The BBC on Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s bullying:

In the Commons on Tuesday, Lloyd Russell-Moyle accused Tory Miriam Cates of making “transphobic” comments.

Shouting, with features contorted by rage.

[Cates] said the proposed changes would make it “vastly easier for a predator to get access to children, to change their sex, to change their gender, with an eye to exploiting loopholes of accessing children and women in particular”.

In response, Mr Russell-Moyle, who was the next speaker, told the Commons: “Goodness me, that speech was probably one of the worst transphobic, dog-whistle speeches that I have heard in an awful long time. The idea of linking trans people with predators, frankly, is disgusting and you should be ashamed.”

He said the first sentence angrily. He shouted the second sentence with face-contorting rage. When men do this to women it’s intimidation, even if it’s in a situation where they’re very unlikely to start throwing punches. The shouts and the contorted face are signals, and they operate below the level of the literal verbal content. They’re signals of imminent violence, and they are frightening to women on a very basic level. Many many men act as if they have no idea this is true. They should figure it out.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP does a classic “that bitch made me do it” pretend apology:

“Passion and anger” because a woman thinks women should continue to have single-sex spaces. Male MP can’t control his rage when a female MP seeks to protect women’s rights.

He limited replies to people he follows, but there are many angry quote-tweets.

More from the “people in Arizona don’t seem to grasp what an arid climate is” department:

Rio Verde Foothills, a suburb of Scottsdale, was cut off from the city’s water supply on 1 January. The controversial move left hundreds without access to running water, prompting residents to file a lawsuit demanding that services be restored.

Scottsdale argues that it bears no responsibility for Rio Verde. In a statement published on 16 January, the city of Scottsdale said that it had for years “warned and advised” Rio Verde – which is governed by nearby Maricopa County – that it could not depend on the city’s water supply, particularly during periods of drought.

Yes but the people in Rio Verde really need water.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of residents last week claims that Scottsdale has placed Rio Verde residents under an “unconscionable amount of stress and anxiety by discontinuing their domestic water supply”.

Except it’s not “theirs,” is it.

“The lack of fresh potable water for families to be able to bathe themselves or running water to flush their toilets is a well-known basic necessity,” the lawsuit added.

Of course it is, which is why people should stop moving to desert towns. It’s not why people should move to desert towns and then demand that others supply them with water.

Arizona is one of 33 US states currently experiencing drought conditions, according to the US Drought Monitor.

Oh, only 33 out of 50. We’ll be fine.

Well that god sure as hell hates women.

A man who beheaded his 17-year-old wife has been sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran, the judiciary says.

Images of Sajjad Heydari carrying Mona’s severed head in Ahvaz after the so-called “honour killing” last year caused widespread outrage.

Nah it’s fine. Women have to be disciplined.

Mona had been married to her husband since the age of 12 and had given birth to their son when she was only 14.

That is, Mona was given to a man like so much livestock when she was 12 years old.

Local media reported that she had fled to Turkey after allegedly being subjected to domestic violence by her husband, who had refused her requests for a divorce.

So her husband hastened to demonstrate his complete innocence of domestic violence by cutting her head off.

In 2020, there was similar outrage after 14-year-old Romina Ashrafi was beheaded by her father after she reportedly ran away from home with her boyfriend. The father, who had consulted a lawyer to find out what punishment he could face for the crime before he killed her, was sentenced to nine years in prison – one less than the maximum allowed under the law.

If only she had thought to identify as a boy.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Not equal treatment but elevated status.

As I was reading this, I was simultaneously engaged in a territorial dispute with my cat. Wherever I made room for him on my bed, he kept trying to lie on my shins. No amount of moving him, moving my legs, pleading with him that other parts of the bed are more comfortable, or explaining that he can’t lie on my legs because it hurts me was going to dissuade him from trying, because he’s a cat, and lying on my legs was the point. He’s intellectually incapable of understanding anything more complex than “I want to lie there, because that’s warm.” My legs radiate heat; wherever I put them, that’s going to become, immediately, the warmest part of the bed. Eventually I won, because I simply kept moving him until he gave up and ceded to my superior strength and stubbornness (anyone who thinks that it’s not possible to out-stubborn a cat hasn’t met a crippled old lady who has lived with cats for decades). He’s now asleep on my bed, next to my legs, with his back towards me; the classic “I’m upset with you, but I need your heat” cat sulking pose.

