Anna Slatz at Reduxx:

A Seattle court has ruled that a female-only nude spa lacks the “constitutional right” to bar males from their facilities. The decision comes after the spa sued the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC), which had forced them to change their sex-exclusive policy due to the complaint of a transgender patron.

Human rights are for trans people, especially male trans people. They’re not for women. Obviously.

In May of 2020, a trans-identified male submitted a complaint to the WSHRC alleging discrimination on the basis of his gender identity.

Haven Wilvich had sought a membership at the Olympus Spa in January of 2020, but had been denied on the basis that he had not undergone “gender reassignment” surgeries and his penis was fully intact.

So?????? He says he’s a woman, and that’s the only criterion.

…the WSHRC ruled that the spa had violated Washington anti-discrimination law, stating that the female-only policy “denies services to transgender women who have not had surgery … because their physical appearance is not ‘consistent’ with the traditional understanding of biological women.”

Well that’s dishonest manipulative bullshit. It’s not about “appearance” – the penis can be deployed to rape women, and that’s not actually a rare or astonishing circumstance. The point is not “Oh no he doesn’t look like our antiquated idea of a woman,” the point is “This is for women and he’s a man.”

Haven Wilvich, the trans-identified male whose complaint resulted in the loss of the female-only space, boasted about his success on Facebook after the initial WSHRC ruling.

He doesn’t look like that.

The Telegraph reports:

Patients may be found guilty of discrimination if they refuse the care of a transgender medic, according to new NHS guidance.

Health bosses have been warned that patients have no right to be told a healthcare worker’s assigned sex at birth.

No rights for patients; rights are only for transgender nurses and doctors. Patients are scum, transgender nurses and doctors are Ascended Beings.

However, transgender health workers can choose not to treat patients if they feel uncomfortable doing so, the report by NHS Confederation says.

Of course, because only transgender people have rights. Non-transgender people have only the obligation to submit.

The report, published earlier this month in partnership with the LGBT Foundation, says patients can only request care from a same-sex staff member in limited circumstances, such as if they are having an intimate examination.

It states that when a patient requests an employee administering care to be a woman or a man, “the comfort of the staff member should be prioritised”.

I thought I was being very slightly hyperbolic, but no, they actually say it out loud. The priority is not the patient, the priority is the staff member. If it were a matter of violent patients I could see saying the safety of staff is the priority, but this is the “comfort,” meaning the comfort of being affirmed in a fantasy.

Patients with dementia “should still be challenged” if they express discriminatory views about transgender staff, the 97-page guide states, while their relatives “may be removed from the premises” if they do the same.

But a non-binary medic can refuse to treat a patient, with the advice stating they “should not be forced to deliver care if this would cause undue distress or invalidate their lived experience of gender”.

Who wrote this shite?

What are these privileged bitches complaining about now? Being groped on crowded public transportation? Wah wah wah, big deal.

It was the morning rush hour in Tokyo. The train was packed and rocky. Takako (not her real name) was on her way to school. The 15-year-old tried to hold on to a grab bar. Suddenly, she felt a hand pressing on her behind. She thought someone had accidentally bumped into her. But the hand started to grope her.

And it went on happening, nearly every day.

Many women like Takako are targeted in public by sexual predators. In some cases, they face another violation – the attack is filmed and the videos are sold online.

Most videos follow the same pattern – a man secretly films a woman from behind and follows her on to a train. Seconds later, he sexually abuses her. The men act discreetly, and their victims can seem totally unaware. These graphic videos are then listed on the websites for sale.

So? They’re still alive aren’t they? Unlike all the trans women who kill themselves several times a day.

“Chikan” is a Japanese term describing sexual assault in public, especially groping on public transport. It also describes the offenders themselves. Chikan perpetrators typically take advantage of crowds, and the victims’ fear of causing a scene. In Japan, speaking too directly and openly may be seen as rude.

