Ron DeSantis is doing his best to nullify the Voting Rights Act.

In mid-August, lawyers representing Florida Republicans made a startling admission. The state’s new congressional map, drawn by governor Ron DeSantis, made it harder for Black voters in north Florida to elect the candidate of their choosing. On Sunday, a judge in Florida ruled the map was unlawful.

From 2016 until last year, Florida’s fifth congressional district had stretched more than 150 miles across the northern part of the state, from Jacksonville to just west of Tallahassee. It was a portion of the state once home to the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. In 2022, it was represented by Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, and 46% of eligible voters were Black.

That year, DeSantis went out of his way to chop the district up into four majority-white ones, all of which elected a Republican last fall.

…

It was the kind of concession that politicians, wary of doing anything that could be perceived as motivated by racial animus, rarely make. And it was particularly striking in Florida, where a provision in the state’s constitution specifically outlaws diminishing the influence of Black voters in that way. Voters overwhelmingly approved that provision as part of a set of anti-gerrymandering reforms, called the fair districts amendment, in 2010.

Welp 2010 was another world. This is now, and racist gerrymandering is the hot new trend.

So it was no surprise that circuit judge J Lee Marsh struck down the map. “Under the stipulated facts [in the lawsuit], plaintiffs have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida constitution,” he wrote in his ruling.

…

DeSantis is already appealing the ruling and the case is likely to be decided by the Florida supreme court, where he has appointed five of the seven justices. And the governor has his sights set on an even bigger goal – getting rid of the protection in the state constitution altogether. It’s an aggressive legal gambit that’s part of a broader conservative push in the courts to limit considerations of race in redistricting, even when it’s being used to protect voters of color.

“Even”? The word you want is “especially.”

While the Florida case is unique because it involves a state-based constitutional provision, it could have broader implications if it reaches the US supreme court, said Mark Gaber, the senior director of redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit group. The court could be forced to decide whether “the history of past discrimination makes it constitutional to prohibit the diminishment, the retrogression, of minority voting strength”, Gaber said. Its decision could affect a handful of other states that have implemented their own standards barring retrogression.

We must pretend that slavery and racism never happened starting NOW.

Talk about too much power in the hands of one unelected gazillionaire…

Elon Musk says he refused to give Kyiv access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid complicity in a “major act of war”. Kyiv had sent an emergency request to activate Starlink to Sevastopol, home to a major Russian navy port, he said. His comments came after a book alleged he had switched off Starlink to thwart a drone attack on Russian ships.

A senior Ukrainian official says this enabled Russian attacks and accused him of “committing evil”. Russian naval vessels had since taken part in deadly attacks on civilians, he said. “By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via Starlink interference, Elon Musk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities,” he said. “Why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?” he added.

Bajillionaires have too much power around here.

Pink News of course is thrilled at the attention from Northumbria Police.

Police are treating transphobic graffiti sprayed in various locations in Northumberland as a hate crime. 

…

An image shared on X, previously known as Twitter, show the words: “U can’t change sex”, written on the bridge, with the reply “Just watch me, mate” penned underneath. A second picture shows graffiti which refers to “woke” as “fascists in disguise”. 

Is it “phobic” to say you can’t change sex?

Is it phobic to say that as a general statement rather than a personal one to a particular wannabe sex-changer?

Graffiti as such is a form of vandalism, but is it a worse form because it expresses the truth that humans can’t change sex?

One local person wrote on social media: “It was a pretty good day until I walked over the High Level Bridge this evening and was sickened by relentless graffiti encouraging ‘woke’ people to jump.”

There are no photos of such graffiti though. There are photos of “u can’t change sex” but not of telling people to jump. You’d think there would be, since telling people to jump is far worse than saying people can’t change sex.

After that Pink News goes on and on and on for 20 paragraphs or so about rising hate crimes against That Community but says not a word about women. The solidarity is all in one direction. Women must support, but don’t we dare expect any support in return.

