Oliver Brown at the Telegraph talks to a woman who had to race against “Lia” Thomas:

The day after she watched Thomas – who until starting hormone therapy was ranked a mere 554th as a man – vanquish every female rival in the country, she found that they would be direct competitors in the 200-yard freestyle final. They finished, ultimately, in a dead heat for fifth. 

Except, only Thomas was allowed to hold the fifth-place trophy, with Gaines told by an official that it was “for photo purposes”. She would need, she was told, to make do with the award for sixth.

They both won the fifth place but she was ordered to take sixth. Insult to injury.

Thomas became emblematic of many sports’ efforts, in defiance of compelling scientific literature, to incorporate trans athletes into the female category. Here was a swimmer who carried all the cardiovascular advantages of male puberty, but who could, with a short course of testosterone suppression, compete against women at the highest levels in America. 

Cardiovascular advantages along with all the other advantages. Lists of them are easy to find. Bones, muscles, body structure.

Gaines was an extreme rarity in that she was prepared to put a name to her concerns. 

“Women are intimidated by their universities,” she says. “They’re told that they will never get into graduate school, that they will never get a job. The women are emotionally blackmailed, told that if trans athletes emotionally harm themselves after someone speaking out, then they are solely responsible. It’s a lot to put on 18- to 22-year-olds.”

It’s especially a lot to put on 18- to 22-year-olds when it’s so grossly and obviously unfair.

They weren’t even warned about having Thomas getting naked in their locker room.

“We were not forewarned about Thomas sharing our space. That’s absolute insanity to me. All of a sudden, the place goes silent and there’s a 6ft 4in biological male towering over everyone else, starting to undress. You feel this sense of total discomfort. It was the most bizarre experience. I walked out of there thinking, ‘Am I missing something? Why are people in authority not talking about how this is wrong?’”

We’re not the ones who are missing something.

Arrgghh.

Current numbers:

Frisch: 155,579

Boebert: 155,506

Arrgghh.

Update: it seems the remaining ballots are from Frisch-leaning counties. Hoping! I long to see her return to obscurity.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Donors are disgusted.

but the new bit is thinking feminism and anti-racism didn’t work that way, why is that? Well why is that? Because fragile is the last thing we want to be or appear to be or claim to be. It’s degrading. It pulls against equality and ordinary inclusion in public life. So…why is it so appealing to “the trans community”? Why do we hear so very very much about it?

I think part of it that campaigns against sexism and racism were eager to argue their position, to have the opportunity to present the facts of the matter to the court of public opinion, to win hearts and minds in order to win the rights that women and African Americans had been denied. Both movements were struggles for justice. Trans activism wants to skip the whole making their case bit and move right on to getting what they want. They want what they want handed to them without discussion or debate because their demands, and the justification for them, would not survive the encounter with reality. That’s why we are never told what trans “rights” are; what is it that they are being denied? What is the injustice they are fighting? A good argument might win them more support, but they don’t have any good arguments; their demands are not for rights but for privileges. They’re not being exploited or abused. In Western society, they have the same basic rights as everyone else. And that’s a problem. What they want is more. They want more cookies and ice cream and television. Quick, give them what they want before they faint dead away or kill themselves!.

These days, EVERYONE is fragile. I am urged to say and do nothing in my classes that might offend or hurt any group of people, including trans, LGB, veterans, youth, climate change deniers, farmers…the list goes on and on.

Strange, given that “trigger warnings” were originally intended as WARNINGS about WHAT IS GOING TO BE TALKED ABOUT, and that prospective audience members should join in or stay away as they deemed appropriate for themselves. Like warnings about physical effects like smoke, strobe lights, gunshots etc. posted at theatres as a courtesy to those who might be adversely affected. These were warnings to NOT COME IN if you were prone to such negative reactions. Other warnings covering coarse language, nudity were, similarly, warnings to STAY AWAY if you were at risk of having your sensibilities offended. Now the warnings are going in the other direction, speakers themselves are to STAY AWAY from “offensive” material, at the risk of being shut down, fired, whatever.

