Now let’s read the response:

Dear Drs. Ramona Pérez and Monica Heller,

Open Letter: RE: 2023 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting Cancellation

We are disappointed that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian
Anthropology Society (CASCA) have chosen to forbid scholarly dialogue at the important joint
conference, themed “Transitions”, to be held in Toronto in November. Our panel, “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”, was accepted on July 13th, 2023 after the submission “was reviewed by the AAA’s Section Program Chairs or by CASCA’s Scientific Committee/Comité Scientifique de la CASCA”. From the time of this acceptance until we received your letter dated September 25th, 2023, no one from the AAA or CASCA reached out to any of the panelists with concerns. Thus, it comes as a shock to all of us that the AAA and CASCA canceled the panel due to the false accusation that “the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.”

Just like that? No discussions, no negotiations, just BANG, you’re cancelled, more than two months after being accepted? It seems remarkably rude, even apart from the substance. And then that accusation…

Due to the serious nature of the allegation, we hope that, rather than maintaining
secrecy, the AAA and CASCA will share with us and its membership documentation about the exact sources and nature of these complaints and the correspondence that led to this decision.

We are puzzled at the AAA / CASCA adopting as its own official stance that to support the continued use of biological sex categories (e.g., male and female; man and woman) is to imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community. Our panel description, written by Kathleen Lowrey, acknowledges that not all anthropologists need to differentiate between sex and gender. One of the abstracts explicitly expresses concerns that ignoring the distinction between sex and gender identity may cause harm to people in the LGBTQI community. In “No bones about it: skeletons are binary; people may not be”, Elizabeth Weiss wrote: “In forensics, however, anthropologists should be (and are) working on ways to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity, which is essential due to the
current rise in transitioning individuals.”

I don’t understand that last sentence. How can they possibly ensure that skeletal finds are identified by “gender identity”? I get that there can be and have been finds of skeletons with tools or clothes or the like that don’t “match” their anatomies, but (as has been pointed out) that doesn’t necessarily indicate gender bending, although it might. Gender identity isn’t the kind of thing it’s possible to “ensure” accurately identifying.

Kathleen Lowrey was key in bringing the panel together and in defining our unifying theme. Our panel included a group of diverse women, one of whom is a lesbian. In addition to having three fields of anthropology presented in our panel, our panel also included anthropologists from four countries with three languages – an international panel concerned about the erasure of women.

Ah well there you go then. That’s not allowed. Sorry it took more than two months to notice, but that’s how the halberd crumbles.

To be continued

It gets worse every day. The pushback has gained strength (and pushbackers), but the petulant whiny nonsense from team Gender Idenniny Gets To Cancel ANYTHING It Doesn’t Like gets worse and worse and worrrrrse.

Let’s do see that cancellation letter.

We write to inform you that at the request of numerous members the respective executive boards of AAA and CASCA reviewed the panel submission “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” and reached a decision to remove the session from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program(me). This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program(me). The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.

So they say, but I don’t believe them. I haven’t read the panel submission, but I know something about Carole Hooven and the attempts to shut her up, so I’m pretty confident I know what kind of “harm” they’re talking about, and how paltry and worked-up and ludicrous it is. These aren’t college kids high on their own virtue, remember, these are grown-ass academics, groveling to the entitled bed-wetters who think they own all mentions of sex and/or gender.

While there were those who disagree with this decision, we would hope they know their voice was heard and was very much a part of the conversation

Oh fuck off. Not everyone is in need of this kind of baby talk. The dissenters don’t care about “your voice was heard,” they care about the substance, and the plunge into idiocy this decision reflects.

It is our hope that we continue to work together so that we become stronger and more unified within each of our associations.

It is their hope that everyone swallows the Kool-Aid so that there will be no need for such discussions ever again.

Going forward, we will undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings and will include our leadership in that discussion.

Why are tedious bureaucrats so in love with “going forward” as a replacement for “in the future” or “from now on” or just nothing? What is the point of adding “going forward” when they already have the future tense “will” in two places? Going forward, we will turn the lights out as we leave the room. Thanks for clarifying that.

Anyway, they’ll “undertake a major review” of how anyone managed to get heresy smuggled into their annual session. That should be enlightening.

Yes just what the public health service needs: lectures on an absurd new ideology that claims fantasy is true while reality is a lie.

