Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on On top of the roller coaster.

I just bought the idea that trans people were “born that way” as in intersex, but that there were men with AGP who used that in order to play out their fantasies with everyone playing along. Then Josh sent a link to me that explained it clearly and I went “OH! those bastards!”

I had so many friends (now distant acquaintances, or not friends at all) who were very nitpicky and skeptical about everything they dd and thought who would make sure they would check all angles before accepting the truth of anything who were very supportive of trans issues. And I had some internal conflict when they attacked you, Ophelia, not because I doubted your skepticism, but because I had to face the fact that these friends of mine were not being honest about their skepticism. And when there is conflict between people I respect over an issue that can be resolved with critical thinking, but those on one side of the issue start yelling “BIGOT BIGOT HATE BIGOT SHUT UP!” instead of defending their case, then it’s very hard to accept that they are applying critical thought.

One of the difficult issues with peaking is that most of us have a natural empathy towards the kids we remember being bullied for not meeting the standards of their sex in either masculinity or femininity. It’s a very confusing topic, and our instincts to defend those kids is directed towards whatever the doctors say will fix them. So, that’s why I think may liberals have been taken in by it.

While I would be stopped dead in my tracks by someone telling me that puberty blockers are safe, and want to research it before I would accept it, there are so many institutions spreading this lie that we are conditioned to accept it. There was a science writer who commented in one of Shermer’s threads yesterday that he would trust the hundreds of doctors who were prescribing over a single famous skeptic’s word. This was a science writer, Their job depends on reviewing the science articles. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that as awful as puberty is, it is necessary for development, but hey, “if some doctors think they’re good then I accept the argument from authority.”

Supporters do that because they believe the suicide lie and don’t want “Blood on their hands.” Because they remember the kids with the bloody noses who were called names, and surrounded by bullies with no one to help them. Or, perhaps they were the kids with the bloody noses who thought about killing themselves because they weren’t normal. Perhaps they were the bullies and this is how they deal with their guilt. I think it fits along all of these lines, and then they shut their minds off and accept that anyone who doesn’t buy into the magical transformation of transgender is mean and bigoted towards those kids.

It was a nurse who was an escort volunteer with me at Planned Parenthood who first explained how great it is that there are drugs that can pause puberty for gender confused kids. I was floored, but before asking her how that could possibly be a good idea I wanted to check into what they were doing to kids. I had already peaked, but this seemed completely over the top. How can anyone be mature enough to make a distinction about gender if their development at the crucial stage of adolescence was arrested? I didn’t think that Piaget was that far off or that there was new science that had disproved his theories on the stages of development.

Anyway, I would think that skeptics would take a step back and look at all of this and say “I think there is something a bit off about this. I should look into it.” It’s very weird that they can turn on friends on a dime as soon as we express doubt. I don’t like to name names, but man, there are some people who really surprised me by assuming that I’m a hateful bastard after knowing me for years. It’s like all these people walked through a brainwave interrupter on this subject. I lost some “friends” over the fact that I didn’t hate Monsanto enough to declare all GMO’s poison, but that’s quite a different thing. This is astonishing.

Oh, and I think it’s hilarious when a transgenderist tells me I’m confusing sex and gender but doesn’t expand on it.

Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on Top of the roller coaster.

there are, of course, zero trans people who think, “people are or can be the other sex”

I have in fact seen trans-identified people claiming just that. But it’s a motte-and-bailey: argue trans activists and their allies into a corner and then OF COURSE, nobody is claiming that trans people really are the other sex! They know very well they’re not!–

–and then we’re lectured endlessly about intersex conditions, which supposedly support the TRA claim that Sex Is Not Binary. We’re told that sex is assigned at birth–yes, sometimes the word used is “gender”, but there’s also “assigned male at birth” and “assigned female at birth.” (AMAB and AFAB.) Sophie LaBelle’s comic about a little trans girl who talks like a twenty year old college activist is titled “Assigned Male.”

