News out of Florida:

Art lovers in Miami looked on in horror on Thursday night, when a collector accidentally knocked a $42,000 (£34,870) sculpture by US pop artist Jeff Koons to the ground.

Oh no, $42,000 gone, just like that!

The statue – one of Koons’ iconic Dog Balloons – smashed into tiny shards, and had to be swept into dustpans by gallery staff.

…

Luckily for the woman, the piece is covered by insurance, Bénédicte Caluch, an art advisor with Bel-Air Fine Art galleries which represents the sculpture, said.

Whew, that’s a relief!

But what I want to know is, in what sense was the piece actually “worth” 42k?

In the sense that someone might be willing to pay that for it, and the sense that Koons and/or people who market his work think people will be willing to pay that for it.

Fortunately however there are lots of them, and I daresay Koons could just whip up another one, or a dozen more, if he thought there weren’t enough now.

The sculpture was part of a limited edition which has now shrunk from 799 to 798.

A limited edition. What’s a limited edition? A device to drive the price up.

“That’s a good thing for the collectors,” Mr Boero told the Times, laughing.

Hahaha yeah. So really this is a happy story!

All the more so because hey, people want to buy the smashed balloon dog.

Despite [its] being shattered into thousands of pieces, there is still interest in buying the destroyed sculpture.

Mr Gamson offered to buy it there and then because, as he said on his Instagram account, “it has a really cool story”.

Will the insurance company still have to shell out 42k?

The usual apologies for the Mail, but it reports that medical people are being told to talk in Gender Neutral unless told otherwise. 1% of people claim to be Gender Interesting so everyone has to be confused by doctors and nurses carefully avoiding calling them women or men.

Steve Barclay last night ordered an urgent investigation into new guidelines that tell NHS staff to treat all patients as gender-neutral.

Nobody is gender-neutral, so it’s bonkers to treat patients as gender-neutral because a few wannabe originals pretend they’re neither women nor men.

It instructs doctors and nurses not to use phrases such as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ until a patient has confirmed their gender identity.

Mind you, “Mrs” is the wrong word to use in the absence of information, while “Mr” isn’t. Surely the Mail understands that after what’s it been now? Half a century? “Mr” works for all adult males and assumes nothing; “Mrs” of course is specific and assumes marital status. The implications of that discrepancy are indeed insulting (they go back to coverture), so yeah, don’t call a woman Mrs unless she tells you to.

The 16-page document features a foreword by Dr Michael Brady, national adviser for LGBT health at NHS England, who describes it as a ‘must read’ for all health and social care professionals.

Oh stop. Call L Ms; call G Mr; problem solved; no need to read boring guidelines for something so basic.

It doesn’t though. It doesn’t ensure that people feel respected. On the contrary. I would feel enraged if a medical person did that to me.

There is textual evidence that Fox knowingly lies.

What Fox’s loyal viewers wanted to watch — and what Fox News was willing to do to keep them — emerged this week as a central question in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against the network by Dominion Voting Systems.

A stunning cache of internal correspondence and deposition testimony obtained by the software company and made public on Thursday in a Delaware court filing showed high-level Fox executives and on-air stars privately agonizing over the wild and false claims of a stolen election that Trump allies promoted on Fox airwaves in the weeks after the 2020 election. “Sidney Powell is lying,” prime-time star Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer about a Trump lawyer who had appeared on Fox and spewed baseless accusations. “There is NO evidence of fraud,” anchor Bret Baier wrote to one of his bosses.

The plaintiff’s lawyers argue that such messages prove Fox brass knew the claims that Dominion had “flipped” votes from Trump to Biden were untrue — but “spread and endorsed” them anyway.

I look forward to Fox’s having to give Dominion $1.6 billion. That will be fun.

But the Dominion filing also lends ammunition to their long-held argument: that Fox allowed the false claims to air because it was fearful of losing viewers to Newsmax, an ever more pro-Trump news channel.

