I still have trouble believing this happened.

So do you use the social media platform X? Why do you use social media? How often do you tweet?

You use ‘He/The’ in your bio. What did you mean by this?

This says ‘Just your daily reminder that trans women are men.’ What did you mean by this? Do you think this could be seen as offensive and could cause anyone alarm and distress?

This shows your account with LGB and symbols separate from the TQ. What do you mean by that?

You state ‘This period of time where people are mutilating children will be looked back in history with disgust. I’ll be able to say I never agreed with this.’ What did you mean by that? Could it could be seen as offensive?

Someone on Twitter has asked, ‘Anyone else not getting their notifications?’ To which you answer ‘None of them are shadow banned for saying trans women are men.’ Do you think this can be seen as offensive?

‘Reality is trans phobic.’ You retweeted this saying ‘Yawn.’ What did you mean by this?

You reply to someone saying they are a woman that they are not. What did you mean by that? Do you think this individual could have found this offensive? Could it have caused them alarm or distress?

I’m going to show where an individual is saying, ‘So I am not a woman?’ You reply, ‘No you are not. No one would take a tweet meant for those suffering in the Middle East and turn it into something for mens rights. You’re a man.’ What did you mean by that? Do you think this could be seen as offensive?

You tweet ‘Do men run away to another platform because they are not getting away with it on X any more?’ What do you mean by that?

Is there any lawful excuse why you made these tweets?

What business is it of the police what people mean by what they say on Twitter? Are they going to come along and demand to read our diaries now? Tap our phones? Listen in on our conversations?

The quandary of how much tolerance we can tolerate never ends.

In a free society we are meant to tolerate the intolerant. But there is a point when appeasing intolerance becomes a death wish.

The paradox, and the extremes, of our tolerance for the intolerant came to life in Bankstown’s Al Madina Dawah Centre last week when Muslim cleric Abu Ousayd delivered a sermon about killing Jews.

Ousayd is his new name. This man is better known as jihadi preacher Wissam Haddad, who previously has expressed support for terrorist groups Islamic State and al-Qa’ida.

Haddad cited Islamic scripture and parables about “the end of times” when Muslims would be fighting Jews and “the trees will speak”. “They will say ‘oh Muslim, there is a yahud (Arabic for Jew) behind me, come and kill him’,” Haddad said.

As this newspaper also revealed, Haddad has a long history of preaching hatred from Islamic centres in southwest Sydney. More recently, after the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel, he said in a sermon: “If all the Muslims in that region (the Middle East) spat on Israel, the people of Israel would drown, the Jews would drown.”

Meanwhile police in the UK haul a woman in for saying that men are not women.

Great god almighty. Unreal.

WeAreFairCop is livid, and rightly so.

Sastra reminded us today of Freddie deBoer and I’m wondering why I haven’t been reading him all along. From August: Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement. I like it already – I’m beyond tired of the constant demands for “affirmation” of utter bullshit.

Dude has a way with words.

It frequently seems like canceling has run out of steam, as a disciplinary tactic; you watch people on social media trying to get somebody canceled, these days, and it sometimes feels like watching them trying and failing to get a pull-cord lawnmower started.

I need to watch the people he’s watching, because the ones I see have all too much success – but I love the punchline.

I’m not predicting a major social change writ large so much as I am predicting a new or newly invigorated response to a preexisting cultural reality, an unfortunate one. I think there’s gathering dissatisfaction with a common set of tropes regarding personal agency and mental health. In particular, I think that the dominance of the therapeutic assumption in American life, and the role of affirmation within it, will be challenged. Currently, an inescapable American cultural mode, particularly among the educated, is one of mandatory therapeutic maximalism and an attendant tyranny of affirmation.

Yes but only for some. Mandatory therapeutic maximalism for some, and brutal shouting and shunning for others. Tyranny of affirmation for some, and loud insistent ceaseless negation for others. But, again, “tyranny of affirmation” is top-notch.

