Start at 50 minutes on this to see and hear Neil deGrasse Tyson being sillier than you or I would have thought possible.

He tells his hosts he can tell women and men apart by looking at them, and that women are more expressive with their jewelry, and that women don’t have short hair, and a whole list of things of that kind. (Every single one of them, by the way, failed to be true of me, and I’m very far from the most strikingly butch woman on the planet, so…) He tells them that with much passion and emphasis, as if he’s saying something novel or surprising or clever. The point seems to be (I got too irritated and bored to watch to the end of his “argument”) that we know which sex is which because of a lot of visible cues, which are not inherent to femaleness or maleness but chosen and a matter of custom and fungible (i.e. they can be swapped)). Well no shit Sherlock, we know that. Now explain why that means we have to let men take everything we’ve won for ourselves over the past half-century.

What naïve credulous babble.

Oh it’s real is it? How do you know? Why am I not aware of having one? How do you know you have one?

Also what is it? What does that mean? Please explain without tautology – without using the word or its cognates.

And what is a “valid” identity? How do you know trans ones are “equally as valid”? Please explain, again without tautology or circularity.

A few more turns of the screw in Scotland:

Police Scotland is setting up a dedicated hate crime unit ahead of Humza Yousaf‘s hugely controversial new laws coming into force early next year, it can be revealed.

The unit is expected to go live in November and training of the force’s 16,400 officers gets underway in December in preparation for the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act being implemented in early 2024. The legislation consolidates existing law and extends protection for vulnerable groups with a new offence of “stirring up hatred”.

So we can expect even more of the kind of opinion-sniffing and women-punishing that prompted Women Won’t Wheesht. What a brilliant plan!

Under the Act, offences are considered “aggravated” – which could influence sentencing – if they involve prejudice on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variations in sex characteristics.

But not, of course, sex. Never sex. Women never matter; women must never be allowed to matter. Prejudice against women doesn’t count, because women are so awful that prejudice is completely reasonable and fair.

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy with human rights group Sex Matters, said: “The establishment of a new, dedicated hate crime unit at Police Scotland sends a sinister message to those who advocate for women’s and children’s rights.

“People need to be able to speak the truth about sex to stand up for their own rights and to carry out safeguarding. Women can’t explain why so-called ‘trans women’ shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports without saying that, as a matter of material reality, ‘trans women’ are men.

“Are we going to see teachers who say that boys who identify as girls can’t go into the girls’ changing rooms pursued by this new police unit? If ‘misgendering’ counts as a hate crime, then people who simply speak the truth risk a criminal record, and it is chilling to think that a dedicated police unit will be now pursuing people who are acting in the best interests of women and children.”

Chilling and sickening and enraging.

The Act became law in April 2021 and, despite the legislation receiving Royal Assent, it has not come into force as Police Scotland had said it would require time for “training, guidance and communications planning”. As that exercise nears completion, police chiefs are refusing to confirm how many officers will be attached to the new hate crime unit, or how much has been spent in preparation for the new laws to come into effect.

They say their new Core Operational Solutions (COS) – a suite of new national systems which have been rolled out to replace 44 legacy systems and processes with five national applications – is also going to be deployed to “bring to justice those perpetrators of hate against protected people and groups”.

And those protected people and groups do not include women. Transgender identity is on the list but being a woman is not – so men in dresses will have a field day calling the cops on women who refuse to pretend to believe in their magic idenniny.

Police Scotland recorded 64,807 incidents of domestic abuse in 2021-22 but women were excluded by the Scottish Government from the new hate crime laws.

Women just don’t count. Women are The Servants. Women are in the background, mopping the floor and making dinner; they just don’t matter enough to merit any protections.

Former Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill said: “Police Scotland are in danger of taking their eye off the ball. All new legislation requires training for officers. But the establishment of a unit when it should be part of the day job gets things out of kilter. The main hate crime has always been and remains misogyny and domestic violence.

Yes but that’s such old news, so much part of the landscape. It’s like wallpaper. It’s not new and exciting like twanzphobeeya.

