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.

Why are so many women pretending not to know what they’ve known ever since they were about 10 years old?

Like Labour MP Angela Eagle pretending not to know why women don’t want men bouncing into the women’s toilets.

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.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Reasons.

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.

Gah! WHARGARBL!!1!

Really heartening stuff.

Golly, Let Women Speak Dublin is huge.

Also, witty.

“If it bothers you so much to possibly be in the bathroom with a trans person, who’s in a stall, with a closed door” – big smirk on the “in a stall, with a closed door” bit.

But here’s the thing. People can open the door, and come out of the stall. The fact that the man in the women’s toilet is in a stall with a closed door when a woman enters the room is not all that consoling or reassuring given the fact that the door is locked on his side, not her side. It’s all very well for smirky condescending bro in the pink bathing suit to pretend that a toilet stall is as impregnable as a bank vault, but the reality is we all know damn well it’s no such thing.

From January 2022, a piece on the garbage fire that “conversion therapy” bans have made of child therapy:

My son has a great therapist. That sets us apart from, I think, the great majority of parents. Mental health care for children is difficult to get, and it’s even more difficult to get mental health care that doesn’t just check the box or blunder about, but actually helps a child. My son’s therapist, who he’s been seeing regularly for years, to help him work through a long list of problems including anxiety, depression, and being autistic, is a great therapist. But I can’t tell you his name.

Because the son also had gender dysphoria, and now doesn’t, and he didn’t “transition” – and we can’t have that, now can we. If someone has gender dysphoria and then gets over it, a crime has been committed.

In time, as my son’s mental crisis subsided, the belief that he was really a woman subsided with it. That belief wasn’t a solution, it was an escape, and it was a false escape at that. How could discomfort with his body, his growing, pubertal, hairy man’s body, be made better by the sort of eternal fixation on one’s body that medical transition entails?

Not to mention the eternal fixation on one’s idenniny, and importance, and needs, and rights that trump everyone else’s rights, and hatred of feminist women? Recipe for a good life is it?

Starting with New Jersey, in 2013 (nine years after gay marriage became legal there), it became illegal to give therapy to a child who believes they should be the other sex, unless that therapy confirms that belief.

And then in 23 more states, or maybe more by now, a year and a half after this piece was written.

The practice of therapy for kids with gender issues became a legal minefield at that point, as a therapist who followed what had been the standard of “watchful waiting” could be accused of “sexual orientation change efforts” if the child went into therapy believing he was a girl and came out no longer believing that… as most do, even without therapy.

In all of these states, it is hazardous to the therapist to accept a child with gender issues. I live in one of these states. My son is still a child, yet all these laws were passed in his lifetime, and they compromised his ability, and the ability of other children, to get adequate mental health care.

…

In states with such laws, kids with gender issues may be shut out from one therapist after another until they end up at a “gender therapist.” There is no real qualification for a “gender therapist:” it’s just a therapist who is enthusiastic about trans ideology and transitioning children.

This means there’s a population of children who need help and can’t get it, or can only get one type of help – a type that causes harm.

Most boys who believe they are girls will grow out of that belief after puberty. This has been demonstrated in study after study. Most of these boys will also, after puberty, come to recognize that they are homosexual or bisexual. Boys can learn to cope with gender dysphoria as they can with other sources of discomfort. But if these boys are passed down the line like hot potatoes until they get to the gender clinic, they might not just never learn to cope, they may never be able to express their sexuality. The first line of medical treatment for these boys at the gender clinic is the same medication used to castrate Alan Turing for the then crime of homosexuality.

What a nightmare.

H/t Papito

Jo Bartosch wonders “why the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) has developed guidance on ‘trans-inclusive practice’.”

It does sound odd, doesn’t it. What “practice”? In what way do museums and galleries have any “practice” with regard to “inclusion”? I don’t want museums exerting any “practice” on me, I just want to walk around them seeing what there is to see.

There is a need for inclusive practice when it comes to people with disabilities – they don’t want to put stairs in people’s way, for instance. But there’s nothing about being trans that would require special “inclusive” arrangements. Neutral toilets maybe? One sad little neutral toilet for the occasional gender-haver?

Last week, a ‘Trans-Inclusive Culture’ document was published by the RCMG, backed by high-profile organisations and heartily endorsed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The aim is apparently to enable cultural institutions to be ‘more ambitious and confident in advancing trans inclusion’. To do this, they should supposedly bring ‘clarity, common sense, pragmatism and ethics to a debate that is too often distorted by misinformed, highly charged and polarised viewpoints’.

In aid of what though? Are the curators going to stop curating and instead wander around the museums and galleries all day looking for trans people to include and patronize?

