Mary Wakefield on the gender birthrate:

It was announced last week that another gender has been added to the list: nominalgender. Most news sites reported this in the sort of proud way a zoo might announce the birth of an exciting animal, a baby Komodo dragon maybe – as if the gender had somehow hatched and was waiting to be adopted. You are nominalgender ‘if your gender is so much just you that no one else can even experience it’, I read.

In fact no news sites reported this at all, so Wakefield is apparently doing satire. (There are a few mentions of “nominal gender” – two words, not one – but they’re not new and the meaning is pretty self-evident.)

Every day the list of possible gender options grows – metastasizes is a better word: non-binary, genderfluid, bigender, demigender, catgender. On Monday it was reported that a drag queen on the Isle of Man had informed Year 7 pupils that there are exactly 73 genders. When one brave child insisted that there were only two, the drag queen allegedly responded ‘You’ve upset me’ and sent the child out.

That on the other hand was reported in the news. I saw it at the time, rolled my eyes, and moved on. Look at all the good I do.

What the drag queen might have said, if the rude child hadn’t interrupted, is that though it’s an article of trans faith that there are 73 genders, it’s also often said that the fastest-growing gender subset is xenogender. You’re xenogender if you feel more akin to animals or plants or foods than humans. It’s funny, but it’s also frightening. There’s a girl on TikTok who explains very seriously that her gender is bird – a cardinal specifically, ey/em pronouns.

It turns out this is what the internet is for – telling the world about your boutique idenniny and pronouns. The lion labored and brought forth a mouse.

What does it mean to ‘come out’ as a bird? What does it mean, for that matter, to ‘come out’ as non-binary, or even trans? Isn’t it an insult to gay men and women for the language of gay rights to be hijacked by children who think they’re cake? It’s dangerous too. The phrase implies that you’ve searched your soul and discovered something true about yourself, and that coming out will set you free. But the reality is the opposite. The phrase ‘coming out’ acts like a trap, a lobster pot. In crawl the children, cheered on by their rainbow friends, but the way out is much harder to find.

That’s a good metaphor. It goes on working, too – being trans is like being the proverbial lobster in the pot that gets hotter and hotter.

I’ve looked into the eyes of that cardinal bird, and she wouldn’t thank you for suggesting that her identity is a joke. It’s not that she believes she has feathers or can fly, but she does think she’s discovered her true inner being. ‘I didn’t decide this. My brain decided for me.’

So the brain is external to the self. Interesting.

Amanda Marcotte wonders why Murdoch is not trying to settle the Dominion case when settling is what he usually does.

I suspect the reason Murdoch and Fox News seem determined to stick this out is that they are just that worried about what impact an admission of wrongdoing would have on their reputation with their audience. The possibility of a jury ruling in their favor, which they could spin as a total exoneration of their tactics, is so important to them that they’re willing to take a big risk that the opposite could happen. A settlement, however, would remove all doubt about who was in the wrong. 

…

[A]s the Dominion filings showed, internal machinations at Fox News were precisely about how to prevent journalists from conducting basic reporting. Tucker Carlson demanded the firing of a Fox reporter for reporting the simple fact of the election outcome. The latest filing quotes Murdoch himself suggesting firing a data analyst for correctly reporting that Biden had won the Arizona election. It’s telling that Fox News puts so much pressure on journalists, even when it’s just opinion writing. It suggests they’re incredibly worried that this lawsuit really could damage them in the eyes of the only people they clearly care about: MAGA. 

…

What this all suggests is that Fox News leadership is genuinely worried that their viewers will perceive them as a propaganda outlet, instead of a news organization. Why that bothers them is hard to suss out. As the court filings show, the leadership of Fox News felt pressure from their audience to downplay actual facts and play up conspiracy theories. It feels like theirs is not an audience who cares about facts, or even the illusion of facts. But watching Fox’s machinations around this case, it seems that they believe keeping up the pretense that they are “news” matters to their viewers, even if no one actually believes it. 

Murdoch and Trump are why we can’t have nice things.

Woohoo International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate –

By promoting a man.