The contortions they indulge in, in order to avoid saying the word “women.” Columnist Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:

‘Abortion tourism’: A tidy phrase for punching down at desperate people

Subhead:

Republicans made it harder to get abortions in red states. Now they have a punchline for trivializing the journeys people undertake to get the procedure.

But it’s not “people” who undertake the journeys. If it were, Republicans wouldn’t oppose abortion rights. It’s not “people”; it’s those harlots known as “women.” It’s those weak, stupid, yet eternally plotting and rebelling people with no penis and too much freedom. Women must be forced to carry and push out babies they don’t want to carry and push out, because they are inferior people who refuse to recognize their inferiority.

Nevertheless Monica Hesse carefully avoids saying the word.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) has used it. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has used it. Focus on the Family uses it; so does the Christian Coalition of America. All of them use it to describe the same broad concept: A patient who needs an abortion travels to a location where they can get an abortion.

Where they can get an abortion – that, unlike “people” and “individuals” and the like, spells out the ridiculous underlying doctrine that men too get abortions.

The phrase itself isn’t new; its use dates back at least 40 years ago, mostly in European countries, to neutrally describe the act of individuals crossing national borders to end pregnancies. But in the past 15 months, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the phrase has bloomed in the United States, used almost exclusively by antiabortion Republicans and with obvious intent: to make pregnant people, whom the party has forced into desperate straits by pushing draconian state laws, seem like harlots on holiday.

Oops. Slipped up a little there. “Harlots” doesn’t usually mean men.

Maybe she lost the plot after “harlots,” because suddenly women appear.

Are women who live in abortion-restrictive places traveling across state lines in order to access abortion? Yeah, almost definitely…

Are women crossing state lines in order to take in a Broadway show, finally eat at Momofuku and grab a relaxing abortion before ice skating at Rockefeller Center? Please.

So she does know it’s women, and that Republicans are insulting them because they are women…yet, in the next paragraph…

“Abortion tourism” is a dismissive, frivolous phrase that implies abortion is a dismissive, frivolous thing — something that bored pregnant people do when they’ve suddenly run out of “Abbott Elementary” episodes. “Abortion tourism” implies that reproductive care is a luxury, not a necessity, and that pregnant people…

Dismissive? Frivolous? How about the frivolous dismissal of the fact that all this bullying and bossing and punishing is aimed at women, specifically and exclusively women? Punishments for not wearing the hijab are aimed at women and forced pregnancy laws are aimed at women. It matters that they’re aimed at women. We can’t name the power imbalance, the injustice, the persecution, the tyranny if we can’t name the people it’s aimed at. Wake the fuck up.

We’re deep in a battle of terminology. Not only in the obvious way of “fetus” vs. “unborn child” or “intact dilation and extraction” vs. “partial birth,” but in the more innocuous-sounding terminology that needs to be unpacked in order to fully grasp how insidious it actually is.

Insidious is it? Take a look in the mirror. Your deliberate erasure of women is insidious. Your innocuous-sounding terminology needs to be unpacked.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard antiabortion activists decry the concept of “abortion on demand,” a phrase clearly meant to imply that people seeking abortion are treating medical clinics like the customer service line of Comcast. That they are impatient, impulsive and self-centered. That they want what they want, and what they want is three free months of HBO and unlimited mifepristone.

In other words how misogynists usually do think of and talk about women. Not people, but women. Women specifically. It makes zero sense to talk about misogyny and pretend that it’s “people” who need abortion rights in the same damn column.

What is the protocol that these activists would prefer? Abortion upon polite request? Upon begging? Abortion upon getting permission from your husband, your father, your priest and a slim majority of your state’s legislative body?

Husband. You’re talking about women here. Quit pretending not to.

