Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on He was made to feel uncomfortable.

Anyway, we don’t know what was actually said at that party, and it’s entirely possible that something transphobic or otherwise shitty was said. But I am not inclined to take that assertion at face value, especially given the lack of specifics.

I wonder what this “transphobia” consisted of. They never say.

Failure to affirm the lie demanded of those around him? Disagreement on what constitutes a “transphobic issue?” More likely a case of perceived lèse-majesté than anything actually “phobic.” Refusal to bow down and kiss the ring. Their feelings of discomfort are always entirely justified and sacrosanct. But what of the feelings of everyone else? They count for nothing. Only The Trans Feelings are legitimate and honourable, and woe betide anyone who dares cause Offence. Everyone else is seen as but a supporting player or mere prop in the Never Ending Me Me Me Story. It seems to come as quite a shock when other people express contrary opinions that suggest an unwillingness to play the assigned role of Beatifically Validating Bystander #3. In the words of Magdalen Berns, “I’d rather be rude than a fucking liar.” Well, I think the tide is slowly turning. Expect more rudeness.

The hyperbolic threat inflation of the language used to describe the constant micro, nanno and non-aggression to which TiMs claim to be subjected is just going to blow up in their faces. When misgendering is genocidal ideation, and you use the nuclear option at the raising of an eyebrow, what do you have left to describe and respond to actual threats and bigotry? The combination of bullying and crying wolf, along with the debasement and devaluation of the vocabulary that used to be reserved to describe actual, serious incidents will only reduce sympathy and concern outside of the emotional support bubble willing to jump at your every word.

At some point you might need the help and support of many of the people you’ve been busily demonizing. Like women. After what you’ve done to them, why would they want to help you? It didn’t have to be that way, but it’s the way it is almost entirely because of you. And you will use the same emotional blackmail, threats and cajoling you’ve always used if the cynical appeals to the self-abnegation inculcated in traditional female socialization fail to give you what you demand. Again. Because there will always be more demands. Because of the ultimate untruth, futility, and unattainability of the “womanhood” you claim for yourself and the recognition of which you try to extract from everyone else. The forced compliance of the whole world will never be enough for the endlessly gnawing, insatiable, emptyness inside you will that you never be able to fill. You might think this hole is woman-shaped, that you can patch it up with play acting, but you can’t and you won’t. It’s just you. You’d better get used to it. Words may affirm, but Reality will only ever deny you, as you are demanding something you can never have, something you can never be.

Victoria Smith on women the contaminants:

Should universities — hallowed places of learning, temples of the mind — allow themselves to be contaminated by the presence of females? What if their passive, bovine intellects were to slow the lively exchange of ideas? What if their inferior morals should poison the purity of free enquiry? What if, God forbid, they were to menstruate all over the books?

It sounds satirical but that is in fact how women have been seen since forever, and still are, more than is generally admitted. Menstrual huts may be Way Over There somewhere but the thinking behind them isn’t entirely distant. Terf=cunt=slut=filth.

In a report compiled by lawyers and academics at Garden Court Chambers and the University of Essex, it’s been found that certain groups have been making a nuisance of themselves by organising on the basis of — urgh! — being female. This is bad not just because a female-centric event might cause distress to attendees expecting something more pleasantly penis-focused. “The hosting of an unwanted event,” the report notes, “would contaminate student life for hundreds if not thousands of people.”

Hundreds, if not thousands! This is because “the distress would be felt in the contamination of a part of the University which holds a particular emotional value to certain staff and students”. Such people might have to face the trauma of going somewhere, knowing that female people once stood there centring femaleness, minus the purifying presence of someone male. 

In other words the writers of the report meant it figuratively – the “contamination”would be emotional as opposed to literal and physical – but they also blithely or maliciously ignored the long history, which is not over yet, of women being treated as literal contaminants. They deliberately invoked emotions of disgust, which are emotions that inspire people to do very bad things. Remember the yellow star? That was a kind of plague-warning, a portable quarantine system – an invoker of disgust and loathing. The writers of the report were playing with a similar kind of fire. It’s unbelievably sinister and shocking.