He shouldn’t be honored to be featured in this campaign, he should be horrified at the invitation, and telling them to feature a WOMAN for International Woman’s Day.

Pink News is SHOCKED AND APPALLED by the misgendering crime spree in Newham Monday. The very reasonable and informative headline conveys PN’s shock and appallment.

Non-binary councillor storms out of chamber after being shamefully misgendered

Oh how shamefully shameful. Also how adult of a councillor to storm out because a colleague forgot to pretend he has a luxury gender identity with luxury pronouns to match.

The incident happened when Newham councillor Danny Keeling, who uses they/them pronouns, was speaking against Labour’s budget plans at a full council meeting on Monday (February 27) at Stratford Olympic Park.

There’s no such thing as “using” X pronouns—>everyone has to use them. Your using eccentric pronouns about yourself does not repeat DOES NOT mean that anyone else has to.

Keeling, who is Newham’s first openly non-binary councillor, was repeatedly misgendered by Labour council chairperson Winston Vaughan, who referred to Keeling as “he”. 

“First openly non-binary” doesn’t mean anything. Everyone is non-binary. It’s not closed. No purpose is served by this Keeling fella’s making such a fuss about his boring non-binary hood.

Speaking with PinkNews, Keeling said incidents of misgendering have been taking place for “weeks and weeks, meeting after meeting” where several councillors “never use the correct pronouns whatsoever”. 

Child, find some better way to draw attention to yourself. Almost anything would do.

A whole entire line of Trump corruption I for one didn’t know about:

Donald Trump made more than a billion dollars while serving as president, including $14 million in income from his business interests in Indonesia from 2015 to 2019, according to a CREW analysis of his tax returns. During that same period, he earned $234 million in total from businesses in foreign countries with interests in U.S. foreign policy. 

That’s so interesting because the normal thing to do on achieving political office is to divest oneself of business interests, by at minimum handing them over to other people to manage and maintaining complete separation between self and those other people. The idea is to get rid of all ability and temptation to use the political office for corrupt purposes. Donald Trump on the other hand goes “Oh boy!!!” and does every corrupt thing he can find to do.

CREW spent years ringing the alarm bell on the unprecedented number of conflicts of interest that marred Trump’s presidency, arising from his decision not to separate from the Trump Organization when he entered office. Trump’s conflicts of interest in Indonesia ranked among the most egregious. 

What I’m saying. The Trump Organization should have been dead to him. That’s not how it played out.

During his presidency, Trump’s son met with Indonesian government officials, the daughter of his Indonesian business partner obtained a high-ranking government position with authority over Trump’s businesses, and once he left office one of the developments he profited from received special tax breaks from the Indonesian government. Trump was making millions from the country as those events took place. 

While he was the head of state.

While Trump was in office his son and Trump Organization executive Eric Trump told Fox News, “When my father became commander in chief of this country, we got out of all international business.” Trump pledged that his company would pursue “no new foreign deals” during his presidency and spent four years denying claims that he was profiting from the presidency.

Read the whole CREW piece for details of how untrue that was.

Trump’s decision not to divest from the Trump Organization cast a dark shadow of corruption over his presidency. It is no secret that Trump was struggling financially and in deep debt before he became president. The release of his tax returns show that for Trump, the presidency was a chance to get back in the black. Even if he did donate his presidential salary — a promise that he may have broken in 2020 while also forcing government agencies to spend taxpayer money at his properties — that income is nothing compared to the money he earned from his properties at home and abroad. For his failing hotels, resorts, and golf courses, Trump’s election was a money-making opportunity that created a huge influx of business from foreign governments looking to ingratiate themselves with the commander in chief. 

Not how any of this is supposed to work.

When they force you to say the words:

A professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio will be paid $400,000 after he was disciplined four years ago for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. 

Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State, was reprimanded in 2018 after he would not refer to a transgender student by her preferred pronouns. He had a warning placed in his file and was told to change the way he addresses transgender students “to avoid further corrective actions.” 