I have a screenshot of the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, tweeting that

“Biological sex” is not a fixed scientific concept but an ideological one….We are assigned sex at birth….Our bodies are bodies, not male bodies or female bodies

And in the Washington Post, just a few days ago, Jennifer Finney Boylan assured us that:

All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.

But nobody is saying “people are or can be the other sex.” Nobody. Zero. Nope. Nada.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on They are pretending they have the right to be certain.

I’d like to offer at least a partial concession to Silent Bob’s argument about gender being “assigned at birth.”

If we take gender to broadly mean the sets of customs and behaviours that are expected of us based on how we’re perceived sexually, then in most other cultures, people really are assigned a gender at birth — they’re assigned a very specific cultural role in their community. Elsewhere in the world, your observed sex at birth will determine which gender role you are assigned, and this will determine which clothing and jewellery you can and cannot wear, which hairstyles you can and cannot adopt, what kinds of work you can and cannot do, which sexual partners you can and cannot have, and what rights you do and do not have.

The thing is, the more a culture loosens the rules about what men and women can and can’t do, the less the idea of “gender roles” makes sense. If it’s no longer illegal or taboo for a man to wear a dress and grow his hair long and have sex with men, there’s no need for such men to deny that they’re men.

In Samoa, for example, which maintains extremely strict and segregated masculine and feminine gender roles, it’s a man’s job to cut open a coconut. I saw a video of a butch lesbian in Samoa, defiantly cutting open coconuts, to show that she has a mascuine gender. She recognizes that she’s female, but because she’s butch (and gay) in a culture where these attributes break the rules that apply to women, she perceives herself as inhabiting a masculine gender — fa’afatana, in the way of a man, akin to a “trans man”, or perhaps more closely to a “nonbinary” female. She’s well aware that she’s female, but she doesn’t see herself as a woman, because to her, woman is a gender role.

But in the US and Canada we don’t prohibit women from cutting open coconuts. She’d have no need to identify as anything but a woman here. Because gender roles are gone, at least in law, and the only thing left that the words “man” and “woman” refer to is our sex.

So why has the idea that everybody needs a “gender role” come roaring back with a vengeance since social media came along? It’s probably partly to do with increased pressure to conform to stereotypes. It may be legal for a woman to open a coconut here, but if her social media feed has nothing but images of Kardashian clones she may develop a sense that she’s alienated from “woman” as a category of person and seek to find a label that doesn’t make her feel bad.

But there’s a far, far bigger factor at play. Man and woman may not denote “gender roles” in our culture anymore, but they still denote sex categories. Sexuality, not “gender roles”, is the primary reason men claim to be women in the Euro-American world today. To put it bluntly: when gay men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to straight men, and when straight men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to themselves. And when women pretend to be men, it’s often because they’re trying to get away from male sexual attention.

You can see this in the different ways men and women endorse gender identity ideology: many women mistakenly think it’s about liberating people from sex-based oppression: they think females who identify as male or nonbinary are freeing themselves from the threat of male sexual assault, and they think the same of men who identify as trans. But men like Silent Bob don’t see it as freedom from danger but an expansion of choice. To men, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because more choice. To the women who believe in gender ideology, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because less danger.

It’s the total conquest of straight men’s rights over feminism and gay rights, masquerading as liberation.

I hope Silent Bob reads this and has a think.

The poor flustered monarchists are trying to put a cuddly spin on this whole “swear allegiance” idea. Can’t be done, chaps. It is what it is.

The King would find the idea of people paying homage to him during his Coronation “abhorrent”, the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby believes.

For the first time, the public are being given an active role in the ceremony as they are invited to swear allegiance to the King.

But Dimbleby, a close friend of the King, told BBC R4’s Today programme he has “never wanted to be revered”.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has previously said the oath is voluntary.