“The texts and emails support [Dominion’s] claim that Fox was more concerned about its audience and market share than the truth concerning the 2020 presidential election,” said Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School who specializes in the First Amendment and called the breadth of the internal communications “extraordinary.”

You want extraordinary? Here’s extraordinary.

Within Fox, the messages show, many worried that the network had been hurt by two key incidents: a debate in which some conservatives believed Fox anchor Chris Wallace lobbed unfair questions to Trump; and Fox’s election night prediction that Biden would win the hotly contested state of Arizona.

Hannity wrote to Carlson and Ingraham on Nov. 12 that the combination “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

“It’s vandalism,” Carlson responded.

And what brand is that? Rabidly right-wing and dishonest to boot? Cool brand, bro.

Trans woman Juno Dawson is angry at his MP.

He guesses to this man he does not count as a vulnerable woman. Well of course he doesn’t, because he’s a man. Of course he’s not “vulnerable” in the way women are. In other ways he may be, but not the ways specific to women.

The names he childishly smeared out are Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce. More power to their elbows.

Phoenix is already lethal.

America’s fifth biggest city has always been hot, but day and night temperatures have been rising due to global heating and the city’s unchecked development, which has created a sprawling urban heat island that has literally become unliveable for some residents. In the past three years, 911 calls and emergency room visits for heat-related emergencies have skyrocketed and more than a thousand people have died from extreme heat.

I did not know that. You’d think it would prompt a mass exodus.

The city is scattered with cooling centres – air conditioned places where residents can go to cool down – but clearly this isn’t working for many people. I wanted to spend a good chunk of time in Phoenix to better understand why, and also who is most affected by the hotter days and nights.

…

It was eerie driving around [last June] as there were so few people outside. In fact, it soon became clear that it was predominantly those with nowhere else to go, the unhoused, who were outside, desperately looking for shade in car parks, shop doorways, bus stops, parks and behind dumpsters. As Phoenix has gotten hotter, the number of unhoused people has also skyrocketed amid an affordable housing crisis and this has been a deadly combination: around a half of the city’s heat deaths are unhoused people. Another big risk factor is drugs. In Phoenix, fentanyl, a downer which can be 50 to 200 times more potent than morphine, and methamphetamine, an upper which increases the risk of heat-related medical complications, are frequently used in combination.

And, I’m guessing, drug addicts aren’t hugely appealing as tenants, so it’s a feedback loop. Seattle has the same issue minus the scorching heat.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

I’ve been studying social aspects of science as a layperson for at least 25 years, some college courses before that, and through discussions with working scientists on my podcast since, and just chatting with Greg Laden. I don’t claim to be an expert on science by any means, since I have limited practical experience designing and conducting experiments only when they are part of an undergraduate course and so that just gives basic context of how some science works. But it’s such a broad area of investigation, that even among working scientists there are concepts in the philosophy of science that they don’t accept or fail to understand. It’s likely that this is due to a lack of interest since they spend so much time mastering a specific field that the broader arguments hold no interest for them. So, when specialists speak out of their field, and I know that they are talking out of their ass but using their authority as say, a theoretical physicist, to expound on a subject that they don’t have experience in researching,. it’s maddening. I’m thinking of a couple of TV and multi-media physicists in particular.

I subscribed for a while to an email service called “The Big Think”: and they used to blast out emails with videos of famous scientists answering questions. Sometimes the questions were lame, sometimes they sparked my interest. But one video in particular was really frustrating. The question that was assigned to physicist Michio Kaku was lame, but I hear it all the time from Creationists, or people new to the evolution v creationism mess: “Has human evolution stopped?” Kako, having the physicists usual arrogance that they are the Top Scientists, decided to wing it with an answer. And, I, with my bachelor’s in business, but with extensive reading in talk.origins, knew the answer. Michio did not. Rather than pass along the question to a biologist, he answered that due to medicine and the advances that we are making, evolution by natural selection is basically over.

I canceled my subscription. The video should not have been sent out, and they should have gotten their money back from Kaku.

