Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room.

Interesting article at Slate about the internal conflicts in abortion funding groups.

Summary: an organization that helps fund abortions in the DC area started making pro-Palestinian posts on social media following October 7. That drew some angry responses and loss of donations from some supporters, which accelerated after a Jewish employee left the organization and published an article about her frustrations.

I’m posting this not because I want to talk about Israel-Palestine. I really, really don’t, as I have nothing to say about that conflict. I’m posting it because it’s an interesting insight about “mission creep” at left-leaning organizations, a subject that has come up here repeatedly in other contexts.

As the article puts it:

The falling-out at DCAF is emblematic of a much larger clash currently roiling the worlds of philanthropy and nonprofits. Employees at left-leaning, mission-driven organizations have increasingly adopted a worldview that sees all issues of injustice as interconnected, making many less satisfied to contain their advocacy to any single issue. This doesn’t always cause internal disputes: Often, a new position added to a group’s platform will be broadly agreed upon, such as a commitment to ending police brutality, and will function more as an expression of solidarity than a programming priority. But nonprofits that attract staffers and funders of reasonably diverse political leanings are finding it difficult to broaden their messaging in ways that please the full spectrum.

As a result, coalitions that have worked toward similar goals are fracturing over issues only tangentially related to their core missions, threatening their ability to make progress on areas of common ground.

The head of the organization is

still struggling to come to terms with the sudden abandonment of donors with whom she thought she was politically aligned, over a disagreement on an issue that has nothing to do with the service the organization provides: funding abortions in the D.C. area. “I didn’t really understand our supporter base the way I thought I did,” she said.

Yes, she is shocked, shocked! to discover that her simplistic worldview of:

1. Abortion rights are a good cause.

2. People who support abortion rights are good people who support other good causes.

3. Therefore, people who support abortion rights will support this Other Thing that I think is a good cause

has proven not to be true.

Frankly, I find this whole attitude to be selfish. People who work in the private, for-profit sector understand that, notwithstanding the occasional HR blather about “bringing our whole selves to work,” the world doesn’t work that way. You don’t jeopardize your company’s business just so you can use its platform to promote your own personal causes; you can do that on your own time (and maybe not even then, if you’re a high-ranking employee). But folks in the charitable/nonprofit/advocacy world seem to think that their job and their organization’s platform is there to be used to just Do Good generally however they see fit, and fuck the donors and supporters if they don’t agree. Even if that compromises the actual mission, and achieves nothing of substance on the other issue. As Slate notes:

Therein lies the big dilemma at the heart of this situation. Whatever influence an abortion fund’s Instagram account might have on the well-being of Palestinians in Gaza is small: It relies on the hope that playing a small role in shifting the cultural conversation might eventually change U.S. policies around Israel. Likewise, the withholding of funds from a pro-Palestine abortion fund will do little, if anything, to protect Israelis or Jews.

The people hanging in the balance here are abortion-seekers who cannot afford the cost of terminating a pregnancy, and everyone involved in this story wants them to get the money they need to make their own reproductive choices. In the last fiscal year, DCAF helped more than 3,000 people living in or traveling to the D.C. area get abortions. Is it worth it to make a political statement—in an Instagram post or with the withdrawal of one’s money—if it comes at their expense?

I should note that Korman, the Jewish employee who left, is hardly beyond criticism here. (Again, putting aside whatever your feelings are about I-P.) She involves a lot of the classic tropes about feeling “unsafe” and accusing her former colleagues of not acknowledging “her humanity.”

It seems Stanford Medicine doesn’t know what a woman is.

Update: That said, I can’t find the page on the Stanford Med website…

Update 2: Marcy Jane xirself stepped up to help me.

Ah yes, there it is, in the glossary – the special bespoke LGBTQ+ glossary. Along with other dubious definitions. The stuff on there is not…how shall I put this…medical. It’s identityical, not medical.

How are adults managing to do this first week at university routine still?

The madness persists, as was made clear last week with news that an NHS hospital – the James Paget University Hospitals Trust in Great Yarmouth – has told people working in obstetrics and midwifery to refer to new babies’ gender as having been “assigned female/male at birth” which it claims “accurately depicts the situation of what happens at birth”.

