This may be a contestant for the Most Passive-aggressive Subhead Ever prize:

A Harry Potter panel due to be held at London’s Comic Con event in October has been cancelled after conversations with an LGBTQ+ charity.

Who cancelled it? Who had the conversations? What is the connection between the cancelling and the conversations? What LGBXYZ charity?

Obviously a subhead can’t give all the relevant information, but that doesn’t mean it has to wrap itself in the passive voice repeatedly. It’s like the “activism” as a whole – all the creepy endless spying “something was said to someone by someone” hissing and pointing. Scandal-mongering without any scandal to work with. More succinctly: bad thinking leads to bad writing. That subhead is bad bad bad writing.

LGBTQ+ helpline Switchboard explained that the charity is due to appear at the event, which runs from 27 to 29 October, but that it raised “concerns” after finding out that a Harry Potter-themed panel was also due to take place. 

More garbage writing. Also why does this clumsy writer – one Emily Chudy – put scare quotes on “concerns”? Why doesn’t Pink News get better writers?

“When we agreed to host a Pride Lounge at this year’s MCM London Comic Con, we did so with the aim of connecting with their diverse fan community,” Switchboard wrote on Twitter. 

Ohhhh, I see – Pink News is working up a tweet into a news story. Ok, I do that myself often enough, so I don’t object to the principle, but then why pretend otherwise at the beginning?

“However, at that time we were unaware of their plans to feature any panels using the Harry Potter IP [intellectual property] … Upon learning about this, we felt compelled to express our concerns about the potential impact on our community, particularly trans individuals.”

Switchboard explained it had since been in “conversations” with the London Comic Con organisers, who were “receptive to our concerns and feedback from their fans”, and then decided to cancel the Harry Potter panel. 

Yet more garbage writing. Who decided to cancel the panel? Switchboard, or the London Comic Con organisers? Whatever; it was one of them. The story is: London Comic Con had a Potter-themed panel on the schedule; some “activists” saw an opportunity to cancel something so they picked a fight on Twitter and got the panel cancelled. Let’s have a big round of applause for our winners.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

It seems like only yesterday that no one would have said anything this stupid even for a hefty bribe.

It’s nothing to do with “governing.” It’s knowing.

News flash: women need to know which people are men, partly for our own safety. We don’t think we have a “right” to “govern” and we don’t consider it “governing” to know the difference between women and men.

We’re not the ones trying to “govern” people on this subject. It’s the public relations arm of trans ideology that’s so keen on ordering everyone to say men are women if they say they are. It’s trans ideology that polices our words, not the other way around.

And yes of course it’s our business. See above.

I expect the next communniny we’ll be ordered to validate and lift up and ally ourselves with is the take pictures up women’s skirts communniny.

A Sydney teacher who was jailed for secretly filming up the skirts of students at his north shore school has had his sentence overturned on appeal, after a judge agreed his mental health conditions including a voyeuristic disorder could be better treated in the community.

I wonder how many men wandering loose in the community have “a voyeuristic disorder.” If we can hear what women tell us it has to be a pretty hefty number.

Eric Wong, 29, was jailed in July for at least six months after he took 90 videos and 300 photos of students in his class at Cammeraygal High School in Crows Nest over a period of two years.

…

Judge John North said Wong’s “unusual and abhorrent behaviour” breached the trust of a large number of young women in his care.

“He was their teacher; this was a gross abuse of trust, and it is indeed a serious matter,” North said. “There are a large number of people who should have been safe in the protective care of their teacher who were anything but safe.”

Girls. A large number of girls. Girls girls girls. This shit is done to girls and women.

North said Wong would not be able to access appropriate treatment for his voyeurism disorder in custody, so the safety of the community would be better served by an Intensive Correction Order, a form of jail sentence served in the community, rather than a short period of custody.

How about first one and then the other?

