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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free enterprise to the rescue!

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

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

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

I missed this Spiked article back in June:

The ACLU is broken beyond repair

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

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

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

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

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

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

Locking him up.

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

In short: fuck around and find out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally a comment by Sastra on Well ask yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

I probably shouldn’t laugh, but…

More chaos has unfolded at the Burning Man festival as revellers clashed during the exodus from the Nevada desert.

Attendees finally began leaving the city at Black Rock City on Monday afternoon after severe flooding and muddy conditions left thousands stranded over the weekend.

During the mass exodus, Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen said that attendees “lashed out” at each other as they faced an eight-hour wait to leave. “As usually happens in what Burners refer to as the ‘default world’ people allow their emotions to override their reasonableness and they are lashing out at each other as they leave the playa and attempt to make it to their next destination,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Peace and love, man, peace and love.

The annual burning of the man went ahead on Monday evening, after being delayed by the weather.

Yay! That little bit more carbon added!

Bahahahahahahaha sure Colin sure.

Originally a comment by Papito on Well ask yourself.

“As with any identity…”

It’s like this Wight is speaking backwards and inside out. He’s reifying a peculiar and uncommon interpretation of “identity.” Most of the other features he wants to conflate with gender identity lack this characteristic of having to be expressed and therefore signaled. Nobody has to express and signal their nationality unless they happen to be passing through immigration and customs at the airport, and we have passports for that. Likewise, nobody has to express and signal their actual sex – it’s still there whether they want to swing it around or not.

Wight’s concept that the trans-identifying male expresses himself through female gender stereotypes because that’s the language people use to communicate the fact that they’re really women inside is precisely backwards. They’re never women inside, but they’re infatuated with the symbolic language of normative gender stereotypes itself – from the outside in, not from the inside out. Maybe the key difference is between the words “identity” and “identification.” The latter is an action, not a quality, and the action is the entire process, a (hopeless) attempt to secure or claim the quality.

Let’s bring class back into it. With apologies to the English – for whom I understand there is a difference between class and wealth – if one is very wealthy one doesn’t run around trying to prove it to people. The very wealthy (and I know my share) don’t act like caricatures of the wealthy (e.g. Trump), covering themselves in gold and always driven about in limousines. That is identification as wealthy. Those who have the actual identity of wealth strive not to be identifiable as wealthy, because it would crimp their lifestyle. They drive modest cars, and I meet them at our local tavern dressed like everybody else.

You don’t become wealthy by expressing and signaling that you’re wealthy – in fact, quite the opposite, you can go broke doing that. Likewise, nobody becomes a woman by expressing and signaling that they are a woman – that just produces caricatures like Dylan Mulvaney.

No abaya in the state schools.

The French education minister has said that nearly 300 pupils arrived at school on Monday wearing the abaya, the long Muslim robe which was banned in schools last week.

Not just pupils; female pupils. It’s so BBC to omit that from the lede.

Most of the girls agreed to change into other clothes.

According to official figures, 298 girls – mainly aged 15 or more – turned up at school in the banned garment. Under instructions laid down by the ministry, there followed in each case a period of dialogue with school staff.

67 girls refused and were sent home. Next step is dialogue with the families; if that fails the girls will be excluded.

It’s difficult, because that’s bad for the excluded girls, and there’s always the worry about xenophobia, religious freedom, all that. On the other hand the whole idea that post-puberty female humans have to be treated as a dangerous contaminant is bad for every girl and woman in France and for that matter the world.

France has a strict ban on religious signs in state schools and government buildings, arguing that they violate secular laws. Wearing a headscarf has been banned since 2004 in state-run schools.

The move comes after months of debate over the wearing of abayas in French schools. The garment is being increasingly worn in schools, leading to a political divide over them, with right-wing parties pushing for a ban while those on the left have voiced concerns for the rights of Muslim women and girls.

But it’s a peculiar kind of “right” of women and girls to be extinguished like a candle just because they’re women and girls.

In 2010, France banned the wearing of full-face veils in public, provoking anger in France’s five million-strong Muslim community.

As usual, the BBC words it in such a way as to nudge us into thinking all French Muslims are Islamists.

And yet, does Peter ever post matching tweets telling us men and trans men are two different kinds of men? Does he ever say “Unite to defend ALL men, including trans”?

