Hmmm. Something doesn’t add up here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Educate? Or promote?

Say goodbye to your forearms, girls.

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

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

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

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

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

NPR posted an excerpt from Clancy’s book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, and yet…”menstruators.”

Breaking news out of Australia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murdoch lost.

Louise Perry on women as flowerpots:

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says it all.

KØN – Gender Museum Denmark, formerly Kvindemuseet (Women’s Museum), is a history museum in Aarhus, Denmark focused on the cultural history of gender and sexuality in Denmark.

Of course it is. It used to be Women’s Museum, but then people came to their senses and remembered that women are worthless and don’t matter, so they changed it to Gender Museum. SO much better. Why anyone ever thought women mattered is a mystery.

There’s a statue of Gender out front.

So the pillow guy said “Prove me wrong and I’ll give you 5 million dollars!” So someone proved him wrong and he hasn’t paid up. He has to pay up.

Mike Lindell has to pay $5 million for losing his “Prove Mike Wrong” 2020 election challenge, an arbitration panel has ruled.

In a decision dated Wednesday, the panel found software developer Robert Zeidman had won Lindell’s 2021 contest challenging experts to prove that data he had was not from the 2020 election, and directed the MyPillow founder to pay him the reward money he’d promised in the next 30 days.

…

The contest took place in August 2021 at a cyber symposium that Lindell — an outspoken election denier and conspiracy theorist — was hosting in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

As part of the symposium, Lindell announced a contest called the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” in which participants were asked to find proof that his cyber data was not valid data from the November election, the ruling said. The announcement said: “For the people who find the evidence, 5 million is their reward.”

…

Among the attendees at the symposium was Zeidman, a Donald Trump voter who was excited to see the evidence Lindell had turned up.

Zeidman “wanted it to be 2020 election data,” said his attorney, Brian Glasser of Bailey & Glasser LLP. 

Imagine his chagrin when he found otherwise!

Lie down with pillows, get up with feathers.

Daddy instinct.

A bald eagle that went viral after nurturing a rock it thought was an egg has become an adoptive father to an eaglet at a Missouri bird sanctuary.

The 31-year-old bird, Murphy, is flightless due to a permanent wing injury. It was “very protective” of the rock, which it treated like an unhatched egg, and would squawk at other birds and charge at those that came too close.

I have no idea why The Telegraph refers to the male eagle as “it,” especially since his sex adds to the interest of the story. Eagles do share the chick-rearing duties.

While Murphy received nationwide press coverage and hoards of online fans for his seemingly natural, if misdirected, parenting abilities, an orphaned eaglet arrived at the sanctuary after falling from a tree during a storm.

When the sanctuary received Bald Eagle 23-126 on April 1, it was only one to two weeks old. It was the first eaglet to arrive at the sanctuary for eight years.

They probably don’t know the sex of the eaglet, so “it” for her or him makes sense. For Murphy, not so much. It’s not anthropomorphizing. Humans don’t have a monopoly on her/him.

The keepers weren’t going to hand the chick over to Murphy because he’d only ever played daddy to a rock, but they changed their minds because he got more and more protective of dear little Rock.

After a cautious introduction of the two birds using a small, heated cage called a “baby jail”, Bald Eagle 23-126 was brought into Murphy’s enclosure. 

The feathered foster father passed the test when it chopped up a whole fish that it was given by keepers so that its new ward could eat it safely.

Way to go Murphy!

Labour MP Fleur Anderson is very glad to see an organization for women “supporting” men at the expense of women.

It’s not a “common sense statement of women supporting women”; it’s a grotesque statement of an institute for women supporting men who pretend to be women.

It’s both, you know. Both aspects are important. It’s the women aspect but it’s also the truth aspect. It’s the brazen, ridiculous, insulting insistence that “women” no longer means “women” but we don’t get to have a new word that does mean “women,” we have to go on using the same word but submit to men who change it to mean women plus men pretending to be women.” We have to join them in telling the big stupid lie. We have to pretend we don’t know what the truth of the matter is or be treated like evil demonic hate-mongers. It’s way too much to expect and it’s way too much to demand.

Hilarious. LBC announces two new presenters and up pops Inja to yell “what about me????”

Gee why would anybody not want to give Willz a show? Apart from the bad temper, the entitlement, the conceit, the smugness, and the playacting a woman.

Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.

At least 78 people have been killed in a crush at a school in Yemen’s rebel-held capital, Sanaa, during a charity event for Ramadan, officials say.

…

Poor people made their way to the Maeen School in central Sanaa on Wednesday night after being told that a local merchant would be handing out zakat (alms) to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The head of the Houthis’ Supreme Revolutionary Council, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, posted a photo on Twitter apparently showing hundreds of people queuing outside the school before the crush.

…

A health ministry official said women and children were among the 78 people killed in the crush.

Another 77 people were injured, according to the ministry. Thirteen were in a critical condition in hospital on Thursday, while the rest were discharged after receiving treatment, it added.

Why doesn’t a benevolent god step in to avert this kind of thing?

The WI washes its hands of Threaty McThreatface.

So he never was a member? He was a supporter, not a member? Did they ask him how he identifies?

But he says the WI has rescinded his membership. Just for a bunch of threats to kill women!