There are of course strong arguments that punishment is a bad and useless way of dealing with crime – that it’s revenge rather than anything more justifiable. On the other hand there are also strong arguments that in the justice systems we currently have, crimes against women are shockingly under-prosecuted, let alone punished.

The Herald previously reported that Wong was caught by a 16-year-old female student when the girl bumped into a whiteboard and dislodged a hidden phone in Wong’s classroom.

A police search of Wong’s home revealed hundreds of videos and photographs on a computer and storage device of girls in school uniform in his classroom, including images up their skirts and of their breast area.

That’s a lot of very dedicated persistent “voyeurism disorder.”

H/t Arcadia

Good grief.

Yet again they honoo and stannd wif the “2SLGBTQIA+” memmers of our communinnee…while of course they don’t “stand with” those boring evil hags known as “women.” If only women could be done away with altogether! And they “stand against hate in all its forms” – except of course they don’t. This very statement reeks of hatred. They hate women who talk back, they hate women who are just women instead of trans women. They hate women who have their own opinions and think they get to utter them. They hate women who don’t just shut up and obey.

Trans rights are human rights, they intone like robots. But what are “trans rights”? For the billionth time, obviously trans rights should have human rights, but what are trans rights? How can we agree anyone should have them when they’re not spelled out?

They promise to confront all forms of hate while they’re in the very act of inciting hatred against feminist women who don’t want trans “activists” to destroy women’s rights. They’re inciting hatred in this very (shockingly childish and crude) “statement.”

Wait what? Who is demonizing whom?

It’s not “demonizing” anyone to say that men can’t be women, or to say that pretending men can be women is very bad for women’s rights.

Meanwhile…

The Telegraph has a long piece on what it calls Whitehall’s woke training regime.

Some of it is about what I would call anti-racism training and the rest is about gender bullshit.

Staff in Government departments are being taught about gender ideology, which affirms the idea that people can choose their gender, while those with legally protected gender critical beliefs, who believe that you cannot change your biological sex, say they are bullied into silence.

Instead of clearing backlogs from the pandemic, staff are spending work time on attending lectures on LGBT+ issues or watching videos telling them biological men can use women-only facilities if they self-identify as female.

In one department, staff shared a “30 days of Pride” calendar, with daily videos and articles on topics including “transgender children” and “the history of the Stonewall riot”, that contained six hours of content.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s inherently bad to give people in civil service jobs training in the need to give everyone equal treatment before the law, which could include pointing out obstacles to doing that, which could include noting entrenched prejudices imbibed from the broader culture. Civil servants should not be treating some people as inferiors, and it could be the case that training helps eliminate that problem.

On the other hand I don’t think this should mean training in treating a small minority of people as magical saints with special magic genders.

Workers in government departments are also being bombarded with material about white privilege and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Like that for instance. I don’t think it’s bad for UK civil servants to be told there is such a thing as white privilege in the UK. Remember India? The slave trade? Stuff like that?

But it doesn’t follow that telling civil servants India Willoughby and Emily Bridges are among The Most Marginalized people on earth is a good idea.

The MoJ’s Gender Equality Network, one of a myriad of groups within the Civil Service set up by staff to discuss subjects such as diversity, circulated a newsletter in July 2022 to its members that discussed gender identity, pronouns and non-binary people.

The newsletter said: “Depending on the culture, people who identify as other genders have been associated with sacred powers, spirituality and are thought to be blessings to the family and community they are born into.

“Many North American Indigenous tribes had no constructs of gender and embraced its fluidity before colonisation.

“In many societies, the gender binary is a product and tool of colonialism and white supremacy.”

That’s fatuous propaganda, but notice the Telegraph doesn’t say it’s part of the training. It’s from a newsletter. There are probably a lot of newsletters flying around the Civil Service with some kind of bullshit in them. What’s the betting most civil servants just drop them straight into the recycle bin?

So, the Telegraph thing is interesting, but read it with caution.

Aw, Billy Bragg is sad that women are so stubborn about thinking their own thoughts instead of thinking his.