They may be reminded of Leviticus 15:20: “Everything [a woman] lies on during her impurity shall be unclean; also everything that she sits on shall be unclean.” Or perhaps Saint Clement of Alexandria: “For women, the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.”

It does, yeah. It does, and it was meant to.

This trend towards contamination is not confined to higher education. On the contrary, a recent article by Jennifer Horgan in the Irish Examiner decries the flourishing of “dirty” feminism. By this, she means a feminism that prioritises the class of people once known as “the Devil’s gateway”. In its place, she advises, is needed “true feminism, the non-dirty kind”, which naturally includes the class of people who aren’t so impure and defective. 

In arguing this, I suspect Horgan genuinely believes she is just “being inclusive”. To her and others, it may seem coincidental that the language of dirt, contamination and stigma just so happens to be directed at women who seek out spaces in which to centre female bodies and lives. Shame at femaleness can be so deeply ingrained that fighting against those who embrace it can become its own moral crusade. It does not surprise me that for many women, an anti-female feminism feels purer and neater than the messy, leaky, corporeally-bound alternative. 

It’s a funny thing, because we’re all products of those messy leaky bodies, but we’re not grateful to them. We want to be the children of stars or diamonds or similar. Something clean, hard, pure, that simply peels off a bit of clean hard pure substance and presto, there’s your new human.

I have never known a time when people have been so open about how little they think of my half of the human race. When I was born, it was no longer possible — apart, perhaps, from in the most extremist religious circles — to express open revulsion for anyone born female. Now it is happening in plain sight.

That’s progress, yeah?

Oh is that so.

It’s not about “banning trans people.” It’s about women running a facility for women. That’s all. It’s none of Willoughby’s business. He should stop trying to bully women into joining his cult.

Lots of things are adjectives. It doesn’t follow that all adjectives mean the same thing. Yes, it is ok for rape crisis centers to say no men.

The Scotsman June17 2019:

A police investigation has been launched after a feminist campaigner was allegedly verbally abused and “almost punched” after a women’s rights discussion at Edinburgh University.

Julie Bindel, a campaigner against violence towards women, had claimed she was attacked in George Square after delivering a speech at an event which had been branded “transphobic” by trans campaigners as it focused on the future of women’s sex-based rights.

Women talking about their rights is transphobic. Ok…………..

It was revealed on Twitter that the person who had lunged at Ms Bindel was a trans-woman called Cathy Brennan. The freelance film critic has said: “I will not be discussing it personally with anyone I do not know.”

December 12 2022 aka today:

Says the guy who physically attacked Julie Bindel.

You know…as I look at this photo something occurs to me, not entirely new but a bit more forcefully than usual.

What? What is it that occurs to me?

Fear.

The fact that the photo sparks fear. I looked at it a little longer than I usually look at such photos and then noticed a feeling and then realized what it was. If I were cornered by that guy and berated over pronouns or terfs or his genner idennniny I would feel fear. He’s big, he looks like a bruiser, he looks angry. I’ve been cornered by guys like that when they were angry, as I think probably all women have. This is just built in. We feel fear if we see a bear charging in our direction, and we (we women) feel fear if we see that face looming over us in anger. We recognize it and we flinch.

This is what makes the whole fragility poor poor me won’t somebody please think of the trans ladies campaign so maddeningly perverse and backwards and callous. Dylan with his tampons doesn’t trigger that reaction, but Tampons Dylan doesn’t represent all men who claim to be women. He doesn’t represent the bears.

But how do you know which side that is?

The issue of course isn’t the Fauci part, it’s the pronouns part. (Tiresome of Musk to jam them together.) How does he know it’s right and respectful to pretend that people can and should decide what pronouns other people use to refer to them? How does he know it’s not, on the contrary, rude and narcissistic to make that demand? He doesn’t, because he can’t, because it is rude and narcissistic. It’s an attempt to force people to think about you and remember Special Instructions about you, and to feel anxious about forgetting the Special Instructions about you. It’s an imposition of extra work and pointless anxiety all for you wonderful you extra-special you.

