Let’s drop the sex categories for the awards, they said! Let’s make the awards gender-neutral, they said! It will be awesome, they said!

Who could possibly have predicted that would happen? The top category in a major music award goes ‘gender-neutral’ — and this year’s nominees are all men. The Brit Awards scrapped the best male and best female categories last year, ignoring warnings that the decision would lead to the exclusion of women. Five male artists, including Stormzy and Harry Styles, are in the running in 2023, with not a woman — or a gender-neutral person — in sight.

Welllllllllll but then obviously that’s because women aren’t as good, isn’t it? Not at all because women just get overlooked and forgotten and discouraged from trying in the first place.

Separate male and female categories are one of the few mechanisms that exist to protect women artists, actors and authors from male-dominated prize lists. The then Orange prize for fiction was created in the 1990s to challenge the absence of widely-admired female authors, such as Angela Carter, from Booker prize shortlists.

Sorry, women just aren’t designed for writing good novels. Their shoulders are too narrow and their hips are too wide.

This is another example of what happens when an organisation decides to address a problem that doesn’t exist; sex is binary and few people genuinely believe that artists who ‘identify’ as gender-neutral are neither male nor female. The comically self-obsessed singer Sam Smith comes to mind — he was excluded from nomination in the best male artist category at the Brit Awards in 2021 after adopting ‘they/them’ pronouns — but it’s hard to see why up-and-coming female musicians should pay the price for his delusions.

It’s because they’re all Karens, every last one of them. All suburban, all white, all Karen.

How to suppress the vote:

When [Ohio] Gov. Mike DeWine last week signed what’s been called the nation’s strictest voter ID law, it raised fears that it would disenfranchise large numbers of voters in poor communities where people are less likely to meet the new requirements.

Why? Because strict ID is not wealth-neutral.

Those fears seem to be supported by a September report that estimates 1 million Ohioans have suspended licenses because of debts from things such as a lack of insurance, unpaid fines, and court costs. That’s in a state with 8 million registered voters.

The analysis, by the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, said the suspensions by far fall most heavily on impoverished urban communities of color. In other words, debt-related suspensions disproportionately affect some of the communities least likely to vote for the Republican officials who passed and signed the voter ID law.

It’s a nice little racket. You want laws that protect rich people at the expense of poor people? Simple: make it harder for poor people to vote.

“There is absolutely no evidence that we need a voter ID law to prevent voter fraud,” said Colin Marozzi, deputy policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which opposes the law.

Even so, the voter ID law, House Bill 458, makes it considerably harder for many of the poorest to vote in Ohio. While voters previously could use documents such as bank statements and utility bills to establish their identity, they now must have a driver’s license, state ID, passport or military ID to cast a vote.

Not education-based ID though. That won’t work.

Perhaps tellingly, college, and university IDs didn’t make the list of acceptable IDs approved by Ohio’s heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature. College students were credited with helping to deliver victories to Democrats in key races around the country in the November election.

Suppress that vote.

This just in –

Originally a comment by Sastra on Damn reaper, the post that reported the bad news that Harriet Hall had died suddenly.

This is very sad news indeed.

I was her official First Fan. I’d somehow come across several of her early essays (including iirc the “Tooth Fairy Science” one) and thought they were wonderful. James Randi’s second The Amazing Meeting was held that year in Vegas and he’d put up the names of all the attendees on a board in the lobby. I was thrilled to see “Harriet Hall” listed and spent the convention looking at the women’s name tags. No luck. Near the end of TAM we went to see Penn & Teller and afterwards a bunch of us decided to walk back to our hotel, which turned out to be further than we expected. My walking companion was a charming, interesting woman who, of course, turned out to be Harriet. She was astonished to hear I’d been looking for her all weekend. “You’re my very first fan!”

We ending up going out to dinner later —and then either lunch or dinner for all the subsequent TAMs. I looked forward to it every year.

I regularly read her webpage. I miss her already.

It’s been pouring rain all day and still is raining, though not quite so hard – but all the same there’s someone with a snarling backpack blower out there, the one who generally takes an hour or more to shift every leaf on the large property across the alley. I hate the sound noise of blowers even more than I hate the noise of mowers, weedeaters, hedgeclippers, edgers, and all the rest of the box of tricks.

