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.

Boots said what??

Good that they’ve corrected it now but what the hell.

Now there’s a fine impartial headline from the CBC:

Nurse tells B.C. hearing she’s not transphobic, but calls gender identity ‘metaphysical nonsense’

There’s no “but” needed in that headline. There’s no contradiction. “Transphobic” means “mean and horrible to people who claim to be trans.” It’s neither phobic nor mean & horrible to know that “gender identity” is metaphysical nonsense. It would be metaphysical nonsense to say that people can be rabbits by thinking they are rabbits, and the same applies to all the other nouns that name something one can’t turn into via the power of thought. People can become teachers, pilots, parents, friends, colleagues, reporters, nurses, and the like. People can’t become trees or planets or watermelons. It’s not phobic to grasp this overarching distinction.

When legislatures decide they get to define women.

A man who is pretending to be a woman is not a woman, no matter how long he has been doing the pretending.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Anne Frank wasn’t diverse enough.

This is the second time this specific article has crossed my radar in the last twenty-four hours, whereas none of my normal German sources have even mentioned it, which I think is somewhat telling. Let me trawl for an actual German article…ahh, yes, a bunch of highly-motivated right-of-centre rags…some respectable publications…no highly-motivated left-of-centre rags…

Ahh, there we are, something actually readable and vaguely objective that isn’t publicly-financed (which is nearly unnecessary to qualify, as publicly-financed media in Germany are often barely readable and quite rarely objective).

Firstly, let’s clarify a few points of confusion or misconceptions. “Kindergarten”, though it is a German word, means something different in Germany than it does to Anglophones — namely, it is a daycare centre for young children (from three years on) which can (but not must) serve as a sort of pre-school for its older wards, and is usually only open to lunchtime or early afternoon. This story doesn’t involve a Kindergarten, however, but rather a Kita (short for Kinderstätte), which takes children for the whole day and theoretically has no lower age limit and is even less likely to have a heavy emphasis on pedagogy (though it also can for its older wards). In East Germany there are relatively few Kindergärten and many more Kinderstätten, and while the difference may seem academic and opaque to foreigners, they are not the same thing. In short, the institution in question is much more like a daycare than a pre-school or the first cohort of a public school.

And the AfD, while admittedly stronger in East Germany and undeniably a right-wing nationalist party, are neither Nazis nor at all relevant to this discussion; the mayor of the town is an independent, and while he doubtless does not wish to anger AfD voters (or at least not attract their attention away from their anger at the Federal Republic), there is absolutely no evidence that he or his council have based their decisions with respect to the daycare upon the AfD or its voters in any way. And the new proposed name, Weltentdecker, translates to “world explorer”; this is hardly a name designed to appease a right-wing nationalist. In point of fact, according to Wikipedia, the AfD received just under 12 percent of the vote and only got 3 out of the 28 seats in the council. We can effectively rule out pleasing the AfD as a motivation for this change.

In further point of fact, the quotes about anti-Semitism growing “among the Far Right” and the implication that the AfD is dangerously antisemitic are doing a lot of work here; the AfD has Jewish wings in its federal and several state parties, though of course these are not uncontroversial in the broader Jewish community in Germany. But, as this is entirely a red herring to the current discussion, it bears no further investigation or exposition here.

To the point of the article, the proposed name change is just one of several progressive reforms to supposedly “modernise” the daycare, which has apparently been in progress for the last 14 months. Other reforms include no longer grouping the children by age and allowing children to follow their own interests and desires rather than having a more uniform, strictly-regimented day.

The mayor writes in an address to the town (probably as a result of the outcry):

Weit vor den aktuellen Diskussionen und Ereignissen ist bereits Anfang 2023 auch die Diskussion aufgekommen, diese grundlegende Konzeptionsänderung durch einen anderen Namen der Einrichtung auch nach außen hin sichtbar zu machen, um diesen fundamentalen Neuanfang sichtbar zu markieren

which translates to

Far removed from the current discussions and events, we have already been discussing since the beginning of 2023 how to make this foundational conceptual change externally apparent through changing the name of the facility, in order to visibly mark this fundamental new beginning

which is a fine example of a German politician covering his arse, but does put paid to the idea that the name change is in response to the recent flare-up of the interminable Levantine brawl. In fact, the Hamas attack has likely drawn far more attention and enhanced the outcry, including getting national reporters in England to sensationalise local news in East Germany.

It is unlikely the name will be changed at this point, but I am not sure what difference that will make in the long run. There is a narrative worth exploring here, of Germany’s continuing evolution and its reconstitution through migration, and what the ethnic Germans of yesterday and today owe the increasingly-non-ethnic-Germans of today and tomorrow (and vice-versa). In some of these Kitas in the major cities, the share of non-ethnic-German children can exceed 80 percent, and there are precious few where this proportion is far below 50; if this continues, there will be a demographic shift in this country within our lifetimes that is essentially unprecedented in the history of the world.