So a university – a place with, one would hope, some concept of respect for truth – ordered a professor to pretend a male student was a female student by calling him “her.” Not urged, not requested, but told. It’s degrading. It’s like telling the faculty to spend the first half hour of every class reading Winnie the Pooh to the students. It’s degrading to all parties, including the university.

The warning stemmed from an incident in 2018, during one of his Meriwether’s lectures when he called a transgender student “sir” when she raised her hand. The student asked Meriwether to call her by her preferred pronouns, which he refused to do saying his “sincerely held religious beliefs prevented him from communicating messages about gender identity that he believes are false.” 

It’s not a religious belief though. It’s a universal “belief,” or rather a fact. Males aren’t females; females aren’t males; we all know that; religion has nothing to do with it. Houses aren’t ice cream, eagles aren’t forks, potatoes aren’t oceans, steel isn’t paper, earthquakes aren’t tiramisu. No university should be ordering its professors (or any other staff) to lie at the behest of a warped stupid reality-denying pseudo-politics.

In a statement, Shawnee State said the settlement was an “economic decision” and that it continues to stand behind a student’s right to a discrimination-free learning environment while also allowing its faculty and staff to freely express their beliefs. 

It’s not “discrimination” (in the pejorative sense Shawnee State means) to refuse to call male students “she.” It’s not comparable to the old Whites Only lunch counters and water fountains in the South.

Originally a comment by Night Crow on Wasting time.

Part of the issue is that in the moment, anger feels good; it feels like the thing to do. It overrides all other moral and rational brakes in the brain because it originates from our primordial, original limbic system: the brain center of our most automatic emotions like fear and desire.…

What happens is that anger can lead to similar “rushes” as thrill-seeking activities where danger triggers dopamine reward receptors in the brain, or like other forms of addiction such as gambling, extreme sports, or even drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines. Anger can become its own reward …

There is also the psychological aspect of ego fragility and injury, often seen in narcissistic personalities; the rush behind anger can be triggered by underlying feelings of weakness or insecurity, a way to feel powerful in the moment and overcome those feelings. – Anger’s Allure: Are You Addicted to Anger?

It has occurred to me that presenting as ‘non-binary’ offers a splendid mechanism for reliably stimulating anger rushes. As I understand it there is not necessarily anything in a ‘non-binary’ person’s self-presentation to warn or remind an interlocutor to ‘affirm’ their special ‘identity’.

So what did David Paisley actually accuse Ceri Black of? Everything he could think of, it seems, some of it repeatedly.

Just one tiny sample:

Defaming Paisley by stating facts about his actions.

Defaming Paisley by reading out his own tweets.

Defaming Paisley by wishing him a happy Christmas, a soft pillow and a life full of love, as I wish for everybody.

Funny way to defame someone.

Causing significant “distress and anxiety” by reporting publicly that Paisley had reported me to the police.

Oh that’s a good one. Sparky takes a baseball bat to my knee, and I cause Sparky significant distress and anxiety by reporting publicly that Sparky took a baseball bat to my knee.

There’s much, much more.

What Rupert Murdoch did for Trump:

According to a new court filing from Dominion Voting Systems—which is currently suing Fox News for $1.6 billion—in 2020, Murdoch gave Jared Kushner, then the first son-in-law and an adviser to the president, “confidential information about [President Joe] Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy…providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.” 

…

Given the way Fox treated Trump while he was in office—like he was the network’s lord and savior, and like its pundits had pledged a blood oath to him in the basement of its Sixth Avenue offices—the company’s owner having shared confidential information with Kushner probably seems neither shocking nor even that bad on the scale of all the bad things the network has done. As a reminder, though, the organization in question purports to be in the “news” business.

Not the campaigning for corrupt ignorant criminal real estate hustlers business but the news business. Their pronouns are fake/fraud/don’t make me laugh.

Well I’ll just have to give you the whole sequence. It’s too maddening and too illustrative to condense.

The woman at the end on the right gets up and talks to The Misgendering Criminal to explain where he went so very wrong. Many silent seconds elapse while she informs him of this utter bullshit. He then says he’s been informed, but in doing so he commits the crime again, and then again. Why does he do this? Is he a wicked brute who enjoys making non-binary colleagues storm out of the room?

