The reasoned debate continues.

It turns out the hurricane was caused by meteorologists.

Trump suggested the Biden administration’s response had been lacking and planned in partisan ways that caused Republican voters be abandoned and left “Americans to drown”, particularly in North Carolina after Helene. “They’ve let those people suffer unjustly,” he said. His comments have received bipartisan criticism, including from some local and state Republican leaders in affected areas.

Remember how Trump dealt with hurricanes? Throwing rolls of paper towels at people? Ignoring Puerto Rico altogether?

Meteorologists tracking Milton have been beset by conspiracy theories that they are controlling the weather, even by using a nuclear explosion, and have faced death threats.

“I’ve never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,” said the CBS meteorologist Katie Nickolaou. She added: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

Ok but will throwing vulcanologists into volcanoes stop eruptions?

Trump thinks “grocery” is an obscure word that needs him to explain it.

Trump attacking other people’s intellectual capacities:

Donald Trump lashed out at the hosts of The View on Wednesday with a string of low-brow insults, including that they are “demented,” “dirty,” and “dumb.”

“I watched that stupid View where you have these dumb people,” a rambling Trump told a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania…Then, as if his brain were spitting out one of his impulsive, celebrity-obsessed tweets of yore, the former president trained his ire on Whoopi Goldberg, The View’s co-host and moderator, calling her “demented.”

Trump claimed, before he was in politics, he once hired Goldberg—a celebrated comedian who has won the Mark Twain Prize and the EGOT—to perform and accused her of having a “foul mouth.”

“Every word out of her mouth was like the f-word,” Trump said “She was so filthy, dirty, disgusting half the place left. I said I’d never hire her again.” He then called Goldberg a “loser.”

But…sir…

The hypocritical Trump, of course, is well known for profanity. He attacked NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem to protest police brutality as “sons of b—–es” and infamously called Haiti and several African nations “s–thole countries” during a government meeting. A New York Times analysis of his speeches published last week found he has used swear words 69 percent more often at rallies this year than he did when he first ran for president in 2016.

But that’s different, because he’s male, and pale, and rich, and evil.

And Trump’s attack on Goldberg wasn’t even his first broadside aimed at a View host that day. At an earlier rally in Scranton, Trump attacked her co-host Sunny Hostin as “dumber than Kamala.”

“She’s a dummy,” Trump told the crowd of Hostin. “I watched her over the years, that is one dumb woman. I’m sorry, women, she’s a dummy.”

At his Reading rally—after he finished disparaging Goldberg—Trump called Harris “a dumb person” before seemingly admitting his own staff have told him to tone down his boorish, sexist attacks on her. “Somebody said to me, one of my people, a nice person, a staff person said, ‘Sir, please, don’t call her dumb, the women won’t like it,’” he said, before insisting women “don’t care.”

A poll released last week by the Women and Politics Institute at American University’s School of Public Affairs found Trump trails Harris among women voters by 15 points.

It should be way more than 15 points.

Mount Holyoke College wants to have it both ways.

At Mount Holyoke College, the leading gender-diverse women’s college, students learn beyond boundaries, explore interests across disciplines and build skills and connections for a lifetime of purposeful leadership.

What thee helll is a gender-diverse women’s college?

Nothing, that’s what. A contradiction in terms. You can be a women’s something or you can be a gender-diverse something, but you can’t be both.

Its second most recent post is about “a vibrant community space dedicated to supporting LGBTQIA+ students, staff and faculty.” So they have gay male students and male students who are trans or queer or asexual or plus? But then they’re not a women’s college.

You have to pick one. You can’t do both, not because it’s not allowed, but because it’s not possible.

Something called “Attitude” tells us:

India Willoughby has slammed the Labour government, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting over the party’s policies regarding the ban on hormone blockers and their stance on trans healthcare.

Speaking to Attitude on the red carpet at the Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards, powered by Jaguar, Willoughby said: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Labour government are going to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands, of trans people.”