The therapeutic/affirmational mode assumes

• Wanting and not getting is disordered and a kind of identity crime
• Human life is meant to be spent in a ceaseless state of feeling “valid,” which is to say, affirmed and respected and paid attention to and liked; any deviation from this state is pathological and a vestige of injustice

For the chosen recipients. Not everyone; just the Truly Madly Deeply marginalized, like for instance trans women, and trans women, and trans women. Women are most definitely not meant to be in a ceaseless state of feeling “valid” (not, admittedly, that I would want to).

• Good people spend a great deal of their time categorically and uncritically affirming others – telling friends and strangers alike that their desires are all legitimate, their instincts always correct, their perceptions of their own needs never mistaken or misguided, their self-conception compelling
• Correspondingly, we should all assume that anyone who is not affirming us is necessarily doing so out of a particular kind of politicized wickedness, that they are likely motivated by racism, sexism, homophobia, or other kinds of bigotry, and if these specific accusations are not plausible, then by simple evil

Again, for the chosen few, and not for others. Trans women yes, women absolutely not are you out of your mind.

We do the best for others by affirming what they already believe and validating what they already want; people are happiest and healthiest when they are encouraged to think that vulnerability is more valuable than resilience and that their pain is more beautiful than their strength.

Which is interesting because it means women are the winners here after all. Who would want to be babied and cooed over the way trans women are? Who would want to be treated as fragile invalids the way they are? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Rebel energy yes, whining malingering fragility a thousand times NO.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on About that capacity to persevere.

Perhaps Museum London is preparing her for the next round of this exhibition by giving Hutchison further opportunities to “persevere through all kinds of different challenges.” Being cancelled is just another “different challenge.”

And as for any trans participation in this event, surely there’s no greater challenge than standing up against what is possible in the realm of material reality. A man claiming he’s a woman demonstrates a Sisyphean resilience in the face of the permanently unattainable. Or to throw in another classical allusion of perpetual torment, being constantly misgendered is just like the punishment of Prometheus, having his ever-regrowing liver eaten anew each day by an eagle. Yikes! So it’s like these guys are rolling rocks up a mountain while having their livers eaten!! Every day!!!* By all rights, this presentation should be nothing but TiMs.

*Of course neither Sisyphus or Prometheus had the Canadian Powerlifting Union or the Ontario Human Rights Commission looking out for their interests by cancelling Zeus, so it’s not exactly the same. Had they had these two organizations batting for them, it would have been Zeus’s liver on the line.

That letter from Museum London [Ontario] merits close attention.

That second paragraph. The Ontario Human Rights Commission says “the words people use to describe themselves and others are very important.”

Are they though? Especially the ones they use to describe themselves? People have a tendency to think more about themselves than others, to flatter themselves more than others, to puff up their descriptions of themselves more than others. People have a tendency to think they matter more than others. Maybe all this huffing and puffing about idennniny and the words people use to go on and on and on about themselves is not a new form of Justice or Empowerment or Incloosion but just more of the same old vanity and self-absorption we’re so accustomed to in humans. Maybe we really don’t need more of it, but rather less.

At any rate, even if you agree that we should all care deeply about how other people label themselves, there remains a difference between truth and lies. “Misgendering” someone in the sense of not lying about what sex they are is not a form of illegitimate or wicked “discrimination.” Women absolutely need to know which people are men and which are not, and we need to be free to warn other women about men who are disguising themselves as women, whether for the purpose of attacking them or stealing their athletic prizes. Museum London is way out of line ordering women to pretend some men are women, and punishing them if they refuse.

Another woman punished, banished, called harsh names for the greater glory of men who claim to be women.

“BREAKING: I now face a 2-year ban by the CPU for speaking publicly about the unfairness of biological males being allowed to taunt female competitors & loot their winnings. Apparently, I have failed in my gender-role duties as “supporting actress” in the horror show that is my #sport right now. Naturally, the CPU deemed MY written (private) complaint of the male bullying to be “frivolous and vexatious.”

And then

It just never ends.

The latest on the corruption of Clarence Thomas:

Leonard Leo is a longtime Federalist Society leader and a key architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. He also steers a network of nonprofits that promote conservative causes in the courts and beyond.