Playing the easily triggered snowflake is a way of objecting to the presentation of information you object to without having to show why it’s wrong. Being told you are “hurtful” by someone is harder to argue against than being told you are “factually incorrect.” How can you argue against someone’s feelings?. You can’t. And that’s the point. Being accused of hatefulness puts you on the defensive. Claiming hurt is less work than having to argue your points, especially when you have no argument. Used in this way, it’s the rhetorical equivalent of stamping your foot, or holding your breath until you turn blue. Apparently too many adults are flummoxed when confronted with another adult engaging in this behaviour. They’re all too ready to hand over the cookies, ice cream and TV, along with the rights to safety and dignity of half the human population: women. Mustn’t argue; mustn’t offend.

The general idea seems to be that “hurt feelings”, “offense” etc. become especially worthy of sympathy and respect when coming from people who otherwise threaten to make your life Hell at best, and end it at worst.

Indeed. And feigning weakness and claiming to be the aggrieved party is good camouflage for the underlying threat if demands are not met. It also helps hide the fact that these demands are themselves offensive, intrusive, and illiberal. In the finest DARVO tradition, attacks (verbal or otherwise) on opponents can be presented as “self-defence.” The whole “marginalized community” bit lets those claiming “marginalization” to get away with a lot. It appeals to, and exploits, traditions of not exploiting the weak and vulnerable, of fairness, “sportsmanship”, and not “kicking a man while he’s down.” To oppose or question anything they want is deemed churlish and mean-spirited, when their own actions are churlish and mean-spirited to start with. Here we have a group that is exploiting the idea of weakness and vulnerability itself. Not a bad bit of jujutsu for a group consisting largely of straight, white males, one of the least weak and vulnerable “communities” on Earth.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Donors are disgusted.

VanitysFiend wrote:

The idea that the religious, be they liberal or conservative, deserved to be treated with kid gloves, and people like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris etc were being highly disrespectful when they called religious beliefs silly, wrong, or worst of all, bad. The idea that the mainstream progressive liberal left would move on from defending conservative Islam to something like Transgenderism isn’t that far fetched to me, what’s bizarre is that the sceptics and atheists followed them on this.

I used to call that the “Little People Argument “ — that being skeptical and honest was a position of power and that the religious were little people, not big people like us. They can’t handle the truth. They need comfort more. They can’t figure out how to be moral. That’s why we shouldn’t make rational arguments meant to persuade. The New Atheists jeered at this Accomodationism because we saw religion as power. But I noticed that enthusiasm for “Draw Mohammed Day” started waning when expecting Muslims to act like adults became increasingly associated with conservative views. Atheists who’ve primarily gotten into activism because they see it as a progressive social justice position are sometimes less wedded to epistemic integrity, I think. Prominent New Atheists started becoming charged with Islamophobia by other New Atheists who thus left the movement.

Back in the 80’s and 90’s rationalists started complaining about what was called Therapeutic Culture, a growing interest in getting therapy, giving therapy, recommending therapy, and applying therapeutic principles to everyday life. What in reasonable doses would be a good thing quickly started spiraling out of control, till resilience became identified with privilege. Wendy Kaminer’s 1992 I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: the Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions was a favorite with skeptics. If we’re looking for the roots of the “fragility as virtue” meme, Therapeutic Culture is probably one of them.

Robert Reich points out that it’s a bad idea to let raging narcissists have a lot of power.

Like Donald Trump and Elon Musk for example.

First is Elon Musk, who last Friday fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, including teams devoted to combating election misinformation – and did it so haphazardly and arbitrarily that most had no idea they were fired until their email accounts were shut off.

This was after he fired Twitter’s executives to avoid paying them the golden parachutes they’re owed. And after posting an article suggesting without evidence that Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was in a drunken fight with a male prostitute.

Attention: the fox is inside the chicken coop.

But this has been his MO all along.

Taunting opponents. Treating employees like dung. Bullying adversaries. Demeaning critics. Craving attention. Refusing to be held accountable. Attracting millions of followers and gaining cult status. Spreading misleading information. Making gobs of money.

