Some Victorian Greens are not entirely ecstatic about the new and more sweeping definitions of “transphobia.”

A newly expanded definition of transphobia is threatening to reopen divisions within the Victorian Greens after a senior member accused the party’s leadership of stifling free speech with its revamped code of conduct.

Others have welcomed the updated policy, which was passed by the party’s state council late last week, arguing the Greens now have the strongest anti-discrimination safeguards of any political party in Victoria for transgender members.

But not the strongest anti-discrimination safeguards for women or feminists or people who understand what words mean.

The Victorian Greens now define transphobia as the vilification of trans people; intentionally misgendering people individually or as a group; denying that non-binary genders exist; or “promoting the unnecessary prioritisation of sex characteristics above gender”.

Aka questioning the fanatical doctrine that “sex characteristics” don’t determine who is a woman and who is a man.

The party’s new rules also state that “advocating for unnecessary restrictions on transition care” and “asking leading questions that cover for doing one of the above” can constitute transphobia.

And who will decide when those conditions have been met? Why, the fanatics, of course. The people who are guaranteed to find sin where sin is expected, and never to err on the side of thinking people are allowed to know who is a woman and who isn’t.

A member of the Victorian Greens, who holds a senior position and was speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss internal party matters, said the new code of conduct went too far.

“The old code already prohibited vilification, harassment and misgendering,” the party member said. “Now you won’t even be able to ask questions about or propose changes to our policy without threat of expulsion. One way or another, this will split us.”

The member went on to accuse MPs – including Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam – of trying to “cleanse the party of dissent”.

“They’re not interested in freedom of expression, facts or science. They’ve declared war on half the membership.”

And on women. That’s how this crusade works – the punishment always lands mostly on women.

However, another Greens member – also speaking on the condition of anonymity – stressed the expanded definition of transphobia was about giving the party the appropriate tools to grapple with important issues, rather than predetermine an outcome.

The member added that in the past, trans-exclusionary feminists – who often prefer to be called gender-critical feminists – have used official Greens meetings to question, among other things, whether men can give birth. Some party members find these sorts of questions offensive because, in their view, it presupposes that trans men are not men.

Which, of course, they’re not; that’s what “trans men” means. They may be butch; they may even be more butch than most men (though that’s hard to pull off without the requisite body type); but they’re not men.

Greens LGBTQ spokesperson Gabrielle de Vietri said the new code of conduct would protect serious debate while ensuring unsubstantiated questions aren’t weaponised against gender-diverse people.

“Respectful debate which is grounded in evidence is crucial to policy development and will always be welcome in the Greens,” she said.

“Leading questions, on the other hand, are a highly effective tactic that bigots can use to fearmonger and mislead people about complicated issues.”

And of course it’s the zealots who will decide which questions are “leading” and which are permitted. Fewer but better Greens.

I approve this elegant and polite mating ritual.

AI gonna eat our lunch yeah?

[Google boss] Sundar Pichai told the CBS programme 60 Minutes this month that AI could be “very harmful” if deployed wrongly, and was developing fast. “So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely,” he said.

…

So how much of a danger is posed by unrestrained AI development? Musk is one of thousands of signatories to a letter published by the Future of Life Institute, a thinktank, that called for a six-month moratorium on the creation of “giant” AIs more powerful than GPT-4, the system that underpins ChatGPT and the chatbot integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The risks cited by the letter include “loss of control of our civilization”.

…

An immediate concern is that the AI systems producing plausible text, images and voice – which exist already – create harmful disinformation or help commit fraud. The Future of Life letter refers to letting machines “flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth”.

So, like right now but even more and worse.

Glinner on Barry Humphries:

My acquaintance with him was about as fleeting as it was possible to get and yet I feel all those qualities manifested in the single email I received from him. A couple of years ago, Stella O’Malley and I wrote a letter defending JK Rowling from the death and rape threats sent to her by trans rights activists. I thought it would be an easy and safe way for comedians to stand up against the rising authoritarianism of the hysterical, misogynist Left. But hardly a single comedian of my acquaintance signed it.

