Joan Smith on another heartbroken dude:

In an interview veering between self-pity and entitlement, Bridges claimed to be ‘heartbroken’ after being refused permission to ride for Wales as a woman in the Commonwealth Games. (British Cycling has suspended its policy on transgender athletes while it carries out a review.) Bridges also claimed to understand the anxieties of female athletes who don’t want to compete with biological males, but dismissed them because ‘I am not a man’. 

Which is funny, because he is a man, and this whole business of dismissing women’s anxieties about being displaced by him and men like him is the very thing women are anxious about.

Not many people, one would guess, really believe that men can become women, but trans activists have created a climate where the fear of being labelled ‘transphobic’ inhibits honest responses. Bridges’s interview is an egregious example, linking criticism of trans participation in women’s sport with the murder of five people in an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs last month. The deaths of two trans people in the attack ‘are directly related to dehumanisation and demonisation of trans people in the media, online, and in debates such as those about sports,’ the cyclist claimed.

It’s tempting to observe that ‘directly’ is doing a lot of work there, but it’s more important to ask whether anyone at ITV Wales actually read this piece of malevolent hyperbole before they tweeted a link. Doesn’t anyone at the channel feel uneasy about publishing a claim that female athletes who defend sex categories in sport are in some way responsible for the actions of a mass killer in the U.S.?

My guess is no, no one at the channel does. It’s the fashionable thing, to see women as the enemy and trans people as their poor fragile trampled victims.

They have got to be kidding.

An Oxford student union official has apologised for her supposedly trans- exclusionary stance after objecting to the abolition of the women’s officer role.

Ellie Greaves, the vice-president for women at Oxford’s student union, put out a statement after a backlash against her comments in The Times.

The union is replacing its women’s officer with a liberation and equalities representative from next year. The reorganisation of union leadership will keep the same number of roles — one president and five vice-presidents — but female students will lose a dedicated women’s officer. The union said this was because the role was created at a time when women could not get full degrees and colleges were segregated, and that the position prioritised one protected group over others.

And because women are bitches and cunts and Karens and don’t deserve any kind of protection or rights or officer or anything else just for them. Bitches.

Sharon Udott, president of the Oxford Feminist Society, said: “It’s incredibly important to have a women-focused role in 2022. To say that it is redundant in this day and age is an incredibly privileged position to hold. From violence against women to advocating for increased support and funding for women’s health, these issues don’t change when the year does.”

Well she’s going to be on the naughty step.

Students took issue with some of her comments, The Oxford Student website said on Tuesday. She was asked at a student council meeting last week: “What do you have to say to the hundreds of students who were consulted regarding [the role review] . . . who agreed that this would be a good change for inclusivity, equality and the priority of intersectionality?”

What do you have to say to the hundreds of students who think inclusivity, equality, and the priority of intersectionality=women don’t matter? What do you have to say to the hundreds of fucking fools at this university who cannot wait to get rid of every trace of feminism until no one even remembers it was ever a thing?

They must have beaten her up, because she went full grovel.

Greaves issued a statement on Tuesday, saying: “The comments I made in the article contribute to a bio-essentialist, narrow-minded narrative of what being a woman is, including the prioritisation of women over minorities. I cannot apologise enough for the damage and hurt I have caused the trans community.”

Fuck the trans community. What about the hurt they’ve caused women? When is someone going to apologize for that? When is someone going to apologize enough for that?

Oxford Student Union said of changes to the women’s officer position: “The role has not been replaced but augmented to include more underrepresented and marginalised communities who currently do not have sufficient representation.”

What communities? You know – men who say they are women.

And another thing. It’s so typical of the maudlin hand-wringing hanky-drenching sympathy for men who claim to be women along with complete indifference toward actual women. Look at this insulting dreck:

Awwww, his journey, cheating women at their own sport. His “competing at an elite level” but actually not doing that because he competes against women and he has the advantage that male athletes have. Imagine a news outlet getting all soppy and flattery about a big hulking adult male competing against children. Why is it not ok to cheat children that way but it’s fine to cheat women?

Awwwww social media backlash – but isn’t that because he cheats? Because he’s a cheater? Because he cheats women, and it’s not fair?

“THE RACE TO BE ME” forsooth. But that’s not what it is, it’s a race to be someone he’s not, in order to cheat at his sport.