We haven’t stopped being progressive Billy. You on the other hand…

Geoff Mulgan on AI and bullshitters:

Since the arrival of ChatGPT there has been much debate about how AI can replace humans or work with them. Here I discuss a slightly different phenomenon which I increasingly notice, and probably wouldn’t have without the presence of generative AI: people who act rather like large language models. The phenomenon isn’t new. It’s just that we now have a new way of understanding it. As I show it’s quite malign, particularly in academia.

The strength and weakness of ChatGPT is that it can quickly assemble a plausible answer to a question, drawing on materials out in the world. It sucks them in, synthesises and mimics, sometimes quite convincingly, someone knowledgeable talking about a subject.

Sound like postmodernists much? This is where I came in. B&W started as a jaundiced look at that kind of empty pretentious blather, that was a mimicry of thought rather than the real thing.

Lots of people now use ChatGPT to help them with first drafts of articles or talks. But I’m more interested in the people who act like an LLM even if they don’t actually use one. These are the smart people who absorb ways of talking and framing things and become adept at sounding convincing.

And, more than convincing, deep. Over the heads of plebeians like us. See: Judith Butler, passim.

The classic example in academia was Alan Sokal’s piece ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeutics of Quantum Gravity’. The article was submitted and accepted by the journal Social Text. The piece was deliberately written to sound plausible, at least to the academic community served by the journal. Yet it was in fact wholly meaningless. It was a perfect example of vapid mimicry and was bitterly resented by the academic community it mocked.

Sokal’s stunt was an extreme example. But what he was mocking is not so exceptional. Many people in many fields, including quite a few in academia, also act rather like a ChatGPT, particularly in academic disciplines that don’t do much empirical work, work with facts or testable hypotheses – the more they are just commenting on texts (as a surprising proportion of the social sciences and humanities do) the more such foggy talk is a risk.

I don’t object to commenting on texts as such. There’s plenty of brilliant commenting on texts, which is enlightening and depth-excavating. I’m a humanities type and I do see value in thinking and talking about literature. What I detest is the attempt to make it sound artificially “difficult” and not for the mere plebs.

But one advantage of age and experience is that I now realise that me not understanding what someone is saying is sometimes a sign that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and that they are essentially acting like an LLM. This would become apparent if they were ever interviewed in the way that politicians are sometimes interviewed in the media, with forensic questioning: ‘what do you actually mean by x? What’s an example of what you just said? What would your best critic say about your comments?’.

That kind of sums up what I do every day, especially the “what do you actually mean” bit. The more people do that the better, in my view.

There’s a lot of that about – a very very very large amount of it.

It’s what makes the trans ideology and “activism” so extremely repellent.

But it’s their idenniny! You can’t say it’s not their idenniny! If they say they are Inuit they are Inuit!

Three women in Canada have been criminally charged after allegedly pretending to be Inuit to receive benefits from indigenous organisations.

According to police, two 25-year-old sisters committed fraud by posing as adopted Inuit children. Both sisters and their 59-year-old mother are facing two counts of fraud each. One Inuit group called the alleged deception “flabbergasting”. The defendants are due in court in the city of Iqaluit on 30 October.

In a statement, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said that the sisters – Amira and Nadya Gill – and their mother, Karima Manji, defrauded two local organisations of “funds that are only available to Inuit beneficiaries by obtaining grants and scholarships” between October 2016 and September 2022.

If people say they are Inuit then they are Inuit. That’s how idenniny works. It’s forbidden to question anyone’s idenniny, let alone deny it. Unless the anyones are Karens, of course – Karens are the one kind of people not allowed to have a sacred indisputable idenniny.

The woman named by the Gills as their birth mother, Kitty Noah, said before her death in July that she was not related to the twins.

In 2021, the Gill sisters – both graduates of Queen’s University in Ontario – launched an online business selling face masks featuring designs by indigenous artists.

Ahhhhh of course they did. Appropriators gonna appropriate.