It isn’t right factually, and it isn’t right morally.

It isn’t even genuinely respectful. It involves treating people as extra-fragile and perhaps delusional or otherwise mentally dilapidated in some way. That’s not particularly respectful.

As a very broad piece of advice it’s ok – it means don’t go around shouting misogynist or racist abuse at people, don’t mock people, don’t pick fights, don’t bully – you know, just basically don’t be an asshole. He’s right that that’s better for all parties; he’s not right about the specifics in this case.

This guy fancies himself a feisty contrarian (which is an amusingly banal thing for a contrarian to do) and yet he’s strikingly non-contrarian on The Orthodoxy de nos jours.

The argument of course isn’t that trans athletes are just like e-bikes. Read the introductory text again, or just read Jon Pike’s tweet again while paying attention.

The argument is that unfair advantage is unfair advantage.

The underlying implication is that people (including relevant officials) are systematically ignoring the fact that being male is an unfair advantage in women’s sports just as riding an e-bike would be an unfair advantage in the Tour de France.

Basic courtesies like not misrepresenting the other party’s argument?

Susan Dalgety at The Scotsman on the opening of Beira’s Place:

Beira’s Place, named after the Scottish goddess of winter, will offer support and advocacy to women in the Lothian region, aged 16 and over, who have experienced sexual violence or abuse at any time in their lives.

The service has been launched to follow the global 16 Days Campaign for the elimination of violence against women. It is free and has been set up in response to demand from female survivors for a women-only service.

J.K. Rowling, who will fully fund Beira’s Place, said that she had founded the project to provide what she believes is an unmet need for women in Edinburgh and the Lothians said: “As a survivor of sexual assault myself, I know how important it is that survivors have the option of women-centred and women-delivered care at such a vulnerable time.

Which Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre used to provide but no longer does: it’s run by a man who calls himself a woman.

[Chief executive Isabelle] Kerr emphasised that the Beira’s Place will provide women-centred services. She said: “Violence against women and girls is an issue that crosses all cultures, classes, and religions. These are gendered crimes that are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men and disproportionately experienced by women.

“Beira’s Place recognises that effective sexual violence services must be independent, needs-led, and provide responsive, women-centred services so that they are free from the pressure of current political agendas. We are committed to ensuring that our service is free, confidential, and accessible to women survivors who may need it.”

They won’t be putting men who call themselves women in charge.

J.K. Rowling will be joined on the board of Beira’s Place by several of Scotland’s most prominent women’s rights campaigners. They are, Rhona Hotchkiss, a former governor of Cornton Vale women’s prison; Johann Lamont, who was Scottish Labour leader from 2011 to 2014; Dr Margaret McCartney, a leading GP, academic and broadcaster and Susan Smith, a director of For Women Scotland, the country’s largest grassroots women’s organisation.

The backlash will be swift.

Rowling has done a thing.

Trans scholarship…

I’ll repeat that: Pape is employed by @iocmedia to promote the IOC framework document…so her “scholarship” on this subject is compromised by a conflict of interest.

Jon links to a few more speakers.

I’ll just interrupt here for a second to say some things I hate about that excerpt from Pape’s chapter. First, “The participation of trans people” – no, it isn’t “trans people” as such, it’s men invading women’s sport, and it may be women who are on testosterone. It’s not trans people in general and it’s not trans people because they’re trans people, it’s because of the specific ways men or women on testosterone can make competition unfair for everyone else.

Second, “A dominant narrative” – which is a way to nudge the audience into thinking “domineering bullying fairy tale.”

Third, “the Global North” – which is absurdly gratuitous and another nudge, this time into thinking “rich privileged bitchy cunty Karens.”

It’s grotesquely manipulative and tendentious for an academic article.

Well it’s her narrative you see.

It’s infuriating stuff.

Dylan and tampons, the struggle continues.

Looooook a wad of cotton! Isn’t it beeyootiful?? It goes up a laydee’s hooha. It’s sooo pridddeee.

Somehow there’s been a backlash.

Trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney has been forced to defend feminine hygiene brand Tampax after the company sent her a PR package.