Yes, youngster, it’s true that we name things and that that’s a human activity as opposed to something carved into the cosmos. It does not follow that the things we name are not real.

Please move on now. Failure to do so will result in failing the course.

We keep bumping into the black box issue. It is, of course, one of the core problems with this ridiculous ideology/mooovement – pinning down wtf it’s about, what it expects, what in hell it’s talking about. What, exactly, do you mean by “trans rights”? What do you mean by “equality”? How do you know any of the claims you make are true or reasonable or compatible with other people’s rights? Where do you get all this?

Case in point:

What, exactly, are these “trans rights” that people are stripping away?

Until we’re informed, I suppose we have to assume it’s the usual nonsense about being “affirmed” as what they are not. But that’s not a right. I know I’ve said that several billion times, but it doesn’t get said enough by other people. There is no such thing as a right to be “affirmed” as X with X being “whatever you say you are.” I don’t have any right to say I’m a tree or a piano or a bag of tortilla chips and force everyone else to affirm what I say. That’s not a right; it bears no resemblance to a right.

Maybe he means also, or instead, the rights that would flow from that affirmation? The right to be hired for jobs that only women can do, the right to go into places that are reserved for women, the right to enter contests for women, the right to compete against women in swimming and volleyball and cycling and above all boxing.

But that putative right would depend on the authenticity of the first right, the right to be “affirmed” as the sex you’re not, and that is not a right.

It’s odd that so many people pretend it is a right. Maybe we just haven’t talked about it enough yet. How is it a right for men to force everyone to agree that they’re women? (It applies with the sexes reversed too of course, but the violations of real rights are much less glaring and grotesque when it’s women claiming to be men.) Seriously: how is that a right? Please explain.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on Under the influence.

we should be able to give informed consent to our own treatment – just as any cisgender young person already can

Yeah, but no. It’s more complicated than that.

First of all, define “young person”. Since we’re talking about puberty-blockers, then that’s going to be someone who is at most in their early teens. So can – let’s say – a 12-year-old consent to treatment? Sometimes. it depends on the treatment, and on the child.

Importantly, though, consent doesn’t mean demand. Too many people think that it does. Consent is a negative thing: it’s about my being able to tell you what you not do to me, not about my being able to tell you what you should. Or, perhaps, we could say that the default is that treatment should not be given, but consent lifts the barrier.

In effect, it means that the doctor comes up with a suggestion that is expected to serve the child’s (or any other patient’s) best interests, and the child (or adult patient) agrees to it. Sometimes, there’ll be more than one option, because treatment modalities have up- and downsides. Sometimes there’ll be more than one option, because what counts as “best interests” is open to debate: medical, social, in keeping with the patient’s account of the kind of life they want to lead, and so on. To give a hackneyed example, the JW might sincerely believe that it is in her best interests not to have the blood transfusion, and given a sufficiently strong commitment about the kind of life she’d find tolerable, then that’s all fine and groovy.

That, in essence, is what Gillick v West Norfolk was all about. And I think that some people get misled by that because, superficially, it lends itself to the fallacy that consent is the same as request or demand. But presumably the doctor in that case thought that prescribing the pill was in the girl’s best interests; had he not thought that, he ought not to have been offering it. In a way, it was fortuitous that she asked for it; but her having asked for it wasn’t really the driving force behind its prescription being permissible.

And so: can these kids give consent? Possibly some can, though since PBs are most use to the very young, the more useful they are, the less likely it is that consent would be possible. But all that rides on there being a medical consensus that they should be offered to begin with. Keira Bell had argued that as a matter of fact, she could not give consent to gender-treatment because not enough was known about them. As we know, she lost. But post-Cass, I’m not sure that a parallel case would be lost, because we now know that there’s not really evidence that it serves anyone’s interests. Therefore they shouldn’t be offered. Therefore consent is neither here nor there.

News from the world of film-making:

Lilly Wachowski, co-director of The Matrix and trans filmmaker, is set to adapt Manhunt, a 2022 dystopian horror novel by Gretchen Felker-Martin.

Trans filmmaker – so not a real filmmaker then?

