The punchline of the now notorious “What is a woman?” by Kat Grant that has caused all this marching up and down is one of the silliest punchlines ever punched, and the need to say why has been bugging me for a couple of days now.

Remember it? Short, and absurd. “A woman is whoever she says she is.”

And by “she” Kat Grant means anyone who says she is, by which she means anyone who says she is, by which…

Infinite regress, but also, infinite nonsense. Is that a special privilege granted to women? Do men have to stick to the truth while women get to claim to be anything and everything and it will be true because it’s a woman saying it? If so, won’t that create a certain amount of confusion?

But also, of course, if a woman is whoever she says she is then actually all a man has to do is say “I’m a woman” and he is a woman. How do we know? Because he said he is, and a woman is whoever she says she is.

I could go on this way all night, but won’t. But I do wonder why Kat Grant is so pleased with her absurd tautology, and why FFRF saw fit to publish it.

The third musketeer slaps the glove across the face (very gently). Jerry Coyne tells us:

Well, that makes three of us. Steve Pinker, I, and now Richard Dawkins, have all decided independently to resign from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).  The organization’s ideological capture, as instantiated in throwing in their lot with extreme gender activism and censoring any objection to their views—as well as in the increasing tendency of the FFRF to add Critical Social Justice to their mission alongside their original and admirable goal of keeping church and state separate, has motivated us in different degrees to part ways with the group. I emphasize again that the FFRF did and still does engage in important work on keeping religion from creeping into governmental activity.

The body of Dawkins’s email:

It is with real sadness, because of my personal regard for you both, that I feel obliged to resign from the Advisory Board of FFRF. Publishing the silly and unscientific “What is a Woman” article by Kat Grant was a minor error of judgment, redeemed by the decision to publish a rebuttal by a distinguished scientist from the relevant field of Biology, Jerry Coyne. But alas, the sequel was an act of unseemly panic when you caved in to hysterical squeals from predictable quarters and retrospectively censored that excellent rebuttal. Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own Advisory Board. A Board which I now leave with regret.

Although I formally resign, I would like to remain on friendly terms with you, and I look forward to cooperating in the future. And to delightful musical evenings if the opportunity arises.

It’s tricky, doing that – publicly resigning and saying why, and remaining on friendly terms. Very tricky. Lamentable discourtesy isn’t really a motivation for staying matey. I’m not criticizing Dawkins for hoping for it, just pondering whether it’s workable or not. The discourtesy really was remarkably discourteous, and all the more so coming from presumed friends.

Steven Pinker follows suit. Jerry Coyne reports:

Like me, Steve Pinker has resigned from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).  His resignation was sent yesterday. Steve is an even bigger macher than I am both intellectually and, in this case, because he was Honorary President of that Board. I put below his two emails, reproduced with permission.

The core of what Pinker told them:

With sadness, I resign from my positions as Honorary President and member of the Honorary Board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The reason is obvious: your decision, announced yesterday, to censor an article by fellow Board member Jerry Coyne, and to slander him as an opponent of LGBTQIA+ rights.

My letter to you last November (reproduced below) explains why I think these are grave errors. With this action, the Foundation is no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics. It has turned its back on reason: if your readers “wrongfully perceive” the opposite of a clear statement that you support the expression of contesting opinions, the appropriate response is to stand by your statement, not ratify their error. It has turned the names Freethought Today and Freethought Now into sad jokes, inviting ridicule from its worse foes. And it has shown contempt for the reasoned advice of its own board members.

We are the heretics, dissenting from the dogma and uttering the blasphemy. The FFRF is the prisoner of a new religion.

Jerry Coyne leaves FFRF:

Dear Annie Laurie and Dan,

As you probably expected, I am going resign my position on the honorary board of the FFRF.  I do this with great sadness, for you know that I have been a big supporter of your organization for years, and was honored to receive not only your Emperor Has No Clothes Award, but also that position on your honorary board.

But because you took down my article that critiqued Kat Grant’s piece, which amounts to quashing discussion of a perfectly discuss-able issue, and in fact had previously agreed that I could publish that piece—not a small amount of work—and then put it up after a bit of editing, well, that is a censorious behavior I cannot abide. I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that “distressing” and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.