Hahaha that’s funny, because exaggerating is exactly what he’s doing. He’s just making shit up, out of nothing. Look at Willoughby: is he dead? Is he approaching being dead? Not so much. He’s standing around in a red strapless dress, looking ridiculous but not dead.

“We are going through a very slow and quiet genocide,” she said.

Yahuh, so slow and so quiet that it can’t be detected at all, no matter how fine the instruments.

Everyone thinks that a genocide is all about death camps. Not necessarily.”

Nope, everyone doesn’t think that at all. Rwanda wasn’t death camps. Even the Holocaust wasn’t all death camps; they started out just shooting people, but decided that wasn’t efficient.

[He[ continued: “You’re stopping people transitioning. This is going to lead to suicides. Every study in the world has shown this leads to suicides. But Wes Streeting just does not care. I think it’s an absolute disgrace.”

Nobody’s stopping anybody “transitioning”; it can’t be done. People can’t change sex. Willoughby is dressed up in a bright red fluffy dress that starts at the tits and ends above the knees. He is 59 years old. Do you know a lot of 59 year old women who dress like that? The photo of him in it is hilarious, because he’s glowering like Sterling Heyden in Dr Strangelove, which doesn’t really jibe well with the pwetty dwess.

Oh ffs. Some pond scum is attacking the Internet Archive. Why? Because Palestine uh uh uh.

Tom Nichols in The Atlantic on the contrasts between George Washington and the wannabe dictator:

Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.

…

Most American presidents have had some sort of military experience. A few, like Washington, were genuine war heroes. All of them understood that military obedience to the rule of law and to responsible civilian authority is fundamental to the survival of democracy. Again, all of them but one.

During his term as president, Trump expected the military to be loyal—but only to him. He did not understand (or care) that members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, and that they are servants of the nation, not of one man in one office. Trump viewed the military like a small child surveying a shelf of toy soldiers, referring to “my generals” and ordering up parades for his own enjoyment and to emphasize his personal control.

Trump was more than willing to turn the American military against its own people. In 2020, for instance, he wanted the military to attack protesters near the White House. “Beat the fuck out of them,” the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. “Just shoot them.” Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper (a former military officer himself) talked their boss out of opening fire on American citizens.

Senior officers during Trump’s term chose loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to Donald Trump and remained true to Washington’s legacy. Such principles baffle Trump—all principles seem to baffle Trump, and he especially does not understand patriotism or self-sacrifice. He is, after all, the commander in chief who stood in Arlington National Cemetery, looked around at the honored dead in one of the country’s most sacred places, and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Not someone we should put in a position to do it again.

No, he doesn’t say that.

“We’ve really got to stand up for the rights of trans people, yes we’ve got to hear those women who say that there’s a case for single sex spaces, I understand that, but, I do think that we’ve got to empathize and recognize the pain that so many people, so many trans people face and treat them with the respect that they deserve.”

The whole bit between the “yes” and the “but” is rushed and gabbled, while everything after that is slowed and said with great emphasis. It’s very very very clear that the “yes yes women blah blah” bit is a contemptuous hostile yesyesIknowallthat, the only function of which is to lead up to the but.

It couldn’t be more clear or more insulting.

Updating to add: Video credit: @Jonnywsbell

So, to cheer us up, here are Jesus and Mo and the barmaid.

The UN coughs up a hairball onto women again.

Oh look! There are the women with missing lower legs again, complete with weird antiquated Captain Hookish prosthetic replacements. Corporate Memphis Pegleg.

Anyway. The real issue is here is the UN again telling us that men can be women, i.e. men can push women aside and take over everything. I tried to find a parallel Gay Men Day but was unable to. UN Free & Equal doesn’t try to force gay men to be incloosive of women but it does try to force lesbians to be incloosive of men. Why’s that then? I suppose it’s because the UN considers women inferior and subordinate.

Are we there yet? I think we are.

Catastrophic hurricane approaches popular low-lying state

Hurricane Milton tore towards Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, leaving residents with one final day to evacuate or hunker down before the “catastrophic” Category 5 storm is predicted to hit, triggering a life-threatening storm surge.

