Updating to add: apologies for the abrupt beginning plus lack of source. I’d been going back and forth between video and a transcript so maybe I thought I’d done a previous post with the sources. US Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did a briefing June 14 at which a reporter asked:

“Does the White House worry about the physical safety of females directly competing against males in sports?”

It’s a complicated issue, says Jean-Pierre. She cites giving schools “flexibility to establish their own athletic policies while establishing guardrails to prevent discrimination against transgender kids.”

That is not what he asked. She carefully ignored what he asked. Why did she do that? Why is it more urgent for schools to have “flexibility” than it is for girls to be safe from boys crashing into them in their sports? Why is it more urgent for the White House Press Secretary to make soothing generalizations while not answering the question about girls’ safety?

She talks about a period for public comment and sums up with “But we do understand this is a complicated issue.” Actually it isn’t, or it shouldn’t be. Just go on having separate sports for girls, for their safety and for their opportunities to win. It’s not complicated.

The question asker responds by pressing the point about the girls’ safety.

“So look,” Jean-Pierre says with a sigh, “what you’re alluding to is basically saying that trans kids are dangerous.”

There it is again, right there – The Big Lie. No he’s not “alluding to” that, he’s saying boys‘ playing against girls is dangerous for the girls for the reasons we’ve all known all our lives.

The question-asker protests and Jean-Pierre says “Well you’re saying that their safety is at risk. You’re laying out a kind of broad example or explanation of what could potentially happen, a broad a broad of what could take place; that is dangerous, that is a dangerous thing to say, that essentially transgender kids we’re talking about are dangerous.”

STOP THAT. Not transgender kids; boys in girls’ sports. Stop lying about it!

“and so that’s something I have to call out,” she says smugly. “That is irresponsible.” He protests and she says she just laid out “how complicated it is” and then cuts him off.

It’s fucking outrageous.

So it really is forbidden to talk about LGB, even when LGB is in fact the subject.

But but but but what if it’s a study about LGB people? What if the study is just not about trans people? Isn’t it ok to report on the study?

Apparently not.

That’s very very very interesting.

It’s interesting the other disciplines/professions don’t grasp that it’s good to say you don’t know when you don’t know. It’s interesting that they’re more self-protective and less thoughtful. It’s interesting that they haven’t internalized the fact that winging it is bad, because it risks disinforming. It’s interesting that the truth takes second place to the ego.

Epistemology should be at the heart of education. What do you know and how do you know it? Do you know how to confirm or disconfirm what you know? Do you check your sources? Do you mistake assertion for truth? It all matters.

If people were taught from the outset that they can’t know everything, that it’s better to learn than to pretend to know already, that we’re all easily fooled, and above all that an assertion, no matter how confident, isn’t true just because it’s an assertion…we’d all be better off.

I suppose we have Chase Strangio to thank for this bulletin:

Opposing the death penalty is one thing, and whining about “medically necessary gender-affirming care” is another, when the gender-haver was a rapist and murderer. Citing the rapist murderer’s “enormous suffering” while not citing the victims’ enormous suffering is grotesque.

More mystifying than ever. He must think he looks fabulous or he wouldn’t tweet it but…

Onlookers don’t think he looks fabulous, and wonder why he has a bikini strap growing out of his neck.

Remember, kids, this is a man age 57. What men age 57 do you know who tweet photos of themselves simpering in bathing suits?

All the rest of his time he spends bullying women on social media. Weird fella.

Dude.

Newsflash, OJ. You know who else is defying the expectations attached to the gender sex on our birth certificate? Feminist women, that’s who. We’ve been doing it for years and years and years, decades, centuries. You didn’t invent it, gay men didn’t invent it, trans people sure as hell didn’t invent it. Women too suffer bigotry because we defy those expectations – including yours. You expect us to shut up, to comply, to listen to you instead of ourselves. It’s all very standard, very masculine, very gender expectationsy. You’re not the radical hero you think you are.

My country Our candidate right or wrong. Sign the loyalty oath or lose your job.

Top Republican Party officials have a message for any candidate worried about signing a loyalty pledge to potentially support a convicted felon: There’s the door.

…

In light of Donald Trump’s indictment for his handling of classified documents, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s campaign on Wednesday requested a meeting with RNC officials about amending the loyalty pledge.

An aide took the meeting; the RNC said forget it buddy.

In a statement, RNC senior adviser Richard Walters said the GOP primary candidates are only “being asked to respect the decision of Republican primary voters and support the eventual nominee.”