Anyway he couldn’t do it, because there are no such people. No one is lesbian and gay and bi and trans and queer and intersex and asexual. We shouldn’t encourage their lumping together all those categories by repeating the 8 letter catchall. But that’s a detail.

Further, when I emailed Annie Laurie asking why my piece had disappeared (before the “official announcement” of revocation was issued), I didn’t even get the civility of a response. Is that the way you treat a member of the honorary board?

I remain surprised as well as shocked by that. It’s all too typical, but it’s still shocking.

The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (“a woman is whoever she says she is”), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.

Exactly.

After all this time, I still don’t understand why that doesn’t repel all those new or gnu atheists who used to be our friends.

Over here men make better women than women do.

Over there……….

Over here it’s men stealing everything we have, over there it’s men forbidding women to have anything.

Trump and bird flu converge. What could go wrong?

Nearly a year into the first outbreak of the bird flu among cattle, the virus shows no sign of slowing. The U.S. government failed to eliminate the virus on dairy farms when it was confined to a handful of states, by quickly identifying infected cows and taking measures to keep their infections from spreading. Now at least 875 herds across 16 states have tested positive.

Well, thanks for that, US government.

Experts say they have lost faith in the government’s ability to contain the outbreak.

“We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”

To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more.

Together with emails obtained from local health departments through public records requests, this investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions.

So doing every possible thing wrong, is that it?

Case in point: The U.S. Department of Agriculture this month announced a federal order to test milk nationwide. Researchers welcomed the news but said it should have happened months ago — before the virus was so entrenched.

“It’s disheartening to see so many of the same failures that emerged during the COVID-19 crisis reemerge,” said Tom Bollyky, director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Far more bird flu damage is inevitable, but the extent of it will be left to the Trump administration and Mother Nature.

So we’re doomed.

Kat Grant – FFR’s women-explainer – has a long post responding to Jerry Coyne’s. It’s quite remarkably sloppy and badly written/reasoned.

Originally, I had planned on launching this blog in the New Year. It seemed like a good, solid time to launch a new project, allowing everyone to get through the holidays with minimal issue.

Wat? Everyone? Because the whole world is agog waiting for this blog?

If you are in the state-church space you may have seen that the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently posted a column by biologist and old guard atheist thinker Jerry Coyne, “rebutting” my “What is a Woman” blog, also written for Freethought Now. 

Oof. Terrible writing. Only the third sentence and we’re hit with all this. Sneery ageism plus scare quotes on “rebutting” – as if he were too dimwitted to take on a genius like her. And the whole structure of the sentence is messy and awkward. Those who cannot write should not try to tangle with those who can.

Now deleted, Coyne’s blog argued that we should not ignore “biology,” as well as cited a debunked British study as “proof” that transgender women are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence.

Even worse! Awkward wording again, stupid scare quotes, clumsy mistakes – this person cannot write her way out of a paper bag. “Now deleted” meaning what? Now deleted why? If now deleted why discuss at all? What mean? Please clear be.

Scare quotes on biology.

“as well as cited” – you mean as well as citing, you illiterate child.

“cited a debunked British study as “proof” that transgender women are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence” – one, he doesn’t use the word “proof” at all, and two, he of course doesn’t word what the study suggests that way. Kat Grant’s clueless translation shows that she’s in way over her head. What he does say is this:

But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men.

He says “suggest” and she shouts “prove.” What a bonehead.

To put a long story short, the blog was bad. Coyne combined straw man arguments and stochastic terrorism to create an essay that was almost comically bad, if it weren’t for the sheer danger it presented.

It’s to “make a long story short,” not “put.” As for “the blog was bad” – kid, you need to work hard on your own reasoning and writing before you accuse other people of being comically bad.

That’s just the first three paragraphs, and it’s more than enough. The mystery is why FFRF prefers this nitwit to Jerry Coyne.

Musk turning up the volume. So to speak.

Why doesn’t FFRF send him a rude letter instead?

