BBC Live on Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation.

One snippet:

Ms Sturgeon says she has found public opinions about her have become “barriers” to debate.

She says issues that are controversial “end up almost irrationally so” – though makes no specific reference to Scotland’s gender reforms.

That’s probably especially true when the issue itself is rooted in an irrational belief system.

Another:

Sky News touches on the row around transgender prisoners. The FM is asked whether this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She is also asked – was it a failure of her leadership not to deliver independence?

Sturgeon says she will “leave other people to judge” her record and says “no, that issue wasn’t the final straw”.

“It’s not the case that this decision is because of short-term issues,” she insists. She does regret not being able to bring a “rational approach” to debates, but cites her track record of standing up for women’s rights and marginalised groups in society. Again, she avoids being drawn into questions about transgender issues.

Yes but “marginalised groups in society” can mean anything or nothing. Women are marginalised, and trans ideology is one of the forces that adds to that marginalization.

Walter Shapiro in The New Republic:

Maybe I’m expecting too much from Biden, but a small incident recently reported by Annie Linskey in The Wall Street Journal troubled me. Toward the end of a nuanced article about the president’s many, many ties to the University of Pennsylvania, Linskey revealed that one of Hunter Biden’s daughters was rejected for early admission to Penn in 2019. That setback prompted Biden—then a private citizen about to declare for the presidency—to speak to the dean of admissions at Penn. Probably not coincidentally, Biden’s granddaughter ended up among the 7 percent of applicants eventually admitted to Penn in 2019.

Of course it did, and of course she did, because this is the guy who let his son leverage Dad’s status into a lavishly paid job that he had no qualifications for. It’s the same old crap. Biden is Mister Important and he uses it. It’s smug and sleazy and not as different from the trumpy network as it should be.

In a world of overhyped fake scandals—where everything is the greatest outrage since Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton—this is a nothing-burger. 

I don’t care. I don’t care how it ranks. It’s using privilege in backstage ways to advance oneself and one’s friends and family at the expense of people who don’t have that privilege. It’s corrupt. Yes there are much worse forms of corruption, but that doesn’t make Biden’s okay.

Perhaps Hunter Biden’s daughter would have gotten into Penn on her merits during the regular admission period, but thanks to Grandpa Joe’s intervention, we will never know. In all likelihood, someone else was denied admission to Penn so there would be a slot for Biden’s granddaughter.

And why? Because she’s Biden’s granddaughter. That’s not a good enough reason.

The Telegraph on the Tavistock:

The Tavistock clinic ignored evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness, a new book claims.

Not to mention the general confusion and partial information and rudimentary critical faculties that go with being very young.

Staff at the NHS facility were so determined to push a pro-transgender policy that children who might not have been trans were treated as “collateral damage” by clinicians who labelled doubters “transphobic”, a whistleblower says.

So the question becomes “why?” WHY were they so determined to do that? What is it about the trans ideology that was so attractive to people at a medical facility?

Seven in ten children had more than five “associated features” such as abuse, anxiety, eating disorders or bullying, and a social worker estimated that as few as 1 in 50 children treated at the clinic would have stayed transgender for life if they had not been given controversial drug therapy.

Well I can estimate that as few as 0 in 50 children would have even thought of being “transgender” before this social contagion came whirling down out of the Bullshit Mountains.

The claims are made in Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, by Hannah Barnes, a BBC Newsnight journalist, which is published on Feb 23.

Time to think indeed. Way past time to think if you ask me.

Less than two per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder, but according to Gids’s own data, around 35 per cent of its referrals “present with moderate to severe autistic traits”.

Among such traits could be literal thinking, which could make it hard to grasp that people can’t literally change sex, especially when crowds of people are assuring you they can.

It’s funny (or sad, or both) when they do the very thing they’re warning not to do. Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, the title says. Spoiler: it’s because they blend right in.

Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Lefties of the 1960s were indeed dismissive and contemptuous of women. That’s one reason “second wave” feminism happened.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence[1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

See it? See where it loses the plot?

Sentence one: We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved.

Immediately followed by: There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

First, WE MUST TAKE MISOGYNY SERIOUSLY AS A PRIMARY EVIL, second, MISOGYNY IS A SYMPTOM OF ALL THESE SERIOUSLY BAD THINGS.

Morris misses her own point. That’s not an easy thing to do!