I’m not the only one who hates the damn things.

It’s almost impossible to enjoy a quiet moment in many of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods without hearing leaf blowers. The engines alternate between bone-shaking rumbles and high-pitched whines that assault our ears.

It’s a snarl rather than a whine – at any rate it’s a peculiarly grating, distracting, irritating, blood pressure-raising noise. All for the sake of moving every last blade of grass and speck of dust, as if that were important, or worth doing at all.

But these machines are far worse than an annoyance. Gas-powered leaf blowers are dangerous to our neighbors, the workers who use them, and the planet. City Council and the Mayor’s Office must ban them.

Other cities and states have already recognized and addressed this problem. Starting in 2024, California will ban the sale of new gas leaf blowers as an effort to stem their negative impact on the environment and human health. The volunteer-led nonprofit organization Quiet Clean D.C. led a successful campaign to ban gas leaf blowers in Washington, which took effect on Jan. 1. Seattle’s City Council voted to phase out gas-powered blowers for city departments and contractors by 2025, and for businesses and residents by 2027.

2027. Groan. Four more years.

The danger of gas leaf blowers has been well documented. According to James Fallows, a former writer for the Atlantic who was born in Philadelphia, gas leaf blowers are “vastly the dirtiest and most polluting kind of machinery still in legal use.” He adds that the engine is powered by “a slosh of oil and gas that spews up to one-third of its fuels as unburned aerosols into the environment.”

All to create a blast of air to move leaves around. It’s too stupid.

Another “progressive” man trashing women via the Karen trope.

Oh damn, bad news.

The CBC on the suppression of Robert Wintemute’s talk at McGill:

Trans rights advocates stormed into a talk Tuesday afternoon at McGill University led by a speaker associated with a group they say is “notoriously transphobic and trans-exclusionary.”

Not a great lede. “Trans rights” always need to be specified, because most readers will think just “human rights for trans people” when in fact what’s meant is a set of novel “rights” that are incompatible with other people’s rights. The people storming the talk weren’t so much “advocates” as an angry shouty mob who physically prevented people from going in. The way they libel the speaker shouldn’t be just slapped down there in the first sentence as if it were true or at least reasonable.

“The T (trans) is so much more vulnerable than the rest of LGB. I think there’s tons of scientific evidence speaking to that,” said Celeste Trianon, a trans activist who led the protest against the event.

Who led the mob that prevented the event from continuing. Also this “trans activist” is a guy, shutting down a talk that is of particular relevance to women’s rights. This conflict has everything to do with women and our rights and the way purported “trans rights” are eroding ours. News outlets should make that very clear instead of muffling it in vagueness.

[Wintemute] says he has a 37 years experience defending LGB human rights and he would never associate with any group that “promotes hate.” He said he came to McGill to promote the message that women have human rights too, but they feel intimidated by the trans rights movement.

“So I have to thank the protesters for giving me first-hand experience of that intimidation,” said Wintemute after the event. “Probably the majority of women in this country disagree with some of transgender demands but they refuse to say so because they will be seen as intolerant.”

And shouted at and bullied and pushed out of things.

Any discussion or criticism is seen as “hate speech,” he said. The protesters held signs saying “no debate,” he noted, “and many women around the world disagree.” The idea that his seminar would lead to genocide of trans people is “absolutely absurd,” he said.

That kind of dishonest hyperbole is pervasive in trans ideology and “activism.” It is in fact one of the (several) signs that it’s not a healthy or progressive or liberal-minded movement. The lies, the screaming, the self-pity, the bullying – they don’t add up to another rung on the ladder to human betterment, do they.

Wintemute’s work inspired the foundation of the LGB Alliance, a British group that advocates against transgender rights in the United Kingdom.

No it does not – that’s an appalling claim for the CBC to make. It resists the creation of new, warped imitations of rights that are just for trans people, like the “right” to be treated as what one is not. It does not advocate for trans people to lose the human rights we all have.

