Wait what? There’s an environment, and it needs protection? Who knew?

The sleeping giant of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stirred.

In the past month, an avalanche of anti-pollution rules, targeting everything from toxic drinking water to planet-heating gases in the atmosphere, have been issued by the agency. Belatedly, the sizable weight of the US federal government is being thrown at longstanding environmental crises, including the climate emergency.

On Thursday, the EPA’s month of frenzied activity was crowned by the toughest ever limits upon carbon pollution from America’s power sector, with large, existing coal and gas plants told they must slash their emissions by 90% or face being shut down.

Not just this month though.

In April, new emissions standards for cars and trucks [were issued that] will eliminate an expected 9bn tons of CO₂ by the mid-point of the century, while separate rules issued late last year aim to slash hydrofluorocarbons, planet-heating gases used widely in refrigeration and air conditioning, by 4.6bn tons in the same timeframe. Methane, another highly potent greenhouse gas, will be curtailed by 810m tons over the next decade in another EPA edict.

In just a few short months the EPA, diminished and demoralized under Donald Trump, has flexed its regulatory muscles to the extent that 15bn tons of greenhouse gases – equivalent to about three times the US’s carbon pollution, or nearly half of the entire world’s annual fossil fuel emissions – are set to be prevented, transforming the power basis of Americans’ cars and homes in the process.

I don’t think the issue was that the EPA was demoralized under Trump, as it was that he would have vetoed anything they did.

But never mind. The Trump-packed Supreme Court will do it instead.

The various climate rules have involved grueling preparation from an agency still considered understaffed from the Trump years and now face a gamut of challenges. The right-leaning US supreme court limited the EPA’s options for cutting power plant emissions in a ruling last year and further legal challenges from Republican-led states are inevitable.

“This rule appears to utterly fly in the face of the rule of law,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which triumphed in last year’s case. “We expect that we would once again prevail in court against this out-of-control agency.”

No doubt they will. Enjoy your luxury vacations, Clarence Thomas.

Reduxx reports:

A man who identifies as transgender and has a disturbing criminal record is suing a New York yoga studio for $5 million in compensation after he alleges employees asked him to use the men’s restroom instead of the women’s. Dylan Miles, who uses the name Ali Miles, filed the discrimination suit against Chelsea Traditional Hot Yoga on May 15.

Using a mixture of masculine and feminine pronouns to refer to himself, Miles alleges that the personnel at Chelsea Yoga “deprived [him] of his civil rights because he is gay, undergoing a gender transition, and because Miles does not conform to … gender-based preferences, expectations, or stereotypes about how a man/woman should dress and conduct himself/herself.”

There is no civil right to force other people to pay attention to your customized special presentation of self. Nobody cares. You’re a man; stay out of the women’s toilets.

He showed up at the studio a couple of weeks ago for a yoga class.

According to the suit, Miles proceeded to tell the manager and owner of the studio about his “gender status”, and stated that he “most closely aligned with female gender identity,” and that he would like to use the women’s restroom and locker room on the premises.

In other words his reason for being there was to perform a Validate Me pageant.

Management informed Miles that he would not be permitted to use the women’s facilities. However, after attending the yoga class, Miles proceeded to enter first the restroom, and then the women’s locker room. At this point, the suit states, “female patrons complained and yelled at Miles about Miles’ presence and use of the single-sex locker room and bathroom labelled Women, and they demanded Miles leave and cease using the facilities.”

He then alleges that while “feeling shame, humiliation, and frustration,” he was escorted to the facilities designated for men, and was therefore “forced to use a locker room and bathroom that was not most closely aligned with Miles’ gender.”

Of course the shame and humiliation of women when a man bounces into their locker room doesn’t even register. Who cares about those bitches? It’s all about the man and his feelz.

You know…if the trans thing were genuine…if he really did feel pain and misery at being in the wrong body…he would genuinely identify with women, so he would get why they wouldn’t welcome him bouncing in on them. The more these assholes make it clear that they hate women and love to abuse them, the less believable it is that they have anything like “gender dysphoria.” More like gender sadism.

Reduxx can reveal that Miles has a history of stalking and harassment charges lodged against him in Yavapai County, Arizona, before he relocated to New York State.

Well stone the crows. What a surprise. He’s not a woman, he’s just an abuser of women.

