One of former President Donald Trump’s long-time assistants told federal investigators that Trump repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House that were marked classified, according to sources familiar with her statements.
As described to ABC News, the aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that — more than once — she received requests or taskings from Trump that were written on the back of notecards, and she later recognized those notecards as sensitive White House materials — with visible classification markings — used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international-related matters.
So he stole the documents because they made a nice free supply of scratch paper?
I don’t know if Russell Brand is guilty of the specific rape and sexual assault and harassment claims being levelled against him. I do know I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for him to be called out as an allegedly predatory and controlling creep.
I do know that when I walked out of a one-on-one interview (actually, there was one of me, and then him and the tittering entourage he played to in the room) with Brand more than a decade ago, I’d just met a very unprofessional and decidedly ordinary human being.
I’d been witness to — and the subject of — a Russell Brand performance he’d spent countless press tours perfecting which featured a specialist misogynist using a facile, lowbrow stunts dressed up as humour to disarm and humiliate women trying to go about their jobs and remind them he was in charge.
It’s so easy to picture, just from that. We’ve all seen the kind of thing. We’ve all been targets of it from co-workers and the like.
I’d been told by other female journalists who’d had the dubious pleasure of interviewing Brand how it would go. Russell would pick a feature … your boobs, your legs, your butt, the length of your dress, early in the meeting. It would be masked as a compliment, and then it would get creepy, unprofessional and uncomfortable as he’d inevitably riff on it again and again.
…
I had written sport for ten years before I switched to entertainment, and in that round had met a thousand Russell Brands: blokes who didn’t like that a female would have the audacity and temerity to write about serious subjects like racing and rugby league.
And it’s so easy to let those pesky women know how contemptible you find them. So easy and so without consequences.
I had plenty of time to watch other journos emerge from their time with him. The majority of them were women. Stony-faced. I can’t recall what he was selling on that trip to Australia. But within seconds it was clear it wasn’t professionalism. As I walked in and offered my hand to shake his, he looked me up and down, carefully assessing me, then slowly met my eyes.
“Hello, Debbie Schipp,” he said, a faint mocking tone as he used my full name and his gaze returned to my legs.
He went on to persist in running away from the interview to talk to random people passing by, until Schipp had had enough and left.
I’d admired the irreverent and offbeat Brand as an entertainer with a formidable intellect who went where few dared, and skewered with smart humour. Resorting to lame commentary on a woman’s physical attributes and palming it off as a joke was lazy humour. Easy pickings. Not the slightest bit clever. I thought he was edgier than that.
It wasn’t funny then. It’s not funny now. Russell, the position you find yourself in now isn’t some mysterious plot engineered by faceless powerful people and angry women to bring you down. You did that all by yourself.
Donald Trump has long attacked Joe Biden, his likely opponent at the polls next year, as “Sleepy Joe”, portraying the 80-year-old president as too old and too mentally fogged to occupy the Oval Office.
Trump, on the other hand, is just plain stupid.
Trump is 77 but polls show significantly fewer voters think he is too old to return to power.
But is he too stupid? Too vicious, too reckless, too self-dealing, too corrupt, too law-breaking, too sexist, too racist, too xenophobic, too rude, too trashy, too sadistic, too ignorant? Hell yes.
Biden says he is fit to serve. So does Trump, telling NBC in an interview broadcast on Sunday “there should be a competency” test for presidents, of the sort he “aced” while in the White House. That prompted memories of previous national mirth, when in summer 2020 Trump, then 74, bragged about successfully recognising “person, woman, man, camera, TV” in a cognitive exam.
And added that everyone was amazed and asked, “How did you do that?!”
The most haunting moment for me of last weekend’s joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, the Sunday Times and the Times wasn’t the admittedly horrific allegations of rape and sexual assault (which Brand denies, insisting that even at his wildest all the sex was consensual). It was the way Dispatches spliced footage of Brand onstage – joking about his enthusiasm for rough sex, for blowjobs that left women choking and gasping and with mascara running down their faces – together with footage of a woman named only as Alice, describing how she allegedly experienced just that with Brand when she was only 16 and he a grown man of 30. When comics talk about themselves on stage, often it’s an act. But what if it wasn’t? What if the audience laughing eagerly along were really rewarding and normalising something we now call abuse, while behind them the mainstream TV and media industry he now makes a career out of railing against was enthusiastically doing the same?
