This is interesting. Women were not permitted to speak, with the result that more women are speaking, and so are men. The bullies scored an own goal.

DeSantis is evil, and not as stupid as Trump.

Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.

He was born in Midway, a small town that’s part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.

There was jubilation when he was elected.

“Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration,” Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. “People saying: ‘Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy – I really wish they could see this.’”

In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.

Why? Because DeSantis carefully gerrymandered his district to make sure that he would lose.

It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive – and successful – efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.

In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud, and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.

Nice guy.

Ugh. I don’t think the police should have been involved, but at the same time I really don’t think pub owners or restaurant havers or food truck users should have racist caricatures on display. Not every “should” or “should not” is a police matter, to put it mildly.

The landlady of a pub whose collection of golliwog dolls was confiscated by police has assembled replacements, which she plans to display in defiance of a continuing investigation.

Last week four Essex police officers and a trainee seized all the dolls on show in the White Hart Inn in Grays as part of an investigation into an alleged hate crime.

We don’t have “golliwog” dolls in the US; it’s not even a word in US idiom. This is a golliwog doll:

No, I don’t think pubs should have those on display. I also don’t think it’s a police matter.

The dolls divide opinion in Grays. On Tuesday some pub regulars turned up to show support, but others expressed their fury. The pub’s landlady, Benice Ryley, 62, refuses to accept they are racist.

A neighbor disagrees with her.

Tony Daly, who manages a nearby charity shop, said the dolls made his “blood boil” and said he was shocked they had been on display in such a diverse area.

He also plans to confront Ryley over the issue. He said: “I find them very offensive and I’ll be going there to peacefully put my point across and to educate her. I grew up in Tottenham in the 70s when we fought against those kind of things. They used to call black people golliwogs. It’s a racist symbol that says slavery to me and the black and white minstrels. It’s so outdated and offensive to black people.”

It may be that Ryley is unaware of the black and white minstrels, but if so she should have taken the trouble to learn more. I hope she can hear what Tony Daly tells her.

Sunder Katwala, director of the integration thinktank British Future, said he was concerned by a post by Chris Ryley [husband of Benice and licensee of the pub] on Facebook. The 2016 post showed dolls hanging from a shelf in the bar alongside a comment by him saying, “They used to hang them in Mississippi years ago”. Katwala said that Chris Ryley had referenced lynchings in Mississippi in connection to the pub’s golliwogs collection in a Facebook post in 2016.

Uh, yeah. That makes the denial of racist intent less credible.

Saying men are not women is exactly the same as the Nazis says Willoughby.

We want trans people – people like Willoughby himself – to stop demonizing and trying to erase women. We want trans people, especially men who claim to be trans, to stop taking everything that belongs to women, and talking over us, and calling us Karens and cunts, and accusing us of hate crimes, and calling us Nazis. That’s what we want.

Watchdog to examine ‘implausible’ UK census trans figures

The statistics regulator is examining concerns that the data behind landmark census figures on the UK’s transgender population may be flawed.

Academics have queried findings by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that 262,000 people identify as transgender in England and Wales.

Next look into how many people identify as a different species.

Michael Biggs, a professor of sociology at the University of Oxford, believes the question posed to record the gender identity of respondents may have confused those whose first language is not English.

He claimed it may be why the London boroughs of Newham and Brent, which have a significant percentage of residents who speak English as a second language, recorded the highest proportion of transgender people in the UK. Overall, those who speak English poorly were found to be five times more likely to be transgender, prompting concerns about the data.

Ssshhhh never mind never mind – the point is there are lots and lots of trans people and we have to change everything to make them comfortable and happy and unlikely to come after us with machetes.

Biggs, who first made his census claims in The Spectator magazine last week, said the problem with the figures originates from the question itself. He noted that the ONS did not simply ask respondents: “Are you transgender?” Instead, it asked: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” This was done following consultations with LGBTQ lobby groups such as Stonewall, he claimed.

Biggs said the authors “never thought about how a Bangladeshi grandmother or a Hungarian plumber will think about this question”, adding: “I’d be disappointed if a master’s student at Oxford made that error.”

Seriously. It’s not a normal question – normal in the sense of being ordinary, commonplace, instantly comprehensible to anyone and everyone. It’s a question from the magical world of Gender Lunacy. To people who don’t live in that world, the question is at best idiotic. At worst it’s random syllables.

