The problem isn’t boys on girls’ teams, the problem is bad coaches!

The February 26, 2021 passage of the Equality Act in the US House of Representatives piqued conservatives into a moral panic.

The bill, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, had a terrifying potential for Republicans: the presence of trans girls in high school sports.

No, not the presence of trans girls in high school sports, the presence of boys in girls’ sports. And it’s not just Republicans or just conservatives who think this will be unfair to girls.

All this language of the need to “protect,” the need to root out other children from “bathrooms” and “locker rooms,” is hard to square with

Men who identify as women can invade women’s sports, but maybe not those contests where people score women on how fuckable they look in bathing suits. For that kind of thing the customer wants an actual woman, by golly.

Beauty queen Anita Noelle Green competed in the Miss Universe pageant, was the first transgender contestant for Miss Montana USA and title holder for Miss Elite Earth Oregon 2019. Only one pageant has excluded her on the basis that she’s not a “natural born female” — Miss United States of America. A federal judge OK’d that policy on Thursday.

It’s a consumer issue. If you buy a steak at the grocery store you don’t want to unwrap it at home … Read the rest

This is so maddening. Go ahead, guys, say you’re trans and presto you can compete against women and be guaranteed to win.

The Biden administration has withdrawn government support for a federal lawsuit in Connecticut that seeks to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls’ high school sports.

Notice what that doesn’t say – that the suit seeks to ban boys from competing in girls’ sports. That would make the reasons way too obvious, whereas if you say “transgender athletes” instead of “boys” it sounds cruel and vaguely homophobic.

Connecticut allows high school athletes to compete in sports according to their gender identity. The lawsuit was filed a year ago by several cisgender runners who argue they have been

Oh Senator.

I started working by bussing tables at the Star Family Restaurant for $1/hour & slowly moved up to cook – the big leagues for a kid like me– to earn $6/hour. Businesses in small towns survive on narrow margins. Mandating a $15 minimum wage would put many of them out of business. pic.twitter.com/izQDOGRAH1

— Senator John Thune (@SenJohnThune) February 24, 2021

Yes but that wasn’t last week or last year or ten years ago.

pic.twitter.com/vNNEEGfa2V

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) February 25, 2021

H/t Roj Blake… Read the rest

More on Cruz –

“Orlando is awesome. It’s not as nice as Cancun, but it’s nice,” Cruz began, referring to the scandal he sparked when he left storm-ravaged Texas for Cancun with his family last week.

A child died in his bed in storm-ravaged Texas, but heeheehahahoho let’s make jokes about it anyway.

Here are some other highlights from Cruz’s speech:

Mask-wearing is virtue-signaling: “We’re gonna wear masks for the next 300 years,” Cruz said. “And by the way, not just one mask — two, three, four — you can’t have too many masks! How much virtue do you wanna signal?”

…

There were no “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations in Houston last year because of the Second Amendment: “In Houston

No it isn’t.

Most of the people who give birth are women. But not all. What do I lose by creating room in the language that I use so it can take into account the experience of trans people? This is such a silly argument!

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) February 26, 2021

No, all the people who give birth are women, no matter how they “identify.” Pretending otherwise is not “making room” but deleting, denying, concealing. What you – and, much more important, what all women – lose by doing that is the ability to talk coherently about the issues that affect women. That’s a very big thing to lose.… Read the rest

It’s asking too much, though.

Democratic plans to include a gradual raise to $15 in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus bill were effectively ended on Thursday when the Senate parliamentarian ruled it should not be part of the package.

…

Biden campaigned on a pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15. Low-wage workers and unions have campaigned for a rise since 2012, and its inclusion in the coronavirus stimulus bill had been seen as a major victory.

While the proposal faced universal opposition by Republican senators and skepticism from some Democrats, Senator Bernie Sanders and others were confident that it could be pushed through with a simple majority in the Senate, where the Democrats hold a slim

I hate this about the US. Hate it. It’s contemptible and awful.

In Europe, many people scoff at the US as a country of low-wage McJobs with paltry benefits – often no paid sick days, no paid vacation and no health insurance. In Denmark, a McDonald’s hamburger flipper averages $22 an hour (with six weeks’ paid vacation), while in the US, fast-food jobs pay half that on average.

Plus no health insurance.

You might wonder: how can the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, be a low-wage economy? Of the 37 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the unofficial club of rich and near-rich nations, the US has the third-highest percentage of low-wage workers, with nearly

"AOC is telling us she was murdered," Cruz "jokes" to the CPAC crowd

This was 3 days after saying people shouldn't "be assholes" (a reference to alleged friends sharing texts w reporters about Cruz family going to Cancun during the deadly storm in Texas)….

1/ https://t.co/FFpu1CzCE8

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 26, 2021

Hur hur, why would she be scared? Why would she tell us about being scared? Hur hur.