With more than 1 million people in coastal areas under evacuation orders, those fleeing for higher ground clogged highways on Tuesday and gas stations ran out of fuel, in a region still recovering from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago.

…

Milton is on a rare west-to-east path through the Gulf of Mexico and is likely to bring a deadly storm surge of 10 feet (3 meters) or more of flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Officials from Biden to Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned people in evacuation zones to get out or risk death.

But of course we’re talking about millions of people here. Getting out won’t be a walk in the park. When gas stations run out of fuel, well, that’s game over.

Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic, growing from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours.

“These extremely warm sea surface temperatures provide the fuel necessary for the rapid intensification that we saw taking place to occur,” said climate scientist Daniel Gilford of Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. “We know that as human beings increase the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels, we are increasing that temperature all around the planet.”

So it’s not even that people should have left sooner, because they didn’t know they had to leave until it was too late to leave.

More than a dozen coastal counties issued mandatory evacuation orders, including Tampa’s Hillsborough County. Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, ordered the evacuation of more than 500,000 people. Lee County said 416,000 people lived in its mandatory evacuation zones.

Evacuation is mandatory and impossible. We’re going to be seeing headlines about thousands of people trapped in their cars as the hurricane takes everything out.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa on Tuesday, when about 17% of Florida’s nearly 8,000 gas stations had run out of fuel, according to fuel markets tracker GasBuddy.

What’s the % now? What will it be 12 hours from now?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Trump’s decompensation on the campaign trail.

“Climate change covers everything. It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold….”

That’s exactly right, and that’s a huge part of the goddamn problem. It’s not just a “change” like flipping a switch on or off; it’s the disruption and destabilization of established, reliable patterns upon which human civilization (and the biosphere in general) depends. It is the removal of “pattern” itself, which makes human planning much more difficult, in this instance, the rescheduling, or the end of the concept of a hurricane “season” itself.

Looking more closely, it’s not just a “climate change” problem, but a nightmare weave of disasters arising from the collective appropriation by eight billion humans of ever more of the Earth’s species and materials for their own exclusive use. Even if we weren’t destabilizing the climate, we’d still be in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, a water crisis, a food production crisis, a pollution crisis, and a resource scarcity crisis. Our numbers alone impose an irreducible footprint and load upon the normal, healthy cycling of the planet and the health and wellbeing of all of its other inhabitants. Multiply anything each of us does by eight billion. We take up a lot of biogeochemical space simply by existing. Our cumulative impact starts at the molecular level and goes up from there, with our fingerprints on change and influence at every scale over the entire planet. We are a growing herd of bulls in a china shop that is still as small as it ever was, but there are now fewer things left to break. Taking everything for ourselves is a self-defeating strategy. Looking at the trend lines we’re following, it looks like our goal is a human monoculture. More humans mean less of everything else, and that “everything else” gives us the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. There are no substitutes. There are no alternative brands we can switch to, no other store we can go to that will stock these items if they disappear from the shelves.

The Earth system is not going to restabilize until we stop dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into it (among other things). If and when that happens, it is likely to have shifted to a new regime unprecidented in human experience, which is not a phrase one wants to hear in conjunction with the very conditions upon which human society depends. The Earth is still recovering from the last such major perterbations we’ve induced; the widespread extirpation of Ice Age megafaunal communities, and the European conquest of the Americas, both of which are still unfolding, and both of which have involved massive disruptions and reorganizations of biomes on a continental scale, the first over a timescale of millenia, the second over centuries. It’s harder to dance if the beat keeps changing. Our current crises (which are developments of and elaborations upon these two previous convulsions) are operating at a decadal level, with things getting worse faster than our models had predicted. We’re not dancing anymore. Now we have to run just to keep up. This is not good news for a global, Just-On-Time civilization, because at some point it means we’re not going to be sure where our next meal is coming from. Multiply that by eight billion.