Leo arranged for Ginni Thomas’s for-profit firm, Liberty Consulting, to receive an unknown sum for a contract that was to have “no mention of Ginni.” In 2012, he told pollster Kellyanne Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25k,” documents show. He directed Conway to get the money by billing a nonprofit he advises. In a statement to The Post, Leo praised the work by Conway and Ginni Thomas as an “invaluable resource.”

Since 2016, nonprofits steered by Leo have paid at least $1.8 million for public relations efforts to defend and lionize Clarence Thomas,including in a laudatory film about his life.

…

Anthony Welters provided a loan that allowed the justice to buy a $267,230 luxury RV in 1999. A congressional investigation found that Thomas made some interest payments, but that it was declared settled by Welters in 2008 without Thomas repaying a substantial portion — or perhaps any — of the principal. An attorney for Thomas said in response that the loan’s terms “were satisfied in full” but has not said what those terms were.

Listen, a luxury RV should just plain come with the job, so it’s all fair and not a bit corrupt.

The Heritage Foundation paid Ginni Thomas more than $936,000 between 2001 and 2007, tax filings show. Tax filings before 2001 are not available. Clarence Thomas reported her employment at Heritage in 2011, after left-leaning activists raised questions.

It’s the conservatives who have this kind of money to spare.

There’s more.

P. G. Wodehouse is now writing the scripts for gender havers.

Bingo the Non-binary Priest – it should be a whole series, shelved next to the Molesworth oeuvre.

My favorite part is the fact that our man Bingo thinks the Bible was written in contemporary English.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on How long a chain of logic do you have to use?

…but one thing I think matters is: how long a chain of logic do you have to use to reach the conclusion that this affects someone’s ability to do the job?

Of course, if the reasoning is sound, and the premises are solid, even a long chain of logic can lead to a justified conclusion. Too often, however, the conclusion is simply claimed to follow while the actual premises and inferences are best left unspecified.

It’s very similar to the way “worker’s rights”, “egalitarianism”, “solidarity”, “anti-imperialism”, “anti-colonialism”, “anti-fascism” etc. in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China were basically just synonyms for “whatever the party/the leader does” (e.g. living like emperors while the workers were living off scraps). It’s easy to be in favor of, say, “worker’s rights”, but how do you get from that to uncritical support for autocracy, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, thoughtpolice, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, forced collectivization, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc.? How does criticism of the latter translate into rejection of the former? Of course, you might as well forget hoping for an answer. Just by asking the question you would have marked yourself as “anti worker’s rights”, as well as “pro-fascism”, “pro-colonialism” etc. No need to spell out the intermediary steps.

Likewise, it’s easy to be in favor of “trans rights” (e.g. there isn’t a single “right” – properly formulated* – that I’m granting myself that I’m not also granting every trans-identified person on the planet), but how do you get from that to uncritical support for sex denialism, biological males in women’s sports/bathrooms/changing rooms/showers/jails/domestic abuse and rape shelters, forced teaming, the idea that it’s bigoted for lesbians to not be into “lady-cock”, automatic “affirmation” and medicalization of children etc. etc. etc.? How does disagreement with the latter translate into denial of the former? Once again, all the major premises are unstated, and all the critical inferences are left unspecified.

* By “properly formulated” i mean formulated in the most generally applicable way possible. E.g. I don’t recognize any universal right to use the “men’s room”, although I do claim that right for myself. Nor do I recognize a universal right to use “the bathroom appropriate to one’s gender identity”. What I do recognize is the right of everyone to use the bathroom intended for their biological sex. My own right to use the men’s room is just what follows from this more general right.

Horrible bossy fool gloats at the prospect of getting people in trouble with the law for not lying about what sex ThEy is.

What about the intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment Whittle and people like Whittle are creating for people who refuse to lie about what sex other people are? Why do Whittle and people like Whittle gloat over forcing people to lie about what sex someone is?

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Without forgetting her nursing training.