What the Star Observer (“Star” meaning sleb, I take it) means of course is that Wachowski is a man pretending to be a woman, aka a trans woman. Funny how it carefully doesn’t put it that way. Why not? When that’s the whole point? Manhunt is the one that’s about torturing women (aka “terfs”) to death for knowing that men are not women.

The adaptation promises to bring Felker-Martin’s brutal and gripping narrative to life on screen, a story that centres around trans women surviving in a post-apocalyptic world where testosterone transforms people into feral, zombie-like creatures.

It centers around Felker-Martin’s disgusting fantasies about slaughtering women.

Fans of trans horror are eager to see this ground-breaking story brought to the screen, especially given the novel’s unique take on a post-apocalyptic narrative, which diverges from the usual cisgender lens.

In Manhunt, trans women Beth and Fran are on the run, not only from these feral men but also from a group of murderous TERFs.

Subtle, right? It’s not men who are violent, it’s women who know that men are not women who are violent. Those women are in fact murderous. Get ’em!!

The narrative goes beyond mere survival, as the women struggle to continue their transitions amidst the chaos, a literal fight for life in the new world gone mad.

How is struggling to continue “transition” from man to woman a literal fight for life? Pretending to be a woman is not the same thing as life. Life does not depend on pretending to be a woman.

A couple of years ago the Daily Mail did a long flattering article on James “Jan” Morris, the famous pioneering dick-remover.

While Jan was feted around the world for her exquisitely warm and vivid prose, her sense of romanticism, her ground-breaking travel books, for being the first to report that Edmund Hillary had reached the top of Everest in 1953, and for her courage and conviction in embracing the ‘real Jan’ in her pioneering transition from male to female — at home she was rather different.

According to [his youngest child] Suki, who yesterday published an excoriating account of Jan’s appalling parenting in the Sunday Times, her famous parent was selfish, neglectful, sexist and deeply unkind.

Huh. Well you know what? That’s a deal-breaker. That’s four things that no parent should be – that’s a list of four qualities that make their owner a really terrible person to raise a child. It means the person is incapable of giving the child what it needs. If you’re like that, don’t have children at all.

But perhaps her worst crime was being so unforgivably blind to the impact of her 1972 sex-change operation — at a Casablanca hospital, by a dashing young French surgeon called Dr Georges Burou — on those closest to her.

There again – that’s not some minor flaw, it’s a crime against his children.

Jan’s career was already flying at this stage. But her sex change simply magnified her fame. And the demands placed on her by others. Which was fine by her, because she loved to be busy.

‘Three-quarters of the time, I was abroad: wandering around, having a marvellous time,’ she admitted in an interview with the Financial Times in 2018. Even when she was at home with Elizabeth and the children, she’d be glued to her typewriter writing at least 3,000 words a day — even on Christmas Day.

‘My chief fault is an utter self-centredness. It hasn’t always been good,’ she once declared.

That’s not just a “fault”; it’s a disqualification. If you’re utterly self-centered you need to leave other people mostly alone. If you’re utterly self-centered you absolutely should not be in close relationships where the other person expects some affection and attention and the like.

The whoopdedo about his being trans doesn’t even matter; the problem is that he’s the kind of person who decides to “change sex” despite the fact that he has four kids and a wife. Being trans seems to be completely inseparable from being utterly self-centered, and that’s a bad quality to have.

It seems they have a website.

“…convicted torturer SJ/Alan Baker. I have raised a PREVENT and a safeguarding concern with Met Police and Westminster City Council”

I suppose Baker designed the website, too, because that’s how dumb it is.

Home page:

The rights and freedoms of trans+ children and young people have been deliberately and systematically eroded. We have been made into political tools for failing British politics in order to create moral panic, split the left, and distract from real problems.

Eroded? Eroded from what? What are these rights and freedoms of “trans children” that have been “eroded”? Do they extend back into the past as far as we can see?

Of course not. Nobody was talking about “trans children” until recently, so nobody was talking about any such “rights and freedoms.” Newsflash: children don’t have the kinds of freedoms adults have, because it’s not safe for them to have such freedoms. There are no special rights for “trans children.” What Baker no doubt means is the “right” to be talked into idennnifying as trans and proceeding to ruin your life. He’s talking about recruitment, not rights.