Northumbria Police are freaking out over…graffiti.

I have to wonder if Northumbria Police ever say a word on social media about misogynist graffiti. I don’t know, and I don’t have anywhere near the patience to scroll through their tweets in an attempt to find out, but my guess is that they haven’t. This isn’t a wild guess, but one based on this pattern. What pattern? This one. The one of freaking out about gender-protestantism as if it were a crime to know that men are men. The one of rushing to cuddle and soothe men who claim to be women while never rushing to cuddle and soothe women. The wildly disproportionate concern for men who pretend to be women coupled with the massive indifference about women.

How can women find out more about support from Northumbria Police? Any hints?

It’s bizarre and alarming to see a whole generation of people (well, a big chunk of that generation) insisting on the magical idea that We Can Be Whatever We Choose To Be. No we can’t. Of course we can’t. We can’t be anything other than humans, for instance – we can’t be rocks or planets or buildings or flowers or lizards – there’s an infinite number of things we can’t be. (We can’t be a lizard, or two lizards, or…) It’s worrying to see so many people so bewitched by a stupid ideology that they think we can be whatever we decide to be – that they think it and say it aloud, in public.

No, we don’t. That’s not even close to true. We have the power to define ourselves in some quite limited ways, but that’s it.

Grandiosity is not healthy for human beings.

That poster is still doing the rounds.

Well…ok but…how shall I put this…anyone can say that. It’s just saying. There’s no particular reason anyone should believe it. We can all draw up statements that start with “I am”; they won’t all necessarily be true.

Maybe the credulity here has bled over from trans ideology, where a certain kind of self-declaration from a certain kind of person is treated as both sacred and mandatory-to-believe. “People are who they say they are,” we’re told constantly – unless of course the people in question are those horrible feminist women who ask questions like “Why should I believe you?”

What if feminists started wearing that “I am a safe person” badge? Would the misogynist activists believe us? Of course not. So…why should we believe anyone who wears the badge? Why should anyone?

Hilarious. (Sorry, just another rando on Twitter, but the thinking is so absurd I can’t resist.)

How do you see a [man] with a headband, a short “pixie” haircut, makeup, lipstick, purse, skirt, and feminine voice, and think this is a man with a headband, a short “pixie” haircut, makeup, lipstick, purse, skirt, and feminine voice? The usual way, bro.

It’s so funny that he thinks adding up all the silly markers will somehow clinch the deal. It’s hilarious that he thinks quantity makes a difference when the quality is not so very convincing. No, dude; zero plus zero is zero. A man in lipstick and a “pixie” haircut (didn’t people stop talking about “pixie” haircuts around half a century ago?) and a headband and makeup and skirt with a purse and feminine voice is still a man. [Also the “feminine voice” probably isn’t.] Adding them up doesn’t change anything. I can put on cat ears and draw whiskers on my face and carry a can of cat food and I still won’t convince anyone I’m a cat.

Oh did he indeed.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee ominously predicted that if Donald Trump is prevented from winning or running in the 2024 election, it will be the last election “decided by ballots rather than bullets.”

And by “ominously predicted” they mean “threatened.”

Mr Huckabee seemed to be reiterating a common accusation from Republicans, Mr Trump first among them, who have claimed that President Biden is essentially waging a political war against the former president as the Justice Department — and state courts — have indicted him over various charges. There is no evidence to support the claims of election interference or political retribution.

And – listen up Mr Huckabee – there is abundant evidence that Trump did interfere with the last election, including that phone call that we’ve all listened to and including that speech on the White House lawn that we’ve all watched and listened to and that failure to act when his private army stormed Congress. The election interference came from inside the house.

Following Mr Trump’s indictment in the Georgia election probe, Texas Sen Ted Cruz said, “This is disgraceful. Our country’s over 200 years old. We’ve never once indicted a former president, or a candidate or a leading candidate for president and this is Joe Biden and this is the Democratsweaponizing the justice system because they’re afraid of the voters.”