Impetuous. Unpredictable. Ruthless. Autocratic. Vindictive.

I don’t know anything about any of this because I’ve never paid attention to Elon Musk. I have no idea how he made those gobs of money – I know it’s to do with a car, but why that one car=richest guy in the known universe I have no idea (and don’t care).

Reich says he’s not Trump 2 but he is all too similar.

But both represent the emergence of a particularly American personality in the early decades of the 21st century: the wildly disruptive narcissist.

That’s unfortunate, because narcissists are horrible even if they’re not wildly disruptive. Why are they? Because they’re focused on self. That’s never a good thing. Self is small and the world is big – there are far more important things to focus on than self. Self just doesn’t matter that much. It matters; we wouldn’t be able to survive and get something done with no sense of self; but it doesn’t matter that much. And another thing about it of course is that it doesn’t matter to anyone else as much as it matters to its owner. Self always looms large and that’s a distortion that we have to learn to correct for. I don’t suppose we can correct completely, but we can do better than the trumps and musks of the world.

Both wield sledgehammers to protect their fragile egos. Both are utterly lacking in empathy. Both push baseless conspiracy theories (such as the one cooked up about Paul Pelosi).

Zero empathy is a weird spectacle. I wish we hadn’t been forced to spectate so much of it over the past seven years.

This is what I mean. They meet, they say words, they wring their hands, but they’re not going to do anything. They’re locked into it. They take private jets to conferences to talk about climate change.

Data from FlightRadar24 shows 36 private jets landed at Sharm el-Sheikh between 4 and 6 November, the start of the summit.

A further 64 flew into Cairo, 24 of which had come from Sharm el-Sheikh.

The COP27 website says delegates should use either airport.

…

Flights produce greenhouse gases – mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) – from burning fuel. These contribute to global warming.

Emissions per kilometre travelled are significantly worse than any other form of transport.

Locked in.

Trump “warns” DeSantis not to compete with him.

Donald Trump has warned Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis against running for president in 2024, saying doing so would harm the Republican Party.

Which of course is code for would harm Donald Trump. Dump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican party, it’s himself he cares about.

He also threatened to release unflattering information about the 44-year-old, without providing details.

Speaking of unflattering information, Don…we have some on you. How much time do you have?

He told US network Fox News that the Florida governor should stay out of the race.

“I don’t know if he is running. I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly. I really believe he could hurt himself badly,” Mr Trump said. “I don’t think it would be good for the party.”

He says everything twice, says everything twice.

By “hurt himself” of course he means he, Dump, would hurt him in any way he could. Adding that he doesn’t think it would be good for the party is sheer camouflage. Again: he doesn’t care about the party, he cares about his precious self.

The elections haven’t been the bloodbath that was predicted.

It’s not that there were no disappointments. There were some painful losses for Democrats: the odious Peter Thiel acolyte JD Vance has won a Senate seat in Ohio; candidates that perennially capture the imagination and hope of national democrats, like Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams, lost.

Beto O’Rourke doesn’t capture my imagination, but losing Stacey Abrams is a bitter pill.

The much-watched state of Georgia provided perhaps the most embarrassing result for Trump: Brian Kemp, the candidate he campaigned hardest against, was comfortably re-elected governor, while Herschel Walker, his hand-picked Senate candidate, polled almost 5% behind Kemp and is probably facing a highly uncertain runoff against Raphael Warnock.

I hope Trump is lurching around Maralago screaming and throwing things and breaking windows.

The Guardian reports on the LGB Alliance hearing:

The creation of LGB Alliance has promoted constructive debate on “difficult and problematic issues” of sex and gender, the Charity Commission told a court on Monday, during final arguments over whether the gay rights group should have been given charitable status.

…

Mermaids, which supports transgender, non-binary and gender diverse children and their families, launched an appeal last year against the Charity Commission’s grant of charitable status to LGB Alliance. Mermaids has argued that the group was set up to lobby the government to restrict legal rights afforded to transgender people.

And to non-binary people and gender diverse children. Let’s make sure to get all the adjectives in every time, even if they do all mean pretty much the same thing.