Oh no! Who would lash back at that sweet little faun in his sweet little pink blousies? All he wants is to play out his fetish in public; why can’t people be kind?

The Independent on our new overlord:

Musk’s latest post – “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” – follows a streak of messages from the world’s wealthiest person on his newly acquired platform that increasingly has amplified far-right and conspiratorial content.

The early morning post – hinting at support for Covid-19 conspiracy theories while offending transgender and nonbinary people – was met approvingly by far-right members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andy Biggs, who indicated that the incoming Republican-controlled House of Representatives will investigate Dr Fauci.

For…? Benghazi was it? Emails? Communists in Hollywood? Jews under the bed?

At the onset of the pandemic, Musk relied on the platform to downplay the magnitude of the crisis. He also wrongfully believed [said] the pandemic would be over within weeks, called public safety guidelines “dumb” and “fascist” as he sought to preserve his heavily scrutinised Tesla manufacturing business, and echoed far-right protesters and Republican officials across the US who have sought to cast [sow] doubt about the dangers of the public health emergency and intimidate health officials and experts who correctly warned the public of its impacts.

…

Shortly after he acquired the platform, Twitter announced it would no longer enforce its policy against spreading Covid disinformation, while its new owner frequently interacts with and replies to posts from far-right personalities, accusing the platform of suppressing “information” about the pandemic that has been labeled false or misleading.

It’s all so intersectional. It’s the intersection of unchecked capitalism with arrogance with powerful social media. Hitler plus multibillionaire plus Twitter. Not good.

Sigh. I remember the good old days when I didn’t have to spend any time paying attention to Elon Musk. I took full advantage of the luxury and paid him no mind at all. Those days are over. The guy’s dangerous.

The Times runs another generic “they’re going after the trans folx!!” piece, disguised in the usual way as being about the LGBTQ.

Since far-right social media activists began attacking Boston Children’s Hospital over the summer for providing care for transgender children, the hospital has received repeated bomb threats.

No, the issue wasn’t “providing care.” That’s worded to make it sound as if Nazis protested a hospital’s treating children for Covid or pneumonia or other diseases. Boston Children’s was (and I assume is) providing “gender-affirming surgery” and bragging about being the first to do so.

Doctors across the country who do similar work have been harassed. 

Doctors who cut off children’s and teenagers’ breasts or penises have been “harassed”? Is it really harassment or is it saying “stop mutilating children and teenagers who’ve been confused by a hideous destructive fad”?

The Times shows a large photo of protesters with signs saying “say NO to males competing as females” with the caption “Demonstrators in Washington in June protested the inclusion of transgender women on women’s sports teams.” Inclooooosion; how could anyone protest incloooooosion? Why would women not want to inclooooooood men in their sports? Just a few men, that is; it wouldn’t do to have too many or then it would just be men competing against men again and the whole point is to give a select few men the fun of cheating women out of their own sports. The Times of course doesn’t so much as whisper anything about all that.

Conservatives say they are trying to protect children from irreversible treatments and ensure women’s sports remain fair; in midterm election ads, right-wing groups argued that transition care amounted to “radical gender experiments” and that allowing transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their gender identity would “destroy girls’ sports.” 

Liar liar liar liar. Much of the left is besotted with the trans ideology, yes, but not all of it.

(The treatments offered to transgender children are endorsed by medical associations and have been shown to reduce suicide risk, and few transgender women and girls seek to participate in women’s and girls’ sports.)

So the fuck what? So what if few men seek to participate in women’s and girls’ sport? One is one too many. It doesn’t become ok because not many men do it, and in any case it will become more and more men doing it over time.

This could be something to look forward to:

Rupert Murdoch rarely has to answer for the alternative realities presented by his hugely profitable US cable network, Fox News.

Its conspiratorial claims of a parade of cover ups from the 2012 Benghazi attack to the climate crisis and Covid-19 have been lapped up by Fox viewers and scorned by much of the rest of America, and then the world moved on.

Well…the world moved on but with more people believing Fox lies about Benghazi and the climate crisis and the pandemic. It’s not “Fox tells lies and then we move on and nothing bad happened”; it’s Fox tells lies and people believe them and this is why we can’t have nice things.