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 you’re one sex when in your mind you’re not that sex. It removes your humanity and prevents you from functioning.

It’s true. Other struggles for rights and equality haven’t worked that way: they have put the emphasis on equality and the accompanying goods like respect, dignity, rights, fairness, openness, participation. The goal was not “Feel sorry for us!!!” The goal was very much the contrary. Do NOT feel sorry for us; don’t patronize us, don’t “protect” us; don’t pat us on the head; give us our rights and get the hell out of our way.

Why is the trans campaign so different?

My guess is that it’s because the trans campaign is (of course) dominated by male trans people as opposed to female ones. Male trans people pretend to be women. What are women? The weaker sex. More fragile, more sensitive, more emotional, more feeble, more whiney. To play a convincing woman you have to be in floods of tears most of the time, and in danger of being humiliated and degraded and beaten to a pulp all the time.

Part strategy, part kink, all bullshit.

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 pointed out yesterday that “Biology is not bigotry” was no longer online, I had no idea what happened, and assumed they had relocated the post. I was unable to believe that they would actually remove my post, especially because FFRF co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor had given me permission to write it and approved the final published version.

I emailed Annie Laurie inquiring what had happened to my piece. I never got a response—or rather, they didn’t have the human decency to write me back personally.

That really shocks me. It probably shouldn’t, given how fast a lot of “friends” rushed to denounce me back in 2015, but it does. I’ve met Annie Laurie and Dan, I was at a dinner table next to them in Dublin at that Atheist Ireland conference before The Trans Wars got going, they were convivial and nice and all the rest of it – they were normal. They didn’t seem like the kind of stalinist shits who would watch in silence while the commissars rounded up the dissenters.

I never got a response—or rather, they didn’t have the human decency to write me back personally. They still have not done so, and now they shouldn’t bother. Instead, they sent out the following notice to all FFRF members (it’s also archived here):

They sent out the notice but they prefaced the long blathery impersonal notice with an offensively dishonest “Dear Jerry” – as if they were sending him a friendly reply as opposed to an insultingly impersonal bit of Party dogma.

I expect I’ll want to pick holes in their notice later, but for now I’ll just sample its crawling bureaucratic sludge.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is dedicated to protecting the constitutional principle of state/church separation, which ensures religious beliefs do not dictate public policy. While advocating for LGBTQIA-plus rights is an indirect component of our mission, we recognize that many attacks on these rights are rooted in attempts to impose religious doctrines on our secular government.

Blah blah blah, which of course has nothing to do with Jerry Coyne or the piece he wrote for them.

We are acutely aware that Christian nationalists have cynically manipulated the LGBTQIA-plus issues just as they have cynically done so with abortion rights. We are proud to have a diverse staff and membership, 13 percent of whom identify as LGBTQIA and 97 percent support civil rights for the LGBTQ community — far more than the general population.

Wait wait wait wait – are they saying the 97 percent don’t support the IA communniny??? I’ve never been so shocked in my entire life.

They go on to explain, in a note that starts with “Dear Jerry,” why they spiked Dear Jerry’s article a few minutes (or perhaps it was seconds) after posting it:

FFRF and its new legislative arm, FFRF Action Fund, will do everything we can to defeat President-elect Trump’s draconian vow that the official policy of the U.S. government will be that “there are only two genders, male and female.” We are already gearing up to fight his promise to end the “transgender lunacy” on day one of his administration.

However, advocacy is rarely perfect, and progress is not always linear. Recently, we published a guest blog post as part of an effort to provide a forum for various voices within the framework of our mission. Although we included a disclaimer that the viewpoints expressed within the post were not necessarily reflective of the organization, it has wrongfully been perceived as such.

Despite our best efforts to champion reason and equality, we recognize mistakes can happen, and this incident is a reminder of the importance of constant reflection and growth. Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values or principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

It takes the breath away. “Dear Jerry, publishing your post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values or principles, love, FFRF.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation should change its name to The Imprisonment by Gender Ideology Foundation.

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 be enthusiastically encouraged to get drastic surgeries in hopes of resembling the sex they are not. The FFRF could for instance cite the right to bodily autonomy while saying that genital mutilation is not 100% benign. They could in fact warn against genital mutilation while still saying it’s a right.

