Tattoo v neovagina.

I think I get what the reasoning is from their point of view: gender transition procedures are (in at least some instances) literally life-saving. People will die without them.

If that thought is accurate the reasoning may possibly make some sense. But is it accurate?

Well, first, not all magic gender-havers claim to be suicidal, or threaten to act on suicidal thoughts, or do in fact commit suicide. Second, blackmail by claims of suicidal ideation is just that: blackmail. That doesn’t make any difference on the personal level – if parents are convinced their kid will kill xirself then claims about blackmail and the wider society aren’t going to mean a damn thing to them – but it does make a difference on the policy level and especially on the rhetorical level. In other words it would be nice if activists for trans ideology would stop using suicide as a blackmail lever.

So, to sum up, kids under 18 ruining their bodies and their futures are not comparable to kids wanting tattoos. Tattoos are not comparable to luxury hysterectomies or penis removals. Tattoos are at worst unattractive or annoying to others. Medically unnecessary hysterectomies or penis removals or puberty blockers are in another category altogether.

For this reason, saying “Golly gee minors can’t decide for themselves whether to have a tattoo but they absolutely can decide to destroy their sexual parts” is reckless and idiotic.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Who, literally, does she think she is?

I realise now that I was very naive to think, as I did for a long time, that the puritan impulse couldn’t survive in a pluralist culture. I’m not sure how the managerial mindset is related to puritanism beyond the fact that they both love putting things (and thus people) into boxes, but the two certainly find it easy to make common cause in promoting authoritarianism. Orwell is certainly relevant here but so is Mill. Without a willingness among the ordinary population (which is to say everyone who doesn’t see themself as a “thought leader”) to tolerate ideas they personally find disagreeable it is all too easy for the managers to appoint themselves priests. (“Don’t worry about the mysteries. You’ll never understand them but we’ve got it for you. We have a direct line to God/Stonewall”.) The totalising impulse, which I think is the puritan impulse in another form, claims that all values can be reduced to one value and thus the work of determining how those values can be put into practice can easily be outsourced. Just find someone/some organisation that “shares your values” as if it didn’t actually work in the opposite way. (Billy Bragg apparently wants that job and seems to imagine that having written a few so-so songs is a suitable qualification but he really should have gotten an MBA or gone into the public service if he wanted to be really successful.)

I have to say I’m scared. It’s almost as if we’ve jumped back a hundred years and the only alternative to one authoritarianism is the other authoritarianism. I just hope that this time we find something less destructive than a World War to demonstrate that the boring rule of law (and agreed norms – I’m looking at you Trump) is preferable to the thrill of being an ideological warrior. (Maybe we could just exile all the flag-wavers to some MMORG. The Metaverse might turn out to have some use after all.)

MP says some women have a penis.

Yes really. An MP actually said that – on the record, in public. A woman MP said that.

It’s not “vilification of trans people” to say that women don’t have a penis.

Breathtaking.

No. Lesbians may not hold lesbian-only events. No.

I really would like to know if it’s normal for an administrator at a healthcare network to lie and threaten and rage at patients and/or employees of the network who don’t believe men can be women and who don’t subscribe to the new religion that underlies that claim. If it is normal it obviously shouldn’t be. What business is it of Chandra Berkan-Hozempa’s if patients or employees or both attend a protest? Or participate in it? Or have opinions she dislikes? How is it her job to send out furious denunciations and warnings about a protest that has nothing whatever to do with the body she works for?

She’s the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Island Health, by the way. It’s becoming all too apparent that DEI is not what it says on the tin, and is a massive threat to the rights and freedoms of people who have the nerve to say things.

Oh good, there’s a source document. Let’s read it together.

Island Health is aware of the anti-2SLGBTQIA protests and counter-protests that are being planned across Canada on Wednesday, September 20th 2023.

And? What business is it of Island Health that there is a protest scheduled? Why does Island Health have to comment on it at all? Let alone threatening and libeling the protesters?