Making women the butt of jokes has been a commonplace of pop culture as long as pop culture has existed. The point of view is the male one; the plot is will he or won’t he succeed in nailing her. She isn’t a person, she’s a goal. Score!
Listening to clips of that show now – the interview in which he offers a female aide to Jimmy Savile effectively as bait, or the lewd remarks about a female newsreader – it’s hard to believe they were ever broadcast.
Is it? (I don’t know, I haven’t heard them.) Lewd guy v frigid bitch is a staple of movies, tv shows, pop songs, novels, you name it.
Some will question why the allegations against him are only surfacing now, though the obvious answer is that the timing matters a whole lot less than the substance of what these women have to say. But look how long it took female surgeons to volunteer last week’s awful accounts of being groped in operating theatres, only to be lectured by one retired anaesthetist in a letter to the Times about needing to “toughen up”. Imagine how police might have responded a decade ago to women reporting being attacked by a notorious womaniser, after willingly entering his home; consider too the torrent of hate and threats that has previously greeted women identified online as accusing high-profile footballers of rape.
Donald Trump is intent on leaning into his criminal cases to boost his 2024 campaign through the election next year, according to multiple people close to the former president, after he tested that strategy through multiple indictments and decided it gave him major political advantages.
That’s great. The more of a criminal he is the more votes he gets. What a shining city on a hill we are.
The summer also gave Trump the confirmation that blurring the lines between the legal effort and political effort was perhaps his best overall strategy, in the gamble that he could use the criminal cases to benefit his campaign, which he could then use to benefit himself.
The conclusion has precipitated the joke internally that Trump is not so much running for the White House in 2024 but for his freedom, because were he to win, he could appoint an attorney general to dismiss any pending cases or potentially pardon himself if already convicted.
“Joke”? What joke? Internally or externally? That’s exactly what he plans to do and if he does get elected it’s exactly what he will do. Nobody is joking. Also, funny it isn’t.
Boebert takes another stab at “apologizing” and fails again for the same reason – the classic mistake of framing the behavior one is “apologizing” for as lovably passionate or eccentric or too intense or whatever the self-flattery organ comes up with.
See, this is the thing: if you do something wrong, you can’t apologize by telling us you did it because you’re so awesome. That doesn’t work. We can all see that you’re trying to convince us that you’re a fabulous person instead of apologizing.
In an interview on Sunday with the conservative One America News Network, the far-right Colorado congresswoman attributed the behavior – recorded on security camera footage – to what she described as her being “maybe overtly animated”.
Yeah that’s cute, Loz, but it won’t fly. You were being loud and rude and intrusive, you were vaping, you were dry-humping the guy next to you. That’s not being “animated,” it’s being a noisy obnoxious crude brat spoiling other people’s theater experience.
“I was laughing, I was singing, having a fantastic time, was told to kinda settle it down a little bit, which I did, but then, my next slip up was taking a picture,” she told the network about her date a week earlier. “I was a little too eccentric … I’m on the edge of a lot of things.”
More self-flattery.
It’s so basic. Never combine an apology with self-flattery. Never. Self-flattery simply cancels out the apology, and adds a new layer of conceit and self-serving.
The equalities regulator has said the Government must urgently publish its delayed trans guidance for schools to provide teachers with “much needed clarity”.
Marcial Boo, the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s chief executive, revealed that the watchdog had been privately urging the Department for Education (DfE) to “expedite” their new guidance, amid wrangling in Government over how to respond to children seeking to change their gender identity in schools.
Wrangling in government over it – as if they were “activists” on Twitter.
Writing to campaigners, Mr Boo also admitted that the EHRC’s own official guidance, in place for almost a decade, had been wrong to tell teachers that they would automatically be guilty of anti-trans discrimination if they referred to a “previously female pupil” as a girl. He said the regulator was urgently correcting “inaccuracies” in its “technical guidance” on the application of the Equality Act in schools.
This has been their mistake all along: equality has nothing to do with it. It’s not equality to force people to pretend that men are women, and it’s not inequality to say that men are not women. It’s not about equality. It’s about identity, which is a much squishier category, and therefore a much trickier one to try to enforce. That is obviously all the more true when the “identity” issue is people claiming to be the other sex. Equality really has nothing to do with that.
Campaigners for women and children’s rights described the EHRC’s admission that its own guidance was incorrect as “enormously welcome” and a “crucial step towards the |Government producing sound guidance for schools”.
Yes, it seems like a big deal. I wish we could have something similar here…without having to take Trump along with it.