In an interview with Canadian broadcaster CBC, NTI President Aluki Kotierk said that “at a minimum”, the Gill sisters and their mother should return the money they received from Inuit associations. He added that the NTI would conduct more training for enrolment committees in the future.

Mr Kotierk characterised the alleged fraud as “another form of colonisation” and part of a wider trend of non-indigenous Canadians claiming indigenous heritage. “You’ve wanted to take our language away from us,” he said. “You’ve wanted to take our culture away from us. Now you’re trying to claim our identity? It’s just flabbergasting.”

Talk to some women to find out what it’s like.

Some Canadians have referred to those falsely claiming indigenous ancestry as “pretendians”. But Jean Teillet, a member of the Métis indigenous community, told Global News that the term downplays the severity of the issue because it “sounds harmless”.

Hi, yes, I know what you mean. Women could tell you a lot about that.

The Telegraph:

The Cabinet Secretary has been warned by senior civil servants of a “woke takeover of Whitehall” that risks “improperly” influencing Government policy. Simon Case was told in a letter signed by 42 staff from 16 departments that ideology on gender promoted by trans activists has become embedded in the Civil Service in a “significant breach of impartiality”.

They should call it a trans ideology takeover or similar. “Woke” is too generic and too vague.

It says the concept that “everyone has a gender identity which is more important than their sex” is “treated as undisputed fact”.

Staff who dare to air gender-critical views – meaning they believe there are two biological sexes that cannot be changed – suffer “serious harassment” at work and live with a “pervasive fear” they will be victimised, the letter adds.

As a result, it says, the operation of government is being “distorted” and the authors plead for “urgent action to ensure that Civil Service impartiality is upheld, and freedom of belief is respected”.

It isn’t just a freedom of belief issue though. In some ways it’s the opposite: gender ideology is a belief system while biology is not. To put it another way, gender ideology is a fiction while biology is not. The conflict isn’t about belief so much as it is about reality, accuracy, truth, not forcing people to lie. Civil servants shouldn’t be bullying other civil servants into pretending to believe a stupid reactionary ideology.

The Civil Service’s head of human resources has met some of the signatories to discuss their concerns, but the letter – along with extensive evidence of the way highly contentious beliefs are promoted in numerous Whitehall departments – has been leaked to The Telegraph amid complaints that the response has been inadequate.

…

The letter states: “Many of us have experienced some form of professional disadvantage because we do not believe that the concept of gender identity is meaningful, or that it is more important than sex. Several of us have been through stressful and intrusive employment disputes.”

I like that way of putting it – we do not believe that the concept of gender identity is meaningful. Just so. We’re tired of being bullied and punished for not finding gender idenniny meaningful.

Documents shared with The Telegraph show staff have been asked to undergo training that says biological men can use female-only facilities and to avoid gendered language such as the phrase “mum and dad” in some circumstances for fear of causing offence.

In departments struggling with inflationary pressures and backlogs caused by the pandemic, civil servants are being encouraged to spend their time attending courses or watching videos that promote LGBTQ+ “allyship”. 

It’s like mildew; it creeps in everywhere.

How dare Italy refuse to treat women like machines for the gestation of other people’s babies???

Italian authorities are bringing in new measures targeting LGBT families and making it harder for them to have children. Many same-sex parents feel that a new law, which would make it illegal to have surrogacy abroad, is a personal attack against them.

“We have two options: to stay in Italy and face prison, or to run away.”

Husbands Claudio and Davide (not their real names) have a baby on the way through surrogacy – a woman in another country is carrying their son for them.

They don’t “have” a baby on the way. What they have is an arrangement by which they pay a nameless woman in “another country” – I’m guessing one poorer than Italy, where women are more desperate to survive – to spend nine months carrying an ever bigger and heavier baby for two guys far away who are paying her (not nearly enough). It’s not a neutral business arrangement with no moral issues attached. It’s not mere “carrying,” like carrying a suitcase or a bag of groceries.