Barry signed it, though. And he sent me this.

Originally a comment by latsot on Trans activism as progressive credential.

Well there’s not even a passion about trans rights, is there? If there were passion, there’d be a constant emotional outpouring describing those rights and the injurious effects of their supposed lack. If there were passion, there’d be powerfully reasoned argument, studded with heart warming and heart breaking examples.

The passion is not for ‘trans rights’, it’s for shouting the slogan, signalling the virtue, siding with the side, as you say, Arty.

One of the most interesting parts of any #LetWomenSpeak event is watching the behaviour of the ‘protesters’ (when they’re not being violent). They’re passionless, for the most part. They stand, slackly and without expression, blandly repeating the mantras. Every so often, someone with a megaphone will whip up 30 seconds of enthusiasm, but it quickly dies out. They put on music, for goodness’ sake, to stop everyone getting bored and wandering off!

The comparison to the passion expressed by our side, in the form of detailed explanations of injustice and calls for specific action rather than vague appeals to phobia, tells you everything you need to know about trans activism.

Then, in my experience (I’ve only been to three), when the trans activists sense that the event is about to finish, they attempt to surge forward. At Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast, this thrust was decidedly half-hearted and the antagonists seemed relieved, more than anything, that the police did such a good job of holding them back.

What they’d have done had the police not been there is anyone’s guess, of course, but my point is that this is the part they get behind. This is why they’re there. The part that requires no words, reason or even responsibility. That’s the only thing they can really muster passion for: the part about stopping women speaking. Because they know what they’re saying and they know who they’re saying it about.

This is borne out by those events that have been less well-policed, where the protesters have been allowed so close to the speakers that their noise really did drown out women’s voices. There’s no passionless shuffling and half-hearted chanting there! It’s almost as though the entire point of these ‘protests’ is to stop women telling the truth about trans activism and its ‘activists’!

I’ve often said how interesting I find it that the TAs never copy our format. They never have similar open mic events where trans people and their allies can speak passionately about the many injustices they feel plagued by. Instead of protesting about *checks notes* women being allowed to speak, they could let trans people speak, right! The optics would be great! The news channels would be falling over themselves to compare and contrast in a light most favourable to their side!

There’s only one reason I can think of why they don’t do this. They know how stupid it all sounds. They know how pathetic it will seem if they whine about getting funny looks when they barge into women’s spaces. They know how monstrous it will look when they demand that disabled women accept intimate care from men against their wishes. They know they have no logical, legal or moral arguments. They know there is no human right they don’t already have. They know their demands are neither feasible nor sustainable and they know they have nowhere near the support among the general public that they have within their social media and, as you put it, media-media bubbles.

You’re right, Arty. The ‘passion’ is all in the side-picking and purity-signalling, not in any deeply-held belief in ‘trans rights’. I have no doubt that many believe in or even feel a deep sense of injustice. We all did, at that age, and sometimes it turned out that the perceived injustice wasn’t really there. This is about the rebellion, not the cause, and it’s the dullest, most tedious, most regressive, least passionate rebellion in history.

Thanks to Rev David Brindley for alerting us to this gem:

And how will we be defining “vilifying”? “discriminating against”? “the rights of trans people”? How will we be knowing when it’s “unnecessary” to prioritize “sex characteristics” over “gender”? How will we be knowing why sex has “characteristics” (which there’s no need to prioritize) while gender doesn’t? How will we be defining “transition care”? How will we be defining “leading questions”? How will we be defining “harms”?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Serious people.