Cold rage for Nancy Kelley.

Notice a theme? Nancy Kelley is promoting men having the chance to break girls’ necks in rugby.

Who is on Team Julie-Anne Bloke?

Nancy Kelley of course.

Replies are turned off; quote tweets are scathing; ratio is vast.

Crowd justice:

Fighting the ban on trans women in rugby

by Julie-Anne Curtiss

Curtiss blurbs himself:

I am a human being. Beyond that I am a transgender woman & believe that trans-rights are human rights. The purpose of this campaign is to challenge the legitimacy of RFU’s ban on trans-women in rugby.

Trans people should have human rights as all humans should. Men playing women’s rugby is not a human right.

Who am I

First and foremost, I am a human being. I happen to love playing rugby. I also happen to be trans. Following transition, I started playing rugby for an amateur women’s club. Anyone who loves sport will know how much community is built within a team: for the first time I was able to play the game I loved, as myself. 

He can say he “happens to be” trans all he likes, but that doesn’t change the fact that male people don’t get to play in women’s sports.

In July 2022, the RFU essentially decided to ban all trans women & girls from playing rugby at all levels. This meant I was suddenly unable to play the game I have loved my whole life, simply because I am a trans woman. 

No, not because he’s a trans woman; because he’s a man.

I don’t think this is fair and I am here to challenge it.    

So he does think it’s fair for men to endanger women and cheat them in sports. What a peculiar notion of what is fair and what isn’t.

The new RFU policy has resulted in me suddenly not being able to participate in amateur women’s contact rugby this season because I am trans. 

No, dude, because you’re a dude.

The first part of the process is the ‘pre-action’ stage. For this, my solicitors sent a pre-action letter to the RFU asking it to explain why it thinks its new policy is lawful. 

We have now received a response to our pre-action letter. We are not able to provide the RFU’s response because it is confidential, but I can confirm that the RFU seems intent on defending its policy.

I should damn well hope so. You seem intent on cheating women out of their own sports.

What a contemptible piece of dung.

The hostile replies on The Nation’s tweet of that ridiculous article defending “Lia” Thomas and accusing women of “frenzy” continue to pile up. Could it break the record for disastrous ratio? Confidence is high.

Yeesh that photo. I don’t think I’d seen that one before.

Reduxx reports:

Japan’s longest-running rape crisis center has been declared ineligible to receive public funding following statements made by the facility’s director which were deemed by government officials to be discriminatory against males who identify as transgender.

So government officials punish a rape crisis center for not “including” males. Kind of misses the point of having a rape crisis center at all, if you ask me.

Tokyo’s Rape Crisis Center was founded in 1983 by six women, half of whom were survivors of sexual assault. Michiko Orita, one of the founders, first confirmed the punitive measure during a meeting held last year in May organized by women’s rights campaign group Save Women’s Spaces, which was primarily concerned with the potential ramifications should gender identity policies be adopted in the nation.

“There have been various attacks and obstructions against our association [Tokyo Rape Crisis Center] throughout the last year. In one specific example, the director of the Minato City Center for Gender Equality carried out a speech suppression and power harassment attack against us for more than an hour, based on criticism that not referring to ‘transgender women’ as ‘women’ is detrimental to the promotion of gender equality and diversity in the Minato Ward,” Orita said during her 2022 presentation.

Well that’s backward. It’s pretending that men are women, and punishing women for not pretending that men are women, that’s detrimental to “gender equality.” I don’t know what “gender diversity” is supposed to be.

The issue was again brought to light during an emergency press conference held in Tokyo on May 1 to address concerns about a proposed LGBT bill that would codify “gender identity” into law while banning “unfair discrimination” on that basis, without clearly defining either term.

“Male self-identified ‘women’ ignore the purpose of having a women-only space,” Orita said. “The desire not to have physical men in women-only spaces is not prejudice or a discriminatory attitude, but comes from evidence-based reality.”

But evidence-based reality is detrimental to the desire of some men to bully and punish and ostracize women.

Yes indeed, the thing to do when the planet is relentlessly heating up such that future humans are going to have a giant nightmare to deal with is have more children.

A Conservative MP has claimed the UK’s low birthrate is the most pressing policy issue of the generation and is caused in part by “cultural Marxism” stripping young people of any hope, at the start of a populist-tinged conference in London.