I’ve been trying to sort out my views on when someone’s statements or behavior outside of their work capacity should justify disciplinary action. (I mean morally justify, not what the legal lines are.)

It’s hard to come up with a formulation that doesn’t involve a lot of case-by-case judgment. The extreme bright-line rules don’t seem workable to me. It just can’t be the case that an employer should shrug and ignore a manager who is posting statements about how members of group X are intellectualy inferior, etc. — that obviously raises concerns that such a person can’t fairly make hiring/firing/employee evaluation decisions. Ditto for someone who is the “face of the company” but has made themselves toxic to the general public and/or your customer base, etc. Conversely, I’m also uncomfortable with the notion that people can’t have separate existences from their job, and that every employee’s every utterance is fodder for HR.

There’s obviously a lot of factors to consider (is it a public-facing job, how far beyond the pale are the statements, etc.), but one thing I think matters is: how long a chain of logic do you have to use to reach the conclusion that this affects someone’s ability to do the job?

When you have to make arguments like “Employee X made statement Y. Statement Y is contrary to the position of advocacy groups for minority such-and-such. Therefore Y constitutes ‘violence’ against that group, and members of that group would be justifiably ‘afraid’ to be treated by X even if X would never utter Y on the job, therefore X can’t do the job and must be fired or disciplined,” I think something has gone wrong.

Also from Reduxx:

A male athlete who has dominated the women’s category of cycling competitions across the United States took home two first-place medals over the weekend, bringing his tally of women’s gold medals up to 10 since December of 2022.

So that’s ten gold medals stolen from a woman.

Tessa Johnson, a male who self-identifies as a woman, took the top spots in both the Women’s SingleSpeed and Category 1/2 races, with the latter also coming with $150 in prize money.

During the races, which fell on the weekend before Halloween, Johnson was dressed as Barbie as part of the optional costume competition.

Attaboy: cheat the women and mock them at the same time.

According to the Chicago CycloCross Cup’s website, the competition prides itself on “first and foremost fostering a positive & supportive community built around competitive cyclocross racing,” continuing: “That means welcoming and challenging everyone who wants to contribute to the series and make it better in that regard.”

So women will never be able to win anything? Cool; thanks a lot.

Reduxx a couple of months ago:

An LGBTI rights organization in France is calling on the Minister of Equality to intervene in the case of a gynecologist who they are accusing of “transphobia.”

On September 8, SOS Homophobie, which describes itself as a “national association against LGBTIphobia” took to X (formerly Twitter) to condemn a gynecologist for stating he only provided services to females. The comment from Dr. Victor Acharian, who operates in the Pau region, was made in reply to a Google review he received in which a trans-identified male’s partner complained that Acharian refused to provide services to him.

What I wonder is, what the hell does a man expect a gynecologist to do for him? However he “identifies” and whatever he calls himself, what, when it comes right down to it, is he looking for? Is the gynecologist supposed to play a game of let’s pretend? For the sake of “validating” Monsieur?

“SIR, I am a gynecologist, and I take care of real women. I have no skills to take care of MEN, even if they have shaved their beards and come to tell my secretary that they [have] become women. My GYNECOLOGICAL examination table is not suitable for examining men. You have specialized and very competent services to take care of men like you,” Acharian wrote, emphasizing his text with capitalized letters. “Thank you for informing TRANS people to never come for consultation with me.”

(Reduxx made a little mistake in translation there, putting that “have” in “have become women” in brackets. The French is “qu’ils sont devenus femmes” and that’s because devenir is one of the few verbs that use être for the past tense instead of avoir. Ils sont devenus femmes isn’t a mistake, it’s just how it’s done in French.)

In their X post on Acharian, SOS Homophobie wrote: “We denounce the transphobes and discriminatory remarks of gynecologist Victor Acharian in Pau. Transphobia is a reality with serious consequences, particularly in access to health. It affects the entire territory.” The organization also tagged Bérangère Couillard, France’s Minister of Equality between Women and Men and the Fight against Discrimination, in an apparent effort to have Acharian investigated.