While filming oneself sexually assaulting women and girls is not? Interesting cultural quirk.

The Japanese police encourage victims and eyewitnesses to speak up, but the crime is far from being eradicated. The problem is so widespread that even the UK and Canadian governments warn travellers to Japan about it.

Chikan has been normalised by its prominence in Japan’s adult entertainment industry. One of the most popular types of pornography in the country – the Chikan genre – has spread to other Asian countries.

Publicly harassing or assaulting women in public is normalized in a lot of places. It’s almost as if women are widely viewed as inferior and subordinate.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I finally get it.

Well ok then. Stand down. It all makes sense now. Plus it’s so adorable.

It’s the old Lone Ranger joke for the millionth time – “Who’s ‘we,’ Kemosabe?” Charles Blow at the Times says “we” a lot but there is no such “we.”

As the L.G.B.T.Q. community celebrates Pride Month, we are besieged by a malicious, coordinated legislative attack.

But there is no such community, at least not without some cautions and stipulations. It’s a very lumpy unwieldy community if it is a community. What unites lesbians and trans women exactly? Especially, what unites them in an environment where all the solidarity is for the trans women and none of it is for the lesbians unless they pretend men can be lesbians every bit as much as women can?

There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.

But most of the bills are about trans issues, not LGB ones.

In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.

Like that. That’s not an anti-LGBT law. It’s not even an anti-T law, properly considered, but even if you agree it’s anti-T that doesn’t make it anti-LGB. But of course Blow shouldn’t be calling it anti-trans to protect children from drastic surgeries. It does seem like overkill to pass laws about pronouns, but then again, it also seems idiotic and ridiculous to teach children nonsense about pronouns.

As Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, recently told me, the number of signed bills is likely to move higher: “There’s 12 more that are sitting on governors’ desks, so you could be at nearly 100 new restrictions on the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community by the end of this cycle.”

For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.

But there is no emergency for LGB people. It’s all about the T, but lumping them together makes it look more tragic and scary.

The way this kind of terrorism works is that it not only punishes expression, condemns identities and cuts off avenues for receiving care but also creates an aura of hostility and issues grievous threats. It’s like burning a cross on someone’s lawn: It’s an attempt to frighten people into compliance and submission.

No, it is not like burning a cross on someone’s lawn. Trans people don’t have a four century history of forced unpaid labor and the violence that backs it. Trans people are not in any way comparable to the descendants of enslaved people.

And one of the saddest aspects of this episode has been seeing a small but vocal group of people who claim to be liberal — and who one would think would be allies — aid and abet the arguments of transphobes.

Some are feminists who have essentially argued that full inclusion of trans women is anti-feminist — that it’s harmful to or an assault on the rights of cisgender women.

Because it is. People reading this already know the ways it is so I won’t belabor them, but it’s definitely one of the saddest aspects of this car crash that men like Blow simply brush them aside.

H/t J.A.

Alison Phipps has a new paper [pdf] out, so I’ve read a little. It’s every bit as horrible as I expected, and more so. Page 3 –

In January 2019, at a joint panel with far-right think-tank the Heritage Foundation, Women’s Liberation Front board member Kara Dansky claimed that if the US Equality Act (designed to protect sexual orientation and gender identity) was passed, the following would happen:

Male rapists will go to women’s prisons and will likely assault female inmates as has already happened in the UK. Female survivors of rape will be unable to contest male presence in women’s shelters. Men will dominate women’s sports. Girls who would have taken first place will be denied scholastic opportunity. Women who use male pronouns to talk about men may be arrested, fined, and banned from social media platforms. Girls will stay home from school when they have their periods to avoid harassment by boys in mixed sex toilets. Girls and women will no longer have the right to ask for female medical staff or intimate care providers, including elderly or disabled women who are at serious risk of sexual abuse.

