I wonder if Tucker Carlson drew a line under his own career with that stunt.

(It won’t signify much to him – he’s been paid a lotta dollas over the past x years.)

Anyway I love the way Anderson Cooper says this.

Oxfam orders us to amplify trans women on International Women’s Day, and Women’s Voices reminds us of Oxfam’s history.

H/t latsot

Now here’s a poignant pairing of articles on the BBC front page (and probably a lot of other front pages, unless they’re mashed into one article):

Tucker Carlson slammed by Republicans for sharing and lying about the riot footage

Tucker Carlson said he passionately hates Trump

We knew he was cynical and in it for himself, but…

First the slam:

Senate Republicans and Capitol police have criticised Fox News after one of its hosts aired previously unseen clips of the riot two years ago at Congress, and played down the violent disorder.

…

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday it had been a “mistake for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks” about the riot.

Mistake? No. Bad, yes, evil, yes, cynical and self-serving, yes, but a mistake, no. Very much on purpose.

Mr McConnell pointed to an internal memo by Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, whose agency is responsible for protecting the buildings where the lawmakers meet. In that memo, Mr Manger says the primetime Monday broadcast was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack”.

“The programme conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” he wrote. “The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”

And now it turns out Tucker Carlson can’t even stand the guy.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a text message after the 2020 election that he “passionately hated” Donald Trump, according to new court filings.

Mr Carlson’s message to a colleague in January 2021 emerged as part of a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. The latest filings in the case suggest Mr Carlson expressed his dislike of the outgoing US president two days before Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to derail lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election win.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” he wrote in a text sent on 4 January 2021. “I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.”

Mr Carlson, the top-rated host on the conservative network, also appeared to denigrate the Trump presidency in these private messages, despite lauding his achievements on air.

“That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

Can this be the end of Carlson’s squalid career?

Even in reporting on a violent abduction with murders we still have to use the baby talk about women.

Two surviving Americans who were were kidnapped at gunpoint in Matamoros, Mexico last week are being treated at US hospitals. Their two friends who were also abducted died during the incident.

…

Shaeed Woodard and Zindell Brown died after unidentified gunmen opened fire as the group of four drove a white minivan on 3 March through Matamoros, a city of 500,000 people located directly across the border from the Texas town of Brownsville.

A Mexican woman, believed to be a 33-year-old bystander more than one block away, was killed in last Friday’s incident.

The group had travelled from South Carolina and crossed the border into Mexico because Ms McGee had an appointment for a tummy tuck, a cosmetic surgery procedure to remove abdominal fat, her relatives said.

That. Can we not have adult reporting? Why “tummy” for godsake?

Of course there’s also the pathetic fact that a cosmetic surgery jaunt ended up with three murders. Humans are a constant disappointment.

Daily Beast:

When the Department of Justice took the position this week that former President Donald Trump acted improperly by urging his followers to attack Congress in 2021, prosecutors did more than open the door to a potential flood of civil lawsuits from police officers who were injured on Jan. 6.

What they actually did, according to legal scholars, is lay the groundwork for a potential criminal indictment against Trump for inciting the insurrection.

It seems odd to think the DoJ could have taken any other position – how could it not be “improper” for Trump to incite his fans to a violent attack on Congress? What else would it be, proper? In line with his office? Part of his duties?

At the behest of the District of Columbia’s federal appellate court, the DOJ last week submitted a legal memo weighing in on a civil dispute by injured police officers. The department clarified that Trump’s speech, full of vitriol and fury, was not protected by presidential immunity, nor was it protected by his own free speech rights under the First Amendment.

“Such incitement of imminent private violence would not be within the outer perimeter of the Office of the President of the United States,” the DOJ wrote.

I’m glad to hear it, but not so glad there could have been room for doubt.

So far, the Justice Department has not indicated its legal analysis of the looming federal case against Trump, which concerns the effort his campaign led to undermine the electoral vote by Congress. However, its new legal memo draws a clear red line on his actions during the lead up to the actual attack on Congress.

