Sastra makes an interesting point on Jerry Coyne’s post about FFRF’s cowardly stab in the front.

One of the things about the transgender topic which has really stood out to me is the huge emphasis its advocates place on victimhood. While that may be a major component of all the areas of critical social justice, when it comes to the transgender it’s turned up to 11.

Trans people are the most marginalized, the most oppressed, the most vulnerable, the most fragile, sensitive, and easily offended. Suicide is seen as a likely and not unreasonable reaction to gender dysphoria. Meltdowns over misgendering are understandable. There is apparently no pain so great, no sense of alienation so cutting, as other people thinking

Jerry Coyne has written a post on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s extraordinary behavior and explanation of said behavior.

When I wrote yesterday about my critique of Kat Grant’s “What is a woman?” piece, a critique published on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) website, I had no idea that what I wrote was being removed by the FFRF at that moment! 

Jolting, isn’t it. It seems they no sooner published it than they depublished it. Why bother? Why not just say no in the first place? But of course that would not be an improvement, just an avoidance of public absurdity. (That part really is a mystery.)

It gets worse, because of course it does.

When some readers

Freedom From Religion Foundation has found religion.

Religious interference often seeks to erode protections for LGBTQIA-plus individuals in areas such as marriage equality, health care, education and workplace rights. FFRF opposes these efforts, as they threaten not only individual freedoms but also the integrity of our secular democracy. FFRF recognizes the right of bodily autonomy for LGBTQIA-plus individuals, just as we consider that the government or outside individuals have no right to dictate or interfere with such intimate matters as abortion or contraception.

By “bodily autonomy” I suppose they mean puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, removal of healthy breasts, genital mutilation and so on. Yes, the right to “bodily autonomy” is important, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that people should … Read the rest

Touchy-feely bestselling author goes the extra mile.

Joanne Harris, author of the bestselling novel Chocolat, has begun adding content warnings to her books after comparing them to “wheelchair ramps”.

Mm. Yeah no. Wheelchair ramps are necessary because people in wheelchairs cannot use stairs: it’s physically impossible. It’s not the case that it’s physically impossible to read a novel because there’s something shocking or painful in it.

Readers are now told that Harris’s 1999 hit novel contains “spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community and religious intolerance”.

Leaving readers feeling there’s no point in reading it now.

At least she’s kind enough to explain the ramp analogy.

“It makes a lot

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on If they hold a certificate.

What does gender identity have to do with strip-searches?

Because trans ideology is a fundamentally moral enterprise and as such has minimal concerns for any facts or indeed any actual human reality. And as a moral enterprise it is fundamentally social and thus ultimately always resolves its conflicts not by reference to actual human needs (even if it sometimes claims to do so) but by deference to (some understanding of) social status. And men in dresses, however much they are identified as women, and as having always been women, retain their male status. (Apparently a male infant gets an irrevocable certificate of male status at some point … Read the rest

Ructions.

Freethought Now, the blog or online magazine of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, posted an article last month by someone named Kat Grant titled “What is a woman?”

The content, I’m sorry to say, is tediously predictable and indeed already familiar, not to say stale. Usual stuff. Vagina can’t be the answer because trans women can have them, missionaries and colonizers, blah blah. Mind you there is one quite startling lie:

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, also known as TERFs, claim that transgender women are rapists who are attempting to take away opportunities from “real” women.

The hell we do. Claim that all “transgender women” are rapists? I don’t know of any gender critic who has ever said that, … Read the rest

Speaking of plagues and anti-vaxxers and doom…

Pertussis, also known as whooping cough, is making a comeback that no one asked for. Recent federal data shows that cases of the vaccine-preventable disease this year have reached the highest levels in a decade.

As of December 14, there have been 32,085 cases of pertussis reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this year. That’s a fivefold increase from the tally recorded in 2023, which only saw around 6,500 cases. There are several factors to blame for the surge, experts say, including declining vaccination rates.

Well great. We’re stupid and getting stupider.

Since 2000, the U.S. had tens of thousands of annually reported pertussis cases. But as with

The director of the Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation in South Africa in the NY Times last month:

The World Is Watching the U.S. Deal With Bird Flu, and It’s Scary

As a virus scientist in South Africa, I’ve been watching with dread as H5N1 bird flu spreads among animals in the United States. The pathogen poses a serious pandemic threat and has been detected in over 500 dairy herds in 15 states — which is probably an undercount. And yet the U.S. response appears inadequate and slow, with too few genomic sequences of H5N1 cases in farm animals made publicly available for scientific review.

Failure to control H5N1 among American livestock could have global consequences, and this demands

How sad, they’re fighting already.

A multi-day firestorm has erupted over comments made by two incoming advisers to President-elect Donald Trump about H-1B temporary worker visas, a carve-out for high-skilled workers that some in MAGA world say are taking American jobs.  

It’s so sad when racism and nativism can’t get along with greed and self-dealing.

Vivek Ramaswamy, in a post on X, criticized an American culture that he said “venerated mediocrity over excellence,” attributing this as one reason for the influx of foreign tech workers. Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, went on to say he hopes Trump’s presidency can start an American culture that prioritizes “hard work over laziness.” Tech executives have called for greater access to

Bird flu is turning up in zoos.

Dozens of rare animals including tigers, lions, and cheetahs are dying as bird flu infiltrates zoos, with potentially “grave implications” for endangered species, researchers have warned.

As a growing number of zoos report animal deaths, scientists are concerned that infected wild birds landing in enclosures could be spreading it among captive animals. In the US, a cheetah, mountain lion, Indian goose, and kookaburra were among the animals that died in Wildlife World Zoo near Phoenix, according to local media reports last week. San Francisco Zoo temporarily closed its aviaries after a wild red-shouldered hawk was found dead on its grounds, and later tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAIV). A rare

Oh yay, the BBC has another story about drag. BBC News should rename itself BBC Drag News.