But on Tuesday, the 91-year-old billionaire media mogul will be obliged to answer difficult questions under oath about the inner workings of Fox.

The “under oath” bit is significant, because it means he’ll have problems if he lies and they can prove he lied. Murdoch and Fox are all about lying, so not lying will be tricky for him.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing the cable news station and its Murdoch-owned parent company, Fox Corp, for $1.6bn (£1.3bn) over repeated claims that it rigged its voting machines as part of a conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.

The suit shines a spotlight on Fox News’ part in promoting Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign and its hand in driving the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But legal experts say that Dominion, which supplied voting machines to 28 states, appears to be building a wider case that Fox News has a long history of misinformation and steamrolling facts that do not fit its editorial line.

Fox’s “alternative realities” and “misinformation” are not what news outlets should be dealing in. Journalism shouldn’t tell lies.

Fox got in trouble with Trump when they called the Arizona vote for Biden in 2020. So…

Fox News put a parade of Trump lawyers, advisers and apologists front and centre over the following weeks to promote a myriad of conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from Trump, including by rigging the voting machines.

Alongside them, some of Fox’s biggest names took up the cry of fraud. NPR revealed that during the discovery process, Dominion acquired an email written by a Fox News producer begging colleagues not to allow one of those presenters, Jeanine Pirro, on the air because she was spreading conspiracy theories about the vote. Pirro, a former district attorney and judge who is close to Trump, continued broadcasting.

Lawyers have also obtained rafts of internal messages that are “evidence that Fox knew the lies it was broadcasting about Dominion were false” and part of a culture of politically loaded reporting and broadcasts far from the network’s claim to be “fair and balanced”.

Maybe they think the truth should be balanced with lies.

It reminds me of the left over the past decade or so. Some of us say we can’t just keep repeating these stupid lies over and over, and others of us say we can and we must and you who refuse are evil murdering demons.

Fox argues that Hannity and the other presenters are protected by journalistic privilege but that position has been complicated by the Fox host’s own description of his role.

In defending his overt bias in favour of Trump and Republicans, Hannity has more than once said he is not a journalist but a talk show host, and so does not have to adhere to the profession’s ethical standards. He took the same position earlier this year after the January 6 congressional committee exposed dozens of his messages to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, offering advice and seeking direction as the White House challenged the presidential election result.

He’s a talk show host who identifies as having journalistic privilege.

Originally a comment by YNnB (yes, again) on Elon Musk does not have imposter syndrome.

Then there’s working on shit to make it livable… solving that problem would also be useful making Terra more habitable even as it undergoes massive ecological shifts.

Maybe I’m just a “glass half empty” kinda guy, but I’m not so sure that it would work this way. Those “massive ecological shifts” are our fault. We already know that much of what we’re doing to the Earth shouldn’t be done, yet we do it anyway. A Mars colony will be a distant, isolated luxury bubble where everyone knows they have to be careful lest they do something stupid that kills everyone. We’re already living in a planet-sized bubble subject to the same rules, it’s just taken a few millenia for our numbers and mistakes to catch up with us. It’s taken more of them, but their effects will turn out to be equally lethal. There’s nothing a Mars colony will teach us that we don’t already know. We already know we shouldn’t dump toxic wastes into the air, water and soil we rely on to breathe, drink, and grow food. The world has become smaller, and it’s all interconnected. We’ve learned too late that “over there” is “right here,” and that you can’y throw anything “away.” We already know that the Earth’s ability to absorb these wastes is limited. We are running into the limits of the bubble in which we already live, and upon which we are utterly, inescapably dependent. If we can’t make things work here, colonies elsewhere (which will themselves remain dependent upon Earth) are pointless, as we will be taking our mistakes with us.