What is “identify with” supposed to mean? Why is a government census asking people what they “identify with”? Who needs statistics on what the populace “identify with”? We don’t “identify with” a height or a date of birth or a medical history or an employment history – and why would the state give a damn if we did? Why would the state care?

“Gender you identify with” and “sex registered at birth” are pseudo-progressive jargon, and the state shouldn’t be using that jargon.

This is what you get when you elect a hardened criminal chief executive.

The Manhattan district attorney on Tuesday sued Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in an extraordinary step intended to keep congressional Republicans from interfering in the office’s criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump.

The 50-page suit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, accuses Mr. Jordan of a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” on the prosecution of Mr. Trump and a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. Mr. Bragg last week unveiled 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump that stem from the former president’s attempts to cover up a potential sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.

Lawyers for Mr. Bragg are seeking to bar Mr. Jordan and his congressional allies from enforcing a subpoena sent to Mark F. Pomerantz, who was once a leader of the district attorney’s Trump investigation and who later wrote a book about that experience. Mr. Pomerantz resigned early last year after Mr. Bragg, just weeks into his first term in office, decided not to seek an indictment of Trump at that time.

Mr. Bragg’s lawyers, including Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. of the law firm Gibson Dunn and Leslie B. Dubeck, the general counsel in the district attorney’s office, also intend to prevent any other such subpoenas, the lawsuit says. Mr. Jordan has left open the possibility of subpoenaing Mr. Bragg.

Jordan shouldn’t be doing any of this. It’s corrupt and authoritarian.

“Rather than allowing the criminal process to proceed in the ordinary course, Chairman Jordan and the committee are participating in a campaign of intimidation, retaliation and obstruction,” the suit said, adding that the district attorney’s office had received more than 1,000 calls and emails from Mr. Trump’s supporters — many of them “threatening and racially charged” — since the former president predicted his own arrest last month.

Mr. Jordan responded in a statement on Twitter.

“First, they indict a president for no crime,” he wrote. “Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it.”

Trump is not a president. Jordan of course does not know the indictment is “for no crime.” Micromanagement of an urban DA is not Congress’s job.

Remember: always distort, re-word, ignore distinctions, exaggerate, lie, distort distort distort.

That’s how it’s done! McGovern said “We need to stop the virus of trans ideology” and Bozo says she “called trans people a virus.” Calling an ideology a virus is not calling the people infected by it a virus, just as calling Covid a virus is not calling the people infected by it a virus. The ideology is the virus, and it’s very very harmful to people, especially their brains and their critical faculties.

Willoughby has finally blocked me. I was surprised he hadn’t done it long ago; I’ve been a vocal non-admirer for a long time.

UN Women is infuriating. Goddam quislings.

There it is, there’s the saying it out loud. He’s a better woman than women are because he had to fight for it. Women are like the children of millionaires while he is like the children of the scullery maid at Chatsworth.

Jean Hatchet points out that Dylan Mulvaney is mocking us and we don’t like it.

Shortly before this year-long, very public “transition”, Mulvaney performed a pilot video for his current lucrative act. In it he told the viewer that he “had trouble finding roles” so a friend had invented one for him, a “femme character”. His character wears a pink dress and pearls, white gloves and ankle socks. At this point Mulvaney must have been delighted to glimpse a potential new career path. It was a very savvy move for him to extend and develop this caricature of a 1950s woman. Now, just over a year later, Dylan Mulvaney has highly paid “partnerships” with a number of companies including Budweiser, Kate Spade and — during the past week, to great objection — the Sportwear giant Nike.

For what? For an extended smirky insulting parody of women.

Imaging a white man reviving the old minstrel show parody. Imagine how much the left would applaud and reward and defend that.

Darling, right? Hilarious? Innocent playful fun?

Of course not.

So why is it ok when he does it?

In an inflammatory paid partnership video with Nike, an inanely grinning, barefoot Mulvaney wears a Nike sports bra and leggings. He performs a series of ridiculous moves including comedic side stretches, a theatrical run kicking his heels up nonsensically and failed chorus-line high kicks. He almost runs backwards into a hedge at one point and pulls a comedy expression of shock. It all looks ridiculous and slapstick. It mocks women by suggesting they exercise trivially and ineffectively, but smiling throughout. 

Why is it ok to mock women when it’s not ok to mock black people or indigenous people or southern hemisphere people?