I’m afraid it looks terribly performative and not at all useful. It’s basically just an exercise in “We’re on the right side, don’t shout at us, shout at those evil feminist women instead of at us.”

Ironically, the document itself reads as highly charged and polarising. With the chilling fervour of obedient Soviet citizens, the authors argue that Britain’s cultural institutions are spaces where ‘we can manifest and model inclusion and equity’. It is clear that those who hold the keys to our collective heritage do not simply want to present visitors with engaging exhibits. They also want to tell them what to think.

How would one go about modeling inclusion and equity in a museum? Rush up to people who look trans and give them massive hugs?

The RCMG advises that museums and galleries ensure their ‘allyship and support for the trans community is permanently visible’. It goes further than promoting the use of ‘gender-inclusive language’ and tells cultural organisations that they should be ready to defend themselves against potential gender-critical protests by ‘preparing clear and unequivocal public statements of support for trans-inclusive programming’. Institutions should ‘nurture and value’ ‘partnerships with trans communities and staunchly defend them in the event of any negative public or media criticism’.

Ohhh, I see. That’s what they’re up to. It’s not about being inclooosive, it’s about joining the crowds monstering feminist women. How very enlightened.

Wait a second. The Telegraph says Conversion therapy ban to be delayed but…

Rishi Sunak is expected to delay a promised ban on conversion therapy following disagreements over how the legislation should be worded.

‌Ministers said in the summer that a draft Bill banning people from trying to change a child’s gender identity or sexuality would be published by the end of the parliamentary session in November.

Wait. They’re calling it “conversion therapy” to try to change a child’s “gender identity”? But what do they think gender identity itself is???

Let’s be real. Gender idenniny is itself conversion. Why is it wicked and suspect to try to undo the original conversion of a child from its natal sex to a fictional “gender identity”? Why isn’t it the original conversion that’s the problem? If you don’t like conversion, why not start with the ur-conversion?

Serious question. Why is conversion from factual, born sex to imagined, artificial new “gender” a good thing while deconversion is a bad thing? Why is it better to be trans than not trans? Why is the first change glorious while a return to square one is wicked and to be forbidden by law? What is the thinking here?

The assumption seems to be that transing isn’t any kind of conversion or change, but that’s just nonsensical. If there is no change then the word “trans” doesn’t mean anything. They can’t have it both ways, or at least they shouldn’t be allowed to.

Well, BBC, wouldja?

Well there’s a surprising lede:

BBC bosses have defended airing a song encouraging listeners to ‘kick’ women with gender-critical views.

I wonder if BBC bosses would defend airing a song encouraging listeners to kick trans women.

I don’t wonder much though: I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t.

Listeners complained after 6 Music played They/Them by Dream Nails, which includes the line ‘Kick terfs all day, don’t break a sweat’.

Oh, so it’s not just kick women, it’s kick women all day. I think that should be in the lede. Kicking someone all day=kicking someone to death.

It comes as 6 Music was accused of ‘blatantly’ refusing to play Roisin Murphy’s songs after the singer publicly criticised puberty blockers. The channel has played only a single track by the former Moloko frontwoman since she made the widely-criticised comments online.

Earlier this week 6 Music cancelled ten hours of shows celebrating Ms Murphy, with staff telling the Mail her comments were the reason behind her axing.

But singing about kicking women to death is just fine.

Sometimes I try to think of a way I could change my mind about all this and join the orthodoxy, and I can’t really do it. I’m quite sure I couldn’t change my mind to the point of believing that men who say they are trans really are women (or that women who say they are trans really are men). I would still see men saying they’re women, not women. But could I perhaps convince myself that I should pretend to think that? Or that it doesn’t matter what I think about it, the point is to affirm them and validate them no matter what I think? Those two would be more possible than the first, I guess, but that’s not saying much.

In other words no, I don’t think I could. I don’t think I could do it morally. I think it’s morally wrong to insist on everyone agreeing to the fiction (aka the lie), and I don’t really see how I could change my mind about that either.

This is how I see religion too of course. I’m pretty allergic to the widespread assumption that belief is a good thing, and that even if we don’t believe ourselves it’s kinder to play along, or at least not say aloud that we don’t believe.

So, I’m too narrow-minded, or stubborn, or vain, or inflexible to be able to change my mind on this subject. But then there’s also a big hole where reasons for doing so should be. With religion we can at least understand how some people find it consoling, especially if they gloss over the eternal punishment bits and so on. With gender religion I for one can’t even see that.

You?

Glinner’s new book is – well I’ll leave it to Arty to tell you.

