I’m reading a piece about Jazz Jennings’s “affirmation” surgery. Had to take a break for a minute to cope with the revulsion. They didn’t know what they were doing but they did it anyway – how progressive.

Jazz Jennings has had a tougher transition than her doctors expected. In the last two years, the teen reality star and LGBTQ+ activist has undergone multiple gender confirmation surgeries, and her doctors are now revealing more details about what went wrong in the new season of TLC’s I Am Jazz, People reported.

Why did the doctors expect a not so tough transition? Why would that be easy? It turns out there was no reason for them to think that other than the fact that they wanted to.

In the episode clip, Jazz’s doctors, Marci Bowers, MD, and Jess Ting, MD, speak to Jazz and her family about the previous surgeries. Bowers admits Jazz “has had a very difficult surgical course,” in the show. “She had a very incredible first surgery—it went seemingly very well, but there were problems. And that prompted a second surgery, which I was not a part of, unfortunately.”

“Taking Jazz on as a patient for surgery, we knew it was going to be a one-of-a-kind surgery,” Ting explained in the clip. “We don’t have the experience of having said we’ve done 50 of these. I was just not expecting her to have a complication as severe as what she did have.”

That’s one place I had to pause to take deep breaths. They had no experience, they knew it would be “a one-of-a-kind surgery” i.e. AN EXPERIMENT on a living child and they did it anyway. “Oh Jess isn’t this exciting, it’s brand new, we’re going to cut his genitals off!” “Oh Marci, it’s so exciting, we get to try to create a vagina from nowhere!”

“This has been a real journey, hasn’t it? We knew it would be tough—it turned out tougher than any of us imagined,” Bowers tells Jazz’s family. “I think in hindsight we would have never sent you home from the hospital. You know, easy to say now. When I wasn’t here when you had problems and had to go back, I can’t tell you how stressful that was.”

Aww was it stressful for Bowers? That’s heart-rending.

Jazz went through her initial gender confirmation surgery in June 2018. Doctors had to use a new technique because she started using hormones at such a young age. Since she hadn’t developed enough tissue to construct a vagina, Jazz’s doctors used tissue from her stomach lining.

That’s where I stopped reading. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

Let’s see if I can get through a little more…

Jazz experienced complications and had to return for a follow-up procedure. “There was just an unfortunate event and setback where things did come apart, and there was a complication,” she told the outlet. “I had to come back in for another procedure, but it was just all part of the journey. The good thing though is that it was only cosmetic and external so it wasn’t too dramatic.”

There is no “good thing” though. The kid was mutilated for a fantasy.

Final paragraph:

Jazz came out as transgender at age 5 and has been sharing her transition in the TLC series I Am Jazz and on her Youtube channel. FYI: Gender confirmation surgery gives “transgender individuals the physical appearance and functional abilities of the gender they know themselves to be,” according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

No it doesn’t. Gender confirmation surgery does not give trans people the functional abilities of the gender they aren’t. Trans women can’t get pregnant, to name the most obvious missing functional ability.

The whole thing is an atrocity.

Oh honestly. Easy for some. King Choss says words about The Poor:

King Charles has highlighted the cost of living crisis and the “great anxiety and hardship” of many struggling to “pay their bills and keep their families fed and warm” in his first Christmas broadcast.

Isn’t that just so kind and loving of him?

Until you remember how much money he gets for his important job of being a tourist attraction. He’s ordered a slap-up coronation, no expense spared:

King Charles III is reportedly in favour of a “glorious” coronation with pomp and pageantry to promote the best image of the UK amid the cost-of-living crisis.

It was speculated that Buckingham Palace might opt for a cut-price event as Charles has long advocated for a slimmed-down monarchy [amid] the financial conditions of the country.

But no. Make it as flashy and expensive as possible! He’s waited all this time, he deserves it.

The Graun continues:

In the message, with the nation in the grip of economic woes and against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the king dedicated a major part of his broadcast to those helping to ease the plight of others.

Footage of food banks and meals being distributed to the needy featured prominently as he praised “the wonderfully kind people” who had donated food or their time.

I wonder if any of the donated food was expensive Duchy of Cornwall lemon curd and biscuits.

