Oh no oh no this new politically correct idea that girls are not public property for boys to fumble at whenever they like is HARMING BOYS.

Boys are being damaged by “an excessive cultural shift” against them triggered by the #MeToo and Everyone’s Invited movements that has left many lost, insecure and traumatised, according to top child experts.

Stupidest lede ever. Saying boys should not sexually assault girls is not “an excessive cultural shift” and it’s also not “against boys.” Some boys actually know they shouldn’t sexually assault girls!

Julie Lynn-Evans, a psychotherapist with 35 years’ experience, says the two movements involving girls and women speaking out about sexual harassment have led to a “dangerous” backlash against boys. Many have done nothing wrong.

Again: that’s just outright stupidity. There is no “backlash against boys.” A heightened awareness of sexual assault is not a backlash against boys, it’s a backlash against sexual assault. I know journalists have to take short cuts but this is more of a canyon.

While her clients during lockdown were mostly teenage girls with eating disorders, or who were self-harming, they are now “exclusively” boys who have been ostracised, punished or even expelled for behaviour that she describes as little more than clumsy “teenage fumbling”.

Is this supposed to be an argument of some kind? It’s meaningless. Maybe she is selecting boys; how do we know? Just telling us she had Z clients before and now has Q clients tells us nothing further. Also, even “fumbling” without consent is wrong and bad.

It goes on and on in the same vein and concludes with

[Lynn-Evans] said: “I like #MeToo and would like to give the woman who started it an award but I think it has gone too far. Now any boy who puts a hand on a bosom because he is slightly drunk and has not asked is being in danger of being ostracised and shamed. Girls are viewing teenage boys as aggressive predators. So the normal sexual dance that has gone for ever now seems not OK. Boys are losing their feet.”

Their feet? The poor wee bairns, are the schools chopping them off? She probably meant footing and the reporter, Sian Griffiths, didn’t catch it. What a lazy destructive stupid article.

The Irish Times reports:

An attempt to stage Waiting for Godot in the Netherlands took on a Beckettian turn when the venue cancelled the performances because the Irish director had auditioned only men for the all-male cast of characters.

Can you imagine?? Auditioning only men to play men??? That director should be in jail, with bruises and contusions.

The play, in which Vladimir and Estragon are occasionally joined by other male characters as they await someone who never arrives, had been in rehearsals since November and was due to be staged at the University of Groningen’s Usva student cultural centre in March.

But the performances were cancelled after the venue discovered the casting call for the play’s five male roles had been open to men only, something they informed the production team went against a university inclusivity policy.

The university has a policy that forbids auditioning according to the sex of the characters?

“If it concerned a play with five white guys that they’d held open auditions for, everything would have been fine. But you can’t ban people right from the start,” Usva theatre programmer Bram Douwes told the Ukrant newspaper.

Yes you can. You can save everybody’s time and trouble by listing some criteria.

“[Beckett] explicitly stated that this play should be performed by five men. Moving forward, times have changed. And that the idea that only men are suitable for this role is outdated and even discriminatory,” university press officer Elies Kouwenhoven said.

That’s the play that Beckett wrote though. It’s too late to fix his thinking, and it’s not “discriminatory” to cast his play the way he wrote it.

“We as a university stand for an open inclusive community where it is not appropriate to exclude others, on any basis.”

Oh fuck off. So students can walk into their professors’ houses without knocking? Toilets have no walls? The public gets to sit in on all lectures and classes? The cafeteria feeds everyone in Groningen?

Of course it’s “appropriate” to exclude others in some circumstances. It’s also necessary. You don’t have to invite people you dislike to your parties. You don’t have to hire the first person who applies when you have a job that needs filling. You don’t have to read the first book you see at the library.

Mr Moyne told The Irish Times he had considered casting people of other genders for the roles, but could not do so because of rules set down by the playwright before his death and upheld by the Beckett estate.

Beckett sued a Dutch theatre company in 1988 for choosing to cast women in the play, the best known work from the Theatre of the Absurd movement. His estate holds the rights to the work until 2059, and has continued to oppose productions that deviate from Beckett’s instructions.