Updating to add details and affirmation from Rosie Duffield and Simon Edge.

The BBC takes a moment to remember what a woman is:

A retired anaesthetist has faced backlash over “disgusting” comments about sexual harassment in the workplace. Dr Peter Hilton from Pembrokeshire wrote a letter to The Times referring to a “snowflake generation” of young doctors who “should toughen up”.

It comes as a new study found female NHS surgeons reported being sexually harassed, assaulted and raped. It highlighted a pattern of trainees being abused by senior male surgeons. The report, entitled Breaking the Silence, was written by the University of Exeter, the University of Surrey and the Working Party on Sexual Misconduct in Surgery.

But you see the senior male surgeons are stressed, they’re tired and emotional, they’re worn out and shattered, and the only possible remedy is to sexually assault the nearest woman. Peps you right up, that does.

Responding to Dr Hilton’s letter in The Times on Thursday, leading members of the organisation, including president Dr Fiona Donald and Welsh chairman Dr Simon Ford, said they were “disgusted” by his suggestion that such behaviour should be accepted.

Snowflakes.

There was a story in the Times about sexual assault of female surgeons on September 12, which drew responses from female surgeons saying you’re damn right it happens on September 13.

Sir, Further to your report “1 in 3 female surgeons assaulted by a colleague” (Sep 12), these incidents are not limited to surgery and occur through out all medical specialties. For years our organisation has highlighted the mistreatment of women in medicine, from misogyny and sexual discrimination to sexual assault. We are tired of being told “there is no problem” and “robust reporting systems are in place”— this is untrue. This steadfast denial makes change very difficult and contributes to the high attrition rate in women in hospital medicine. We would welcome a collaborative response to this survey. It should be from the top down, so we would welcome Amanda Pritchard’s involvement as NHS chief executive.
Dr Kate Stannard
Co-founder, Women In Medicine International Network

There was also a letter arguing for the other side.

Sir, This “snowflake generation” of young doctors, largely female and selected on mainly academic excellence, clearly did not do their homework. Medical training and practice is brutal and demanding, with long hours, and bullying happens. Sexually inappropriate comments and actions do occur. It is stressful. All I can say is that if they want to make a success of this rewarding career then they should toughen up. Perhaps four A*s at A-level are not the answer to all the problems they will face.
Dr Peter Hilton
Consultant anaesthetist/intensivist 1986-2020; Haverfordwest

Doesn’t he seem nice.

Don’t judge people by appearances, he exclaims, talking much too fast. Just because somebody is wearing lipstick doesn’t mean they’re a woman, he says. Very true: anyone can put on lipstick. Just because somebody has a penis doesn’t mean that they’re not, he insists. Ding ding! Error! Change of category without notice!

That’s probably why he talks so fast: hoping to get all this past people by yammering.

It’s like saying

Just because somebody wears footy pajamas doesn’t mean they’re a child

followed by

Just because somebody is four years old doesn’t mean they’re a child.

Pattern detected:

First, item anyone can do because item is social and voluntary.

Second, item that is physical and involuntary and thus cannot simply be put on and taken off.

Now if he’d said strap-on instead of penis…

Boebert is such a cut-up.

Boebert didn’t care if she ruined the musical “Beetlejuice” playing at the Buell Theatre for anyone else, and she certainly didn’t care if the pregnant woman sitting behind her had to breathe her second-hand smoke from a vape pen. Boebert denies that she was vaping, although she did admit to taking photos of the live performance.

The woman sitting directly behind Boebert shared her story with The [Denver] Post on the condition of anonymity out of fear that there would be backlash from the congresswoman and her supporters. She provided me with the receipt for her tickets and a photo from the event that shows Boebert seated in front of her.

…

“These people in front of us were outrageous. I’ve never seen anyone act like that before,” the woman, who lives in Denver and is in her 30s, said. It wasn’t until later during the play that someone informed her that the misbehaving theatergoer was, in fact, Boebert, a member of Congress.

The woman says Boebert took multiple long videos during the first half of the performance. When she asked Boebert to stop vaping, the congresswoman simply said “no,” the woman said. Boebert was also kissing the man she was with, and singing along loudly with her hands in the air, the woman said.

As one does at the theater. When I go to a play I like to shout the lines as the actors are saying them.

When the woman returned with her husband to their seats, she said Boebert called her a “sad and miserable person.”

“The guy she was with offered to buy me and my husband cocktails. I’m pregnant!” she said.

But the behavior continued, with Boebert using her phone to record several segments of the second half of the show. The rest of the story is captured on surveillance video showing Boebert and an unidentified man getting ushered out of the Buell as the performance is going on.