If you’re telling people to take misogyny seriously as a bad thing in itself, not just as a bad thing because it’s a gateway to much more important bad things, then you don’t go straight from “misogyny is bad” to “it’s a gateway to these other things!!”

It’s no picnic being a girl, and it’s apparently getting worse.

Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.

Never mind that; let’s bemoan the plight of trans girls instead. Paying attention to the problems of female people is so last millennium; the cool kids are all about male people who idennnify as female.

Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling so persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous year that they stopped regular activities — a figure that was double the share of boys and the highest in a decade, CDC data showed.

Girls fared worse on other measures, too, with higher rates of alcohol and drug use than boys and higher levels of being electronically bullied, according to the 89-page report. Thirteen percent had attempted suicide during the past year, compared with 7 percent of boys.

I seriously wonder if one reason for that could be that feminism has abandoned them in favor of cooing over males who pretend to be female. I do. Feminism isn’t there for them any more, it’s there for male people who claim to have gender issues.

Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said there is probably not a single cause to explain the data but rather interacting causes that vary by race, ethnicity, class, culture and access to mental health resources.

Even so, he said, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” he said.

And guess who gets to be the target of that aggression.

It seems someone went too far.

His friends line up to continue his valiant work.

Chase Strangio is in battle gear.

Did Tennessee ban care for trans adolescents though? Did it pass a law saying trans adolescents can’t have health care?

The ACLU press release is more precise than Strangio on Twitter.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Tennessee, and Lambda Legal are promising the transgender youth of Tennessee they will bring immediate legal action against proposed restrictions on their health care currently being considered by the state legislature.

SB 1 and HB 1 would ban the only evidence-based care for gender dysphoria for transgender people under 18. State senate committees have thus far ignored the warnings of transgender youth, their families, and their medical providers about the potential harms of these bills, and similar restrictions in Alabama and Arkansas have been enjoined by federal courts.

There we go. So it’s not health care in general, or health care for adolescents in general, it’s “health care” for gender dysphoria…so presumably puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones and/or surgeries.

The problem of course is that these are drastic measures, and some people who have taken such drastic measures now regret it. This isn’t straightforward medical treatment, it’s attempts to change the body to make it match the opposite sex. There are side effects.

There are also effects to not taking these measures, but it’s not simply a fact that the drastic measures fix everyone and do no harm and never end up with bitter regrets. They don’t fix everyone, they do harm at least some people, and they do end up with regrets in some cases.

But the ACLU is aboard the trans train and making it go faster and faster. Too late to jump off now.

There’s no such thing as misogyny.

On Saturday night, Wiebke Hüster, a German dance critic, was taking a break from watching a ballet program at Hanover’s main opera house when the choreographer Marco Goecke appeared in front of her.

That morning, Ms. Hüster, 57, had published a review of Mr. Goecke’s latest work, and it wasn’t positive. Watching his new dance, “In the Dutch Mountains,” audiences would feel like they’re either “going insane” or “being killed by boredom,” she wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major German newspaper.

So it was perhaps unsurprising when Mr. Goecke, 50, the ballet director at the Hanover State Opera, confronted her, asking why she wrote so negatively about him.

Oh I don’t know, I think it’s a little surprising for an artist to confront a critic, especially in person. Bad reviews are part of the life of an artist.

What was a surprise was that Mr. Goecke — who is known for his pet dachshund, Gustav, as well as for his work — then pulled a bag filled with dog excrement out of his pocket and rubbed the feces on Ms. Hüster’s face.

As one does.

Would he have done that to a male critic? Not unless he wanted his nose broken.

The Hanover State Opera said in a statement posted on its website that it had suspended Mr. Goecke from his position as ballet director, a role he has held since 2019. His “impulsive” action had not only offended Ms. Hüster, but “massively damaged” the ballet company, it added.

It wasn’t “impulsive.” People don’t carry dog shit in their pockets. It was planned, which is the opposite of impulsive.

The opera house has asked Mr. Goecke to explain his actions and said it would wait to hear from him before deciding on further steps, the statement said.

There is no “explain.”

I decided for some reason we needed some Lift Every Voice and Sing.

There was this derailment in Ohio last week…the one that spilled a whole lot of vinyl chloride. It’s gone bizarrely or suspiciously under-reported. I looked for reporting a few hours ago and the only major news outlet that turned up was, of all things, Fox News. Where the hell are the other majors?