So the People of Incloosion will have to leave Beckett alone for 36 years. Fortunately there are other plays.

Originally a comment by Graham Douglas on Julie don’t want no stinkin’ fair competition.

I’ll admit up front that I am a huge rugby (union) fan. The team I support (Sale Sharks) started up a women’s team about three years ago and they now play in the top league for women’s rugby in England. I go down to watch them whenever I can because the standard of rugby played is very high. The games are most enjoyable and I always try to encourage anyone with even a vague interest in rugby to get down and watch the women.

All of which pre(r)amble is to say that the supporters’ club organised a meet&greet with some of the players and coaching staff of the women’s team last week.There was a Q&A session and, whilst there was no mention of TiMs in rugby, they were asked what they thought were the main differences between the men’s and women’s games.

Just about everything revolved around the physical differences between men and women. One of the first things mentioned was neck strength – I hadn’t known that the women have special training to improve neck strength and are regularly monitored on it. They were saying that they are all very aware of being more vulnerable in contact – even against other women – and prefer to play to avoid the crunching tackles that men revel in. (Not to that there aren’t any: there’s no quarter given when it comes down to stopping an opponent making ground.)

What I also found intriguing was that there is mounting evidence that menstruation increases susceptibility to some forms of injury. I can’t remember what they quoted, but it was things like fractures and other stuff that you might not immediately associate with periods – or, at least, do a double take if it’s mentioned.

What was abundantly clear, even though no-one was explicit about it, is that allowing men – of any calibre – to play against women would kill the sport by making it impossible for women to play without greatly heightened levels of risk.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is annoyed because They Don’t Pay Her Enough.

Earlier this week, the Republican representative from Georgia appeared on journalist Glenn Greenwald’s podcast and expressed concern about her congressional salary, which according to public records is $174,000 annually.

Greene told Greenwald: “Becoming a member of Congress has made my life miserable. I made a lot more money before I got here. I’ve lost money since I’ve gotten here.”

She’s welcome to quit. She wasn’t drafted.

Additionally, Greene complained about the amount of time her congressional work consumes, saying: “The nature of this job, it keeps members of Congress and senators in Washington so much of the time, too much of the time … that we don’t get to go home and spend more time with our families, our friends … or maybe just be regular people because this job is so demanding. It’s turned into practically year-round.”

Gee, what a surprise that being part of the legislature of a huge complicated country turns out to be demanding and time-consuming. Who could possibly have foreseen that?

Also, people are mean to her.

The congresswoman said: “I have people come up to me and say crazy things to me out of the blue in public places that they believe because they read it on the internet or saw it on some news show about me.”

Golly. The crowd at today’s Let Women Speak is MASSIVE.

The whole thing:

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on He’d like that.

The English Rugby Football Union (RFU) is facing a legal challenge to its ban on male players competing in contact rugby with women.

Julie Curtiss, 52, told @ESPNUK that opponents to men participating in women’s sports “need to be dragged, kicking and screaming.”

When reported honestly, like this, in plain language which doesn’t hide the issue, it’s perfectly clear what’s at stake. It’s also perfectly clear that the men are in the wrong. “Identification” may have no power to change material reality, but it sure plays havoc with journalistic integrity.

“Transness” has nothing to do with it. It’s men in women’s sport. Let them keep their socially consructed gendered soul. Let them keep it to themselves. They can be whoever or whatever they want to be between their ears and behind their eyes. Nobody give a fuck. And that’s the problem. They demand an audience, they require enthusiastic validation and participation in their little fantasy. It doesn’t count if nobody knows, if nobody applauds, if nobody bows down to the specialness inside of them, paraded ostentatiously on the outside for all to see. This makes it real, it confirms the impact of their personal belief upon the world.