It’s possible that he really does have “gender dysphoria,” that he really does want to “live as a woman,” but even if it is, that doesn’t justify his cheating. He should stay out of athletic competition if he can’t stand to compete against his own sex. End of story.

Mara Yamauchi on “Emily” Bridges:

Bridges is horrified and terrified yet women are murdered at a far higher rate than trans people are. What’s he got to be so terrified about? Does he ever pause to think about the terror of women?

Being self-obsessed is not the same thing as being self-aware. At all.

Yes he IS a man. And a lot of other things, none of them good.

I had much the same thought.

As I said Monday, Adichie didn’t reduce it to the absurd, it IS absurd. It comes pre-absurded.

In fact…how is Zoe Williams not just the Guardian version of Lady Susan Hussey?

Hilarity:

As fallout from Donald Trump’s meeting with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes continues, a far-right activist has claimed the meeting was a set-up, meant to “make Trump’s life miserable”.

Sigh. Now I have to catch up with the Trump news. I overlooked the meeting and the fallout.

NBC News reported that in an attempt to “send a message” to the former president, Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing provocateur and former Breitbart editor, helped arrange for Fuentes to travel to Mar-a-Lago in Florida for a dinner between Trump and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.

Trump ate with the pair. He’s been criticized for doing so.

Ye, who like Trump is running for president in 2024, said he used the dinner to ask Trump to be his vice-president, only for Trump to insult his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.

Hahahahahahachokehahahahahahaha god don’t you wish you’d been a fly on the wall when Mr West asked Trump to be his VP? Haaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha

“Trump started basically screaming at me at the table telling me I was going to lose,” Ye said in a video since deleted from social media but transcribed by Newsweek. “I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, ‘Woah, woah hold on hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye.’”

Seriously. Dude, who do you think you are?

A source close to Trump told NBC the former president was left furious by the meeting.

Hahahahahaha you don’t say.

“He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said of Ye, according to the source, who also said “Trump was totally blindsided” by Fuentes’s presence, adding: “It was a set-up.”

Oh my goodness, totally blindsided, how surprising and shocking for such a disciplined thoughtful man.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s campaign was “putting new protocols in place to ensure that those who meet with him are approved and fully vetted”. Among those protocols, the AP said, citing unnamed sources, is a requirement that Trump is accompanied by a senior official at all times.

falls to floor in shrieks of laughter

Wait who is doing the obsessing here?

Arwa Mahdawi wrote a column on creepy advertising by Tampax and Balenciaga, but in the process she managed to take a swipe at The Designated Enemy.

If any brand has licence to make jokes about things being up vaginas, it’s Tampax. Sexualising tampons, however, is revolting. Still, the tweet had the intended effect, I suppose, which was to get people talking about Tampax. The gender-neutral language also sparked a heated argument about trans people because, hey, what doesn’t spark a heated argument about trans people these days? While I admit spending 60% of my life on Twitter isn’t healthy, it’s not as unhealthy as spending 99.99% of your waking hours obsessing over trans people’s right to exist, which is what a depressing number of people seem to do.

No they don’t. That’s a stupid lie, which keeps being told despite the billions of corrections.

It’s not that we think trans people don’t have a right to exist. Saying we do implies, none too subtly, that we want genocide of trans people. The issue is not existence, it’s definition. We think that trans people don’t have a right to define themselves as literally the sex they are not, and then proceed to help themselves to the rights that go with being that sex.

Definition is not the same as existence. I’m not a tulip, and I don’t cease to exist if I’m told I’m not a tulip. You can swap any noun for “tulip” and it remains true.

Alex Massie in The Spectator:

Yesterday Nicola Sturgeon spoke at an event celebrating 30 years of the charity Zero Tolerance and its long running – and essential – commitment to ending violence against women. In a revealing sign of the times in Scotland today, organisers emailed those attending the event to warn them certain subjects should be ignored. As they put it: ‘We wish to create a safe and supported environment for our guests and ask you to support us in this aim by refraining from discussions of the definition of a woman and single sex spaces in relation to the gender recognition act.’

But…how then will they know what anyone is talking about? If they don’t know people are talking about women as opposed to women and men who say they are women, how can they understand the discussions at all? This is the problem, isn’t it. When you’re talking about a subject that affects women specifically, then it muddies the waters to drag in men who say they are women. This is exactly why it’s a bad idea to pretend that men can be women.