Again, backward. (So much DARVO.) We’ve never once had such a flagrantly criminal and treasonous sack of shit former president. Not even Harding, not even Nixon.The issue is not holding Trump accountable, the issue is Trump being a flagrant open in your face criminal and wannabe overthrower of the government.

UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls Reem Alsalem responds to a response [pdf]:

On 18th of May 2023, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) published
a statement on its website entitled “There is no place for anti-trans agendas in the UN”, which
as of today, was signed by 844 organizations and individuals. I was informed by the two
executive directors of AWID, Inna Michaeli and Faye Macheke Co-Executive Directors a week
later (the 24th of May 2023) that the letter had been published. A day later, I acknowledged
receipt and informed AWID that I would be responding to the letter at an appropriate time
and space. I am choosing to do so today.

In the letter, AWID and its co-signatories stated that I had “weaponized “protection of
women’s rights” to advocate for positions that misrepresent and regress from international
norms and standards.

I will not dwell on these false and dangerous allegations, as I have done so elsewhere in great
detail, including in response to a similar letter from Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI), which can
be found here. The letter by AWID did however contain one novelty, which I found very
concerning, namely its allegation that I reportedly continue to “perpetuate narratives
upholding outdated and non-scientific understandings of binary biological sex.” There is
nothing outdated or unscientific about the binary nature of sex, and I would encourage
signatories of this letter to seek out biologists for a conversation around this issue.

When men start having babies then they can tell us how outdated and non-scientific our understanding of biological sex is.

The content and symbolism of this letter evoked strong reactions from amongst different
feminist and women organizers, who recognized the gravity of its aim which was to castigate
me as a rapporteur and present me as someone who was anti-trans; who damaged the
integrity of her mandate and who reportedly acted in violation of established human rights
protections and principles. In doing so, the letter also has the intention of punishing and
silencing me, a fate that many women, girls, and their allies across the world continue to
experience when they speak on the issues of sex, gender, and gender identity.

Across the world every day.

What is also gravely concerning to me is that some organizations are trying to undermine the
long-standing and continued record of support that I have had for the right of all women and
girls to be free from violence, as expressed also in my most recent report and statements
since my engagement on Scotland’s self-ID bill. In doing so, they have also tried to deprive
women and girls that are victims of violence of the voice and support of the mandate, as it
carries out vital work in so many different thematic areas that are relevant to the mandate in
order to advance the protection and response agenda.

Actions such as these constitute a conscious attempt to undermine my work as an
independent mandate holder, and to undermine my credibility and reputation. These, in my
view, constitute undue interference in my work as a rapporteur.

I was and continue to be gravely concerned at the way in which organizations that claim to
be human rights centered and feminist, and from which a number are accredited with the
human rights council, still continue to position themselves as the custodians of the feminist
movement, villainizing those who do not agree with their views, and attempt to ban
discussions on issues that many women and girls, in all their diversity, as well as their societies
clearly care about.

All for the sake of men who pretend to be women. (Women who pretend to be men are not excluded, but we all know they don’t do a fraction of the shouting and bullying and punishing that the men do.)

Read the whole thing.

But…

A man who dressed as a woman to sexually assault another man has been found guilty by a jury.

Wayne Rogers, 47, wore a wig and fake breasts when he targeted a 20-year-old who had been out drinking in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, in September.

But how do they know he’s not trans? Or non-binary? How do they know the wig and breasts were not sincere womaning by a sincere trans woman living her best life?

“He is a sexual predator that picks on drunk men and deceives them by being dressed as a woman,” prosecutor Mark Trafford KC said.

How can they know he’s not a trans woman? Maybe he’s too bashful to say he’s a trans woman, but that doesn’t make him any less a trans woman, or any less a woman. People who dress as women are women.

Rogers was arrested on 4 November. Police found two blonde wigs and a pair of fake breasts under the defendant’s bed.