And, of course, there is the newest turn of phrase I’ve seen cropping up in recent weeks: “Abortion trafficking,” which implies that pregnant people are being kidnapped and thrown into vans, dragged unwillingly to unwanted abortion appointments. What does it actually describe? Friends or romantic partners giving pregnant people lifts…

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has an entire guide related to insidious abortion terminology. It is almost entirely composed of the terms that antiabortion activists use to make abortions sound scarier than they are, and to make the people seeking them sound less trustworthy…

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has an entire guide related to insidious abortion terminology. It is almost entirely composed of the terms that antiabortion activists use to make abortions sound scarier than they are, and to make the people seeking them sound less trustworthy.

“Mostly” women. Imbecile.

H/t What a Maroon

Attitudes.

That drop in support for faking birth certificates is a good thing. It’s good that more people think blatant absurd lies should not be “legally recognized.”

Which twin has the moral panic here? I’d say the moral panic was all the hang-wringing over the poor fragile persecuted men who only wanted to grab everything that belongs to women.

And the trans ideology is not part of that long post-war liberalisation. It’s a parody of it. Men claiming persecution on the basis that they are women inside despite having male bodies is a parody of feminism, not a branch of it.

As for feeling unsafe and unwelcome, has Nancy Kelley been paying any attention at all to how feminist women are treated by trans ideologues and enforcers?

How sweet: just as Birmingham offers a new statue of The Hijabi Woman, Iran beefs up its punishments for women who try to escape the damn thing.

Iran’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that would increase prison terms and fines for women and girls who break its strict dress code.

Those dressed “inappropriately” face up to 10 years in jail under the bill, for which a three-year “trial” was agreed.

And by “inappropriately” they mean for instance a stark naked head and neck. Funny how men are allowed to have stark naked heads but women are not.

Under Iranian law, which is based on the country’s interpretation of Sharia, women and girls above the age of puberty must cover their hair with a hijab and wear long, loose-fitting clothing to disguise their figures.

While men don’t have to do any such thing.

On Wednesday, members of parliament voted by 152 to 34 to pass the “Hijab and Chastity Bill”, which says people who are caught dressed “inappropriately” in public places will be subject to a “fourth degree” punishment.

“People”? Does it say that? Not “women”? But men don’t wear hijab at all, so a hijab bill wouldn’t be talking about “people” as opposed to “women” would it? I don’t trust the BBC not to be sneaky and dishonest on this subject.

The bill also proposes fines for those “promoting nudity” or “making fun of the hijab” in the media and on social networks, and for owners of vehicles in which a female driver or passenger is not wearing the hijab or appropriate clothing, according to AFP news agency.

Any person who promotes violating the dress code “in an organised manner” or “in co-operation with foreign or hostile governments, media, groups or organisations” could also be imprisoned for between five and 10 years, it says.

Women must be terrorized and punished and blotted out. Women are the source of all evil. Women are a temptation to innocent men, and they must not be allowed to get away with it.

Earlier this month, eight independent UN human rights experts warned the bill “could be described as a form of gender apartheid, as authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission”.

Ya think?

They hate women. Really really bone-deep hate them.

The bullies win another round.

But it’s not “very clear.” It’s very unclear. Define “transphobia.” Define “biphobia.” Explain why you burble about transphobia but not misogyny. Explain why you seem not to give the tiniest shit about women’s rights.

The CBC reports:

Two people have been arrested in Ottawa for “inciting hatred” by “displaying hateful material” during a protest against school policies on gender identity curriculum, according to Ottawa Police.

The CBC doesn’t say what kind of “hateful material” of course. Is it the “men are not women” kind? Is it hateful to say that?

Two people have been arrested in Ottawa for “inciting hatred” by “displaying hateful material” during a protest against school policies on gender identity curriculum, according to Ottawa Police.

Like what? Material that says women have rights?

The march in nation’s capital is part of a number of protests and counter-protests across Canada where heated exchanges are taking place. Some parents and socially conservative groups are protesting LGBTQ-inclusive education policies in the classroom and in extracurricular settings under the banner of parental rights. 

Liars liars liars. It’s not only “socially conservative groups” who object to campaigns that try to force us to agree that men can be women. Far from it.

Policies emerging across the country, including in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, that require young people to get parental consent before teachers can use their preferred first names and pronouns are at the heart of these protests.