Summing up, Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, said LGB Alliance’s “worldview and objectives are based on conflict and confrontation. This makes its approach fundamentally unpleasant, aggressive and corrosive of public discourse.”

What an absolutely idiotic thing to say. You could say that about Doctors Without Borders or anti-war groups or let’s not destroy the climate groups or any groups with a purpose. You could say it about anti-racism movements and feminist movements – you could say it about anything other than sitting still and saying nothing.

He said LGB Alliance had repeatedly described Mermaids in derogatory terms, accusing the charity of promoting a “gender identity ideology”, of inappropriately medicalising children, “of child abuse, basically”, and of having homophobic views.

Yes, and? Are they supposed to lie?

Steele set out the law on the granting of charitable status, assessing whether or not the purposes of LGB Alliance were “exclusively charitable” and “for the public benefit”.

“An institution whose purpose is to promote the rights and fair treatment of lesbian, gay and bisexual people will be acting for charitable purposes,” he said. “The issue is whether LGB Alliance was actually established to pursue the pro LGB purposes it set out or whether it really has anti trans purposes.”

“Anti trans” is ambiguous. There are trans people (people who call themselves trans), and then there is trans ideology. One can dispute the ideology without being “anti” trans people.

Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on Donors are disgusted.

Because fragile is the last thing we want to be or appear to be or claim to be. It’s degrading. It pulls against equality and ordinary inclusion in public life. So…why is it so appealing to “the trans community”? Why do we hear so very very much about it?

They need the argumentum ad misericordiam. Their movement relies on it to garner support. Why are we subjected to a “Trans Day of Remembrance,” when it’s easy to demonstrate that trans people aren’t any more likely to be murdered than anybody else? Why are gender critics constantly told we’re responsible for trans suicide and violence against “the trans community”?

It’s a rhetorical trick that’s very useful when your argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Appeal to pity. OK, so, maybe, no matter how hard you try, you can’t make yourself really really believe that Rachel Levine is a woman. It doesn’t matter, don’t you see? It’s so hard, being trans, so dangerous, a lot of Bad People are hurting them–but you’re not a Bad Person, right? You’re a compassionate person who doesn’t want people to suffer. So, use the pronouns. (They’re just words, and it means so much.) Be inclusive. (There aren’t really that many trans people anyway, what difference does it make in the scheme of things?) Just BE KIND. (It’s easy!)

But remember, being trans has nothing to do with mental illness. “The trans community” wouldn’t be so fragile if the Bad People would just stop hurting them. It’s called minority stress. (I keep meaning to look up minority stress; I don’t recall any other liberation movement appealing to it. But there I go, thinking with my head instead of my heart, like a Bad Person.)

Pippa Rogerson still dealing with blowback from her venomous attack on Helen Joyce:

Prof Rogerson joined Dr Andrew Spencer, the college’s senior tutor, in vowing to boycott the talk. They emailed all of the students  stating Ms Joyce’s views were “offensive, insulting and hateful to members of our community who live and work here”.

…

The intervention by the college chiefs – before Ms Joyce spoke – led to donors telling The Telegraph they were “embarrassed, appalled and absolutely disgusted” and would not give any more without a retraction and apology.

Pardon me while I interrupt myself for a moment, because an idea about this has occurred to me. It’s about fragility, in particular fragility used as a cudgel. As I read what Spencer and Rogerson said, again, I wondered for the millionth time why there’s so much heavy breathing about offensive insulting n hateful in connection with this one set of people (aka “community”) when there never has been for other oppressed sets of people. Why are trans people talked about as if they were made of crystal or bone china? Why is it all so maudlin, why does it all depend so heavily on fragility? Millionth time, as I said, but the new bit is thinking feminism and anti-racism didn’t work that way, why is that? Well why is that? Because fragile is the last thing we want to be or appear to be or claim to be. It’s degrading. It pulls against equality and ordinary inclusion in public life. So…why is it so appealing to “the trans community”? Why do we hear so very very much about it?

I don’t know. I’d love to know. Is it for a kind of gotcha? Men are stronger than women therefore haha we’ll punish those pesky feminists by pretending men are more fragile?