So if Republican primary voters pick the worst human being on the planet, good Republicans respect that.

“Candidates who are complaining about this to the press should seriously reconsider their priorities and whether they should even be running,” Walters said.

Yeah, priorities, people. What’s the priority? Winning. It doesn’t matter what you win, so long as you win.

Carla Jaeger seems to have a bit of a specialty in reporting on men who claim to be trans invading women’s sports. Her specialty is carefully concealing the fact that she’s talking about men invading women’s sports. I shared today’s entry; there’s another from four days ago.

In March, Harcourt and Robinson formed part of the three-person panel assembled by Basketball Australia to assess the eligibility of transgender basketballer Lexi Rodgers, who applied to join the semi-professional WNBL1 South league. The application was rejected after a near-month long assessment.

Yebbut transgender how? Which kind of transgender?

She doesn’t say. Not only does she not say here at first mention, she never says. She never once spells out that Lexi Rodgers is a trans woman aka a man. Why not? I can only conclude because she or her editors or both are hell bent on promoting men in women’s sports at the expense of women in women’s sports, and willing to do bad journalism in service to this cause.

When empathy comes up, it’s all for the men who say they are women. Women don’t get any empathy.

Compelled by her recent work with transgender athletes (a “really rewarding experience”), Robinson – a professor at the University of Notre Dame – said above all, the issue must be approached with empathy, sensitivity and with an informed mindset.

“The [transgender] athletes I’ve dealt with thus far are very genuine. They’re very keen,” Robinson said.

That’s nice, but what about the women athletes? Why no empathy and sensitivity for them?

Harcourt said: “The gains in women’s sport is significant, and we don’t want to lose that. Not that I think transgender [inclusion] is a risk of that – it’s not, not at all.

“But I don’t think people realise that yet.”

Probably because it’s a big honking lie.

The joys of commerce. Nice Frogtees promotes its line of “or I will stab you” merch.

I wonder if they have any others in that vein. Move to the back of the bus or I will stab you? Get on the train to Auschwitz or I will stab you? End the strike or I will stab you? Stay south of the Rio Grande or I will stab you? Stop screaming and spread your legs or I will stab you? Obey the tyrant or we will stab you?

The text that accompanies this festive threat is slightly discordant.

This is the newest Respect My Pronouns Or I Will Stab You Shirt, hoodie, sweater, tank top and long sleeve tee. These items are created by the design team of Nicefrogtees Store. It is the best gift for you, your friends and your family as well. This item is for men, women, kids, adults, from XS to 5XL. It is a limited edition product so you can buy it for yourself or your loved ones as a gift.

This is our best seller for a reason. Relaxed, tailored and ultra-comfortable, you’ll love the way you look in this durable, reliable classic. Comfortable and light, this premium product is the best choice. High-quality print adds a statement to one’s workout or everyday routine.

Journalism simply refuses to report on this subject honestly or accurately. The Age on “Australia’s new sports trans guidelines”:

Transgender athlete Hannah Mouncey has declared Australia’s new guidelines for elite trans athletes as the best and most detailed that she’s seen.

The issue isn’t “trans athletes.” The issue is males in female sports. Journalism simply will not say that.

However, the guidelines, developed by the Australian Institute of Sport to guide Australia’s sporting codes on what to do when transgender athletes seek to join elite competitions, were condemned in a scathing statement from the Queer Sporting Alliance.

Not transgender athletes; male athletes in female elite competitions. They know this but refuse to say it.

At a time when the inclusion of transgender athletes is at the centre of a polarising debate, further complicated by the politicisation of trans rights, these new guidelines are intended to create a consistent and fair approach that balance the interests of inclusion and the integrity of sport in Australia.

Still lying, still concealing the actual issue, still presenting it as being mean to transgender athletes.

Mouncey, an elite handballer whose bid to join the AFL was rejected, said the guidelines were the best and most thoughtful that she’s seen.

Why was his bid rejected? The Age carefully doesn’t say.

In the guidelines, the AIS states that an outright ban of transgender athletes from a sport – similar to policies introduced by World Aquatics (formerly FINA) or World Athletics – could be in breach of Australia’s anti-discrimination laws. Instead, the framework emphasises the need for case-by-case assessments of trans athletes.

Again. Issue not transgender athletes. Issue male athletes in women’s sports.

They are not compulsory, however, and emphasise the assessment and eligibility of transgender athletes in professional settings is dependent on the sport. This is because what is considered advantageous differs from sport to sport.