The short version is it’s bad. Really really bad.

Since the news outlets are looking fixedly in the opposite direction for some reason it’s going to have to be some tweets, sorry.

Nina Turner is a former Ohio state senator.

New York Times? Washington Post? Anything? Hello? Is this thing on?

This is how they derive the “they want to wipe us out!!!” lie. They translate successful treatment into wiping them out. Their condition is their idenniny so treating the condition equals genocide.

Making gender dysphoria go away=wiping out trans people, is the logic here.

But. The people in question still exist.

That makes it not genocide, not “they want to wipe us out.”

If people change political parties they don’t cease to exist. They change, but they don’t cease to exist. If believers turn atheist or atheists turn believers, same thing – they still exist, they’re just different.

A change in belief can of course be a very profound change, but no matter how profound it is it’s still not death.

It is possible for people to think of their former selves as dead in a way. Maybe we all do, in a way – but it’s a metaphorical way, a “feelings” way, a way in the head. It’s not literal death.

What if trans people were forced to accept treatment they don’t want, to get rid of their gender dysphoria? What if they’re blissfully happy pretending to be the other sex, and want to leave it at that? They should be left in peace, surely, provided they’re not harming other people. No men in women’s sports or prisons or rape crisis centers or awards, which would probably slash the number of blissfully happy trans women to near zero, but other than that, do watcha want. But either way, getting rid of the dysphoria is not getting rid of the person who had it.

Tavistock scandal is scandal:

More than 1,000 children were referred for puberty blockers at an experimental gender clinic where concerns were ignored to preserve a “gold dust” NHS contract, a new book claims.

Former clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, have detailed how some “incredibly complex” children were placed on medication after one face-to-face assessment, despite many having a variety of mental health or family background problems.

And the “medication” isn’t really medication, it’s more like tampering.

The claims come in Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes, which will be released this month.

Barnes, a BBC Newsnight journalist, spoke to dozens of clinicians who worked at Gids, governors at the trust and children and their parents who used the service.

Barnes reports that “The clinic accounted for almost 30 per cent of the Tavistock NHS Trust’s income by 2021 and staff said it resembled a “tech start-up” with regular trips to international conferences.” And with money rolling in, which doesn’t always nudge people to think “Wait maybe we’re doing the wrong thing here.”

In 2016, Susie Green, former head of the pro-trans charity Mermaids, emailed Dr Polly Carmichael, who was then the head of Gids, asking to cut the time children had to spend on puberty blockers before irreversible cross-sex hormones could be introduced.

What kind of “charity” is it that tries to interfere with medical decisions at medical institutions?

Staff raised concerns when, on behalf of families, Green requested children’s clinicians to be changed to someone believed to be more likely to prescribe hormones.

How was that any of her business? Why wasn’t she told to fuck all the way off?

After initially treating just a handful of patients each year, referrals to Gids increased dramatically. In 2009-10 it received 97. By 2019-20 it received 2,748 — a rise of more than 2,700 per cent.

Participle confusion there. Gids initially treated just a handful of patients each year, but then referrals increased dramatically. At any rate – if this were an actual biological infection, a dramatic increase would indicate biological contagion. Since it’s not, what does the dramatic increase seem to indicate? Could it be popularity? Social contagion as opposed to medical contagion?

Dr Anna Hutchinson, a senior clinical psychologist at Gids, said the service was soon “accepting everyone”. She said puberty blockers were supposed to be prescribed to children to give them “time to think” about whether they wanted to transition fully, but she realised that almost all went on to take cross-sex hormones, such as testosterone and oestrogen, which have irreversible consequences.

Plus it turns out that blockers don’t just allow time to think – they too have irreversible consequences.

There were also concerns that parents were pushing children into transitioning, in cases of fabricated or induced illness (FII), previously known as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.

In one case, he said, the child told him, “my mum wants this for me”, or “my mum wants the blocker more than I do”. He said there was sexual abuse and domestic violence in the family and he and a colleague agreed that they would not be putting the young person forward for puberty blockers. However, this decision was allegedly overruled by Carmichael.

On other occasions a change in clinician would be requested by Green, the Mermaids chief, Spiliadis said. “I remember thinking and talking to Paul [Jenkins, the Tavistock chief] and saying that this is really inappropriate — how come a person who’s the director, or the CEO of a charity, is entitled to request a change of clinicians on behalf of a family?”