Yes but Arch, such an oath is itself…well it’s an oath. That’s the point of swearing it, and calling it an oath. You can’t do both – you can’t suggest swearing an oath and claim it’s all terribly egalitarian and free and choicey. One or the other, Arch, one or the other.

Also it’s faintly amusing that Choss disavows homage (if it’s true that he does) but doesn’t disavow all the lovely lovely cash. And that he rebuffed all suggestions of a slimmed-down coronation, demanding the full ride at other people’s expense.

A spokesperson for Lambeth Palace said it hoped people would say the homage out loud and there would be a “sense of a great cry around the nation and around the world of support for the King”.

But why should we support the king? He’s got all that money, and armies of people doing things for him, famously including putting the fucking toothpaste on his fucking toothbrush. The king could support everyone else for a change.

They’re all embarrassed now, and trying to pretend someone else said it.

It is unclear who came up with the idea, but it is “pretty inconceivable” that Buckingham Palace was not aware of the homage element or the entire order of service before it was announced, the BBC’s Religion Editor Aleem Maqbool told the Today programme.

Earlier this week, the archbishop said it was fine if people did not want to join in the voluntary oath.

Asked about some newspaper reports suggesting he had gone “rogue”, he insisted the service had been a “huge, collaborative [with Buckingham Palace and the Cabinet Office] and very lovely process”.

“There’s no individual who can claim the credit for this service,” he added.

Translation: “I never said it, gov!”

There is one lighter moment though.

The royal couple have recorded an announcement reminding train passengers to “mind the gap” – which will be played at every railway station across the UK and all London Underground stations between Friday and Monday.

Ok. They can have that one. I do love “mind the gap.”

The Washington Post:

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

And when Republican activists do things about voting rights, they’re not working to expand or protect them.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conwaythat he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012.

All in secret.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

An ideological ally and a secret source of large amounts of $$$. Peak squalor.

The Guardian makes a point of insulting women some more.

Not everyone in the US can afford period products: an estimated 16.9 million menstruators live in poverty, sometimes having to choose between buying food and pads. Those who can may still be using the first type of pad or tampon they ever bought.

In the 2010s, there was some innovation marketed to millennials who craved a more comfortable way to deal with menstruation. Period underwear brands led by Thinx  cropped up, often using suggestive advertising like yonic-looking fruit to hawk the panties. (Knix, Aisle and Bambody are other popular labels.) Suddenly, menstruators had a bit more choice, though many still felt that their best choices were uncomfortable tampons or bulky pads.

On the one hand “menstruators”; on the other hand the annoying diminutive “panties.” The people who menstruate are women, and women wear underpants. Don’t erase us and don’t belittle us. Really don’t do both in the same damn paragraph.

“What someone uses for menstruation gets decided early on, and people typically stick to one brand, or product,” said Ida Tin, the co-founder of Clue, a period tracking app. “But what you need when you’re 12 is not the same as what you need just after you gave birth. Or what you want on a camping trip is different than what you use when you’re at home.”

What “someone” uses – gee, I wonder who.

According to Candice Matthews, who invests in the period care brand Femi Secrets, the average woman will only switch menstrual products four times at most in her life. “If that’s the case, a brand has got her for 10 years,” she said.

Such devotion may be why people feel so emotionally connected to whatever they use. In January, Thinx settled a class-action suit with customers regarding its supposedly “organic, sustainable, and non-toxic” panties.

You almost had it! The average woman – but aw damn you lost it again, back to people feeling emotional about what they use. And the god damn “panties” again. Women are now the People who wear Panties.

Activists say that the stigma around periods, and the idea that a woman’s cycle should be a hidden, discreet experience, means that people are not conditioned to take a closer look at what’s inside their products.

Is this how the author – Alaina Demopoulos – decided to work it? One “woman” balanced by one “people” per mention?

No, she’s fine with omitting “woman” altogether.

Okamoto initially thought she would sell menstrual cups or period underwear. But then she started talking to people about their menstruation.