Along with these grotesque parodies of womanhood, he promotes products with zero shame, grifting whilst gurning and gaslighting women. Shortly before he began this career-saving venture of “being a girl”, Mulvaney can be found mocking a female cheerleader in a sketch where he pretends to break his leg. He has honed and perfected these earlier attempts to portray women as weak and stupid, and he deflected attention from them by declaring himself a woman. Gender identity is once again the smokescreen for misogyny, and negative criticism leads to an award-worthy performance of his being hurt and bullied. Mulvaney simply reverses the victim and offender. Women are bullies, he is the target. Many women recognise this pattern from relationships with abusive men. 

Mulvaney is an abusive man.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on They don’t even get the initial euphoria.

Not that this hasn’t been discussed all along, of course, but still, learning that estrogen likely makes them more depressed than they already were…well, it can’t help the discourse much.

And so they get locked into chasing the dragon with ever increasing medical interventions.

That’s gotta cause some major dissonance. When I finally started getting real help for my social anxiety, the hope that my life would improve by itself gave me a sense of hope and elevated my view of myself, the world, and my place in it. I’m trying to imagine what kind of state I’d be in if the thing I believed was helping was actually making me worse. My tendency has always been to look inward for fault, hence the social anxiety, but if I were the sort to have an external locus of control? I’d be looking for someone, anyone to blame for my suffering. Which neatly explains the vehement hatred of anyone not on board 100% with the Genderist project, and it explains the obsession with making every nook and cranny of life conform to the ideology. “If transition isn’t making us happy,” they think, “then there must be something out there that’s preventing it from working, even if we can’t see it. We must find it and destroy it.”

Oof, this is a painful read. It’s about the horrifying side effects of “wrong sex hormones on men” as the author puts it, and how systematically it’s been and continues to be concealed. I say it’s painful but I also recommend reading it: it’s very clarifying.

It starts with the effects on feelings as opposed to the body, and finds that they’re a wash for males.

I started to find out what can be expected from the medical interventions for young AMAB (assigned-male-at-birth) trans women like my son. And there, the researchers of the NEJM study are unequivocal about their findings: even among the variables that were finally reported, “depression and anxiety scores decreased…but not among those designated male at birth.”

That’s right. For young men like our son, even those researchers who believe in “full steam ahead with hormones” have nothing optimistic to report. Zip. Nada.

So what about the body?

But so much for patient surveys on their mental outlook and how they feel. How does the body react physiologically to estrogen? To go back to the cocaine analogy I introduced earlier, we do not willy-nilly administer cocaine to patients just because they feel some initial euphoria (which, in the case of estrogen, is ironically conspicuous by its absence). What do the clinical studies on the effect of estrogen on the brain and the body say?

…

In 2018, researchers from Germany showed that increased estrogen levels are associated with depression in males. No wonder all the patient survey studies, including the latest in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed no improvement in the psychological outlook among males.

Oops.

It occurs to me that this could be part of the explanation for why the political (or pseudo-political) ideology that underpins this dangerous experiment is so deranged. It’s for and about and largely created by men with severe mental problems. Not that this hasn’t been discussed all along, of course, but still, learning that estrogen likely makes them more depressed than they already were…well, it can’t help the discourse much.

At this point, it is so surreal to see that it is parents like us, coming from fields far removed from biology and medicine, who are taking all their time from their day jobs to go through this research. For many, it has affected our professional and personal lives, not to mention our physical health and well-being.

As for the people who should have been doing this job and acting as gatekeepers – the psychologists, the endocrinologists, the doctors and the nurses, and the entire medical profession – why, they all have resorted to magical thinking and activism and even claiming that “although gender-affirming hormones can cause some irreversible changes,…these effects are primarily cosmetic.”

Shrinking brains, cognitive decline, depression, Alzheimer’s, suicide, cardiovascular diseases, asthma, arthritis, systemic sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases – yes, according to the gender “experts,” all these changes from estrogen are “primarily cosmetic!”

So what explains that? I will never understand it.

Nancy Kelley’s war on lesbians isn’t popular with everyone.

There are rules about charities that don’t do what they purport to do. The Charity Commission frowns on charities that don’t do what it says on the tin.

Jim Jordan is a lawbreaker.

Legal analyst Glenn Kirschner has said that Representative Jim Jordan broke the law in New York state by threatening to investigate Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Jordan, an Ohio Republican who currently serves as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, vowed in the wake of Donald Trump‘s historic indictment to investigate Bragg’s conduct in bringing criminal charges against the former president, claiming that the district attorney’s actions were politically motivated. Pursuant to that goal, Jordan on Thursday issued a subpoena for testimony to former Manhattan prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who worked on the Trump case before resigning last February.