It’s the human imperative to fight over something. We can’t get out of bed in the morning unless there’s a fight to inspire us. India chooses communalism.

Tensions are rising in India over prime minister Narendra Modi’s push to make Hindi the country’s dominant language.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janaya party (BJP) government has been accused of an agenda of “Hindi imposition” and “Hindi imperialism” and non-Hindi speaking states in south and east India have been fighting back.

Of course with Modi and the BJP it’s not just Hindi, it’s also Hindu – it’s not just the language, it’s also the religion and all the baggage that goes with it.

Modi’s speeches are given exclusively in Hindi and over 70% of cabinet papers are now prepared in Hindi. “If there is one language that has the ability to string the nation together in unity, it is the Hindi language,” said Amit Shah, the powerful home minister and Modi’s closest ally, in 2019.

That’s a big “if” though. It’s entirely possible that there is no one language that can do that. Furthermore, if there were, it could be that only the foreign one would work. English might work the way Latin did in Europe for many centuries: it was no one’s natal language, so it was neutral.

The debate over Hindi’s prominence has raged since before India’s independence. Though there are more Hindi speakers than those of any other native language in India, they are largely concentrated in the populous, politically powerful states in the north known as the Hindi belt. Hindi traditionally has very little presence in southern states such as Tamil-speaking Tamil Nadu and Kannada-speaking Kerala, and eastern states such as West Bengal, home to 78 million Bengali speakers.

…

“Under Modi, language has become a heavily politicised issue,” said Papia Sen Gupta, a professor in the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. “The narrative being projected is that India must be reimagined as Hindu state and that in order to be a true Hindu and a true Indian, you must speak Hindi. They are becoming more and more successful in implementing it.”

Hey I have an idea: why not partition the true Hindu section of India off from the rest of it? That went so well the last time…

Some have warned of the bloody history that language imposition has triggered in the region. Sri Lanka descended into 26-year civil war after Sinhalese nationalists tried to foist their language on the island’s minority Tamils, and it was the oppression of the Bengali language in east Pakistan that led to the 1971 war and the establishment of Bangladesh.

Let’s go to war over language! No let’s go to war over religion! Let’s do both! No let’s do first one and then the other!

In response to the policies seen to promote Hindi, multiple nationalist language movements have now emerged across India, from Rajasthan to West Bengal. In West Bengal, where the Bengali language is seen as a very fundamental part of people’s cultural identity, there has been a growing Bengali nationalist movement over the past two years.

Nationalism begets more nationalism. Anything for a fight, eh?

We are Inclusive, so we are excluding you. Have a nice day!

You couldn’t make it up. “We have recently written and adopted an Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) Policy for our charity…This policy clearly states that we must be inclusive as an organisation.” Therefore we are excluding you.

Also the bit about yeah yeah we support feminism and women’s rights BUT we support the trans comyoonidee way way way more than we support excloozhyunary bitches like you.

Golly gee who knew Louisa May Alcott was butch? Besides everyone?

Louisa May Alcott balked when her editor asked her to write a book for girls. “Never liked girls or knew many,” she journaled, “except my sisters.”

…

To family and friends, she was Lou, Lu, or Louy. She wrote of herself as the “papa” or “father” of her young nephews. Her father, Bronson, once called Alcott his “only son.” In letters to close friend Alfie Whitman, Alcott called herself “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.”

Gasp – could this mean………………………..?

All this leads me to wonder: Is Alcott best understood as a trans man?

No. Why? Well, for one thing, because she’s not particularly hard to understand in the first place. She didn’t feel comfortable with the exaggeratedly genderized rules of the world she lived in, in much the same way that I don’t feel comfortable with the exaggeratedly genderized rules of the world I live in. I don’t identify with the huge skirts and prissy manners of the Victorians and I don’t identify with the torture shoes and waxed crotches of the 2020s. Big whoop. That doesn’t make me a trans man, it just makes me a woman who thinks the conventions about how women are supposed to look and talk and act are deeply stupid and limiting.

Alcott scholars agree that she felt a profound affinity with manhood. “I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model,” said Gregory Eiselein, a professor at Kansas State University and the current president of the Louisa May Alcott Society. In “Eden’s Outcasts,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alcott, John Matteson wrote that Alcott believed “she should have been born a boy.” Jan Susina, a professor of children’s literature, concurred: “Alcott may have experienced what we today would consider gender dysphoria.”