Addressing the National Conservatism gathering, run by a US-based thinktank, Miriam Cates said western countries faced an existential threat from falling reproduction…

Of course that depends on how you define “existential.” I assume she means “western countries” are going to change a lot because people from non-“western countries” will be migrating to them. By “western” of course she means white. But change isn’t automatically an existential threat. What’s really an existential threat is a planet that’s hot, dry, and empty.

She explained the conditions for “starting a family” i.e. having children.

“You must also have hope for the future. And that hope is not reaching so many of our young people today, because liberal individualism has proved to be completely powerless to resist a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.”

“When culture, schools and universities openly teach that our country is racist, our heroes are villains, humanity is killing the Earth, you are what you desire, diversity is theology, boundaries are tyranny and self-restraint is oppression, is it any wonder that mental health conditions, self-harm and suicide, and epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion characterise the emerging generation?”

Hang on. The bit about the earth – that’s not “cultural Marxism.” The floods in Pakistan were not cultural Marxism, the dead coral reefs are not cultural Marxism, the drying up of the Colorado River is not cultural Marxism, the deadly wildfires in Australia were not cultural Marxism, the worse and more frequent hurricanes are not cultural Marxism, the deadly heat waves in Europe and the western US were not cultural Marxism.

The use of “cultural Marxism” as a description by the Penistone and Stocksbridge MP is controversial because it is a term referring to a conspiracy theory often associated with the far right and antisemitism.

When Suella Braverman, the home secretary – who is addressing the conference later on Monday – used the phrase in a 2019 speech, she was criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Cates’s argument for a higher birthrate echoes those made by European populist leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, although they are explicit about contrasting this with what they see as a parallel threat from immigration.

Let’s make cultural Orbánism a label.

Cates said the low birthrate was “the one overarching threat to British conservatism, and to the whole of western society”, and was a greater concern than the climate emergency, Russia or China.

If she really thinks that she must not know a damn thing about the climate emergency.

Interesting…

“Well, it’s an adult human female, but Neil our laws have changed and attitudes are changing where there are people now who identify differently to their biological sex. And what I have always wanted is to respect that and include people.”

This “include” thing – it’s a puzzler. Sometimes “include” is neutral and passionless. You can include tomatoes on your shopping list, you can include socks when you pack a suitcase, you can include chairs when you furnish a room. Sometimes “include” has to do with human relationships – you can include people among your friends, or not; children can include classmates in their birthday party invitations, or not. But it’s a new and confused idea that we can “include” people in definitions in defiance of the meaning of the definitions, and that we ought to do so because if we don’t we’re failing to “include” those people the same way children fail to “include” the nerdy kids in their class. Definitions are not birthday parties or clubs or picnics or circles of friends. Definitions cease to function as definitions if we start “including” items in them for the sake of not hurting someone’s feelings.

So it is with this idea of “including” men who pretend to be women in the definition of women. It’s not necessary, and it misses the whole point of a “definition.” It’s beside the point that some men may feel hurt or angry or dissed if they’re not “included” in the definition of “women,” because the meaning of the word relies partly on the fact that men are not women. The two words are mutually exclusive. Men are not women; they are not-women. Women are not men; they are not-men. “Including” some of each for the sake of “including” people because that’s the nice kind non-bullying thing to do just doesn’t make any sense. You don’t add a few token giraffes to the definition of “lion” and you don’t add a few token lions to the definition of “giraffes.” It doesn’t matter if some giraffes or some lions will have hurt feelings about this. You can invite them to the parties, but you can’t “include” them in all the definitions.

Ben Appel in spiked on The New Homophobia:

In 2017, at the age of 33, I enrolled at Columbia University, New York to complete my undergraduate degree. There, I was shocked to discover how gay activism had evolved since marriage equality became the law of the land. The focus was now entirely on personal pronouns and on being ‘queer’. My classmates labelled me ‘cis’, short for cisgender. I didn’t even know what it meant. All I knew was that they called me ‘cis’ in the same cadence that the seventh graders had called me ‘fag’.

Oh but that can’t be right. Cis is to trans as straight is to gay, isn’t it? No, it isn’t, but we’re supposed to pretend it is.