The group has opposed progressive gender affirmation bills in the U.K., like the Scottish Gender Recognition Act, which improves the system by which transgender people can apply for legal recognition.

But who says they are progressive? What if they’re not? What if they’re the opposite of progressive?

The LGB Alliance denies being transphobic or hateful.

The CBC sneers.

An open letter signed by McGill students, professors, alumni and others from the Montreal LGBTQ+ community says trans rights are not at odds with the rights of others.

They can say whatever they like, but they’re wrong. Some purported trans rights very much are at odds with the rights of women…and, ironically, lesbians and gays, despite all the brandishing of LGBTQMNOP.

“Undermining the human rights of trans people does not benefit any member of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, nor the feminist movement,” it says.

Yeah? What about the ZRPMWIF-x/ community?

Though Canada and Quebec have remained “mostly sheltered” from transphobic rhetoric, those ideas have gained momentum in the U.S. and the U.K. and could easily spread here, said Trianon.

She pointed to the multiple instances of drag queen story hours being attacked by anti-LGBT activists over the summer in Montreal.

“This plays into the transfeminine predator stereotype. It’s very much a debunkable thing,” said Trianon.

Except that there are predators who pretend to be trans women, stereotype or no stereotype.

What. the. hell.

I magnified to read the sign between the two so that you wouldn’t have to: it says “The nearest female WC is on the other side of the floor.”

PS fuck you and have a nice day.

Why do they do this? How can they not see how insulting and unfair and grotesque it is? How can they think it’s ok to give men toilets just for men while opening women’s toilets to anyone who feels like dropping in?

They promoted the “protest” on Facebook:

Also shared photos:

Small space filled with people; event cancelled; success!!

The dishonest reporting files:

Truthout:

Students at McGill University in Montreal Protest Anti-Trans Speaker

The speaker, Robert Wintemute, is a member of the anti-trans hate group LGB Alliance.

The students did more than “protest” and the speaker is not “anti-trans” and the LGB Alliance is not anti-trans and not a hate group. That’s a lot of lies for just the headline and subhead.

The story seems to have been written before the “protest” happened.

Lawyer Robert Wintemute is giving a speech at the university entitled “The Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate In the United Kingdom and the Divorce of LGB from T.” Wintemute is a member of the United Kingdom-based LGB Alliance, which claims to advocate for lesbian, gay and bisexual causes but which activists at McGill have pointed out is actually part of a “Christian right-supported campaign to ‘divide and conquer’ the LGBT community.”

Activists at McGill haven’t “pointed out,” which implies accuracy. They’ve said, or claimed, or lied.

There is no “LGBT community.” Beware of that word “community,” which all too often is a disguise for forced teaming. Lesbians and men who call themselves lesbians are not a “community.” Feminists and trans activists are not a “community.” People allergic to bullshit and trans activists are not a “community.”

LGB Alliance, which is listed on the website of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism as an extremist hate group, espouses anti-transgender views under the guise of being pro-gay and pro-women.

Oh well then there’s no more to be said. If this one group is listed on this one website, we know all there is to know.

This is the corner where all the crashes occur. That’s because “transgender views” are riddled with nonsense and wishful thinking and domineering assertion. We oppose the “views” not because we’re evil and akin to racists but because the views are bad and stupid. The “views” tell us that huge abusive men are women just as we are provided only that they say so. We have a problem with that. Lying about us isn’t going to make that problem go away.

Further, the group has actively worked against the interests of people it supposedly seeks to protect — it has endorsed conversion therapy for gay and lesbian people, for example…

Has it? First I’ve heard of it. Given the wild detours around the truth in this piece, I don’t believe it.

The group’s charitable status was challenged last year when LGBTQ advocates noted that it doesn’t actually work to help lesbian, gay or bisexual people.

Again. There are no “LGBTQ” advocates. The LG is not the same as the T or the Q, let alone both mashed together. The “advocates” in question are Mermaids, all T and no LG.

By granting LGB Alliance members a platform to share their transphobic views, McGill University is “actively contributing to the genocide of trans people across the world,” student organizers wrote in an open letter challenging Wintemute’s presence on campus.