Unlike some other secular groups, FFRF opposes such assaults not only in principle but also in practice. FFRF has devoted many resources toward education over LGBTQIA-plus rights — and countless hours and efforts toward defeating anti-LGBTQIA-plus legislation through action alerts, statements and blogs. 

This is the problem with the alphabet soup. There is no “LGBTQIA-plus” – that’s an ever-baggier portmanteau word that means less the more initials are added. The “rights” that trans people demand are not the same rights as lesbians and gay men have. They’re not even in the same ballpark.

However, advocacy is rarely perfect, and progress is not always linear. Recently, we published a guest blog post as part of an effort to provide a forum for various voices within the framework of our mission. Although we included a disclaimer that the viewpoints expressed within the post were not necessarily reflective of the organization, it has wrongfully been perceived as such. 

Despite our best efforts to champion reason and equality, we recognize mistakes can happen, and this incident is a reminder of the importance of constant reflection and growth. Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values or principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

Moving forward, we are reviewing our content guidelines and internal processes to ensure our public messaging consistently reflects our values. We are committed to learning from this experience.

We stand firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community and their allies in advocating for equality, dignity and the freedom to live without fear of religiously motivated discrimination. Our mission to keep religion out of government is inextricably linked to preserving and advancing these fundamental rights.

What cowardly backstabbing shits. The post they rudely and swiftly removed was by Jerry Coyne, yet they don’t even whisper his name.

Freedom from religion but no freedom at all from deranged destructive body-denying ideology.

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 of sense,” she said at the time. “Trigger warnings are like wheelchair ramps. They exist because some people need them.

“The fact that some people don’t take the stairs does not detract in any way from my experience, nor do I hang around the wheelchair ramp mocking those who use it, or telling them how much better it would be for them to be exposed to the climb.”

Well no but that’s because wheelchair ramps really are physically necessary [see above]. Trigger warnings are not physically necessary, and it’s far from universally agreed that they’re emotionally or psychologically necessary. Really very far from universally agreed.

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 that mysterious ceremony at birth during which they are are assigned male. The actual birth certificate, however, can be altered. This certificate, like a bad tattoo on the soul, is forever)

And why is such a blatant absurdity not ignored but rather celebrated and indeed elevated to the status of some sort of divine truth?

Well, from my admittedly heretical point of view it’s because we have taken something that was created during the enlightenment, and out of the trauma following the continent-wide devastation of the Thirty Years War, and made it our model of “morality”, that is, of soft social control. That thing is, of course, the idea of the sovereignty of individual conscience.

I want to be clear here, that I am not, of course, claiming that morality didn’t exist prior to the invention of conscience. Morality has always existed, but for most of human history it was religious or the religion itself – the mandate of heaven in all its forms. What needs to be explained is how a fundamentally religious concept can persist in the minds of thoroughly secular or even irreligious people. And to my mind, understanding the (false) idea of the sovereignty of individual conscience is the key.

In this model the individual obtains a certain status by subscribing to one of the available religious doctrines. Obviously atheism wasn’t available as an option, which I mention only as an illustration of the fundamental limitations of this approach. But once the doctrine is accepted and the status established, the actual way it is applied in a person’s life is entirely a matter of an individual’s conscience. (There are limits, of course. Anyone who pisses off too many people who themselves possess status, or just one person of great status, will quickly find themself out of the club on their arse.)

Now, that might work well in a religious setting where, after all, everything is just made up, but it’s a horrible model for everything else. Remember, the whole purpose of elevating the individual conscience was to get it out of the realm of politics. But here we have a model where a person gains social status, which has a strong, but complex and perilous, relationship to social power and by gaining that status correctly understands that they are authorised to act on behalf of society and in the world (that is to punish, which is to say, harm other people). “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, or the offices of the Guardian, as the case may be.” And that’s not supposed to be a problem? So we have people acting under a societal mandate but when challenged they will claim the privilege of individual conscience. Or rather they will claim both the mandate of society and individual conscience, seeing no conflict in serving two masters. And morality like religion has developed complex mechanisms for simultaneously legitimating and concealing contradictions,so they may well be entirely sincere in their protestations of innocence.