…in a letter to the Sex Matters campaign group, which alerted the EHRC to “errors” in the guidance, Mr Boo said: “You raise important and complex areas of equality law. For example, as you suggest, it may not be directly discriminatory for a school not to refer to a child by their preferred gender (where it differs from their legal sex). However, schools must carefully consider how they justify and consistently apply their policies on this matter to avoid any risk of indirect discrimination.”
Well done Sex Matters.
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, said: “When Sex Matters wrote to the EHRC, we argued that a school refusing to refer to a boy as a girl, or a girl as a boy, is not discriminating against a ‘trans child’. In fact it is protecting that child, because biological sex is a crucial factor in safeguarding.”
Call young Sally “Sam” and let her change clothes with the boys, and see what happens.
Hmmm. If I were a passer-by I’m not sure I would find that a very persuasive slogan.
TRA#1: "What slogan can we use to convince the world that we are real women, who just want to live peaceful lives and have no violent intentions towards females?" TRA#2: pic.twitter.com/8Dkau3eNLy
I get the thinking, maybe…It’s about being defiant, unafraid, in our face, unashamed, bold, brassy, blunt, real. It’s a sort of imitation of feminism, in a way – feminism that said all along we’re not ladies and we’re not girls, we’re women, with all that that implies. It’s not a dainty business, being a woman – you try pushing an infant human being through a small hole in your body. Feminism said all along that we’re not asking, we’re telling; we’re not begging, we’re taking. We’re not pleading or coaxing or simpering or apologizing, we’re just demanding what’s ours. Feminism was often deliberately sweary and coarse. Maybe trans activism sees itself as doing the same thing.
But of course it doesn’t work if it’s men telling women to suck the men’s trans balls. It doesn’t work because it’s punching down, fairly literally. Women don’t rape men; men do rape women. Orders to suck someone’s balls are inescapably linked to rape. Trans activists with any brains should be able to figure that out. I’m forced to conclude, then, that these people are thick as two short planks.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that, due to a confluence of factors, modern society has become entangled in a cultural version of the Savior Complex. The psychologically exaggerated need to save other people has lead to the inadvertent creation of those who need saving: in this case, the Trans Child. Here the combined influence of Therapy Culture and nostalgia for civil rights battles seduces people into loving the pure and innocent Authentic Self suppressed by the Orthodox and bullied by Oppressors. These kids are vulnerable, weak, needy, hurt. They’re just like gay kids used to be in the bad old days. But they can save them! Today, in the here and now! All that’s needed is the courage to believe them, and to continue to believe them, despite whatever obstacles the “reasonable” may try to put in their path.
Psychologists point out that those with Savior Complex can often harm those they try to help by overestimating their capabilities, misdiagnosing the problem, and/or inhibiting the natural growth and development of the designated Victim. Again, that seems to apply here. Teachers deal closely with children; it’s especially easy for them to be seduced into a role of noble advocate rescuing their charges from an unfeeling world.
The San Francisco Chronicle is venomous enough. The headline:
Anti-trans group, advertising as feminists, descends on S.F. for annual convention
Geddit? They’re lying about being feminists. Also they’re not gender critical, they’re haterz of tranz people.
San Francisco will host trans-denying activists for a convention. The twist is that they advertise themselves as a feminist organization.
News flash, Erin Allday [the “reporter”]: trans ideology is not feminist. Feminists are critical of trans ideology. The “twist” is not a twist.
San Francisco is hosting a “radical feminist” group aligned with anti-transgender efforts in the U.S. and abroad for a convention this weekend that is drawing fury from local trans and other LGBTQ individuals and allies.
Or to put it another way, local trans people are flying into a rage because a radical feminist group is in town. Feminists have no right to hold conventions without getting trans permission.
The organization, built on the premise of protecting “women’s sex-based rights,” has stated that “gender identity” — and the concept that gender may be separate from biological sex for some people — threatens the civil rights of cisgender women. Members do not consider transgender women to be women.
Members are aware that transgender women are men.
That the group would come to San Francisco shocked many people in the city’s transgender community, who have flooded the hotel hosting the convention — Hilton San Francisco Financial District — with demands to cancel the event, and have asked civic leaders to denounce it.
Now tell us how many people in the city’s women-community are pissed off that the trans communniny wants to get their meeting canceled. Tell us which people are the bullies here.