Soon, I learned about nonbinary identities, and that some people – many people – were literally arguing that sex, not gender, was a social construct. I met people who evangelised a denomination of transgenderism that I had never heard of, one that included people who had never been gender dysphoric and who had no desire to medically transition. I met straight people whose ‘trans / nonbinary’ identities seemed to be defined by their haircuts, outfits and inchoate politics. I met straight women with Grindr accounts, and listened to them complain about the ‘transphobic’ gay men who didn’t want to have sex with women.

All around me, it seemed, straight people were spontaneously identifying into my community and then policing our behaviours and customs. I began to think that this broadening of the ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrella was giving a hell of a lot of people a free pass to express their homophobia.

And their misogyny too. It’s turning out to be quite a gift.

I wondered how different these so-called trans kids were from the little boy I had been. Obviously, I grew up to be a gay man and not a transwoman. But how could gender clinicians tell the difference between a young boy expressing his homosexuality through gender nonconformity, and someone ‘born in the wrong body’? I decided to dig deeper into the real history of medical transition.

What I learned validated all of my worst fears. I learned that for decades after their invention, synthetic ‘sex hormones’ were used by doctors and scientists who sought to ‘cure’ homosexuality, and by law enforcement to chemically castrate men convicted of committing homosexual acts.

…

I began to fear we had reached a point of no return a couple of years ago, during a conversation I had with a supposedly ‘progressive’ friend. I told her that, if I had been a young boy now, I likely would have been prescribed puberty blockers and gone on to medically transition. ‘And you don’t think you would’ve been happy as a transwoman?’, she asked me. Her question left me speechless. I couldn’t find the words to state the obvious: that I am a gay man, not a transwoman; that statistics tell me my medical transition may not have been successful; and that I would suffer severe medical complications. In any case, if I had transitioned, I wouldn’t be living an authentic life. After all, isn’t that what this is supposed to be about? Living authentically?

Well…yes, but…not that kind of authentically. The other kind. The kind based on fantasy and cosplay.

He has a book in the works. I want to read it.

Ben Appel is a writer based in New York. His forthcoming memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, will be published by Post Hill Press.

Cis white woman gender heretic sends high five.

It seems that despite all this bravado and sneering and abuse, Trump is still in deep trouble.

But in the coming months it’s going to get a lot harder for the former, and possibly future, American president to spin his legal problems as political persecution by Democratic elitists. Investigations against him are mounting, and even more troubled legal waters lie ahead for Trump – and some of his acolytes.

Indictments in conservative Georgia are coming down the line and many of the key witnesses against Trump will be his fellow Republicans, including some who helped him try to rig the 2020 election.

And we can be confident about this because they’ll testify to protect themselves.

Similarly, investigations by a justice department special counsel into Trump’s actions leading up to the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol, and the stashing of classified documents at his Florida mansion, are being built on the accounts of aides and political associates who are potential witnesses against him.

…

Leading the way is a prosecutor in Atlanta who is stacking up witnesses against the former president, almost all of them Republicans, over his attempt to rig the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia. They include some who tried to help Trump steal the vote but who have been persuaded to give evidence against him to save their own necks.

The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has spent more than two years investigating the “multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results”.

…

Willis had been expected to charge Trump and others this month, but indictments are not now likely before mid-July as prosecutors put together immunity deals to lure the former president’s Republican co-conspirators to testify against him and his top aides.

…

Willis expanded the investigation as more evidence emerged of Trump and his allies attempting to manipulate the results, including the appointment of a sham slate of 16 electors to replace the state’s legitimate members of the electoral college who do the formal business of selecting the president. The fake electors included the chair of the Georgia Republican party, David Shafer, and Republican members of the state legislature who have been warned that they are at risk of prosecution.

Earlier this month it was revealed that at least eight of the fake electors have done a deal to give evidence in return from immunity from prosecution, although Shafer is not included.

Eisen said the immunity deals are a sign that charges are in the offing.

“We know that multiple fake electors have received immunity. That is another indication of trouble for Donald Trump because those deals are extended by prosecutors typically when they are preparing to bring a case, and they believe they have a case to bring,” he said.

“So it’s a sign of prosecutorial seriousness. And it’s a sign that the district attorney can mount an effective case because these immunised fake electors can serve as tour guides for the jury into the plot, which we know ran all the way up to the Oval Office.”

Tick tick tick…

Musk’s Twitter wants the world to burn.