I’m finding this “identity” discussion Colin Wight is curating quite frustrating, because I can’t figure out what he means by “identity” and he keeps elaborating on it without saying what he means by it. I gather we’re all supposed to know, but I’m kind of allergic to things we’re all supposed to know (and act on, and respect, and so on) that can’t be defined.

Well ask yourself what a class identity is, or a National identity? It’s the same thing with gender. It can only mean you identify with/as the word proceeding it. So it would mean they identify with gender not sex. And gender is; the norms, values, expectations, roles, practices, and beliefs a society places on the sexes. So gender identity would be to identify with the norms, values, expectations, practices, and beliefs a society has placed on the sexes. Some people identify intensely with gender; some not at all. And that’s exactly what we observe; trans people adopt the gender norms associated with the opposite sex. They identify with an image of the opposite sex they’ve constructed in their heads on the basis of their understanding of those gender norms. Re your questions, we tend to see. 1; some do actually believe they are the sex they identify with, some don’t. 2. Some do want to become the opposite sex and undergo surgery etc, some just dress and act as if they’re the opposite sex. 3. Most, I would suspect do want to be seen and recognised “as if” they were the opposite sex. The way this is mostly attempted is through gender expression and performance. 4. Since it’s gender identity, the way they mostly achieve this (3) can only be by adopting the gender norms (stereotypes) of the society they’re in. As with any identity to express it to the world we have to signal it. Punks wear particular clothes. Nationalists fly flags. Women (according to the gender norms)…wear make-up, dresses, act feminine, can’t drive, dance around, are ditz. See Dylan Mulvaney, he’s a perfect example of someone who thinks being a girl is to conform with the gender norms we associate with the female sex. He can’t demonstrate how he’s a girl by acting like a large gamete (that would be sex identity), he can only signal it using signs that society will understand. That’s gender.

Like that. “Well ask yourself what a class identity is, or a National identity.” I have no idea! That’s my point! I do not know what you’re talking about. I don’t see what “identity” adds to “National” there. Nationality is a crisp, official, simple fact.

I don’t have a “class identity” or a “National identity.” I don’t normally capitalize “national,” either. I have a nationality: it’s just a fact. My class is less factual, more complicated, more open to debate, as is the case with many people, so using the two together as examples is unhelpful.

I’ve written about this puzzle of what people mean when they blather about “identity” before. One of my columns for Free Inquiry was about it. As we all know, trans “identity” is a very big and obtrusive subject – but that’s because it’s so ridiculous and counter-factual.

Maybe this bit will help clarify?

As with any identity to express it to the world we have to signal it.

So identity is something we want to express to the world?

But what if we don’t? What if we don’t want to express it to the world? What if we wouldn’t dream of flouncing around in the world expressing our idenninies all the time?

I’m stumped. I cannot figure out what he’s talking about.

I don’t get this. I don’t think “identity” is real, and I don’t really get why other people do.

I don’t think I can describe myself as gender critical anymore (if I ever did). Gender identity is real. It’s as real as national identity, class identity, ethnic identity; any group identity you can think of. People identify with all sorts of things; their careers, their families, their football clubs, types of music, even their cars (yes, I have friends who identity with being only BMW drivers; sad I know). And the things they identify with are important to them. The thing is, though, saying gender identity is real, doesn’t mean everyone has a little gender man/woman/NB inside their head before they’re born. You can only identify “with/as” something once you become conscious of it. Identity is an on-going process of human development and it’s not something innate. And some of our identities are quite fixed, others are constantly changing. If I was born in Liverpool I’d probably be a Liverpool supporter (what a thought).

But how is national identity “real”? There are facts (real facts, if you like) about people’s nationality; what is added by labeling that “national identity”? There is the clear, factual sense of “identity” as in “identity card,” but that’s a different thing from this abstract idea of having a national or class “identity.” You just are whatever nationality you are. You just have the history you have, and it may be clear what class you are or it may not. You just have a sex; what a “gender identity” is is shrouded in mystery.

And is “identifying with” things “real”? What does it mean? It doesn’t mean you are the things – it seems to mean you are someone who likes the things, or spends time doing the things, or paid a lot of money for the things. Why bring “identity” into it?

I, for one, don’t think I do “identify with” things that way. I have likes and passions, yes, but when I need to talk about them I just say that, I don’t bother with identifying with them.

I don’t think we need to take this idea with such seriousness. Leave it to the sociologists.

What fresh hell is this?