I delivered my 6th virtual 1.5-hour trans awareness session (in a series of eight) for staff at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust yesterday. It's been really interesting to see my audience grow throughout this series. #DiversityandInclusion #diversityequityandinclusion pic.twitter.com/Wz0lmnsU2E

— Katie Neeves – Cool2BTrans – Trans Ambassador (@cool2btrans) September 8, 2023

Nine hours of listening to a guy in a dainty blouse talking about “trans awareness” – as if there hasn’t been enough public yammering about trans everything yet.

The Times on the importance of the ruling that Trump committed fraud:

While the trial will determine the size of the penalty, Justice Engoron’s ruling granted one of the biggest punishments Ms. James sought: the cancellation of business certificates that allow some of Mr. Trump’s New York properties to operate, a move that could have major repercussions for the Trump family business.

LET’S HOPE SO.

The decision could terminate his control over a flagship commercial property at 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan and a family estate in Westchester County. Mr. Trump might also lose control over his other New York properties, including Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan and his golf club in Westchester.

See above.

In his order, Justice Engoron wrote scathingly about Mr. Trump’s defenses, saying that the former president and the other defendants, including his two adult sons and his company, ignored reality when it suited their business needs. “In defendants’ world,” he wrote, “rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air.”

“That is a fantasy world, not the real world,” he added.

And you can’t run a business from fantasy world because that amounts to cheating people.

Comedy interlude:

The judge also levied sanctions on Mr. Trump’s lawyers for making arguments that he had previously rejected. He ordered each to pay $7,500, noting that he had previously warned them that the arguments in question bordered on being frivolous.

Repeating them was “indefensible,” Justice Engoron wrote.

But it’s so Trump. Repeating lies is basically his life.

In a footnote, [the judge] added a line from the movie “Duck Soup” uttered by Chico Marx: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Trump ruled a fraud.

A judge ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House.

Judge Arthur Engoron, ruling in a civil lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, found that the former president and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing financing.

Engoron ordered that some of Trump’s business licenses be rescinded as punishment, making it difficult or impossible for them to do business in New York, and said he would continue to have an independent monitor oversee the Trump Organization’s operations.

…

Beyond mere bragging about his riches, Trump, his company and key executives repeatedly lied about them on his annual financial statements, reaping rewards such as favorable loan terms and lower insurance costs, Engoron found.

Those tactics crossed a line and violated the law, the judge said, rejecting Trump’s contention that a disclaimer on the financial statements absolved him of any wrongdoing.

…

Engoron found that Trump consistently overvalued Mar-a-Lago on his financial statements between 2014 and 2021, inflating its value on one statement by 2,300%, and rebuked him for lying about the size of his Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan. Trump claimed the three-story penthouse was nearly three times its actual size, valuing the property at $327 million.

Thoughts about dick measurements inevitably intrude.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Mandatory shop bags.

How is it the shop’s business to have anything to say about a customer’s decision to accept or reject a shopping bag? The “Progressive Pride” flag is not, as we have discovered, a neutral statement. It’s no longer even friendly. It is the banner of forced teaming, of aggressive, insistent parasitism of trans activism on gay and lesbian rights. It is a statement of a political ideology and religious belief. It is the promotion of an anti-that is profoundly anti-women. It is the flag of an occupying army flexing its muscles in yet another power play, and the shop’s behaviour confirms it: they called the fucking police. And even more unbelievably, THE FUCKING POLICE FUCKING RESPONDED! The correct answer on the operator’s part would have been to tell the wannabe Stasi informant to go away and stop wasting the police’s time or face charges. But no. It turns out that the police are quite happy to waste their time and intimidate members of the public by jumping to the call of furious, authoritarian trans “allies” who can’t stand the thought of anyone failing to accept with fervour and gratitude the Flag of Enforced Compliance being thrust upon them. Off to re-education camp for them!

At least police in the UK don’t seem to be as heavily armed or trigger-happy as American cops, otherwise there might have already been bloodshed over stickers, ribbons, limericks, or sarcasm.

Donor Concierge introduced Kylee on Facebook in August 2020:

Introducing Donor Concierge’s new Surrogacy Program Manager: Kylee Warren!

Kylee joined Donor Concierge in 2020, and she has over 8 years of experience working in the third party fertility field.

Oh is that what they call it. “Third party fertility” – how elegant – how mollifying. It’s not renting a woman to cook someone else’s baby, it’s third party fertility. Public Relations wins another round.