“Ninety-nine per cent of people were only interested in tampons and pads,” Okamoto said. “They cared about sustainability, but they were like, ‘I don’t want to use anything that requires me to touch my period blood. Some of my most progressive, feminist friends think that reusing any item for their period will cause a disease or illness.”

“Feminist” sneaks in there at the end, but, you know, they could be feminist men.

The director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project (they have such a project??) wrote a piece a few weeks ago titled Trans Rights Are Women’s Rights. It’s subtitled “Here’s why the rights of trans people are at the heart of gender justice for all” and illustrated with this adorable photo:

Hur hur, cis-ters, what a hilarious pun, and how impressive for a grown-up, can tie its own shoes organization like the ACLU to use it.

March is Women’s History Month, which means I’m often asked to name the most pressing issue facing women in America. Answers spring to mind, sometimes faster than I can form the words.

She says there are a lot of them, and lists some.

None of these ills, however, is the subject of so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” laws being introduced in a growing list of states including Kansas, Arizona, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Montana. Instead, this legislation would create a legal definition of womanhood based on the capacity to produce ova, or human eggs. This definition of “woman,” which is gerrymandered to exclude trans women and girls, would then apply throughout state law — and could make it impossible for trans people to live openly at work, at school, or anywhere in the states they call home.

It’s not gerrymandering to exclude male people from a definition of women. I too don’t much want Republican legislatures defining women, but I don’t want the ACLU doing it either. That’s where we are now.

The “Women’s Bill of Rights” is only a sliver of the cruel campaign to deny basic rights to trans people currently underway across the country.

What basic rights? It’s not a right to define yourself as something you’re not and force everyone else to agree or at least shut up about disagreeing. That can’t be a right, because you can’t generalize it.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Ria Mar doesn’t bother to specify what she means by “basic rights” – which is quite a bizarre omission for a rights organization. What basic rights are being denied to trans people? Please inform.

As feminists, we reject efforts to appropriate the rhetoric of “women’s rights” to inflict life-threatening harm on trans people, men or women.

They’re not feminists. They embrace the rhetoric of “threatening harm” and “deny basic rights” to knock huge holes in women’s existing rights.

Attacking trans people does nothing to address the real problems women face. 

It’s not “attacking trans people” to refuse to agree that men are literally women. One of the real problems women face is indeed the ever-growing pattern of men taking prizes and jobs and organizations for women. That’s a real problem. It’s a violation of women’s rights.

To the contrary, limiting freedom for trans people worsens conditions for all women by re-entrenching the very gender stereotypes that have underpinned centuries of women’s oppression and that the ACLU Women’s Rights Project has worked for more than half a century to dismantle. After all, the very notion that a person should identify with the sex they were assigned at birth for their entire life is a stereotype, as the more than 1.5 million trans people living in the United States attest to every day.

Wut? Can she really believe that? Is Chase Strangio standing over her as she types?

She goes on to pretend that stereotypes about women are the same thing as facts about women.

It’s embarrassing.

Joan Smith on the SNP’s free speech problem:

The silence speaks volumes. Where are the politicians showing solidarity with a colleague who has been no-platformed by a leading Edinburgh venue? Joanna Cherry is an Edinburgh MP, a human rights lawyer and a powerful voice for women’s rights. It’s another example of the demonising of women who hold perfectly legitimate views, allowing them to be picked off and isolated from mainstream politics. 

Anyone who claims to believe in basic freedoms should be horrified. So where is Humza Yousaf, leader of the SNP and Cherry’s long-standing colleague? Where is Stephen Flynn, the party leader at Westminster, where Cherry is an MP?

…

[L]eading lawyers have spoken out about the decision to cancel her appearance at The Stand. Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, wrote on Twitter the decision was “plainly unlawful”. Michael Foran, lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow, agreed that it was “unlawful discrimination”. 