The point is, that when it comes to claims of pseudoscience, the reader still needs to apply critical thought, even if a scientist makes the claim. More to the topic at hand, Sean M. Carroll, another physicist, shared an image about DSDs with some verbiage about what “The Science” says about trans issues. So, as a physicist he doesn’t even know what the transgender claim is, and as a physicist, he has the god-like brain to make a declaration that is irrefutable. He didn’t respond to any of the replies that pointed out his error.

So, GLAAD, which is another organization that once existed to promote the well-being and social acceptance of lesbians and gays, wrote about how the science was settled and that the Times were promoting pseudoscience to dispute it.

Anyone with a basic understanding of science knows that the “science is never settled.” All answers are provisional, subject to further exploration.

It sticks in my craw, and grinds my gears because the proponents of transgenderism are using a propaganda technique of sounding sciency and using the language of science to promote their own pseudoscience, and all those people who have those signs on their lawns about “in this house we believe” that “Science is Real” are fooled into thinking that it’s settled. The Dutch and the Danes figured it all out years ago, and any objection is denialism. Well, no one wants to be called a denialist! Especially if they don’t fully understand how the science is supposed to work.

Along with all of the other weaknesses in our educational system, teaching the process of science is one of the weakest. Teaching critical thinking and the acceptance that even the best science can be overturned by new facts and new techniques is lacking. We are taught that science is a body of knowledge, not that it is an imperfect process of gaining understanding. We’ve lost the spirit of the IGY, and just take in as accepted fact what we hear from experts who tell us what we already agree with. It’s easier to let other people do our thinking for us, and we can then get back to doomscrolling and “liking.”

– footnote about Neil DeGrasse Tyson –

I really like him, but whenever I see that clip of him saying to Bill Maher that “Science is true, whether you believe it or not,” it pierces me. Deeply. I may be a pedant, but that is such an imprecise statement that he shouldn’t say it. It gives a completely wrong impression of what science is.

I haven’t read much Roald Dahl because I was put off by his unabashed hatred of women decades ago.

Hatred of women never goes away. Never.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

…an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language…

Like bleeders, uterus-havers, clownfish, cis and TERF? Or is the problem the fact the NYT didn’t use their preferred terms like bleeders, uterus-havers, cis and TERF?

…while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.

Or maybe the Times reported on the contoversy surrounding how best to treat dysphoric children, and discussed options other than just “gender affirming” care. And as for the omission of “relevant information,” how about an admission that humans can’t change sex? Call me mad, but that seems somewhat relevant to me. And what about the testimonies of desisters and detransitioners? They’re villified and ostracized and accused of never having “really been trans.” As if anyone is. What about loss of sexual function and sterility? What about the documented harm caused by puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones, not to mention the horror shows that can arise from surgical “treatments” designed to carve the body into a crude, non-functional visual likeness of the target sex? That’s a lot of data supression right there, all of it relevant. Informed consent much? And trans activists have hidden it, lied about it, denied it and shot a multitude of messengers who’ve dared to bring these skeletons to light. Watchful waiting has nothing to hide. Genderists have long since run out of rugs under which they could sweep their dumpsters full of dirty, monstrous secrets. Does trans activism really want to go down the path of science, and studies, and sources, and follow-ups? Because it if it does, it will lose.

…swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.

Are you going to protest reality, too? It is by far your biggest and most determined opponent. That’s a stream with a mighty powerful rate of flow, and you ain’t gonna get far against it. Where will you find the appropriate address to which you can forward a copy of this letter? The NYT could just write honestly about realities (which it did not itself create) and you would be complaining about “bigoted coverage.” And as for pseudoscience, you’re way ahead of everyone else with the Genderbread Person, not to mention your reintroduction of Cartesian dualism.

More than 180 contributors…have penned a letter raising “serious concerns” about the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.

The only thing keeping these demographics together is forced teaming, and a shared incoherence when it comes to defing any of these “conditions” in a non-circular way that doesn’t rely on sexist steretypes, or wilfully misgender the rest of the population as “cis.”