Gee, silly parents, not wanting their kids to mutilate themselves and mess up their lives for the sake of a grotesque social contagion.

It’s psychological cult capture, that’s what it is.

Would you say that Scientologists who believe that “body thetans cling to their body because they have lost their free will as a result of events in their past lives” have a psychological condition? Or would you say that they have been subject to cult indoctrination? Buying into the thinking that leads you to believe you are the opposite sex is a psychological condition only to the degree that it is psychological cult capture. It is social engineering, programming, and propaganda that is being aggressively pushed into every level of culture on a global scale. Like the Church of Scientology, there is MONEY to be made from selling people the idea that they need to medically alter their body in order to cure their “gender dysphoria.” Gender dysphoria is an implanted belief, it is as imaginary as a body thetan.

Emphasis mine. This is what I keep saying. It’s not some pure psychic state that just happens, it’s social contagion at best and deliberate social engineering at worst. I think Amy’s dead right about this.

How utterly revolting.

A new sculpture believed to be the first of its kind in the world will be unveiled next month to celebrate women who wear hijabs.

The Strength of the Hijab was designed by renowned sculptor Luke Perry and will be installed in the Smethwick area of Birmingham in October. It is believed to be the first sculpture in the world of a woman wearing the head covering, worn by many Muslim women.

The sculpture is five metres tall and weighs around a tonne.

It’s not a “head covering” that is “worn by many Muslim women.” It’s a bandage that wraps the hair and neck leaving only the middle of the face exposed, and it is imposed on many Muslim women, often by violence. Some women wear it “voluntarily” but only if you consider a religious obligation “voluntary.” Many are very much forced to wear it, and many are beaten or killed for refusing. It’s beyond revolting for a man in a semi-secular country to create a statue celebrating the damn thing. Will he next do a statue celebrating female genital mutilation? Just imagine what that will look like.

Mr Perry said: “The Strength of the Hijab is a piece which represents women who wear hijabs of the Islamic faith, and it’s really there because it’s such an underrepresented part of our community, but such an important one…“It’s something which people feel very strongly about, identify with, [and] they feel happy about and comfortable with.”

Some probably do, but it’s ridiculous to assume they all do when it’s well known that the hijab is forced on many women and girls whether they want it or not. It’s ridiculous to assume they all do when it’s a heavy, hot, smothery garment, which may be comfortable outside in winter but isn’t the rest of the time. It’s ridiculous to assume they all do when it’s notoriously re-imposed on women any time hardliners replace reformists in countries where Islam is mandatory.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on More to a woman.

Anna Funder’s book is a brilliantly written and forensic analysis (she is a trained lawyer, and acutely sensitive to words and what they don’t say, but nevertheless express) of Orwell’s bullying & abuse – sexual & otherwise – of women, including his wife, and his moral cowardice where those women closest to him were concerned. As I read, I found myself almost trembling with rage at times, racked with guilt at my own deficiencies toward others, but, above all, appalled throughout at the manipulativeness, cruelty & furtive hypocrisy of Orwell.

I am not, as it happens, a great admirer of Orwell, apart from ‘Animal Farm’, the idea for which came from Eileen Orwell, who also, as Funder makes clear, made a great contribution to the wit of its writing. I have always felt that there is a kind of dead puritanism at Orwell’s heart, something ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confined’, a hatred of exuberance and joy, which has a lot to do with his prurience, his furtive & unpleasant sexual adventures, his wheedling advances to various women, whether in person or by letter, & his rapes (yes!) or attempts at them. Not to mention his fundamental dislike of working-class people, even as he seeks to appear to be on their side.

I recommend Funder’s book to everyone. It is excellent, and as devastating for the reader as it is to the gilded memory of George Orwell.

Now there’s a headline.

Doctors say transgender women should be allowed to compete in female sports because it boosts ‘their mental health and self-esteem’

Yes and adults should be allowed to compete in children’s sports because it boosts their mental health and self-esteem.

