The Bridge to Total Freedom…

Dawn Butler v Mumsnet:

The founder of parenting message board Mumsnet has hit back at a Labour MP who has threatened to report the website to the Metropolitan Police after users on the site slammed her reaction to the Brianna Ghey murder trial verdict.

Dawn Butler told critics to ‘get a life’ after they hit out at her suggestion that the trans teenager’s death at the hands of two teenagers in Cheshire earlier this year had been driven by ‘hate towards the trans community’ from within the government.

They sure do love that “hit back slammed hit out at hit hit hit” trick at the Daily Mail, which I suppose is not surprising. Dawn Butler talked nonsense and people at Mumsnet said it was nonsense. No one hit anyone.

The Brent Central MP’s post was then shared on Mumsnet, and she claimed this prompted an influx of messages from ‘nasty, vicious, inhumane’ people on X, formerly Twitter. The MP then said she would report the message board to the Met.

In a statement to MailOnline, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts said the website allowed ‘legal discussion’, adding: ‘(This) sometimes means people will make comments that individuals don’t agree with or like.’

Well then they will have to be reported to the Met. What else is there to do?

In a statement to MailOnline, Mumsnet founder and CEO Justine Roberts said: ‘Our forum guidelines are pretty clear. We allow legal discussion, which sometimes means people will make comments that individuals don’t agree with or like. We specifically disallow hate speech and deliberately inflammatory posts and we have an active moderation team who respond, on average in under an hour, to complaints about posts. 

‘It’s somewhat ironic that Ms Butler chose to post her attack on Mumsnet on X (formerly Twitter) which regularly hosts comments that wouldn’t last a moment on Mumsnet and where the moderation is light touch at best. We see this kind of double standard a lot and I’m beginning to wonder if it might be because Mumsnet is the only major platform dominated by women’s voices.’

‘Beginning to wonder’ – nice sarcasm.

Ah Joly. Never change. You’re comedy gold.

This headline, in The Times, is flatly untrue. I have not been questioned by the police. At the judges’ [sic] request, they contacted me with her question. There has never been, as this headline suggest [sic], any police investigation.

Got it. He has not been questioned by the police, the police have merely asked him a question. Glad we got that straightened out.

Originally a comment by Sastra on An innate sense of bulllshit.

It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself

And yet both gender — and sex — are supposed to be social constructs.

It’s quite a contradiction, this denial of objective categories consisting of the objectively true coupled with an intense belief in the innate and immutable truth of one’s own Identity. According to Yascha Mounk ( in his book The Identity Trap) this circle was squared by what’s called “strategic essentialism.”

While it is important to bear in mind the theoretical fact that identity groups are socially constructed, for practical purposes the strategic imperative to encourage the formation of identity groups that can become a locus for resistance against domination must take precedence. Over time, practice won out over theory, and the emphasis shifted from the idea that these concepts are socially constructed to the prescription that they should, to all intents and purposes, be treated as an objectively given fact.

Thus, the ability to believe two opposing things at once. We’re using metaphysical layers.

It would be a good idea I think for the Genderists to consider the distinct possibility that our deepest knowledge of our heart, soul, and being is also socially constructed, given how our nature was and is influenced and shaped from birth by our environment. All the talk of neural wiring causing transgender identities ignores the plasticity of the brain under different conditions. I am willing to entertain the idea that, given different circumstances in my upbringing and socialization, I might now be identifying as transgender. I might even be gay. If nothing is written in stone, fewer things were written in the prenatal brain than we can ourselves discern. Being extremely close doesn’t necessarily give us perspective.

At any rate, the contradiction between gender as social construct and gender as the inviolable Me-ness of Me gets to sit on the Science of Gender shelf next to the contradiction between wanting to eliminate strict binaries between the sexes while screaming that being referred to as one sex when you’re really the other strips away your humanity. Gender GP’s description of “the true nature of gender incongruence “ is nicely incongruent itself.

Gender GP explains the science of gender.