She previously worked for a top U.S. fertility clinic, focusing on egg donation and gestational surrogacy. Kylee recently earned her Masters in Global Public Health and holds a BS in Health Sciences and Pre-Nursing. Kylee’s deep medical experience, passion for family building and leadership have made her perfectly suited to take on this new role!

This new role treating women like machines for the manufacture of other people’s babies.

There’s a photo of her, in which she looks perfectly pleasant and decent. I’m not sharing it because it’s not the point; it’s the soothing “this is all perfectly normal” wording and the actions behind the wording that I find revolting.

Note that Donor Concierge doesn’t say anything about the profits. I suspect they’re not small.

Helen Joyce explains one reason so many institutions have gone all trans-ideology:

…by now most institutions have at least one senior employee who has socially, and perhaps medically, transitioned a child—and who is likely to spend the rest of their lives justifying that decision to themselves.

It’s a terrible, difficult choice, what to do about it, she says: make their child furious and miserable, or make their child happy at least in the short term.

But that second option amounts to a promise to the child that parents cannot keep without involving everyone else in a pretence. If you tell your child that yes, he “really is a girl” or she “really is a boy”, you require all the rest of us to play along, not just now but always. You require the child’s school to tell the teachers and pupils that Anthony is now Adelaide and that they must never again mention the truth. Anthony has to be allowed into the girls’ toilets, changing rooms and sports teams. When the time comes Anthony will have to go on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and probably get surgery. All of society must be rearranged to accommodate Anthony as really, truly a girl and then a woman. Because anything else means that the parents have made a horrific mistake.

I know of several parents in influential positions in British public life who have made this choice. Each, whether or not intentionally, casts a pall of collective dishonesty over an entire organisation. Any colleague of theirs who knows about the child will feel gagged when it comes to speaking about the dangers of childhood transitioning or the overreach of trans lobby groups. If the parent is in senior management, they may be able to impose “trans-friendly” policies across the organisation, such as gender-neutral toilets or pronouns in email signatures.

I hadn’t really thought of it this way. It would explain a lot. Just one person high up at the ACLU, at Planned Parenthood, at NOW, at the BBC, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and on and on.

It’s grim.

Meanwhile, if the shop hands you a carrier bag (one you have to pay for) and it has anything about trans world on it, it is against the law for you to refuse it.

How is the shop entitled to control who says what in “the shop’s vicinity”?

The police ignore rape but get very busy on gender heresy in public.

Holy shit this is disgusting.

The Valley Girl accent and vocal fry don’t help, but the content is………..the word for it doesn’t exist. I need a mashup of horror and disgust and rage. The sanctimonious bloodless corporate-speak about renting women to gestate babies “to the specifications” of the smart shopper – it’s grotesque and foul.

“What this matching process entails is a gestational carrier through a vetted agency that has undergone a stringent medical review”

Note that “that.” It’s not who, it’s that. A “gestational carrier” (which has to be some kind of machine, right?) is a thing that has undergone a stringent review by skilled engineers.

“a stringent medical review by the Donor Concierge Internal Medical Records Review Team”

Notice that their respect for their own moneymaking scheme is so intense that it gets 7 capital letter words in one sentence, while the woman who is paid to be a “gestational carrier” gets zero and is a “that.”

Also “Donor Concierge.” Fucking hell. What a suppurating combination of yuppy moneybags preening and callous exploitation of actual human beings. Concierge!!!!! It couldn’t be more disgusting if that had been their goal.

“a vetted agency that has undergone a stringent medical review that is a team of nurses with over thirty years of experience, that’ll ensher that you are not only getting a gestational carrier candidate”

Let me just repeat that, shouting.

A GESTATIONAL CARRIER CANDIDATE

“a gestational carrier candidate that is meeting your specifications and ideal preferences”

She leans into that your specifications with all the unction of the dedicated panderer to the rich. This luxury bathroom comes fitted with all the luxury extras and luxuries and luxuriosities that are suited to your greedy desires and lusts. This is a fucking human being manufactured by another human being she’s talking about!

“but also is going to meet ASRM guidelines”

ASRM=American Society for Reproductive Medicine

“and is going to meet the medical qualifications for your reproductive clinic.”

Isn’t that awesome? It’s like buying a Mercedes, knowing that you can take it to any approved Mercedes clinic if anything goes wrong.

