Ray Blanchard talks to the National Review:

Kearns: What do we mean by “gender identity”?

Blanchard: What do I mean by it?

Kearns: Yes. Let’s start with that.

Blanchard: Well, back in the days when I was writing a lot on that topic, which is quite a while ago now, I tended to avoid the phrase “gender identity” because I think that it’s a trivial concept when it’s applied to normal people. I mean normal men and normal woman know what sex they are, and they respond to that automatically, like when looking for a washroom. But I think it’s only at very unusual moments that a normal man or woman has a conscious awareness of “I’m a woman” or

From a Fresh Air interview with the novelist Stephen McCauley:

GROSS: The first time we talked in 1996, we talked about how one of your characters – your main character – always felt like he was either too young and then he felt like he was too old. And he never felt like he was the right age. And you talked about how when you started teaching, you felt like you were too young to be an authority figure. And then at some point, you felt like you were too old in the sense that you had kind of bypassed the common reference points that you used to have with your students. Where are you now?

MCCAULEY: I’m at the

Catherine Bennett notes an interesting juxtaposition.

In terms of knowing the enemy, much of it, in the US, will certainly resemble the Alabama misogynists – the 25 white, male, no longer young Republicans who have just stripped half their state’s population of reproductive rights. Photographs have been generously distributed. But, as the men would probably be the first to admit, they couldn’t have ushered in a generation or more of unwanted children without assistance from at least two women combatants, Terri Collins and the state governor, Kay Ivey.

…

Signing the ban into law, Ivey celebrated “a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious & that every life is a sacred gift from God”.

“Drink bleach” is a version of “drop dead” or “fuck off”: it’s not a “miracle cure,” or a humdrum ordinary medical cure either. Bleach is not good to ingest. It’s toxic.

But that doesn’t stop monsters from peddling it as a miracle cure:

An American pastor from New Jersey backed by a British former clairvoyant is running a network that gives up to 50,000 Ugandans a “miracle cure” made from industrial bleach, claiming drinking the toxic fluid eradicates cancer, HIV/Aids, malaria and most other diseases.

(A former clairvoyant? He used to be able to see magical stuff that no one else can see but then lost the knack?)

The network, led by pastor Robert Baldwin and part-funded by Sam

Where do we draw the line?

When Mary Gregory filled out the registration form to compete in a local weightlifting event, she checked the box that read “female” without hesitation.

“I mean, that’s my gender,” she said “I didn’t even think about it. That’s who I am.”

If any eyebrows were raised, Gregory didn’t notice, and on April 27, after months of training, she strode onto the platform at the Best Western hotel just east of Charlottesville and wowed the spectators and fellow powerlifters in attendance. That night she posted a picture on Instagram of herself holding a trophy, telling her 120 followers about the records she set for her age and weight class in the 100% Raw Powerlifting

Jeffrey Toobin reminds us to be outraged:

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called President Trump’s cries of “TREASON” on Friday morning “reckless and irresponsible,” adding that it’s yet another norm the President has broken.

“And treason is a crime for which death is a potential penalty,” Toobin said on CNN’s “New Day.” “It is so reckless and irresponsible to talk that way. One of the things that this president has done has violated so many norms.”

“It’s not illegal to say what he said, but the idea of a president accusing people of any crime — remember, he accused  Michael Cohen’s in-laws of crimes. A president, who is the head of the Justice Department, the head of

Wait.

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women, including trans women, and move beyond outdated, exclusionary understandings of feminism. #NoTERFsonourTurf” [4/4]

— Liberation at EdUni (@EdUniLiberation) May 7, 2019

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women and “TERFs” must be kept out. So discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women but not the women who disagree that men can be women. So discussions on women’s rights must include men who say they are women and the women who love them but not women who refuse to agree that men who don’t “identify as” men are therefore women. So ALL women but not ALL women. Mkay.

H/t Holly

https://twitter.com/aytchellesse/status/1129408007564140544… Read the rest

The Liverpool Echo reported a few days ago:

Two women have been charged after a woman was threatened with a hammer during a shocking road rage incident in a car park.

Footage from the incident shows two small groups coming to blows at Stonedale Retail Park in Croxteth on Wednesday night (May 8).

Initially the groups can be seen shoving and pushing each other before a woman retrieves a hammer from the boot of a car.

At one point the video shows a woman swinging the hammer towards another, younger woman, who tries to defend herself with a shoe.

A 19-year-old woman suffered head injuries, which are believed to be from a punch and was taken to hospital for assessment,

Oops. Wokey McWokerson made a little mistake.

https://twitter.com/MJB_SF/status/1129045483157110785

Yaaaaaaay inclusivity, no mention of women, just “uterus holding individual”! Utopia is nigh!

Oh but wait though, what’s that ugly thing in the line above? “Men”? That can’t be right. On the one hand men, on the other hand uterus holding individuals? Do these rules apply only to women?

Woking every day is not easy.… Read the rest

Playing the pretend-knowledge trick: I am an expert in this made-up Thing (field? discipline? ideology? campaign?) so I get to say anyone who disputes said made-up Thing has no right to do so because No Expertise.

Like trans-activist Ugla Stefanía Jónsdóttir for instance:

Experts on trans rights and people who have been working in the field for decades are being pitted against almost anyone with a negative opinion about trans people – regardless of who they are. This seems to be a trend among anti-trans campaigners; they’re given a platform despite their lack of knowledge or experience of the discussion they’re taking part in. As an example, in a controversial move, Scottish MP Joan McAlpine has just invited Canadian writer

I hadn’t heard of Miriam Toews until I read this New Yorker profile of her.

Toews, who is fifty-four, is one of the best-known and best-loved Canadian writers of her generation. She grew up in Steinbach, a town founded by Mennonites in the province of Manitoba, for which the colony in Bolivia was named. (“Toews,” which rhymes with “saves,” is as recognizably Mennonite as “Cohen” is Jewish.) Her fiction has often dealt with the religious hypocrisy and patriarchal dominion that she feels to be part of her heritage, and with a painful emotional legacy, harder to name but as present as a watermark. Her father and her sister both died too young, and she sees a certain Mennonite tendency

Biden is so full of shit.

“History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration,” Biden told an Iowa ballroom-full of supporters last week. “This is not the Republican Party,” he continued, noting his longstanding ties to “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

If this is not the Republican Party, why is it occupying all those Republican seats and passing all those Republican votes and protecting Donald Trump no matter what he does? If it’s not the Republican Party why don’t they all quit, or vote with the Democrats to hobble and then impeach Trump?

Indeed, as The New York Times has reported, “in the Obama White House, he was known as the ‘McConnell whisperer’ for

The barmaid hits a nerve.

… Read the rest

Lindsey Graham told Don Junior to break the law. Seems a bit flaky for a US senator.

[W]e ought to reserve some surprise for occasions like Monday, when the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, himself a lawyer, told a private citizen to defy a Republican senator and to break the law. And that’s what Graham did when he advised Donald Trump Jr. to ignore a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee, run by his Republican colleague Richard Burr. We should pause to be horrified. For the record, in the past Graham claimed that both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton could be impeached for defying subpoenas. But that was in the b.t. era: before trump.

…

Burr has questions,