So? Since when are women not allowed to wear wigs or falsies?

Are the police terfs now?

The tweet Peter Tatchell keeps repeating, I guess on the theory that someone is bound to believe it if he says it often enough.

Certainly, and by the same token, trans petertatchells are trans petertatchells.

They are not the same as biological petertatchells but they are equally valid.

Two different kinds of petertatchells.

One based on biological petertatchellness. One based on gender identity.

Unite to defend ALL petertatchells, including trans.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Balance.

So, when we’re talking about extremes here, what do we mean? Is one extreme just handing out the hormones to everyone with a valid credit card, while the other is listening to people of good sense who say there is no such thing as being trans?

Or, how do they measure whether someone is truly trans and could benefit from hormones? Is there a gendersoul checker machine, a “t-meter” that works like the Scientology “e-meter,” measuring trangrams in pre-clears? Do they followup to check to see if one becomes clear after a certain number of months of treatment or do we just look to see if they pass? I think someone could make a lot of money if they applied to concepts of chirporactic to trans treatment. Realign the spine to realign gender! It only takes 12 treatments administered weekly, with monhtly followups after that. Acupuncture could also work to align the she-chi with the he-chi.

Trump loses again!

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that Donald Trump is civilly liable for defamatory statements he made about writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when she went public with claims he had raped her decades earlier.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, as part of that ruling, said the upcoming trial for Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump will only deal with the question of how much the former president should pay her in monetary damages for defaming her.

Loser loser loser. Trump is a loser. Can scowl at the camera all he wants; still a loser.

Normally, a jury would determine at trial whether a defendant is liable for civil damages claimed by a plaintiff. But Kaplan found that Carroll was entitled to a partial summary judgment on the question of Trump’s liability in the case.

He cited the fact that jurors at a trial in a separate but related lawsuit in May found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, and defamed her in statements he made when he denied her allegation last fall. Carroll’s lawyers argued, and Kaplan agreed, that the jury’s verdict in that case effectively settled the legal question of whether Trump had defamed her in similar comments he made about Carroll in 2019.

It’s a very prominent part of Trump’s personality and way of being in the world that he defames anyone and everyone he feels like defaming. It’s as integral to him as the scowl, the fake hair, the fake tan – he’s genuinely, deeply fake and genuinely, deeply, venomous and defamatory.

Here’s hoping the jury decides he has to give Carroll a very very large amount of money.

Trump in a Louis XIV wig.

From the Mirror:

An inmate groped two prison officers while they served her food in her cell, after being locked up for sexually assaulting a nurse.

Katana Paris who identifies as a woman, assaulted the male and female staff members at HMP Forest Bank in Salford last year. The female officer was serving Paris, 27, breakfast with the help of two inmates. Paris walked towards her and touched her inappropriately.

The following day, while being served lunch by a male prison officer, she reached through the hatch in her cell door and grabbed his genitals. Paris, who was part way through serving a three-year sentence at the time for sexual assaulting a nurse, admitted two counts of sexual assault. At Manchester Crown Court, she was handed a six-month sentence to be added to her prison time.

The Mirror is scrupulously careful not to misgender this friendly man.

Prosecuting, Megan Edwards said that on the day of the incident, a female prison officer was on breakfast duty at around 7.50am. “She approached the defendant’s cell and unlocked the door in order to serve her breakfast,” Mrs Edwards said. “She stepped out of the cell, which was unusual, as prisoners would normally remain in their cell.

“She asked the defendant to move back, but the request was ignored. The defendant then placed a hand on her hand, before sliding her fingers between her knuckles.” The officer moved away and the two prisoners helping gave Paris with her breakfast. She then ‘jumped up and down like she was excited’, before moving over to the woman and touching her genitals.

She 1 and she 2, there. She 1 approached the defendant’s cell, she 2 stepped out of the cell and grabbed she 1 by the crotch.

Anyway. Just another fun incident in the long game of Gender Surprise.