But above all it differs depending on which sex we’re talking about.

The guidelines also recommend a testosterone threshold of 2.5 nanomoles per litre for a minimum of two years, a stricter threshold than the majority of Australian sports’ current policies. However, the guidelines include wiggle room for sports that rely less on explosive and physical power, as experts emphasise the nuance required when addressing trans eligibility in elite sport.

Finally a hint that the issue might have something to do with male athletes destroying women’s sports, but it’s a very secretive veiled hint.

Olympic swimmers McKeown and Groves have also come out in public support of transgender inclusion at the elite level.

Now that’s just weird. It’s the first mention of these two names, and we don’t know what sex they are. In contrast…

“I’m all for allowing trans athletes to compete in sport and giving them equal opportunity to pursue their dreams, have fun and compete to the best of their ability,” McKeown said. “After all, isn’t that what sports are all about?”

Groves added: “Australia prides itself on being a country that gives people a fair go, we should never deny people opportunities because of their gender … Trans people deserve to play sport like anyone else.”

Others, including Katherine Deves, the one-time Liberal candidate who has been criticised for inflammatory and offensive language used against transgender people, described the guidelines as a “betrayal” to women’s sport.

At long last a woman gets to say something, but she is called evil first so that we’ll be sure to understand that we have to ignore what she says.

It’s a staggeringly dishonest article.

Always start the day with a bracing challenge to pious humiliation rituals. Kathleen Stock is a brilliant challenger. The news from Ukraine is grim, she says, but on the upside…

…the American author of Eat, Pray, Love has withdrawn her next book from publication.

The novel in question, The Snow Forest, is set in Siberia, and is now postponed indefinitely in the name of the Ukrainian people. In a video made by its author Elizabeth Gilbert to explain her decision, she explained she did “not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm”.

Upon hearing this, my first thought was that surely this book can’t be that bad. A memoirist and compulsive advice-giver as well as a novelist, Gilbert writes chatty, candid prose with an emphasis on spiritual matters.

In other words she writes the kind of thing I’d rather rip my own head off than read.

Though the peppy writing style tends to set my teeth on edge, thousands of female readers apparently adore her.

Wait. Maybe I am trans after all.

Joke, but not entirely joke. It always irritates me that women are the target audience for this kind of dreck and that so many of them oblige.

It’s perhaps not surprising when a self-help guru turns out not to follow her own lessons in practice. But it is genuinely sad to find a novelist as apparently accomplished as Gilbert misrepresenting fiction as governed by some strange guilt-by-association principle — acting as if, at any time, a work’s importance and value might be cancelled out by more pressing priorities in the real world.

Lie down with slushy self-help authors, get up with profound confusion.

…the truth is that sensitivity readers, trigger warnings and censoring attempts are mostly directed towards publishing for women and children, rather than publishing for men. It’s chick-lit not prick-lit that tends to be treated as something to be morally perfected, and each week seems to throw up a new example. This week, it was also the turn of Nancy Mitford’s comic romance The Pursuit of Love, now published with the pious declaration that the text contains “prejudices” which were “wrong then” and which are also “wrong today”.

Oh get out. Of course it contains prejudices; they’re part of the comedy!

But if we collectively stopped giving internet bullies the power, they wouldn’t have any. In my own preferred version of a more inspiring world, no women author or other female creative would ever have to make a retraction of their work again, or publicly apologise for anything at all. But if that’s too much of a pipe dream, then I think we should at least all commit to mocking any prominent authors with apologetic tendencies, until they start apologising for previous apologies in a panicked recursive spiral. I really think this strategy could be a gamechanger. I might even write a self-help book about it.

Let’s think of a title. Eat, Drink, Mock?

Wait, who missed the point here?

Hinting that we’re vermin now. Always a healthy sign.

It turns out Trump is the victim of an authoritarian coup.

The day before former President Donald J. Trump was arraigned on federal charges, he gave an interview to Americano Media, a conservative Spanish-language broadcaster in South Florida, and described his indictment as a “regression” of democracy.

Minutes before he pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom on Tuesday, his spokeswoman told reporters that the episode was something “you see in dictatorships like Cuba and Venezuela.”

…

As he mounts his political defense against a 37-count indictment, Mr. Trump has repeatedly invoked corruption and dysfunction in Latin American governments, casting himself in the role of oppressed political dissident.