Just what I was wondering.

Read on.

This. Again.

A woman’s $1,100 went to a man.

Coel will enjoy this.

Trump called in the researchers, but they didn’t deliver the goods, so he blanked them.

Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined werevoter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.

…

“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted,” said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. “Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.”

And turned up nothing. There were a few anomalies but there are always a few anomalies.

Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in aDecember 2020conference call, people familiar with the matter said. Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said.

Meadows was skeptical based on what? Besides what the boss wanted? It’s like being skeptical of the number of blades of grass in New Jersey. How would he know???

“Katy” Montgomerie says he had a bad experience.

What is a “hen do”? It’s what in the US is called a “bridal shower” – a party for a soon-to-marry woman attended only by women.

First of all, obviously nobody should throw drinks over people.

Second, if it really was a hen do then he didn’t belong there, and neither did the guy who threw the drink over him.

Third, I don’t believe it for a second about the crying. Montgomerie is a notorious bully; I can easily believe he was enraged, but not that he got the boo-hoos.

Fourth, it wasn’t his night, it was the future bride’s night. (Sorry, I find all this bridal/showery/do stuff kind of ooky, but it’s part of the story.) Fifth it wasn’t necessarily for no reason, on account of how Montgomerie is Montgomerie.

Whatever; he of course got lots of Twitter hugs and sympathy.

OJ is doing his “blame women” thing again.

To put it another way, it’s striking how men like OJ cheer from the sidelines as other men dress up in womanface and steal women’s rights.

Men who dress up in womanface are not “vulnerable” in relation to women. It’s the other way around. Men can still punch even when wearing lipstick.

Also, false equivalence is false.

Yes, Birth of a Nation and the KKK used white women as justification for racist violence. That’s true. It doesn’t follow that no one ever abuses women, or treats women as human shields. The KKK is one thing, and feminist women are another.

The rest of that interview:

20:59:

Robinson: Just one last specific: the other example, about women’s rights, is this yes tabloid story, but with substance behind it, that people who give birth shouldn’t be called mothers, they should be called people who give birth – is that really Stonewall’s view of the world?

Anderson: So, no, this again is what gets mischaracterized. What Stonewall looks to do is to provide organizations with good practice to provide an incluzive place to work. It’s not the law, Nick.

Robinson: But is it good practice to stop calling mothers “mothers”?

Anderson: In some organizations potentially that’s what they might want to do, in terms of the culture that they’re trying to create and in terms of what had actually worked in other organizations. These are suggestions…

Had actually worked how? In what sense? For whom? What are we talking about here? Why is it seen as a good thing to “create a culture” that conceals the existence of women?

This is about creating a place, creating a culture, where people really can be themselves.

Not if those people are women it doesn’t. It erases women so that men who pretend to be women can feel more comfy.

After that they move on to party politics so that’s where I cease to transcribe.

Chapter 2 – ideology. And somebody, on mainstream BBC Anderson says in a scolding voice, talked about “an LGBTQ ideology.” Yes that’s right, Sunshine, it’s an ideology that men can become women.

I mean, I’m not living an ideology, Nick. I’m living my life.

But he’s not T. It’s the T bit that rests on an ideology. Robinson:

But it’s a set of ideas, that we’re gonna come to, it’s an assertion of a belief not a fact that trans women are women – we’re gonna come to that –

They cross-talk for a few seconds with Anderson repeating “my life” and Robinson citing “a set of views and beliefs that some people see as an ideology.” Finally around 16 minutes they get around to women and their rights. Anderson says he can’t see why we’ve gone backwards and at 17:17 Robinson says

Well because a man with a penis was sent to a women’s prison, in an era in which you’re telling me that there are rights to safe spaces. [Anderson interjecting “Yeah…yeah…”] And Stonewall said it wouldn’t happen.

Anderson: And this individual is a rapist, and the full force of the law should apply to that individual –

Robinson: Is he a man, or a woman?

Anderson: Well, that person committed an offense whilst a man, has transitioned to being, um, a woman, and the Scottish Prison Service, as I believe would happen in England and Wales as well, has undertaken a risk assessment pretty quickly, and put said individual into a man’s prison.

Robinson: But it’s not an irrelevant question to ask is he a man or a woman?