…for the moment and whether Sturgeon likes it or not, this is the hot-ticket women’s issue in Scotland. I say women’s issue but, really, it’s not just a women’s issue. It is, in the end, a choice between those who wish to inhabit a reality-based world and those who insist truth is an endlessly moveable, malleable, feast. 

Yes but also no. The truth v fantasy aspect is very important, but it’s also very important that it’s women who are the Designated Enemy.

Sturgeon said:

‘Much of what I’m going to say today is about male violence against women because it is men who commit violence against women. In my long experience, most men who commit violence against women don’t feel the need to change gender to do that. Those who do, my argument is we should focus on them because they are men abusing a system to attack women. What we shouldn’t do is further stigmatise a group of women who are already too stigmatised.’

By which she means men who say they are women.

It’s not stigmatising men who say they are women to say they are men. The intrusion or offense or aggression is from the other direction. It’s an insult to women for men to insist that being a woman is just a matter of assertion. No, it isn’t: it’s a matter of being born with a female body, of growing up vulnerable to various forms of aggression from men, of being not as big or fast or strong as men, of being the prey not the predator. Women can no more afford to pretend men are women than gazelles can afford to pretend cheetahs are gazelles.

Good grief.

First I see this:

Then I see a reply saying Lady SH is Lady Susan Hussey so I hie me to Google for information on Lady SH and find a bouquet of headlines saying she’s resigned. I chose the BBC:

Lady Susan Hussey quits over remarks to charity boss Ngozi Fulani

The late Queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Susan Hussey has apologised and resigned after she repeatedly asked a black British charity boss where she was from.

Ngozi Fulani, a charity founder, was questioned about her background at the charity event at the palace on Tuesday. Ms Fulani said she was “totally stunned” by Prince William’s godmother’s comments.

The palace described the comments as “unacceptable and deeply regrettable”. An eyewitness to the conversation, Mandu Reid, told the BBC Lady Susan’s questions had been “offensive, racist and unwelcoming”. She said she had a “sense of incredulity” about the exchange in which Ms Fulani was interrogated about where she was from, even though she had already explained she was born and lived in the UK.

This is their job, pretty much the whole of it – celebrating and rewarding people who do good work. Royalty and the nobility are obviously an absurd anachronism with little or nothing to justify their status, so surely the most basic duty they have is to do the celebrating and rewarding properly. It’s been common knowledge for years that singling certain kinds of people out for the “Where you from?” interrogation is, yes, racist. Persisting in the question after a very clear response that it’s not an ok question is off the charts. That’s without even talking about the bit where Lady SH moved Ms Fulani’s hair.

The Telegraph solemnly reports:

A non-binary senior US nuclear official has been charged with stealing a suitcase at an airport.

The owner of the suitcase however is non-non-binary. She’s not a man, even half.

Sam Brinton, 35, became the most prominent genderfluid person in the US government in June, overseeing the disposal of nuclear waste.

He’s a man non-binary as opposed to a woman non-binary.

The appointment of the MIT graduate, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them”, was hailed at the time by diversity campaigners.

By laughably credulous “diversity campaigners.” A pale man who calls himself “them” and has a high-up government job is not much of a blow for diversity.

When Brinton took up the post in June they tweeted a picture from their office wearing Stars and Stripes stilettos.

They wrote: “As one of if not the very first openly genderfluid individuals in federal government leadership, I was welcomed with open arms into the Department of Energy.”

Not one of the very first self-obsessed goons though.

Found guilty.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes of seditious conspiracy for leading a months-long plot to unleash political violence to prevent the inauguration of President Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The panel of seven men and five women deliberated for three days before finding Rhodes and a co-defendant guilty of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transition of presidential power. Rhodes and all four co-defendants on trial were also convicted of obstructing Congress as it met to confirm the results of the 2020 election. Both offenses are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

…

The indictment brought against Rhodes, 56, and other Oath Keepers associates in January was the first time the U.S. government leveled the historically rare charge of seditious conspiracy in the massiveJan. 6 investigation. He is the highest-profile figure to face trial in connection with rioting by angry Trump supporters who injured scores of officers and ransacked offices, forcing the evacuation of lawmakers.