I wonder if it’s at all possible that one reason she was scared is because people like Trump and Cruz and tabloid tv like Fox News have been making her a target ever since she was elected.… Read the rest

Insult and injury.

This is how the roles of women in public life are being filled by males who identify as trans. Meanwhile women die as these great boundaries are crossed and celebrated as “diversity”. It is an insult to women to talk of “empowerment” whilst replacing them as spokeswomen. pic.twitter.com/6jB2vGXKVc

— Jean Hatchet (@JeanHatchet) February 26, 2021

I don’t know how it’s possible that anyone needs this explained, but women don’t want webinars on domestic violence that are chaired by men.… Read the rest

Well this changes everything!

Trans people exist.

— OREO Cookie (@Oreo) February 25, 2021

They do?????????? Gee, they’ve been awfully quiet about it.

Anyway thank god we have huge corporations that make horrible cookies explaining the world to us.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Papito on No persuasive evidence.

This is a rough read, but I find it depressingly unsurprising. Privilege knows no bounds. A woman making, at the end of her career, half as much per year as it costs to attend the college is abused and threatened. Why? Because some oppression trumps other oppression. What ever happened to “intersectionality?” If someone is attending Smith College, they ipso facto have privilege vis-a-vis the security, dining, and facilities workers. Colleges can be positively feudal.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on

Proud that the ⁦@ESRC⁩ research of @transpregnancy⁩ is speaking out against attempts by some to halter the use of inclusive language in law and policy. #MaternityBill Language evolves as society progresses. https://t.co/SzcmBxzkLR

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) February 25, 2021

“Proud” that what? That people are pretending men can get pregnant and push out children and breastfeed them? How is that something to be proud of? How is it “as society progresses”? What’s progress about pretending both sexes make children in their bodies?

And it will

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) February 25, 2021

How is it moving forward to pretend that men can gestate children?… Read the rest

The rest of that story. (I got too exasperated to do it all in one bite.)

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training.

Ah so it’s only the peons who have to be brainwashed reeducated trained.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at

Another battlefront in the Woke Wars:

In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

Kanoute was upset and angry, and posted about it on Facebook.

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The Times, the Post, and CNN picked up the story, and … Read the rest

This guy is very hostile to women.

I'm sorry if Allison Bailey doesn't like being told that the logical consequence both of the policies she advocates by signing the Women's Declaration of Sex-Based Rights and the fascism that her culture war views enable is that a lot of people die.

But these are serious times.

— Roz Kaveney (@RozKaveney) February 24, 2021

It is of course in no way “a logical consequence” of Allison Bailey’s view that humans can’t change sex that “a lot of people die.” All people die, and Allison Bailey’s entirely familiar and everyday view that men are not women isn’t going to hasten that (also familiar and everyday and biological reality-based) fact.

Allison may not like

Now some people find this hurts their ears, but it makes me laugh too hard to notice. The girl is only fair but the dog is BRILLIANT.… Read the rest

First it’s the pretend-police, now it’s the NHS.

Today, we’re focusing on misgendering, which is one of the most common unintentional blunders made by cisgender people. Why not try adding your pronouns to your email signature, which provides clarity and encourages others to do the same #LGBTHM21 pic.twitter.com/nsTP871iQB

— NHS England Workforce, Training and Education (@NHSE_WTE) February 23, 2021

Why not try fucking right off.

To elaborate a little, because there is no such thing as “cisgender people” and because all this noise about “misgendering” and “your pronouns” is just a way to force us to pay more and more and more attention to a tiny set of people who want all the attention in the universe and beyond. That’s … Read the rest

If there’s anything movie stars should not be doing, it’s giving medical advice on Covid. Naturally that’s exactly what Gwyneth Paltrow is doing.

Paltrow recently wrote on her blog that contracting Covid-19 had left her with “some long-tail fatigue and brain fog”.

She said a “functional medicine practitioner” had recommended an “intuitive fasting” healing regime.

But NHS England’s Prof Stephen Powis said some of her methods were “really not the solutions we’d recommend”.

As part of her recovery, the Hollywood-star-turned-lifestyle-guru said she was on a mainly “keto[genic] and plant-based” diet, with no sugar or alcohol. She fasts until 11:00 every day and takes infrared saunas.

A “lifestyle guru” shouldn’t be guruing on medical subjects, especially this one.

Prof Powis,

Wtf? The BBC reports:

Amnesty International has stripped the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after it says it was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting xenophobic comments that he has made in the past and not renounced.

A spokesman for the human rights organisation in Moscow told the BBC that he believed the wave of requests to “de-list” Navalny was part of an “orchestrated campaign” to discredit Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic and “impede” Amnesty’s calls for his release from custody.

But on review, Amnesty International concluded that comments made by Navalny some 15 years ago, including a video which appears to compare immigrants to cockroaches, amounted to “hate speech” which was incompatible with the