We at GenderGP understand the true nature of gender incongruence where someone’s true gender identity is different to the one that society expects them to have based on their genitals.

Being transgender is not a lifestyle choice, a preference or a cool thing to do. It is an innate sense of self.

Wait. How are those different things? How is “an innate sense of self” not a lifestyle choice or a cool thing to do or a preference? What exactly is “an innate sense of self”? How does Gender GP know? How does Gender GP distinguish between “an innate sense of self” and what people grow up being told about the self and their own selves?

There’s no such thing as “an innate sense of self.” There’s only growing up and being told things. A child raised by goats wouldn’t have any “innate sense of self.”

It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself.

Woofle woofle woofle. Pretty words that mean nothing. Get drunk on your own rhetoric all you want, but leave everyone else out of it.

People who are gender incongruent, transgender, trans, gender diverse – whatever we want to call it, are real. They exist, they are honest, they are telling us something simple. Society expects them to be male, but actually they are female. Society expects them to be female, but actually they are male. Society is saying they must label themselves as either male or female, when neither feels right. Society expects them to fit within a picture of gender that has been constructed over time, but does not match reality.

Simple and stupid. Simple and crude. Simple and wrong.

No one child deserves any better treatment than another child. White, cisgender, able children do not need to be protected from any child that is black, trans or less abled simply because that is what they are. All the children in your school need to be protected from harm – equally.

Notice what they carefully leave out. Of course they do. They leave out male and female, because that would remind everyone that being male is an advantage just as being white or able is an advantage. (“Cis” is just nonsense.) They mustn’t remind us of that because it makes it too obvious what a disaster their ideology is.

Chip chip chip slowly but steadily every gain women have made over the past 50 years or so is being taken back.

Canada rewards this disgusting pig of a man for defunding a rape shelter. A woman stands next to him while he gloats. He appears to be manipulating the levers on her back, probably trying to make her smile more energetically.

Good law guy apologizes to the court for potentially prejudicing a trial. What a genius.

Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, has apologised after a judge castigated him for tweeting ­during the Brianna Ghey trial about the defendants’ supposed transphobia.

The barrister and staunch supporter of trans rights posted a series of tweets on November 27, the first day of the trial, in which he wrote that “the killers exchanged transphobic slurs”.

He’s not some random gossip on Twitter, he’s a barrister. He’s even a barrister who calls himself Good Law.

Following a complaint about the tweet from the prosecution, Mrs Justice Yip said that the comment was potentially in contempt of court, a crime that can result in a jail term for those judged to have prejudiced a trial.

Maugham was spoken to by police on behalf of the court and deleted the tweet, the court heard. He said he had later apologised to the judge.

How generous of him.

Yet another deliberate insult.

There are simply no women who could do that. Not one. It just has to be a man in girly makeup.

He says he’s incredibly proud. I bet he is – women are incredulous too.

Even a Catholic college.

Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic women’s college in Notre Dame, Indiana, has reversed a new policy that would consider transgender women for admission following public outcry.

In November, a local student newspaper, The Observer, reported that Saint Mary’s had notified students of an update to its non-discrimination policy, which was approved in June. Saint Mary’s would have considered cis women as well as individuals who “consistently live and identify as women,” for admission beginning in fall 2024, according to the college.

Classic, isn’t it? The Catholic church keeps women down in every way it can think of, but when it’s a matter of men pretending to be women (and taking what belongs to women) why then the church is delighted to give its approval. Heads women are screwed, tails women are screwed.

The LGBTQ+ community, especially the transgender community, has been targeted in recent years as they fight for inclusion and equal rights. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently tracking more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills across the U.S. While progressives push the LGBTQ+ community to be protected, conservatives see them as a threat to gender and sexuality norms.

Wrong. There are plenty of progressives who don’t want men invading and taking everything that belongs to women. It’s a split within the left as well as a split between left and right.

Originally a comment by Piglet on Could be.

There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be?