In that it’s a lot like the problem of cranks and conspiracy theorists that plagues the online world. Perhaps it’s the same problem. Doing your own research, thinking for yourself, will get you exactly nowhere. Because nothing we have made was created by individual effort. When The Creature finally comes into the world, it will not be the creation of a lone scientist working in a remote castle but a product of The Frankenstein Company (sole proprietor, the estate of Elon Musk). And that’s the problem. We cannot confront 21st-century problems, let alone those of the twenty-second century (only three quarters of a century away, remember) using social mechanisms created in the 17th and 18th centuries and with their roots firmly planted in the long and oppressive history of religious thought.

Just some apocalyptic thoughts to take you into the new year.

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, let alone all of us. We do point out that being a trans woman doesn’t rule out being also a rapist, but that’s not even close to saying what Grant claims we say. (Grant is a they. It’s not clear what sex “they” is.)

What’s the point of having freedom from religion if you’re still imprisoned by this kind of bullshit?

So. Jerry Coyne stepped up.

So here’s the story. I’m not only a member  and supporter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but am also on its Honorary Board.  Thus I was doubly distressed when I saw the post below on their website Freethought Now!, a post that completely ignores the widely-accepted biological definition of a woman—one based on the possession of a reproductive apparatus evolved to produce large immobile gametes—in favor of a definition based on self-identification. (Kat Grant identifies as non-binary.)

He quotes from it and points out what’s wrong with it. Then:

Perhaps you won’t be as distressed as I was when you read it, but as someone who, as an Honorary Director, supposedly gets to weigh in on the direction of the FFRF, I felt I had to say something. Recently-confected and ideological definitions of “woman” not only offend me as a biologist, but they have nothing to do with the mission of the FFRF.  So I asked if I could make these points in a response at the same site. Mirabile dictu, the FFRF let me, for which I’m grateful. You can read what I said by clicking below or going here:

NOTE: My article seems to have disappeared but one copy has been archived in two places,

here:  https://web.archive.org/web/20241227095242/https://freethoughtnow.org/biology-is-not-bigotry/

and here: https://archive.ph/psT4I

In other words they told him he could reply and then they removed his reply – apparently without telling him so or saying why, let alone apologizing. How very Freethought Blogs.

Read his post: it’s full and detailed and very worth studying.

He concludes with:

Mission creep has begun to erode other once-respected organizations like the ACLU and SPLC, and I would be distressed if this happened to the FFRF.

After a bit of back and forth with the bosses of the FFRF, they accepted this version, which of course will get me in deep trouble with many who favor “progressive” ideology over the biological truth (see below).

But when they published my piece, the FFRF told me this:

We have decided to publish every blog with a disclaimer going forward so don’t feel picked on.

And so they put their very first disclaimer atop my article:

Disclaimer: FFRF Honorary Board Member Jerry A. Coyne requested that this column be written as a guest blog. The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Make of this disclaimer what you will, but I find it a remarkable coincidence that the appearance of disclaimers just happens to accompany the publication of an article discussing the definition of “woman”. 

Right. Don’t feel picked on, but here for the first time ever is a disclaimer at the top of your article.

It’s so very Freethought Blogs.

Massive h/t to Peter N

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 many infectious diseases, the covid-19 pandemic indirectly reduced the spread of pertussis, thanks in part to people practicing social distancing. With the world and people’s social habits having largely returned to normal, the incidence of these diseases has climbed back up as well. So at least part of this year’s spike in cases could simply be a return to pre-pandemic trends, according to the CDC.

That said, this year’s tally is unusually high for modern times. It’s the highest number of cases seen since 2014, when there were 32,971 cases. And in some states, experts and health officials have blamed lowering vaccination rates among residents and their children for the rise.

And all too soon we’ll be adding Idiot Kennedy to the mix.

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 urgent attention. The United States has done little to reassure the world that it has the outbreak contained.