Some of the UK’s top scientists are struggling to deal with what they describe as a huge rise in abuse from climate crisis deniers on Twitter since the social media platform was taken over by Elon Musk last year.

Since then, key figures who ensured “trusted” content was prioritised have been sacked, according to one scientist, and Twitter’s sustainability arm has vanished. At the same time several users with millions of followers who propagate false statements about the climate emergency, including Donald Trump and rightwing culture warrior Jordan Peterson, have had their accounts reinstated.

Climate scientists say the change has been stark, and they are fighting to make themselves heard over a “barrage” of often hostile comments.

“There’s been a massive change,” said Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London and the author of popular books including How to Save Our Planet. “I get so much abuse and rude comments now. It’s happening to all of us, but I challenge the climate deniers so I’ve been really targeted.”

Maslin says he used to have regular meetings with Sean Boyle, Twitter’s former head of sustainability, who was laid off in Musk’s mass cull of staff shortly after he took over in Aprll 2022. Maslin said Boyle discussed the platform’s work to develop ways of ensuring that trusted information was pushed to the top.

“They were using climate change as a good test bed, because it was fairly clear who the good and bad actors were,” Maslin said. “But he was sacked and Twitter became the wild west.”

That’s ok. There’s no reason not to err on the side of “deny deny deny until everything is scorched and dead.”

H/t Tim Harris

Confusing.

The Radical Left Fascists?

Also, why the commas before and after “quickly”? They don’t, make, any sense.

Retorts on the bird.

On the bright side – that appalling article in The Nation is getting absolutely hosed, both on Twitter and in comments on the article. The more scathing the comment the more upvotes it gets. The rare comment that agrees with the article gets a mass of downvotes. This is good news.

KEITH DANISH says:

May 12, 2023 at 1:24 pm

Sad to see women-hating made respectable.

204 approve, 7 disapprove.

nina rodrigues says:

May 12, 2023 at 7:22 pm

“There is no evidence that trans women have an unfair advantage over the others.” Oh please, there are very good reasons why men cannot compete with women in sports. Darts? Perhaps? I’m not transphobic. I know trans women and trans men. Have you asked yourselves why there’s no one complaining about trans men competing with others in men’s sports? Why women do? What’s the difference? There are difference in endurance, speed, strength, muscles and so on. That’s the way it is. Don’t bully the women for stating the facts.

216 yay, 4 nay.

The most recent and my favorite:

Edward Szewczyk says:

May 13, 2023 at 9:24 pm

Maybe female swimmers become “transphobic” because they work their asses off, getting up at 4:30 every morning to swim God knows how many miles, lift weights & do whatever else they do to prepare & improve, so they resent having their efforts defeated because trans-women, who have the strength, endurance, coordination and athletic ability of men, are creating unfair competition.

194 yes, 3 no.

Hey, The Nation, ask a stupid question why doncha.

“a frenzy” – yes those hysterical women, how dare they get in “a frenzy” just because a large ruthless self-serving man forces himself on them and cheats them at their own sport.

The author of this garbage is one Frankie de la Cretaz. Google turns up the information that “they” is a freelance writer and a “they” After a lot of scrolling I still can’t find whether they is a he-they or a she-they. From the ruthless smugness and smug ruthlessness I’m guessing they’s a he.

The question is why The Nation sees fit to publish this kind of offensive openly misogynist insulting dreck.

The title is insulting – “How Women’s Swimming Got So Transphobic” – it’s not transphobic for women to want women’s sports to go on being for women. It’s sexist to call women names for wanting to keep their own sports.

The subtitle is insulting – “Almost no other sport is as hostile to trans athletes—and that’s because its culture created the perfect conditions for transphobia to take root.” I repeat – it’s not transphobic for women to want women’s sports to go on being for women. Also it’s not “hostile to trans athletes” to keep men out of women’s sports. The issue is not that he’s trans, it’s that he’s male. Male trans people could solve this problem in a heartbeat by not bullying women.

So. The article.

When Lia Thomas first entered the women’s NCAA swimming scene in 2021, her presence was immediately felt. National media outlets became obsessed with her. She got the kind of attention rarely given to swimming athletes outside of the Olympics.

Thomas was good, but she wasn’t the next Simone Biles of her field. So what explained such a frenzy? Simple: Thomas was a transgender woman having success in the women’s division.