About page:

Healthcare

We deserve equal access to gender-affirming healthcare. To delay care to a trans person is to deny it. We don’t have time to wait. Secondly, we should be able to give informed consent to our own treatment – just as any cisgender young person already can.

Well that depends on how you define “young person,” but seeing as how the website is for “trans kids” with no minimum age mentioned, Baker clearly means from infancy on. I’m pretty sure toddlers can’t give informed consent to anything, let alone medical treatment. Baker is an idiot.

We deserve to be treated with respect in all areas of life. We are human beings, and should be protected from misgendering and deadnaming at all times.

Massive non sequitur. Might as well say we are human beings, and should be protected from leaf mold and dry rot at all times.

And finally

We deserve to be heard in all matters which affect our lives. We should not be used as political pawns, and must not be made a spectacle for the benefit of politics or the press.

That is hilarious. Baker is using them as political pawns and making them a spectacle for the benefit of politics and press, and ventriloquizes them as saying he should not be doing that.

There is of course a page telling you to check their fundraising page.

Lizard man very active devouring people.

Elon Musk is using his social media network to spread election conspiracy theories about U.S. disasters — just as online falsehoods are complicating the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Musk has helped spread accusations that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “actively blocked” donations to victims of Helene and is “seizing goods … and locking them away to state they are their own” — allegations that FEMA officials call false and which run afoul of state and local Republican leaders’ praise for the assistance from Washington.

On his social network, X, Musk also amplified rumors that authorities in North Carolina had “taken control to stop people helping” stricken residents and accusations that sheriffs were threatening to arrest FEMA staff “if they hinder rescue and aid work.” Many of his allegations centered on the claim that immigrants had already depleted federal disaster funds, which FEMA has said is untrue.

“FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason,” Musk wrote without evidence on X, where he interspersed messages about hurricane damage with political attacks on Democrats.

The horror movie we’re living in keeps getting worse.

The lizard people are teaming up.

Elon Musk’s X social media platform has reportedly worked with Donald Trump’s campaign to censor material that could be harmful to the former president’s White House chances as part of a pattern of election interference that is unprecedented in U.S. history. According to The New York Times, Trump told one associate that Musk was pumping $500 million into his campaign. The two men are said to speak “multiple times a week.”

The Times reported that the Trump campaign “connected with X” to prevent the spread of hacked information supposedly from a dossier drawn up by GOP staffers tasked with vetting running mate JD Vance. X, formerly known as Twitter, then suspended the account of the journalist who posted the leak and blocked links to the material, said two people quoted as having knowledge of the situation.

…

The tech billionaire’s “frenzied engagement” in the race is said by the Times to reflect his determination to help secure a Trump victory. His millions are being funneled through a Super PAC and he has set up a team of top advisors at a war room in Pittsburgh. According to federal records, America PAC has so far spent $80 million boosting the Trump campaign, much of it going towards voter canvassing programs.

“I’m not sure there is a precedent in modern history to how Musk has inserted himself into the presidential race,” historian Benjamin Soskis told the Times.

They should just rename it the Bad Men Party.

Ah this again. Seems like a century ago, and like yesterday.

The Telegraph on the slaughter of the crickets:

Four suspected trans rights protesters attacked a gender-critical conference by releasing hundreds of live crickets into a packed auditorium. The stunt threw the annual LGB Alliance conference into chaos, as a room of about 600 people had to be evacuated on Friday afternoon…Rhona Hotchkiss, the compere of the event, encouraged people to stamp on the crickets.

That seems unnecessary. Crickets are harmless, and they’re nourishment for a lot of critters up the food chain. I’ve fed crickets to plenty of reptiles and birds back in the day.

Kate Barker, LGB Alliance’s chief executive, told The Telegraph that security guards had stopped the protester as she tried to leave the building and the police were called to the scene. She said: “They are trying to squash reasoned debate with silly tactics.

Could that be because reasoned debate is ruled out because what can they say???

It was an abrupt end to the charity’s fourth annual conference, which had featured speeches from writers, activists and lawyers. Many of the speeches criticised gender ideology, which is the belief that gender is not binary and can differ from your assigned sex at birth.