And what a ludicrous thing to write it is, but Truthout presents it as meaningful and damning.

That’s how this whole conversation is conducted. It’s an embarrassment.

Why we can’t have anything nice ever:

Schools across the UK are encountering increasing numbers of pupils who admire [social media misogynist Andrew] Tate – and so teachers are having to work out how to respond.

Some are actively putting out guidance on how to talk about him, as part of a concerted attempt to tackle his influence.

…

“A lot of the boys can see that there’s parts of Andrew Tate that they respect and admire, and then there’s parts that they don’t – they know that he says a lot of terrible things,” says Ms Carson, 46, who teaches Learning for Life and Work – Northern Ireland’s equivalent of PSHE in England’s schools.

They know he says a lot of terrible things that their teachers disapprove of, but that’s what they like. We can’t have feminism without having also the reaction against it.

Like this guy. He does it as a deliberate provocation, and says so. There are always going to be Tates and Urquharts.

Male barrister who claims to be a woman calls Helen Joyce “this numpty”.

He also claims she got the spelling of “trans women” wrong because a third party quoted her as saying (not writing) “transwomen.” How can the male barrister be sure she didn’t say “trans women”? How can the male barrister be sure the third party didn’t misquote her? How can the male barrister be such a numpty?

Steal everything. Steal the oppression and subordination of women, and when women push back, steal the genocides of the Nazis.

The porn-soaked kind.

Eliza Mondegreen has, fortunately for us, written up her experience of trans activist “protest” yesterday.

At first it was just a few saddos, and she felt almost sorry for them.

But just as I was stuffing the flyers into my backpack, feeling a little pity for the poor turnout, a surge of protesters arrived and the energy turned menacing all at once. The mob blocked access to the lecture hall. A friend and I tried to get to the doors and were pushed around as though lives depended on turning us back. We just wanted to hear a human-rights lawyer talk about a conflict in human-rights law.

It’s surreal, honestly, to be pushed and shoved and grabbed by people who are screaming about “nonviolence.” We were TERFs, transphobes, and (curiously) ‘scabs.’ A wild-eyed young man screamed: “I’M NOT GOING TO BE ERASED BY YOU PEOPLE.” We had no place at McGill. We were pinned in the middle of a raging crowd and screamed at to “GET OUT,” while prevented from going anywhere at all. I kept looking around for anyone not participating, anyone who looked uncomfortable with the way this peaceful protest had gone. But all the activists were chanting or shouting or screaming. The jumpy activists I’d observed a few minutes ago had transformed themselves into a mob, with the license of mobs. There’s no reaching people in that state, which is why it felt like anything could happen, especially after they’d already manhandled us.

It’s a very bad combination – a set of ludicrous fantasy-based beliefs and crowd energy. Their opinions are bullshit and their rage is amplified.

The activists particularly harassed two women, pushing one to the ground, and blasting them with bullhorns. At one point, the activists jeered: “Why are you even staying?” One of the women responded, very bravely, I could just hear her over the noise: “We don’t want to surrender to that kind of bullying.” And the activist shouted back: “What bullying? This isn’t bullying!”

That’s brilliant. “Why are you even staying [when we’re making it so physically unpleasant and dangerous for you]?” plus “This isn’t bullying!” Threat plus not bullying, oooookaaaaaay.

When we went outside to get away from the crush, a hulking man (who identifies as a woman and a lesbian, naturally) followed us. He said he knew all about people like us because he used to be a neo-Nazi himself.

Scratch the “used to be,” bub.

Meanwhile, back inside, the activists pushed through the doors, interrupting the talk, unplugging the projector, and throwing flour on the speaker, Professor Robert Wintemute.

…

I have no idea what went wrong with campus security. They were outside. The police were outside, too. Inside, it was completely chaotic and it would have only taken one person slightly more unhinged than the rest to send it to a very bad place. And now the activists will be emboldened. They won because they stopped anyone from saying anything they didn’t want anybody else to hear. And they won because Canadian media won’t cover the way it went down. The CBC attached the subhead “Advocates say debating trans women’s rights is harmful to all women” to its piece about activists shutting down free inquiry on campus.