So what does SOS Homophobie want doctors to do? Pretend that men really are women and go on from there? Really? Have they thought this through?

H/t Guest

The BBC offers training for female self-shooters.

Female Self Shooters is a practical self-shooting skills training programme for factual TV and documentary, supported [by] the BBC.

Good good good. Thanks, BBC.

Aimed at female (and those identifying as female) TV producers or those at producer level, who will be in a position to use the acquired skills after the training, e.g. as 2nd camera operators, shooting taster tapes or directing your own self-shot film. 

Oh. Never mind.

Dirty trick, BBC.

Oh dear I detect a mentation deficit.

A crucial point in this piece on Amy Hamm:

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms warned that “professional misconduct must not be permitted to be redefined to include speaking unpopular truths” — in this case, unpopular truths that bear directly on Hamm’s medical training and responsibilities as a nurse and nurse educator. Hamm knows that sex is observed, not “assigned”, at birth. Her case highlights the contradictory expectations professionals in her position face: to pretend to go along with a strange new set of beliefs about sex and gender without forgetting her nursing training, in which sex is not a postmodern riddle but rather a constantly relevant factor in medical evaluation and treatment. 

It’s all very well* for people who aren’t medical professionals to echo the stupid mantras but people who are medical professionals had god damn well better not lose track of which people are which sex, and everyone knows it, and even the zealots don’t actually want their nurses and doctors pretending they’re the other sex when it makes any kind of medical difference which sex they are. Do men who claim to be women want to see a gynecologist? Do they want their gynecologist to ram a speculum into their genitals? Do they want to be checked for breast cancer but not for testicular cancer?

When philosopher Kathleen Stock and athletic coach Linda Blade testified as expert witnesses on Hamm’s behalf, opposing counsel declined to ask either woman a single question, perhaps fearing any elaboration on the common-sense views they share with Hamm. “We’ve had language for boys and girls, men and women, since the beginning of time,” Stock testified on Tuesday. “Biology hasn’t gone away” — something a nurse should know better than anyone — “but all of us have lost the ability to freely refer to facts about ourselves, important facts, for instance that we are a sexually dimorphic species.”

We used to be a sexually dimorphic species. Now that kind of thing is old hat, so we’re creative and poeticalish instead.

*it’s not all very well at all of course

No.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Portents.

I think that for a long time, pro-choice advocates were regarded as the boy who cried wolf. “You keep saying that Roe will be overturned, but it never is, and all these abortion laws mostly get struck down by the courts and the abortion clinics survive the ones that aren’t anyways. I’m not pro-life, but I’m gonna vote GOP because [taxes etc.]”

And indeed for a long time, there was a school of Savvy Punditry that insisted that Republicans didn’t want Roe overturned anyway, and that’s why it would never happen. (My take is that the first part of that was largely true — there were definitely a lot of GOP strategists who liked having the issue to rally voters but didn’t care about it and certainly didn’t want to deal with a post-Roe backlash — but the second part was wrong because when you appoint and confirm anti-choice justices, they don’t care that you had your fingers crossed when you did it.)

Anyway, all those voters who are pro-choice but didn’t vote on it because they took Roe for granted have now had a rude awakening. And having seen Republicans pass all sorts of draconian laws and abortion clinics shut down, they’re not likely to buy the new focus-group-tested GOP spin that they just want “reasonable restrictions” on “late-term abortions” and certainly don’t want bans no why would you say that such a crazy thought never mind what our party platform says and what most of our elected officials said up until two months ago.

It’s not a great consolation for losing Roe, of course. But at least there’s some consequences.

Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia.

Abortion rights advocates won major victories Tuesday as voters in conservative-leaning Ohio decisively passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, while those in ruby-red Kentucky reelected a Democratic governor who aggressively attacked his opponent for supporting the state’s near-total ban on the procedure.

In Virginia, a battleground state where Republicans pushed a proposal to outlaw most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Democrats were projected to take control of the state legislature after campaigning heavily on preserving access.

Women push back.