This guy…

Ah – reducing ‘females’ to their anatomy. What stellar feminist thinking. 😍 Really top notch. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a cluster account of ‘femaleness’ can include cis and trans people, but also exclude both. It doesn’t make sense. Much like the GC agenda.

Who is it that he’s setting straight with such authority?

Boodleoops – you know, an actual philosopher.

The only “gender identity” I have is knowledge that my body is female, and an awareness of what that body means for how I am treated by others. If you don’t have a female body, then you and I don’t share any gender identity, and therefore we can’t both be women. Sorry.

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on Magic with words.

When I was a general surgeon (eons ago it seems), I had been highly trained in surgery for diseases of the breast as part of my residency. I was an early advocate of less invasive surgery for breast cancer and was the first I know of who worked with a team of physicians to council women about their options. When I saw a woman with breast cancer in my office I coordinated the visit with oncology, radiation therapy and plastic surgery in one visit so the individuals I saw could make the best choice for their needs. When surgery was part of the therapy, I worked with … Read the rest

David Karpf on the translucently thin skin of Bret Stephens:

Bret Stephens is above me in the status hierarchy. He knows this. I know this. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and has a regular op-ed column in the New York Times. I am just some professor. I’ve written two books, but unless you are professionally involved with digital politics, you probably have never heard of me.

We have now though.

Karpf was surprised to get an email from Stephens, and surprised to see the provost of his university was cc’ed on the message.

He shares the email. I neglected to quote the whole thing yesterday so why don’t I do that now.

Dear Dr. Karpf,

Someone just

And I thought we’d gone crazy. Boris is getting away with his coup.

Parliament will be suspended just days after MPs return to work in September – and only a few weeks before the Brexit deadline.

Boris Johnson said a Queen’s Speech would take place after the suspension, on 14 October, to outline his “very exciting agenda”.

But it means the time MPs have to pass laws to stop a no-deal Brexit on 31 October would be cut.

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said it was a “constitutional outrage”.

The Speaker, who does not traditionally comment on political announcements, continued: “However it is dressed up, it is blindingly obvious that the purpose of [suspending Parliament] now would be

Another one:

When June Eastwood steps onto the start line for the Clash of the Inland Northwest cross country meet on Saturday morning in Cheney, Wash., she will make history. Eastwood, a senior at the University of Montana, will become the fastest distance runner to ever compete in an NCAA Division I women’s race.

In fact, it won’t even be close.

Eastwood’s personal best in the 800 meters is 1:55.23. That’s almost four seconds faster than the collegiate record of 1:59.10 set by Raevyn Rogers in 2017.

Her personal best in the 1500 is 3:50.19. Jenny Simpson’s collegiate record, unchallenged for a decade, is almost 10 seconds slower (3:59.90).

Eastwood has run 14:38.80 in the 5,000, far ahead of

Pink News tweeted this clip from last year today.

One thing the “non-binary lesbian” on the left said – or “argued” – is interesting.

At the end of the day they are terms, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists. So someone telling me that I can’t be a non-binary lesbian doesn’t mean anything [snigger] because I already am one.

What?

Yes, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists, but to do that they have to do that. They have to be accurate as opposed to inaccurate, or otherwise they’re not describing the experience, but failing to do so. If she’s trying to describe her experience of being a lesbian and swaps … Read the rest

Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter today:

A follow up to the dead rat that was nailed to our door recently… this morning we found this writing scrawled across the windows of our storefront space that we use for support and training groups

“KILL TERFS / TRANS POWER”

Any chance it’s provocateurs, I wonder? It seems pretty insane for actual trans people to self-present that way…but then again it would hardly be the first time.

… Read the rest

I also went looking for recent Bret Stephens wisdom, and found some on the subject of The War On Excellence a couple of week ago:

Today’s students are not chafing under some bow-tied patriarchal WASP dispensation. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a system put in place by professors and administrators whose political views are almost uniformly left wing and whose campus policies indulge nearly every progressive orthodoxy.

So why all the rage?

The answer lies in the title of Anthony Kronman’s necessary, humane and brave new book: “The Assault on American Excellence.” Kronman’s academic credentials are impeccable — he has taught at Yale for 40 years and spent a decade as dean of its law school — and his

Oh this is interesting. I wondered if I’d written anything about Bret Stephens here before so I did a search and I’ll be darned, look what I found from April 2018:

But sometimes a person’s worst tweets, like a person’s worst blurts or jokes or exclamations, tell you something.

Expressing a belief in a tweet – or on Facebook or Instagram – does not make that belief any less yours. That’s why I found it so odd when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an open letter to Williamson this weekend, apologizing to him over having his character “assassinated”.

“I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet. When you write a whole

Another entry in the “horrors inflicted on other people are as nothing compared to a minor insult aimed at me” file: NY Times columnist Bret Stephens goes nuclear on one unnoticed tweet.

On Twitter Monday afternoon, a George Washington University professor compared conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug after a Times editor had posted that bedbugs were spotted in its newsroom.

David Karpf’s tweet, which read, “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens,” initially gained little traction.

“Little” traction meaning no traction – zero retweets. But never mind traction; Stephens emailed Karpf all the same, and copied in the provost at GWU where Karpf is a professor.

“This afternoon, I tweeted

Also in today – Devon Rape Crisis and Sexual Abuse Services tweets:

Are you a self-identified woman? Are able to commit 3 evenings a month to volunteering? Are you passionate about gender equality & ending violence? If you’ve answered yes to all of the above we want to hear from you. Full details; http://devonrapecrisis.org.uk/support-us/get-involved

Which, as many women angrily responded, is just a terrible thing to do. Women who need rape or sexual abuse services don’t want them from men. They don’t want them from men even if those men “self-identify as” women. Rape and sexual abuse services should not be a place for men to exercise their fantasies. Rape and sexual abuse services should be … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at the Miscellany Room.

Can you stomach another article on Epstein?

This one is a Mother Jones interview with Stuart Pivar, who described himself as a close friend of Epstein, until he realized what Epstein was up to. Though he still continued to engage in some fairly gross apologetics for him, so I take the claimed separation with a grain of salt. (Pharyngula readers may recall that Pivar once sued PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot.”)

Some notable excerpts. Those dinners with scientific stars:

There were lavish dinner parties with the likes of Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould during which Epstein would ask provocatively elementary questions like “What is gravity?”

The least useful message shirt ever:

Smirk smirk abortions not just for THE LADIES.

As if abortions were like earrings or Jimmy Choos or being on the cover of Vogue.… Read the rest