Pleas for protection from this dystopia conveniently disregard the fact that in countries that allow gender self-identification, such as Ireland, Malta, Norway and Portugal, none of these things have happened. Because the facts are not relevant – what is really being evoked here is the ‘purity’ and ‘innocence’ defended in white supremacist culture and the sexualization of the ‘rabble’ that stalked fears of anticolonial resistance.

She doesn’t say how she knows “none of these things have happened” in the countries named. We know at least some of them have happened in Ireland (Barbie Kardsashian anyone?) and I suspect Phipps doesn’t actually know they haven’t happened in Malta, Norway, and Portugal. But whether she’s right or not, the leap to the next sentence is simply disgusting. I can’t read her; she’s too loathsome. Page 3 will have to be as far as I got.

After reading yesterday about Oxfam’s embrace of the fake feminism of Alison Phipps I thought I should see what she’s up to.

Well there you go – same fake feminism – same fake feminism using fake feminism to trash feminism.

Yay! Enjoy this “takedown” of feminism that’s not about men who pretend to be women! Join Alison Phipps in saying feminist women are evil privileged white supremacists while men who pretend to be women are all the new Emmett Till.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on We know less about a person than before.

“LGBTQ+” is an example of a term that gives us less information than we had when the individual letters were broken out into separate attributes. And I suspect that’s a large part of LGBTQ+’s appeal.

LGBTQ+ basically just means “different in a sex and gender kind of way.” Which is deliberately more vague than “sexually attracted to persons of the same sex.”

Deliberately more vague is appealing to lazy journalists who don’t want to bother being specific.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to formerly-LGB-focused lobby groups who want to capture a broader demographic.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to straight people who aren’t actually sexually attracted to persons of the same sex, but who want to claim a place in the rainbow parade now that it’s got cachet.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to men for whom their specific “sex and gender” difference constitutes having sexual paraphilias that they’re too embarrassed to openly admit to; and it’s more appealing to the people who have to interact with these paraphilic men in their family or work life, who would rather not have to address head-on the kinky elephant in the room.

And deliberately more vague is most appealing to the many young people who are struggling to reconcile themselves with the bodies they inhabit, which each come equipped with a sex and a sexual orientation of their own, outside of their inhabitants’ control, and often ill-fitting with the identities these young people are trying to curate online so that they can fit in with their peers.

The primary problem with labelling people — especially young people — as “LGBTQ+” is that we’re taking information away: we’re saying, there’s a cohort of kids who are “different” and it doesn’t actually matter how they’re different. Because a lot of people believe that once someone has found his or her (or their) way to the LGBTQ+ club, they’ve found their oasis of acceptance, free from the malign influence of the far right and the Christian conservatives, and everything that comes afterwards must therefore play out organically without friction or bias, in a kind of utopian paradise where all the misfits find their perfect fit. And that void of critical thinking is irresistible to charlatans, profiteers, crooks and liars.

The Telegraph article goes on to explain how Oxfam decided to abuse women in the name of Trans Solidarity Supremacy.

Learning About Trans Rights and Inclusion was drawn up in 2020, whilst Oxfam was still reeling from sexual exploitation scandals in Haiti and Chad. 

…

The training manual was written after the charity’s LGBT+ network wrote to the leadership team demanding that they publicly support trans people and suggested that any debate about rights was part of a “patriarchal and white supremacist narrative” used by the far right.  

The letter called for specific resources to be made available, adding: “To argue that trans-inclusivity would undermine the vital work we do for women and girls is not only transphobic, but also perpetuates the white saviour complex that assumes that we know best for the people we work with.”

It says that it is “transphobic” to question whether men who identify as women could pose a threat to women and the fact that debates around identity continue among staff is exposing queer employees to “harm”.

Everything is transphobic. Furthermore, transphobia is somehow connected to the white saviour complex, or at least saying it is is how to get Oxfam to obey orders.

The document produced in the wake of the complaint tells staff that protecting single-sex spaces for women has “contributed to transphobia and undermining of trans rights”.