We can hear why he does it – it’s because it’s natural. It’s ingrained. It’s ordinary language. We’ve all been steeped in it from infancy. It takes a massive mental effort to remember to do something different for this one boring self-obsessed time-wasting fool. That’s the point of the Specialty Pronouns: to force everyone to lavish extra attention and effort on gender narcissists. It worked beautifully here – all those minutes squandered on this one guy who, I think we can safely assume, otherwise has nothing that would hold the attention of a deeply bored person waiting for a bus that’s an hour late.

He shouldn’t be deeply sorry, or shallowly sorry either. He shouldn’t waste half a second on the factitious emotions of this goon.

A local government meeting interrupted so that one narcissist can make a long-winded repetitive tedious speech about making sure to use the wrong pronouns for The People of Special so that everything anyone says will become more confusing, and not just making sure to do it but making sure to do it INSTANTLY so that the poor overworked narcissist doesn’t have to do it himself.

“You have the power to make this a safe space for trans n non-binary members,” he says earnestly. He of course does not explain how referring to a man as “they” instead of “he” makes any space safe. The point of the exercise is to make every single person in that room edgy and tense about accidentally referring to a man as “he” instead of “they” and being subject to a chastisement like this. Everyone there will be thinking about the pronoun minefield instead of what they’re there to think and talk about.

Charles Pierce on Murdochs and Foxes:

If I had to guess, I’d say that the lawyers having the most fun these days are the ones handling the defamation suit against the Fox News Channel and the extended Murdoch clan. Every now and then (most recently on Monday), they get to release another tranche of documents related to the case that make Fox look like the malevolent entity it always has been; that make the elite political journalists who have stood up for them over the years look like unusually useful idiots; and that make the Murdochs look like the invasive predatory species they are. This is a public service of immeasurable value. The lawyers must be convulsing with laughter over whiskey and appetizers when the workday is done…

…

In some ways, it’s comforting to realize that Fox’s malfeasance was based on pure greed, overwhelming venality, and a frantic desire to maintain its audience. Those at least are motivations we can all understand, rather than some unfathomable, twisted ideological dementia afflicting an entire television news network. However, in all other ways, the revelations have given us a window into how Fox prefers to be greedy, venal, and frantic rather than to cease pumping out the poison that even some of its own executives believed to be damaging American democracy.

The greed explanation is sort of comforting, for the simple reason that it save us the bother of trying to figure out a more…erm…reasonable explanation. Like – “Do they actually believe this shit? Stupid question; no, of course not, it’s just what they do to keep the cash rolling in.”

The Guardian version:

A transgender woman found guilty of raping two women before transitioning has been jailed for eight years.

Is he a transgender woman though? Even in their terms? He “transitioned” after he was arrested. Does even the Guardian really think he really thinks he’s a woman?

Isla Bryson was convicted last month of raping two women – one in Clydebank in 2016 and one in Glasgow in 2019 – while still a man known as Adam Graham.

“while still a man” ffs. He didn’t magically change into a woman – he tried to get away with his sexual violence against women by claiming to be a woman.

She was found guilty of two charges of rape in January after a six-day trial at the high court in Glasgow.

Pronouns über alles.

The victim said: “I said to stop but he (Bryson) just kept on going, and that’s when I just closed my eyes and I am doing what he wanted to do.”

Again with the helpful “he (Bryson)” as if we might not know the victim meant Bryson.

On Tuesday, Lord Scott said Bryson was, in fact, “preying on these two women because of their vulnerability and raped them in their own homes where they were entitled to feel safe”.

Addressing Bryson, he added: “You are not at the stage of accepting what you did or acknowledging the serious harm you inflicted on two women.”

That kind of woman doesn’t matter though. It’s only the kind like Bryson who matter.

ITV on that rapist fella:

A transgender rapist who raped two women has been jailed for eight years at the High Court in Edinburgh.

Isla Bryson, from Clydebank, was sentenced to eight years in prison with a further three years on licence.

…

The 31-year-old was convicted last month of raping two women: one in Clydebank in 2016; and one in Drumchapel, Glasgow, in 2019; committing the offences while known as Adam Graham.