No shit, Sherlock. He got a lot of attention because he was cheating women in their own sport. That’s a bad thing to do, and he shouldn’t be allowed to do it. It’s not fair to the women.

There was a lot of news media attention, Cretaz notes.

“That level of coverage of women’s swimming, specifically, has not come close to being matched in the year after the end of [Thomas’s] swimming career,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters. “They like to say that this is coming from a place of caring about women’s sports, but it’s hard not to notice that they don’t really cover women’s sports unless trans women are competing in them.”

I think you’ll find that’s a pattern all over the news media. They don’t really cover victims of mass shootings until the mass shootings. They don’t really cover Ukraine until Russia invades it. They don’t really cover global warming until it’s far too late to do anything about it. The news media don’t cover things that aren’t news.

The intensity of the critical media coverage helped fuel an equally intense backlash against Thomas. Sixteen of her University of Pennsylvania teammates signed a letter midway through the season saying that she had an unfair advantage.

Because he does.

That letter was organized by former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who, along with fellow Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona, is a founding member of the Women’s Sport Policy Working Group, which has been leading the movement to ban trans women and girls from competing in the women’s division in sports across the board. (The Human Rights Campaign has called the WSPWG “a hate group.”) 

(The Human Rights Campaign is wrong.)

And World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion.

No, it doesn’t ban them from competing, it bans them from competing against women. This is such shitty dishonest “reporting” – how is it that The Nation waved it through?

And why shouldn’t men face “incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion” in women’s sports? Why shouldn’t they just be told “No”? Why don’t women matter here?

(As I have written previously, there is no real evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage over their cisgender counterparts.)

I repeat: the issue is not trans athletes, it’s male athletes in women’s sports. Does The Nation not have any editors? Why did it publish this dishonest pile of dung uncorrected?

The World Aquatics policy was the culmination of a long-simmering anti-trans sentiment in the sport of women’s swimming, particularly in Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. While most sporting bodies have taken a hard turn to the right in recent years when it comes to allowing transgender athletes—and transgender women, in particular—to compete, women’s swimming is, in some ways, uniquely anti-trans.

It’s not “anti-trans,” it’s not a “sentiment,” it’s not “a hard turn to the right” or any turn to the right at all.

Jumping ahead –

How did someone like Hogshead-Makar, who fought so hard for girls to be protected in the world of sports, end up on the perpetrating end of such a targeted campaign of harassment and exclusion? If you ask her, she believes she is still “protecting” girls—by defining girlhood as exclusively belonging to cisgender girls and seeing transgender girls as a threat. In doing so, she has fallen for one of the most insidious transphobic talking points—that transgender girls are “biological men” and therefore a threat both on the sporting field and in the locker room.

Yes how dare she “define” girlhood as meaning girls instead of girls and some boys who pretend to be girls? So archaic, so strange, so hard to believe.

There’s more. Lots, lots more. I don’t know if I can face reading any more of it. I would still love to know how The Nation manages to think this merits publication.

Holly is pushing back against the bullying.

A feminist philosopher targeted by trans activists has lodged a formal complaint against the University of Melbourne, alleging it failed to provide a safe workplace.

Associate professor of philosophy Holly Lawford-Smith, in a complaint lodged last week with WorkSafe Victoria, accuses her employer of occupational health and safety breaches, of bullying her for her political views, and of undermining the university’s stated commitment to academic freedom.

Sound familiar? Kathleen Stock? Rebecca Tuvel?

The gender-critical feminist, who is opposed to trans women having access to women-only spaces and services, said she lodged the complaint following a two-year campaign against her that reached a crescendo following her attendance at the now notorious Let Women Speak rally, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.

“The institutional culture at Melbourne [University] and the way they allow gender-critical feminists to be treated is unacceptable and violates academic freedom and what a university should be about,” Lawford-Smith said.

Hear hear.

The author of Gender Critical Feminism and a second book, Sex Matters, published by Oxford University Press, has for the past six weeks been the subject of an anonymous boycott campaign by student and trans rights activists against her second-year feminism class. She has also been the subject of disciplinary processes initiated by the university.

I didn’t know that. How horrible.

Stickers and posters produced under the banner of Fight Transphobia Uni Melb started appearing on campus about a week after Lawford-Smith attended the March 18 rally…

Ugly bullying snotty stickers and posters they are. The Age has photos.