…

Every time this happens, the objections are based on things the victims of no-platforming have not said. None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people. They have not demanded that trans people should lose their jobs, be prevented from holding meetings or stopped from carrying out academic research. They are simply upholding the rights of another group, women and especially lesbians, to whom all these things are being done in the name of “trans rights”. 

This is what I keep saying. We don’t oppose the human rights of trans people; of course we don’t. We oppose new made-up rights that aren’t rights at all, and that destroy the rights of other people, especially the people formerly known as “women.”

The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing. At protests organised by trans activists, we don’t see placards demanding “let men use women’s toilets now” or “make women share cells with rapists”. Instead, we see banners claiming that feminists are calling for “genocide” and comparing a belief in biological sex to Nazi eugenics. 

And it goes on and on and on and on…………………

Brendan O’Neill on the Scottish Inquisition:

Imagine a country where every time women tried to speak up about their rights they were insulted and abused by mobs of men. A country where women were continually prevented by gangs of misogynists from showing a film about womanhood. A country where women who express their political views run the risk of being branded old hags and even threatened with death. A country where members of the ruling party can be seen standing next to placards calling for women to be beheaded. A country where lesbians can be censored for daring to say women are real. A country where even wearing the Suffragette colours is a risky business.

In other words Imagine Scotland; boom.

It used to be the Bible-bashing Christian right that was made ‘uncomfortable’ by outspoken lesbians – now it’s Guardian-reading young people. The old blue-rinse lobby that viewed the likes of [Joanna] Cherry as an abomination against God have been replaced by blue-haired art kids who see her as an abomination against their self-esteem.

The Fringe is fast becoming a no-go zone for outrageous women who refuse to daintily bow down to the gender cult. Cherry’s card was marked a couple of months back when trans comedian Bethany Black withdrew from a performance at The Stand over its repulsive moral error of giving Cherry a platform. Black is a biological male who identifies as a transsexual lesbian. Imagine going back in time and trying to explain to someone that in the future men who claim to be lesbians will be complaining about the presence in public life of an actual lesbian, and that they’ll be applauded for doing so. You’d be packed off to an asylum.

…

Is Scotland the most misogynistic country in Europe? It’s worth considering. It’s certainly hard to think of any other European country where there have been so many instances recently of women’s rights to gather, to speak and to associate with one another being so unceremoniously thwarted by angry activists.

This is the country where MPs for the ruling party – the Scottish National Party – were photographed at a trans rally next to a man holding a placard saying, ‘Decapitate TERFs’. In short, behead women who believe in biology; garotte those harridans. Imagine if a Tory MP attended a demonstration where there were banners saying ‘Behead Muslims’ or ‘Kill blacks’.

…

So let Scotland be a lesson to the world. The farther you go down the road of gender delusion, the more you will unleash a simmering hate for women and a twisted intolerance of women’s rights. Nations of the world, take note.

I wish I could say he’s wrong.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Top of the roller coaster.

Silent Bob #21 wrote:

And what has it got to do with “pretending” anything? Trans people are people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies. What does this have to do with any pretence? What pretence? I

Are we assigned “gender” at birth? I thought we were supposed to be assigned sex. Gender involves masculinity and femininity. Assigning gender at birth would be putting pink frilly bonnets on girl babies and calling them “quite the little princess” or shoving a male infant into a miniature Green Bay Packers onesie. Which, admittedly, we do.

In which case, if trans people are really just “people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies” they’d be saying “I’m a feminine man” or, perhaps, “I’m a feminine man who wants to pretend I’m a feminine woman and hope others will do so, too.” Which isn’t what they’re saying. There’s no pretense in saying “I want to pretend.”

But I think there is pretense when people say “I know WHAT (not “who”) I am.” Or “TW ARE Women.” They’re pretending that they not only experience the same internal mental state as the opposite sex (no, not “gender”) but can know that. It’s not a matter of whether they’re sincere. I can grant they’re honest in that respect just as readily as I can grant that the religious are sincerely certain they have experienced God. Self-deception occurs when the interpretation of what we experience is considered the gold standard of reliability, without the honest recognition that it has been filtered through a plausible prior narrative or strong personal desire to believe. They are pretending they have the right to be certain.