This is a daily tussle. Again, the salient point is he’s a cat; like a human toddler, he’s incapable of the higher-order thinking required for him to be able to rank competing needs or have the necessary empathy to put another animal’s greater needs above his own lesser needs, or even wants. Most of the time he lives entirely in the moment, and right at that moment he wants that heat. I win because, eventually, his need for sleep overrides his ability to keep arguing; he’ll have forgotten all about it when he wakes up, and I’ll have to go through it again (until I get him his own hot water bottle?). Perhaps the only reasons I always won arguments with my toddlers were my greater stamina and their short memories.

Anyway, these TRAs are grown men behaving like cats or toddlers. Unlike cats or toddlers, however, they don’t have the excuse of a lack of intellectual ability; they’ve actively decided to ignore the civilised part of their brain in order to demand that we give in to their wants, overriding everyone else’s needs. No amount of looking for any extra needs they may have, and catering to them, will make the slightest bit of difference because their actual needs are already being met.

“You want that space, I want that space; I’m more important than you, so let me have it.

What do you mean, you need that space? In that case, I need it, too. So let me have it. I’m me, so I’m always the most important person to me, so anything I want takes precedence over everything else.”

The only way we can win against such an attitude is to out-stubborn it. Pleading is a waste of breath (I only do it with the cat to appease my own conscience, because I am civilised; it makes exactly zero difference to him). Unfortunately, far too many people have been attempting to appease it, instead, so we are now at a much greater disadvantage than we would have been, say, fifty years ago had we listened to lesbians who were already attempting to warn people about what such men were doing to their community.

An academic paper from 2013:

Boycunts and Bonus Holes: Trans Men’s Bodies, Neoliberalism, and the Sexual Productivity of Genitals

One author is an anthropologist, the other is a linguist.

You want to read the abstract, right? Of course you do.

Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of nonnormatively gendered bodies. This article deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating Internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how trans men navigate homonormative sexual economies by linguistically recuperating their bodies’ sexually productivity. Instead of undermining claims of embodied masculinity and homoerotic value, potential sites of exclusion—i.e., trans genitals—become sites of flexible accumulation that enhance rather than detract from their bearers’ desirability.

If you say so, but do trans men really have a lot of luck on gay “dating” sites?

Argumentum ad fake comparison:

I don’t have enough eyes to roll here.

He’s trying to jostle us into thinking men like him are comparable to Black people in majority-white societies or Jewish people in Nazi Germany. They’re not. Just being an identifiable group doesn’t make that group comparable to all other groups.

But they’re a demographic you see. As long as you’re a demographic you get to claim persecution whenever someone is skeptical of your grandiose claims about yourself.

It’s literally all about the dress.

“For me it was a case of, I wanted to get married, and I didn’t want to have to, on my wedding day, write down ‘Mister Male’ on what should be [voice quavers with emotion here] one of the most feminine-feeling days of my life, getting married to the person I love….Largely a gender recognition certificate is significant for someone to be affirmed as who they are when they get married.”

Interviewer helpfully says it’s about a feeling, an identity, not about doing x y or z.

“It’s about validity, and it’s about who you are not being disregarded. It’s about, [with extra emotion, and gestures] on my wedding day, in my beautiful white dress, on this day, not having to go and write down [with burly gestures] ‘I am male!’.”

My dress, my dress! My beautiful white dress!

It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he can just wear his damn dress, without first having to drive a truck through women’s rights to do it.

Paging Moley, Moley to the red telephone.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Twanzphobia ith a thin! with emphasis added.

“…trans people are whole and holy….Trans people are divine.