But they want to be more than just a static, brute fact, a roadblock or obstacle that everyone is forced to notice and make allowances for; they want to do shit. They want use this power they’ve taken (and been given) to force their will on the world, to go places they normally wouldn’t be allowed to go, and do things they normally wouldn’t be allowed to do. Schoolboys might fantasize about having a ring or cloak of invisibility that would let them do naughty things, unseen, and get away with it. Well these men want a cloak or ring of obviousness. They don’t want to “just go pee.” They want to mark their newly conquered territory, to run their flag up the pole and make everyone salute. They want to revel in the public enactment and enforcement of their fetish. This is boner material. They don’t want to blend in and go unnoticed; they want to broadcast the fact that they have been given social licence to violate women’s boundaries, that they have permission to do what they’re doing, and that women can’t do a goddamn thing about it. They need to be seen getting away with their transgression. They want licence to gloat, to cause women to be dragged away, kicking and screaming when, in a sane world, it would be these men who would be subject to forcible ejection from female only spaces and facilities.

ESPN tells us more about the tragic exclusion of huge “Julie” Curtiss from women’s contact rugby, and the entitlement still looms as large as Julie himself does.

In July of 2022, the Rugby Football Union (RFU), the game’s governing body in England, voted to ban transgender women from playing women’s contact rugby, and trans player Julie Curtiss is leading the opposition to fight the decision.

Trans player Julie Curtiss, who is HUGE, is leading the opposition to fight the decision.

The RFU’s reasoning behind the ban, they said in their July statement, was to ensure ‘fair competition and safety of all competitors.’ They added that their decision was based on the latest available scientific research.

For Curtiss, that decision has impacted more than her ability to play a sport, as she says it has impacted her mental health. It has also put her at the forefront of a global debate about trans athletes competing in elite sports, after she launched legal action against the RFU in September.

See that? Again, he just sails right past the part about the safety of all competitors, to whine about how this decision has affected him, him him him precious him. No one else matters. He might as well whine because he’s not allowed to cut women’s heads off.

I don’t know if the ideology fosters selfishness on this scale, or if people who are selfish on this scale are drawn to the ideology, or both, but I do know that we’ve seen this jaw-dropping obliviousness to the needs and rights of women a billion times over the last ten years or so. It should scupper it, but so far it hasn’t.

“Although I’m still involved with Hove rugby, not being able to play and feeling stuck off on the side… And everybody always wants to talk about it, and I love to talk about it. And I’m glad they want to talk about it and want to find out how things are going.

“But at the same time, it’s just this constant thing of feeling like you have been kicked into the long grass and just discarded with no forethought.”

Then compete against men. It’s perfectly simple. Just play on the men’s team; problem solved. All this whining and roaring and self-pity and emotional blackmail when all he has to do is play on the men’s team and accept being not very good at the sport.

Wow. The placid, determined, immovable entitlement of this massive guy is breathtaking. (Being tackled by him would be breathtaking too, and bonebreaking and possibly life-ending, if he snaps your neck.)

“They” offered him coaching or reffing and he said no because if he does those things it means that he is “accepting that trans women can’t play this sport.” No it doesn’t. It means accepting that men can’t play women’s rugby, including men who call themselves trans.

“You just can’t play contact,” he says they told him. “They just seem to have been blissfully ignorant of the impact they’ve had.” Impact? It’s “Julie” Curtiss who seems to be blissfully ignorant of the impact he would have if he played contact rugby against women.

He did say the thing about needing to be dragged kicking and screaming. Not into doing something, as is usual with that metaphor, but just dragged kicking and screaming. He’d like that.

There was a conference in London today: Education for Women’s Liberation.

Of course there were “protests.”

Maryam was there!

Julian Baggini has a very nice “wisdom list from big thinkers” piece in the Guardian, in which he mixes philosophical training and literary appreciation. I’m a sucker for that combination.

Philosophers are, of course, the archetypal expert thinkers. Their discipline is often portrayed as a kind of formal method that lists fallacies to be avoided and distinguishes between deductive and inductive reasoning, invalid and sound arguments. These things have their place. But philosophy cannot be reduced to mere technique. Thinking well also requires adopting the right attitudes and being prepared to nurture effective habits. Without these “intellectual virtues” even the cleverest end up merely playing theoretical games.

Mind you, some people are happy just playing theoretical games, and fair play to them, but more is available.