Stone the crows! That would be so exciting if it weren’t for the fact that everyone has always known it because it’s spelled out in the novel.

Still, these scholars hesitate to use the word “transgender” to describe Alcott. “I’d like to be cautious about imposing our words and terms and understandings on a previous era,” says Dr. Eiselein. “The way folks from the 19th century thought about gender, sex, sexual identity, sexuality is different from some of the terms we might use.” 

Some of us might use. Others of us, not so much.

H/t Mike Haubrich

Stella Creasy now:

Stella Creasy last May:

Stella Creasy is clarifying her position on the word ‘woman’. “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes”, she declares. “But they are now women and I respect that.”

…

Surely, as a fellow feminist, she and JK Rowling aren’t too far apart on the issue? “No, I don’t agree with her and I’m told I am a bad feminist because I take a different view,” she reveals.

Her “different view” being that men are women if they say they are.

“JK Rowling doesn’t support self-identification whereas I do. Of course biological sex is real – it’s just not the end of the conversation. I am somebody who would say that a trans woman is an adult human female. I would say that you and I were adult human females.”

But a trans woman is not an adult human female, he’s an adult human male. That’s what the words mean. Self-identification doesn’t change reality.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Despite warnings.

It really is (morbidly, frustratingly, infuriatingly) fascinating how this movement reveals just how insignificant the concerns and welfare of women and girls are to those in power. And not just political power. It’s as though power itself, even if only that of an artist or book club chairman, makes it difficult to remember that female people exist and are as valuable as males.

The movement’s success also shows how fragile actual progress is and that liberty really does have an eternal price. After all, Genderism quite obviously depends on the exploitation of existing sexism, whether conscious and overt or nascent and hidden. The very idea of gender identity requires that there be nonphysical traits that are not merely predominantly associated with but actually unique to one sex. To be taken in by the ideology requires some degree of what used to be called sexism. (It’s a sort of ethical special pleading via persuasive definition. You get to engage in the very thing you decry, because the new definition doesn’t apply to you.) Genderism doesn’t create sexism; it liberates it. Genderism absolves people of moral failing, transmuting sin and shame into virtue and pride.

What an exultant rush that must be.

Thanks, Keir.

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to change the law to allow trans people to self-declare their gender, The Telegraph can reveal in the wake of anger over similar moves in Scotland.

The Labour leader has said he will “update” the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) if elected, despite warnings that doing so would impact women’s rights and could enable predatory men to access single-sex spaces.

It’s so heart-warming to know that Labour doesn’t give a shit about women.

In a message to Pink News for Pride last year, he said his priority was “forming the next government so we can introduce legislation and change society so that, whoever you are, you can lead a happy and fulfilled life. We are committed to updating the GRA to introduce self-declaration for trans people”.

So that, whoever you are, you can lead a happy and fulfilled life unless you have the bad taste to be a woman. If you’re a woman, then fuck you. Solidarity.

Asked by The Telegraph about the leader’s comments to Pink News, Labour confirmed that he stood by plans to reform the GRA.

And to destroy women’s rights. Thanks a lot.

The return of The Soul:

“Who people are” is no longer who they literally are, but who they mystically are.

Who people are isn’t the dull material facts of date of birth, parentage, history, sex, education, skills – that’s all so yesterday. Now who people are is who they think they are inside their heads. The fun about that is that it can be literally anything. We can imagine ourselves mountains, planets, dragons, erupting volcanoes, melted candles.

The Seattle Times on what it’s like here now:

A quarter-inch of frozen water ground the region to a halt.

…

Transportation — moving by any means — was all but impossible.

It was – you couldn’t walk, let alone drive.

King County Metro shut down all its buses. So did Pierce and Snohomish counties. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport briefly closed all three runways, an “unprecedented” situation. Paine Field closed. So did Highway 2 over Stevens Pass. Garbage pickup was canceled. Museums, theaters, libraries, the zoo, the aquarium: all closed. Doctor appointments moved online.

“Stay home if you can,” King County Executive Dow Constantine tweeted. “Please don’t go viral on TikTok trying to drive on the ice.”