Women’s Declaration International USA has been denounced as bigots masquerading as feminists by the National Organization for Women. Last year, the group participated in a protest against trans athletes, alongside multiple organizations designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
NOW is wholly captive. The issue is not “trans athletes”; the issue is men invading women’s sports and thus ruining them for women. The SPLC is not god and it’s dead wrong on this issue, as is the SF Chronicle, especially this brainless reporter.
Women’s Declaration International USA has made Bay Area appearances before and last November staged a small rally in Oakland to protest the transfer to a women’s prison of Dana Rivers, a trans woman who killed a lesbian couple and their child.
Uh, yes? And that was wrong and bad why exactly? A man who killed a lesbian couple and their child should be in a women’s prison why exactly?
The argument about the relative importance of sex and gender identity – whether someone feeling they are male or female should replace the reality of sex in law and society – has become one of the most polarising identity issues of our time. But out of this toxic mess a sensible consensus has emerged: both parties have largely ditched commitments to enshrine in law the view that people should be able to self-declare their sex for legal purposes. It has at last been acknowledged that this would effectively dismantle women’s hard-won legal protections for single-sex spaces, services and sports, and these are not inconsistent with robust anti-discrimination protections for trans people.
Both parties have? I didn’t know that.
But profound disagreements within government and across the public sector continue to leave a policy vacuum that is being filled by activists with no understanding of existing law on sex and gender. Nowhere is that more true than in schools.
Schools. Where kids go to learn – often, these days, to learn that they can have a magic gender soul that’s the opposite of their body.
On what constitutes clinical best practice, the “affirmative approach” is an ideological position grounded in a belief everyone has a gendered soul separate from their sex. So when children experience gender distress, it is a sign their gender identity differs from their sex and they should be affirmed as the opposite sex (to explore other reasons for their distress is to deny their identity); appropriate ways of treating gender distress include puberty-blocking drugs, then cross-sex hormones.
I.e. ruining their bodies for life.
The evidence-based position is embodied by an independent review for the NHS by the distinguished paediatrician Hilary Cass. Its interim report underlined the lack of evidence for the affirmative approach that parts of the NHS have been pushing on children…
Critically for schools, the Cass review says that “social transition” – treating girls as though they were boys and vice versa – is not a neutral act, but an active intervention that can have long-term effects on psychological functioning.
That. Of course it’s not neutral; how could it be? Especially when accompanied by a nonstop firehose of trans dogma about how idenninies are REAL and trans women ARE WOMEN?
Before the Cass review, I had assumed social transition was pretty harmless. The reality is that it probably beds in, psychologically and socially, what might otherwise be temporary gender distress; and in young children who don’t have the capacity to understand they haven’t literally changed sex, it is effectively misleading them about reality.
Which is a bad thing to do to children, because they don’t yet have the tools to doubt, question, resist. They’re too busy questioning bedtime and resisting kale.
Moreover, the law means schools are tightly proscribed in terms of what aspects of social transition they cannot facilitate. Safeguarding law requires schools act to protect children from harm and promote their welfare. They must not discriminate against children experiencing gender distress, but this does not oblige schools to treat them as though they were of the opposite sex. In fact, there are specific areas where it is unlawful to do so, for example when it would undermine the safeguarding of that child or other children. Schools are obliged to provide single-sex toilets for over-eights and changing facilities for over-11s. To force other children to pretend another child is of the opposite sex, for example through mandated pronoun policies, is likely to constitute belief discrimination. They cannot do anything that would constitute sex discrimination against other children; for example, in relation to competitive sports or sleeping arrangements on residential trips. And schools must be politically impartial: they cannot teach partisan ideology such as the idea that everyone has a “gender identity” and sex is “assigned at birth” as fact, only as a contested set of beliefs.
Really? I didn’t know all that. Surely some schools are flouting the law then?
Campaigning groups with ideological positions so blunt they cannot possibly accommodate these complex medical and legal positions have stepped into the gap left by government. Trans inclusion toolkits have been produced for schools that are uninformed by evidence on child development and safeguarding and include legal misinformation such as telling schools they must treat gender-questioning children as the opposite sex for all purposes. Many schools rely on relationship and sex education materials produced by external groups that teach gender ideology as fact, in a way that reinforces rather than challenges damaging sex stereotypes and may well encourage gender distress in vulnerable children.
Why are many schools doing that? Where are the people who should be telling them to stop?
Sodha goes on to say some teachers do what they want, and there is no central body or mechanism to stop them.