Rhodes and followers, dressed in combat-style gear, converged on the Capitol after staging an “arsenal” of weapons at nearby hotels, ready to take up arms at Rhodes’s direction, the government charged. Rhodes’s defense said he and co-defendants came to Washington as bodyguards and peacekeepers, bringing firearms only in case Trump met their demand to mobilize private militia to stop Biden from becoming president.

Oh is that all. How is that a defense? They’re not allowed to mobilize private militia to stop Biden from becoming president. That’s a no-no. It’s not permitted; it is forbidden. Not ok, not cool, not high spirits. No no no no no bad citizen, bad, bad, leave it.

The Justice Department arrested Rhodes in January and Tarrio in June after an internal debate over whether the magnitude and organization behind the Capitol attack merited bringing rarely used seditious conspiracy charges. Bringing the politically charged count posed a higher risk at trial because it required that prosecutors prove the defendants harbored an intent to forcibly oppose the federal government, compared to the charge of conspiring to obstruct a proceeding of Congress, which is punishable by the same 20-year maximum prison term.

I’m hoping Trump’s head explodes. Very literally.

I’m looking for more on this claim by anthropologist Dan Hicks that Bentham “contested immediate emancipation.”

It’s certainly possible in the abstract, given utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number” principle. The obvious objection is that lots of people can be made happy about the sufferings of a smaller number of people, so let’s not do it that way. Actual utilitarians wrestled with the problem; working imperialists, not so much. How about in the concrete? Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has a relevant article:

Classical Utilitarianism, on one reading, is the view according to which an action, rule, policy or social institution is right if and only if it is designed to advance aggregate well-being, hedonistically construed. Relying on some version of this moral framework, the Classical Utilitarians — Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick — advocated for a wide range of social, political and legal reforms.

Both their reformist agenda and the time at which they lived led each of the Classical Utilitarians to intellectual entanglements with British imperialism, colonialism and related issues (e.g., race and slavery). However, the nature and extent of their involvement with and relationship to the British imperial project and colonialism in general has not yet been properly or fully analysed. The purpose of this nicely assembled and timely volume is to remedy this situation and, as the editors state in their introduction, ‘to bring out, to engage with, the different aspects of the utilitarian legacy that bear directly on questions of race and empire’.

Sounds like a good read.

The two papers on Bentham are among the most interesting and illuminating in this volume. In his article, “Jeremy Bentham on Slavery and the Slave Trade”, Fred Rosen responds to the view that Bentham failed to have the appropriate moral reaction to slavery and slave trading. Bentham’s error, it is claimed, is that he held that the security of the property of slave owners had to be balanced against equality in deciding the right public policy to have regarding slavery. This problem is seen clearly, critics contend, in Bentham’s advocacy of a gradual rather than immediate emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.

In reply, Rosen demonstrates that Bentham’s position is both more sophisticated and more plausible than critics acknowledge. Relying on a little-known letter published in the Public Advertiser on June 6, 1789, Rosen shows that Bentham was clear on the issue of slave trading: it should end without compensation to slave traders. He advocated gradual emancipation, not because he wrongly gave weight to the security and protection of private property, Rosen continues, but out of concern for the protection of slaves: he wanted to ensure that the abolition of slaveholding did not make slaves worse off. For in conjunction with emancipation, what is needed is another economic and social system not based on slavery, ‘one that provided subsistence and security for the newly freed slaves and did not leave them in a worse position in relation to their former masters’.

You know what? He was not wrong about that. US history from 1865 on is an infinite encyclopedia on the subject. Many “freed” slaves absolutely were in a worse position in relation to their former masters, which is why David Oshinsky titled his book about what happened after Reconstruction was killed off Worse Than Slavery.

So it looks as if Hicks’s remark is less than fully accurate.

Hipster captioning.

The full caption:

Suddenly the BBC is being a good deal more blunt:

A trans woman who groomed and had sex with a 14-year-old girl, making her pregnant, has been jailed.

The defendant – named by police as “David Orton, also known as Danielle Rose Gemini” – was found guilty of penetrative sexual activity with a child following a trial.

…

The offender, whose name was recorded as Danielle-Rose Gemini by Leicester Crown Court, was jailed for nine-and-a-half years.

Leicestershire Police – who said the 25-year-old identified as a woman at the time of the offences – were not able to give a current gender identity.