Still Orwellian; they’ve just changed texts: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

This is either a banal truism (everyone is holy, including trans people) or a claim that trans people are extra-specialer than boring old non-trans people. Just like claims to being non-binary, it’s either pointless (because nobody falls at either end of Barbie to GI Joe Gender Spectrum, meaning everyone is trivially “non-binary”), or a statement of exceptionalism, that the normal rules don’t apply to them because they’re above them. I think this claim is more the latter than the former.

This “holiness”, “divinity” (and from prior hectoring claims “sacredness”), is a claim to an elevated status, rather than a plea for equal treatment. Equal treatment is the last thing that trans activists are interested in, because equal treatment would mean that nobody would give a fuck about their precious identities, when what they insist upon is attention, submission and obedience. Not equality. What they are claiming is sainthood. Through self ID, TiMs are magically rendered harmless and blameless, no longer part of the male demographic or subject to its patterns of behaviour and offence, and, on that basis, are to be welcomed into women’s single-sex spaces. Or else. They are to be considered Pure and without Sin, perfect Angels incapable of predatory intent. Ever. They are ever and only the victims here; don’t you forget it. (They refuse to admit the possibility that baser creatures might pretend to be Angels in order to satisfy their gross appetites. Turns out it’s hard to tell the real Angels from guys wearing cheap wings on their backs, so it’s best to avoid this topic altogether, and summarily condemn as evil transphobes any and all women who bring this up. We can be thankful that their Inquisitorial aspirations are not more fully realized, empowered and enforced than they already are.) They’ve had plenty of practice claiming persecution, martyrdom and incipient genocide. They have Suffered for the Faith, bearing the vicarious, psychic wounds of Actual Violence. Nametags sporting preferred pronouns are the equivalent of the halos in Western paintings of Holy People; we are supposed to abase ourselves as unworthy sinners in the presence of these Divine Beings.

The BBC live-reported on the gender battles among MPs today and yesterday.

Today it included a chat it had with a person of gender:

The BBC has spoken to a genderfluid, trans woman who is not yet out to family and close friends.

What does that even mean? How can you be “genderfluid” and “trans”? Being trans means you’re so convinced you’re the opposite sex that you officially declare yourself as such. Genderfluid is the opposite of that.

They said: “It is unlikely that I will personally be in a position to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) even if England were to relax the process.

“However, I do rely on the protections of the Equality Act and I am really concerned that this government will seek to row back on protections, particularly for trans people.

“We are a small part of the community, at high risk of abuse and it seems that the profile given to us far outweighs any risk to society and in particular cis women’s rights.

Yeah. In particular cis women’s rights – those stupid backward tame boring women who were just born that way don’t matter enough for their rights to matter. Yawn. Those women are particularly worthless and trivial.

The trans woman went on to explain: “How often do we show our birth certificate? As I understand it with a GRC you can change tax records, get married in the correct gene lsic] and be buried as such, but it has nothing to do with toilets.”

He’s “genderfluid” but he’s also a trans woman. Make it make sense.

The Beeb also includes the bit where Lloyd Russell-Moyle decided to shout at a woman.

Things are getting heated in the Commons chamber, with Labour’s Lloyd Russell-Moyle describing remarks by Conservative MP Miriam Cates as “one of the worst transphobic, dog-whistle speeches that I have heard in an awful long time”.

“Describing” in a furious testosteroney shout.

Cates had said there was a risk of “predators” exploiting the bill “to get access to children”, comments that Russell-Moyle described as “disgusting”, and said Cates should be “ashamed” of.

But how is there not such a risk? How exactly would it be done away with? Why wouldn’t men who want to fiddle with children exploit gender performance to get easier access? Please explain.

The trans ideology fanatic Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP, who had to apologize to JK Rowling after he misrepresented what she had written, flies into another rage at another women.

What a horrible man.

Originally a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany Room.