The practice is illegal in Italy and most of Europe, so couples travel to countries where it is legal – such as the US and Canada – and bring their babies back home.

Now why might it be illegal? Is it homophobia or mere squick? Or could it be at all to do with exploitation and/or the inherent risks to the manufactured child? The BBC doesn’t say.

But the Italian senate is set to approve a bill that would make surrogacy a “universal crime” – one so serious that it would be prosecuted even if committed abroad, like human trafficking or paedophilia.

Again, why might that be? Could it possibly be because it is like human trafficking? The BBC doesn’t say.

“I don’t want to leave my country. I am proud to be Italian,” Davide says.

“I’m trying my best to be a good citizen, and now I’m being treated like a criminal – just because I want to have a family.”

No, that’s not true. The issue is not his wanting to have a family. The issue is the rent-a-womb method of “having a family” he’s resorting to.

The surrogacy bill is part of the socially conservative agenda of Giorgia Meloni – Italy’s first female prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party is a direct political descendant of a movement formed by members of Mussolini’s Fascist Party after the war.

But social conservatives are not the only ones who think surrogacy is at least morally questionable.

Angelo Schillaci, Professor of Comparative Public Law at Rome’s Sapienza University, calls the proposed law “irrational” and says it does not make sense to place surrogacy in the same legal category as paedophilia and crimes against humanity.

“This bill is seeking to punish things that are perfectly legal in countries that are our allies, such as the US and Canada,” Prof Schillaci says. “It would be like prosecuting someone for smoking weed in Amsterdam after they’ve come back home.”

No it would not. What a callous frivolous brutal comparison. A woman is not a joint.

And what about the child? What about the child’s learning that she or he never had what we understand as a mother, but only a “gestational carrier”? What if the child feels like a piece of toast, produced by a machine?

Carolina Varchi, the Brothers of Italy MP who drafted the bill, vehemently rejects [the claim that the law is an attack on LGBTXYZ rights]. “Most people who use surrogacy are heterosexual,” she says.

Experts have told the BBC that 90% of the couples who use surrogacy in Italy are straight, and many of them hide the fact that they have gone abroad to have a baby.

You mean gone abroad to hire a machine-woman to produce a baby for them.

Ms Varchi strongly believes the new law will “protect women and their dignity”.

“It’s intolerable. Women’s bodies are reduced to objects that are rented for nine months to bring a child into the world, who is then ripped away to be delivered to the clients.”

Via Amazon no doubt.

In countries where surrogacy is legal, regulations vary – including whether or not a surrogate can be paid more than expenses, and what steps must be taken to ensure surrogates give free and informed consent.

Aha – so they admit “surrogates” can be exploited and coerced. Why doesn’t that cause them to think a little more carefully?

Billy Bragg tells a woman how to feminism.

Originally a comment by maddog1129 on TRANSlation.

I can’t dress in the “approved for women” way, either. With me, it starts with the shoes. I simply can’t wear the foot-binding torture devices that are assigned to women. I haven’t always had bilateral plantar fasciitis, but I’ve had the condition for several decades. In my 20’s, I could wear soft-soled oxfords; now I need all-black cushioned athletic shoes. Starting from that foundation, pants suit or pants and blazer are as close as I can get to appropriate business wear. Luckily, I didn’t have to actually go to court very often.

If I were somehow forced to put on the woman-appropriate glad rags it would feel profoundly uncomfortable…which is quite irrational.

But it’s not irrational at all. First, there is actual, physical discomfort. Women’s clothes are designed for looks (in the male gaze kind of way) rather than for the comfort of the wearer. They put scratchy lace in undergarments. It’s torture. The designs are often restrictive of movement. I’ve worn puffy sleeves and cuffs that literally prevented me from moving my arms freely. Pencil skirts hobble the stride. There aren’t any damn pockets. The clothes are objectively un-comfortable. It’s not a bit irrational to feel uncomfortable in them.