To be clear, Island Health respects the right for 2SLGBTQIA+ people to live in peace, without fear of discrimination, harassment and threat of violence, and recognize that the human rights of the trans and 2SLGBTQIA+ community are not up for debate.

Do they not get bored and embarrassed barfing out that endless string of letters over and over? The shorter UK version is bad enough, and this one is ludicrous.

More substantively, no one is trying to take the 2blah community’s rights away.

Gender identity and expression are protected grounds under the BC Human Rights Code (Bill 27 – 2016: Human Rights Code Amendment Act, 2016) in addition to the existing grounds of sex and sexual orientation. There is no place for transphobia, homophobia or discrimination of any kind in our Island Health community.

But masses of time for womanphobia, apparently.

Please note, these dangerous, misguided and hate driven campaigns are a concerning matter of safety and public health, not only for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, but for anyone who may be questioning their identity or even for visible and open allies. These rallies are an insult to human dignity, expression and rights for us all. As an organization, we stand against hate and discrimination, and stand in solidarity with the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.

What a venomous malicious libelous crock of shit.

Please note, any anti-2SLGBTQIA+ messaging or commentary that targets community members will not be tolerated.

What does that mean? Will employees who attend the protest be fired?

 2SLGBTQIA+ staff, colleagues and their allies have a right to a work environment free from threat of violence, harassment, embarrassment and discrimination.

So do women. Remember them? Ever heard of them?

Any comments, questions or concerns can be directed to Chandra Berkan-Hozempa (Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) [except for women]…

Wow. Canada really is very…erm…restrictive. And scary.

The whole image:

I would not want to work at any institution where Chandra Berkan-Hozempa had power over the staff.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Pink News has bad writers.

Here’s an idea: how about those attendees not interested in, or distressed by, a Harry Potter panel not go to that panel? If they are so fragile that the mere presence of such a panel at a large event upsets them so, they are likely too unwell to go anywhere, or do anything, as there’s no telling how many times they might unexpectedly run into the words “Harry” or “potter” whilst in the course of their travels. Either one on its own is bad enough. The two together? It must be like encountering a critical mass of harmful, verbal material, resulting in permanent injury and psychic scarring. Louis Slotin redux, but with words instead of uranium. “Tickling the Wizard’s Tale” * perhaps? Maybe it would be best for them to stay at home.

As for those performatively posturing on behalf of these weepy wilters, maybe they could have just come up with a waver for them to sign. Or the charity could hve pulled out. I know that’s not going to let them be seen “doing something,” but I’d bet there would have been more people disappointed at the cancellation of the HP panel than traumatized by it. The Comic Con organizers are cowards. They bowed down to bullies, allowing themselves to used as another avenue to demonize and punish JK Rowling, which is the real point of this power play.

Surprisingly, this Pink News article includes a link to the podcast series The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, and actually gives Rowling the last word:

Rowling, who has repeatedly denied transphobia allegations, claimed on the podcast The Witch Trials of JK Rowling that her comments on the trans community had been “profoundly” misunderstood.

“When I first became interested, then deeply troubled by what I saw as a cultural movement that was liberal in its methods and very questionable in its ideas, I absolutely knew that if I spoke out, many folks would be deeply unhappy with me,” Rowling said.

“Time will tell whether I’ve got this wrong … I believe there is something dangerous about this movement, and it must be challenged.”

*Dr. Louis Slotin died of massive radiation exposure during a demonstration of critical assembly, when he accidentally brought two spheres of fissile material too close together, too quickly. This seat-of-the-pants demonstration was known as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” More about this small, fatal nuclear accident here.

Uh oh. Salt water contaminating the drinking water in a highly populated area.

Drought-like conditions in the Midwest over the summer have created a growing water problem in the New Orleans area this fall.

Water levels of the Mississippi River have dropped low enough to make the river less resistant to a mass of saltwater flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico. This circumstance, known as saltwater intrusion, is endangering the drinking water systems in and around the city, as well as smaller municipalities to the south.

Is that scary enough yet?