Humans are a pattern-seeking species. It has been one of our vital survival skills, allowing us to see fleeting parts of a whole and infer the signal “predator” lurking in the undergrowth. The occasional “noise” of a false positive where it’s a false alarm is a small price to pay compared to the lethal and overconfident false negative that resulted in a non-forebear becoming dinner. Pattern-seeking is the basis of all science. But we are pattern-creators too, with the false-positive noise of mistaken inference being elevated to the level of meaningful “signal” Our pattern-seeking instincts can be hijacked and redirected by our cultural expectations and turned into elaborate, whole-cloth delusional structures, like astrology. Or, they can be incorporated into an existing cultural construction where there is a resemblance to expected imagery. Pareidolia can be quite culturally specific. From this we get the veneration of a random pattern on a leaky oil storage tank because it happens to look vaguely like some peoples’ idea of the appearance of the Virgin Mary, and that this is actually a vital message, a call for repentance and renewed faith. That’s a lot of baggage to load onto a stain. Non-Catholics and non-Christians are much less likely to see any such resemblance, and even less likely to ascribe any meaning or urgency to any such “apparition,” and yet still succumb to triggering by a resemblance to something culturally salient to themselves. Catholics and other Christians will in turn see nothing of interest or import in someone else’s “significant” patterns of burnt toast, or stained walls. Message not received. (This cultural naivety/gullibility can be used by the unscrupulous, with “images” created for power and profit, the “Shroud” of Turin being the most well known among all the relics of the Saints, and splinters of the True Cross.)

There’s money to be made in the other direction as well. What we’re dealing with now is a denial of pattern, a claim that there is no connection, no signal in the supposed pattern of phenomena ascribed to “climate change.” That this denial happens to align perfectly with the economic and financial interests of those promoting it is supposed to be disregarded (in effect, the denial of another pattern) and ignored, their hand poorly hidden behind made-to-order astroturf organizations whose sole purpose is to sow doubt. Denial of the tobacco-cancer link was just the audition. In a nice bit of judo, this conflict of interest is projected upon the researchers studying climate change, with the charge that they are grifters making a buck out of the climate change “industry,” and that their calls for “more research” are just grabs for more money. This accusation, coming as it does from the oil industry’s side of this grotesque power imbalance, would be laughable if it weren’t leading us on into disaster. But it’s part of the fine human tradition of hiding from ourselves the true costs of our behaviours. It’s as old as calling cows, pigs, and chickens “beef”, “pork” and “poultry,” and of a piece with hiding sweatshops overseas, and euphemistically naming suburban property “developments” for the natural features plowed under and bulldozed away to make room for them. We’re encouraged to look the other way, to not concern ourselves with how others have to pay for what we have and how we got it. If we lose our appetite for what’s on our plate, we no longer buy their product, but we still have to find something to eat.

Part of this pattern denial is hiding alternatives to the way things are now. Products labeled “fair trade” offer a hint of this. What does that say about products that aren’t labelled as such? What of the treatment of people at the other end of the supply chain? Isn’t it possible to run a profitable business that doesn’t rely on oppression and expoitation in service to the bottom line? These are choices that have been made, not things that just happen. Somebody signs those paycheques and decides how many zeros follow the number on the line. It shouldn’t be remarkable or noteworthy to treat people working for you with dignity and respect, and to take less in profit in order to pay them a living wage. The end price that consumers pay should reflect these considerations, rather than be used as an inflexible position to use as leverage against workers’ conditions in a race to the bottom. One would hope that a knowledgible, educated, compassionate society would be aware of this and realize that our economic relationships should be more like a partnership or collaboration, and less like a dictatorship or theft. We’re all in this together, and we shouldn’t let sociopaths set the agenda or write the rules. At this point in time, a “winner take all” mentality ends up with everyone losing.