Cycling news tells us in the headline:

‘It is incredibly painful to be othered’ – Austin Killips on division, debate and building dialogue

Gee, you know what else is incredibly painful? To lose a race to Austin Killips. If you lose a race to Austin Killips you’re a woman, because that’s where he races: in the women’s races. This means that you’ve lost a women’s race to a man who claims to be a woman. Painful? I’d say so. It’s also painful when he assaults you during the race.

Here’s an interesting fact. There are clips of Killips assaulting a woman during a race but Google images pretends there are none. I just tried to search and all I get is Killips In Triumph. I think Google images is hiding them.

Back to Cycling News.

Austin Killips’ overall victory at the long-time American professional cycling stage race Tour of the Gila in Silver City, New Mexico, on Sunday, was met with another wave of controversy surrounding a nearly polarised discussion about transgender rights in both sporting and political arenas.

No, not “transgender rights.” Men ruining women’s sports. Trans people, including men, can perfectly well have rights without ruining everything that belongs to women. Too many choose not to.

Killips credited her victory to the preparation, training and support from the Amy D Foundation that went into her performance.

No, dude, it’s because you have a male body, which is a huge advantage in a women’s race.

“Existing publicly as an athlete has been new for me over the last couple of years. It is incredibly painful to be othered – queer, trans, non-binary athletes who feel inspired to survive, race and pursue the sport in every way. I’m grateful to have those connections and to meet riders at events, like at cyclocross nationals this year, where they have the non-binary category again. I’m close with a lot of riders, and we feel a sense of solidarity and camaraderie. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t divorce myself from the reality that I’m sharing the world with other queer and trans folks who see what I’m doing, and it has an impact,” said Killips, who aspires to compete on the Women’s WorldTour.

Of course he does. He’ll have that massive advantage.

Corrupt enough yet?

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

Is that dirty enough yet?

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

That has to be dirty enough yet. It’s jaw-dropping.

Proud Boys convicted.

Former Proud Boys extremist group leader Enrique Tarrio has been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

The conviction follows a seven-day jury deliberation on five members of the far-right neo-fascist organizations who have been accused of conspiring against the peaceful power transition between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in January 2021.

Three other members of the Proud Boys – Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl – have also been convicted after facing a slew of charges including conspiracy charges, evidence tampering and obstruction of the Electoral College vote.

Enjoy your stay.

Kezia Dugdale, former leader of the Scottish Labour Party, does the “hurr hurr Joanna Cherry isn’t being silenced, look, she’s still talking!!” routine.

In one interview yesterday she said: “Lesbian feminists and women such as myself are being prevented from speaking in public about our views”.

This is a literal quote from the teatime STV News bulletin watched by hundreds of thousands of people. Her views were being broadcast to, let’s say, the equivalent of Edinburgh, compared to the venue capacity of The Stand?

An operator yes, a martyr no.

In other words the Streisand effect. The Stand withdrew its invitation to her, and the result was a lot of bad publicity for The Stand. You know what? That’s not Joanna Cherry’s fault.

But never mind that, because she has views that are unacceptable. Why are they unacceptable?

The runner up in the SNP Leadership race Kate Forbes has lent her support to Ms Cherry via her own newspaper column.

In it, she says “When you believe in the strength of your case, you do not fear debate. It’s those without a case to answer who run from arguments… in a fair, free and respectful debate, the truth always wins.”

That’s a powerful bit of writing until you remember this isn’t some theoretical school debating club. It’s about people’s lives.

Ohhhhhh, people’s lives.

But here’s a puzzler. The women who resist the pressure to pretend that men are women in all circumstances and locations also have lives. Of course it’s about people’s lives; that’s why we refuse to obey.