I’m amazed that, in this quote at least, they didn’t use the standard LGBTQ formula, as that could rope in gays and lesbians to artificially inflate their numbers.

It seems Buttigieg has been neglecting his job.

On the very day that DeWine was uttering these dire words [telling people to evacuate the area after the East Palestine train disaster], Buttigieg appeared on three Sunday news shows: CNN’s State of the Union, NBC’s Meet the Press, and ABC’s This Week. Remarkably, on none of these programs was Buttigieg asked about the ongoing East Palestine disaster—despite the fact that, as transportation secretary, regulating train safety is one of his responsibilities. Nor did Buttigieg feel it incumbent on himself to raise the issue and offer what guidance and assurances he could. Instead, Buttigieg’s ubiquitous TV appearances were taken up with the transparently hyped-up issue of a Chinese weather balloon that entered USA airspace—quite possibly as a result of unpredictable wind patterns.

Ask yourself, which is more glamorous, a train wreck in Ohio or a Chinese balloon that might be spying on us just in case Google Earth crashes.

It took Buttigieg a full 10 days to make a statement on the East Palestine disaster.

In a twitter thread on February 13, Buttigieg wrote, “I continue to be concerned about the impacts of the Feb 3 train derailment near East Palestine, OH, and the effects on families in the ten days since their lives were upended through no fault of their own.” The next day, Buttigieg followed up by writing, “We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe.”

This statement was only partially true. It’s undeniable that the Trump administration’s deregulations have been a problem. But Trump whittled regulations that had already been watered down by Republicans in Congress in 2015 thanks to railroad industry lobbying.

Equally important is the fact that the Biden administration and its transportation secretary have made no effort to remedy the situation. As The Lever reported on February 10, “In the aftermath of a fiery Ohio train derailment, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has not moved to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes, ‘there will be more derailments [and] more releases of hazardous materials.’” In fact, under Buttigieg’s watch, the Transportation Department was contemplating stripping down brake safety rules even further.

I guess this is the arrangement they have. When Republicans have the executive branch they eliminate safety regulations, and when Democrats have it they do nothing. Activity on the one hand, passivity on the other. Heads they win tails we lose.

In a follow-up report, The Lever debunked Buttigieg’s hapless complaint that “we’re constrained.” In fact, industry watchers and union activists have suggested multiple ways Buttigieg could use his existing power to ramp up the regulation of the railroad industry. Buttigieg’s policy paralysis is a matter of choice, not structural barriers. It’s hardly surprising that Buttigieg, whose résumé includes time as a McKinsey consultant, is allergic to government regulation of industry. By both ideology and formation, Buttigieg is a thoroughgoing neoliberal.

And that’s the best we can do. The worst is Trump, and the best is…this.

Andrew Sullivan on That Letter.

[T]his week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

It’s an echo of Evergreen and Yale and Middlebury and Reed. The ploys are repeated because they work and there’s no downside. And almost all the university presidents caved. They held meetings and meetings; they apologized; they appeased; they conceded core liberal principles of free speech and dissent; they terminated dissident faculty; they equivocated and collaborated in the pursuit of “diversity” and then “equity.” In a word, they were pathetic.

The Times bosses were supposed to do the same, but they didn’t.

Check this out, from the executive editor of the NYT. It’s the response we always needed from the leadership of besieged liberal institutions before and never got:

It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism. In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort. Their protest letter included direct attacks on several of our colleagues, singling them out by name. Participation in such a campaign is against the letter and spirit of our ethics policy … We have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such atacks …
We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.

I take “will not tolerate” to mean some asses could be fired.

The letter is available at the elegantly short address nyletter.com.

We write to you as a collective of New York Times contributors with serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.

Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly. Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.

15 thousand in eight months? So under two thousand a month? That’s not a lot. That’s not even close to a lot. An article or two per month. It’s a pressing issue, it’s in the news constantly, why would the Times not be covering it? Apart from the fact that the letter-writers don’t like the content?

Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender⁠-⁠affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” 

Then again calling it “gender⁠-⁠affirming medical care” is also highly tendentious, and in fact misleading. It’s not medical care as commonly understood, and “gender-affirmation” isn’t medical at all, it’s political, and fatuous besides.

To sum up the letter is bad and wrong, and the writers and signers should feel bad.

Another campaign / protest / open letter / list of demands, this time aimed at the New York Times.

The New York Times has been accused by its own writers of fomenting “bigotry and pseudoscience” against trans people in the latest controversy to grip one of America’s biggest-selling newspapers.

Pseudoscience? Because what, trans ideology is based on such authentic genuine non-counterfeit not at all pseudo-type science?

More than 180 contributors, including Sex and The City actress Cynthia Dixon, writer Lena Dunham and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, have penned a letter raising “serious concerns” about the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.

Oh no, not Cynthia Dixon and Lena Dunham. How will the Times survive?

[The letter] said the newspaper had “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”.

Signatories said: “Some of us are trans, non⁠-⁠binary, or gender nonconforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record.

“Some of us are cis, and we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.”

Is that supposed to be scientific? Their person is not good enough? Discovering and fighting for their true selves? That’s not science, it’s idenniny ideology.

It added that the New York Times had published more than 15,000 words of front-page coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children in the last eight months alone.

As they should. What if the trans fanatics are wrong? What if transing children is really bad for the children? What if trans activism is not like feminism or LGB rights but like lobotomies and symphysiotomies?

Because female people don’t matter.

Six first-class counties are demanding urgent answers from the England and Wales Cricket Board as to why a middle-aged player who transitioned from a man to a woman is being allowed to compete against girls as young as 12.

A two-fer. Not just a man, but middle-aged. Not just decades older, but male.

One letter from a coach claims the player “hits the ball harder than any other I have seen in the league”.

Gee I wonder what could possibly explain that.

It is understood that the player has previously caused injuries, although inadvertently, including one to an umpire and another to an opponent at county trials who was left unable to play for months. Some parents, disturbed at the significant inequalities of power between young girls and an adult who was born male, have threatened to remove their daughters from their league in response.

Or, and hear me out here – he could get out. Instead of forcing the girls out, the middle-aged man could get out instead. Call me crazy but I think that’s a fairer way to deal.

The worries raised by the case have become so acute that a group of six first-class counties met the ECB last week to insist on immediate clarification of the governing body’s transgender policy. All argue that they have been left without any clear guidance on the issue of girls’ physical safety.

As it stands, the ECB’s rules around transgender players in recreational cricket are among the most liberal in sport, decreeing that “trans women may compete in any female-only competition, league or match and should be accepted in the gender in which they present.” 

“Liberal” not as in progressive or liberty-respecting but as in generous to the point of lunacy. How “liberal” is it really to give one player massive advantages that both endanger all the other players and give him an unearned edge? It’s not so much liberal as just plain cheating.

[T[here is a view among the counties that the ECB is obfuscating and prevaricating on the subject. One county said that it had been pressing for concrete changes to the transgender policy for three years, only to be referred after last week’s meeting to literature from Stonewall, the LGBT charity advising organisations on pronouns and gender-neutral spaces.

Stonewall is happy to look on while girls are trampled to death. Stonewall is not the answer here.

NPR yesterday on the East Palestine disaster:

Some residents have reported headaches and rashes in the days since the derailment. And many have expressed frustration at what they say is a lack of answers from the railroad company and public officials.

I suspect the lack of answers is because the answers don’t make the railroad company or public officials look responsible or competent. “We could answer, but then you would come at us with pitchforks.”

On Wednesday night, hundreds of East Palestine residents crowded into a high school gym to press state and local officials for answers about air and water testing and the risks of long-term exposure.

“Why are people getting sick if there’s nothing in the air or in the water?” one resident shouted to thunderous applause.