Can we hurry up with that looming federal case? Before the next election?

Also shoving women aside on International Women’s Day: Jeremy Corbyn.

The Independent goes out of its way to rub our noses in the fact that women don’t even get to have our own day any more:

Don’t tell me what a woman is, based entirely on what she is not

Says a man pretending to be a woman. Hey bub don’t tell us we don’t get to say that men are not women. You’re not a woman, based entirely on the fact that you’re a man.

Jordan Gray is the guy who played the piano with his penis on tv.

His first move is to gloat:

Indy Voices has asked me what it means to be a woman in 2023. I’m honoured by that question.

Of course he is. He likes to make people call him a woman, so when a national newspaper does it, hopla, that’s a good day.

The Independent has listed me as one of the “50 Influential Women of 2023”. All the while I’m keeping a stiff upper lip, while my human rights are disputed by billionaires.

No he’s not. It’s not a human right to force people to agree that you’re a woman when you’re a man.

On any given day, I can post a picture of myself online (eating some Wotsits, perhaps?) and the comment section will be inundated with unsolicited definitions of what a woman is… based entirely on what she is NOT. “Women are not men!” “Women don’t have penises!” “Women won’t wheesht!” (which I believe to be some type of gateau?). “Women have babies!”

Oops. Stupid, isn’t he. Based entirely on what she is NOT, like for instance “women have babies!” Dude, check your copy.

So he explains to us what a woman actually is.

A woman endures. A woman takes a licking and keeps on kicking. In 2023, a woman is angry – and has the power to channel that anger with incredible effect. A good woman looks before she aims.

But she is not allowed to keep on kicking against trans ideology. She’s not allowed to be angry at piggy men like Jordan Gray. She’s not allowed to channel her anger at the complete bullshit talked by men like Jordan Gray. She’s not allowed to see Jordan Gray when she looks before she aims.

H/t latsot

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Do you wanna be a slave? Do you?

Apart from the bit about slavery, this is a direct copy of the Australian policy of the last 20 years.

We have people confined to places like Manus Island and Nauru, so determined are we that “if you come by boat, you will never settle in Australia”. We paid millions of dollars to Cambodia to take a handful of these poor, desperate people. The USA and New Zealand have taken some off our hands, but too many still languish.

Apart from the inhumanity, we are also losing great opportunities by not settling these people and taking advantage of the undoubted skills many can bring. A number of earlier “boat arrivals” have gone on to great things:

Hieu Van Le – arrived by boat from Vietnam, and became a much admired Governor of South Australia.

Anh Do – On a boat from Vietnam, multi talented entertainer, artist and author.

Munjed Al Muderis – arrived by boat, after an arduous journey from Iraq, is now a world-renowned humanitarian and surgeon.

These are but a few of the refugees who have made Australia, and in the case of Munjed Al Muderis the world, a better place.

We love to see ourselves as the world’s greatest and most egalitarian nation, but in reality, we have the national mindset of children terrified of the dark and jailers terrified of the prisoners.

It is to our lasting shame that we have treated people seeking refuge in such a callous manner, and both our major political parties are in lock step with these policies.

The UK taught us so well, that the student has now become the teacher and they are following our lead, no matter how dark the lesson becomes.

What are human rights?

It’s clearly meant to shock. What next? Rishi Sunak tweeting promises of concentration camps? Gas chambers? Mass graves?

The Guardian notes that it’s calculated…which is pretty clear if you think about it, because nobody more intelligent than Donald Trump would say that accidentally. Sunak is definitely not stupid, let alone as stupid as Trump.

The problem with the government’s illegal migration bill is not just that it is inhumane and unworkable. It is that the inhumanity and unworkability look calculated. They are not simply bugs of the project; they may even be features.