There are trans people who feel their very existence and identity are threatened by the words of people who share Ms Cherry’s outlook. They are not up for “debate”.

If the staff in the Stand are trans, or know trans people or just understand the above in their own bones, surely they have a moral right to withdraw their labour and hope a good employer would respect that?

That’s an extraordinarily bad argument. The fact that some enraged loonies “feel their very existence and identity are threatened by the words of people who share Ms Cherry’s outlook” does not make what they “feel” true.

It doesn’t even demonstrate that they really “feel” that. It could be pure rhetoric all the way down.

Yes, we know that there are shockingly many people who make frenzied catastrophizing claims about their Very Existence being threatened, and we also know that’s one of the signs this “activism” is irrational and dangerously aggressive. Gender critical feminists don’t assault trans activists; the same cannot be said in reverse.

Originally a comment by Papito on Top of the roller-coaster.

My peak happened rather suddenly when my son announced to us that he was really a woman inside. This was patently absurd. His pediatrician wanted to send him straight to the gender clinic. He said to me, “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?” I said to him, “I brought my son to you because he was cutting himself. I would like the cutting to stop, not for a professional to do it instead.”

FYI, my son is over it now. I was able to steer him carefully around all the eager affirmers, and find him a real therapist. He’s autistic, he’s not like the other boys, and he feels uncomfortable in his body. The TRAs would have you think that means his Johnson must be cut off, and he must present henceforth as a simulacrum of a woman. He eventually realized that would not be an improvement.

One of the things that struck a bell in my mind in the Cambridge.org article linked above is this sentence:

The notion of conversion therapy for those seeing themselves as transgender relies on another binary – that of ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’ – being set, closed, biologically anchored categories without overlap, rather than a more plausible hypothesis that one’s gender identity is flexible, informed by one’s culture, personality, personal preferences and social milieu.

That’s it, that’s what the epithet “trans kids” means: all kids can be sorted, from birth and permanently, into two categories: trans and cis. The binary goes away, the binary comes back.

Why? Why must the TRAs insist that the natural categories of male and female are nebulous, arbitrary, wobbly, and made up by Victorian colonialists, at the very same time they insist that as soon as a child utters the magic words “I’m trans!” he jumps irrevocably into the other box and may nevermore be “cis?” He is now a “trans kid,” and any consideration that this self-identification may be temporary, may be mistaken, and may later be regretted, any consideration whatsoever that human beings are complicated, children grow and learn, or that we are not fully known to ourselves, is nothing but oppression, by one side of this binary against the other.

Trump says it’s such a ridiculous, made-up story. Just ridiculous!

Donald Trump called a writer’s claims that he raped her at a Manhattan department store “the most ridiculous, disgusting story,” testifying in a deposition shown in court Wednesday that the allegations were “made up” and that the assault never happened.

Lawyers for accuser E. Jean Carroll played about 30 minutes of excerpts from the former president’s deposition, including his emphatic denial of the longtime advice columnist’s accusation that he attacked her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

It does seem like an odd story, for sure. And yet…

…we’ve all heard him saying “You can grab them by the pussy.”

He said it. He said it voluntarily, chatting with some tv flunkies he felt like impressing. He said “You can grab them by the pussy,” which implies that he knows this because he’s done it. If it’s such a “ridiculous” story why did he tell it about himself, unprompted?

Judge to Trump: No.

A New York judge has tossed out Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times, and ordered the former president to pay all attorneys fees, legal expenses, and associated costs.

Trump filed the lawsuit in 2021, alleging that the newspaper, three of its reporters and his niece Mary Trump engaged in an “insidious plot” to obtain his private records for a Pulitzer-winning story about his tax issues.

…

The twice-impeached former president’s claims against the defendants “fail as a matter of constitutional law,” New York Supreme Court Justice Robert R. Reed wrote in his ruling filed on Wednesday afternoon, deeming the paper’s newsgathering as being at “the very core of protected First Amendment activity.”