The Washington Post had an excellent, disturbing series recently on abuse in the bodybuilding world, including of course sexual exploitation of female bodybuilders. Karen Attiah followed up with a mostly excellent opinion piece, pointing out that even female bodybuilders are vulnerable to the male gaze and male abuse. I say “mostly excellent” because this is the final paragraph:

There has been a ton of fuss about transgender athletes in women’s sports, with some claiming that allowing trans women to compete is a form of “abuse.” No. The abuse of women in bodybuilding is a reminder that the biggest threats to women and girls in sports are — and always have been — men.

There is an excellent response to her piece in the comments section.

Transwomen are indeed biological men. As such, trans identifying men who enter women’s sports cause terrible distress to women on many levels: forced shared private space, inevitable loss in sports to XY humans, girls/women’s compelled speech to use trans identifying man/boy’s preferred pronouns when one’s eyes sees the lie, terror of speaking truth to power because of financial consequences. So trans identifying male forcing himself into domain of women/girls’ sports is as vile as the male body builders you rightly vilify in this article.

It speaks volumes that whenever woman intersects with a protected group, woman ALWAYS loses. We are devalued everywhere. In the East, we are erased from public view by hijab, niqab, and chador. In West, woman is erased from language to now include men in skirts. That change in language affects policy and law. Trans identifying men are able to transfer to women’s prisons where they terrorize, beat, rape and impregnate female prisoners. But it seems nothing beats support for trans, not even lesbian, Black women in prison.

And you, Karen, are part of the devaluation of Woman when you do not stand up for our rights to privacy, our own spaces, in sports, women in prison having to share space with rapists, and protection of girls from out- sourced self-harm by medical community which performers mutilating surgeries, hormone suppressants and cross hormones on vulnerable people. All to further the delusion of those vulnerable people that they are born in wrong body. No one is born in the wrong body. We are our bodies.

Steerpike at The Spectator reports on the shouting down of Rosie Duffield:

This afternoon, Rosie Duffield rose in the Commons to support Scottish secretary Alister Jack’s decision to block the new legislation. But she had barely started speaking before the jeers rang out across the House.

Barracking is hardly unusual in parliament, yet what was remarkable was how they came exclusively from the opposition benches. Members of Duffield’s own party joined in unison with the SNP to express their displeasure at her words of encouragement for Jack.

How dare a woman refuse to side with men who call themselves women at the expense of women? How dare a woman side with women instead of men who call themselves women and want to take over everything that belongs to women?

Men on the left shouting down women on the left who dare to defend women’s rights. Same old same old same old.

Because it’s only women. Women don’t count the way men do. Women aren’t fully people the way men are. Women are a little bit empty, a little bit trivial, a little bit unreal. They just don’t matter all that much.

If you lose an election, the thing to do is just start shooting at people in the winning party. Payback.

A man who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican state politician in New Mexico is accused by police of masterminding a shooting spree targeting the homes of Democrats. Solomon Pena, 39, conspired with and paid four other men to shoot the properties of four local politicians, say Albuquerque police.

Shoot the properties? So, just, like, shooting the chimney or something?

No.

Mr Pena lost his attempt to sit in the state’s House and contested his defeat. The election result was a convincing one, with his Democratic opponent and incumbent winning 73% of the vote.

Hahahaha that’s not so much convincing as a massacre.

On 15 November he posted a photo of himself in a Make America Great Again sweatshirt and draped in a Trump 2024 flag, saying he would not concede the election.

Also, he would throw catsup all over his walls.

At a press conference on Monday shortly after his arrest, police said that following his loss, Mr Pena had approached the four Democrats he later targeted – two county commissioners and two state legislators – to say without evidence that the election was fraudulent.

The following week…

The local paper, the Albuquerque Journal, reported that on 4 December eight shots were fired into a commissioner’s home and then 12 bullets at another commissioner’s home a week later.

On 3 January, three shots were fired at a state Democrat’s home. The bullets travelled through her young daughter’s bedroom, the paper reported. A fourth politician then found damage to his property.