The goal must be to undermine women’s rights in order to de-undermine trans rights, because obviously trans people are infinitely more important and special and persecuted than stupid boring women.

Julie Bindel sums up:

With the rape conviction rate at an all-time low, I would have hoped that a charity concerned with inequality and oppression would make combatting sexual violence a priority, writes Julie Bindel. Particularly one whose own history in this area is dubious at best.

In the UK, of the tiny minority of rapes that are actually reported to police, only 1.4 per cent are charged by the Crown Prosecution Service.

And only another tiny minority of those get convictions. Three tiny minorities, which means rape is pretty much de facto legal.

However, looking at the document that forms part of Oxfam’s training programme, Learning about Trans Rights & Inclusion, you would think that sexual violence was an imagined problem, dreamed up by racist or fragile white women.

Feminists have fought for sexual assault to be taken seriously. The low conviction rate is evidence that this battle is being lost. If we are now to further dismiss women’s experiences as simply “tears” what hope do we have for this endemic problem to ever be taken seriously?

None. Read the rest.

Melanie Newman, Julie Bindel, and Hayley Dixon on Oxfam’s hatred of women:

An Oxfam staff training document says “privileged white women” are supporting the root causes of sexual violence by wanting “bad men” imprisoned.

Ah it’s the Karen card. Oxfam is playing the Karen card. Women are just bitches who complain about being raped instead of smiling stoically and pretending nothing happened.

In the wake of sex scandals that have rocked the charity, Oxfam has produced guidance which states that: “Mainstream feminism centres on privileged white women and demands that ‘bad men’ be fired or imprisoned”.

Accompanied by a cartoon of a crying white woman, it adds that this “legitimises criminal punishment, harming black and other marginalised people”.

I can’t do any sarcasm any more. That’s just breathtaking. Is there some mechanism by which we can take money away from Oxfam and give it back to donors? Imagine all the women now realizing they sent money to this. Privileged white bitches that they are. (I wonder if there are any white men at Oxfam.)

It advises staff to read a controversial book which concludes: “Mainstream feminism is supporting, not undoing, the root causes of sexual violence.”

What’s tributarystream feminism? Wait, I know this one – it’s all trans women, isn’t it.

…the charity was warned on Wednesday night that the document, compiled by its LGBT network and seen by The Telegraph, could breach equality laws as it suggests reporting rape is “contemptible”.

The four-week “learning journey” recommends that staff read Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism, a book by Alison Phipps, a professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex.

Ahhhhh that book.

Summarising the book’s central premise, the Oxfam document says white feminists need to ask themselves whether they are causing harm when they fight sexual violence.

It then links to Prof Phipps’s Twitter account and a thread which summarises the main themes of the book, including: “White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetuate through white supremacy.”

I remember when that book was published. I remember the white-hot rage. Phipps may very well be the worst of a bad bad bad lot.

Naomi Cunningham, a discrimination and employment law barrister, says the document may breach the Equality Act, which bans harassment in the workplace on the basis of sex.

“The message seems to be that a woman who reports a rape or sexual assault to the police and presses charges is a contemptible ‘white feminist’,” said Ms Cunningham. “I think any woman could make an arguable case that this has created or contributed to ‘an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’, which is how the Equality Act defines harassment.”

Excuse me, I have to go gibber with rage now.

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on The pedantic version.

In my day job I work with information management and AI systems. A key goal we’re always striving for is improved information content within structured data sets. We only add new elements or classifiers to the language or lexicon structures if they are required to improve differentiation amongst a set of entities that are characterized by some combination of these classifiers. We meticulously avoid adding ambiguous classifiers as these do nothing but reduce the information content of data sets and reduce the precision of the operations that can be performed by the systems.