Someone will have to explain that to Trump. Too many abstract words.

Reed further ruled that Trump failed to demonstrate any tortious interference, unjust enrichment, or negligent supervision on the parts of the Times or reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow, and Russell Buettner.

In the original lawsuit Trump alleged that the Times colluded with his niece to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over ” to the paper despite a confidentiality agreement she signed in 2001 during a family dispute. He further claimed that Craig, Barstow, and Buettner were “motivated, at least in part, by their actual malice” in reporting on the details within tax returns he’d refused to disclose.

No, Don, we don’t hate you because of malice, we hate you because of everything about you.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Smoke and mirrors.

You gave us a “nutshell” summary with what was wrong with the Tavistock. Here’s a nutshell with what is wrong with trans activism:

None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people.

The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing.

Trans activists lie to conceal what their opponents say; they lie to conceal what exactly they are demanding. They rewrite the language to do both, launching their political attacks from a platform of novel, repurposed meanings designed to hide truth. It’s all lies and deception, bullshit and bullying. There is no “good faith.”

Actual human rights and social justice campaigns depend upon clear communication and truth to achieve their goals, because they are describing a wrong and counting on public support to correct it. Discussion and dialogue are central to this process. What better way to advance a just cause than to have a public airing of the issues involved? A just cause has nothing to fear from robust, open discussion and lively debate. Ideally, this is how democratic politics works. But not with trans activism, the “social justice” movement that is neither social nor just. It is a campaign that is dangerous to women’s rights that has been reliant on secret, back-room deals designed to avoid and short-circuit public scrutiny, questioning, and accountability. It is thus a danger to democracy, too. It’s no accident that one of their rallying cries is “NO DEBATE!” Honest, open debate is poison to their program. Truth is its enemy. Truth is “transphobic.” Having forgone the normal channels used by rights campaigns to win public acceptance for its goals, trans activism has no choice but to rely on coercion to hang on to whatever gains it manages to make in secret. Any movement that is, at its very foundations, so fundamentally reliant upon lies and the secrecy required to maintain them, will inevitably and unavoidably corrupt any individual or organization that embraces and supports it.

Trans-identifying man Jennifer Finney Boylan says sex is not in the body, it’s in the brain.

When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?

Nothing. It means nothing.

Or it means something, but the something it means is about fantasy and imagination; it’s not about material reality. We can think we “feel like” anything, and that can be a fine pathway to empathy and broader sympathies. It can be, but it can also be a lousy rotten stinking pathway to telling people you know more about being those people than they do.

Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology.

They don’t say that about everything. Nobody cares what fantasies people have about themselves unless those fantasies impinge on other people’s rights.

In Florida, a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) keeps “biological males” from playing on the women’s sports teams in public schools.

Yes, because it’s not fair for males to play on women’s sports teams, regardless of what their fantasies about themselves are. This does not mean the males have to drop their fantasies; it just means they can’t live their fantasies at the expense of the rights of girls and women.

It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.

Then be a womany man or a manny woman.

H/t John Reed

Glinner is explaining to David Baddiel about peaking, and I saw this reply.

The bit about first you climb up believing all kinds of nonsense.

I never did actually believe it.

What did I do? Kept my mouth shut. Watched and waited. Avoided. Evaded. Bracketed. Ignored.

I guess to be more precise what I never did actually believe is that people are or can be the other sex, but I thought maybe possibly it could be that it’s to their benefit to pretend they can. I was far from passionately convinced even of that, but I thought it might be the case, and that I didn’t know much about it.

So I just kept quiet about it for several years. One specific occasion I remember is when Michelle Goldberg wrote a (very good) skeptical piece on the subject in The New Yorker and some people I was then friends with called her every name in the book. I thought they were wrong, but I wasn’t sure enough to disagree with them, so instead I just said nothing.

That was a million times easier to do then. The subject hadn’t devoured everything yet.