…

If the aim [were] truly to cut costs to taxpayers and save lives by curbing dangerous small boat crossings, there would be two obvious places to start. The first would be to tackle the sclerotic Home Office bureaucracy, where mismanagement and inadequate resources have created a logjam…

There is no legal requirement for people to seek asylum in the first safe country they reach. The government’s own actions are of questionable legality, as it has acknowledged. It has briefed that there will be a “brake” on rights, raising the question of how it can avoid obligations under the European convention on human rights.

Pretty much the way the Nazis did what they did, is my guess.

Glinner urges readers to try to buy a copy of Hannah Barnes’s book Time to Think. A reader reports on one such attempt:

So on Tuesday last week (28 Feb), I looked for ‘Time to think’ in Waterstones Broadgate (Liverpool Street station). I was told that they had one copy, but that it had been ordered specifically for a customer. I was told that the nearest branch with a copy was Gower Street. (I didn’t look there…)

One copy. Why just one copy? I don’t think that’s how these things work. I think normally bookstores get several (or hundreds if they know it will fly off the shelves). They seem to have just One Copy only when it’s a book by some wicked feminist like Kathleen Stock.

On Friday (3 Feb) I looked in Waterstones Piccadilly – the biggest bookshop in London – where the front section as you enter is full of new releases and recommended books.

Been there done that. The Piccadilly one is the first place Jeremy and I went when the fashionable nonsense dictionary was published. (There were several copies.) Anyway – they didn’t have a single copy. Our reporter expressed surprise and one of the assistants snapped at him. Yeah that’s totally normal. The other assistant said it was an order but didn’t say when it would be in, and was vague about it when asked.

I then went to Foyles on Charing Cross Road (Foyles is now owned by Waterstones btw), who also didn’t have it on display in the front of the shop along with the new releases and recommendations. The assistant there said they had sold their allocation and were waiting for more copies, but again didn’t offer when it would be in stock. He looked up to see where I might find it nearby, and said that Waterstones Trafalgar Square had a copy.

One copy.

It could be that they’re just selling faster than Waterstone’s expected, but that seems unlikely, being as how Waterstone’s can pay attention to the news just as well as we can. And even if that is the case, why are they being so lackadaisical or just rude about it? We probably know why.

I couldn’t see it in Waterstones Trafalgar Square either, despite there being a two-unit display headed ‘In the media’. When I asked, I was told that I could find it in the ‘New social sciences’ section.

I found it and bought it. That might have been the last copy in a Waterstones store in London (!).

Suppress suppress suppress.

Yet another example of how we’re living under the rule of…Tucker Carlson.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday released security video from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using footage provided exclusively to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to portray the riot as a peaceful gathering.

So much wrong in that one sentence. A tucker carlson should not be in a position to “release” such security video. McCarthy should obviously not be giving it to him at all, let alone exclusively. Tucker Carlson should not be trying to portray the January 6 horror as a “peaceful gathering.”

Carlson acquired the tapes as part of a push by McCarthy, R-Calif., to win the speaker’s gavel. When McCarthy was struggling to gather the votes to lead the House, Carlson used his program to list two “concessions” he could make to win over far-right Republicans.

Carlson should not be doing that. Fox shouldn’t be doing that.

Carlson announced in late February that McCarthy had given him exclusive access to 44,000 hours of security video from the deadly riot before he unveiled some clips of the video on his show Monday night.

I know we’ve already seen this. I can’t leave it alone.

“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson told his audience Monday. “Instead it shows police escorting people through the building, including the now-infamous ‘QAnon Shaman.’”

That is, the particular footage that Carlson selected. Other footage very much does show a riot-insurrection in progress.

Video that Carlson didn’t air shows police and rioters engaged in hours of violent combat. Nearly 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack. About 140 officers were assaulted that day, and about 326 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employees, including 106 assaults that happened with deadly or dangerous weapons. About 60 people pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement. Two pipe bombs were also planted nearby but were not detonated.