One parent I spoke to discovered that, even where a head agreed with her and her child’s psychologist that watchful waiting was the right approach, other senior staff disregarded the head’s directions.
Because of the fad for this poisonous, destructive ideology.
Lauren Boebert, the US congresswoman, has issued an apology after being kicked out of a performance of the musical Beetlejuice in Denver for inappropriate behavior, an experience she has called “difficult and humbling”.
Boebert, a Republican representative for Colorado, and a male guest accompanying her were ejected from the musical on 10 September for vaping, recording video and disturbing other patrons during the Sunday performance. Video also showed them eagerly groping each other while in their seats.
Other than that they behaved impeccably.
Boebert and her campaign manager initially denied that she was vaping and said she was removed for being too loud. But surveillance video obtained by the Denver television station 9News shows the congresswoman openly vaping during the performance.
…
The CCTV video also shows Boebert’s guest fondling her breasts after they had taken their seats. Boebert is also seen petting her guest’s crotch in the venue.
Boebert and her date were later removed by security in the second act of the musical as their disruptive behavior continued.
The CCTV footage shows a blurred-out gesture that Boebert flashed at theater security as she was escorted out. Business Insider reported that the gesture appeared to be a middle finger.
The pride of Colorado.
Boebert apologized for her behavior in a Friday evening statement.
“The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community,” Boebert, as reported by the Colorado Sun.
Hmm. That’s not actually an apology for her behavior, it’s an apology for bringing unwanted attention to the community. It’s also a bit of a whine for herself. Some people just don’t know how to apologize, or else have sworn an oath to themselves never to do it.
Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.
Why yes, of course he is, but he always has been, and that has always been glaringly obvious. It’s more glaringly obvious with him than perhaps anyone else on the planet. How could it possibly take until now to notice?
“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Then why could she support him until now? It’s not as if he’s covert about the narcissism. It’s not as if he has that psychopath skill of acting like a non-psychopath.
Ellis, 38, was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977.
Family. Yes, because he’s such a pillar of familyhood – so reliable, so loyal, so steadfast, so affectionate.
Ellis is a former counsel for the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic group, whose claims to be a constitutional lawyer have been widely doubted.
Described by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as “a lawyer whom Trump sought out after seeing her television commentary”, in 2020 Ellis rose from relative obscurity to become part of what she called an “elite strike force team” working to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden.
Elite in what way exactly?
She knew Trump well “as a friend, as a former boss”, she said, adding: “I have great love and respect for him personally.
“But everything that you just said resonates with me as exactly why I simply can’t support him for elected office again. Why I have chosen to distance is because of that, frankly, malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Nope. You can’t have both. You can love and respect people who are lazy or absent-minded or boring, but you can’t love and respect someone you consider a malignant narcissist. Malignant narcissism obliterates love and respect the way lave obliterates everything it touches.
A somewhat less blatantly partisan news article on the LWS rally in the Irish Examiner, but only somewhat, and not for long.
Hundreds of campaigners took part in rallies on opposing sides of the transgender debate in Dublin on Saturday.
Well, yes, but to be clear, the Let Women Speak rally was scheduled and then the “opposing” rally was added to the day’s festivities. It seems that a lot of people just can’t stand to see women getting together to say let us speak.
A large garda presence was visible in and around Merrion Square for the two events and metal barriers were erected to create a space between the rival demonstrations.
Again, making it sound like a football match or a race – like an event where you expect two sides. It wasn’t that though, it was women talking and people who want them to shut up trying to make them shut up. They weren’t really “rival demonstrations”; they were a rally and an attempt to shut down the rally.
The counter demo organised by Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin assembled outside the Dail on Kildare Street ahead of marching to Merrion Square.
Leading pro-trans activist Jenny Maguire told the crowd: “We as queer people are forced into a world that’s not meant for us.
“We do everything we can to force a world that accepts us and that can love us all unapologetically, and it is them that wants to reverse any progress we’ve made so far and pull us back into the Dark Ages.”
She added: “Trans people aren’t going anywhere.”
Funnily enough there is no matching bit where any of the women who want to speak are quoted. Jenny Maguire is quoted for Team Shut Up, but Posie Parker and Graham Linehan are just reported as being there. Why do the people who object to women speaking get to speak while the people who think women should be allowed to speak don’t get to speak?
At Merrion Square, the trans campaigners chanted and played loud disco music in a bid to drown out speakers addressing the crowd at the Let Women Speak event on the other side of the metal barriers.
Linehan chatted and posed for selfies with well-wishers at the Let Women Speak rally.