Written some time between the sixth and second centuries BCE, supposedly by Akapāda Gautama, the Indian classic the Nyāya Sūtras is the first great treatise on the principles of reasoning. Gautama distinguishes between three kinds of debate. In jalpa (wrangling) the aim is victory, while vitanda (cavilling) is concerned wholly with criticising the other side. But in good or honest discussion, vada, the aim is truth.

On the one hand, a kind of sport, where the goal is to win; on the other hand, a kind of conversation, where the goal is to learn or discover something.

Philippa Foot was one of the best British philosophers of the 20th century. Yet she told me, “I couldn’t give a five-minute lecture on dozens of philosophers. I couldn’t tell you about Spinoza. I’m very uneducated really.”

Mary Warnock was another philosopher with a keen sense of humility, saying: “I haven’t done very much work and I haven’t done it very well.”

Both women’s remarks sound ludicrously self-deprecating to anyone who knows their work. In fact, they reveal a self-awareness and honesty that helped them to excel. Foot was probably right to say that she wasn’t as good a scholar as many of her peers and wasn’t especially clever in the sense of having an ability to process complex logical calculations quickly. Rather than trying to compete with those who were, she played to her strengths: great insight, a penetrating mind, and a good nose for what’s right.

Read on.

We’re in the era of assault rifle lapel pins.

Recently, Republican members of Congress, Rep. George Santos and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna have been spotted wearing lapel pins resembling miniature AR-15 rifles.

“Where are these assault weapon pins coming from? Who is passing these out?” Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez tweeted.

In another tweet, Gomez noted that Luna had worn the pin at an Oversight hearing less than 48 hours after her state of Florida experienced a mass shooting that wounded 11 people.

So? Mass shootings smell like Freedom.

The mystery of the lapel pins has now been solved. Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde from Georgia owns a gun store and has now taken responsibility for handing them out.

“I hear that this little pin I’ve been giving out on the House floor has been triggering some of my Democrat colleagues,” he said in a video posted to Twitter. “Well, I give it out to remind people of the Second Amendment of the Constitution and how important it is in preserving our liberties.”

The liberty to shoot up schools and Walmarts and Targets and gay bars and hospitals and subway trains and Krogers and FedEx and bowling alleys…

The congressman owns Clyde Armory in Athens, which makes millions selling military-style rifles, body armor, ammunition, and other weapon accessories.

His handing out of the lapel pins comes after there have been an estimated 54 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Democratic Rep. Cori Bush noted that lawmakers wore the pins during National Gun Violence Survivors Week.

Goddam Democrats have no sense of humor.

Apparently there’s a rumor going around that Ron DeSantis is ordering female athletes to tell him all about their periods, and apparently the rumor is false.

Social media users are suggesting the conservative Republican governor, who has been an outspoken critic of transgender athletes, is again using sports to stoke controversy as he weighs a run for president in 2024.

The AP is trying to sort fact from fiction here, but the AP itself gets it wrong in the usual way – the issue is not “transgender athletes.” People have been so well trained to hide the truth on this subject that they do it even when debunking bullshit.

But the proposed mandate hasn’t had final approval, and wasn’t developed by DeSantis’ office.

…

DeSantis and Diaz’s offices didn’t respond to emails seeking comment this week, but Harrison stressed the proposed changes are not in response to concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, as some social media users claim.

“There is absolutely no support of the argument that their recommendation is aimed towards addressing an individual group of people,” he wrote in an email.

It’s about tracking the effects of sports on menstruation; it’s not about verification of who is actually female. Which ought to be obvious anyway, because how could that possibly work? Are people thinking DeSantis plans to send cops to check girls for signs of menstruation? “Pull out that tampon and show it to me right now!”

Deep breaths, people. Check for plausibility first.