That is, committing the crimes before changing his male name to a female one.

Bryson met both the victims online, with prosecutors saying Bryson “preyed” on vulnerable women.

The case sparked an uproar after Bryson was initially housed in an all-female prison before being moved to the male estate following the outcry.

Note the frightened avoidance of the pronoun, a part of speech whose purpose is to avoid the clumsy awkwardness of repeating the name over and over.

Then there’s a bit where the reporter actually corrects the victim for saying “he.”

The second victim, who gave evidence via live video-link, told the court Bryson continued to have sex with her after she said stop.

The victim’s police statement said Bryson instead told her to “stay there” because “he [Bryson] wasn’t finished”. The victim told the court: “I said to stop but he [Bryson] just kept on going, and that’s when I just closed my eyes and I am doing what he wanted to do.”

Oh gosh how impolite of her to call the man who raped her “he.”

H/t Alan Peakall

Trans epistemology:

In trans epistemology, statements that trans women who are convicted of violent crime will be barred from female prisons = statements that trans women are male predators. In trans epistemology the limiting clause “who are convicted of violent crime” becomes invisible, so that the statement becomes simply “trans women will be barred from female prisons.” Mind you, that is what ought to happen, but it’s not what the sentence Willoughby is fulminating about says. The sentence says one thing, and Willoughby claims it says quite another thing. That’s trans epistemology.

Simon Edge on the Guardian’s dereliction of duty:

If you fail to report on the biggest medical scandal of the century, even though the story is everywhere else, you are part of the cover-up. You are deliberately hiding the story from your readers, who may well treat you as their primary if not only news source.

This is inexcusable at the best of times, but all the more so when those most at risk in this scandal are more likely to read the Guardian than other newspapers. By your silence, you’re telling those vulnerable people there is no scandal.

You’re also effectively telling them that any stories they may hear elsewhere about a supposed scandal aren’t valid – because if they were valid, you’d have reported it, right? In other words, you’re reinforcing the narrative that this is all a culture war motivated by hatred.

This is dereliction of journalistic duty on a gargantuan scale. I can’t think of any parallel that comes close to it. And I can’t think of a greater gap between a newspaper’s self-righteous image of itself and the nasty, shabby reality.

The struggle continues. Why why why WHY won’t people remember to call this man “they” or “them” whenever they refer to him? WHY????

He’s not really beyond annoyed and upset though, he’s thrilled that he gets to rant in public about how oppressed and bullied he is because people can’t remember to call him “they.”

One piece of good news…or at least one piece of bad news finally thrown out.

That’s not all.

And…

Hoo-boy. Listen to this.

“We give puberty blockers to cancer patients so obviously they’re fine for trans kids right??”

Yes, absolutely, that’s definitely the way medical treatments are managed: if it’s prescribed for one thing then it can be prescribed for a different thing. All medications are completely interchangeable! Yippeee!

“Is Isla Bryson a man, or a woman?” Sophy Ridge asks.

Well I think Isla Bryson is at it if I’m honest, I think they’re a dangerous individual, a deceptive individual, I don’t think they’re a true trans woman, I think they’re trying to play the system for personal advantage; now what I can’t do, Sophie, is I can’t change law: the law, which has been the law for many many years, allows Isla Bryson to self-identify as a woman if they wish. I I I I think they’re at it, I don’t think they’re a genuine trans woman so I wouldn’t describe them in that way. What I would say is we need to be really careful in this discussion, because what we can’t do is roll back the rights for those trans women, the 99.9 percent who don’t commit any crime, to live their lives like you and I do, not interfering with anybody else’s rights. What we can’t do is regress and and and decide to curtail people’s rights because of one despicable individual, so no, I don’t believe Isla Bryson is truly and genuinely a trans woman.

I wonder where he got that 99.9 percent. I suspect he got it out of his ass. I also wonder how he thinks he knows it’s such a very very very rare thing for men to pretend to be trans women in order to play the system for personal advantage. I also wonder why he isn’t more concerned about the obvious danger to women this whole religion is.