This is not in any news stories yet, as far as I can see.

But of course by “transphobic” they mean knowing that men are not women.

How dare women know that men are not women.

Arwa Mahdawi is a little behind the curve on the Colorado shooter.

On the eve of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a gunman opened fire in an LGBTQ+ nightclub, killing five people and injuring at least 25 in what is widely thought to have been a hate crime.

One, it’s not an LGBTQ+ nightclub, it’s a gay bar. Its owners call it a gay bar. Two, the gunman’s lawyers are saying he’s “nonbinary” so that makes him part of the mythical “LGBTQ+” so how you gonna deal with that?

Over the past year there has been an escalation in dangerously dehumanising anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. The idea that LGBTQ+ people are “groomers” and paedophiles has become a mainstream conservative talking point pushed by everyone from Fox News to Republican politicians.

Now that’s just a falsehood. Grooming and paedophilia are issues to do with trans ideology & proselytizing, not lesbian and gay rights, and it’s not only conservatives who think it’s a bad idea.

The dehumanising rhetoric has been accompanied by growing violence. The Proud Boys, a far-right group, have been disrupting Drag Queen Story Hour events (in which performers read books to children) across the US, often turning up with guns. In September Boston children’s hospital received bomb threats after sustained far-right harassment sparked by the hospital’s work with transgender youths. The tragedy at Club Q didn’t happen in a vacuum.

The Proud Boys should definitely sit down and shut up, but as for Boston Children’s, it’s not just innocuously “working with transgender children,” it’s boasting about its drastic surgeries for children it considers transgender. Elective genital mutilation and/or mastectomy isn’t comparable to talk therapy or the like. I wonder how conscious of hiding the ugly reality Mahdawi was when she did it, or if it’s pretty much automatic by now.

The Denver Post:

The person suspected of killing five and wounding 18 after opening fire in a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs is nonbinary, their defense attorney wrote in court filings Tuesday.

Uproar in court!

Notice the punctilious “their defense attorney” – on the one hand homophobic mass murderer but on the other hand nonbinareeeeeeee, must get them there pronouns right.

Joseph Archambault and Michael Bowman, the state public defenders for suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich, filed a slew of motions Tuesday and included a footnote about Aldrich’s identity.

“Anderson Aldrich is nonbinary,” the footnote states. “They use they/them pronouns, and for the purposes of all formal filings, will be addressed as Mx. Aldrich.”

Now what? How will they all deal? Whose idenninee outweighs whose?

Aldrich is being held on suspicion of murder and bias-motivated crimes in connection to the shooting at Club Q late Saturday night.

But what kind of bias? What kind of bias can he have? We’re told and told and told and TOLD that “LGBTQ+” is all one communineeee so how can he have a bias against his own communineeee?

Aldrich, who was injured after being attacked by the patrons who stopped the shooting, was released from a Colorado Springs hospital on Tuesday and booked into the El Paso County Jail.

They are scheduled to make their first court appearance virtually from the jail on Wednesday.

The idennineee police will be there to make sure no pronouns are insulted.

Listen, if makers of menstrual products can’t insult women who can? What kind of country is this, anyway? Can’t you bitches take a joke? It was funny. You’re funny. You’re a joke, so are we supposed to pretend you’re not?

Tampax has been accused of “sexualising women” after posting a controversial tweet that has gone viral and led to calls to boycott the company.

The US arm of the sanitary hygiene brand posted on Monday: “You’re in their DMs. We’re in them. We are not the same.”

The tweet spoofs the classic internet meme that reads, “You are in their direct messages”, meaning to approach someone romantically, with the follow-up remark of “I am…”.

Romantically? You mean sexually.

Tampax US, which is owned by the multinational firm Procter & Gamble and has featured Amy Schumer in adverts promoting the brand, states on its website that it’s mission is to “make period conversations as normal as periods so women and all who bleed can feel educated, empowered and limitless every day of the month.”

There is no “and” after “women.” The all who bleed in the way Tampax means are women and girls. There is no other category of people who bleed that way.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Both sides.

In hockey (and other sports too, of course), there’s a well-established and documented tendency for referees to try to “even up” the penalties called during a game. So if the home team has taken three penalties in a row, barring an absolute murder on the ice the next one is going to be called on the visitors.

I was explaining this to a neophyte fan one time, and he asked “but what if one team is just dirtier than the other?”

And yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s no reason to assume that two teams are equally likely to commit fouls, but the referees act as if that were the case. They don’t want to be seen as determining the outcome, even though of course you’re also influencing the outcome if you let one team get away with infractions that the other team can’t.