No, I’ve seen this being seriously argued. The idea is that men are faster, stronger etc than women because they have stronger encouragement to do sport, better coaches, more resources etc. Which is why it’s so important to let male people barge in and hog the meagre resources that female athletes DO have. /s

I read the paper and it’s actually quite funny in a way—it reads like an assignment given to undergraduates so that they can demonstrate statistical methods. What I think they’ve done in this paper is the gender equivalent of The Art of War.

A lot of people read that book (there’s this peculiar idea that it’s useful in business management) and come away thinking it’s all too bleeding obvious. Understand your enemy, focus on his weak points, big whoop. But Sun Tzu was specifically writing a how-to guide for inbred idiotic noblemen whose family connections meant they were leading an army with no idea what they were doing, and he needed a basic handbook to throw at them (possibly literally). There’s a definite sense of “FINE, I’ll actually codify these extremely basic and obvious principles so you don’t lose ANOTHER thousand men in another rout…”

Just fancy, being tethered to a phone all day every day isn’t good for the intellect.

PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.

Never mind. AI will do the math for us.

Screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA survey, wrote that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt “nervous” or “anxious” when they didn’t have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.

There are other surveys.

Studies have shown that students on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information from class, that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs, that students who text a lot in class do worse on tests, and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests. As Haidt, a psychologist, has written in The Atlantic, the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention.

One could stop right at that “students who text a lot in class” – why are they even allowed to do that? Is it because they could be taking notes and the teachers can’t be checking everyone all the time? Or because everyone’s just given up?

Oh well. AI will do our thinking for us.

Dawn Butler working the crowd.

But the trial revealed that the murder wasn’t about trans or “the Trans community.”

Never mind. She’s too busy reporting Mumsnet to the police to bother with pesky facts.

Macron is all bros before hos.

President Emmanuel Macron of France this week condemned what he called a “manhunt” targeting Gérard Depardieu, the embattled French actor whose worldwide fame has been tarnished in recent years by allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Really. Why should mere harassment and assault of women tarnish the fame of a movie star dude? Obviously movie stardom is far more important and valuable than the feelings of 10 or 100 or however many stupid whiny women.

Macron’s comments, which prompted swift criticism, came after a documentary that aired in France this month showed the actor making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea.

Who cares? It’s only women. You can grab them by the pussy, remember?

Feminists and leftist politicians said on Thursday that they were appalled by Macron’s comments.

“Manhunts remain prohibited. The hunt for women, on the other hand, remains open,” Osez Le Féminisme, a feminist group, said on social media, while Sandrine Rousseau, a Green lawmaker, called Macron’s comments “yet another insult to the movement to let victims of sexual violence speak out.”

…

The documentary that set off a new wave of scrutiny aired this month on France 2 and features previously unseen footage of Depardieu on a 2018 trip to North Korea, where he is seen repeatedly making extremely crude and uninhibited sexual and sexist comments about women.

The documentary suggests that sexual jokes, comments and attitudes by Depardieu on movie sets were commonplace and widely-known, but that the French movie industry brushed them off.

Merci to Macron for brushing them off some more.

Totally normal.

In the 24 hours since the Colorado Supreme Court kicked former President Donald Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot, social media outlets have been flooded with threats against the justices who ruled in the case, according to a report obtained by NBC News.

The Colorado Supreme Court didn’t “kick” Trump off anything. That’s like the BBC and the Guardian constantly saying people “hit out at” and “hit back at” when they mean “disputed.” It’s a metaphor but news media should avoid that kind of metaphor because it’s far too emotive and manipulative.

Anyway.

Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research, identified “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats, often in direct response to Trump’s posts about the ruling on his platform Truth Social. They found that some social media users posted justices’ email addresses, phone numbers and office building addresses.

In this case violent rhetoric that means it, as opposed to the sloppy journalistic hitting out and kicking off.

“This ends when we kill these fuckers,” a user wrote on a pro-Trump forum that was used by several Jan. 6 rioters.

“What do you call 7 justices from the Colorado Supreme Court at the bottom of the ocean?” asked another user. “A good start.”