All of which Carlson of course knows perfectly well. He’s doing everything he can to make this country ever more Nazi-like and out of control, all for the sake of his personal paycheck. What a guy.

At long last.

NHS must reinstate ‘woman’ in cancer and pregnancy webpages, staff demand

The NHS must reinstate the word “woman” in its cancer and pregnancy webpages, more than a thousand staff in the health service have demanded.

Yes! Finally!

At least 19 women’s health pages on the NHS website fail to mention women either at all or in addition to non-gendered language, including for guidance on ovarian and uterus cancer, menopause, childbirth and heavy periods.

As if those items were gender-neutral.

So now around 1,200 doctors, nurses and health practitioners have said stop doing that, pointing out that it harms women.

The NHS online overview for womb cancer previously opened by referring to “the female reproductive system” that is “more common in women who have been through the menopause”, but the new version contains no reference to women or females.

Censored medical information. Brilliant move, yeah?

The clinicians’ letter, seen by The Telegraph, says: “Removal of sex-based language is discriminatory and could leave the NHS open to legal challenge… We call for the reinstatement of sex-based, respectful communication that meets the healthcare needs of women.

“Specifically, the NHS must use women’s words for women’s bodies and women’s health problems… NHS.UK healthcare messaging shows a lack of concern for women, is disrespectful and insults women.”

Thank you. That’s exactly what it does.

Dr Louise Irvine, a spokesman for the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, told The Telegraph: “These changes have occurred by stealth across the UK, over the past couple of years. NHS communications exist to promote and support the health and wellbeing of the UK population, of which over half are women.“

Our guiding principle as clinicians is ‘first do no harm’ and yet these underhanded, ideologically-driven changes in the NHS, which trump evidence-based healthcare, carry real risks and impact real lives.”

That is heart-warmingly blunt.

An NHS spokesman said: “The NHS website provides information for everyone and we keep the pages under continual review to ensure they use language that is inclusive, respectful, and relevant to the people reading it.”

No they don’t. Of course they don’t. We all know they don’t. What an idiotically obvious lie.

Insulting tits guy has been placed on leave.

A Canadian teacher has reportedly been placed on leave after months of criticism from parents about her size-Z prosthetic breasts.

Kayla Lemieux, an industrial arts teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School in Ontario, Canada, was reportedly photographed by a newspaper outside school, dressed as a man and without the prosthetics.

Dressed as a man? How could they tell? I was outside today dressed in black jeans, a turtleneck and couple of sweaters, and a windbreaker. Was I dressed as a man? (I know, it’s not fair – it’s easier for a woman to wear jeans and t shirts than for a man to wear dresses and high heels.)

At a board meeting last month, Julia Malott, a transgender mother, said that what Ms Lemieux was wearing in class was “absolutely not appropriate for school”.

She said: “It is fetish wear used in sex work and the drag industry or people in their own houses who enjoy it. It is certainly not something I would want my daughter to see.”

Can’t a guy have a hobby?

Young-adult novelist and Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse takes the bold and original step of calling JK Rowling a bigot.

Things are said that sound reasonable. You would only know they were unreasonable — they were, in fact, wrong — if you had the patience to fact-check, or if you had the personal experience of counterevidence.

Like believing, or saying you believe, that men can be women? That kind of personal experience?

Is it common for transgender rights activists to virulently protest “feminist” conferences, as the podcast asserts?

To answer that last question, you would have to already know — because the podcast won’t tell you — that the “feminist” conferences protested by transgender rights advocates are typically gatherings that specifically exclude transgender women from the umbrella of the feminist movement.

There is no such umbrella. It’s a contradiction in terms. White people are not “excluded from the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter movement” because there is no such umbrella. Feminism is for and about women: that’s what the “fem” part means. We don’t exclude men, they just aren’t in the frame. Definitions are not invidious exclusion. Tigers aren’t “excluded” from the umbrella of “rabbits”; tigers just are not rabbits.