It could be because there is something in the air or the water, or it could be the power of suggestion, or it could be a mix of both. We can be pretty confident that the controlled explosion and fire didn’t improve the public health.

The meeting was originally meant to include representatives from Norfolk Southern. But a few hours before the meeting was set to begin, the railroad pulled out, saying in a statement that it had become concerned about a “growing physical threat to employees and members of the community.”

Ok so skip the representatives, send in the big bosses for a change. Send in the people who actually make these decisions, not the ones who try to sugarcoat them after the fact.

Because most of the rail cars were carrying non-hazardous materials, Norfolk Southern was not subject to laws that would have compelled them to notify Ohio officials of the train’s contents. On Tuesday, DeWine urged Congress to consider changes to hazardous cargo notification requirements.

That’s a thing? There’s a “minority of cars” escape clause? How stupid is that? Or rather, how corrupt is that? Please advise.

Guy loiters in female changing room to watch young girls getting naked. Staff says nothing can be done.

Janayh Wright, a photographer and mother of three, spoke to Reduxx about her own encounter with the man — one she says she had heard about before interacting with [him] herself. Wright explains that she was aware of rumors that a male had been using the women’s facilities at the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre from other parents, some of whom said they had lodged complaints with both staff and local police.

On February 3, Wright was visiting the pool with her daughter and niece. She told Reduxx that she would typically wait for her daughter outside of the changing room, but decided to accompany her that day.

While in the changing room, Wright witnessed a man wearing a wig and a face mask enter the women’s facility and proceeded to walk over to the shower area. Wright says he did not have a towel or pool bag, and gave no indication that he was getting changed or going swimming. He then returned and entered the stall next to the one Wright’s daughter was changing in.

Let me guess – the stall doesn’t have walls floor to ceiling.

Wright watched as the man tried to peer under the stall and into the one her daughter was using.

How on earth did I guess?

You know, if these buffoons are going to insist on letting men do this, they could at least make the stalls pervert-proof. Floor to ceiling, god damn it, not those stupid things with gaps that invite people to peer and poke cameras under or over.

She immediately confronted him as he exited, but the man simply responded that he identified as female and that it was his “human right to be in the women’s changing room.”

Oddly enough girls and women don’t want women peering at them under the stall either. If he really were a woman, he would still be invading people’s privacy. But also there’s no such thing as a “human right” for men to force women to get naked while strangers watch them.

She escorted the man out of the changing room and reported the incident to the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre staff, who told her that she was not allowed to kick him out. They warned her that she could be arrested and charged for her actions.

His human right to leer under partitions was violated! Call the cops!

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on But whose dignity?

Using preferred names and pronouns, referring to TIMs as a kind of “women” (more specifically the “trans” kind as opposed to the “cis” [1] kind), reframing special privileges as “rights”, reframing forced obedience as “respect” or “dignity” etc. are the Trojan horse, the foot in the door, the thin end of the wedge, the seemingly (at the time) benign concession that gets the justification spiral going:

Only a weak-minded dolt would have made these concessions because of simple peer-pressure, tribalism, fear of ostracism etc. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, so if I did make those concessions, it had to be the only reasonable, or even decent, thing to do. By the same logic, the people who didn’t make the same concessions have to be unreasonable, indecent bigots and haters who only deserve to be fired from their jobs, being flooded with hate on social media 24/7, having their names pulled trough the dirt all over the internet etc. They have to be the villains so that I can be the good guy!