Posts — whose images and links were included in the report — noted a variety of methods that could be used to kill those perceived as Trump’s enemies: hollow-point bullets, rifles, rope, bombs.

“Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete,” read a post on a fringe website. “Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.”

Totally normal.

The threats fit into a predictable and familiar pattern, seen time and time again after legal developments against Trump. After the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, a man who had been at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun while holding an AR-15-style rifle. When a grand jury in Georgia indicted Trump, some of his supporters posted the grand jurors’ addresses online. When U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan was assigned to special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference case against Trump, she faced threats from Trump supporters. A federal appeals court pointed out the pattern when it upheld a narrowed gag order against Trump in his election interference case this month, noting that those he publicly targets are often threatened and harassed.

He knows that, and wants it, and encourages it on purpose.

Rebecca Solnit kneecaps her own argument immediately after making it.

Republicans have sought to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote against them and to undermine the systems set up to protect elections from corruption. They’ve sought to give corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the gun industry, immunity from accountability as both climate change and gun deaths devastate the nation, as well as to liberate dark money to dominate politics.

The legislation and legal cases they have pursued makes women unequal to men by overturning the bodily autonomy necessary to make women free and equal participants in society. Having overturned abortion rights in their pliant supreme court, and launched a new era of persecution of both pregnant people and medical providers in the states they dominate, Republicans are now threatening to overturn marriage equality.

In the first sentence it’s women who have been made unequal, and men they’ve been made unequal to. In the second sentence it’s pregnant people.

How dumb can you get?

Marriage equality threatens conservatives not only by making queer couples equal to straight couples, but by establishing that marriage is a freely negotiated relationship between equals, a blow to patriarchal marriage’s demand that wives submit to husbands. Some Republicans, including the new house speaker, also aspire to eliminate no-fault divorce, which would trap unhappy couples in general and abused women in particular.

Wobble wobble. One minute she knows what women are and knows what patriarchal marriage is, the next minute she’s burbling about pregnant people. Get a damn grip.

A new discovery lights up the headlines.

Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity

Ya think???

Sex may be a more useful explanatory variable than gender identity for predicting the performance of athletes in mass-participation races, a new paper has found.

A new paper has found what everyone has always known. Humans are sexually dimorphic.

Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes.

Surely they mean sex disparities in outcomes.

More to the point, what theory? There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be? I thought the theory was just that men who claim to be trans have found an easy way to cheat.

How dare a woman say that men shouldn’t take women’s scholarships?

Anti-Trans Swimmer Slammed After Causing Trans Teen To Lose Volleyball Scholarship

That is, woman yelled at after she points out that a boy won a scholarship intended for girls. The boy didn’t “lose” anything; he was never entitled to that scholarship, because it’s for girls.

Peter Karleby writes:

Anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines has once again sparked outrage after her public campaign against a trans high school student resulted in the teen’s college scholarship being revoked.

That is, Riley Gaines “sparked outrage” in a male journalist after she pointed out that a scholarship for girls had been awarded to a boy.

It’s unclear how Gaines knew about the teen, but she took to X, aka Twitter, last week to write a cruel screed against the student, outing and misgendering her, revealing her identity with a photo, and calling on UW to revoke her scholarship.

A cruel screed is it? What about the cruelty of a male student stealing a scholarship intended for a female student?

Gaines claims that the student and her parents deceived the university by concealing her trans identity. Disclosing someone else’s sexual or gender identity without their consent is considered illegal harassment under Washington law.

So males who claim to be trans get to cheat while everyone else has to keep his secret? Why would that be?

Gaines’ supposed concerns about athletic fairness are likely not even valid. The teen is thought to have transitioned before puberty, meaning she never developed any of the supposed athletic advantages anti-trans agitators advocate against.

The “supposed” athletic advantages. Riley’s “supposed” concerns about fairness. What would it take to convince him of the reality?

Those advantages have yet to be proven substantive, even in cases of transition after puberty, according to the limited research on the topic.

Substantive? What are you trying to say, Lassie? Do you mean substantial? Real? Significant?