Republicans have spent decades “working the refs” by complaining about liberal media bias, precisely to create this kind of false equivalence. Trump just took advantage of that by moving the Overton Window: if you start telling more and more outrageous lies, the media’s desperate striving for “balance” will lead it to ignore your ordinary lies, while blowing up the opposition’s minor evasions into huge scandals.

You only have to compare how Clinton’s email server dominated media coverage in 2016, but the many many instances of terrible information security by the Trump administration got mentioned on the electronic equivalent of page 10. Neither voters nor the press really gave a damn about IT protocols, they just needed to nail Clinton with something to offset Trump’s fraudulent businesses, blatant lies, racism, and confessed sexual assaults.

About that dog’s breakfast at the Scottish Parliament…

Gender reform bill moves on to final stage of Holyrood scrutiny

THE reform of gender recognition policy in Scotland has moved on to the final stage of parliamentary scrutiny before becoming law.

By “reform” they mean removing all obstacles that could slow down men who want to call themselves women and take everything that belongs to women. Here you go, brothers, full speed ahead!

Today, MSPs debated amendments made at Stage 2 of the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill in a marathon committee meeting at the Scottish Parliament.

The bill aims to make it easier for transgender people to legally change the sex on their birth certificate and removes the need for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria by a doctor before they can legally do so.

No need for that, just step up and say your name is Petunia.

The committee meeting was briefly disrupted by a protester wearing the historic colours of the Suffragette movement before being completed this afternoon.

Stupid bitch, how dare she, thank god the committee ignored her and all the other stupid bitches.

Maggie Chapman MSP, Scottish Greens equalities and human rights spokesperson, said she was pleased that the bill was a vital step closer to delivering the reforms that trans people had been waiting so long for.

She said: “This is for those who have waited so long – too long – to be given the chance to live their lives as they choose to be recognised, but it is also for all those parliamentary colleagues who have faced down mistruths and disinformation.

“The consultations and committee scrutiny of the bill have been subjected to reckless scaremongering, ill informed innuendo and the most dangerous mistruths designed to distract people from the real issue at stake – the right of individuals to be recognised in law as who they really are.”

But that’s not the issue. That’s the opposite of the issue. The real issue at stake is the purported right of individuals to be recognised in law as who they really are not. It’s the purported right of men to be recognized as women despite all objections from women that such a “right” will dig a massive hole in our rights.

Apart from anything else it’s just breathtaking to see a parliament solemnly making law to validate people’s fantasies about themselves.

“It is to this parliament’s credit that such crude and frankly dog whistle attempts to undermine trans rights and democracy have failed because of the robust systems and structures that we have in place to represent all of our citizens, including some of the most marginalised.”

But not including our female citizens. Fuck them, right?

This is just news media gossip, but then news media gossip does matter, because we get our news from the news media, so we want to know which ones have good sense and which ones don’t.

There are approximately 7 million replies all saying are you seriously comparing Trump’s record of lies with your not being invited to Biden’s granddaughter’s wedding???

Parker is a Senior National Political Correspondent for the Washington Post.

Suzanne Moore wonders where the armbands for women in Qatar might be.

Women’s rights are not much of a fashionable cause these days and are mentioned often as an afterthought.

If they’re mentioned at all. Mostly people are too busy calling us Karens and terfs to mention our rights.

This is particularly evident in Qatar, where footballers and commentators are struggling to make righteous statements about the tiny but hugely rich country they are in. The agonising around wearing a rainbow flag armband seems to me a substitution for real thought. Obviously, it is terrible to stage the tournament in a place where homosexuality is illegal and even punishable by death, but identity politics flails against the reality of choosing to play in a country that adheres to the strict sect of Salafism, often referred to as Wahhabism, which is prevalent in both Qatar and Saudi. 

This interpretation of Islam also has severe consequences for women, who live under a repressive regime of guardianship.

They have to get the permission of their male “guardian” to do anything beyond staying home out of sight.

Neither rape nor domestic violence is illegal. Men can marry up to four wives but can divorce any wife without even informing them about it. Divorce for women is limited, even if the marriage is abusive. Women are not guardians of their own children. They do not have the authority to make decisions about their own children’s schools, finances or medical treatment. A woman who reports rape may be sent to prison. 

Women are not really people at all in this form of theocracy; women are a kind of livestock and only men are full human beings who can act and think and talk. The big difference between women and livestock is that women can conceive via other men and thus steal their husbands’ owners’ Right To Impregnate. Husbands can be tricked into raising some other dude’s kid! Or kids!! And women are such demonic whores that they’re bound to do it, so it’s essential to strip them of all rights starting at birth.

And, although the government and an increasing number of Qatari women talk about gender equality, women’s rights and female empowerment, the reality is that there is nowhere to go to complain and no monitoring of how women are treated. What the government really does is hand down a mandate to families to keep control of their girls in every way possible. If a father wants to pull his daughter out of education and beat her, then that is fine. The extreme patriarchal nature of Wahhabism means that everything a woman does is controlled; the honour and reputation of her family is paramount.