That cannot but have consequences. If the only parties anticipating and discussing those consequences get called Nazis for doing so, then either only Nazis will do the discussing or the term “Nazi” will so lose its meaning and potency that nobody will care when actual neo-Nazis do actual neo-Nazi shit.

In particular, what do these new peoples who have come to Germany owe to Anne Frank? These peoples, who have virtually no connection to the Holocaust or any other part of German history, who bear no collective guilt for the industrial massacre of European Jews in the middle part of the 20th Century? These peoples who tend to see Germany not so much as a land of opportunity but as a rich lifeboat whose byzantine bureaucracy they must navigate in order to get free accommodations and an allowance without having to (or in many cases even being legally allowed to) work?

These are very important questions with very important answers. And as Germany sacrifices its economy in order to punish Russia’s malfeasance, we are only going to see more and more ethnic Germans asking them, and, should those answers prove unsatisfactory, the next round of questions may be even less to our liking.

Siiiiiiiiiiigh

Aw yeah, nothing better for increasing yer inclusion & diversity than putting a white guy with bangs in charge of it.

Oddly enough the Institute of Physics turned off replies.

Updating to add:

There are a lot of furious and/or contemptuous replies and then one outlier.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on ‘Microaggressions started out as a legitimate issue’.

Like, I can see putting a hand on someone’s knee as being actually innocent, even though invasion of personal space is always suspect. I had a coworker who always put his hands on people’s backs when talking to them at their desks, for instance. It made me uncomfortable, for obvious reasons, but I didn’t attribute ill intent to it, because the dude was probably autistic. On the other hand, it can absolutely be anything but innocent, and there’s no way for a woman (or much less often a man) to know the intent motivating the incoming hand. For some reason, we have yet to evolve the ability to read each other’s thoughts. So we either condemn hands on knees entirely or try to determine which hands on which knees are problematic. The former option is, of course, easier to implement, but as Thomas Sowell says, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs,” and it’s hard to predict what the trade-offs. Chesterton’s Fence and whatnot.

But the crotch-to-backside thing? How could anyone, even a male, not recognize that as sexually aggressive? Nothing could epitomize more perfectly what sexual harassment is than pressing clothed cock against clothed butt. It’s miming the act. It’s a velvet glove, a veiled threat, a transgression with just enough ambiguity to allow plausible deniability. Do these male friends not believe that there are men who actually do that kind of shit? Is the issue the same kind of oblivious theory of mind failure that lets people believe that Putin wouldn’t use nuclear weaponry if Russia were losing a war or that no man would ever dress like a woman just in order to get into women’s intimate spaces?

This is actually one of the reasons I hate “microaggressions”. In order to render the claimant infallible, the concept makes actual harm irrelevant to the claim’s truth. But this means that actual harm is irrelevant to the discussion! Imagined and performative victimhood is put on the same moral footing as actual, genuine, real victimization. Sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault are reduced to mere perceptions and thoughts in your mind. It’s just that your mind makes it “real” in the Matrix-like way of social constructivism.

Further, the “micro” part is really the standpoint epistemology component. The aggression is micro in the sense that those in the oppressor class cannot see it with their own eyes, instead requiring the assistance of someone with the appropriate social positionality to see for them. That is to say, it’s in principle impossible to construct an argument that would allow a man to understand why any particular behavior is harmful to women.

This is a fun heads I win tails you lose Trump has going here. If he pitches fits in court and calls the judge names why that’s because he’s The Victim Of A Conspiracy. If he doesn’t, same deal.

Mr Trump was combative on the stand. He took direct aim at the judge, leading to some heated exchanges, and drew his rebukes for airing broad grievances when they were not directly relevant to the question.

Is this because he’s a goon who acts like that at all times? Or is it a cunning plan?

“I think he is trying to goad the judge into doing something he can argue on appeal shows prejudice on his part,” Prof McMunigal said. “Maybe he makes a comment they can use to support a bias case later.”

Or he can just do that regardless, as he always does.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told the BBC that Mr Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, appeared to view the trial as an opportunity to campaign.

“[His] behaviour suggests that he may view the trial as an opportunity to play the victim of an unfair justice system and, thus, attempt to capitalise on the trial to score political points,” Professor Tobias said.

Head he wins, tails we lose.

Oh, good idea, Germany.

A German kindergarten has said it will drop Anne Frank from its name in favour of a “more diverse” alternative, adding fuel to the national debate over anti-Semitism amid the Israel-Hamas war.

More “diverse” than Anne Frank. (I have no idea what the German for the buzzword “diverse” is, or even if it’s comparable to the Anglo buzzword.) More “diverse” how? Adding anti-Semites? Nazis? Neo-Nazis? Fans of genocide?

In what way is there a need for more “diversity” than a name that symbolizes the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazi regime? To put it another way, why is it a good idea to change the subject when the subject is Anne Frank/the Holocaust?

“We wanted a name without a political background,” Linda Schichor, the kindergarten’s director, told a local newspaper.

Ms Schichor said that the story of Anne Frank was difficult to explain to small children, while immigrant families had “often never heard of her” or her diary about her family’s attempt to remain hidden from the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam.