But…

That’s my nabe. The hill is very steep.

I look forward to being able to walk around outside again!

Again with the sloppy “trans rights!!!!” without defining trans rights.

We are ORDERED to agree with various slogans about “trans rights” without ever being told exactly what those rights are. The right to destroy women’s sports? The right to steal women’s prizes and jobs and promotions? The right to shove women out of feminism if they talk about their own rights instead of trans rights? What are trans rights?

It’s hard not to suspect that the reason we can’t just produce a document the way we can produce the US Bill of Rights or the UDHR is because the rights enumerated would look bad. “The right to take everything that belongs to women.” Hmmmm let’s think about this for a minute first.

The Sun says it’s sorry.

The Sun newspaper says it regrets publishing a Jeremy Clarkson column about the Duchess of Sussex and is “sincerely sorry”.

What was its first clue?

I still don’t see why the editor or editors didn’t read it the first time and say “Ffs he can’t say that” and simply take it out. Even if you think Markle is scheming and manipulative and fake, you don’t get to say poisonous degrading things about her in a much-read tabloid.

Neil Wallis, media commentator and former editor at the Sun and News Of The World, told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme Clarkson was failed by the editorial team.

“The bottom line of this is this is a dreadful failure of editing,” he said.

It is. I was an editor for The Philosophers’ Magazine for several years and I can promise you a sentence like that would have made my hair stand on end. If it had been between quotation marks as an example of hate speech that would be a different matter, but Clarkson wasn’t offering a paradigm, he was venting his very own loathing and contempt. Any competent editor would take it out.

He added: “At at least three points it seems to me there were opportunities for people in senior responsible positions for putting their hand up and saying ‘we can’t publish this, this is just wrong’. The job of being an editor is to sometimes protect a columnist from themselves.”

It always is. An editor protects a columnist from typos, bad grammar, misspellings, rambling, incoherence, clumsy wording, verbosity – the list is endless.

I doubt the sincerity of the Sun’s apology.

Some responses to the ACLU’s triumph in Connecticut:

He’s right you know. This will work for them only if it doesn’t become universal. If all the men and boys start doing it they’ll be right back where they started, competing against men without any unfair advantage. Meanwhile women’s sports will have ceased to exist.

1. (Aaron Walker [↩]

It never ceases to amaze, the smugness, the shy self-flattery, the absolute indifference to the concerns and rights of women.

He will be (and was) proud to vote to take rights away from women and hand them over to men. What a thing to be proud of.

He starts from the position that, as a socialist, he believes in equality. What does equality have to do with pretending that some men are women? What does it have to do with ignoring all the women who object?

“Trans people are among the most discriminated against,” he sermonizes, while ignoring the fact that women are at least as “discriminated against” as men who call themselves women. Those men will never be forced to keep a pregnancy they don’t want or to give birth when they don’t want to; they will never be charged with a crime for having a miscarriage, or need to travel hundreds of miles to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Of course “trans rights are human rights,” because trans people are human, so they have human rights – but if he means new and peculiar “rights” like forcing everyone to agree they are women: those are not genuine rights.

He says he would never support anything that he believes would deny or undermine women’s rights…but it’s not his call, is it. Our rights are not his to give away, are they. He doesn’t give a shit, but he does want everyone to think he does. What courage.

What utter morons.

“Historic day for equality” – what’s it got to do with equality????

Not one thing. It’s not equality to get governments to affirm that you are something you’re not. If a small segment of people decided to start identifying as bears it wouldn’t be “equality” for the government to pass a law saying those people really truly are bears. It would be ridiculous, embarrassing, baffling, weird, incomprehensible, but not For Equality.

If a small segment of bears decided to start identifying as people it wouldn’t be “equality” for the government to pass a law saying everyone has to welcome the bears and give them all the rights and privileges that people have.

It’s not “equality” for governments to try to force women to pretend men are women just as women are, and thus never a threat to women or obstacles to women’s rights or cheaters in women’s sports.

Governments trying to coerce people into pretending to believe other people’s fantasies about themselves has nothing what so ever to do with equality.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Working with.

WAIT!

WE NEED A LOGO!