And this is under Biden. Just think how exciting it will get when Junior Kennedy takes over the Department of Health and Human Services.

The recent infection of a pig at a farm in Oregon is especially concerning, as pigs are known to be mixing bowls for influenza viruses. Pigs can be infected by both avian and human influenza viruses, creating a risk for the viruses to exchange genetic material and potentially speed up adaptation for human transmission. The H1N1 pandemic in 2009 was created and spread initially by pigs.

Beyond the risks to its citizens (there are over 45 cases of people in the United States getting the virus in 2024), the United States should remember that the country where a pandemic emerges can be accused of not doing enough to control it. We still hear how China did not do enough to stop the Covid-19 pandemic. None of us would want a new pathogen labeled “the American virus,” as this could be very damaging for the United States’ reputation and economy.

We’re doomed.

H/t Blood Knight

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 the widely used immigration visa, arguing that it is necessary to fill high-skilled tech and other specialized jobs.

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Trump adviser Elon Musk, with whom Ramaswamy is a co-leader of Trump’s incoming Department of Government Efficiency, had posted yesterday on X in response to a tweet about a shortage of skilled workers in Silicon Valley that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.” Musk, who was born in South Africa and is a naturalized American citizen, urged people to “[t]hink of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”

The posts generated backlash among ardent MAGA supporters who want a hardline approach to all forms of immigration and exposed a chasm in the relationship with a right-wing faction of some of Trump’s closest allies and advisers from the tech sector.

You mean some Trump fans are racist and ethnocentric? Really??? Well knock me down with a feather.

Some attempted to broker agreement between the factions, with venture capitalist Shaun Maguire defending Krishnan and writing that “the tech community should also hear MAGA’s points,” namely that immigrants “should be skilled AND aligned w/ American values” and fully assimilate.

Which American values? The ones that got Trump elected for instance? Greed, corruption, criminality, bullying, lying, cheating, stealing, boasting?

Should make for some entertainment at least.

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 red-breasted goose died at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, causing aviaries to close and penguin feeding for visitors to be suspended in November. 

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Researchers have warned for decades that this variant of bird flu could kill primates, rodents, pigs, and rabbits, with reports of Bengal tigers and clouded leopards also being killed. Infections in zoos were not unexpected, said virologist Dr Ed Hutchinson from Glasgow University. Visitors to zoos in the UK in recent years may have noticed bird enclosures being temporarily closed off or netted when the risks of infection by the H5N1 bird flu variant from wild birds were known to be high, he said. “When zoos care for animals from endangered species, taking measures to reduce the risk those animals face from H5N1, such as limiting access of wild birds to enclosures, is particularly important.”

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Bird flu viruses can be passed among a wide variety of animals. In 2020, a variant spread across the world, finally reaching the Antarctic in late 2023, causing millions of wild animals to die across Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America on its route. In the US, it fully adapted to cattle, increasing the risk of human infections.

I did not know that. It’s not drag, so it didn’t make the headlines.

H/t Blood Knight

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.

Your license fees, paying for daily mockery of women.

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 and often racialialized norms.

In this talk, I envision transphilogyny as epistemology, performance, and phenomenon, inviting the audience to imagine what it would feel like to experience transfeminity as womanhood and how that practice could change their reality. Drawing on the research of queer feminist scholars such as mecha Cardenas, Jill Dolan, and Sarah Ahmed, this presentation asks the audience to discover the political potential of trans womanhood as a means of disrupting the cultural algorithms which force us into increasingly narrowing and divisive experiences of our lives, cultures, and bodies.

Pella is an actor, poet, filmmaker, podcaster, and activist Charleston WV. Her research centers on archival sound performances as cultural phenomena and the world-building potential of digital audio in creating “utopian vibrations” or extensions of performance which reshape our cultural experiences of identity, space and time. Pella has presented her research at the Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association and Great Lake Sound Studies Association. In addition to research Pella also has over 20 years of performance experience as an actor, comedian, poet, and sometimes theologian. Pella is pursuing her PhD In the Department of Theatre and Film at BGSU. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

In short it’s not actually a TED talk, it just identifies as a TED talk.