That and the paternity of her children.

When Fifa president Gianni Infantino, who is said to be well integrated into Qatari society and must surely know some of this, gave his deranged monologue about feeling gay, disabled, African etc, it was pointed out that he had missed out half the world’s population so he added: “I feel like a woman, too.”

And not one person on the planet believed him.

Another woman hauled up before the police for not genuflecting to trans ideology.

Meanwhile the “kill all the terfs” gang continues merrily on its way.

Glasgow Times reports:

Two people who have gone through gender reassignment treatment and later regretted it – sometimes referred to as detransitioners – are due to speak to MSPs at a meeting in the Scottish Parliament.

…

Sinead Watson, a 31-year-old woman from Glasgow, and Ritchie Herron, a 35-year-old man from Newcastle, will share their views on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill.

…

The stage one vote on the Bill led to nine SNP MSPs breaking with the whip to abstain or vote against the legislation, as well as the resignation of minister Ash Regan from the Scottish Government.

The Bill aims to make it easier for transgender people to be legally recognised as their preferred gender.

Which will make it easier for men to push women out of everything. Let’s not do that – let’s go back to not letting men do that.

Opponents have raised concerns about the impact of the legislation on women and girls, while supporters say it will have little impact outside the trans community.

Supporters who say that are telling whoppers.

A brand from the burning:

Shame on everyone who has thrown her to the wolves, she concludes.

NO in thunder.

Well done.

Baroness Nicholson has written a letter about that You are being monitored email. It’s good stuff. I especially like “awash with transgender-dominated staff groupings demanding ‘trans allyship’ in as official a manner as they can manage, while suggesting that anyone who demurs is a bigot or worse.” Exactly so, and it gets more suffocating and nauseating by the day.

Please tackle at your earliest convenience.

How can this circle ever be squared? Are they even trying?

If “trans people are entitled to use single sex facilities in accordance with their gender identity” then everyone else – 99% of people – is not. If men who call themselves trans are using women’s facilities then women can no longer use single sex facilities. Why do people who call themselves trans get more rights than everyone else?

I’ve never seen an answer to that question. I don’t see how an answer is possible.

The guy who stopped the shooter:

Richard M. Fierro said he was at a table in Club Q with his wife, daughter and friends on Saturday, watching a drag show, when the sudden flash of gunfire ripped across the nightclub. His instincts from four combat deployments as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan instantly kicked in. Fight back, he told himself.

In an interview at his house, where his wife and daughter were still recovering from injuries, Mr. Fierro, 45, who left the Army in 2013 as a major, according to military records, described charging through the chaos at the club, tackling the gunman and beating him bloody with the gunman’s own gun.

…

When the shooting started, Mr. Fierro said, he hit the floor, pulling a friend down with him. As bullets sprayed, he saw the gunman move through the bar toward a door leading to a patio where dozens of bar patrons had fled. Mr. Fierro, who served in the Army for 15 years, said he raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him.

“Was he shooting at the time? Was he about to shoot? I don’t know,” Mr. Fierro said. “I just knew I had to take him down.”

He bashed him over the head repeatedly.

As the fight continued, he said, he yelled for other club patrons to help him. A man grabbed the rifle and moved it away to safety. A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels. The whole time, Mr. Fierro said, he kept pummeling the shooter’s head while the two men screamed obscenities at each other.

He had thought he was finished with that kind of thing. He’d wanted to be finished with it.

Mr. Fierro, who owns a local brewery, said that on combat deployments in the Army, he had been shot at and had seen roadside bombs shred trucks in his platoon. His record shows that he was awarded the Bronze Star twice. The experiences of combat still haunt him, he said, and the psychological and physical toll of the deployments were why he left the Army.

He said he never thought he would have to deal with that kind of violence at home.

“I was done with war,” he said.

But this is the United States, where there are more guns than people.

Digging right through the barrel:

But this

never

happens.

The Colorado Sun gives background on Club Q:

Matthew Haynes opened Club Q 21 years ago with the goal of making sure LGBTQ people in Colorado Springs had a long-lasting place to call home.

Except that’s not exactly how Matthew Haynes words it, at least not in this story.

Haynes says Club Q has always been a community center more than anything else.

“There have been so many happy stories from Club Q,” he told The Colorado Sun on Sunday morning. “People meeting and relationships being born. So many celebrations there. We’re a family of people more than a place to have a drink and dance and leave.”

…

Haynes, who is a co-owner of Club Q, said he opened the club because Colorado Springs’ main gay bar at the time, Hide and Seek, appeared on the verge of closing. (The Colorado Springs Independent reports Hide and Seek shut down in 2005. The Gazette reported it opened in 1969.)