HAhahahahahahaha this should work very well.

Somebody really missed the memo. No no no, Sparky, we don’t push men to do anything, let alone pushing them to fuck men who pretend to be women. That would be gross. We push women to fuck men of every kind including the pretend-women kind and the pretend-man kind. We leave men strictly alone to do whatever they want all the time. Read that memo.

So the horrors will continue, just not at the NHS.

The director of a new private clinic has said he hopes to start prescribing cross-sex hormones within the “next couple of months” to teenagers questioning their gender. Dr Aidan Kelly is among several former staff from the Tavistock gender clinic who have set up a new practice that will provide private referrals for hormone treatment and reassignment surgery.

Gender Plus will charge £275 for a one-hour appointment, which can be booked via its website without an NHS referral. Anyone wishing to pursue hormone treatment to change gender must complete an assessment over six appointments, only one of which needs to be in person. The other five appointments may be over Zoom calls.

Six chats and you get to ruin your life, for only £1650.

The clinic, which operates from above a chicken shop in east London, is accepting patients for consultations only but is in the process of applying to register with the Care Quality Commission so it can also start prescribing hormone treatments, “where appropriate”, to people who identify as transgender.

If its application is successful, the clinic will be monitored by the watchdog, which will carry out unannounced inspections to ensure it is operating within regulations.

Tampering with children’s puberties is fine as long as it’s regulated.

The Tavistock was the NHS’s main gender identity service for young people, but it is being closed down after safety concerns.

Free enterprise to the rescue!

Kelly insisted that vulnerable patients at Gender Plus would not be rushed towards transition, adding that he was trying to find the “middle ground” in a highly contested area of medicine.

“I think extremes are really unhelpful. I think in any aspect of life, balance, thoughtfulness are really important and this area in particular, I think, needs that,” he said.

Yes, and by the same token, we need balance and thoughtfulness and a middle ground on cutting people’s heads off when we find them irritating. Some zealots say we shouldn’t do that at all, but I say we need a balanced thoughtful middle ground where only truly irritating people, as verified by our experts, will have their heads cut off.

I missed this Spiked article back in June:

The ACLU is broken beyond repair

In March 1984, 14-year-old Karen Slattery was babysitting two children in a Florida home when Duane Owen broke in. He repeatedly raped her and then stabbed her to death. Two months later, Owen broke into the home of Georgianna Worden, before raping the 38-year-old mother and murdering her with a hammer. She was found in her bed the next morning by one of her children.

Last week, after he had spent three decades on death row, the state of Florida executed Owen for his crimes. On the day of the execution, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a statement on social media decrying Florida’s actions. Did the ACLU condemn the use of the death penalty? No. Did it allege that the killer had not received a fair trial? Also no.

Instead, the ACLU’s main complaint was that the Florida prison service was unwilling to provide Owens with the gender-reassignment treatment he had requested before his execution.

A man who raped and murdered a girl and a woman wanted the state to help him mock women before his execution, and the ACLU considers that a human right and a civil liberty that the state should assist.

The old heroes of the liberal, progressive cause are long gone. And the institutions they created have been hollowed out. In case more evidence of this was needed, last week Planned Parenthood issued a tweet decrying the use of the phrase ‘women’s rights’ when discussing abortion. Apparently, this ‘erases the experiences and identities of queer, nonbinary and trans folks’.

So instead let’s erase the experiences and idenninies of women.

Locking him up.

Enrique Tarrio, the former national chairman of the Proud Boys, has been sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Tarrio was one of six Proud Boys leaders to be charged for conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results in Congress. Of them, he has received the longest prison sentence to date.

In short: fuck around and find out.

Tarrio was also convicted for obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging their duties, obstruction of law enforcement during a civil disorder and destruction of government property with value of over $1,000.

Tarrio wasn’t at the actual Capitol riot because he had been arrested days earlier for setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner, stolen from Asbury United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., and was ordered out of the city.