The trans campaigners tried to drown out the speaking women, while Glinner chatted with people, yet somehow the trans campaigners are treated lovingly by the reporter while the talking women and Glinner are not. What do women have to do to get fair coverage?
Finally at the very end he gets to say something.
He criticised the rival event. “I just want to kind of expose them for trying to silence women and that’s why I’m here,” he said.
The writer said the vast majority of people agreed with his position on the trans issue. “It’s only a few extremists who don’t think that women shouldn’t have their own sports and their own private spaces,” he added.
A demonstration was held in Dublin city today in protest against a rally held by an ‘anti-trans’ campaigner.
Why does the protest against the rally come before the rally itself? Why isn’t the reporting about the rally first and only then the protest against it? And why say “by an ‘anti-trans’ campaigner” instead of something less pejorative? Why isn’t the lede more like “Gender-critical feminists held a rally in Dublin city today, and were met with protests”?
And that’s only the first sentence.
British activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, better known as Posie Parker, held one of her Let Women Speak events in Merrion Square this afternoon.
A counter-protest was planned “in support of trans people” following Parker’s announcement she was coming to Dublin. The LGBTQ+ community and allies were encouraged to “bring all the noise and joy you have” and “drown out supporters of Posie Parker”.
Well there you are. A bad person came to Dublin, and good people protested in support of her tragic victims; the good people brought all the noise and joy they had.
Really fabulous reporting; well done.
Demonstrators gathered outside Dáil Éireann at 11am and marched towards Parker’s Merrion Square event. Protestors were kept separate from the Let Women Speak event by gardaí and barriers. The pro-trans counter protest chanted “trans rights are human rights” and “get Posie Parker off our streets”. Critics of Parker have labelled her ‘anti-trans’. She has described herself in interviews as a “women’s rights activist”.
But the Irish Independent knows better, wink wink nudge nudge.
The capture of the Trevor Project was a special stab in the heart/stab in the back to me. I remember Tim Gunn and other out gay celebrities telling gay kids, “It gets better.” These spokespeople were undoubtedly bullied as adolescent gay and lesbian youth, but they found that, as time went on, and they grew older, the circumstances of life did change. They became happy and successful gay and lesbian adults. The bullying of young LG people had led tragically to many suicides and suicide attempts. The purpose of the Trevor Project was to assure young LG people that, despite social ostracization from (usually religious) anti-gay bigots, they need not go to the extreme of suicidal ideation, impulse, or attempts. Life really does (did) get better. People learned that we can get along together, and that we have common shared values, such as love and support with/from a life partner. That someone else has the same rights and protections as you do, does not diminish anything that you have. It turned out that the “gay agenda” was pretty much the same as anyone else’s: get up, go to work, get married, take care of family, pay taxes, do the household chores, help the kids with their homework, and the million-and-one other things that most people do every day. There was no scary bogeyman hiding underneath the ordinary people who just happened to be lesbian or gay. This was important to me, because I lived through an era in which it wasn’t exactly safe to let your employer know you were a lesbian or that you were gay. The work of the Trevor Project really did help things “get better.”
Now, instead of working to prevent young people from committing suicide, the Trevor Project instead tells non-conforming kids that they WILL — they are much more likely to — commit suicide UNLESS they get special gender magic, such as stunting their growth with puberty blockers, crippling their bodies with the effects of wrong-sex hormones, and mutilating themselves with irreversible surgeries. From protecting kids from harm, the Trevor Project has pivoted to actively promoting harm to gender non-conforming kids who, in the normal course of things, would grow up to be lesbian or gay adults. Now, it DOESN’T get better. It gets worse. The Trevor Project whipsaws their target audience between two competing harms: suicide (total annihilation, or self-erasure) or “transition” (self-harm or self-mutilation). It’s one species or another of self-abnegation. The Trevor Project has made itself an instrument of evil against the interests of gender non-conforming children. They ruin lives instead of saving lives.
And it’s all so disheartening. Once the organizations created to combat anti-gay bigotry and discrimination had largely achieved their goals of legal and social equality and acceptance, those organizations looked around for something to do, to justify their continued existence as powerful and influential structures on the social/political scene. Once organizations have a deep structure and substantial financial backing, they are unwilling to put themselves out of business by achieving their primary goals.
