Bea Jaspert (@hogotheforsaken) April 10, 2021

https://twitter.com/JudyWeb92176381/status/1380863145883930626

It’s outrageous that children are … Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on The most extreme elements.

A compromise is supposed to be a mutual acceptance of terms. A deal. It’s expected that each party give something up to achieve a result beneficial to everyone. The phrase a “compromise on the rights of women” implies that it’s only women – as usual – who are expected to give anything up and what they’re expected to give up is – as usual – their rights.

This is not a compromise as the word is generally understood. Sullivan uses it to make disagreement seem unreasonable and himself the sole arbiter of reason.

That much is obvious. What’s not, apparently, is that negotiation isn’t really about making compromises, it’s … Read the rest

This kind of crap.

https://twitter.com/MagsVisaggs/status/1380198966348877825 https://twitter.com/MagsVisaggs/status/1380199252379496451

No you’re not, because I for one did say it and you didn’t and you can’t, because you don’t know where I am and because it’s hardly worth it to travel from wherever you are and because there’s no such thing as “period diarrhea” and because if there were you wouldn’t be keeping it in a tub now would you.

Anyway. This. This is why the whole idea is so fucked up. The belief that women can’t function in the world because [gasp] they have periods is one of the pretexts for subordinating and confining us for however many years it’s been. To see fetishizing fantasizing men claiming they’re menstruating and that as … Read the rest

It takes my breath away sometimes to see with what relaxed confidence some men will tell women to compromise on our rights. Andrew Sullivan is one such man.

If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who

… Read the rest

This is very bad news: Amazon succeeded in blocking the union.

Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.

That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.

The union said it would challenge the results.

It accused Amazon of interfering with the right of employees to vote in a “free and fair election”, including by lying to staff about the implications of the vote in mandatory staff meetings and pushing the postal service to install a mailbox on company grounds in an effort to monitor the vote.

“Amazon has

… Read the rest

“Rachel” McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy is working his final weeks at the College of Charleston and still finding time to abuse a student on Twitter. It’s almost as if he’s just not a very nice man.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380316558912815113 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380317893372620800 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380479516993335307

Selina Soule was of course not suing to ban trans women from sport, she was suing to keep males from competing in women’s sport.

But also, this is a man in his late 30s, a professor, holding a first year student up to ridicule on Twitter, and lying about her in the process.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380480258424631302 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380480761711710208

I guess Rhys McKinnon wants bullying a teenage girl on Twitter to be his legacy at 39. Yikes.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380481705866362883

Yes definitely the fact that he never … Read the rest

Mm. Progressive.

https://twitter.com/Slatzism/status/1380295311399264259

More on “Jessica Marie” Hann from March 2019:

Desert Hot Springs, California. Jason Michael Hann was convicted of senselessly murdering his infant daughter and son, and abandoning their bodies in storage units. At the time of his arrest, he was found to be subjecting a third infant, his son, to life-threatening harm. Now on death row, the 45-year-old serial baby killer says he identifies as a woman, and is demanding that the state of California approve him for gender-affirming surgery to supplement the bras, makeup and hair-styling tools he is permitted to use.

In 1999, Mr Hann was living in Vermont with Krissy Lynn Werntz, the mother of his children, when he beat their infant son,

… Read the rest

Man approves of man being nominated for women’s prize.

https://twitter.com/GarthGreenwell/status/1379783066302971907

Easy for him. He’s a man, so he doesn’t get overlooked and forgotten and tucked away on the pink fluffy shelf the way women do.

https://twitter.com/GarthGreenwell/status/1379783419715059714

He’s apologizing to himself in case any of the ugliness on Twitter has been directed at him. How sweet.

https://twitter.com/nanalanfann/status/1380076206809178114

Oh yes, that’s so funny, women and little girls are so funny for being afraid of male strangers getting all kinky and ironic in their toilets and pageants.… Read the rest

Yeah, god damn it, open up the cruise industry again, because how could that possibly be at all risky in the midst of a pandemic?

The state of Florida is suing the Biden administration to reopen the cruise industry “immediately” and allow cruises to “resume safely,” Florida’s governor and attorney general announced Thursday.

“Safely” how? A cruise ship is a small place where thousands of people are packed together like tuna in a can.

“We don’t believe the federal government has the right to mothball a major industry for over a year based on very little evidence and very little data. And I think we have a good chance for success,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news

… Read the rest

The Babylon Bee:

LITTLE ROCK, AR—In a huge blow to trans-species rights, Arkansas has passed a controversial law banning the dismemberment and surgical altering of children if they want to be a different creature. 

But trans mermaids are mermaids!

“I’ll never forget the day my daughter Belle was splashing in the tub and said, ‘Look at me, Mommy! I’m a mermaid!'” said local progressive mother and part-time librarian Zindy Derple. “I knew that day she was different. A mythical fish-creature trapped in a human girl’s body.”

Belle’s dismemberment surgery has now been canceled due to Arkansas’s new law. 

“Now, we can’t even get her the compassionate leg-removal medical care needed to turn her into her true mermaid self,” she

… Read the rest

Greg Sargent at the Post notes the determination of the Republicans to enforce evil on all of its foot soldiers via the example of Georgia governor Brian Kemp.

Kemp’s travails are detailed in a great new piece in the New York Times. It examines Kemp’s frantic efforts to atone for the heresy of refusing to help then-President Donald Trump overturn his Georgia loss, and then defending the loss as a legitimate outcome.

That is, the heresy of refusing to help Donald Trump break a bunch of laws in order to steal the election.

The central revelation is that Kemp sees his advocacy for Georgia’s new voting law as a way to win back GOP voters still fuming over his

… Read the rest

The Republican “we’re gonna TELL on you” ploy is getting more attention.

The National Republican Congressional Committee debuted a bright-yellow prechecked recurring-donation box on its donation page with a startling ultimatum.

The message from House Republicans’ campaign arm — which caught the eye of many reporters on Wednesday — told people that it needed to know it hadn’t “lost you to the Radical Left” and that if they opted out of making their donation a recurring one and “UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems.”

It’s interesting how stupid that message is, and how cheerful the Republicans who thought it up must be about telling their own people “We … Read the rest

The insult of nominating a man to win a women’s writing prize is compounded by the fact that the book is badly written as well as stomach-turningly sexist. (I haven’t read the whole book, but I have read snippets, and writing that bad is not confined to snippets. The snippets are as it were diagnostic. Someone who writes that badly writes that badly all the time.)

"Standing for decency." Lol. pic.twitter.com/kr606laHtY

— International Lesbian Solidarity ⚢ (@theomegalesbian) April 8, 2021

It just couldn’t get much worse. It’s a prize for women so the people in charge nominate a man who calls himself a woman, for a book in which he writes that “feminization” is all about being the object of … Read the rest