Anyway, whatever he’s trying to say, he’s trying to say it by lying outrageously. Two words: Lia Thomas.

Woke dogs! Gaslighting dog-havers! DEI for the canine set!

Comment sections filled with discussions on “woke idiots” in dog training. “Radicals are Hijacking Dog Training” posted one trainer, calling force-free training, the anti-aversive movement of which Mr. George is arguably the most prominent face, an “ideology” and a “cult” with a “radicalized agenda” — language that sounded awfully familiar.

Even before this, I’d seen the occasional Instagram post by a trainer using terminology that seemed drawn from another context: I’d paused on several posts that applied the term “consent” to dogs — as in, we should get their consent before we pet them. In some cases, the trainer’s vocabulary seemed drawn from even more distant shores: “I will not project colonial, capitalist, or patriarchal concepts on my dog,” one post read, in between tips on leash reactivity and separation anxiety; “don’t gaslight your dog,” another urged.

We should get their consent before we pet them…hmmmmmmm…how can we ever be sure of a dog’s consent? Maybe that tail is wagging to be polite; how can we know?

But Mr. George’s series of videos seemed to send whatever process had generated those posts into overdrive.“It sounds like dog training has become just one more target for the woke community to prey upon!” a YouTube user wrote. “These are the same people with ‘gender fluid’ dogs,” another wrote, a statement that I found funny, then spent too long trying to parse. (What is standard gender expression in dogs?) I watched a video in which a trainer referred to the “dog training far left,” which should have made no sense, except that at this point, I knew what he meant.

It’s not so much far left as far something else – far incloosive, far validationing, far emotional support dogging…thus bringing us around in a circle.

Far left would be communal ownership of the means of production. The soppy touchy-feely validationy wing of the left isn’t really lefty at all, it’s its own weird thing. It’s dripping wet emotionalism run riot.

Everyone I spoke to for this story was deeply sincere (these are, after all, dog people): “The world of dogs does not exist in a vacuum of pet guardian and pet but is interconnected with systemic oppression,” Rachel Forday, a positive trainer, told me when I asked about her use of political language. “Systemic oppression dictates who is allowed to own a dog and what kind of dog they own.” Robert Cabral, a balanced trainer, worried in one of his videos that the rise of science citations in dog training was turning the profession into an “elitist realm.” “I have an issue with that,” he said. “I’m a simple guy. I didn’t go to college.” He continued, “I think when you make things complicated, you cut out a lot of good people.” The vibes these people are projecting are simply who they are.

Meanwhile their dogs are sniffing other dogs’ butts.

Will he be sued? Is he trawling to be sued? Does he have wistful daydreams about being sued? Does he identify as being sued?

By the way it’s not “denigrating” anyone to point out that people can’t change sex.

Not a hate crime after all?

Within 48 hours of Brianna Ghey’s murder, DCS Mike Evans of Cheshire police told the media that the force had “no information or intelligence to suggest it was a hate crime”. The statement caused an immediate uproar, particularly among the LGBTQ+ community, who held vigils in her memory. Many people suspected that Brianna’s being a transgender girl [might] well have played a role in her killing and were angry that detectives seemed so quick to rule out transphobia as a motive.

After all, it’s not as if the detectives could have known more about it than the “many people” who were watching from Twitter.

Although transphobia did not come up in the trial, the judge, Mrs Justice Yip, may consider it to be an aggravating factor when sentencing one or both of the teenagers. But she told potential jurors on the first day of the trial to put aside any “uninformed views” about Brianna’s killing.

She also took a dim view of online commentators who pronounced that the defendants were transphobic. After the case was opened, the prosecution complained about a tweet from the barrister Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, saying the teenagers had exchanged “transphobic slurs”.

Yip said the tweet was potentially in contempt of court, a serious crime that has previously resulted in short jail terms for those judged to have prejudiced a trial. Heer said the prosecution had deliberately not used such terms in the presence of the jury.

Maugham was spoken to by police and deleted the tweet, the court heard.

Good law indeed.