It seems to me this is similar to the gender/pronoun language problem. All these new categorizations reduce the actual information content of language. We know less about a person than before. And not just one person who makes an issue about it. By insisting on using these new gender classifiers we introduce ambiguity in all descriptions until we get these tortured monikers like people who menstruate rather than saying women. And that’s not even accurate since not all women (or females) menstruate. Should we expect in the future to have to further refine this to, ‘people who could menstruate if they were mature, but not too mature, and not on any medications but not everyday so they may not currently be menstruating’ in order to preserve the information content? Or maybe we can come up with a single term that contains all the same information – maybe something like ‘women’.

Item 3 – Johns Hopkins has an LGBTQ Glossary.

Under “lesbian” we find

Lesbian [sexual orientation]: A non-man attracted to non-men. While past definitions refer to ‘lesbian’ as a woman who is emotionally, romantically, and/or sexually attracted to other women, this updated definition includes non-binary people who may also identify with the label.

So, we think to ourselves, they do the same with “gay man,” right?

Judge for yourself.

Gay Man: A man who is emotionally, romantically, sexually, affectionately, or relationally attracted to other men, or who identifies as a member of the gay community. At times, “gay” is used to refer to all people, regardless of gender, who have their primary sexual and or romantic attractions to people of the same gender. “Gay” is an adjective (not a noun) as in “He is a gay man.”

Chef’s kiss.

Next up: an abstract from Sage Publications from December 2020:

Specificity without identity: Articulating post-gender sexuality through the “non-binary lesbian”

That’s actually really easy. Non-binary doesn’t mean anything. A lesbian who calls herself non-binary is just being a bit precious. (This raises further questions – are there non-binary butch lesbians and non-binary femme lesbians? Or do they have to pick one? Can we ever ever ever escape the dreaded binary? Answers from a napkin from the last lesbian bar on the planet, if you can find it.)

This paper uses the paradigmatic pairing of non-binary and lesbian as identity labels to investigate changes in conceptualizations of sexual specificity as gender becomes divorced from its founding binaries. Contrary to the belief that lesbian is threatened by movement away from binary gender, this analysis postulates that it is not individual identities that are becoming problematic as gender identity becomes less binary; rather, it is the fundamental structure of identity which, for decades, has sanctioned identities built on exclusions. This cultural shift has the potential to liberate structures of desire, giving way to a model in which sexuality without gender is more redemptive than contentious.

In what way is the pairing (what pairing?) of non-binary and lesbian “paradigmatic”? What’s it paradigmatic of? Nonsense? Why pair them at all when they make no sense as a pair?

The deepity about identity being “for decades” (what because before that it was all different?) “built on exclusions” is especially hilarious. You can’t have anything called “identity” without “exclusions” – you can’t have most things without “exclusions.” If you go to the farmers’ market for tomatoes you’re “excluding” all the other fruits and vegetables, and all other food items and objects and red things and one could go on forever.

Yeah let’s have totally inclusive definitions of everything, we will arrive at Utopia without even needing a passport!

I’m curious about this “it’s a misconception that lesbians are women attracted to women” thing, so I’m looking for tracks. Here’s an item from Planned Parenthood’s blog March 23:

Someone asked us: I’m non-binary but also a lesbian. Does this mean I’m straight or does my sexuality have nothing to do with my actual gender, which is a girl?

Uh…wut? And why are you asking Planned Parenthood? You’re not going to be needing contraception.

PP explains:

Gender identity — like nonbinary or girl — is what gender you feel like and identify with. And sexual orientation — like lesbian and straight — is about who you’re attracted to.

Wut?

Confusion confusion confusion. “Gender identity” is a fad. Ignore it. Sexual orientation is about which sex you’re attracted to. Not a random meaningless ungrammatical “who” but which sex.

Sexual orientation has to do with both your gender and the type of people who turn you on or who you’d prefer to be sexual partners with. Sexual orientation labels say whether you’re attracted to your same gender, different genders than yours, both your and different genders, and other variations.

Wut?

Being “straight” usually means that you’re only attracted to people of the opposite gender. In our culture, straight usually means boys who are only attracted to girls, and girls who are only attracted to boys.