“Through the Donor Concierge Donor matching process, you will have not only access to a wealth of knowledge from the Case Management team and the Medical Review team”

What kind of knowledge? The “you” in this scenario is the one person who is at no kind of physical or medical risk whatsoever. The “gestational carrier” and the object she is “gestational carrying” are at all kinds of risk, psychological at a minimum, but the sperm donor? He’ll be fine no matter what. But he’s the one paying, so he gets all the oil.

“not only access to a wealth of knowledge from the Case Management team and the Medical Review team, but someone to help you along the way, holding your hand”

Your hand. Not that bitch who’s doing the work, but you, Mister Moneybags.

“holding your hand, making sure that you are not alone in this journey.”

You must be pampered at every turn, sir. The bitch gestational carrier just has to get on with it.

“You will be assigned a case manager to help assist you through your journey”

What journey? What journey?

“your journey with the Donor Concierge team. We look forward to helping you build your family”

We look forward to helping you buy luxury children via the bodies of desperate women.

“We look forward to helping you build your family and finding your dream surrogate.”

There aren’t enough vomit emojis in the world for this.

Will it ever sink in? Will they ever get the point? Will they ever stop saying this?

But it isn’t “for who we are.” THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT. It’s “for who we are not.” The demand is for respect and recognition of a fiction, a game, a lie – a fiction-game-lie that intrudes on and weakens the rights of other people, in particular the half of human beings who are female.

It’s beyond ridiculous to keep howling about respect for who we are when what they mean is respect for who they are not. Beeee-yond.

Women win a volleyball tournament. Men storm the court and run around jerking off.

Santo Amaro University has expelled several students after footage of them went viral this week.

The ugly scenes in São Paulo, Brazil, saw male students from the futsal team sitting on the sidelines watching the women’s volleyball team with their pants around their ankles.

After the team won the volleyball championship at São Camilo University, the players stormed the court and appeared to perform a group masturbation celebration.

As one does…if one has nothing but contempt for women.

São Camilo University confirmed the incident originally took place in April, though footage of the moment went viral over the weekend.

Cool cool. So it was no big deal until the media found the story.

“Unisa, an institution with more than 55 years of history, vehemently repudiates this type of behavior, completely antagonistic to its history and values,” the school said in a statement.

Then why weren’t the students expelled last April?

The new Dick and Jane book. See Dick pay for sex; see Jane used by Dick.

The city of Berlin has prompted outrage from locals after offering a graphic picture book on prostitution to children via its official website. The book, titled Rosie Needs Money (Rosi sucht Geld), is advertised as a resource for youth aged 6 to 12 years old.

For the girls in case they want to go into the trade, for the boys in case they want to look forward to paying women to be raped.

Bizarrely, the book concludes with quotes from children and young people who live in areas where street prostitution takes place. Most of the sentiment is overwhelmingly negative, and presented as examples of attitudes towards prostitution in youth which require discussion.

“I’m ashamed to live here… I can’t sleep well at night… Why is there no prostitution next to a town hall?” wonders one youth.

“I’m afraid of the johns. Even though I have curtains, I’m afraid to change in my room. Why do we residents and the ladies have to suffer just because the men can’t find a wife?” asks another.

Because that’s called being “sex-positive.” Complaining about it is called being “sex-negative” and “mean to sex workers.”

Arrow said that the decriminalization of the sex trade in Germany has resulted in the exploitation of migrant women, and emphasized that there had been a recent increase in the numbers of women from Ukraine who had fled their home country after the Russian invasion. According to government statistics, the amount of women from Ukraine registered as “prostitutes” doubled between 2021 and 2022.

It’s very kind of Germany to help Ukraine this way.

Last year, Reduxx reported that Google searches for terms such as “Ukrainian girls,” “Ukrainian porn,” and “war porn” spiked during the first week of the conflict.

It was later learned that a Berlin-based “sex work” advocacy agency “made up of trans and non-binary sexworkers” used social media to solicit Ukrainian refugee women for information on entering the legal German sex trade.

Ah, well then. The only inclusive thing to do is embrace all this lovely sex work advocacy with open arms legs.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Safe haven:

Even if we granted that adolescents who are “really” transgender would feel so bad they might commit suicide if they didn’t get surgeries to “correct” their genitals, the inextricable flipside of that is that adolescents who turn out to be “not really” transgender would feel so bad they might commit suicide if they did get surgeries which rendered their genitals “incorrect.”

Surely, then, it would be best to wait until they’re adults for surgeries. The risk of enduring a couple years in adolescence with the “wrong” genitalia is far outweighed by the risk of enduring the entirety of one’s adult life with genitalia that’s been surgically rendered “incorrect.”