That “who said the 25-year-old identified as a woman” is two layers of skepticism right there in the open. There’s not a word of sympathy or tender concern for him anywhere in the article.

Interesting.

End violence against women…

…unless of course that might inconvenience men who call themselves women.

A charity event to push for an end to male violence against women and girls has banned discussion about single sex spaces.

Push for an end to male violence! But don’t push hard – in fact push as gently as you possibly can.

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, is scheduled to give the main speech to the 30th anniversary gathering by Zero Tolerance in Edinburgh today. The charity‘s core belief is that male violence should not be tolerated.

Unless the male “identifies as” a woman. Then the violence is quite all right.

A note sent to attendees said it wanted “to create a safe and supported environment for our guests and ask you to support us in this aim by refraining from discussions of the definition of a woman, and single sex spaces, in relation to the gender recognition act”.

It added: “As feminists we have strong opinions on these subjects, but this is not the place for that conversation.”

Of course it is. It’s exactly the place for that conversation. How the hell can anyone campaign to end violence against women if nobody knows what a woman is? How can anyone campaign to end violence against women if no one is allowed to talk about women? How can anyone campaign to end violence against women if men who claim to be women have to be “included” in everything women do? How can anyone campaign to end violence against women if we’re all too anxious and “polite” to say men are not women?

Sturgeon is giving a speech at the event.

The decision might have been made to “save the blushes of the first minister”, suggested Marion Calder, director of For Women Scotland.

Here’s an idea: don’t bother to save Sturgeon’s blushes. She should be blushing. More to the point, she should not be favoring men who pretend to be women rather than women.

Won’t someone please have some sympathy for the poor beleaguered fragile trans laydee who makes racist taunts?

He’s deleted the tweet but there are many many screengrabs.

The enlightened sympathize with India but also remember to be intersectional.

But don’t ever ever ever be better than calling a woman a cunt. That’s absolutely fine, in fact it’s obligatory.

And how are we defining equality exactly?

What does it mean to “police” who is a woman? It doesn’t seem like something anyone can police. Either you are or you aren’t. It’s commonplace to police things like who is a citizen, who is a lawyer, who is a doctor, who is an Olympic medalist – that is, there are criteria for all those things, which can be lied about or faked. You don’t want a pretend dentist messing with your teeth.

But who is a woman and who is a man aren’t like that. There are criteria in a sense, but they’re built in. It’s almost always obvious, and it used to be taken for granted. Now suddenly it’s a matter of “policing,” and women are ordered to accept anyone who claims to be a woman as a sister, especially when the person doing the claiming is a man.

What does that have to do with equality?

Still working on the government by force thing.

And who should do the installing? The military?

Rolling Stone has more:

Much of Lake’s Trump-backed campaign was centered around bolstering unfounded claims of electoral fraud in the 2020 election, and the former TV anchor has lived up to her commitment to only accept election results if she won.

Lake, who lost her bid for governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs, has refused to acknowledge the election results, instead filing a lawsuit requesting public records from Maricopa County that would detail which voters experienced issues casting their ballots, and information regarding errors in ballot counting.

“We know we won this election,” Lake said in a weekend interview with far-right streaming service Real America’s Voice. “We are going to do everything in our power to make sure that every single Arizonans vote that was disenfranchised is counted.”

Trump “knew” he “won” too.

News from museum world:

A museum in London is closing one of its main exhibitions following concerns over “racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”.

The Wellcome Collection says the Medicine Man display is ending after a 15-year run. Founder Henry Wellcome, who died in 1936, collected more than a million objects to give an insight into global health and medicine. The museum has marked the closure as a “significant turning point”.

Controversial objects include a 1916 painting titled “A Medical Missionary Attending to a Sick African” which depicts an African person kneeling in front of a white missionary.

It’s pretty obvious why that would be controversial. I wonder if they could just mark it historical with a note that views and attitudes have changed.

The museum said in a statement on Twitter: “We can’t change our past. But we can work towards a future where we give voice to the narratives and lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored.

“We tried to do this with some of the pieces in Medicine Man using artist interventions. But the display still perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language.”

At least they didn’t say “transphobic theories and language.”

I don’t know. I’m seeing a lot of skepticism, but maybe the Wellcome would benefit from some updating. Then again maybe the people doing the updating will be a shade too righteous or smug or both to do a good job of it.

Party time!