Anderson: No it’s not an irrelevant question to ask, and this is a transitioning individual…

So there’s a liminal space between the two? If you’re “transitioning” it’s not quite right to say you are a woman? But then how do you ever know who is a woman?

Robinson: So he’s not a man or a woman.

Anderson: He is now identifying as a woman…

Robinson: But that’s describing what he thinks. I’m asking you what you think. Is he a man or is he a woman?

Anderson: What this person is is a rapist.

Robinson: No no, he’s a man or a woman. He may also be a rapist but is he a man or a woman?

Anderson: Well this person is now identified as a woman but fundamentally Nick they’re a rapist, and –

Robinson: No fundamentally, in a debate about whether we should change the law, so that people are what they say they are, with no other test and no other protection for women’s spaces, what matters is, are they what they say they are, so if Adam the rapist says I’m Isla the woman, is he a woman?

Anderson: But there is space, and current legislation does protect safe spaces, and that’s what –

Robinson [cutting him off and exasperatedly laughing a little]: But he was sent into a women’s prison! It’s only after the row that he was then removed from the women’s prison.

Anderson then, annoyingly, burbles condescendingly about prison stats – lots of people in prison, tiny number of trans prisoners, blah blah.

Robinson: But without getting bogged down, the reason many people think it matters, even if it was one in ten million, is because it’s about a principle. And the principle at the heart of this complicated row is a simple one. Stonewall appears to be asserting – are they? – that a trans woman is in all circumstances, whoever they are, whatever they’ve done, whatever their genitalia, is. a. woman. legally forever.

Anderson replies, absurdly, that people say “what is a biological woman??” and we know what a biological woman is…

…and Stonewall is not saying anything to change that. What it is saying is that we believe that a trans woman is a woman.

Which is exactly, but EXACTLY, why this is an ideology. Stonewall is “not saying anything” to change the fact that women are women but it believes that a man [who claims to be a woman] is a woman. THAT IS THE IDEOLOGY.

That one reply should become a meme, because it gives the whole fucking game away. Starts at 20:27. Make a note of it.

“What I’m not trying to do,” he goes on blithely, “is convince people of anything other than that.”

Other than what? That Stonewall believes The Magic Gender Ideology? We know. Or that trans women are women? That’s a whole other thing, bub, and you should stop trying to convince people of it.

Nick Robinson interviews Iain Anderson on Political Thinking, under the subtitle

How will the new chair of Stonewall approach the heated debate around gender politics?

We know the answer of course. With the complete indifference to the concerns of women that Stonewall has been demonstrating all along.

They start by talking about Stonewall, and Anderson cites “the LGBTQ+ community” – so right at the beginning we know we’re not going to get clarity, because there is no such community and there can’t be such a community, because they are at cross-purposes. The T is not the same as the LGB and they don’t belong together because the T is destructive of human rights, especially women’s rights, while the LGB is not.

Nick Robinson does at least mention the issue, which makes a nice change. At 3:47 he says “What’s fascinating about that is the suggestion that there is an LGBTQ+ community, there are people who dispute that, who were founders of Stonewall for example, and the suggestion that this is a repeat of what happened” – but then he says let’s come back to that, and changes direction. He points out that Anderson sat with Laura Kuensberg on the Beeb and said he wanted a conversation, he wanted a big tent, “and a day later you seemed to pack up your tent and say you didn’t want a conversation with anybody who disagreed with you, why did you change your mind?”

Not quite true, he says. “I’m interested in a conversation with anybody that wants to help support and lift up LGBTQ+ people.” So there we are again, as always, back at the same stupid dead end. If you “lift up” T people you drop LG people and women.

Anderson burbles about people “hitting Twitter” instead of sitting down to have a real conversation, and Robinson calls his bluff and asks “Would you meet with JK Rowling, would you meet with organizations like Women’s Place, would you meet with people who think they’re standing up for women’s rights, or are they not part of the quotes ‘real conversation’?” Robinson comes back with “people who want to lift up LGBTQ+ people” – so round and round we go forever, would you meet with feminist women, would meet with people who want to liftuplgbitq+people repeat infinity. If you look at the polling, Anderson says unctuously, most people, the vast majority of people, want to see LGBTQ+ people lifted up. FINE, but that’s NOT THE ISSUE.

That’s chapter one.