I still can’t quite figure out where all of this passion about “trans rights” has suddenly come from. It’s got little to do with the ‘Western’ concept of transsexualism as it was understood a few decades ago, and it’s got nothing to do with celebrating or encouraging gender diversity in general. Nor does it have anything to do with the ways other societies are structured around sex, sexuality, and gender roles, like in indigenous, collectivist cultures around the world. “Transphobia” as the term is presently used is an elusive spectre that seems to have been conjured entirely out of people’s minds. None of the terms it relies on can be consistently defined, or even roughed out: what is and is not “transgender”? What does and does not constitute a “trans right”?

If we can’t get anywhere with the words themselves, can we find some clues in the people who use them? What do the people who carp about “trans rights” have in common? Based on the insults they throw at their supposed enemies, they seem to share an anxiety about the “far right”, about Donald Trump or Brexit, about a general sense of loss of social cohesion, some kind of cultural splintering, and a fear of being left tribeless after a period of political disruption…

All that anxiety has led to the formation of an in-group/out-group mentality among some progressives, and “trans rights” appears to serve no function except as a shibboleth to signal that one is loyal to the tribe and willing to fight the good fight against its enemies in order to earn favour and maintain status among the in-group. It’s certainly got nothing to do with actual progressive values. Women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech… they’re being ripped to shreds. The degree of enthusiasm with which a person takes up the transgender cause corresponds closely to the degree to which that person is invested in publicly displaying his or her “progressive” credentials: direct financial incentive, career obligations or opportunities, insecure social standing or job position, etc. Jolyon Maugham has found a lucrative market in selling virtuous, crusading lawsuits to credulous backing donors within the group. Billy Bragg built his entire image for decades around being the most progressive folk troubadour in England — it’s his bread and butter. Owen Jones, progeny of prominent old-school hippie leftists, rests his entire social media and media-media brand on lefty militancy. On and on.

No wonder JK Rowling, possibly the woman with the most secure credentials, career opportunities, and finances in the whole United Kingdom, is so far the most prominent person to step up and speak out.

Yuh huh.

He’s a guy. He may be a guy of distinction, I don’t know, but he’s a guy.

That’s a woman who won’t get a 2023 women of distinction award, because this fella got it instead.

Well, feminist organizations shouldn’t be promoting men at the expense of women. That’s not feminist.

And another thing.

“…but trans rights are human rights. They shouldn’t be up for debate amongst serious people…”

Jolyon Maugham is a lawyer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it an important part of a lawyer’s job to be very careful about precision in language, and to make sure everybody is talking about the same thing?

I ask because what exactly are “trans rights”? How can we tell whether they’re human rights or not if people aren’t clear about what they mean by the category?

Is it a human right to force everyone to pretend you are what you visibly are not?

No, it isn’t. It can’t be. Such a right would be unworkable, and often disastrous.

Is it a human right to force everyone to say you are a woman when you obviously are not?

No, of course it isn’t. Why would that be a right? It doesn’t even look like other rights.

Is it a human right for people to be treated as if they were the sex they’re not for all purposes?

No. Such a right would carve great gaping holes in women’s existing rights, and they would be pretty bad for children too.

Those seem to be the pseudo-rights that trans activists want, but they shouldn’t and can’t have them. If they attain them everyone else will lose some genuine rights.

Jolyon Maugham is a lawyer. On some level he must know this, right? That the claimed rights aren’t rights as normally understood?

Jolyon continues to out-Jolyon himself.

What possesses him to keep calling her “Jo” in that infuriating way? He’s not her friend, so he doesn’t get to “Jo” her – especially since in his case it’s not just inappropriate familiarity, it’s also male condescension plus intrusion. It’s a deeply hostile act, so it makes his whiny “Y won’t you make a truce with me??” all the more passive-aggressive and obnoxious.

And then there’s telling her what she knows again. There’s telling her no good will come of fighting when he picks fights with everyone. There’s saying he tweeted at her “warmly” as if he were just the nicest kindest sweetest most cuddly man on the planet, when in fact he’s an aggressive Twitter bully.

And then there’s whining about the fact that she blocked him, when he’s blocked countless feminist women because we dare to dispute him.