End of interruption.

But in her letter, Prof Rogerson refused to apologise, instead telling alumni “we expressed our personal opinions – as is our right”.

Nonsense. They weren’t purely personal opinions, they were opinions in their roles at Cambridge University. They used their roles at Cambridge to get their opinions heard. They used their roles at Cambridge to bully and demonize Helen Joyce.

She said a cancellation of the event was not considered and “free speech is fundamental”, but added pointedly: “I hope it is possible for reasonable people to disagree and that freedom of expression is available to everyone, including me.”

Including freedom to use her Cambridge position to cast aspersions on a guest speaker? That’s not so much freedom as it is an abuse of power.

Dear Billy Bragg, still telling women what to do.

Blimey.

Academics have demanded an apology from the London School of Economics (LSE) over what it claims is a “hostile environment” for students and staff with gender-critical views.

A group of leading scholars have written an open letter condemning an “ideological cabal” at the Russell Group university’s gender studies department – the largest in the UK.

The letter was sent from academics from the Open University Gender Critical Research Network (OUGCRN). The group brings together a range of academics and scholars who share a common interest “in exploring how sexed bodies come to matter in their respective research fields”.  The network also shares a “commitment to ensuring that a space within academia is kept open for rigorous exploration of issues of sex and gender”.

Come with me back back back in time, to when a preceding open letter was sent around, calling the OUGCRN all kinds of names:

An open letter with over 350 signatures from staff and postgraduate research students at the Open University (OU) has been circulated in protest at the formation of a new Gender Critical Research Network. Tens of thousands more from across the UK academy have added their support online.

The gender critical research network, officially listed under the OU’s special interest research groups, claims to be bringing together a range of scholars to ‘critique the constraining influences of gender’ and ‘foster evidence-based and rigorous research’. This should mean scholarship that explores gender-variance and looks to recent research and developments, but instead the Network’s interpretation favours narrow interpretations of gender and disregards the medical evidence for gender-affirming care.

However, those condemning the group have highlighted that its gender critical founding members are all well-known for sharing views that negatively impact rights for trans and non-binary people.

Well, no. Its founding members are all well known for being bullied and lied about and libeled by people like the ones who wrote that bilge.

Back to the Telegraph:

Shortly after [the launch of OUGCRN], a row flared when an excoriating “statement of solidarity with Open University staff” appeared on LSE’s website, signed as the entire gender studies department, claiming the network caused an “antagonistic environment”.

There was a backlash, the statement was removed, LSE bosses investigated.

The public “denunciation” claimed the network was “an explicitly anti-intellectual attack on Gender Studies, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and inclusive, intersectional feminist politics”.

The good kind of feminist politics, the kind that puts men first.

The letter purportedly on behalf of the LSE department said that gender-critical views – that biological sex cannot be changed – “undermine trans rights” and “relies on and invests in racist, colonial understandings of sex/gender”.

Quick, somebody call the math department to get help with the decolonization.

But guess what. The fella who coordinated that letter is none other than Jacob Breslow.

Jacob Breslow – who, emails show, coordinated the statement as a senior leader in the department – is now under investigation by LSE after he allegedly gave a presentation in 2011 to the US-based B4U-ACT group when he was a graduate student at LSE.

It’s almost as if the gender revolutionaries hate women because women get in the way of their…hobbies.

The group calls for paedophiles to have the right to live “in truth and dignity”. Mr Breslow, an associate professor of gender and sexuality, quit as a trustee of the children’s trans charity Mermaids after the claims last month.

It prompted the OUGCRN to write last week to Baroness Minouche Shafik, director of LSE, claiming the department “appears not to uphold the values of science, debate, academic freedom and scholarship which most LSE academics hold dear”.

The OUGCRN includes Prof Kathleen Stock, the [philosopher] who quit Sussex University in a trans row, Prof Alice Sullivan, a sociology lecturer at UCL, as well as Prof Jo Phoenix and Prof Rosa Freedman, both criminologists at the University of Reading.