I went out in the wind and rain early this afternoon, and I did get pretty cold and wet, but it was fun too. (It looks stormier now.) When I got home and got reasonably dry I stood for a while looking out the window at the wind n rain and I guess thinking about weather and climate and the planet and doom, and thought (not for the first time) that it’s bizarre yet not bizarre that now that we know we’ve broken the planet and are pushing it steadily over a cliff is when a surprising number of us start thinking humans can magically change sex. You’d think we’d be intensely focused on the real, the physical, the material, the truth about actions and consequences and outcomes. You’d think we would, but instead lots and lots of us are lost in a dream of magic identity that transcends mere bodies and carries us off into a heaven of…I don’t know, Eddie Izzards and India Willoughbys I guess.

In other words we’re all mind-body split again, including [many of] those of who used to recognize mind-body dualism when we saw it, and reject it with contumely.

So I was happy to see ‘Gender Identity’ Is A New Gnostic Gospel by Matt Osborne.

“Trans women are women, trans men are men” is a gnostic statement. It presupposes a division of the body from the thinking being — the definitive sophistry of esotericism. Like all religious movements in history, “gender identity” is an alchemical pastiche of ideas and borrowed rituals.

Take the mind-body split of Cartesian dualism, add queer theory, and announce your pronouns.

The result, these new gnostics tell us, is literal transmutation of the flesh through magical utterance. “I feel like a woman, therefore I am one.” “Some penises are female, some lesbians have penises.” “I am my true self now.” The phrase “gender euphoria” replaces dysphoria, for they are experiencing hormonal rapture, a transcendence of mere flesh-matter by the divine gender-soul.

And that’s one of the reasons it’s so massively irritating to those of us who don’t believe in magical transcendence of that kind.

I said read the rest but I can’t keep away from that Slate piece on the guns despite restraining order ruling. I have to yell at it some more.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen held that all restrictions on the right to “armed self-defense” are presumptively unconstitutional. The only gun safety laws that pass legal muster, Thomas declared, are those with “historical analogues” from 1791 (when the Second Amendment was ratified) or 1868 (when it was applied to the states). This sea change in the law created a flood of litigation in the lower courts as litigants tried to prove that modern gun restrictions were not deeply rooted in American history. Courts have been receptive, relying on Bruen to strike down a slew of laws targeting the criminal use of firearms.

But it isn’t 1791 any more, nor is it 1868. We don’t want to live in 1791 or 1868. We don’t want to live as if it were 1791 or 1868. Clarence Thomas wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court if it were 1791 or 1868. His odds of being a judge of any kind would not be great. His odds of going to law school wouldn’t be great. Neither would any women’s.

In his opinion for the court, [Judge Cory] Wilson declared that there is no deeply rooted tradition of disarming individuals under a restraining order for domestic abuse. The modern law “embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society,” he wrote, but courts have no power to weigh “those policy goals’ merits.” They may only look to U.S. history. And the record compiled in this case failed to prove that domestic abusers were routinely disarmed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. “Our ancestors,” Wilson wrote—meaning the white men who wrote the laws—“would never have accepted” such a practice.

Of course they wouldn’t, which is why we shouldn’t consult them.

Wilson acknowledged that people deemed “dangerous” were denied the right to bear arms, including slaves and Native Americans. But, he asserted, these people were disarmed “by class or group, not after individualized findings of ‘credible threats’ to identified potential victims.”

Ah. I see. Saying “no guns for you” is ok if you say it to slaves and Native Americans but not if you say it to white guys who like to batter women. Lucky us to have such astute judges.

Wilson also speculated about a parade of horribles if the government could remove “irresponsible” or “non-law abiding people” from “the scope of the Second Amendment.”

“Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms?” Wilson asked. “Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”

Ah, powerful point, and the idea that women should be safe from violent men is just as whimsical and politically correct as recycling. Let the punching begin!

Of course, domestic abusers are categorically different from speeders and dissidents. There is a reason why the government disarms them today: They are at exponentially heightened risk of using their gun to commit murder. As I wrote in November, an abuser’s access to guns makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. More than half of intimate partner homicides are committed with guns. An American woman is shot and killed by an intimate partner every 14 hours. Domestic abusers are also disproportionately likely to commit mass shootings: Nearly 60 percent of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 were related to intimate partner violence, while 68 percent of mass shooters had a history of domestic violence.