Officials in Louisiana and with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say that a “saltwater wedge” could reach water treatment plants near New Orleans in October and are working to slow the influx while also bringing in more fresh water to the region. Many water treatment facilities cannot handle water with high salinity levels, which corrode pipes and cause metals in the pipes to leach into the water.

…

The Corps of Engineers is also getting barges to transport water that can be combined with water at the treatment facilities for safe drinking. Colonel Jones said about 15 million gallons will be delivered in the coming days, but the demand at treatment facilities could ultimately rise to at least 36 million gallons per day. Colonel Jones said that the Army Corps was working to get access to more barges but that he was confident that figure could be met.

And that’s very easy and sustainable (and not at all yet another addition to the problem). Just ship in 36 million gallons of water every day. Piece of cake.

Many coastal communities, like parts of the Jersey Shore, Long Island and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, are no stranger to saltwater intrusion, which also occurs when storm surges or high tides top areas that are low in elevation. As sea levels rise along the coasts, the threat of saltwater intrusion does, too. Other countries like Bangladesh are grappling with that reality.

Nah, it’s just liberal scaremongering. Buy another SUV to piss them off.

H/t TheDudeDiogenes

This may be a contestant for the Most Passive-aggressive Subhead Ever prize:

A Harry Potter panel due to be held at London’s Comic Con event in October has been cancelled after conversations with an LGBTQ+ charity.

Who cancelled it? Who had the conversations? What is the connection between the cancelling and the conversations? What LGBXYZ charity?

Obviously a subhead can’t give all the relevant information, but that doesn’t mean it has to wrap itself in the passive voice repeatedly. It’s like the “activism” as a whole – all the creepy endless spying “something was said to someone by someone” hissing and pointing. Scandal-mongering without any scandal to work with. More succinctly: bad thinking leads to bad writing. That subhead is bad bad bad writing.

LGBTQ+ helpline Switchboard explained that the charity is due to appear at the event, which runs from 27 to 29 October, but that it raised “concerns” after finding out that a Harry Potter-themed panel was also due to take place. 

More garbage writing. Also why does this clumsy writer – one Emily Chudy – put scare quotes on “concerns”? Why doesn’t Pink News get better writers?

“When we agreed to host a Pride Lounge at this year’s MCM London Comic Con, we did so with the aim of connecting with their diverse fan community,” Switchboard wrote on Twitter. 

Ohhhh, I see – Pink News is working up a tweet into a news story. Ok, I do that myself often enough, so I don’t object to the principle, but then why pretend otherwise at the beginning?

“However, at that time we were unaware of their plans to feature any panels using the Harry Potter IP [intellectual property] … Upon learning about this, we felt compelled to express our concerns about the potential impact on our community, particularly trans individuals.”

Switchboard explained it had since been in “conversations” with the London Comic Con organisers, who were “receptive to our concerns and feedback from their fans”, and then decided to cancel the Harry Potter panel. 

Yet more garbage writing. Who decided to cancel the panel? Switchboard, or the London Comic Con organisers? Whatever; it was one of them. The story is: London Comic Con had a Potter-themed panel on the schedule; some “activists” saw an opportunity to cancel something so they picked a fight on Twitter and got the panel cancelled. Let’s have a big round of applause for our winners.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

It seems like only yesterday that no one would have said anything this stupid even for a hefty bribe.

It’s nothing to do with “governing.” It’s knowing.

News flash: women need to know which people are men, partly for our own safety. We don’t think we have a “right” to “govern” and we don’t consider it “governing” to know the difference between women and men.

We’re not the ones trying to “govern” people on this subject. It’s the public relations arm of trans ideology that’s so keen on ordering everyone to say men are women if they say they are. It’s trans ideology that polices our words, not the other way around.

And yes of course it’s our business. See above.

I expect the next communniny we’ll be ordered to validate and lift up and ally ourselves with is the take pictures up women’s skirts communniny.

A Sydney teacher who was jailed for secretly filming up the skirts of students at his north shore school has had his sentence overturned on appeal, after a judge agreed his mental health conditions including a voyeuristic disorder could be better treated in the community.