That’s granting an awful lot, of course. But the point is, even in the baby blue and rose-coloured worldview of gender ideology, the logic still doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Add to that the fact that these surgeries don’t really change genitalia from male to female, and that there are risks (the surgery has an incredibly high complication rate, up to 50% in some clinics), side effects (lifelong medical patienthood and a significantly lowered life expectancy), and main effects (sterility)…

I give up!

To misquote Jonathan Swift, you can’t reason someone out of a position he was never reasoned into. The tools of rational argument won’t get us anywhere with these people. This is a socio-cultural/quasi-religious phenomenon. People came into these beliefs through strange eddies in modern political and cultural dynamics. And those are the tools we’ll have to use to get people out of it. Whatever benefits the gender ideology tribe is offering to its prospective members, we need to identify them and undermine them, or counter-offer with something better. And I’ve actually got an idea about where to start. Hear me out:

Ironically, the appeal of gender ideology is its unpopularity — most people don’t actually like it.

All the civil rights movements started out unpopular, and only became popular through arduous campaigning and struggle. This pattern repeated itself enough times that everyone absorbed three things:

1. The eventual outcome for all civil rights movements is success and widespread adoption by society. Why should the next one turn out any different than all the ones that have come before it?

2. The eventual outcome for those who oppose civil rights is social shame. For this reason, overt opposition to sex equality, racial equality, sexual orientation equality, disability rights, etc, has largely quieted down. (I may still have anti-gay colleagues, but no one’s said anything overtly homophobic to me in a workplace for 20 years because they know they can’t anymore.)

3. The eventual outcome for those who embrace civil rights is social capital — virtue. The earlier someone joins a new civil rights movement, the more virtue she will eventually receive. The very earliest adopters of civil rights eventually get statues and holidays in their honour.

This pattern suggests that the more overt opposition a (supposed) rights movement has, the earlier it is in its inevitable trajectory to widespread adoption, and the greater the virtue will be amassed by those noble souls who were the earliest to heed the calling of progress. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the same pattern of human behaviour that has driven people to join religious sects. Call it the economics of religion.

It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme where the product is “progressive values” and the reward is “virtue.” It doesn’t actually matter what you’re selling; the point is that you always have to have more people below you to sell it to, or the whole thing collapses. The other civil rights causes have lost their usefulness precisely because they no longer have a huge pool of outspoken opponents. There isn’t an anti-gay or anti-Black equivalent of JK Rowling, and by progressive logic today, that’s a weakness for those movements, not a selling point.

The best way to stop a pyramid scheme is to point out to everyone that it is a pyramid scheme. You don’t keep people out of Amway with bad reviews of the junk they sell; you do it by showing them that the whole thing is a scam and if you sign up, you’ll go broke. Unfortunately for some, they don’t get the message until they start seeing people around them go broke.

For this reason, we don’t need more science to prove that there are only two sexes or that sexchange surgeries are risky and harmful — deep down, everybody already knows this, just like deep down every Amway salesman knows his products are garbage.

We need to show people that gender identity ideology is an ersatz “civil rights campaign” and those who get on board are not going to end up alongside Martin Luther King, the Suffragettes, and the Stonewall rioters on some imaginary Mount Rushmore of civil rights heroes. We need to remind them of the very real civil rights they’re destroying right here and now, nevermind some imagined future where they’ll reap so much virtue.

Unfortunately for many, they won’t get that message until they start seeing people around them regret the surgeries they’ve been sold.

Wouldn’t you think Canadian MPs would know a little about WWII? It’s a long time ago but not that long, and anyway it cast a very long shadow. A very very very fucking long shadow, on account of the many millions of people who were killed, and on account of the gruesome specter of genocide. On account of the UN and the UDHR, on account of nuclear weapons, on account of the Bloodlands.

Governed by imbeciles:

Full tweet:

It seems the ‘conversion therapy’ ban is over, for the time being at least. Thank God.

But let’s not forget the inanely grinning, brain-dead MPs (of all parties) who held up these placards in May of last year, advocating a policy which would have criminalised anyone trying to *prevent* tomboy girls and camp boys from being steered towards untested drugs and surgery.

None of this lot are homophobic, in the traditional sense. But they hadn’t bothered either to stop and think, or to question a campaign where the ‘vibes’ felt right. The exact opposite function of what MPs are for.