If anything should stand for the protection of gay and lesbian rights, it should be Stonewall. GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, was precisely about GL people, gay men and lesbian women. However, once the target policy of marriage equality had been achieved — a pinnacle of social and legal acceptance and integration of gays and lesbians in general society — the vast infrastructure of civil rights mobilization for gay men and lesbian women had no more need of its vast warchests of charitable moneys and armies of motivated civil rights activists. They looked around and latched onto what they (perhaps) believed to be the next group in need of similar mobilization: transgender rights advocates.
In my view, this impetus to maintain political relevance, by taking on the cause of T, following their successes with respect to LG rights, has been a capital mistake. The forced partnering of T with LG, piggybacking off the success with respect to LG rights and protections, has harmed everyone involved. The extremism of T demands has undermined a great deal of the achievements of the movement for gay and lesbian rights. The forced partnering of LG with T has led to a backtracking of support for gays and lesbians. It is conceivable that some states may act to abrogate marriage equality in state law. The packing of the US Supreme Court with radical right wing extremists makes the prospect of overruling Obergfell a real possibility, undoing decades of efforts to achieve equal protection under the law for lesbians and gay men.
The T enterprise, in and of itself, is antithetical to gay and lesbian people’s rights. It constitutes an updated form of conversion therapy against people who would otherwise be lesbian or gay. The failure of the former LG organizations to recognize the threat to their former work is a profound betrayal of all the brave men and women who fought for gay and lesbian rights.
Greed and the hunger for continued power led many organizations created for the benefit of gays and lesbians to turn their backs on the partners who brought them to the dance. Former LG organizations allowed T to take them over. LG and T can’t coexist compatibly, because their interests are opposed to one another. The T parasite has been allowed to consume the host LG organizations, leaving nothing but a husk of the former organization in place. The hollowed-out organizations continue to trade on the decades of influence and good will wrought by LG advocates, to now ignore (at best) or denounce (at worst) LG rights in favor of all T, all the time. They are very close to dismantling LG rights, and the rights of women, in their quest for T hegemony. It’s ludicrous. It’s infuriating. It’s insane. It’s fundamental betrayal. It’s unadulterated evil.
Nonsense from MP Angela Eagle part 2. It’s sad when people produce so much nonsense you have to address it in pieces.
Jo Grady, the union boss who was also on the panel at the fringe event, claimed people have freedom of speech, but not “freedom to offend”. The University and College Union leader said this was something she taught to her members, who include academics, lecturers and postgraduates.
She said: “Whilst it’s clear that gender-critical beliefs are protected, the form of expression isn’t. You might have freedom of speech, but you don’t have freedom to offend – particularly if that offence is enshrined within law, and I think that’s one of the things that we try and educate our members about quite a lot.”
I bet she does.
I don’t think it’s wrong to argue that legality is not the only issue. There are no laws saying you can’t go up to strangers in the street to tell them they’re ugly, for instance, but morally that’s a horrible thing to do and no one should ever do it.
But Grady wants to extend that kind of thing to cover disagreeing that people can be the opposite sex, and not just strangers in the street but anyone anywhere for any reason. A guy in a skirt is standing by the sinks staring at everyone? Never you mind, it would offend him if you told him to get out.
Dame Angela said the freedom of speech argument on trans rights seemed plausible “until you start analysing it”, adding: “To what extent does freedom of speech ever allow people to question the existence of other human beings?”
I think what the Times is trying to say there is that Dame Angela said it seems plausible to claim that people have freedom of speech to point out that people can’t change sex, until you start analysing it – at which point you should change your mind because if you point out that people can’t change sex you are questioning the existence of other human beings.
Note the switcheroo. Saying people can’t change sex is not questioning the existence of people who claim they can and do change sex. We know those people exist and we don’t question their existence. That’s a non-issue. The issue is what they say about themselves. If I say a dog is not a rabbit I’m not questioning the existence of the dog (and it works the other way around, too – if you say a rabbit is not a dog you’re still not questioning the existence of the rabbit. Or the dog. Or the person recording the whole thing.)
What Dame Angela was trying to say is that you should change your mind because if you point out that people can’t change sex you are questioning the self-description of other human beings. Not the existence, but the narrative, the story, the fantasy. Well, guess what, sometimes we do have to question the stories other people tell, including stories about themselves. Look at Trump for the most glaring example on the planet. You can’t take what he says about himself at face value, now can you. Now extrapolate from that.
Among friends and colleagues, sure, there’s an assumption that what people say about themselves is mostly true. But when the circle widens that assumption narrows very fast. With the vast majority of people we simply don’t know, and in many circumstances we should be cautious about instant belief. Trust but verify.