Scary feminist women who aren’t in solidarity with men who want to rape children.

Biologist Luana Maroja on An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science:

The restriction of academic freedom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research.

Let’s start with teaching. I need to emphasize that this is not hypothetical. The censorious, fearful climate is already affecting the content of what we teach.

One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 million times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary. 

But in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes—not gender, sex—are on a continuum. At least one college I know teaches with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two distinct and discrete sexes. 

In biology 101???

That’s insane.

Even medical schools and the Society for the Study of Evolution have issued statements suggesting that sexes are on a “continuum.” If this were true, the entire field of sexual selection would be baseless, as its bedrock insight lies in the much larger female investment in reproduction, explaining the demonstrated choosiness in females (who have more to lose) and competitiveness in males (the “abundant” sex in most species, one male can fertilize multiple females). Published papers (see here, for example) ask us to be “inclusive” by limiting the sex discussion to the few species of algae and protists (such as amoebas) that have equal size gametes—even when that has no relevance to any animal or vascular plant. 

Hmm. Maybe if we campaigned hard enough we could change the rules – make it so that the sexes really are on a continuum. Worth a try, don’t you think? And screwing up biology teaching forever?

Society of Authors boffin continuing to win friends and admiration.

Times Higher Ed reports:

Mathematics degrees in the UK are being “unnecessarily politicised” because of expectations that lecturers decolonise the curriculum, leading academics claim.

Decolonize math? I can see decolonizing a lot of things, but math?

A letter shared with Times Higher Education accuses the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) of trying to mandate a “narrowly skewed perspective on the history of mathematics” via its new subject benchmark instead of giving academics the freedom to design courses as they see fit.

Are we talking the history of math, or math itself? I can see decolonizing the first, but not the second.

The benchmark statement for mathematics, statistics and operational research (MSOR) – a document intended to establish a common understanding of what students can expect from a UK degree in this area – has grown by 50 per cent since 2019 to include sections on equality, diversity, accessibility and inclusion as well as sustainability and employment.

Equality AND diversity AND inclusion. Couldn’t they bundle all three and save some space?

The proposed guidance – which has been put out for consultation – states that “the curriculum should present a multicultural and decolonised view of MSOR, informed by the student voice”.

It adds that students “should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the MSOR content they are being taught”, listing examples such as how some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, and mathematicians’ connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism.

Oh ffs. That’s just stupid. It’s crude, it’s childish, it’s a category mistake.

And while decolonisation might have some relevance when teaching the history of mathematics, it has little bearing on other areas of the curriculum, the letter argues.

What I’m saying. It’s meta. You can do a course on meta-math, an intellectual history type of class, and then who was or wasn’t racist could be of interest, but other than that – don’t be silly.

It’s like taking on a house maintenance project and before getting to that leak around the window taking a few years to investigate the views of glassmakers.

“We struggle to imagine what it would mean to decolonise, for example, a course on the geometry of surfaces. For the most part, the concept of decolonisation is irrelevant to university mathematics, and our students know this. If we engage in obviously tokenistic anti-racism efforts we will simply be sending a signal that we do not take racism seriously,” they write.

And/or that they think their students are all lunatics.

“These things may be very virtuous and interesting, but they are not mathematics, they are not our expertise; and mathematicians really want to talk to our students about the mathematics that fascinates them,” [Dr Armstrong] added.

A QAA spokeswoman said the benchmark statement was created by an expert advisory group “to ensure the resulting documents will be of current value to the discipline communities”.

There’s your problem right there. Stop thinking of everything in terms of “communities” and you’ll avoid a lot of this bedwetting nonsense.

This is revolting.

I can find only three women, stuck way off in a back corner. One is the Italian PM according to a reply.

The net tightens.

Writers in Scotland have warned that a code of conduct imposed by a national book charity threatens to infringe on the free speech of authors and poets who disagree with “gender identity theory”.

The Scottish Book Trust sent the code to 600 writers on its Live Literature register, advising that they must sign up in order to keep their listing. Inclusion on the register is essential for writers, poets and spoken-word artists who want to earn a living from public events in schools and libraries.