There are other ways in which women’s clothes are uncomfortable, and that’s not irrational either. I’ve known since I was old enough to talk that the clothes assigned to women and girls are ooky. Girls’ skirts exist for boys to look under or flip up. Girls are sitting duck targets for male sexualized aggression. When girls hit puberty, the footwear for girls changes to articles designed to prevent girls from running away, even if their life depended on it. Girls are trapped. Of course it feels ooky. Clothing for women and girls is designed to keep females vulnerable, subordinate, compliant — and fearful. The clothing carries an inherent, and perhaps not-so-subtle, rape threat. No wonder many girls and women hate female clothing. No wonder many suffer something very like gender dysphoria. It really does something to your psyche to be under siege and in danger 100% of the time, because of your sex. And the danger is itself sexual. Women and girls are vulnerable to a particular risk of male violence that males just simply aren’t. Yes, male bodies can be sexually violated, but they never suffer the added risk of parasitic takeover.

So, yeah, I (and many other women) know all about gender dysphoria. It sucks to be the subordinate sex, the unfree sex.

Just an additional thought about Maoist communist workers’ uniforms: were the uniforms identical? Did they, for example, all button up the same way, or did they keep the clothing industry standard of buttoning men’s shirts and jackets one way, and buttoning the women’s shirts and jackets the other way?

Such womany behavior:

A trans-identified male led a gang of activists to ransack the concession [stand] of a culturally significant cinematheque in Mexico last week in protest of his removal from the women’s washroom.

Sounds like fun. I think I’ll identify as Queen Elizabeth I and flip over all the library wastebaskets when they fail to believe me.

On September 12, a man calling himself “Laura Glover” took to social media to complain that he had been physically removed from the women’s washroom at the National Cinematheque in Mexico City, the nation’s most culturally significant film archive and theatre.

…

Glover was then recorded by his friend confronting security outside of the cinema, screaming at a male guard for the behavior of the female officer who had initially asked him to leave the women’s facilities.

“This is an act of discrimination by the National Cinematheque of Mexico,” Glover exclaimed in the video. “We women are tired. This bitch beat at my door and she hit it very hard and this happened at the National Cinematheque of Mexico.”

We pretend-women are tired, so we get to call women “this bitch” when they don’t do whatever we say all the time.

Within hours of the clip going viral on social media, the Cinematheque issued a statement apologizing to Glover and reaffirming its commitment to “non-discrimination.”

Glover owes them an apology; they owe him nada.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Thomas the fundraising draw.

Like you, I don’t think there’s any quid pro quo going on here. Thomas is an ideologue and a true believer.

I think there’s three things going on here:

1) Conservatives want to keep justices like Thomas “in the fold.” There has long been a belief in the conservative legal and political world that Republican appointees like Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, and even Kennedy have gone “soft” and turned into moderates because they were co-opted into the Washington cocktail party circuit, or trying to curry favor with the liberal intelligentsia or whatever. (This used to be called the “Greenhouse Effect,” named for then-NYT legal reporter Linda Greenhouse — the idea being that Republican justices would shy away from conservative rulings so that Greenhouse would say nice things about them.) This is probably nonsense, but many conservatives believe it. So I think a large factor here is wanting to keep the Thomases and Alitos surrounded by a social network of hard-core conservatives, and using luxury vacations and stuff to facilitate that.

2) The opportunity for backchannel legal strategizing. I’m sure these gatherings include late-night conversations over cigars and bourbon in which Thomas comments on which conservative legal goals would probably get five votes on the Court, and which ones aren’t there yet, and what kinds of test cases might win over the swing votes. They may not be explicitly mapping out strategy (“if you bring this kind of challenge, I can get five votes for it, so tee that up this year”) — though I don’t rule it out — but if Thomas/Alito are leaking enough gossip about the justices’ views, it’ll amount to the same thing. Of course, this kind of thing would still go on even if no justices ever attended such events, because there’s an extensive network of SCOTUS clerks who serve two-year posts and then move on to positions at private law firms or conservative legal groups or whatever. The only difference is that instead of Recent Former Thomas Clerk gossiping about what the boss said the other justices think, it’s Thomas directly.