They used to be so close, he whines.

Once upon a time, JK Rowling and I had a good relationship. We followed one another on twitter. She funded Gingerbread, the Charity for single mothers I was on the Board of. And from time to time she asked me for help. https://t.co/jsOtzs2xQR

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) April 22, 2023

Ah she asked him for help did she. So she was the supplicant and he was the benefactor. He’d like us to think that, wouldn’t he.

Knowing that, alongside her position on trans rights which I do not agree with, she has funded much good work, I wrote to her on Twitter DM, as I have written to many other GC feminists, with warmth and in sadness.

It was that message I referred to in my tweets earlier today. pic.twitter.com/pJlR1solEW

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) April 22, 2023

He wrote to her with warmth and in sadness, to try to persuade her that his superior wisdom could rescue her from this willful insistence on having her own opinions about whether men should be able to take over Being Women from us stupid weak useless female people. How warm and sad of him, and how patronizing and conceited and generally repulsive.

What an insufferable man.

Now for the scathing review of Jolyon’s book by Yuan Yi Zhu in the Times.

How to explain the rather indefinite but very real fame of Maugham to those who do not tweet? Well, you see, he was a successful but obscure tax barrister. Then he started a mildly successful blog, which led to him advising the Labour Party on tax policy and even to fleeting fantasies of becoming attorney-general in the House of Lords in an Ed Miliband government.

But what really made him famous was his energetic abuse of anyone who disagreed with him on Twitter…

That yes but I think his colossal ego also played a large part. It really is a sight to behold.

For instance there’s the attention to his martyrdom over The Fox and the Kimono.

His account of the inner-London fox hunt is spread across eight pages and ends with him quoting, in full, the long statement he issued on Twitter (where else?) after the RSPCA declined to prosecute him. He compares his calvary to that of Caroline Flack, the television presenter bullied into suicide by social media. The reader will be glad to know that for him “the pain of it all has faded somewhat”. For the fox as well, one hopes.

I take it there’s nothing about our pain.

One more thing the reader should know about our brave hero Maugham is that he is a King’s Counsel. If the big blue letters “KC” on the cover escaped your notice, he refers to his exalted rank at least 13 times in the body of the book alone; on four of those, he reassures the reader that he wasn’t interested in taking silk for the money it would bring (how much money he could be making in private practice instead of pursuing his noble activism is another of the book’s leitmotifs).

…

Several chapters are dedicated to cases he brought through the Good Law Project, the Goliath-slaying private company he founded to sue the government with money donated by gullible laymen, with a dismal success rate. One chapter concerns a judicial review against the awarding of some contracts during Covid. The judge found part of the process unlawful, but that it made no difference to the eventual outcome, and refused to grant declaratory relief — in substance, a pathetic defeat for Maugham.

But “at least from my perspective, it didn’t really matter . . . The might of the crowd — we had received over 16,000 separate donations — helped us expose a series of transactions that stank of sleaze.” In other words, throw enough mud and some will stick. This is a refreshingly frank admission, but one which does him no credit.

The real crime of this book is not that its author is insufferable. It is not that he displays an ugly streak of meanness against anyone who disagrees with him. It is that it is unbearably boring. Lawyers are supposed to be in love with the sound of their own voices; Maugham is also in love with his own prose.

He quotes his own blog posts, interviews, tweets. The man is a fountain of vanity.

Page after page, we are treated to ponderous declarations and clumsy narrations, some of which literally make no sense. It is all downhill from the book’s very first, unforgivable sentence: “The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not.” Is this a song lyric? What does it even mean? Does Penguin no longer employ editors? Give your money to the RSPCA but please do not buy this book. Maugham is a first-time author who should not be encouraged to reoffend ever again.

I promise not to buy this book!

Heh Rowling finds Jolyon’s “we both know” as absurd as I do.

He does! Of course he does. The conceit of that man could power a rocket to Mars.