Sure, chum, the fact that you say You Are A Safe Person means you absolutely are one and definitely not just saying you are one for nefarious purposes. This is a very excellent idea.

Also, notice that as usual women have no need of safety. Women are the people everyone else needs protection from.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on No worries.

…“by the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse”…

Well maybe they should have tought of that, hmmm? Aren’t there other economic systems not reliable on “reliable growth?” “Supply and demand” isn’t nearly as robust a law as “You can’t eat if there is no supply. Or drink. Or breathe.” You’d think we’d have a bit more sense than a mat of bacteria in a Petri dish that thinks it’s got a limitless supply of growth medium at their disposal. Or not.

Our current economic regime represents a tiny fraction of the time that humans have been on Earth. We’ve never had it so good; we’ve never made it so bad. We haven’t yet realized that these two are cause and effect. It doesn’t have to be this way. We could do fine with less stuff; better still if there were fewer of us putting pressure on the planet. There’s a bare minimum required to sustain our numbers, but our impact goes way beyond that. How much of what we’ve done has been the result of industrialized liesure and entertainment, mechanized, motorized, mass-produced – and consumed- pleasure and distraction? Ophelia’s comments on cruise ships hit this on the head. Yet stopping this would be seen as a restriction on “freedom.” But our freedom to be irresponsible is costing the world. Shifting gears to change this would cut into too many profit margins for it to be permitted. So much easier, and cheaper, to continue with business as usual for as long as possible than to disrupt everything and retool how we do things to forestall disaster. Which will be a good deal more disruptive, but whatever. So the ones selling us the tickets will keep telling us that there is a free lunch, things are just fine, and that this rollercoaster will keep going up-up-up forever. As long as there is money yet to be made from the Cruise to Hell, they’ll keep offering passage and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Mustn’t alarm the bacteria paying customers, right?

Huh. So they want to exile us now.

He wants to “exile” us as “sick”; he wants to boycott us and banish us.

But don’t worry, this is a very healthy and progressive ideology and movement.

The Guardian tells us:

A high-end hotel in the liberal Texan enclave of Austin is playing host to a conference whose theme is boosting global birth rates, but which will in fact feature racist and eugenicist internet personalities and far-right media figures.

Boosting global birth rates – brilliant. That’s like throwing bottles of gasoline onto a house fire.

The Natal conference – whose website warns that “by the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse” – is scheduled to be held on 1 December at the Line Hotel.

Somebody should tell them about the other systems that are going to collapse, long before the end of the century.

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, said the meeting will cement links between the far right and influential rightwing opinion-makers. “It’s not surprising to see far-right folks, eugenicist types and white nationalists joining forces at a conference like this. They have become bedfellows,” she said.

She added: “The far right has long fretted about a demographic winter, and though they don’t necessarily say it openly, what they are referring to most often is a fall in white birthrates.”

If only they knew they can just stop fretting because global warming is going to make their concerns irrelevant.

Billy Bragg is unapologetic and determined: he knows which views are unpopular and To Be Avoided. Whether they’re any good or not is entirely beside the point.

Come on, Suzanne. Can he be any clearer??? The views in question are frowned upon. What more is there to say? We all know that no true claim is ever unpopular, right? Well then.

Her views are contentious! And divisive! And therefore obviously wrong. No true or reasonable or useful view is ever contentious or divisive, so why is Hadley even trying?

Nobody must ever say anything contentious!! How is this so contentious? Why is everyone not agreeing with my assertion that contentious views are automatically wrong and forbidden?!!

People can see! They won’t sit next to you in the cafeteria! They won’t ask you to their parties! They’ll point at you and laugh!

Batshit crazy godbotherer or droll parodist? You be the judge.

Has to be parody, doesn’t it?

Besides, who the hell wants canned peaches for anything? In fact who keeps a big stock of canned foods, so many that you need a code if the labels are gone? Canned foods are mostly bad foods. Why isn’t he instead getting all theological up in there with demanding fresh vegetables and pasta sauce in a glass jar?

Ok has to be parody.

Ooh I know this one, I can help.

Let me explain. Those are two different people, saying different things. So, to offer an analogy, you might like the novels of Natalie Haynes but not the novels of Lionel Shriver, or vice versa, because those are two different people writing different books. Do you see how that works? It’s quite a common occurrence, so it’s a good idea to get used to it.

LOVE the macramé bracelet.

Click on the image to see the classic Keds, too.