Making choices depends upon knowing their are choices to be made, that choice is even possible. Hiding this fact, and acting as if our current conditions are somehow “natural”, “inevitable” and not themselves the products of past and current choices prevents us from making informed decisions. Ultimately we are constrained by the physical limits of material reality (limits which are making themselves felt more keenly as time ticks away). But the most important limits might be both imaginary and imaginative, dependent upon our ability to discern the importance of patterns that are actually present, our ability to overcome cultural and economic blindness to those patterns, and our willingness to change what we’re doing. Not all changes are improvements, so having a clear understanding of where we are, how we got here, where we want to go, and how we might get there, are crucial to choosing our actions. The human impact on the Earth can be found everywhere, at all scales. This knowledge is sobering, but it means that opportunities for action to heal those injuries is possible at all scales, everywhere. Wherever we are, there are things we can do. We’re capable of so much. We have produced more than our fair share of cruelty and barbarity, destruction and thoughtlessness. But we also have an amazing aptitude for creativity and genius, curiousity and determination, understanding and compassion, physical and mental courage, stamina and perseverence; for imagining things that one would scarcely believe possible, both individually and collectively, and doing them. Multiply that by eight billion.

Roll up your sleeves: there’s work to do.

What’s the big deal?

A trans rights activist who poured tomato juice over controversial women’s rights activist Posie Parker is seeking to have her conviction overturned, with her lawyer saying it was out of proportion to the offending.

Eli Rubashkyn previously pleaded guilty to assault after she poured tomato juice over Parker – also known as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull – and another woman at Auckland’s Albert Park in March 2023.

Eli Rubashkyn ain’t no she.

Rubashkyn earlier pleaded guilty to two charges of assault and was convicted and discharged by Judge Kirsten Lummis in September.

On Tuesday, Rubashkyn’s lawyer, James Olsen, appealed the conviction at the High Court at Auckland. Olsen told Justice David Johnstone that Judge Lummis was not correct to convict his client given the low gravity of the offending.

Really. It’s no big deal for a man to stop a woman speaking by assaulting her, is it. Is that because women just don’t matter?

Rubashkyn was deeply remorseful for her actions and the impact it had on the two victims and the wider communities on both sides of the aisle, Olsen said.

Was he? Why? Why be deeply remorseful if the actions were low gravity?

Olsen said Rubashkyn’s offending was born out of her attempt to support those within the LGBTQI+ and transgender communities and was significantly affected by Parker’s attendance.

Wait, what? Why do trans people get counted twice? Why the LGBTQI+ and the transgender communinnies?

Olsen said Judge Lummis hadn’t properly considered the general consequences of the conviction and submitted it was out of all proportion given the offending.

“This was pouring tomato juice as an act of protest to prevent Ms Keen from speaking,” Olsen said.

No it wasn’t. It wasn’t “pouring tomato juice”; it was pouring tomato juice over a woman’s head to prevent her from speaking. Also keep in mind that she couldn’t know at the time that it was only tomato juice.

She is a qualified pharmacist and researcher and an advocate for intersex and gender issues at the United Nations. The conviction will have an impact on her ability to travel for work and gain employment in pharmacy.

Good. It ought to.

H/t Rob

Interlude for hilarity.

The image. I just can’t love the image enough.

Trying to make who is what sex a matter of law instead of fact:

Amnesty International has been given permission to intervene in a landmark Supreme Court case on the legal definition of woman.

The charity, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Scottish Lesbians, and Sex Matters have all been granted permission to take part in For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers at the end of next month.

…

The case at the UK’s highest court is the latest development in a long-running legal battle over whether someone who is biologically male can legally be regarded as female for the purposes of the Equality Act.

The answer to that ridiculous question is so obviously “no” that it’s hard to grasp how it can be a long-running legal battle. Can rich people be legally regarded as poor for the purposes of the Equality Act? It would make just as much sense. The relationship among women, men, and equality is that women have historically globally been treated as unequal, so changing that has nothing at all to do with endorsing the fantasies of men who cosplay as women.

For Women Scotland had initially challenged the SNP government over a new law designed to increase the number of women on public boards. The legislation stated that anyone “living as a woman” would be eligible.

Thus defeating the whole purpose. Making men eligible for a law designed to increase the number of women on public boards is an exercise in futility. It’s like trying to make a car go faster by standing on the brake pedal. If you want to increase the number of women on public boards it won’t do you a bit of good to add more men even if they wear lipstick.

The group’s first action was successful, forcing the publication of new statutory guidelines which stated that transgender women should still be counted as female, so long as they held a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).