Hilarious. Jolyon Maugham has published a book. The Times has a disdainful review. JK Rowling remarked on the review.

So what does the notoriously pompous self-admiring barrister do? He tells her – chummily calling her “Jo” as if they were friends which they are NOT – she should read it.

“We both know” ffs – as if she automatically thinks exactly what he thinks about the matter – i.e. about how impossible it is that he Jolyon Maugham could have written a bad book. Why would she admire his book as much as he does? Why would she take the same view of his critics that he does? That’s some badly broken theory of mind right there. “We both know, Jo, that you admire me as much as I admire me.”

Then he tells a huge lie.

They both know no such thing, because it’s not true.

Hmmm. Something doesn’t add up here.

There’s this show on Channel 4 in the UK:

Channel 4 is known for pushing the boundaries and kickstarting conversations with its shows – and Naked Education is no exception.

Fronted by Anna Richardson, the six-part series – co-hosted by Yinka Bokinni and former Love Island star Doctor Alex George – aims to break taboos and aid body positivity with frank discussions and a whole load of nudity.

One pair we meet in episode three is Finlay Games and Lucian Main, two transgender men who get candid about coming out, transitioning, surgery, and navigating life as trans people.

In a truly powerful moment, the guys bare all, with Lucian showing his scars from top surgery, which he had six months prior.

Wait wait wait wait. The show promotes body positivity…and Lucian shows his scars from top surgery. Well which is it? News flash: it’s not body positivity to amputate healthy parts of the body. Getting healthy breasts cut off is about as body negative as it gets.

Meanwhile, Finn has also had top surgery, as well as bottom surgery, (phalloplasty) to create a penis and urethra using tissue from his forearm.

His forearm would like everyone to know that it does not consider it body positivity to make a mess of one’s own forearm. That’s quite a useful bit of body, which has better things to do than hand over a lot of tissue to make a pretend-penis.

The host is proud of the work but is oddly offended by the words “vaginoplasty” and “phalloplasty,” or perhaps it’s “uterus” and “ovaries” that are so obscene.

Educate? Or promote?

Say goodbye to your forearms, girls.

J.A. alerted us to the fact that Science Friday on NPR was about menstruation and went big on the “people” who menstruate bullshit. Let’s read their summary:

Saying the phrase “menstrual blood” or or the word “period” can feel almost dirty. That’s because in the western world, people with periods are taught not to discuss this exceedingly normal biological process. Half the world will menstruate at some point in their lives, and yet menstruation remains exceedingly under-studied. 

Sure enough – they tactfully bashfully ashamedly hide the fact that it’s women who are subject to this association with dirt and failure to study. It’s intensely ironic (and of course enraging) to hide women even on this subject, because how can you possibly talk about taboos and disgust and loathing around menstruation without talking about disgust and loathing directed at women? And how can you talk about that without talking about menstruation? And how can you talk about menstruation properly while pretending it’s not connected to women? And here’s Kate Clancy, who is rightly outraged by the taboo thing, yet goes along with the new mandate to pretend it’s not disgust for women. I hope she wakes up in the middle of the night every night sweating with shame for doing this.

Biological anthropologist Kate Clancy dug into the history of menstruation research, and the myriad misconceptions about it, while working on her book, Period: The Real Story of Menstruation. What she found was a lack of basic understanding of the biological process, from physicians and menstruators alike. 

Do we call cancer patients “cancerers”? Do we call autistic people “autistickers”? Do we call people with disabilities “disabilityers”? Duh, no. But somehow it’s ok to call women and girls “menstruators.” To be sure, the point in that sentence is to underline that the people doing the menstruating lack basic understanding just as doctors do, but it’s laughably easy to do that by saying “from physicians and their female patients alike.”