It took just under twenty years for the lessons of the Apollo One fire to be forgotten. The Challenger disaster did not prevent the pressures and complacency that resulted in the destruction of Columbia seventeen years after that. (And that’s just the American space experience; the Russian track record has its fair share of incompetance and heedless, expedient risk-taking.) Any Mars colony will have its own version of shoddy construction, O-rings and foam-shedding. We as a species have already blown through any number of the equivalents of faulty wiring, O-rings and tile damage. We are seeing the very real possibility of a planetary scale loss of mission, loss of vehicle, loss of crew, yet we push on with what NASA’s repeated inquiries called “go fever.”

The best thing we could be doing is reducing our ecological footprint, reducing the pressure that humans are putting on the rest of the living and non-living environment. Even without anthropogenic climate change, human overshoot is an ongoing crisis. Our sheer numbers limit our ability to do this; having eight billion humans places a certain minimum level on the level of activity which must take place to keep all of them alive and healthy, but we’re not even doing a very good job of that, thanks in part to extreme, grotesque inequalities of wealth distribution (Hello Mr. Musk. Fancy meeting you here!). Decreasing the human population is key to the drawdown of human demands upon the planet. It will happen, one way or another. If you think human dictatorships are bad, wait ’til you see Nature’s idea of draconian measures. We can try to manage our numbers ourselves, or they will be managed for us. If we do not step back, we will be stepped on.

The continued pursuit of a suicidally unsustainable way of life will result in disaster for ourselves and many other living creatures. That we allow ourselves to be led along such a path by those who can make a quick buck off of it while the ride lasts seems to be a lethal flaw in our make-up. That all of us have heard of and have been forced to pay any attention at all to the likes of Elon Musk (or Donald Trump!) and anything he thinks or does is a symptom of this. That his wealth gives him such power and influence is a sign of our weakness and immaturity as a society and a species. This mind-set cannot be fixed by throwing engineering at it. Our technological development has outstripped our ability inclination to use it wisely.

In the next few decades, we’ll likely be facing massive disruptions of weather patterns and climatic zones, with cascading follow-on effects on agriculture, and whatever surviving natural biomes that might yet be hanging on. Add rising sea levels and island/coastal inundation, and you have the foundation for the collapse and disappearance of nations (some of which are armed with nuclear weapons) and the mass movement (and death) of hundreds of millions of people. Even if we avoid actual armed conflict, the damage, destruction and displacement will make the two World Wars combined look like the proverbial Sunday school picnic. Unless its life support systems were wildly chaotic, and its inhabitants unpredictably violent, I’m not sure that there are many lessons we could learn from a Mars outpost that would be applicable to living on Earth That’s Almost Here.

Jennifer Bilek talks about gender ideology as corporate fiction:

The creation of this corporate fiction is one step toward attempting to overlay a virtual reality onto the natural world and to construct a religion out of technology.  Elites at the highest levels of our technocracy have been speaking about technologies so advanced that they provide us with god-like qualities for at least fifty years, probably longer. 

Ring a bell? Sound like Elon Musk at all with his cheery plans to move humans to Mars?

The current iteration of this ideology, established by the technocracy we live in, is meant to ensconce us in a virtual or cyber world to which the natural world is subjugated. With its massive propaganda apparatus, it has only taken a decade to convince the populace that there is a unique type of human, untethered to the biosphere like the rest of us, mere “biological people.”

Let’s just put the magic helmet on and spend the rest of our lives dreaming.

Corporations, banks, international investment houses, governments, legal institutions, and influential non-governmental organizations (NGOs) market the idea that we are not a sexually dimorphic species. They don’t care about the identity issues of a minuscule part of the population. It is patently ridiculous to think so.  They are marketing disembodiment. “Gender,” currently being promoted as a revolutionary human rights movement to set us free, is an industry posing as social progress for the people.  It seeks to deconstruct human reproductive sex for profit and human engineering. It is posited that our freedom will emerge when technology takes over where human reproduction ends. When this purported dead weight of human reproduction ends, male & female will be obsolete. We can then live as our “authentic selves” beyond male and female, youth and adult, beyond material existence and its limitations.

I know little or nothing about this but it’s an interesting thought. It sounds like Avatar. I found Avatar extremely creepy and gruesome, a geeky boys’ fantasy run amok. Yay we can sit comfortably on flying horses without being snapped off by physical forces because it’s all just a video game we live in forever. Who the hell wants to?