I’ll be boring and spell it out. Why does the mental health and self-esteem of men who pretend to be women matter more than women’s mental health and self-esteem? Why does the former in fact simply cancel the latter? Why should men be allowed to trample women into bleeding fragments to boost their own mental health and self-esteem? Why do men count while women are so much garbage?

Researchers at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, said participating in sports had many benefits, including boosting mental health, self-esteem and lowering the risk of obesity and chronic diseases.

No shit, so how about not driving women out of sports?

They advocated for trans people to be allowed to compete in their desired gender category at elementary, middle, high school and college. But they admitted competitive sports were a different matter because participants had invested their whole careers in the game.

Oh horseshit. In elementary school sports aren’t divided between boys and girls are they? The issue is puberty – that’s when male people add all those physical upgrades that women don’t get, on account of how their job is to gestate babies.

They warned that a wave of 22 bans on transgender athletes at schools and colleges was harming the mental and physical health of the group and discouraging them from competing in sports.

That’s fascinating. Now, what about the mental and physical health of girls and women?

Also, there aren’t “bans on transgender athletes.” There are (not nearly enough) bans on men in women’s sports, and there are rules about doping.

A gender-atheist academic writes:

A French philosopher named Michel Foucault, who was alleged to have abused young boys in Tunisia, was primarily responsible for a theory that came to be known as postmodernism. This theory was adopted by mediocre academics who were unable to do any serious thinking. These academics came up with a number of bizarre ideas, including but not limited to, that sex was not binary and was on a “spectrum,” that sex was not immutable and could be changed, that sex was irrelevant and only gender mattered, that everyone had an “innate” sense of gender even though gender is a cultural construct, and that men could be women and had a right to use women’s toilets and other facilities, and to play on their sports teams. The Foucauldians rejected the idea that we should all just live and let live and, instead, demanded that, although there was no truth, everyone had to accept their metaphysical, quasi-religious beliefs as literally true and had to do whatever the Foucauldians wanted or they would be called lots of horrible names and be subjected to endless repetitions of slogans such as “trans women are women” and “trans rights are human rights” until they wept from boredom. Liberal, pluralistic society disappeared, virulent misogyny was given free reign, everyone had more pronouns than anyone could remember, and the only music permitted was that of Billy Bragg. Everyone remotely interesting was canceled. Universities abolished all departments except for gender studies because all other areas of study, especially all biological sciences, were deemed “transphobic.” Everyone was absolutely miserable, especially those who had surgery and took hormones and regretted it. No one lived happily ever after.

Meanwhile the planet kept right on overheating. Tune in next week for another exciting installment of

The Guardian last month on Orwell and women:

George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, made his work possible at the cost of her own by taking on the household drudgery and typing up his writing instead of completing her master’s in psychology. But Wifedom, a remarkable new book by Anna Funder, shows there was much more to a woman who appears only fleetingly in her husband’s work and is poorly served by his biographers. Shortly before meeting Orwell she wrote a dystopian poem titled End of the Century, 1984; she suggested that he write an animal fable instead of an essay denouncing Stalinism; and she noted her husband’s “extraordinary political simplicity”. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell mentions a shopping trip they make to buy stockings in Barcelona – but not that she had a political job in the offices of Poum (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), for whom he fought in the civil war; nor that she took significant risks to get them and others out of the country after Stalin ordered his men to liquidate the party. She took risks, too, to save the manuscript.

But she was a woman, so he couldn’t really see her. He was one of those men.

Funder greatly admires Orwell’s work; she does not want it to be “cancelled” by her unflattering portrait of him, especially his shoddy treatment of his wife. But she also notes that O’Shaughnessy “has been cancelled already – by patriarchy”; that is, “buried first by domesticity, and then by history”. Funder says she writes for the same reasons Orwell himself gave – “because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention”…

“Women have always been 50% of the population, but only occupy about 0.5% of recorded history,” the historian Dr Bettany Hughes has observed. Even those who are remembered, she notes, “aren’t allowed to be characters … they have to be stereotypes”: Cleopatra is remembered as a seductress, not for her talents in maths and philosophy. 