Unlike all those other exciting cultures where it means something completely different, which we won’t spell out because we’re already quite lost enough thanks.

A lesbian is usually a girl who’s sexually and/or romantically attracted to other girls. But some nonbinary people also identify as lesbians. So, use “lesbian” if that resonates with you.

Lesbian means woman or girl attracted to women or girls. That’s all. It’s quite easy once you get the hang of it. No need to worry about resonance.

Only you get to decide which labels make the most sense for you, and there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to be.

Well, yes and no. You won’t be arrested for getting all your words wrong, but it doesn’t follow that you should just talk gibberish because only you get to decide. Language has to be mutually comprehensible to be any use at all. It’s simply not true that there’s no right or wrong. Try visiting Paris and resolutely speaking English on all occasions, see how well that goes.

There are also lots of different sexual orientation labels people use beyond lesbian and straight, like: queer, gay, bisexual, pansexual, and skoliosexual. Some people may also use questioning or fluid if they’re not sure of their sexual orientation, or if it changes from time to time. Many people who have a sexual orientation other than “straight” use the umbrella term “queer” to describe their sexual orientation.

Many people are pretentious fools who spend far too much time talking about themselves.

Why the blacklist?

There’s nothing as coarse as an official blacklist at the BBC. Our national broadcaster doesn’t ban people, it doesn’t forbid words or phrases, and it doesn’t proscribe certain stories.

It’s just that some words and phrases are never used, some stories never see the light of day — and some people never, ever get the call. This is true for domestic coverage at least, which is what I know about.

This struck me when the BBC on a single day interviewed not one, but three men whose behaviour has ranged from dubious to deplorable — Philip Schofield, TikTok star Mizzy and the misogynist Andrew Tate. The activities and views of these men didn’t prevent them from getting the opportunity to explain and defend themselves.

But what activities and views do prevent the BBC from inviting you for a chat? Feminist ones. Like –

Helen Joyce, former staff journalist at the Economist, including as International, Finance and Britain Editor, author of the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and the Director of Advocacy at the campaigning organisation Sex Matters. She used to appear on the BBC fairly routinely, as a guest on the papers review, and commentator on economic issues and UK politics.

Then she became interested in the feminist approach to sex and gender, took a sabbatical from the Economist, wrote Trans and has never been on BBC radio or TV since. 

Why? Why is Andrew Tate good radio and tv while Helen Joyce is not? What is it about the trans religion that causes this? I guess it must be to do with the frantic claims about fragility and phobia and whatnot, but that just rewords the question. Feminist women point out the ways trans ideology is harmful to women but that doesn’t result in everyone rushing to have them on the BBC so what is it about transism that is so much more potent that way than feminism is or has ever been? Why are self-obsessed men so much more convincing than feminist women?

How does this happen? No, there’s no blacklist. There are unspoken mores, born in a miasma of fear, confusion and occasional activism, that seem to function as a brake on allowing a certain kind of convincing gender critical feminist to have much of a platform at the BBC.

But Andrew Tate is worth talking to.

Helen Joyce says the interest in her dried up instantly after an interview on Woman’s Hour in 2020, before her book was published, when she said what she describes as “all the sorts of things you aren’t allowed to say on the BBC” about biological sex. She understands that higher representations have been made internally, in an attempt to end the blackout, but to no avail. The Woman’s Hour Twitter account has at times been inundated with requests to bid Helen on the issue of women’s sex-based rights. People want to hear about it, and they want to hear from Helen. The call never comes.

It’s not a question of resources. The resources were there, for example, when the trans activist academic Grace Lavery was interviewed on Woman’s Hour after he pulled out of a public debate with Helen. It’s a question of picking up the phone.

Woman’s Hour will talk to horrible “Grace” Lavery but not to Helen. Woman’s Hour. Why is this?

The BBC was asked to comment for this article and replied: “There is no “blacklist”, a range of views are regularly heard across BBC outlets.”