In response, Bragg’s office released a statement decrying Jordan’s efforts as “an unprecedented campaign of harassment and intimidation.”

“The House GOP continues to attempt to undermine an active investigation and ongoing New York criminal case with an unprecedented campaign of harassment and intimidation,” a spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said Thursday. “Repeated efforts to weaken state and local law enforcement actions are an abuse of power and will not deter us from our duty to uphold the law.”

Jim Jordan is an abuser in many fields.

Originally a comment by Sackbut on We need to be asking “fair to whom?”

I think here again the distinction between “disproportionate advantage” and “category advantage”, as described by Jon Pike in his recent paper, become important. We don’t look at individual adults to see if they are within the skill capabilities of children before deciding whether these particular adults are allowed to participate in children’s sports, we have separate categories for children based on the idea that children have abilities and needs different from adults, and beyond that we don’t test any further. Age grouping is a category advantage. Sex grouping is also a category advantage.

NPR recently interviewed an endocrinologist (why not a sports physiologist?) who basically shrugged his shoulders and said “We simply don’t know” regarding trans athletes having an advantage against “cis” athletes, again missing the point. We do know that men have significant advantages against women, and we have sex grouping in sports partly (partly!!!) for that reason. It isn’t “trans versus cis”, but “men versus women”. They are arguing that men should be allowed to compete in the women’s division, but only those extra-special men who claim to be women, not other men. Some people are explicitly arguing that all sex divisions should go away, but most do not seem to realize that’s what they are arguing, ultimately.

So I decided to Learn More and went to their “Day of Pink” page.

Or is it the Courage Across Canada Tour page?

Or is it the Reopening With Pride page?

Or is it the United We Stand a Chance page?

It’s hard to tell. We’re offered all those on the front page. Much slogan, very little explanation.

But anyway, they do tell us some things, in pink lettering on a white page.

April 12, 2023 is the International Day of Pink!

Discrimination takes many shapes, whether it’s based on race, age, disabilities, gender or sexuality. The 2SLGBTQIA+ community is no stranger to the bullying and violence that stems from hateful beliefs. While progress has been made towards removing these social barriers from our society, discrimination still persists. So, every year, on the second Wednesday of April, we urge people around the world to put on a pink shirt and stand in solidarity with the 2SLGBTQIA+ community to continue fighting for equality and acceptance.

Ok, that was not clear from the Toronto school board tweet. Of course one could take “pink” as a clue, but since all the rest of the content was general, that didn’t seem to be what they meant. Also, by the way, pink doesn’t=gay or homosexual or same-sex attracted in general, it’s a guy thing. On the other hand in straight world pink very often does signify girls and sometimes women. If wear pink day is about “the 2SLGBTQIA+ communninny” why isn’t there a color for the female ones? Just the usual reason? Women don’t matter? Or if it does mean girls and women then why is it for the 2SLGBTQIA+ communninny? They seem confused.

Whether it’s in Canada or beyond, we need to stand up against hateful beliefs to keep the clock from turning backwards on our efforts towards establishing equality for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. It’s time now to educate the future generation to not repeat history, demand more of our politicians and policy makers, and participate in creating real change through real effort.

What’s that got to do with wearing a pink shirt?

International Day of Pink has one purpose, to create a more inclusive and diverse world.

How can it do that? How can urging children to wear a pink shirt to school do that? Seriously.

We do this by encouraging young people to challenge social norms, ask more of their educators, and stand up against bullying towards their 2SLGBTQIA+ peers. Over the years we have worked with countless educators, politicians and organizations around Canada to spread this message and create young activists for this mission. We hope to continue this work and reach more communities with every passing year. We can only do this with your support and involvement. So please consider sharing our work, wearing our merch, donating to our cause, and joining our movement in any way you can.

Oh there it is – wear our merch!

Now I understand.

Wat?

What are they even talking about? How does “wearing pink” signify (or signal or advertise or promote or nudge or push) creating a more inclusive and diverse world? How does it at the same time stand in solidarity with the 2SLGBTQIAZMDJRVTPXMKLQ+ communities?

This time it’s not so much enraging as sick-making. It’s so smarmy, so creepy, so damp hand in yours and soft voice telling you you are loved when all you want to do is fling the hand off and run away as fast as you can go.

I hope all the students and teachers wear green and black and yellow and sky blue and not one speck of pink.