That’s what I mean by not really seeing. Women are like shadows, ghosts, passing thoughts. They don’t matter much. They have little substance. Nobody cares. (“Nobody” of course means “no men” – women don’t get to be anybody or somebody. Neutral nouns of that kind refer to generic men, not generic people.)

Aw, sad – Vivian Wulf had to close that petition to tell Peter Tatchell to shut up, because The Wrong People found it. I’m embarrassed and ashamed and queasy that I am one of those Wrong People – I found it, I shared it, I made fun of it. Oh dear, I seem to be making fun of it again, even now. What is wrong with me?

SEP 20, 2023 — Contrary to their bleating on social media GCs clearely love having Tatchell on air if it means trans people don’t ge a voice. He is the perfect strawman for them. They can attack trans people by attacking him and simultaneously his presence helps keep trans voices out of the mainstream. He misrepresents us constantly and helps to confuse the public about who trans people are. Which is what the Gender Criticals want.

So even my earnest plea to have trans voices in the mainstream media and for cisgender men to stop speaking for and over us has been silenced in this instance by the vicious and spiteful bullies of the GC movement.

Sorry! Sorry sorry sorry! I’m so very sorry to be such a vicious and spiteful bully, in sharp contrast to the benevolence and generosity of such paragons as India Willoughby and Freda Wallace and that Montgomerie fella.

But I will not stop working to replace Tatchell and others like him in the media with trans voices. We deserve a platform. We deserve to be heard and not misrepresented by proxies.

Nothing about us without us.

And Fuck TERFs.

I’m sure the Big Bosses of Big Media are conferring right now on how to ban Peter Tatchell from all journalistic outlets and replace him with the many eloquent brilliant thoughtful spokespersons for trans ideology – like Vivian Wulf for instance, renowned author of the punchline “And Fuck Terfs.”

Deepities flying.

Ah the normativity of it. It’s so normative (and white and cis and Republican) to say that ospreys are not mammals or that whales are not plankton. Don’t be like Norman Normative; reach for the stars; call your dick a girl-dick and live on Cloud Freedom forever.

Bad definition to say that male people are male. Male people are not male if they utter the magic word “trans”! That’s not normative at all. Also: you’re stupid.

Hi, a literal scientist here with something of a claim to the title "biologist" as well:

What you just said was very very stupid. The physical universe does not decide on what the definitions of our words are. Words are invented by humans.

— Nicolas Bray (he/him) (@yarbsalocin) September 19, 2023

Therefore, all meanings are arbitrary (and normative); therefore, all words mean what we say they mean – but not what you say they mean of course. Just us, the cool kids.

On the one hand, women standing up for women’s and lesbians’ rights. On the other hand, men (and some women?) screaming at them “You’re fucking fascists!!”

Crisply said.

The whole thing without the irritating break at the end:

“Nonsense, Andrea. People who identify as trans have the exact same rights everyone else has. The problem is that at least some who identify as trans seek a privilege–to require others to accept trans beliefs and to give up their rights to accommodate those beliefs. That is something NO other group gets. So perhaps it should be “Human rights for thee and a whole lot more for me.”

Another stanza of the epic Men Are Better at Everything:

Missouri High School Crowns Male Student as “Homecoming Queen”

It’s tempting to say “Let them have that one” because wtf is a “homecoming queen” anyway? There is no homecoming king, nor are there beauty pageants for men in general, so why does this creaky antiquated “all women can do is stand around and look pretty” brand of competition keep hanging around?

But, it does keep hanging around, so it is just one more insulting theft for men to insert themselves into such contests.

A high school in Kansas City, Missouri, is facing mockery after crowning a trans-identified male student as “Homecoming Queen” this past weekend. After the news hit social media, Oak Park High School quickly turned [off] the ability for the public to comment on their X post congratulating High School senior Tristan Young. 

The girls he cheated are of course expected to smile and hug him and pretend they’re ecstatic.

That’s funny.

Truer than he (Brand) perhaps intended – Orwell was indeed a shit to women.