Amelia Bright, a 23-year-old trans woman and gender studies student, said she was not involved in the boycott campaign but called for the university to commission an external review of Lawford-Smith’s second-year subject by experts in teaching and learning, psychological safety, trans issues and feminism.

“Dr Lawford-Smith fundamentally doesn’t believe in hearing out trans people, in considering their safety or having them in public life,” said Bright, the editor of a report by the student union’s Queer Political Action Collective into Lawford-Smith’s feminism class.

“All of her personal views absolutely seep into this subject. Frankly, you wouldn’t let a flat-earther teach an astronomy class.”

Uh, no. I hate to break it to you, but you’re the flat-earther in this scenario.

I had to stop and say om for a long time.

Just kidding. I never say om.

Anyway, the Times goes on:

Lawford-Smith, an associate professor in political philosophy at Melbourne University, hit back, saying: “Obviously, almost none of what Eugenia says is true”. She described her comments as the “familiar sort of ludicrous hyperbole coming from trans activists”.

Speaking of ludicrous hyperbole, she didn’t “hit back,” obviously; she responded. She disagreed. She retorted.

She said: “Oxford University Press must not let a small group of zealots control its processes. Freedom of inquiry is of paramount importance and should be protected at all costs, whether the threat to it comes dressed up in social justice costume or otherwise. The idea that feminism about females could be fairly characterised as either genocidal or fascist is just absurd.”

Absurd but also frankly abusive. One it’s a lie, and two it’s defamatory.

Proponents of gender-critical feminism, also known by opponents as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, believe biological sex should be prized above gender identity, and therefore trans women are not women.

Oh come on. Do better, Times. It’s not about “prizing” one or the other more highly ffs, it’s about reality. Gender identity can’t change what sex people are, just as fairy tales, religion, a really long conversation, and greeting cards can’t change what sex people are. Trans women are not women because they’re men.

It was news that a second book, Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, would be published which led Zuroski to withdraw her upcoming title, A Funny Thing: The Undisciplined Eighteenth Century.

Zuroski doesn’t deserve the Eighteenth Century. It’s better than she is.

The Times reports on this triumph of self-cancellation:

An academic has withdrawn her upcoming book from Oxford University Press and accused the publisher of helping to launder “genocidal fascism” against trans people as apolitical philosophies.

The publisher defended its right to publish works on “a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints” after Eugenia Zuroski, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada, attacked it and withdrew her book on 18th-century humour.

I have to say, someone who could claim that feminist women who don’t believe men can be women represent “genocidal fascism” seems to me the wrong kind of person to write about 18th century humor. Alexander Pope she ain’t.

I mean that literally. It’s a ridiculous, ignorant claim, hyperbolic for the sake of it and obviously not even slightly true. It’s stupid, it’s childish, it’s way beneath a working academic. Men don’t drop dead because we don’t believe they’re women, and nobody tries to slaughter them because we don’t believe they’re women. There is no genocide here.

In a blog post, she claimed the decision by the OUP to publish a second book by Holly Lawford-Smith, a gender-critical feminist from Australia, had contributed to a genocidal agenda, and that the publisher was helping to launder “transphobia”.

…

She wrote: “Honestly, it makes me sick. I cannot stomach the thought of allowing my own labours to feed a press willing to lend its reputation to ‘gender critical’ fascism.” She also pointed to research by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, an American charity, which claimed the gender-critical movement “advanced a genocidal agenda through tactics that include laundering fascist ideas as apolitical ‘philosophies’”, adding: “OUP’s publication of this kind of material therefore directly contributes to this agenda by granting it scholarly credibility.”

Oh ffs, that’s embarrassing. As we discovered months ago, “the Lemkin Institute” is a big nothing, a shopfront, a name on a letterhead and nothing else. There is no institute. It’s a crank pretending to be an institute, and fooling people like Zuroski.

I’ll have to dig up her wretched blog post now.

Cutting off her nose to spite women who know what a woman is.

Grey Slavery is impressed.

“The genocide dimension” ffs! WHAT GENOCIDE DIMENSION? There is none, and using the word for this cheap tawdry stupid bullying just drains it of meaning, in a world where literal genocide is all too real.

But, good – she’s punishing herself instead of women, which makes a nice change.