It’s a new version of the code, and it includes the threat that the trust “will not tolerate bigotry and transphobia.” Since the censorious word “transphobia” can mean simply saying men are not women, the Scottish Book Trust is basically excluding women for the sake of men who call themselves women.

The trust is a national charity whose mission is to promote literature, reading and writing. Its income for 2020-21 was £4.8 million, 86 per cent of which came from the Scottish government. Critics of the trust fear it is toeing the government line.

…

The row comes as the SNP-Green reform of the Gender Recognition Act makes its way through parliament. Supporters say it will simplify the process of gender recognition but opponents say it “rides roughshod over the rights of women and girls”.

It has become all too clear that you can’t “simplify the process of gender recognition” without destroying the rights of women and girls.

Another entry for the Encyclopedia of Pointless Groveling: The Jam Jar Bristol posts an apology to The Trans Communinny on Facebook and then issues a second apology a week later saying the first one wasn’t groveling enough.

The Jam Jar is “an independent arts venue.” What they’re apologizing for is that time a bunch of trans activists bullied and threatened a group of non-submissive feminist women, blocking them on a staircase and screaming in their faces.

The first apology starts with this:

We apologise for how long it has taken us to publicly address the concerns of the Trans community regarding an event in April 2018 organised by a group with controversial views. The panel discussed issues affecting trans people, some of these views were hurtful for the trans community. This occurred due to a poor understanding of the issues faced by these communities and bad management structures at the time. Whilst much has changed at The Jam Jar in recent years, we acknowledge the harm caused by this event. We have since done our best to identify how we might heal this relationship and recognize a written statement is necessary.

It goes on with Core Values, all are welcome, communities, diverse audiences, Safer Space Policy. Nothing about women or feminists of course, no reaching out or apologizing to them, only “the trans community.”

But that wasn’t good enough. They felt they had to crawl even lower so they apologized for the apology.

We would like to follow up from our post last week. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback. We appreciate that the post was not framed correctly and did not go far enough to address people’s concerns. Nor did it properly demonstrate what actions we have taken to rectify the damage done by the occurrence of an Event in April 2018 organized by ‘We Need to Talk’. The Jam Jar’s involvement in this event and how it was dealt with was incredibly distressing for the Trans Community & their allies, causing a huge degree of harm to an already marginalised group. Understandably some have since felt unsafe or chosen not to attend the venue.

Still not a word about any distress for the Women Community and their allies, of course.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Updating”.

…but the general public are not at all informed about the issues.

And if they rely on mainstream media to inform them, good luck with that. Their style guides and codes of conduct are preventing them from reporting honestly.

Asked “do you support giving trans people rights?” they say yes, of course. Asked “should biological men who claim to be women compete in female sports, use female changing rooms, have open access to women’s refuges?” they say no, don’t be daft.

Showing the importance of framing what little debate there is, and clarity of language. If the media manage to wake up and smell the lipstick, and start doing their job properly, we might get an informed discussion that doesn’t result in women getting robbed.

How a group like midwives get captured like this bewilders me.

Maybe it’s a generational thing? Can anyone be that scared of the whole “wrong side of history” bullshit? They can’t see that expunging “mother” from midwifery guarantees that that’s the side of history they’ll be on? Women have had to fight for their health care since forever; for an organization supposedly dedicated to the most woman-centered form of health care it’s possible to have to succumb to this is mindboggling.

It’s long since past the point where I see this sort of thing as benign or well-meaning, for the sake of being “inclusive.” It’s possible to be inclusive without obliterating the word “woman.” Add a clause or two onto what you’ve already got written down. Erasing “woman” or “mother” is not being “inclusive” it is supplanting. Replacing. It excludes and disappears most of their clientelle. The move to erase rather than add to shows me that the erasure itself is the point of the excersize.

To be that concerned about triggering the tiny number of trans identified females WHO ARE PREGNANT with the word “woman” is too much of a stretch. You’d think the PREGNANCY itself would be a hell of a lot more triggering than a word or two. If it is that disturbing, then maybe they’re really not cut out to be a parent at all.