Maybe the gender-is-magic people do.

The male sexual fetish of transsexualism, a compulsion to own female biology for oneself, has been rebranded to “transgenderism” because a male fetish would be a tough sell to any population.  “Transgender” sounds cool and edgy & feels mutinous for teens filled with the rebellious spirit of youth who are clueless about the repercussions of being sterilized by the drugs & surgeries being marketed to them. Claiming synthetic sex, a corporately manufactured illusion, has become the medical-tech generation’s counterpart to getting a secret tattoo.  These kids adopting synthetic sex identities have grown up online with cyber identities & have had their personalities medicalized since they were old enough to talk, while previous generations were out exploring the real world.

It sounds horribly plausible, doesn’t it.

Technocratic elites have spent years discussing the virtual reality they seek to create. We will be enclosed and connected to everything and everyone else via bodiless minds without any roots in the biosphere.  Elon Musk promotes his Neuralink, Ray Kurzweil, a Singularity, Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem movement, and Lifenaut organizations tout immortality in cyberspace. Mark Zuckerberg promises a utopia in his Metaverse, and Yuval Harari’s technological god will rid us of the cumbersome world of nature for something much more significant.  Elites and corporations are investing in humans framed as otherworldly and not like the rest of us, rooted in biology, because they see profits and believe this is our future. The fascination of elites in “gender ideology” takes on a new light when seen in context. 

A lurid new light. To repeat, I know little or nothing about this, but I think there’s at least something to it. It’s pretty grim.

Originally a comment by Sastra on They are appalled.

I just watched the film. It’s mostly just talking heads with a few sometimes awkward special effects thrown in, but still worth seeing. It’s worth seeing even if you believe TWAW, so you understand the concerns. I’ve read enough of the other side to guess what they’d object to, and why.

… it endangers trans* people on campus and beyond, erasing their identities and encouraging the spread of hateful portrayals.

Sometimes hyperbole like this makes it harder to maintain my natural sympathy and respect for trans people because it diminishes their stature. Instead of ordinary human beings struggling with difficult problems and searching for meaning and happiness, they start to sound like emotional basket cases on the verge of a breakdown, incapable of coping with disagreement or thinking straight. They, on the other hand, seem to think this fragility ought to move our sympathy for what must surely be such a horrible situation it would break down even the strongest.

I’m reminded of a time when PZ announced he was going to desecrate a blessed communion wafer and this got picked up by some online Catholic groups. The devout started pouring into the comment section of Pharyngula in various stages of distress. One overwrought woman informed us that treating the Consecrated Host with disrespect caused her so much anguish that she’d rather her 6 year old daughter was raped, then for that to happen. That little revelation didn’t inspire pity. It inspired contempt for the system, yes — but also for her. She’d lost her perspective.

Thinking about this, I’m starting to wonder how the transgender-identified male would deal with this Sophie’s Choice. Would they rather 1) be socially thought of as men who believe they’re woman and consequently denied a right to enter at least some single-sex spaces or 2) be raped, beaten, and left for dead? If they honestly think it’s the latter, well, I think they ought to sort out their priorities, as Ron would say.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What does bullshit mean?

And there’s no obligation to “trust” that anyone is “who they tell you they are.” Do banks and government institutions do this when you’re filling out forms? No. They require proof of identity; that is “identity” as in being the individual human being you purport to be, not the “identity as inner sense of self=personality.”

Being compelled to believe what people tell you to believe is not a thing, unless you’re living in a dictatorship. Even then, in your heart of hearts, you have the right to doubt, the right to say “no.” Whether you can say so out loud is a test of your freedom.

As a matter of politeness, one might give a stranger the benefit of the doubt, that they are what they say they are. In casual conversation you’re not going to ask for diplomas and licences if someone tells you they’re a lawyer, a doctor or a pilot. But if you’re going on trial, under the knife, or stepping onto a plane, you’re assuming that someone, somewhere has asked for, and been provided with, the requisite credentials that certify that the person holding them has the training and knowledge entitling the lawyer, doctor, or pilot to plead your case, wield the scalpel, or fly the plane. Any time someone succesfully cons their way into any regulated profession without the proper training and vetting, it is treated as a major failure of the system in question, and rightly so. We regularly place our lives in the hands of such individuals; such fields of trust, skill, power and knowledge should be off limits to frauds, charlatans, and amateurs.