You would have to know that there are many feminist organizations and individual feminists, such as myself, who find this exclusion unconscionable.

Then you and they don’t understand the word “feminism.”

That transgender women don’t want to take down feminism; they want to be a part of it.

They “want to be a part of it” whether we like it or not, whether we consent or not. What does that sound like?

The piece goes on for many many more paragraphs but there’s nothing worth quoting – it’s all hand-waving and repetition.

H/t Sackbut

Ohhhhhhh yes it is.

Of course it’s a belief system. What else would it be? There is no physical test for it or physical symptom of it. It’s an idea. It’s a feeling, an interpretation, a story, an (attempted) explanation.

Also, yet another of those “reminders” that aren’t reminders because they’re not true. “Reminder that the sun is smaller than the earth.”

Also people don’t “just happen” to be trans. It’s about the least “just happen” way to be you can imagine. It’s something people decide to call themselves. They don’t “just happen” to make that decision; they make it because they’re alive now as opposed to a century ago or a century in the future, so they have absorbed the contemporary delusion that people can change sex by the power of thought.

The Washington Post on taboo teachings:

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on New York police’s use of force, analyzed by race.

These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, facing pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination, administrators wary of controversy, and a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

The “TQ” issues of course complicate things.

The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation.

Notice what’s missing. Sexism/misogyny didn’t make the cut. Mary Wollstonecraft leads the article but her subject matter gets lost again. It always gets lost these days.

The Washington Post asked teachers across the country about how and why they are changing the materials, concepts and lessons they use in the classroom, garnering responses from dozens of educators in 20 different states.

…

Greg Wickenkamp began reevaluating how he teaches eighth-grade social studies in June 2021, when a new Iowa law barred educators from teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”

Return of sexism! But only for the purpose of forbidding mention of it.

Wickenkamp did not understand what this legislation, which he felt was vaguely worded, meant for his pedagogy. Could he still use the youth edition of “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”? Should he stay away from Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You,” especially as Kendi came under attack from conservative politicians?

Well, yes, I think he should steer clear of Kendi, but on grounds of quality, not content. He’s just not a very good writer or thinker; there are other, better ones. Anyway that’s what I think but I wouldn’t demand a law enforcing it.

Wickenkamp was fielding unhappy emails and social media posts from parents who disliked his enforcement of the district’s masking policy and his use of Reynolds and Kendi’s text. A local politician alleged Wickenkamp was teaching children critical race theory, an academic framework that explores systemic racism in the United States and a term that has become conservatives’ catchall for instruction about race they view as politically motivated.

Yes! We have to talk about race without any political motivation!

For 14 years, a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident. The point was to show how Columbus’s marriage of enslavement with his quest for profit helped shape the world we live in today.

The teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment, directed children to the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” titled “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress.” Throughout the chapter, students encountered paragraphs taken from the explorer’s journal in which Columbus delineated his views of, and interactions with, the Native peoples of America.

“As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force,” Columbus wrote in October 1492, in a slice of the journal quoted by Zinn. “They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” he also wrote.

But last year a parent complained, so that was the end of that.

Oops, methane is leaking.

More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.

Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a “scary” surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say.

“May be” “seriously risks” – as if there’s some chance we’re suddenly going to decide to reverse the process now.

To console us, there is one quite witty photo.

About 40% of human-caused methane emissions come from leaks from fossil fuel exploration, production and transportation. These rose by almost 50% between 2000 and 2019. Another 40% comes from agriculture, dominated by burping cattle, and 20% from rotting waste sites. All are forecast to rise.

Nicely done.

Men who pretend to be women are so INSPIRING.

Diana Sarosi is Director of Policy & Campaigns at Oxfam Canada. She retweeted Oxfam Canada’s obnoxious tweet about celebrating “the diversity of all identities” with an even more obnoxious version of “trans women are BETTER than women” bit of drivel.