“It was clear that the Hide and Seek was in trouble, was failing,” Haynes said. “I bought that real estate (Club Q) intentionally because other gay clubs have come and gone in Colorado Springs. By owning that real estate and making our mark there it was intended to be long term. And it has been. It was literally: There wasn’t any place in Colorado Springs.”

When Haynes is directly quoted he calls it a gay club like other gay clubs. It appears to be the reporters who call it LGBTQ+.

Colorado Springs, which is home to Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian organization, has grown more friendly to the LGBTQ community, as has the rest of the country.

“Twenty-one years ago, we didn’t have marriage,” Haynes said. “Twenty-one years ago you got kicked out of the military if they found out you were gay. You couldn’t go sit in a restaurant next to your partner. Club Q was that safe place for people to come and feel and understand that they are normal — that the way they feel is normal and there are people just like them.”

Haynes talks about one community, the reporters talk about a different one.

(Also, though, is it true that two men or two women couldn’t go sit in a restaurant? That doesn’t sound right. I can believe they felt constrained to pretend to be Just Friends, but not able to go at all seems unlikely.)

Alycia Erickson, a pastor at Pikes Peak Metropolitan Church, which was founded in 1979 by members of the LGBTQ community, knows many people who patronize Club Q and and called it a refuge for them.

But there was no “LGBTQ community” in 1979. Nobody called it that then. There can’t have been members of a “community” that didn’t exist.

“Club Q has been an important part of this community for many years,” Erickson said. “We are not welcome in so many places, and we can’t be ourself. Gay bars have been a sanctuary of a different kind.”

Again the interviewee says gay and the reporters change it to LGBTQ.

Kelsey Fauser, pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Colorado Springs, described Club Q as a place “for safety, love and security,” and where people in the LGBTQ community could celebrate themselves and “just be.”

We can’t be confident that that bit outside the quotation marks is what Fauser said.

“It’s hard when you hear about news like this because it isn’t just some distant place or a news headline, but rather you know the color of the walls,” said Fauser, who is part of a LGBTQ league with drag queens and kings who perform at the nightclub.

Drag queens and kings. That’s not the same as trans.

The horror of what happened at Club Q is of course much bigger than the question of how Club Q is described, but all the same, the words do matter. It matters how women are described in reporting on violence against them, it matters how black people are described in reporting on violence against them, and the reporting on Club Q matters too.

Here’s a strange thing: Club Q in Colorado Springs describes itself as a gay or gay and lesbian adult bar, yet most of the headlines call it LGBTQ+. When did adding the TQ+ become absolutely mandatory with no exceptions? Why can’t lesbians and gay men organize and talk and agitate as lesbians and gay men? Why are they being forced to add trans people, when being trans is not the same thing as being lesbian or gay?

CNN: What we know about the suspect in the Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub shooting

NBC News: Live updates: Colorado LGBTQ nightclub shooting victims mourned as community pushes for answers

Washington Post: Shooting at popular LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs leave at least 5 dead

ABC News: Colorado club shooting updates: Suspect named after 5 dead, dozens injured at LGBTQ nightclub

Reuters: Colorado Springs police probe motive in LGBTQ nightclub

Thanks to all this forced teaming we get bullying crap like this from relentless bully Billy the bully Bragg:

They specifically excluded plumbers, ballet dancers, miners, academics, astronauts, poets, too; so what? What law is it that says an alliance of lesbians, gays and bisexuals has to name-check trans people?

Trade union catastrophizing:

“It’s great to be able to be loud and proud – and I will continue to be loud and proud against homophobia and loud and very proud to be a trans ally, and I will ensure that UNISON always remains the best trade union for LGBT+ workers.”

That was the pledge from UNISON general secretary Christina McAnea this morning, when she addressed the union’s LGBT+ conference in Edinburgh, as she applauded the fact that being “loud and proud” was the event’s central theme.

Proud to be against homophobia and very proud to be a trans ally – there’s always that little extra that signals the category “trans” is the most urgent, the most in need of allyship and love and concern and endless encouragement.

UNISON, she continued, had “always strongly advocated for trans rights.” The union’s “brilliant” trans equality campaign helps “give our activists the tools to combat the divisive political weaponising of trans issues,” which is damaging to trans people , but also to the “whole of society”.

What “weaponising” exactly? Mention of the conflict with women’s rights? Is that the weapon?

The past year had seen over 400 members trained on how to be a good trans ally, while there’s also been a “bump in members taking part in UNISON’s trans caucus.”

But Ms McAnea was clear that such things were needed precisely because anti-trans discrimination is “not going away and we have to be ever more vigilant.”

Ever more. Ever more and more and more and more. It will never end.