Yebbut schools were much smaller in 1868. Can’t disagree with that, can you! Case closed.

Domestic violence was not deemed a criminal offense for most of American history. When women were denied equal citizenship, the men who wrote and enforced the laws viewed wife-beating as a mere “familial affair” beyond the province of the courts. Legislators and judges alike saw domestic abuse as a natural part of family life, to be dealt with privately and punished only in the most extreme and murderous situations. It’s no surprise, then, that the historical record shows no history of laws keeping guns out of the hands of abusers. The very notion that men should not be allowed to abuse their wives and girlfriends is a modern belief that only developed in the 20^th century.

Right, so it’s just trendy, like tofu or not wiping out whole species for the hell of it, so [bronx cheer].

Slate reports:

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a gun while under a restraining order for domestic violence, the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday in a decision with alarming implications for gun violence in America.

What is a restraining order restraining if it’s not restraining gun-having, one wonders. Maybe it’s about table manners. No elbows on the table.

Although mass shootings and intimate partner murders are heavily linked to domestic violence, the 5^th Circuit held that the government cannot disarm alleged abusers solely because they are subject to a civil protective order. The court vacated the conviction of a man, Zackey Rahimi, who possessed a gun after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, and invalidated the federal law that prevents alleged abusers from bearing arms. If upheld, its decision will prove lethal to countless Americans who rely on the government to protect them from intimate partner violence.

This is a horrible backward country, and it’s going more backward by the day. Soon Afghanistan will look like a utopia of equality and fairness compared to us.

Thursday’s ruling in U.S. v. Rahimi springs from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in last year’s Bruen, which dramatically expanded the scope of the Second Amendment. Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen held that all restrictions on the right to “armed self-defense” are presumptively unconstitutional

Let’s have more guns, and more and more and more. Let’s play cowboys until we’re all dead.

The law in question here is a federal statute that bars individuals from possessing guns if they are “subject to a court order that restrains [them] from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner.” The case began in 2020, when Rahimi’s ex-girlfriend accused him of assaulting her. A Texas court then issued a civil protective order restraining Rahimi from harassing, stalking, or threatening his ex-girlfriend (or their child). Rahimi agreed to this order, which also explicitly barred him from possessing a gun. Yet officers later discovered a rifle and a pistol in his home. Prosecutors then charged him with unlawfully possessing the guns and secured a conviction.

After the Supreme Court issued Bruen, Rahimi argued that his conviction was unconstitutional. In the district court, Justice David Counts—a Donald Trump appointee—agreed, striking down the federal law. And on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 5^th Circuit upheld Counts’ decision. The panel was composed of two Trump appointees, Judges Cory Wilson and James Ho, as well as the arch-conservative Ronald Reagan appointee Judge Edith Jones.

Read the whole thing if you want to feel sick with rage.

H/t Screechy Monkey

The ACLU has organized what it says are lawmakers targeting “LGBTQ” rights into six categories plus “other.”

They are

Accurate IDs

Civil Rights

Fress Speech and Expression

Healthcare

Public Accommodations

Schools and Education

Under Accurate IDs they say

These bills attempt to limit the ability to update gender information on IDs and records, such as birth certificates and driver’s licenses. This puts transgender people at risk of losing jobs, facing harassment, and other harms. Trans, intersex, and nonbinary people need IDs that accurately reflect who they are to travel, apply for jobs, and enter public establishments without risk of harassment or harm.

But what the ACLU means by “Trans, intersex, and nonbinary people need IDs that accurately reflect who they are” is that trans etc people need IDs that DON’T accurately identify who they are. The ACLU is talking about the new kind of ID that instead of recording the simple facts, records the ID-haver’s fantasy about xirself.

Under Free Speech & Expression they tell us

Despite the safeguards of the First Amendment’s right to free expression, politicians are fighting to restrict how and when LGBTQ people can be themselves, limiting access to books about them and trying to ban or censor performances like drag shows.