If “Linda” (she/her) here, with her “lady-cock”, is indeed (as I have already conceded!) just another kind of “woman”, comparable to black women, disabled women, working class women etc., who but a bigot could possibly advocate excluding “her” from women’s toilets/changing rooms/showers/jails/rape shelters/sporting events/awards etc.? Furthermore, since “Linda” (she/her) has to be a “woman”, being a “woman” (of any kind!) cannot be about biological sex. In fact, biological sex cannot enter into it at all [2], since that would allow us to talk specifically about biological females to the exclusion of “women” like “Linda” (she/her), hence sex has to be arbitrarily “assigned at birth”, a Western cultural construct (inextricably linked to Western hegemony, cultural imperialism and white supremacy), a “spectrum”, or, at the very least, too complicated and messy [3] to allow us to say anything about the sex of individuals. On the other hand the word “woman” has to refer to something real. After all how can “Linda” (she/her) be “a real woman” if there are no real “women”? Therefor something other than physical traits has to make “Linda” (she/her) a woman. And not only that: To make it true that “Linda” (she/her) does indeed belong (as I have already conceded!) in all the same spaces as the apocryphal biological females, the thing that makes the latter group “women” has to be the same as the thing that makes “Linda” (she/her) a “woman”. Hence biological females are whatever they have to be to make “Linda” (she/her) one of them, and they don’t get a say in the matter [4]. Well, if someone is indeed a “woman” in every relevant sense of the word, they don’t stop being so the moment they commit a crime, so “Linda’s” (she/her) long history of violently forcing her “lady-cock” on “cis” women is irrelevant to whether or not she belongs in a women’s prison. And if that means putting the cis women at increased risk of rape and violence, that’s their problem. Fuck’em! I mean literally!

I think something like the above is not too untypical of how people get from a (misguided, but still) sincere desire to be “kind”, treat others with “dignity” and “respect” etc. to putting dangerous rapists in women’s jails and going out of their way to destroy anyone who objects.

1. Once again, either “trans women” relate to “cis women” the way baseball bats relate to fruit bats (i.e. not at all, it’s just a bad pun), or there is no justification for equating biological females with “cis women”.

2. Unless the point is to argue for the necessity of puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, “gender affirming” surgery etc. Then Oceania has always been at war with East-Asia changing one’s physical features into a bad simulation of the ones associated with the other (supposedly non-existent, or at least totally irrelevant) biological sex is so vitally important that anything other than automatic affirmation in advance is “hate”, “violence”, or even “murder”.

3. Needless to say, no comparable demand for clearcutness or simplicity applies to “gender identity”: Circular definitions (or no definitions at all), equivocations (a.k.a. bad puns), word-magic, proof by assertion/loudness/endless repetition etc. Anything goes.

4. Since the thing that makes both “Linda” (she/her) and the apocryphal biological females “women”, cannot be physical traits, it has to be something “internal”, a way of thinking or feeling etc. best left unspecified. Hence calling someone a “woman” (whether “cis” or “trans”) is to make an implicit claim about what’s going on inside their heads. An exception can be made for a minority of “trans men” and “non binary” people as long as no one challenges the larger framework of “male” vs. “female”, “masculine” vs. “feminine” ways of thinking and feeling.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on But whose dignity?

The TRAs have shown that there’s no way to give them what they want in the way of dignity and respect in order to get the same back; they want to trample over boundaries, and as soon as one falls, they’re going for the next. (The order of the following may vary from place to place):

If we give in on fetishistic cross-dressing, they demand bespoke pronouns;

If we give in on pronouns, they demand that we cede to them all the other words which apply to our sex;

If we let them have our words, they demand access to our toilets;

If we give them access to our toilets, they demand inclusion in women’s shortlists;

If we give them inclusion on our shortlists, they demand that they win;

If we let them win, they demand inclusion in our sports teams;

If we let them have those, they demand inclusion in our sex-specific changing rooms, showers, rape crisis centres, prisons, health services, hospital wards, dating sites, and as sexual partners.

All of those have happened and continue to happen, often simultaneously.

They will never, ever stop, because they want to take us over completely, jealous because it is a fact that they can’t become the opposite sex, and they know it. They won’t stop even when every single woman has lost every shred of dignity and respect; they won’t stop until there are no women left.

We can’t let them continue their rampage; not if we want any semblance of polite society left. We should have stopped them right at the beginning, but too many people thought that it was more important to treat psychopathic delusional narcissistic men with dignity and respect than to protect half the human race from predators.