We are governed by imbeciles.

Imbeciles who smile happily as adolescents are mutilated.

Sastra raises the perennial question of what we are talking about when we talk about how “some women have a penis” [and related subjects, which are infinite in number]. She asks if it’s a matter of new discoveries in science or new sensitivities to human rights, which is a very good question.

I was thinking about the purported “new sensitivities to human rights” yesterday, wondering for the billionth time why there is such heightened sensitivity to and compassion for men who claim to be women when there was never such sensitivity to and compassion for feminist women with their old sensitivities to human rights. Why are the sensitivity and compassion so very heightened, so frantic, so loud, so hyperbolic, so laced with threats? Why are so many people so extremely passionate and agitated about this form of “liberation” when that was never a thing for feminism? It’s as if feminism had been for “Karens” all along.

I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that maybe it’s because most people or nearly all people or all people are in fact more or less squicked by fake genitalia and medically unnecessary mastectomies and the like. Maybe it’s because most people or nearly all people or all people actually don’t want to “date” trans people and they feel horribly guilty and ashamed as a result so they overcompensate.

Could that be it?

Originally a comment by Sastra on Brain rot.

If “some women have a penis” does that mean:

1.) There have always been some women who have a penis, but we only now realize this because of new discoveries in science.

2.) There have always been some women who have a penis, but we only now admit this because of new sensitivities to human rights.

3.) Women-with-a-penis is a totally new thing, the result of advances in medical science.

4.) Women-with-a-penis is a totally new thing, the result of advances in human rights.

My guess is that people who believe “some women have a penis” would dearly love to say it’s #1, mostly push #2, and fall back on #3 or #4 if they’re either forced into it, or feel like it ought to help their case on #2.

Tattoo v neovagina.

I think I get what the reasoning is from their point of view: gender transition procedures are (in at least some instances) literally life-saving. People will die without them.

If that thought is accurate the reasoning may possibly make some sense. But is it accurate?

Well, first, not all magic gender-havers claim to be suicidal, or threaten to act on suicidal thoughts, or do in fact commit suicide. Second, blackmail by claims of suicidal ideation is just that: blackmail. That doesn’t make any difference on the personal level – if parents are convinced their kid will kill xirself then claims about blackmail and the wider society aren’t going to mean a damn thing to them – but it does make a difference on the policy level and especially on the rhetorical level. In other words it would be nice if activists for trans ideology would stop using suicide as a blackmail lever.

So, to sum up, kids under 18 ruining their bodies and their futures are not comparable to kids wanting tattoos. Tattoos are not comparable to luxury hysterectomies or penis removals. Tattoos are at worst unattractive or annoying to others. Medically unnecessary hysterectomies or penis removals or puberty blockers are in another category altogether.

For this reason, saying “Golly gee minors can’t decide for themselves whether to have a tattoo but they absolutely can decide to destroy their sexual parts” is reckless and idiotic.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Who, literally, does she think she is?

I realise now that I was very naive to think, as I did for a long time, that the puritan impulse couldn’t survive in a pluralist culture. I’m not sure how the managerial mindset is related to puritanism beyond the fact that they both love putting things (and thus people) into boxes, but the two certainly find it easy to make common cause in promoting authoritarianism. Orwell is certainly relevant here but so is Mill. Without a willingness among the ordinary population (which is to say everyone who doesn’t see themself as a “thought leader”) to tolerate ideas they personally find disagreeable it is all too easy for the managers to appoint themselves priests. (“Don’t worry about the mysteries. You’ll never understand them but we’ve got it for you. We have a direct line to God/Stonewall”.) The totalising impulse, which I think is the puritan impulse in another form, claims that all values can be reduced to one value and thus the work of determining how those values can be put into practice can easily be outsourced. Just find someone/some organisation that “shares your values” as if it didn’t actually work in the opposite way. (Billy Bragg apparently wants that job and seems to imagine that having written a few so-so songs is a suitable qualification but he really should have gotten an MBA or gone into the public service if he wanted to be really successful.)

I have to say I’m scared. It’s almost as if we’ve jumped back a hundred years and the only alternative to one authoritarianism is the other authoritarianism. I just hope that this time we find something less destructive than a World War to demonstrate that the boring rule of law (and agreed norms – I’m looking at you Trump) is preferable to the thrill of being an ideological warrior. (Maybe we could just exile all the flag-wavers to some MMORG. The Metaverse might turn out to have some use after all.)