It’s gotta fit into a corner of our poster-like images. We could use it on our letterhead, if we ever bothered to commit anything to paper. Or pay for postage. Our logo has to be something convincing enough to make people think we’re more authentic and bigger than we really are boldly dynamic, engagingly synergystic, with exponentially mobilized potential to leverage strategic, global-stakeholder partnerships. Something Institutional. Without one, how will anyone be able to tell our Official Institute Communications from those of some ersatz, wannabe “Institute” that’s just somene else with a laptop? We have to have some way for our marks supporters to be able to distinguish OUR laptop from everyone else’s, so that the money reaches our hot little hands this most worthy of causes.

Do we design the logo in-house, or farm it out and write it off as an expense? (If one of us happened to become a “Graphic Design Company” we could do both at the same time! Which reminds me, we’ll need a book-keeper. Ethical standards Hours flexible.)

There should be a committee. Maybe a “Standing Committee” or an “Ad Hoc Committee,” whichever one sounds like it would be something you’d find in an Institute. (We could form a Committee to look at the use of committees by other Institutes. Just so we follow standard Institututional Committee Practice.) Once that Committee reaches its conclusion, we can use those findings to form the Logo Design and Approval Committee.

T-shirts. There have to be T-shirts. (Or at least pictures of T-shirts (or pictures of a T-shirt mock-up.)) Until an Official Logo is designed and approved, we could use a Provisional Logo for the T-shirts, so everybody knows we’re a Real Institute, (or soon will be) that means business. And has T-shirts. (Or at least pictures of T-shirts. (Or pictures of T-shirt mock-ups.))

Originally a comment by John Wasson on Chiseling away.

Loss of glaciers and sea ice means less sunlight is reflected.

As glaciers grind over ground they free up mercury in rocks and 42 tonnes may be released from south-west Greenland ice sheet. Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/s4a561-021-99753-w

New Scientist May 29 2021 p. 21

As the world warms and the Greenland ice sheet melts, its fresh cold water is expected to slow down a dominant conveyor belt of ocean currents: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). An AMOC collapse would leave an excess of heat in the tropical South Atlantic, which would trigger a series of air-pressure changes that ultimately strengthen the Pacific trade winds.

The good news is that Greenland will somewhat rebound with the loss of weight of the glacier which would decrease the increase in sea level.

“There’s a plan to save Greenland glacier” (New Scientist, Oct. 29 2022, p. 8) by constructing a physical barrier of heavy, premade concrete foundations to slow the ingress of relatively warm water at the base of the glacier which would take 30 years to complete and do nothing to slow surface melting by warmer atmosphere. Geoengineering on this scale is unlikely to materialise any time soon. A green revolution for the necessary reduction in fossil fuel use must continue. (Poul Christoff, U of Cambridge).

When news outlets and dictionaries lie:

Fact Check-Cambridge Dictionary expanded, not replaced its definition of “woman”

When it comes to definitions, expansion can be replacement. If you expand the definition of “apple” to include bananas, cherries, apricots, papayas, and tangerines, it’s no longer a definition of “apple.”

The Cambridge Dictionary updated its definition of the word “woman” to include a further definition that includes transgender women. However, social media users sharing the new definition mistakenly claim the dictionary replaced existing definitions of “woman” with the description.

See above. If you “expand” the definition of “woman” to include “trans woman” then the definition is no longer a definition of “woman”; you have replaced it. The social media users were not mistaken. Reuters is mistaken, the Cambridge Dictionary is mistaken.

Just depressing. Adult human female mocking adult human females who don’t believe in magic gender. Adult human female who is a Lib Dem councillor mocking adult human females who don’t believe in magic gender.

Hur hur, so funny. Why won’t women just shut up and wave all their rights goodbye?

Bray is a councillor in Wokingham, and that’s not even a joke – it’s a real town, 7 miles from Reading.

On a more cheerful note – South Ken Natural History Museum T rex gets Xmas jumper:

The animatronic T.rex is sporting the festive knit, which has been made by a family-run firm in Leicester.

British Christmas Jumpers has previously produced sweaters for Ed Sheeran and the Houses of Parliament.

Director Snahal Patel said the latest design was the company’s biggest job yet and took staff 100 hours to complete.