NPR posted an excerpt from Clancy’s book:

There were a few key things I learned about periods as an adolescent. From fifth-grade health class, I learned that menstruation signaled a failed menstrual cycle with no baby. From my pediatric nurse practitioner Dr. Debbie, I learned that periods make you iron deficient. And from the world around me, I learned that I must hide all signs that I menstruated or face deep, crushing shame. 

What does that tell us? That women are seen as disgusting because they are the ones who make new humans. It’s very odd and perverse and it’s horrendously destructive – and Kate Clancy must be aware of that, yet she bows to the new imperative to pretend men also menstruate.

She bows to it even though she knows that it’s women who are shamed and marginalized for menstruating.

I noticed an assumption about periods that, with even the gentlest of prodding, completely disassembled. And I could not help but also notice that underlying these assumptions was a certain belief about what people, organs, or processes carry scientific importance, especially in my discipline of anthropology…I had one professor who only assigned women anthropologists in his one “feminist” week of the semester, but we had to read these works alongside scornful critiques. In my reflection assignment that week, I wrote that it seemed like he was setting up these authors to be mocked. In response, he read my comments aloud to the class and laughed. That moment created in me my own personal spite project to prove a different type of science is possible—that someone like me, asking the questions I ask, could be a professor.

Someone like her, i.e. a female person, yet she avoids saying it.

When I decided I wanted to write this book, I was years deep into a different spite project that had grown to epic proportions: someone dared to tell me that uncovering discrimination in the sciences was a “witch hunt.” It started with a collaboration to study sexual harassment in the field sciences, which led to additional projects in astronomy and the planetary sciences, then undergraduate physics, and then a major consensus report, testifying in front of Congress and flying all over the country for a year disseminating the results of the report.

And yet, and yet…”menstruators.”

Breaking news out of Australia:

Fox Corporation chief executive Lachlan Murdoch has dropped his defamation case against the Australian publisher of news outlet Crikey and several of its editors and executives.

Friday’s move came [after] Fox News and Dominion Voting reached a last-minute settlement in a billion-dollar defamation case in a US court on Wednesday, in the final minutes before a trial was due to begin.

Mr Murdoch launched legal action against Crikey publisher Private Media in the Federal Court in August, claiming it defamed him in referring to his family as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the US Capitol riots.

The action related to a June 29 opinion piece that was taken down and then posted back online on August 15.

Mr Murdoch alleged the article – titled “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator” – conveyed a meaning that he illegally conspired with former US president Donald Trump to “incite a mob with murderous intent to march on the Capitol” in Washington DC on January 6.

In its defence, Crikey said Mr Murdoch was “morally and ethically culpable” for the attack on the US Capitol.

To put it very very very mildly. Murdoch has poisoned this country.

Mr Beecher and Mr Hayward released a joint statement on Friday, welcoming the move.

“We stand by what we published last June, and everything we laid out in our defence to the court. The imputations drawn by Murdoch from that article were ridiculous,” they said.

“The fact is, Murdoch sued us, and then dropped his case.”

They described the decision as “a victory for free speech”.

“We are proud of our stand. We are proud to have exposed the hypocrisy and abuse of power of a media billionaire,” the statement said.

“This is a victory for free speech. We won.”

Murdoch lost.

Louise Perry on women as flowerpots:

Last month, the Law Commission published its long-awaited report on the legal status of the surrogacy industry. It contained – as expected – one particularly alarming recommendation. Alongside various tweaks to payment and regulation processes, the Commission suggests a crucial change to the parental status of a baby born by surrogacy.

At present, the woman who gives birth to the baby is considered to be that child’s legal parent, and the intended parents are obliged to apply for a parental order following birth. But if the Law Commission gets its way, the situation will be reversed. Although the surrogate will still have the right to object, the default presumption in law will be that she is not the child’s mother. In implementing this recommendation, the UK government would be making a clear statement on the nature not only of surrogacy, but also of motherhood: to put it bluntly, that it is both morally and legally acceptable to deliberately engineer the separation of mother and infant.