Women are not repeat not under any obligation whatsoever to pretend to believe men who tell us they’re women.
Gender-critical feminists want trans women to show their passports to use public lavatories, a veteran Labour MP has claimed.
Dame Angela Eagle, who is standing to be a Commons committee chairman, said lavatories were being “policed” at the expense of those who don’t conform to gender norms.
[Patiently but through gritted teeth] No, that’s wrong. That’s a falsehood. We’re just saying women need toilets/lavatories/restrooms for women and men have to stay out of them as men have always had to stay out of them. We don’t want to “police” them, we just want men to stay the fuck out of them.
The MP for Wallasey said the heated debate about trans people using single-sex spaces revolved around “recreating and then enforcing” gender stereotypes.
There. That’s the bit where she pretends not to know what she does know. It’s nothing to do with gender stereotypes just as it always has been.
This would make it clear that trans women have to use the men’s lavatories, while trans men have to use the ladies’, Dame Angela said.
Why are we saying “men’s” and “ladies'”? How about consistency? Either gentlemen’s and ladies’ or men’s and women’s. I, for one, don’t identify as a “lady.”
She added: “Whilst that may affect a small number of people, the actual effect is that loads of non-gender-conforming women will effectively be being policed in their use of public facilities.
“We’ve never had to show a passport to get into the toilet before. I dread to think what else they might want us to show if they change the law.”
So her point is that women who say they are men will get policed. I suppose that might happen, but I can’t really work up much sympathy. The trans army has zero sympathy for anyone else, so I find my organs of compassion have taken a beating over the years.
“This is all about recreating and then enforcing appearance, behaviour, making certain that you actually behave and look the way your sex, your gender ought to look,” she said.
No, it isn’t. That’s not true. It’s about hanging on to women’s rights until our fingers bleed.
Could we in principle change someone’s sex? Sure, but it would involve alterations so radical and so subtle that I don’t think it plausible, much less useful or ethical. Because what needs to change is not just a few body parts, but rather an entire suite of interpenetrating systems, all of which together compose the system we call sex. Transplant a functional uterus and ovaries into a man, and he’s still a man, because (a) that uterus is not from his body, (b) the eggs in the ovaries are not from his DNA, and (c) his body is not just unequipped to regulate those organs, it’s developed to maintain the complementary set of organs. Calling him a female or a woman would be even more laughable than calling a black man white because he got a heart transplant from a white man. Or saying that I have 20/20 vision because I wear glasses.
I don’t know if it’s still in use, but there used to be a very similar bad argument, named for a forum user, in online RPG discussions: the Oberoni Fallacy. People often try to argue that a particular rule is not dysfunctional/inconsistent/broken/problematic by appealing to the fact that the DM (dungeon master) can always modify the rule to make it work. (No, really. This is a remarkably common argument.) That this argument is fallacious ought to be obvious. It would be like if I were to say that your TV isn’t off because you can turn it on.
To be a particular sex means that your body is such that it is organized around the production of a particular sort of gamete. That doesn’t involve just the bare presence of ovaries or testicles; it involves every part of your body that is a product or component of the evolved system of sexual reproduction. Having wide hips is a part of being a human female, just as having broad shoulders is a part of being a human male, and this is not at all in tension with the fact that not all women have wide hips and not all men have broad shoulders. That this needs explaining to adults will never cease to amaze me. Losing is a part of playing roulette, but not every player will lose. Injuries are a part of contact sport, but not every athlete will get injured.
All this is to say that while the bar is high, a human sex change isn’t an analytic impossibility. One can certainly imagine a fantasy world in which some magic spell could effect all the necessary physical changes. I doubt technology will ever be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from that magic, though.
Of course, none of this touches on the psychological aspects of being and growing up and living as a male or female. It also doesn’t even begin to examine potential ethical considerations. Genderism is built on so many layers of sophist bullshit that peeling them away is actually frustrating, because it’s like cutting heads off mythology’s stupidest hydra. I genuinely feel dumber for having to do things like explain that saying all women are female doesn’t reduce women to their genitalia or limit the ways to be a woman. All triangles have three sides and three vertices, but there are infinite varieties of triangle. What none of them is, however, is a rectangle, because rectangles have four sides and four vertices. This means that there is a set of things that are true of triangles and things triangles can do, and this is not the same as the set of things that are true of rectangles and things rectangles can do.