Getting ushered out=getting ejected.

It’s a pattern of behavior from Boebert who doesn’t seem to think rules and laws apply to her.

Whether it’s health and safety rules in her now-closed restaurant in Rifle, refusing to show up to court dates, and other dramas unfolding with her family and friends in Garfield County, there is no question that Boebert, whose ex-husband made nearly a million dollars in two years as an oil and gas consultant before Boebert filed for divorce this year, considers herself beyond reproach.

I’d say she considers herself beyond consequences. She really doesn’t give a shit about “reproach” – in fact she probably enjoys it. It tells her everyone else is sad and miserable, and only she knows how to live life to the fullest.

Too much water all at one time.

More than 5,000 people are known to have died and thousands more are missing after devastating floods swept through the Libyan port city of Derna.

Entire neighbourhoods disappeared into the sea as a huge tsunami-like torrent of water swept through the city. Whole families were washed away, according to a Libyan journalist who has been speaking to survivors in the city, and who described the situation as “beyond catastrophic”.

A river runs from the mountains through Derna to the Mediterranean, and two dams on that river collapsed, so the city was like a dollhouse hit by a firehose.

The storm – a Mediterranean hurricane-like system known as a medicane – brought more than 400mm of rain to parts of the north-east coast within a 24-hour period. That is an extraordinary deluge of water for a region which usually sees about 1.5mm throughout the whole of September.

Is it climate change? As usual, it’s not possible to brandish fingerprints that remove all doubt, but climate change is expected to cause things like Unusually Heavy Rains, so there you go.

The Free Speech Union tells us:

Bosses at the impartial public service broadcaster, the BBC, have cancelled a scheduled series of programmes featuring Irish singer Roisin Murphy just weeks after the Irish singer faced backlash from trans activists for her views on puberty blockers.

As reported by The Telegraph, Radio 6 music was set to broadcast five hours of Murphy’s songs, interviews and concert highlights next week, as part of the 6 Music Artist Collection, which celebrates the music and careers of artists and explores their influences and who they have inspired.

However, Murphy has been replaced by rapper Little Simz. The BBC said the decision was taken so that Little Simz’s work could reflect poetry, rap and spoken word programming the following week, and insisted it was not [influenced] by Murphy’s views on transgender issues.

It’s pure coincidence that the thought police are canceling Murphy everywhere they can. The BBC canceled her for completely different reasons that are nothing to do with fear of the trans inquisition. The BBC suddenly realized in the middle of the night that they had to replace Murphy with Little Simz because it just did, that’s why.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Nuanced.

“Remember that your child has probably been thinking about and exploring this for some time – whereas you’ve just found out and you now need to go through that process of learning and discovery too

Pay no attention to those TERFs with their talk of ROGD! NO SOCIAL CONTAGION TO SEE HERE, FOLKS. YOUR CHILD HAS BEEN THINKING AND EXPLORING, SO SHUT UP AND NOD AFFIRM WHATEVER THEM SAYS.

Notice that there’s no suggestion that the parents cast their minds back to their own experiences struggling with these same issues when they themselves were growing up. Because none of this shit had been invented yet. The Beeb would have been able to connect the old vocabulary used to describe these concepts to the new terms. But they don’t because they can’t. What are being described as new terms are the novel redefinitions of old terms, hijacking them and using them in novel, idiosyncratic ways that have no parallel to the parents’ experience of puberty and maturation. Sex words turned into gender words. Sex words conflated with gender words in order to suggest that sex is somehow fluid and malleable, that your personality (i.e. “gender identity”) can and should override the trajectory of your body’s pubertal development.

If it were true that “there have always been trans,” then there would be a rich history of growing up with these struggles with supposed “gender identity” already present in the whole cultural tradition of “coming of age” stories. Sure there’s plenty of lore surrounding growing up, of boys and girls becoming men and women (much of it burdened with sexist, patriarchal stereotypes), even of discovering one’s homosexuality, but there’s no rich tradition of becoming the other sex. It’s all new to parents because it’s new, period. It’s strange and confusing because it’s impossible and can’t happen. Children are being told it can, and, being impressionable, some – too many- believe it. Without outside prompting, this isn’t something the children would be pursuing. It’s no different than if what was being encouraged was trans-speciesism rather than trans genderism. Changing species is just as impossible as changing sex, but advocates of the former lack the power and influence to inject their beliefs into society the way genderists have uploaded transness into the culture. Transness is freshly made up, out of whole cloth, putting the lie to the claim that it has always been around. Parents would have already been exposed to it and in the know if it were as widespread as it is claimed to be, or more importantly, real at all.