For Women Scotland challenged this, arguing that the Scottish Government had overstepped its powers by effectively redefining the meaning of female…An appeal by For Women Scotland was rejected by the Inner House last November prompting the Supreme Court bid.

Amnesty International UK said: “Amnesty International is intervening because we believe it is vital the Court is assisted by submissions setting out why legal gender recognition is a human rights issue and that trans people should not be expected to live without it.”

It’s a human rights issue all right but Amnesty is on the wrong side of it.

A bid to intervene by the Good Law Project was rejected. The group was representing Victoria McCloud, the UK’s first transgender judge and Prof Stephen Whittle, an academic who has been campaigning for transgender rights since the 1970s.

The one bit of good news.

Public Notice on Trump’s relentless lying about climate change:

With another historic storm, Hurricane Milton, now bearing down on Florida, Trump not only still refuses to acknowledge that climate change is happening and creates conditions more favorable to severe storms, but he’s actively lying about it.

“Nobody thought this would be happening, especially now,” Trump said during a photo op in a Helene-impacted part of Georgia on October 1. “It’s so late in the season.” 

The season is June 1 to November 30, so now is late in a sense, but it’s also irrelevant. Hurricanes don’t look at the calendar and think “Aw damn I can’t possibly get there in time” and decide to stay home. Trump means, as always, that he failed to understand that this could be happening now. He makes all his failures to think a universal failure.

Trump’s decompensation on the campaign trail this year has been undeniable, and his rhetoric about climate has if anything gotten worse.

“Climate change covers everything,” Trump blathered at a Wisconsin campaign stop last Tuesday, while western North Carolina was under water. “It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold. Climate change. I believe I really am an environmentalist. I’ve gotten environmental awards.”

Yes and he’s also a physicist and a brain surgeon and a rocket scientist and an Olympian and a ballet star.

[This story is a couple of years old but what the hell, a second thrashing is well deserved.]

The Times reporting does eventually hint at how appallingly reckless and women-hating the “Marceline” Harvey story is.

It is unclear where [Susan Leyden’s] path first crossed Ms. Harvey’s, but at the time Ms. Harvey posted about Ms. Leyden, she was seeking her own placement in city shelters. Immediately after her 2019 release, she sought housing in the Bronx. [In other words Harvey was seeking placement in city shelters.]

Ms. Harvey “presented as a mild spoken, very tall Black man,” said Anne Brennan, the nurse practitioner who ran the intake. “I said, ‘Well, why are you in the women’s shelter?’”

Ms. Brennan said she told Ms. Harvey that placing her in a women’s shelter seemed like a bad idea, given her history of killing women. Despite her objections, Ms. Brennan said her supervisors allowed Ms. Harvey entry.

“Apparently his feelings and identity were far more important than all the other women that were terrified of him,” she said.

And apparently the NY Times can’t find the nerve to call him “him” even in a story of this kind, even when it sows confusion about who is doing what to whom. It’s despicable. The choice to pamper him at the expense of clarity about her is despicable.

Julia Savel, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Social Services, said rules were followed.

“Our policy — in accordance with the law — is to place individuals in shelters based on their reported gender identity,” she said.

Well that’s a bad, evil, dangerous to women policy. To hell with that policy, and the law.

“Being homeless or transgender does not make you inherently violent and are not connected to the crime that was committed.”

No shit, stupid, but the fact that he had murdered a woman does hint that he might do it again.

Also, being a man does make you inherently stronger than women and more potentially aggressive toward women.

The reporting of this story is outrageous.

The New York Times, July 30, 2022:

The person before the parole panel in June 2019 was tall and slim, in far better shape than 81 years of life might have suggested. Mild and polite, the supplicant seemed nothing like the murderer who had spent decades in prison, first for shooting a girlfriend dead in 1963, and then for stabbing another in 1985, stuffing her corpse into a bag and leaving it in Central Park.

“I’m no longer that person,” the inmate told the parole board commissioners. Despite misgivings, they would rule in favor of release.