This is the danger of the so-called “right” to change one’s sex on a birth certificate or passport. Being “officially” declared the sex you are not is a legal fiction carried too far, and one that should be reversed. Immediately. Governments would never allow someone to “legally” claim to be a different height, or age, or species. Claiming to be the sex one is not is equally as impossible and nonsensical. Even without documentation, we’re supposed to believe that males who claim to be female are as safe to be around as women, that they are no longer men, so no longer a threat. “Trust me when I tell you who I am!” To quote some Olympic women weight lifters, “No thank you.”

Trans activists might wave around their wee scraps of paper that “declare” they are actually female when they are not, using them as licences to access facilities, spaces and opportunities to which they should have no right. but these doctored documents do nothing to change the facts of the matter, any more than the “incorporation” of a company magically creates an actual person, ex nihilo. Unlike the professions, there is no “training” or “skill” that lets you change sex. Things just don’t work like that, and all the lipstick and high heels in the world can’t change it. Such an edit might be validating and affirming on paper, but reality isn’t listening. Neither should we.

There are many larger issues at stake, alongside the safety of women and girls (which is large enough in itself.) Do we really want official government documents to be as malleable as a Wikipedia article? Do “gender fluid” folk get to have the sex indicated on their passports in pencil? Do we render our statistics and book-keeping null and void because some men are now legally “women?” It is a bad idea, a legal fiction taken too far. It’s not “kind” it’s not “inclusive” it’s just stupidity that will redound upon the legitimacy of government institutions themselves, rendering the basic identification information we are supposed to trust less believable and authoratative than one of those novelty certificates you can buy that grants you ownership of real estate on the Moon, or even a star. At least the Moon and stars actually exist.

Yet another FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYONE burble, this time from The Irish Examiner.

When I discuss feminism with my students, I stress that feminism is for everyone. It is a social and political ideology intended for all human beings. Feminism is about equality, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or creed.

No, it is not. Of course it’s not. Look at the “fem” part. Take as long as you need.

In a way, all rights struggles and equality struggles are about everyone. The core ideas of equality, fairness, rights, justice are for and about everyone. Human rights benefit all humans, yes. But the reality is that rights and equality struggles are struggles: they have to be struggles because we don’t in fact have perfect human rights and freedom and justice. Many categories of people have to struggle harder for their share. Those categories of people get to carry out that struggle, without being told that their struggle is for everyone.

I go on to explain that this fight for equality is blighted by male violence. I explain that male violence is also a problem for men, who are attacked by other violent men. But more so for women.

But more so for women plus male violence toward men isn’t a feminist issue and isn’t a problem women are required to solve. But Jennifer Horgan thinks it is, because otherwise the men won’t listen. She says we must raise our boys to be allies.

There is a brand of feminism now, stuck on an anti-trans argument, that seeks to destroy this alliance, thereby returning us to an unhelpful and overly simplistic ‘us versus them’ gender-focused struggle.

Yes, sure, it’s frightfully simplistic, but it’s also frightfully simplistic when men beat up women or rape women or refuse to promote women or take over women’s spaces.

Hayley Freeman wrote in the Sunday Times last week that feminism is becoming a dirty word. 

Great job. She means Hadley Freeman, not Hayley. Top quality feministing here.

Why? Well, according to Freeman, it is becoming a dirty word because it is no longer OK for biologically born women to criticise trans women (born male) accessing female-only spaces. She claims that LGBTQ+ rights are trumping women’s rights.

Liar. She does no such thing. She doesn’t lump trans people in with LGB people.

She goes on for several more paragraphs, dismissing concerns about men in women’s prisons with the breezy confidence of the safe and comfortable, and telling us more about “dirty feminism.” It’s grotesque.