But it’s framed as permissible because the “surrogate” and the egg are separate.

Modern so-called ‘gestational’ surrogacy arrangements reduce the legal risk by weakening the surrogate mother’s claim to custody, since the baby is conceived using a separate egg donor, meaning that the woman is not genetically related to the baby she carries and gives birth to. Or as one surrogacy industry website puts it: ‘Gestational surrogates are not biologically related to the babies they carry at all.’

But such surrogacy cannot void the maternal relationship, because what on earth is pregnancy, if not ‘biological’? The child born to a mere ‘gestational’ mother comes into the world composed entirely of matter produced by her body, and craving her touch, voice and smell – the only things a newborn baby knows. It has long been recognised that maternal separation causes stress to newborns, potentially leading to permanent alterations to the brain. This is just as true for babies born via gestational surrogacy.

…

When we decide that an egg donor has a better claim to motherhood than a surrogate, we are privileging the male-type relationship over the female-type relationship, much as in Aristotle’s ‘flowerpot theory’ of reproduction, in which the woman does nothing but supply the inert container. But anyone who has experienced pregnancy and motherhood, or observed it up close, will know that it is not merely a physical process. Which is why there is a recognition, even among defenders of the industry, that surrogacy can be emotionally difficult.

Blah blah blah, never mind all that, the man must have his shiny new baby.

In the UK it is illegal for a dog breeder to permanently separate a puppy from its mother if it is under eight weeks old. Yet the surrogacy industry has no such limits placed on it. And this despite the fact that the emotional bond between human mothers and babies is much stronger, by virtue of the fact that babies are much more vulnerable than puppies and so require more devoted maternal care, including – in the era before infant formula – round-the-clock breastfeeding.

Yeah yeah yeah. He ordered a baby, it’s his baby.

Saudi Arabia uses various sports to try to make itself look not horrible.

Now Saudi Arabia is coming for cricket – just another step in the grandest sportswashing campaign in history. The country is an autocratic monarchy run on the fundamentalist principles of Wahhabist Islam. Laws of ‘guardianship’ mean that women cede control of their lives to male relatives.

No that’s not the right way to put it. Women don’t cede anything, they’re not given the chance to cede anything – laws of “guardianship” mean they never have control of their lives at any time.

The legal system uses prison, torture or execution against political dissent and anyone outside proscribed sexual or gender norms. The Saudi-led war in Yemen killed hundreds of thousands. The engine driving all this is Saudi Aramco, the biggest oil company in the world, the single biggest driver of our climate crisis, source of over 4% of global carbon emissions since 1965. Its only plan for the future is to increase production.

So the kingdom wants a better reputation – not by addressing its failings, but by marketing. It has deduced that the best path is through high-profile sport, with its vast international audience and its remarkable ability to generate goodwill.

Who cares that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t recognize a human right if it bit them on the ass, they like sports. Male sports that is – obviously there’s no such thing as female sports.

Unsurprisingly the prospect of Saudi cash motivates plenty of apologists. They like to claim that criticism stems from racism, cynically using the language of equality to defend a project whose foundation is discrimination. It is true that every society has power structures that feed and benefit from inequality. It is also true that this reaches a different level when codified in law. Nations that recognised this when isolating apartheid South Africa are much less inclined to bother on gender grounds.

Reminds me of the Pharyngula commenters accusing me of “Islamophobia.”

It is that wealth, with an economy valued into the trillions, that emboldens Saudi sportswashing. Their one failure so far was sponsoring this year’s Women’s World Cup, an attempt abandoned after players and federations pushed back. This isn’t just shameless, like Aramco producing 13.6 billion barrels of oil last year while installing recycling stations for drink bottles at cricket grounds in the name of sustainability. There is something perversely aggressive about targeting events where all the competitors are women and so many are gay, as a country where their gender makes them second-class humans and their sexuality is a crime. Saudi marketers don’t care: they’re already bidding to host the 2026 Women’s Asian Cup.