I wonder how many men wandering loose in the community have “a voyeuristic disorder.” If we can hear what women tell us it has to be a pretty hefty number.

Eric Wong, 29, was jailed in July for at least six months after he took 90 videos and 300 photos of students in his class at Cammeraygal High School in Crows Nest over a period of two years.

…

Judge John North said Wong’s “unusual and abhorrent behaviour” breached the trust of a large number of young women in his care.

“He was their teacher; this was a gross abuse of trust, and it is indeed a serious matter,” North said. “There are a large number of people who should have been safe in the protective care of their teacher who were anything but safe.”

Girls. A large number of girls. Girls girls girls. This shit is done to girls and women.

North said Wong would not be able to access appropriate treatment for his voyeurism disorder in custody, so the safety of the community would be better served by an Intensive Correction Order, a form of jail sentence served in the community, rather than a short period of custody.

How about first one and then the other?

There are of course strong arguments that punishment is a bad and useless way of dealing with crime – that it’s revenge rather than anything more justifiable. On the other hand there are also strong arguments that in the justice systems we currently have, crimes against women are shockingly under-prosecuted, let alone punished.

The Herald previously reported that Wong was caught by a 16-year-old female student when the girl bumped into a whiteboard and dislodged a hidden phone in Wong’s classroom.

A police search of Wong’s home revealed hundreds of videos and photographs on a computer and storage device of girls in school uniform in his classroom, including images up their skirts and of their breast area.

That’s a lot of very dedicated persistent “voyeurism disorder.”

H/t Arcadia

Good grief.

Yet again they honoo and stannd wif the “2SLGBTQIA+” memmers of our communinnee…while of course they don’t “stand with” those boring evil hags known as “women.” If only women could be done away with altogether! And they “stand against hate in all its forms” – except of course they don’t. This very statement reeks of hatred. They hate women who talk back, they hate women who are just women instead of trans women. They hate women who have their own opinions and think they get to utter them. They hate women who don’t just shut up and obey.

Trans rights are human rights, they intone like robots. But what are “trans rights”? For the billionth time, obviously trans rights should have human rights, but what are trans rights? How can we agree anyone should have them when they’re not spelled out?

They promise to confront all forms of hate while they’re in the very act of inciting hatred against feminist women who don’t want trans “activists” to destroy women’s rights. They’re inciting hatred in this very (shockingly childish and crude) “statement.”

Wait what? Who is demonizing whom?

It’s not “demonizing” anyone to say that men can’t be women, or to say that pretending men can be women is very bad for women’s rights.

Meanwhile…

The Telegraph has a long piece on what it calls Whitehall’s woke training regime.

Some of it is about what I would call anti-racism training and the rest is about gender bullshit.

Staff in Government departments are being taught about gender ideology, which affirms the idea that people can choose their gender, while those with legally protected gender critical beliefs, who believe that you cannot change your biological sex, say they are bullied into silence.

Instead of clearing backlogs from the pandemic, staff are spending work time on attending lectures on LGBT+ issues or watching videos telling them biological men can use women-only facilities if they self-identify as female.

In one department, staff shared a “30 days of Pride” calendar, with daily videos and articles on topics including “transgender children” and “the history of the Stonewall riot”, that contained six hours of content.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s inherently bad to give people in civil service jobs training in the need to give everyone equal treatment before the law, which could include pointing out obstacles to doing that, which could include noting entrenched prejudices imbibed from the broader culture. Civil servants should not be treating some people as inferiors, and it could be the case that training helps eliminate that problem.

On the other hand I don’t think this should mean training in treating a small minority of people as magical saints with special magic genders.

Workers in government departments are also being bombarded with material about white privilege and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Like that for instance. I don’t think it’s bad for UK civil servants to be told there is such a thing as white privilege in the UK. Remember India? The slave trade? Stuff like that?

But it doesn’t follow that telling civil servants India Willoughby and Emily Bridges are among The Most Marginalized people on earth is a good idea.