I’m proud to work for an organization that is trans inclusive and has the superb @FaeJohnstone on our board! Her courage and determination inspires us all to fight even harder for the rights of all women.

Or to put it another way, “Fuck you, women.”

We’re supposed to be impressed and deeply moved by Fay Johnstone’s “courage and determination” to shove women aside and take center stage himself. We’re not. We wouldn’t be impressed and deeply moved if a white person tried to take center stage in an anti-racism organization. We wouldn’t be impressed and deeply moved if a plutocrat tried to take center stage in a labor union. We wouldn’t be impressed and deeply moved if a WASP tried to take center stage in a Native American organization. There is nothing impressive or moving about people who have the upper hand trying to steal the spotlight from people who are stuck with the lower hand. Nothing.

Schools shouldn’t have “blasphemy” rules.

The home secretary has agreed to issue new guidance on ‘blasphemy’ incidents at schools, following concerns raised by the National Secular Society.

In a letter sent last week, the NSS asked Suella Braverman to work with the Department for Education towards “an improved understanding of blasphemy and its role in the wider threat posed by Islamism” in the context of state schools.

Writing in The Times this weekend, Braverman said schools should answer to “pupils and parents” rather than “self-appointed community activists”.

“I will work with the Department for Education to issue new guidance spelling this out”, she added.

Ms Braverman’s article continues: “We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them on this country. There is no right not to be offended. There is no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion. The lodestar of our democracy is freedom of speech.”

That’s a good sentence – “There is no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion.” I don’t think any comparable US head of department would say that.

Her pledge comes in the wake of events at Kettlethorpe High School in West Yorkshire, where four pupils were suspended last week after one of them brought in a scuffed copy of the Quran. The episode was recorded as a “hate incident” by the police and one of the boys, who has high functioning autism, has been subjected to death threats. His mother said she had been left “absolutely petrified”.

The police persecute people for being skeptical of religion, including the religion of TransWomenAreWomen, while turning a blind eye to colleagues who rape women. Skewed priorities.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Will we be queering queer?

Queer in the queer theory/new queer movement sense is the worst word, because it represents self-contradiction. It implies a confusing, a muddying, a cognitive dissonance built right into it. To queer a concept isn’t to prove it or disprove it; it’s neither hardening the rules nor softening them; it’s neither clarifying the boundaries nor eliminating them; it’s neither respectful or disrespectful. It’s putting something in almost a quantum state exactly so that it can’t be inspected accurately.

“Queer” is applied to sexual orientation by straight people most of all, because they both want to be a part of the gay rights movement (which would make them imposters), and they simultaneously want to respect the rights of gay people. “Queer” is the sharp, jarring word that blares over that hypocrisy so nobody quite notices it.

“Queer” is applied to sex (which they of course call “gender”, as in “genderqueer”) to cover over the fact there are two completely contradictory impulses behind transgender ideology: the belief that gender stereotypes are unimportant and completely unrelated to sex, and the belief that gender roles are the most important things in the world and they completely define what sex we all are. Sex is everywhere you look and nowhere at all; it both doesn’t exist and exists, simultaneously. “Schrödinger’s dick” is a wisecrack often made about gender identity ideology for this reason.

I dislike the word queer for a number of reasons, but mostly because it represents a social idealism that is supposed to be a reaction against the strict social hierarchies and rules espoused by social conservatism — sexism, homophobia, etc. But in practice the outcome is no different than social conservatism. It’s a fact that humans come in two sexes and three sexual orientations which can’t be changed; to try and blur these facts doesn’t eliminate discrimination along these “axes of oppression”, it just makes it impossible to measure or talk about the ways women and gays face oppression.

You couldn’t possibly make up a worse way to try to improve inequality than Queer Theory. It’s so bad at what it’s supposedly intended to do I can’t help but suspect a deliberate con job. Every time I hear someone use the word “queer” I feel a little frisson of distrust. It’s an obfuscation; it’s a diversion. Someone’s trying to slip something past my radar.