James Dreyfus, the keynote speaker who appeared in the 1999 film Notting Hill, said he had experienced homophobic abuse from supporters of the gender ideology movement.

“The current gender movement is undoubtedly the most homophobic movement I’ve witnessed since the early 80s,” he said. “And that is no exaggeration. We all have re-experienced being called ‘fucking poofs, Aids carriers’ etc.

“From three very specific groups. Firstly, the mob that is known as Trans Radical Activists. Secondly from those who feel the need to put their preferred pronouns in their online bios. And thirdly, from the ‘allies’, perhaps the most worrisome of all, who understand so little of the facts or indeed what the entire argument is about that I’m continually astonished how usually intelligent people have become so utterly brainwashed.”

Same, James, same.

Other speakers included Catherine Leng, a former senior journalist on the BBC News Channel, who left the corporation after multiple disciplinary actions over her gender-critical views. Speaking at the conference, she said the BBC had been, and remained, unbalanced in its coverage of trans issues.

She said: “2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, everything was so trans-affirmative it was incredible. There were no stories about puberty blockers but there were stories about transgender struggles.”

A BBC spokesman said: “We don’t agree with this characterisation; the BBC reports a wide range of views and perspectives on the subject, in line with our editorial guidelines.”

Hahahahahahahahahaha that’s a good one.

“India” Willoughby is an evil dangerous liar.

“Gender Critical is a hate movement,” he says. “No different [from] belonging to the Ku Klux Klan.” He’s a filthy malicious liar. Of course being gender critical is nothing like belonging to the KKK. The KKK disguised themselves and terrorized Black people with violence because the Klan considered them inferior and dangerous. People who are gender critical don’t believe that men are women, and we say so, and we argue about it.

Not the same things.

Willoughby is a filthy liar.

I share his frustration.

Alabama’s most respected meteorologist, James Spann, recently expressed frustration over a “society full of hate, anger, rage, and the inability to think clearly,” following an onslaught of negative responses after he attempted to debunk hurricane-related misinformation. Spann took to Facebook earlier in the week to share his concerns after encountering a wave of false claims about Hurricane Milton, which developed in the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall in Florida. His post, as first reported by AL.com, urged his followers to stop spreading misinformation.

Among the wild claims Spann addressed were conspiracy theories, such as the assertion that “the moon has disappeared and was nuked by the government,” and that hurricanes were being steered by “chemtrails.” He also highlighted other baseless claims, like the notion that federal agencies were manipulating weather patterns to influence the upcoming presidential election or imprisoning relief workers.

I was unaware of that claim about the moon. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it around lately.

Later in the week, Spann shared a link to a FEMA page that debunked rumors surrounding Hurricane Helene. However, instead of appreciation, Spann was met with a barrage of hostile comments. In a follow-up post, he wrote, “I pass along information from officials with zero comment. I have no interest in politics. But the threats I have received from posting this are not good. Some I turned in. Some of the most hateful messages I have received come from people with Bible verses all over their profile. It is clear that we live in a society full of hate, anger, rage, and the inability to think critically. It has been very tough today, and all I do is pass along information. If you hate me, that is fine, but you might want to pull down those verses and your church affiliation. It isn’t a good look. This post will be gone soon.”

Two words. Trump & Murdoch.

Obama tells men it’s not Manly to be afraid to back women.

Former President Barack Obama traveled to Pittsburgh on Thursday to urge voters there to choose Vice President Kamala Harris in November, aiming a message at one group in particular: Black men.

The decision voters have between the vice president and former President Donald J. Trump, her Republican opponent, “isn’t a close call,” Mr. Obama said as he visited with a group of campaign volunteers and officials at a field office just ahead of his appearance at a Harris rally. His message was for Black male voters whom he said might not be yet on board with Ms. Harris.

Citing “reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities,” he called out what he said was flagging enthusiasm for Ms. Harris compared with the support he received when he was running for the presidency in 2008.

“You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve got a problem with that.

“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Mr. Obama continued, adding that the “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time. When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting.”

Besides which, is it really better to have a toad for president rather than a woman?

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.