But what does it mean for trans people to “be themselves”? It means pretending to be what they are not, which is an odd way for people to Be Themselves. It also, as we know all too well, frequently interferes with other people’s right to be literally non-fantasyly themselves.

Under healthcare:

These bills target access to medically-necessary health care, like Medicaid, for transgender people. Many of these bills ban affirming care for trans youth, and can create criminal penalties for providing this care. 

That is at the very least disingenuous. “Affirming care”=non-medically necessary amputations, sometimes followed by stripping healthy tissue from arms or thighs to make a simulacrum of a penis or a vagina, with frequently miserable results. That’s not “health care” as commonly understood. It’s risky at best and a horror at worst.

Public accommodations:

Public accommodations bills seek to prohibit transgender people from using facilities like public bathrooms and locker rooms.

That’s just a straight-up lie. No they don’t.

Schools & Education:

State lawmakers are trying to prevent trans students from participating in school activities like sports…

Again, just a lie. No they aren’t. They’re trying to prevent boys from competing in girls’ sports.

The ACLU is a disaster zone.

H/t Sackbut

Advertising on that Guardian article:

Hur hur guys hur hur.

There is audio.

A newly released audio recording offers a behind-the-scenes look at how former US president Donald Trump’s campaign team in a pivotal battleground state knew they had been outflanked by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election.

But even as they acknowledged defeat, they decided to “fan the flames” of allegations of widespread fraud costing Trump victory there, which were ultimately debunked – repeatedly – by elections officials and the courts.

In other words they decided to amplify a lie, knowing it was a lie. Not surprising on one level, but there are other levels.

The audio from 5 November 2020, two days after the election, is surfacing as Trump again seeks the White House while continuing to lie about the legitimacy of the outcome and Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 win.

…The audio centers on Andrew Iverson, who was the head of Trump’s campaign in the state.

“Here’s the deal: comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We’ll do whatever they need. Just be on standby if there’s any stunts we need to pull,” Iverson said.

“Stunts we need to pull”=lies we want to tell.

Iverson is now the midwest regional director for the Republican National Committee. He deferred questions about the meeting to the RNC, whose spokesperson, Keith Schipper, declined comment because he had not heard the recording.

How convenient. “Talk to the bosses, who will say they know nothing, nothing. Repeat forever.”

The meeting showcases another juxtaposition of what Republican officials knew about the election results and what Trump and his closest allies were saying publicly as they pushed the lie of a stolen election. Trump was told by his own attorney general there was no sign of widespread fraud, and many within his own administration told the former president there was no substance to various claims of fraud or manipulation – advice Trump repeatedly ignored.

To put it more bluntly, the meeting is yet more evidence of how shamelessly Trump and his gang tell lie after lie after lie.

The ACLU is getting more captured by the day.

So much wrong in that one simple sentence.

The health care they have in mind has nothing to do with LGB people.

There’s no such thing as “gender-affirming” health care. Amputating parts of your body to match a fantasy that you’re the opposite sex is malpractice, not health care.

Promoting these reckless claims about needing amputations to match a personal fantasy is a million miles from what the ACLU should be doing.

Dragging lesbians and gay men into this foul campaign to encourage self-mutilation is absolutely not what the ACLU should be doing.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Lord Falconer.

Whenever I’m accused of fear mongering and creating a problem out of nothing because transwomen are no more violent than other women I always try to point out that they’re tacitly admitting that if transwomen WERE more violent than natal women, then they must believe that there’d be cause for alarm. So — what’s the figure and remedy?

If their level of violence were — oh, let’s say it’s hypothetically the same as men — would that be enough to put safeguards in place? What would those safeguards consist of? What if transwomen were more likely to be violent than males in general? In their view of things, is there a particular percentage increase where some solution is proposed? Would transwomen at any point cease to be women?

They don’t answer, and explain it’s because I’m asking hypotheticals that haven’t and won’t happen. But that shouldn’t matter. They ought to be able to think it through anyway. They can’t think it through because “transwomen are just like other women” isn’t and can’t be a conclusion. Conclusions can be falsified. Instead it’s a fundamental assumption which can’t be falsified with any evidence— and they don’t want to see that.