3) The opportunity to fundraise based on access to the justices.

Should this stuff be prohibited, and subject to criminal punishment and/or impeachment? I don’t know. I lean towards no. Just disclose it, and the public know the slimy stuff that’s going on. The justices really do tend to care about their reputations and legacies — there’s a reason Thomas, who generally doesn’t care about drawing criticism, keeps concealing this stuff — so that isn’t nothing. Enough to deter it from continuing? Probably not in the cases of Alito and Thomas. But I can imagine other justices looking at this stuff and thinking that a weekend in Palm Springs isn’t worth the damage.

Oh so that’s how they get there – simple – just claim that “transvestite”=”transgender” and breeze right past all the differences.

New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People

The author is Laurie Marhoefer, a historian at the University of Washington.

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case.

It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians, including myself, before finding that the historical evidence shows that trans people were, indeed, persecuted by the Nazi regime.

This is an important case. It was the first time a court recognized the persecution of trans people in Nazi Germany. It was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans and cisgender queer people as victims of fascism.

Wtf are “cisgender queer people”? What’s the German for that?

In 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler took power, the police in Essen, Germany, revoked [Toni] Simon’s permit to dress as a woman in public. Simon, who was in her mid-40s, had been living as a woman for many years.

The Weimar Republic, the more tolerant democratic government that existed before Hitler, recognized the rights of trans people, though in a begrudging, limited way. Under the republic, police granted trans people permits like the one Simon had.

In the 1930s, transgender people were called “transvestites,” which is rarely a preferred term for trans people today, but at the time approximated what’s now meant by “transgender.” 

Ahhhhh there it is. It’s a simple trick. Just pretend that what was meant by “transvestite” then is exactly what is meant by “transgender” now and go on your way rejoicing.

But it isn’t the same. It isn’t remotely the same. Transvestites, however deeply they felt “like” the other sex internally, didn’t run all over the landscape trying to force the rest of the world to agree that they were indeed the sex that matched their clothes.

Hey I have an idea, why don’t we all just go the Maoist route and make everyone wear drab uniforms with no sex/gender differentiation. Problem solved.

The police permits were called “transvestite certificates,” and they exempted a person from the laws against cross-dressing. 

Clothes clothes clothes, it’s all about the clothes.

I was thinking about this today, nudged by that nonsense from Neil Tyson about How We Know What Sex People Are and the fact that I said “not me” to every single one of his cues for Who Is Woman. I don’t generally have to think about it much because I don’t generally have to get dressed up or put on Appropriate Business Attire or anything like that…but if I did have to it would be awkward. I worried about that a little back when I was invited to speak at conferences now and then. Did I look too casual or sloppy in my non-feminine “presentation”? The thing is, and was, I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t dress in the approved-for-women way. In that sense I maybe understand what is meant by gender dysphoria. If I were somehow forced to put on the woman-appropriate glad rags it would feel profoundly uncomfortable…which is quite irrational. It should be no big deal, but it isn’t. And the only reason it would feel so creepy is the This Is Not Me feeling, which is such a narcissistic thing to worry about in the first place. Who cares? No one. But it would feel ooky anyway. So in that sense…I don’t know, maybe I can grok what people are so worked up about.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

Originally a comment by Mostly Cloudy at Miscellany Room.

The extremist trans activist Alejandra Caraballo is promoting an article in the Smithsonian Magazine that claims the Nazis persecuted transgender people:

The Nazis came for trans people, burned the first trans clinic, and murdered the first trans woman who ever got bottom surgery.

To deny this is to engage in holocaust denial.