One, ten, many Savita Halappanavars. The Washington Post has the details:

At 36, she’d already experienced a long line of miscarriages, but none of the pregnancies had been more than five weeks along. Now she had to deliver a nearly 16-week fetus — a daughter she’d planned to call Bunny.

And when she did she immediately started hemorrhaging.

She had intended to deliverthe fetus in a hospital, a doctor by her side. When her water broke the night before — at least six weeks ahead of when a fetus could survive on its own — she drove straight to the emergency room, where she said the doctor explained that she was experiencing pre-viability preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes (PPROM), which occurs in less than 1 percent of pregnancies.

Remember that? From the Halappanavar case? Medically speaking it’s essential to do a D&C when that happens so that the woman doesn’t bleed to death. The way Savita did. It’s standard of care.

But in Florida it’s “Go home and die.”

At the hospital in Coral Springs, Fla., Cook received antibiotics, records show.Then she was sent home to wait.

Which is medical malpractice.

Cook’s experience reflects a new reality playing out in hospitals in anti abortion states across the country — where because of newly enacted abortion bans, people with potentially life-threatening pregnancy complications are being denied care that was readily available before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

Catholic hospitals have been doing this all along. A big hospital in Seattle merged with a Catholic chain recently so now they follow the Catholic woman-killing rules. It shouldn’t be allowed but it is. Women just don’t matter.

When abortion was legal across the country, doctors in all states would typically offer to induceor perform a surgical procedure to end the pregnancy when faced with a pre-viability PPROM case — which is the standard of care, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and an option that many women choose. Especially before the 20-week mark, a fetus is extremely unlikely to survive without any amniotic fluid.

But in the 18 states where abortion is now banned before fetal viability, many hospitals have been turning away pre-viability PPROM patients as doctors and administrators fear the legal risk that could come with terminating even a pregnancy that could jeopardize the mother’s well-being, according to 12 physicians practicing in antiabortion states.

Could kill the mother. Isn’t it odd how the dead fetus matters more than the living adult woman. It’s almost as if it’s just an excuse to torment and murder women.

One of the sponsors of Florida’s 15-week abortion ban defended the currentlaw as written, saying the existing exception should be sufficient to cover cases with serious health risks. An explicit exception for PPROM is not necessary, she added.

“The bottom line is we value life, and we would like to protect life,” said former Florida state senator Kelli Stargel (R). “We don’t want to give a gaping exception that anyone can claim.”

Liar. She’s not protecting life, she’s protecting the fetus, even the dead fetus, at the expense of the living woman.

Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx:

A symposium in Nantes intended to raise awareness of the plight of Afghan and Iranian women has been postponed after trans activists threatened to violently ambush the event because of the presence of a gender critical speaker.

Step aside, Afghan and Iranian women, the much more important cause of men who pretend to be women needs all the space and attention and concern.

The Comité Laïcité République (CLR – Republic Secularism Committee), an organization dedicated to promoting secularism “as a force for reflection, dialogue, with a balanced tone,” issued a statement on April 5 announcing that their symposium – entitled “Women, Life, Freedom” after the mantra of the Iranian women’s protest movement – would be postponed to a later and as yet unspecified date. The event had previously been planned for April 15 at the Château des ducs de Bretagne in Nantes.

The activists were enraged over the planned presence of Marguerite Stern, a French women’s rights campaigner known for having critical stances on gender ideology and the sex trade.

Because men who pretend to be women are always more urgent and more in danger than any women. Women in Afghanistan and Iran are pampered princesses compared to men in skirts in Paris.

“Numerous threats inciting violence were made on social media, including the distribution of our poster announcing the event crossed out with a knife, with calls for counter-demonstrations due to the presence of Ms. Stern, an activist feminist, critic of transgender ideology,” read the CLR’s statement.

“This led the organizers to postpone this event for the sake of preserving the safety of the speakers, of all the participants, and to prevent the Château from suffering any damage. The Comité Laïcité République lodged a complaint and informed the Prefect of these threats.”

Threats are entirely legitimate when they’re aimed at disobedient women.

Speaking with Le Figaro regarding the threats of violence from trans activists, Stern compared the accusation of “transphobia” to the label of “Islamophobia”, saying that both terms are used to silence critics. She noted that, according to her detractors, “recalling biological facts and wanting to protect women and children is considered the worst affront.”

Fact. PZ’s sycophants liked to call me both.