“I didn’t think that the leopards would eat my face”…

Kathleen Stock reviews Sturgeon’s farewell press conference:

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

…

Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

…

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

Just read the whole thing. It’s epic.

This talk of treating trans people with dignity and respect just as we treat everyone else with dignity and respect could be put another way. It could be described as walking on eggshells.

The only reason there’s an issue about dignity and respect, I think, is the fact that trans people are a challenge to dignity and respect. If you see it as just a fantasy, or social contagion, or a mistake about the self, and the like, then…the dignity part is missing. Being trans is like a pratfall. A pratfall is the opposite of dignity.

This is not helped by the unreasonable nature of the demand, let alone the constant escalation of it, and the abuse dealt out for failing to obey it. All of a sudden we have to pretend Joe next door is Nancy, and we have to treat him with dignity while we’re at it. This isn’t comparable to having to treat other humans in general with respect, it’s a veering off from that into a thorny swamp full of alligators.

We don’t have to pretend anything to treat people in general with respect. We do have to pretend anything to pretend to believe other people’s fantasies. The two are different. The result is infinite eggshell walking.

Screechy Monkey alerted us to a piece by Matt Yglesias on trans issues. It’s far from the usual disdain and hatred for all who don’t obey all The Imperatives, but it is more cheery about the whole subject than I think is quite justified. He starts from a column by Jamelle Bouie that emphasizes dignity.

Bouie skillfully elevates these controversies out of the weeds and into the level of principle — “in the democratic ideal, we meet one another in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges” — and argues persuasively for a politics of dignity. He notes that while we best know Frederick Douglass as an anti-slavery activist and advocate for racial equality, he was a broad-minded and forward-thinking visionary who fought for a range of causes that he saw as linked by the quest for human dignity. This loops back to a call for solidarity:

The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.

Equal respect is one thing, and equal dignity is another. It sounds like a good and progressive idea, but it gives me pause. I certainly don’t want to run around depriving people of dignity that they have, but on the other hand I’m not sure I’m required to ignore the fact that people have abandoned dignity. This is part of the problem – it’s why the trans issue is different from its predecessors. The trans ideology rejects dignity. In other words it’s hard to nod along to passionate defenses of the dignity of trans people when so many trans people make such silly absurd claims. You know? This is one of the stumbling blocks after all – the whole game of let’s pretend, the dressing up, the endless photos, the bizarro-world truth claims. None of that is really anyone else’s business on its own, but when it’s shoved at us…it’s made our business.

There’s also the fact that trans women can be a massive threat to the dignity of women, and way too many have no qualms about that whatever. Way too many of them rejoice at it. So, given the current circumstances, I’m not convinced that the rest of us are the problem when it comes to the dignity of trans people.

I would add, with a gesture at Judith Shklar, that decent people are on guard against the politics of cruelty. Cruelty can be tempting and it can be fun, but even the worst of us know that cruelty is wrong. So there are always people seeking a higher justification for their cruelty, a reason that being an asshole is actually a high-minded undertaking serving some crucial purpose. And today’s backlash to trans rights clearly involves people doing this — bullies and wannabe bullies being jerks for sport.

But some trans activists are cruel, especially to women. The backlash no doubt involves some people being cruel, but at the core it’s about the damage to women’s rights, and the harms and risks to children and adolescents. It’s very much not clear that all the cruelty comes from people who resist trans ideology, and none of it comes from the ideologues themselves.

Yglesias acknowledges some of that (with nervous caution), but he also skips briskly over the thornier issues.

The vast majority of trans adults are, after all, not competitive athletes or otherwise implicated in these edge-case questions. They want what they are entitled to, which is to be treated with dignity and respect and to be allowed to live their lives as they see fit.

But wait. What does “living their lives” mean? If it means being forcibly “included” in everything women do or have, whether women consent or not, then I disagree that they’re “entitled” to do so. Living their lives as they see fit in private, of course, but when they’re in public and shoving women aside with threats and disregard of our dignity, then no. Yglesias waves at that point from very far away, but he doesn’t really engage with it.