An Australian drag queen may not be the obvious choice to be one of the stars of a Christmas panto in Bradford.

But for Shane Jenek, who is currently playing Blue Faerie in the Alhambra’s Pinocchio, it makes perfect sense.

The 42-year-old burst into living rooms down under in 2003 when his alter ego Courtney Act successfully auditioned for Australian Idol (the day after Jenek was rejected) and landed a record deal. Courtney went on to be a runner-up on RuPaul’s Drag Race US in 2014 and won Celebrity Big Brother UK in 2018.

And so on, for 24 more enthralling paragraphs.… Read the rest

Oh dear, I found him – the “transphilogyny” guy. It’s a sort of TED talk but not really. His name is Pella Felton.

Here’s all 16 minutes 46 seconds.

Here’s his pseudo-intellectual drivel in writing, with a couple of paragraph breaks added:

Transphilogyny refers to the affirmation and normalization of transfemininity as womanhood. Coined as an analogue to trans scholar Julie Serrano’s transmisogyny, I devised transphilogyny as a counter to the rise in structural, political and physical violence towards trans women . Rather than looking at such violence as inevitable, I envision transphilogyny as a collection of utopian practices through which we can imagine and enact a different reality through which human women become legible and valued beyond the gendered

Dude screams that he gets to define what hatred of women is, “patriarchy be damned.”

Make no mistake, these men are dangerous…

They hate women… pic.twitter.com/NG8EwOyO8x

— Jonny Bell (@Jonnywsbell) December 26, 2024

He also says “philogyny” when he means “misogyny.” Twice. The second time he calls it “philogyny nwar” – meaning, misogynoir, a portmanteau word for, of course, hatred of black women.

Dude is white and male as well as large and loud. He’s not the progressive he thinks he is.… Read the rest

Sometimes it just looks like sheer unadulterated sadism. For the sake of it.

Male officers identifying as female are allowed to intimately search women if they hold a gender recognition certificate

Women’s rights campaigners are suing the British Transport Police (BTP) over guidance that allows [male] transgender officers to strip-search women.

Why would they do that? Why would the higher ups lean back in their chairs and blow cigar smoke at the ceiling and decide yes indeed, we will allow men who pretend to be women to strip-search women? Other than sadism?

The policy, revealed by The Telegraph, allows male staff identifying as female to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

A … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Check the label.

“Liberal democracy” was a short lived experiment, between circa 1946 and 1986. It grew to be too much of a threat to the autocratic kleptocracy it briefly rose above, and has been slowly wound back ever since.

The Middle Class in which many of us grew up or aspired to join was a pleasant result of that short experiment, but the autocratic kleptocrats could not accept that so many people were suddenly joining in the common wealth and began a relentless campaign to turn worker against worker, to teach those outside the middle class to scorn them, and thus began the class war that would only ever result … Read the rest

How does anyone manage to believe this? The Washington Post:

NEW CASTLE, Pennsylvania — Lori Mosura goes to the grocery store on a bicycle because she can’t afford to fix her Ford F-150 truck.

The single mother and her 17-year-old son live in an apartment that is so small she sleeps in the dining room. They receive $1,200 each month in food stamps and Social Security benefits but still come up short. Mosura said she often must decide whether to buy milk or toilet paper.

It was all that penny-pinching that drove the part-time tax consultant to abandon the Democratic Party this fall and vote for Donald Trump.

“He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of

The Associated Press had a contest to name Female Athlete of the Year. You know what comes next.

A group of 74 sports journalists from The Associated Press and its members voted on the award.

Clark received 35 votes, Olympic gymnast Simone Biles was second with 25.

But Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif was third, getting four votes.

Naturally. If you have an item for women – an event, a list, a contest – it’s important to add men, because women must not be allowed to have anything all to themselves.… Read the rest

The BBC’s obsession with drag queens continues.

Strictly to feature first drag queen competitor

Notice the weird chummy insiderism of the title. Wtf does it even mean? It looks like an uncompleted thought rather than a title. It’s a cozy reference to a tv program that everyone who matters knows all about so no need to spell out the program’s actual title; it’s so much cuter to use just the first word of the title, and let everyone who isn’t in on the joke puzzle over the meaning.

Does the Beeb always do that, or only when the subject is drag queens? Does it refer to “Call” instead of “Call the Midwife”?

No. The BBC doesn’t do that.

Strictly’s Christmas

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Check the label.

Liberal democracy does not depend on silly lies about who can do what in the way of magic personal changes.

Aye, but there’s the rub. Germany is slowly (actually not-so-slowly) ceasing to recognise itself as a liberal democracy as you might understand that term; it sees itself, rather, as the world’s first “defensive democracy”. Its politicians regularly tar any opinions, statements, or policies which disagree with the ruling coalition as “anti-democratic”, regardless of how soundly those opinions, statements, and policies are founded in the principals of liberalism nor how widely they are to be found amongst the demos itself.

Anything that does not fit onto the tip of the … Read the rest

So kids in school can be compelled, by the school, to use wrong, counter-intuitive, fantasy-based “pronouns” in conversation.

A federal appeals court decided on Friday to revisit its recent decision to uphold a central Ohio school district’s right to enforce policies against the bullying of transgender students, which had been challenged by a conservative parents group.

That’s very misleading. Of course schools should have and enforce policies against bullying, but failing or even refusing to join someone else’s fantasy isn’t bullying. Arguably the demand to be called anything non-intuitive is itself a bullying move. If you’re ordered to call people by the counter-intuitive pronouns, you’re going to have to work hard to remember to do it and avoid … Read the rest