Two and a half years after leaving Cayuga Correctional Facility, Marceline Harvey was accused again, charged with killing Susan Leyden, 68. Parts of Ms. Leyden’s body were found in March inside a shopping cart in East New York, stuffed in a bag. In Ms. Harvey’s apartment, investigators found a bloody mop, a tub full of towels and a box for an electric saw.

You’ll never guess what the NY Times is concealing here. Note the first two words – “The person.” Note the “Ms. Harvey.” Yes, really: even in reporting crimes against women this horrendous, the Times takes care to lie about what sex he is. The reporters are both women. Many more blood-chilling paragraphs follow before they admit he’s…a trans woman. They don’t of course admit he’s a man.

For seven decades leading up to her latest arrest, Ms. Harvey navigated New York’s intricate criminal justice bureaucracy: the country’s largest police apparatus, the state’s overlapping welfare agencies, its prisons and the officials charged with deciding who remains in them. She confronted the system in some moments, manipulated it in others. Behind her was a trail of crimes so grisly that for decades, parole officials refused to let her out.

…

Decades worth of police documents and court records detail the life of Ms. Harvey, a transgender woman who transitioned at some point after her release from prison. Central to her tale are more than three decades of parole board minutes obtained through the state’s Freedom of Information Law. In them, she insists that authorities exaggerated evidence, changes stories about crimes she admitted and veers between contrition and blaming those she killed.

The records include several examples of her harassing or attacking women throughout her life. She was accused of attempted rape at 14; the victim was an 8-year-old girl. Ms. Harvey, who by her own account struggled with her mental health, said she had to choke down rage when women challenged her manliness before she transitioned — making fun of her soft voice, for example.

This was a boy and then a man, harassing and attacking women all his life, yet the NY Times carefully pretends he is and always was a woman. Two women put their names on the lie.

A homeless shelter worker and people close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms. Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.

Gosh, really??? How horrifically transphobic of them. You won’t catch the New York Times being like that.

Sometimes the disgust is enough to choke a person.

The Times interviews Sandi Toksvig:

Toksvig certainly boasts the widest-ranging CV imaginable. Her most recent achievement was officiating at the Abba star Björn Ulvaeus’s third wedding last month in Copenhagen. She and Ulvaeus, it transpires, have been friends since 2015, when she organised a Scandinavian-themed Women of the World festival at the Royal Festival Hall, where an all-female orchestra played Waterloo and Ulvaeus appeared. “You can be feminist and fun, you see.” More recently they collaborated on writing the interactive show Mamma Mia! The Party.

“Björn is a very gentle, not divaish person; he and I are both humanists,” she says…

I knew that about Björn. That time I went to Stockholm when Hatar Gud Kvinnor? was published, his daughter picked me up at the airport. I pretended not to know.

But that’s not why we’re here. This is why we’re here:

“I’m easygoing, but I’m also keeping an eye on things. The world is still full of people who take against your life. Homophobia’s increasing. The only good thing about lesbians is they titillate men so it’s marginally less aggressive towards us. I don’t know what they think Deb and I are doing. Mainly we’re discussing if the tomatoes have gone off.”

The hostility, Toksvig continues with quiet fury, is fuelled by “intemperate language on social media around the trans discussion. That’s opened the door to people thinking it’s now fair to have a general go at diversity, that the world is too woke. I don’t know how you can be too woke — woke means being awake to the dangers that are around you. Mental health within the LGBTQ community is not good and that’s not because you’re not comfortable with who you are. It’s the way society treats you.”

She is especially angry by [about] how many “radical feminists” attack trans people. “How could you be so white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life yet you decide to punch down on people?”

Excuse me? Excuse me???

Who tf says we’re all privileged? Who says we’re all heterosexual? Who says we’re all never marginalized?

What utter bullshit. Women are not privileged in the sense of seen as and treated as better than the other sex. That’s rather the point of feminism. We have to fight to be seen as and treated as not the worst, the stupid, the weak, the sly, the whoreish, the disgusting sex. We have to fight to be seen as not inferiors. That doesn’t suddenly stop being true just because some men pretend to be women and berate us when we say they’re not.