It’s just a matter of luck that no one was killed or injured.

We still live in Trumpworld.

The godbotherers join the fun.

Typical godbothering blather, announcing that “transphobia” is a “sin” without explaining what “transphobia” is or what “sin” is. Let’s join up all the magicky words in a chain so that we can tie everyone up with it.

Transphobia is a sin, plus trans people are whole and holy. Wtf does that mean? What does it mean for a human to be “whole”? It has all its parts? Well, trans people who’ve had “gender-affirming” surgery don’t have all their parts, so in literal terms, whole is exactly what they aren’t. Or is it supposed to be “spiritual”? But then it means everything and nothing; it’s just churchy warm fuzzies. As for “holy”: warm fuzzies times a billion.

Transphobia is a sin. Trans people are divine. Trans people exist because their ancestors existed.

Lying is a sin, or rather lying is bad. The core dogma of trans ideology is a lie, the lie that people are whatever sex they say they are as opposed to the sex their body is. This dim-witted person doesn’t bother to say what counts as “transphobia” but doesn’t hesitate to call it a sin – so churchy, that is. Trans people are of course not “divine” because that’s a magic-word, and magic isn’t real. If the evangelist means “divine” as in “this chocolate mousse is divine” well then it’s a case of de gustibus non est disputandum. As for the last bit…well duh. All people exist because their ancestors existed. Are we supposed to think their ancestors were trans and that’s why they are? They come from a long and glorious line of divine trans people? If so, what are her sources?

Let us all call out and denounce the sin of transphobia in our communities and institutions and loudly, boldly and joyfully proclaim that trans people are created in God’s image to be their extraordinary selves.

Blah blah blah. Let’s get happy-clappy, kids – bring out your guitars and let’s all embarrass ourselves!

The gender recognition wars rumble on.

The UK government has decided to block a controversial Scottish bill designed to make it easier for people to change their legal gender. UK ministers say the draft law would conflict with equality protections applying across Great Britain.

What equality protections? Mostly the ones that protect women. It’s odd (or cowardly) that the Beeb doesn’t spell that out. The harm done by gender ideology is done almost entirely to women; no doubt that’s why nobody cares.

Nicola Sturgeon’s government believe the current process is too difficult and invasive, and causes distress to an already marginalised and vulnerable minority group.

But what about distress to an already subordinated and vulnerable half-of-humanity group? Why do trans people matter so much more than women? Why is it all right to trample on women’s rights, but not all right to deny men who identify as women peculiar new “rights” that aren’t really rights at all?

Originally a comment by Enzyme on It would be so easy to move on.

That made me think of Daniel Barenboim taking Wagner to Israel, too.

On a more general point, I wonder whether the reason they can’t leave Harry Potter alone is that most of the complainants are of the internet-in-the-bedroom cohort. They’re the generation that grew up online, rather than reading. As such, I would not be surprised if HP is the only book/s they have ever read, or at least the only ones that they’ve read aside from those they were required to read at school. Their cultural exposure is, I strongly suspect, highly stunted.

Harry Potter blocks off most of the horizon because they genuinely don’t know how big the horizon is.

And lest it sound like I’m being disdainful – oh, all right then: I am, a bit – they’re products of a culture. We can’t hold them to blame for having intellectual rickets when it’s the culture generally that’s kept them out of the sun.

News from Afghanistan:

A former Afghan MP and her bodyguard have been shot dead at her home in the capital Kabul, Afghan police have said.

Mursal Nabizada, 32, was one of the few female MPs who stayed in Kabul after the Taliban seized power in August 2021.

Her brother and a second security guard were wounded in the attack on Sunday.

Former colleagues praised Ms Nabizada as a “fearless champion for Afghanistan” who turned down a chance to leave the country.

The Taliban’s god hates women.

Hannah Neumann, a member of the European Parliament, said: “I am sad and angry and want the world to know!” in response to the killing.

“She was killed in darkness, but the Taliban build their system of gender apartheid in full daylight.”

The Taliban hates women.