Why does that sound so familiar? Oh yes – because it sounds like men in skirts claiming to be oppressed by women. It’s the Hot New Thing for people at the top of the pyramid to pretend to be at the bottom and the victim of people who actually are at the bottom. You’d think it would be too blatantly outrageous to get any traction, but as we’ve learned, you’d be wrong.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly alluded to Democrats as “communists,” including during a speech on Tuesday night at his club in Bedminster, N.J.

“If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me,” he said. “They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings and even future Republican candidates, which they do.”

Roy Cohn lives again.

The Rev. Yoelis Sánchez, a pastor at a local church who was born in the Dominican Republic, said she did not hesitate when asked to go to Versailles Restaurant to pray with Mr. Trump. Several religious people, including evangelicals and Catholics, prayed with him while her daughter sang.

“We prayed for God to give him strength and for the truth to come out,” she said. “We are really concerned for his welfare.”

Ms. Sánchez, who lives in Doral, Fla., was not yet a citizen in 2020. She would not say whether she plans to vote for him next year.

“I don’t think he came here just because of the Latino vote,” she said. “He came because he wanted to meet with people who have biblical thinking — he’s pro-life and pro-family and Latinos identify with that.”

Pro-family? Really? Two divorces, bragging about not doing a lick of childcare, much extra-marital shtupping, you can grab them by the pussy?

Other people’s identities…

…and if your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure, and cause them such discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.

What does that even mean?

At this particular moment we know that “people’s identities” means the raging insistence of a small number of men that they are women and that women must not say they are men.

So it seems she’s saying that if the views of women that men are not women are displeasing to men who say they are women, then those women must be forcibly silenced.

So then what about the safety, security, and comfort of women?

What if men’s insistence on invading women’s sports and women’s spaces and women’s literal (not fantasy) identities makes women’s lives insecure and unsafe and causes them such discomfort that they cannot live in peace?

I’d love to know, but I don’t suppose Senator Pauline O’Reilly will ever say.

Reduxx reports:

A prominent trans activist has been sentenced for the 2016 triple homicide of a California lesbian couple and their son. Dana Rivers, born David Chester Warfield, has been handed a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

“It is a horrible thing to sentence someone to die in prison, and I don’t take that lightly,” Judge Scott Patton said during the court hearing held today. “But this is the most depraved crime I ever handled in the criminal justice system in 33 years. Frankly, you deserve to spend the rest of your life in prison.”

…

Rivers’ crimes date back to November 11 of 2016, when police were called in response to the sound of gunshots being fired outside the home of Wright and Reed in Oakland, California. When authorities arrived, they found Rivers covered in blood and gasoline and fleeing from the house, which had been set ablaze.

…

Examiners found that Charlotte Reed had been stabbed and bludgeoned dozens of times in addition to having gunshot wounds. Her partner, Patricia Wright, had been shot twice, and her son, Benny Diambu-Wright, who had just graduated from Berkeley High School, had been shot in the heart. The bodies of Wright, Reed, and Diambu-Wright were found inside the burning wreckage. Rivers was quickly taken into custody and booked at the Alameda County jail where he has remained since.

According to police reports, Rivers “began to make spontaneous statements about [his] involvement in the murders” while being arrested. Rivers ultimately confessed to killing the two women and their son, but entered a plea of not guilty on charges of triple homicide in 2017.

Before that he was something of a celebrity activist. He got fired from his job teaching high school, and parlayed that into semi-pro haranguing.

Following the administration’s decision not to renew his employment, Rivers subsequently initiated a widely-publicized discrimination lawsuit that launched his career as a trans activist and resulted in a compensatory award of $150,000. He appeared on the Today Show and Good Morning America, and had even been profiled in the New York Times, quickly elevating his profile as a respected LGBT advocate.

Rivers was a keynote speaker for the National Center for Lesbian Rights as well as for The Tiffany Club, an organization founded to promote the political interests of those with “gender confusion.” 

Rivers also spoke as a guest lecturer at several universities, including Stanford and UC Davis, and served as a Board Member for the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE).

But it turns out he didn’t like lesbians all that much after all.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Originally a comment by latsot on Preserving mystery in legislation.

I’ve lived a sort of double life as part scientist and part engineer, so I like to come at these things from two directions. On the one hand we have the big-picture thinking described well by iknklast and Holmes: this is a terrible idea for freedom and democracy. It will be used to serve political goals, that’s inevitable. Over in the UK, we’ve installed Police and Crime Commissioners as political appointments; these are the people who would be in charge of how hate laws are implemented in practice, which makes me more than a little uneasy. The entire principle of policing in the UK is that police are supposed to be civilians, not soldiers or agents of the government.