Then why isn’t Helen Joyce one of them?

The Times on Oxfam’s ostentatious hatred for women:

Oxfam has been branded “utterly shocking” for releasing an anti-trans cartoon character apparently based on JK Rowling.

The charity’s animated #ProtectThePride video was issued to mark Pride month. It said it could not “ignore the cruel backdrop” against which LGBT people marked the celebration.

And to illustrate the “cruel backdrop” it threw in a Cruella Rowling caricature.

The woman [in the caricature], with blood-red eyes and face contorted in hate, was wearing a green dress – similar to one worn by Rowling at a film premiere – and was looking at the Pride flag. As she appeared on screen, a caption said that LGBT people were “preyed on by hate groups online and offline”.

A green dress with a V-neckline and a colorful blob on the left, exactly like the one worn by Rowling.

Milli Hill, a feminist author, told The Times: “Oxfam’s caricature of an ‘ugly hag’ wearing a Terf badge is so typical of the attitudes displayed to feminists who stand up for women’s rights. We are evil old witches basically, and this is the same old misogyny we’ve been fighting for decades, repackaged as ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’.

“It is utterly shocking that an established global charity like Oxfam would portray women in this way, it shows huge disrespect and discrimination – but it also shows their true colours.”

That applies to so many people. It’s been startling to learn how much loathing and contempt for women still bubbles away under the surface, ready to burst out whenever a woman says no.

A letter to Oxfam staff today:

The character wearing the “terf badge” didn’t resemble JK Rowling, it was adapted from a photo of JK Rowling. It’s wearing the same damn top ffs. Of course it was the intention of the designers.

Oxfam may say it’s committed to becoming feminist, but I don’t believe it for a second.

Updating to add: or as Simon Myerson put it much more crisply:

From the Holocaust Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia:

Der ewige Jude

As part of its heightened wartime attack on Jews, the Ministry of Propaganda turned to motion pictures as a medium for antisemitic messages.

Fritz Hippler, the president of the Reich Film Chamber, directed the film Der ewige Jude, with input from German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. A pseudo-documentary, it included scenes of Jews shot in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos by propaganda company crews attached to the German military. This film was quite popular with audiences in Germany and throughout occupied Europe.

That image looks familiar somehow.

H/t Fred Sargeant

Oxfam’s unedited video:

“preyed on by hate groups online and offline”

Oxfam has issued a stupid resentful blamey OFFICIAL STATEMENT that says it’s transphobia’s fault.

One: there are no LGBTQIA+ communities. Those are different, sometimes competing things, and they can’t all be mashed into “communities” together.

Two, define transphobia.

But three, we know how you’ll define it, because of that vicious caricature of JKR. You mean feminists defending the rights of women and continuing to know that men are men even if they call themselves trans. You’re saying you want to stop women being feminists and defending our ability to enjoy our rights. You want men who claim to be trans to have the ability and the “right” to cancel our rights in favor of their rights, or rather their pseudo-rights.

You say you made a mistake but fail to admit what the mistake was. It was that grotesque disgusting Der Stürmer-level cartoon of three monstrous people, one of whom was quite obviously Rowling. You’re the Julius Streicher of trans propaganda; I’m surprised you’re so minimalist about trying to walk that back.

As for “no intention to portray any particular person or people” – well that’s just an obvious lie, isn’t it. You just said this is about “transphobia” so the intention was certainly to portray people you consider “transphobic.” A sneery cartoon of some generic “Jewish people” doesn’t become Not Anti-Semitic because the cartoonist says they’re no one in particular (but especially not when at least one of the generic people is instantly recognizable).

It’s nice of you to support our right to hold our philosophical beliefs, but it doesn’t do us much good if you don’t support our right to utter them.

And in conclusion – never mind our “sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics” – what about our sex? Do you support our right to have our sex respected? Since you took great care not to say so, I’ll assume that you don’t.