I keep hearing this claim put about by many trans activists. The obvious purpose of this claim is to smear anyone who disagrees with puberty blockers, men in women’s prisons, men competing in women’s sports, etc. as being a similar type of murderous bigot that the Nazis were.

Has anyone researched this? I know Malcolm Clark has looked into the issue.

The Nazis persecuted and murdered tens of thousands of homosexual men. A number of these homosexual men were what used to be called “transvestites”, who wore women’s clothing for most or all of the time. One of them was “Liddy” Bacroff, who has been described as a homosexual and a transvestite.

So it seems the “trans” people that Caraballo is talking about were actually homosexuals who liked to cross-dress.

Their suffering was tragic and deserves to be commemorated, but such people were not the main target of the Nazis, like Jews and Roma were. Nor is there any ideological connection with disagreement with “gender ideology” and Nazism.

Pro Publica has more on the ever-expanding “Clarence Thomas has multiple conflicts of interest” scandal.

On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Libertarian meaning extremely conservative and pro-rich people & anti-poor people.

One passenger on one private jet was Clarence Thomas.

During the summit, the justice went to a private dinner for the network’s donors. Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.

That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.

That’s in addition to the extraordinary position of taking all these bribes in the first place and going to all these highly political events and conferences and retreats in the first place.

Thomas’ involvement in the events is part of a yearslong, personal relationship with the Koch brothers that has remained almost entirely out of public view. It developed over years of trips to the Bohemian Grove, a secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for two decades, where he stayed in a small camp with real estate billionaire Harlan Crow and the Kochs, according to records and people who’ve spent time with him there.

Shorter: Thomas is dirty. Very, very dirty.

The code of conduct for the federal judiciary lays out rules designed to preserve judges’ impartiality and independence, which it calls “indispensable to justice in our society.” The code specifically prohibits both political activity and participation in fundraising. Judges are advised, for instance, not to “associate themselves” with any group “publicly identified with controversial legal, social, or political positions.”

But the code of conduct only applies to the lower courts. At the Supreme Court, justices decide what’s appropriate for themselves.

“I can’t imagine — it takes my breath away, frankly — that he would go to a Koch network event for donors,” said John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush. Jones said that if he had gone to a Koch summit as a district court judge, “I’d have gotten a letter that would’ve commenced a disciplinary proceeding.”

“What you’re seeing is a slow creep toward unethical behavior. Do it if you can get away with it,” Jones said.

Hey, I thought. Judge Jones? THE Judge Jones? So I googled. Yes, THE Judge Jones – the intelligent design ruling Judge Jones.

The Koch network is among the largest and most influential political organizations of the last half century, and it’s underwritten a far-reaching campaign to influence the course of American law. In a case the Supreme Court will hear this coming term, the justices could give the network a historic victory: limiting federal agencies’ power to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. After shepherding the case to the court, Koch network staff attorneys are now asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent. (Thomas used to support the precedent but flipped his position in recent years.)

In short, Thomas is strikingly corrupt.

Mind you, I’m confident he would rule for Koch-thought anyway, even if they’d never given him so much as a sandwich, but all this partying and holidaying and festivity with the billionaires who want everyone else to have less of everything is kaka anyway.

Start at 50 minutes on this to see and hear Neil deGrasse Tyson being sillier than you or I would have thought possible.

He tells his hosts he can tell women and men apart by looking at them, and that women are more expressive with their jewelry, and that women don’t have short hair, and a whole list of things of that kind. (Every single one of them, by the way, failed to be true of me, and I’m very far from the most strikingly butch woman on the planet, so…) He tells them that with much passion and emphasis, as if he’s saying something novel or surprising or clever. The point seems to be (I got too irritated and bored to watch to the end of his “argument”) that we know which sex is which because of a lot of visible cues, which are not inherent to femaleness or maleness but chosen and a matter of custom and fungible (i.e. they can be swapped)). Well no shit Sherlock, we know that. Now explain why that means we have to let men take everything we’ve won for ourselves over the past half-century.