The MoJ’s Gender Equality Network, one of a myriad of groups within the Civil Service set up by staff to discuss subjects such as diversity, circulated a newsletter in July 2022 to its members that discussed gender identity, pronouns and non-binary people.

The newsletter said: “Depending on the culture, people who identify as other genders have been associated with sacred powers, spirituality and are thought to be blessings to the family and community they are born into.

“Many North American Indigenous tribes had no constructs of gender and embraced its fluidity before colonisation.

“In many societies, the gender binary is a product and tool of colonialism and white supremacy.”

That’s fatuous propaganda, but notice the Telegraph doesn’t say it’s part of the training. It’s from a newsletter. There are probably a lot of newsletters flying around the Civil Service with some kind of bullshit in them. What’s the betting most civil servants just drop them straight into the recycle bin?

So, the Telegraph thing is interesting, but read it with caution.

Aw, Billy Bragg is sad that women are so stubborn about thinking their own thoughts instead of thinking his.

We haven’t stopped being progressive Billy. You on the other hand…

Geoff Mulgan on AI and bullshitters:

Since the arrival of ChatGPT there has been much debate about how AI can replace humans or work with them. Here I discuss a slightly different phenomenon which I increasingly notice, and probably wouldn’t have without the presence of generative AI: people who act rather like large language models. The phenomenon isn’t new. It’s just that we now have a new way of understanding it. As I show it’s quite malign, particularly in academia.

The strength and weakness of ChatGPT is that it can quickly assemble a plausible answer to a question, drawing on materials out in the world. It sucks them in, synthesises and mimics, sometimes quite convincingly, someone knowledgeable talking about a subject.

Sound like postmodernists much? This is where I came in. B&W started as a jaundiced look at that kind of empty pretentious blather, that was a mimicry of thought rather than the real thing.

Lots of people now use ChatGPT to help them with first drafts of articles or talks. But I’m more interested in the people who act like an LLM even if they don’t actually use one. These are the smart people who absorb ways of talking and framing things and become adept at sounding convincing.

And, more than convincing, deep. Over the heads of plebeians like us. See: Judith Butler, passim.

The classic example in academia was Alan Sokal’s piece ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeutics of Quantum Gravity’. The article was submitted and accepted by the journal Social Text. The piece was deliberately written to sound plausible, at least to the academic community served by the journal. Yet it was in fact wholly meaningless. It was a perfect example of vapid mimicry and was bitterly resented by the academic community it mocked.

Sokal’s stunt was an extreme example. But what he was mocking is not so exceptional. Many people in many fields, including quite a few in academia, also act rather like a ChatGPT, particularly in academic disciplines that don’t do much empirical work, work with facts or testable hypotheses – the more they are just commenting on texts (as a surprising proportion of the social sciences and humanities do) the more such foggy talk is a risk.

I don’t object to commenting on texts as such. There’s plenty of brilliant commenting on texts, which is enlightening and depth-excavating. I’m a humanities type and I do see value in thinking and talking about literature. What I detest is the attempt to make it sound artificially “difficult” and not for the mere plebs.

But one advantage of age and experience is that I now realise that me not understanding what someone is saying is sometimes a sign that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and that they are essentially acting like an LLM. This would become apparent if they were ever interviewed in the way that politicians are sometimes interviewed in the media, with forensic questioning: ‘what do you actually mean by x? What’s an example of what you just said? What would your best critic say about your comments?’.

That kind of sums up what I do every day, especially the “what do you actually mean” bit. The more people do that the better, in my view.

There’s a lot of that about – a very very very large amount of it.

It’s what makes the trans ideology and “activism” so extremely repellent.

But it’s their idenniny! You can’t say it’s not their idenniny! If they say they are Inuit they are Inuit!

Three women in Canada have been criminally charged after allegedly pretending to be Inuit to receive benefits from indigenous organisations.

According to police, two 25-year-old sisters committed fraud by posing as adopted Inuit children. Both sisters and their 59-year-old mother are facing two counts of fraud each. One Inuit group called the alleged deception “flabbergasting”. The defendants are due in court in the city of Iqaluit on 30 October.