Prosecutors say from a hotel outside of D.C., Tarrio directed his Proud Boys to attack the Capitol without him.

But it turns out we’re not allowed to attack the Capitol. Who knew??

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Well ask yourself.

Um, he’s misusing the term “national identity”. A national identity isn’t something possessed by a person. It’s the sum total of values and culture that are core to a particular nation, such that one can say, “This is English,” or, “That’s not Spanish.” It’s how we identify whether a particular policy is consistent with the ethos undergirding a nation’s jurisprudence. When we talk about the American project, we’re talking about the national identity. We’re talking about the good and bad aspects of our culture and history that make Americans distinct from Britons, even though many of us descend directly from English stock.

This is not the same thing as saying, “I am an American.” It’s not the same thing as saying, “I feel a strong affinity for Japanese culture.”

This misuse of the term is just yet more of the mindless habit of using “identity” to refer to any and every possible way to describe someone. Are you white? Identity. Are you straight? Identity. Are you short, curly-haired, confused by sports, fond of trashy romance novels, likely to sneeze at the sun, a dog owner, a cat fancier, a hunter, a vegan, a partisan, college educated, in need of an aspirin, or utterly flummoxed by all this nonsense? Identities all. Of course, calling everything an identity elevates the trivial and inconsequential to the integral, confusing the accidental with the necessary.

And one more thing. The identity in body identity integrity disorder is identity in the philosophical sense: that which makes this and that the same entity. For example, recognizing that the you reading this right now is the same entity in some meaningful way as the you who took the dog for a walk this morning is identity over time; i.e., temporal identity. If you came to doubt that continuity, thinking that the earlier you was someone else, as though you’d been given false memories like in Blade Runner, that would be temporal identity integrity disorder. Recognizing that this hand and that wrist are but parts of one body would be body identity. If you came to believe that your hand were actually not yours, that would be body identity integrity disorder.

This is where things get confused, because the most intelligible interpretation of gender identity would be just a type of body identity focused on the sexed aspects of one’s body. Everything else, all the talk of social constructs and gendered norms and whatnot, is just a subset of reasons one’s sexed body identity might lose coherence. For example, one might begin to doubt that one’s male anatomy is actually one’s own, because of preferences that don’t conform to the social expectations for males. Maybe you like musical theater and flower arranging, and you can’t quite square that with being male, which causes an identity crisis as you attempt to integrate these two parts of yourself. It’s literally the same psychological phenomenon exploited by Maoist thought reform: out the subject in a situation where he must reconcile incompatible ways to interpret his own actions and motivations.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Well ask yourself.

So gender identity would be to identify with the norms, values, expectations, practices, and beliefs a society has placed on the sexes.

Here’s the problem, though: the common claim made by people who insist that Gender Identity is more significant than sex is that GI has no direct relation to the norms, values, expectations, practices, and beliefs a society has placed on the sexes. It’s pure. Its existence is not influenced by culture, but culture will influence a trans girl to behave in a feminine manner in the same way a cis girl is influenced by her environment. Trans people are no longer said to identify with or as a gender, but to be that gender. And by “gender” they mean “sex, but without all that stuff specific to reproduction.” Or it could be something else by now.

It’s hard to pin down the meaning of “identity” in a system which keeps creeping into what it’s being contrasted with. They used to allow “male” and “female” to be sex words. Now a transwoman is female, who doesn’t identify as female, but is as a matter of fact. It says so on the official certificate.

The meaning of “gender identity” I find the least problematic is the one which has been used for decades in the study of early childhood development. How does an infant boy gradually come to recognize that he’s a boy and figure out what that means? When does a young girl understand the distinction between following the shifting rules about being feminine and the implacable truths about being female?

If we start from scratch, at some point there’s a series of moments where our growing understanding of self jostles around our sex. Babies start out needing to learn the distinction between self and other. I’m okay calling that “identity formation” partly because I can’t think of what else to call it.