Interesting that the CBC said trans women’s rights as opposed to trans rights. Almost as if the CBC knows what the problem is but doesn’t dare say so. Also, of course, absurd that the CBC says “trans women’s rights” without spelling out that that means men’s rights to force everyone to agree that the men are women, which doesn’t sound quite so rightsy and justicey.

You don’t make law based on people’s fantasies about themselves, either.

And in another part of the forest –

Here they are in “action”:

McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism advertised a discussion scheduled for today:

The Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate In the United Kingdom and the Divorce of LGB from T

About

By Professor Wintemute: Since 2018, there has been a debate in the United Kingdom about whether or not the law should be changed to make it easier for a transgender individual to change their legal sex from their birth sex, and about exceptional situations, such as women-only spaces and sports, in which the individual’s birth sex should take priority over their gender identity, regardless of their legal sex. This debate inspired the foundation in 2019 of an organisation, LGB Alliance, which rejects the political coalition of LGB and T and challenges some transgender demands, on the basis that they conflict with the rights of lesbian and bisexual women or the rights of children who might grow up to be LGB adults.

The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism took care to disavow their own event beforehand:

CHRLP note: the CHRLP invited Professor Wintemute to give this talk based on his record as a human rights and LGB scholar. We note that Professor Wintemute is also a trustee of the LGB Alliance. The CHRLP does not endorse the views of the Alliance or of any speaker. The CHRLP is committed to a respectful and inclusive space for debate.

Well thanks, good to know you don’t actually mean it about the pluralism, or in fact the human rights.

Speaker:

Robert Wintemute (McGill LLB and BCL 1982) is a Professor of Human Rights Law at King’s College London, UK. Since 2003, he has participated as a lawyer for the applicants or third-party interveners, or as an expert witness, in 15 successful cases challenging discrimination against LGB individuals or same-sex couples in the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the United Kingdom Supreme Court.  On 23 March 2022, he argued the case of Macate v. Lithuania before the 17-judge Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (restrictions on a book of children’s stories because it included a princess who fell in love with a woman and a prince who fell in love with a man). The Court’s judgment will be published on 23 January 2023. 

Commentator (which here seems to mean dissenter or other side or similar):

Darren Rosenblum. Professor Darren Rosenblum’s scholarship focuses on corporate diversity, with emphasis on remedies for sex inequality. They joined the Faculty of Law of McGill University as a Full Professor in August 2021, from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Among many other publications, they wrote the first law review article of queer legal theory “Queer Intersectionality” (1994) and the first law review article on transgender prisoners “Trapped in Sing Sing” (2000). They have taught Sexuality, Gender and the Law since 2003 at Fordham, McGill, NYU, Pace and U.Penn. They were appointed Associate Dean (Graduate Studies) in 2022.

A they.

Anyway, it didn’t happen. Instead the predictable thing happened. The CBC reports:

Trans rights advocates stormed into a talk Tuesday afternoon at McGill University led by a speaker associated with a group they say is “notoriously transphobic and trans-exclusionary.”

The talk was ultimately cancelled shortly after it started.

McGill University’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) hosted the event, titled Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate In the United Kingdom and the Divorce of LGB from T. It was led by McGill alumnus Robert Wintemute.

…

“The T (trans) is so much more vulnerable than the rest of LGB. I think there’s tons of scientific evidence speaking to that,” said Celeste Trianon, a trans activist who led the protest against the event.

Trianon said Wintemute’s talk excludes transgender people’s rights and is transphobic, further discriminating against the community.

But Wintemute, the man at the centre of the controversy, maintains he does not promote transphobic views and describes the reaction to his talk as “hysterical.”

He says he has a 37 years’ experience defending LGB human rights and he would never associate with any group that “promotes hate.” He said he came to McGill to promote the message that women have human rights too, but they feel intimidated by the trans rights movement.

“So I have to thank the protesters for giving me first-hand experience of that intimidation,” said Wintemute after the event. “Probably the majority of women in this country disagree with some of transgender demands but they refuse to say so because they will be seen as intolerant.”

And mercilessly bullied.