Two conflicting stories in one tweet – the WI has canceled his membership, and he won’t be surprised if the WI Labour cancels his membership. Which is it? Who knows.

It’s the people who object to murder threats who are cruel and heartless. Wah.

This is all fine.

Now trans activist who boasts of her violence joins Women’s Institute: Self-professed ‘violent and cruel’ martial arts champion signs up to organisation amid row over policy to allow transgender members

That’s the headline. They do long headlines, the Daily Mail.

A transgender activist who claimed she was drawing up a kill list of ‘Nazi’ opponents says she has just joined the Women’s Institute.

Shanu Varma, who has described herself as ‘violent and cruel’ and purports to be a martial arts champion, said she had signed up to the organisation amid a row over whether or not it should allow transgender members.

No, the row is over whether it should allow men who are trans. It’s not about being trans, it’s about being men, because the Women’s Institute is for women.

She posted on social media a screenshot of the WI website thanking her for a ‘one-off purchase of WI Supporter Plus’ membership and added the caption: ‘Fantastic news, now a Women’s Institute member.’

But other Twitter users highlighted her recent warnings that she had drawn up a list of dozens of critics of gender ideology to help friends who wanted to murder them – although last night she claimed the messages had not been meant seriously.

…

Ms Varma, who lives in Greater Manchester and claims to have recently joined the Labour Party, uses two Twitter accounts.

Using one account, under the name DJ Miss Gripper, she has also boasted about her love of fighting. In one message last month she wrote: ‘I’ve permanently paralysed nine people from the neck down. 

‘Am a gold medal holder shao’lin kung fu champion. Be careful who you threaten, I can make one phone call, call a favour in and end of troll.’

It’s extraordinary how many times the Daily Mail endorses this guy’s ridiculous claim to be a woman, even while underlining how ridiculous it is and how dangerous he is.

In another she said: ‘I am very violent and cruel when I fight and have never lost in 320 fights in 40 years.’ And in a series of other tweets, also now deleted but widely shared online, she spoke of drawing up a kill list of gender critics, known as ‘terfs’.

She said two friends were ‘going to murder the top 50 prominent terf’ if being trans was made illegal in the UK and had been ‘making a snuff list’.

Last night on her other account, under the name Dr Shanu Varma, she claimed the kill list messages had been a sting operation. She wrote that she had ‘published some disinformation yesterday only to delete this morning as I wanted to see who would out themselves’.

And she said that she removed the tweets ‘as the onslaught was horrible’, with ‘thousands and thousands of nasty’ messages, which she has given to Greater Manchester Police.

Aw diddums did the mean women say mean things to you just for saying you’re going to put a lot of women on a hit list?

Ok, so this guy is promising to kill any woman who objects to a man in the women’s toilets. “It will be the last mistake you ever make,” he says smugly.

One, man charged with punching woman in the face.

Police have charged a 20-year-old man with allegedly assaulting an elderly woman at an Auckland anti-transgender rally last month.

The charges arise from the heated clashes at the speaking engagement for activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who goes by the alias Posie Parker, at Albert Park.

Videos online show both supporters of Keen-Minshull and protesters clashing, with one showing a man hitting a woman twice in the face.

Two, he got to hide his name.

A man charged with assaulting an elderly woman during a protest against an anti-transgender speaker has received name suppression.

The man appeared in the Auckland District Court on Thursday morning, where he was given name suppression and remanded on bail.

He was ordered not to associate with the complainant and not to act violently towards anyone or anything.

Why should he get to hide his name? It’s not a parking ticket – he punched a woman in the face, hard, twice. He fractured her eye socket. Why should he get to hide his violent assault?

H/t Rob

Wikipedia sheds light on what is is about Thank You, Jeeves that would make a publisher anxious.

The book uses the dated and now derogatory term “nigger minstrels” which was once a common term for white performers in blackface. Blackface minstrels were a staple of British seaside resorts until World War II.^[19] The term “nigger minstrels” was historically used to differentiate blackface minstrels from “colored minstrels” who were actually black performers.^[20]

Blackface performances, widely considered offensive today, were popular at the time Wodehouse was writing this novel. During this period, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple were among the many actors who performed in blackface.^[21]

What’s a publisher to do?

Maybe there’s no answer to that question; maybe there’s no good option.

Guess who hasn’t been reporting on the Fox News-Dominion settlement…

Fox News’s last-minute settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday earned banner coverage on every television news network but one: Fox News.

The $787.5 million settlement was covered only three times by Fox News in about four hours after the settlement became public, amounting to about six minutes of coverage. For most of the day, including during the network’s prime-time shows, hosts appeared to be focusing on other issues, like illegal immigration and Covid-19’s possible origins.

Sorry, we’re busy here, very very very busy, we’ve got breaking stories about immigration and Covid.

Anyway. The settlement is a record-breaker.

The $787.5 million that Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems to settle the lawsuit against the cable network appears to be one of the largest settlements in a defamation case in U.S. history.

While the terms of out-of-court settlements are not always revealed, the Fox-Dominion deal immediately enters the upper echelon of publicly disclosed damages and other payouts in defamation cases.

Fox makes a lot of $$$$. By destroying everything.