But the engineer in me sees it from the practical angle too. The phrase that keeps occurring to me is “if all else fails, we can always get him for hate crime.”

Police hate protests because they’re difficult and expensive to manage. They’re always looking for excuses to prevent them or to ban them outright. In the UK we’ve just passed an extremely dangerous law giving police authority to arrest people in the general area of a protest without probable cause. It was used on day one to do just that. It’s roughly the equivalent of arresting someone with a paperclip of “going equipped to commit a crime” because they might conceivably pick a lock with it.

If they had hate crime laws to back them up, I have no doubt at all that UK police would use them to put as much of an end to protests as they could; not for political reasons, but purely because of cost.

There is absolutely no upside to this law that I can see and I hate to think of it serving as a model in other jurisdictions.

Make it make sense.

Women have shared their concern about the erasure of “all female identities” after Johns Hopkins University used the phrase “non-man” to describe lesbians.

The Baltimore-based university received backlash online after defining “lesbian” as “a non-man attracted to non-men” in its glossary of LGBTQ+ terms.

The update, which has since been removed from the website, was initially meant to be inclusive of non-binary individuals, who may still identify as lesbians.

That last bit. What can possibly be the point of being “inclusive” of a tiny tiny tiny fragment of the population, which has a fatuous delusion that it’s something labeled “non-binary,” which doesn’t mean anything, at the expense of over half of the population? Why be “inclusive” of 147 people at the low low cost of excluding 4 billion? What is the point?

Katha Pollitt on Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-cancellation:

Sometimes, the censors get lucky. The latest writer to cancel herself is Elizabeth Gilbert, the immensely popular author of Eat, Pray, Love and other memoirs, novels, and self-help tracts. On Monday, Gilbert announced on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook that she is “making a course correction” and pulling her upcoming novel, The Snow Forest, from publication. The novel, she explains, is about a Russian family that withdraws from Soviet society in the 1930s and remains isolated for many years in Siberia. “Over the course of this weekend,” she writes, “I have received an enormous massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now, any book, no matter what the subject of it is, that is set in Russia.”

Which makes no sense. None. Zero. What about a book on how Putin clawed his way to power? What about a book on the state murders he has made happen? What about a book about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya? I have such a book; should I get rid of it?

What about a biography of Chekhov or Tolstoy or Balanchine? What about a book about Stalin’s Terror? What about a book documenting how New York Times journalist Walter Duranty prettied up Stalin’s Terror in Ukraine???

Katha goes on:

The publication announcement describes the book as “a dramatic story of one wild and mysterious girl in a pristine wilderness, and of the mystical connection between humans and the natural world.” To tell you the truth, it sounds rather silly to me. But since no one commenting has read the book, how do they know it romanticizes the Russian soul and admires Russia? After all, the book is about Soviet dissidents in the time of Stalin who are so horrified by their society they hide away from other Russians for many decades.

It sounds extremely silly to me, as does the eatpraylove book, but not as silly as her decision to cancel herself.

I support Ukraine in its self-defense against the Russian invasion. I don’t understand the infatuation of a part of the left with the USSR or Putin’s Russia, or their weird claim that Russia, currently invading a sovereign nation, is anti-imperialist. I can understand why Gilbert’s Ukrainian fans would be upset about The Snow Forest, as it exists in their imaginations. But I can think of better ways for Gilbert to have responded, beginning with “I think you’ll be surprised when you actually read the book.”

As for Hitler, should people really have stopped reading German literature when the Nazis came to power, let alone any book, by anyone in the world, set in Germany—in any time period? My mother, who was Jewish, took German as a student at New Utrecht High in Brooklyn in the 1930s—did memorizing poems by Heine make her a Nazi sympathizer?

Should Russian and German and Ukrainian people now stop reading US literature because of Trump? Reading anything is an act of rebellion against Trump, who can’t even manage to read the Presidential Records Act.

“The reason we haven’t defined hate crime in our bill banning hate crime is that then people would know what the crime is.” They’re going with that?

[Ireland’s Minister for Justice Helen] McEntee also defended the proposed hate crime and hate speech bill, and said she believes the majority of people want to see it enacted.

…

“Firstly, when it comes to the hate speech and the hate crime legislation, the reason that we haven’t defined hate is by defining hate and using another word, you then have to try and describe essentially what that means. And you’re potentially leaving a gap where certain prosecutions might fall or where it may be more difficult to have prosecutions under this legislation.”

It takes the breath away.