Well yes, which is why it’s quite a good idea to teach about her/memorialize her. That’s not to say schools shouldn’t also teach about other persecuted groups, but once you have an Anne Frank kindergarten it’s kind of a bad look to erase her name.

…coming at a time when Germany is engaged in soul searching over whether the lessons of the Nazi era are being forgotten, the name change has caused a national scandal.

Christoph Heubner, the deputy head of the International Auschwitz Committee, appealed for the name change decision to be reversed in a letter sent to the local council.

“If one is prepared to forget one’s own history so easily, especially in these times of renewed anti-Semitism and Right-wing extremism, one can only feel fear and anxiety about the culture of remembrance in our country,” he said.

Quite so. Expand the history, but don’t hide or downplay the bit between 1933 and 1945.

Jewish organisations have raised concerns in recent months about growing anti-Semitism from both the far-Right and immigrant communities from the Middle East.

Germany’s Central Council of Jews has warned that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is polling at over 20 per cent, “embodies Nazi ideals”.

Senior figures in the AfD have played down the crimes of the Nazi era, with one leader calling it “a bird sh-t” on German history, while others have questioned why there is a memorial to the Holocaust in the centre of Berlin.

Not a good moment to take down Anne Frank’s name.

Meanwhile let’s get this straight. There’s a prolific women-hater on Twitter named David Leavitt but he is NOT repeat NOT the novelist named David Leavitt. They are two different people.

I don’t know if the novelist is on Twitter, but the journalist definitely is. He’s a very bad man.

Also either dishonest or stupid. Rowling does not say what he claims she says in the tweet he singles out to demonstrate her saying the thing she didn’t say.

A very bad man. Not the novelist.

The most marginalized…

But don’t ever ever ever suggest that trans “activism” is just a tiny bit inclined to abuse and threaten women. No no no no no don’t you dare or we’ll tell you cunts exactly how we want to slaughter you.

BBC yet again cheering on the destruction of women’s sports:

Two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya says she is “not going to be ashamed” of being “different”, and will “fight for what is right” amid her ongoing dispute with athletics authorities.

Some lede. Should read: Two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya, who competed against women, says he is “not going to be ashamed” of cheating women, and will continue to cheat amid his ongoing dispute with athletics authorities.

Semenya, 32, was born with differences of sexual development (DSD) and cannot compete in female track events without taking testosterone-reducing drugs.

What kind of differences of sexual development? Odd that the BBC doesn’t say. Why be so cryptic about it?

In a wide-ranging interview with BBC Breakfast’s Sally Nugent, Semenya says:

• She felt she was “different” from the age of five but “embraces” her differences
• She will not conform “to be accepted”

He “embraces” the differences that enable him to cheat women in sports.

He will not stop cheating women in sports.

• She wants to empower women to “have a voice”

Fuck all the way off.

“For me I believe if you are a woman, you are a woman,” said Semenya, who won Olympic 800m gold in 2012 and 2016 and is a three-time world champion over the same distance.

Is that how that works? And if you believe you are a dolphin you are a dolphin?

Anyway, that’s not a useful criterion, because no one can know what other people “believe.” It’s a black box. You could just be pretending to believe.

JKR nails it again.

The Honourable Chris Kourakis has issued a statement referring to my ‘anxiety’ about the use of female pronouns for men standing trial for violence against women and rape. He states that ‘a victim of crime would never be asked to address an accused person in a way which caused the victim distress.’

That assurance is welcome, although I note that he’s addressed the matter only after it was raised publicly. No such exemption is mentioned in the Practice Note, which takes the ideological position that the ‘use of preferred gender pronouns is a matter of respect’. The natural inference is that a woman would be considered guilty of disrespect if she, alone in the courtroom, described her male attacker as a man, while all court officials were addressing and describing him as a woman. This is not a hypothetical situation. The judge will be aware, if he’s informed himself – as he implies I have not – that I’ve already cited an example where a 60-year-old woman was violently assaulted by a 26-year-old trans-identified male. She was chided by the judge for displaying ‘bad grace’ by not using her attacker’s preferred pronouns.

The Practice Note does not acknowledge that in sexual and violent crimes committed by men against women, there is a clear clash of rights. The woman has a right – indeed, a legal duty – to speak truthfully about the male violence/sexual violence to which she was subjected. Meanwhile the Practice Note says that court officials should respectfully use female pronouns for the attacker if he says he identifies as a woman. The likely effect on a traumatised woman of hearing her attacker addressed and described as a female by the court is neither mentioned nor addressed in the Practice Note. Respect, it seems, goes only one way.

Millions of women are losing confidence in judicial systems that have adopted an ideological position with which they do not agree. In the very place where they go to seek justice, a woman may now be obliged to listen to court officials asserting they were raped or beaten by a fellow woman. Such women are not merely ‘anxious’, they are furious, about the apparent inability of certain men, judges or not, to understand how dystopian this situation seems to those of us who have suffered male sexual violence.

And about the equally apparent indifference to their own inability to understand. They just don’t care.