In a statement, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said that the sisters – Amira and Nadya Gill – and their mother, Karima Manji, defrauded two local organisations of “funds that are only available to Inuit beneficiaries by obtaining grants and scholarships” between October 2016 and September 2022.

If people say they are Inuit then they are Inuit. That’s how idenniny works. It’s forbidden to question anyone’s idenniny, let alone deny it. Unless the anyones are Karens, of course – Karens are the one kind of people not allowed to have a sacred indisputable idenniny.

The woman named by the Gills as their birth mother, Kitty Noah, said before her death in July that she was not related to the twins.

In 2021, the Gill sisters – both graduates of Queen’s University in Ontario – launched an online business selling face masks featuring designs by indigenous artists.

Ahhhhh of course they did. Appropriators gonna appropriate.

In an interview with Canadian broadcaster CBC, NTI President Aluki Kotierk said that “at a minimum”, the Gill sisters and their mother should return the money they received from Inuit associations. He added that the NTI would conduct more training for enrolment committees in the future.

Mr Kotierk characterised the alleged fraud as “another form of colonisation” and part of a wider trend of non-indigenous Canadians claiming indigenous heritage. “You’ve wanted to take our language away from us,” he said. “You’ve wanted to take our culture away from us. Now you’re trying to claim our identity? It’s just flabbergasting.”

Talk to some women to find out what it’s like.

Some Canadians have referred to those falsely claiming indigenous ancestry as “pretendians”. But Jean Teillet, a member of the Métis indigenous community, told Global News that the term downplays the severity of the issue because it “sounds harmless”.

Hi, yes, I know what you mean. Women could tell you a lot about that.

The Telegraph:

The Cabinet Secretary has been warned by senior civil servants of a “woke takeover of Whitehall” that risks “improperly” influencing Government policy. Simon Case was told in a letter signed by 42 staff from 16 departments that ideology on gender promoted by trans activists has become embedded in the Civil Service in a “significant breach of impartiality”.

They should call it a trans ideology takeover or similar. “Woke” is too generic and too vague.

It says the concept that “everyone has a gender identity which is more important than their sex” is “treated as undisputed fact”.

Staff who dare to air gender-critical views – meaning they believe there are two biological sexes that cannot be changed – suffer “serious harassment” at work and live with a “pervasive fear” they will be victimised, the letter adds.

As a result, it says, the operation of government is being “distorted” and the authors plead for “urgent action to ensure that Civil Service impartiality is upheld, and freedom of belief is respected”.

It isn’t just a freedom of belief issue though. In some ways it’s the opposite: gender ideology is a belief system while biology is not. To put it another way, gender ideology is a fiction while biology is not. The conflict isn’t about belief so much as it is about reality, accuracy, truth, not forcing people to lie. Civil servants shouldn’t be bullying other civil servants into pretending to believe a stupid reactionary ideology.

The Civil Service’s head of human resources has met some of the signatories to discuss their concerns, but the letter – along with extensive evidence of the way highly contentious beliefs are promoted in numerous Whitehall departments – has been leaked to The Telegraph amid complaints that the response has been inadequate.

…

The letter states: “Many of us have experienced some form of professional disadvantage because we do not believe that the concept of gender identity is meaningful, or that it is more important than sex. Several of us have been through stressful and intrusive employment disputes.”

I like that way of putting it – we do not believe that the concept of gender identity is meaningful. Just so. We’re tired of being bullied and punished for not finding gender idenniny meaningful.

Documents shared with The Telegraph show staff have been asked to undergo training that says biological men can use female-only facilities and to avoid gendered language such as the phrase “mum and dad” in some circumstances for fear of causing offence.

In departments struggling with inflationary pressures and backlogs caused by the pandemic, civil servants are being encouraged to spend their time attending courses or watching videos that promote LGBTQ+ “allyship”. 

It’s like mildew; it creeps in everywhere.