It must be tricky trying to play football in an abaya and a niqab.

Again, adult news outlets parroting the childish fantasy-based jargon.

Montana’s House speaker on Thursday refused to allow a transgender lawmaker to speak about bills on the House floor until she apologizes for saying lawmakers would have “blood on their hands” if they supported a bill to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, the lawmaker said.

“She” is “he” and there’s no such thing as “gender-affirming medical care.” “Affirming gender” is not medical and it’s not care.

Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who was deliberately misgendered by a conservative group of lawmakers demanding her censure after Tuesday’s comments, said she would not apologize, creating a standoff between the first-term state lawmaker and Republican legislative leaders.

“Misgendered” is silly jargon too. Granted, some bullies like to refer to boys or men they consider too “effeminate” as she and her, and the reverse for girls or women they consider too butch, but that’s called “taunting.”

Zephyr said she stands by what she said about the consequences of banning essential medical care for transgender youth.

“When there are bills targeting the LGBTQ community, I stand up to defend my community,” Zephyr said. “And I choose my words with clarity and precision and I spoke to the real harms that these bills bring.”

There is no LGBTQ community. What he means by “essential medical care” is more like malpractice. He chooses his words to manipulate.

The issue came to a head Tuesday when Zephyr, the first transgender woman to hold a position in the Montana legislature, referenced the floor session’s opening prayer when she told lawmakers if they supported the bill, “I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”

What about the blood on the hands of people who perform surgeries to try to make people look more like the opposite sex? What about all those mutilated genitals?

Later, the Montana Freedom Caucus issued its censure demand in a letter that called for a “commitment to civil discourse” in the same sentence in which it deliberately misgendered Zephyr. The caucus also misgendered Zephyr in a Tweet while posting the letter online.

“It is disheartening that the Montana Freedom Caucus would stoop so low as to misgender me in their letter, further demonstrating their disregard for the dignity and humanity of transgender individuals,” Zephyr said in a statement Wednesday.

Pretending to be the sex you’re not has nothing to do with dignity or humanity. Playing along with that pretense also has nothing to do with dignity or humanity, although lots of people do consider it the kind thing to do.

What are they even for? One minute we’re told “head of state” and the next it’s “bringing in the tourist cash.” Are they any real use at either of those, or anything else? Are they enough use to justify the enormous amount of tax-free money they keep having more of?

A common argument in defence of the royal family is the benefit they bring to the UK economy through tourism. But despite widespread claims of their tourist value, firm evidence that the Windsors are what bring visitors to Britain is hard to come by, with most assertions anecdotal or speculative. The storm-tossed tourist industry may be desperately hoping for a coronation bump, but the benefit the event will bring is not clear.

Tourists visit France, Italy, Switzerland – I don’t think it’s in hopes of seeing royalty. Why would it be in the case of Britain?

Numerical claims about the value of the monarchy frequently rely on creative interpretation of visitor numbers to sites with any royal connection, however tangential, says Graham Smith, of Republic, which campaigns to abolish the monarchy.

“If you look at the Tower of London, where the royals haven’t lived for hundreds of years, it’s far, far more popular than Buckingham Palace,” says Smith. (Annual visits to the tower are more than 2m, compared with 121,000 to the palace). “So it’s clearly not the living history that people are interested in, it’s the history – and history never goes away. There just isn’t any evidence to suggest that people would not visit if [the royals] were not there.”

Perhaps even more popular is Kensington Palace, and you know why? Because it’s at one end of Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens, that’s why – a massive green space in the heart of London. London itself is quite a tourist draw, so if the number-crunches are interpreting tourism in London as caused by the monarchy…that’s pretty hilarious. No, dalling, it’s the theaters, the museums, the galleries, the bookshops, the river, the parks, Shakespeare, Keats, Highgate Cemetery – it’s a thousand things.

Also Choss is pretty obviously a horror, so there’s that.