Stern is set to speak at the event regarding the state of feminism following the Me Too era. The description of her presentation also mentions that Stern was ousted from her own movement in direct response to her concerns about transgender ideology. Les Collages Contre les Féminicides, a direct action campaign she launched in 2019, involved the creation of murals calling attention to male violence against women and girls.

By January 2020, just under a year after she founded the collective, Stern’s project had been “hijacked” by gender ideology, a situation that she described in a series of posts on Twitter.

“Debates on trans activism are taking up more and more space in feminism, and even garnering all the attention. I interpret this as a new male attempt to prevent women from expressing themselves,” she wrote. “At all times, men have tried to silence women by silencing their revolts. Today they are doing it from within by infiltrating our struggles and taking center stage.”

Indeed they are, and if we resist they punish. It’s a very clever way to destroy feminism, I have to give them that.

The Nation for some reason decided to publish an article by a they/them called Frankie de la Cretaz who has nothing but contempt and hostility for women.

In 2021, the Department of Education announced a formal review of the way Title IX was enforced. The goal was ostensibly to come up with an interpretation of the law that protects transgender students from discrimination.

The proposal unveiled on Thursday, to put it mildly, does not meet that goal. Instead, under the cover of a ban on what it calls “one-size-fits-all” anti-trans policies, it makes explicit allowances for restrictions on trans participation in sports to ensure what it describes as “fairness in competition” and “preventing sports-related injury.” Even observers inclined to be generous to the Biden administration about the proposal acknowledge that it would allow for targeted bans against trans students, particularly in high school. 

Male trans students, they means but of course doesn’t say. It always always always has to be concealed that the people being championed in these polemics are male people who want to displace and cheat women.

…it’s important to understand these terms for what they are: transphobic talking points that have been honed and weaponized by anti-trans groups. They sound reasonable but they are incredibly insidious—and now they are being used by a supposedly trans-friendly administration to justify its endorsement of anti-trans policies.

Yes it’s just so incredibly insidious to try to protect women’s sports and the women who play them. The not insidious thing to do would be to sit back and watch cheerfully as men destroy women sports and injure the women who play them.

Title IX, because of the way it is written, allows for this kind of discrimination against transgender athletes, and transgender girls and women, in particular. That’s because when Title IX was passed, the need for its existence relied on arguments that there were biological differences between girls and boys, which created a need for separate divisions.

Ah yes those silly obsolete arguments of yesteryear that there are biological differences between girls and boys. Isn’t it glorious to live now, when we know so much better??

It made the definition of “girlhood” reliant on a body, rather than on a concept of gender. These arguments, built into the very fabric of Title IX itself, allow for the protection of cisgender girls to be maintained at the expense of transgender girls.

At the expense of. We’re so rude, so greedy, so callous, so heartless, protecting girls at the expense of boys.

Let’s examine the two concepts the DOE leaned on to justify the discrimination against trans kids. The first is “fairness in sports.”  This is a red herring, an elusive and unattainable concept. Sports are inherently unfair.

…

When anti-trans groups harp on the issue of fairness, they are framing the issue in a misleading way. We need to be asking, fair to whom? When we think about fairness we should think about justice, which requires centering the most marginalized people in the room—and that is transgender women and girls. It is that group that we should be most concerned about including, rather than making rules at their expense.

Men who claim to be women are the most marginalized people in the room. Women who are mere women however are the least marginalized people in this particular room. Men are at the mercy of all-powerful women. Who knew?

The rule’s second anti-trans loophole, the supposed prevention of sports-related injury, implies that transgender women and girls are inherently bigger and stronger than cisgender girls, and that cisgender girls will be harmed if trans girls are allowed to compete. There is no evidence to support this. All sports come with the risk of injury and a cis girl is just as likely to be injured by a larger cis girl than she is by a trans girl on the field.

A girl is just as likely to be injured by a larger girl as she is by a man on the field? No. That’s just a lie.

The Biden administration has capitulated to well-worn anti-trans talking points, ones which transgender advocates have spent years trying to dismantle. These arguments, which transphobic groups frame as “protecting girls,” actually put our most vulnerable girls at risk by harming trans girls. If you want to protect women and girls, you need to be protecting all women and girls, not just the ones you deem worthy of protection, and not at the expense of the group of people most likely to be the victims of discrimination and violence.

If you want to protect workers, you need to be protecting all workers, not just the ones who work in factories and meatpacking plants, and not at the expense of the group of people who make the rules and pay their workers as little as they can.

The Nation should be embarrassed to publish this dreck.