The UN should not be saying nonsensical harmful dreck like this:

The first reason the UN shouldn’t say things like this is because they’re not true. Everyone does not “have an internal sense of their own gender.” That’s a lie foisted on us by gender ideology, and like all lies, it’s not true. We call lies “lies” because they’re not true. The UN should not be shoving lies in our faces.

This particular bit of trans ideology confuses what we know with a particular (and peculiar) “sense” but that is in fact a confusion. We know what sex we are for a billion reasons that start in infancy, but that doesn’t make the knowledge “an internal sense” of anything. What sex we are has plenty of external clues, along with the internal ones that we learn about in biology class.

There is no “internal sense” that’s “different from the sex you were assigned at birth” because the sex is what you are. There’s also no “internal sense” that you’re a human as opposed to a chimpanzee or a gibbon. It’s not about mystical inner knowledge. We have the external physical evidence and that’s what settles the matter.

People can feel it’s a bad fit. They can feel they would match the other sex much better. They can wish they’d been born the other sex. None of that makes it ok for the UN to inform us that we all have a magical inner sense that we in fact don’t have.

Weird (and long) headline.

Dylan Mulvaney Gives Tampons to People Who Need Them. Transphobes Are Mad

In a video posted to TikTok on Thursday as part of her popular “Days of Girlhood” video diary, Mulvaney explained she was “so tired over sticking up for myself for something that was so pure intention,” referring to her carrying a tampon around in case someone else needs it.

…

“The bigger problem,” Mulvaney went on, “is that you feel me carrying a tampon around is a threat to you and your womanhood. How is someone doing something nice so repulsive to you?”

Where to begin.

I guess with “something nice.” It’s not something nice. It’s creepy and intrusive at best.

That’s not a thing. Women don’t carry tampons around just in case some Fellow Woman might need one any more than people carry extra coffee around in case some Fellow Coffee Drinker has run out. Nobody carries extra anything around in case someone needs it. Where would we begin? Where would we end? How would we carry it all?

Anyway needing a tampon isn’t that big a deal. You can use a big wad of toilet paper, or grab some paper towels and use those. Maybe you’ll ask someone at the sinks to pass you some towels over or under the partition. But the spare tampon thing? Get out of here.

So, no, I don’t believe for a second that Mulvaney is “doing something nice,” I think he’s doing something prurient and passive aggressive and creepy. Is that repulsive? You bet it is, Dylls.

This isn’t the students, this is the adults – the academic staff. This is the adults talking silly childish jargon and pulling their hair out in clumps because someone says men are not women.

Man is expert on feminism again.

The abstract of Feminism will be trans-inclusive or it will not be: Why do two cis-hetero woman educators support transfeminism? :

As two cis-hetero woman feminist educators, we provide an educator’s perspective on trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourses.

The stupid starts with zero delay. “Cis-hetero” is stupid. Cis and hetero are two different things so what’s the point of treating them as one thing? Of course “cis” is also not a real thing, which makes the mashup doubly stupid.

 We begin by discussing the heterosexual matrix and the gender violence that it produces in schools as well as other socializing institutions.

What’s a heterosexual matrix? I can help with that! Professor Google says

“Heterosexual Matrix” comes from Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”. It describes an invisible norm which does not appear to be constructed but comes through as “natural” – a norm that defines everyone and everything as heterosexual until proved differently.

Yeah ok I get that – there are a lot of invisible norms of that kind. Everybody’s white, everybody’s middle class, everybody lives with a mommy and a daddy, and on and on. But does the heterosexual norm produce “gender violence”? It produces a lot of bad feelings once kids are old enough, no doubt, but I suspect they’re using violence to mean more than, you know, actual violence.

The socially constructed sexual binary constrains identity production to adhere to the heteronormative, at the same time excluding those who transgress this normativity.

Of course it does. The sociology jargon makes that sound more impressive than it is.

 We then critically analyse some of the increasingly belligerent popular discourses promoted by TERF groups since the 1970s, appropriating feminist discourses to produce arguments that contradict basic premises of feminism.

Nope nope nope nope. It’s not a “basic premise of feminism” that men are women. Never has been. We’re not the ones appropriating feminist anything.

We trace possibilities for a collaborative response by reinforcing alliances between transfeminism and other feminist movements.

The hell with “transfeminism.” Transfeminism would be feminism that calls itself feminism but is the opposite of feminism because it’s all about letting men do whatever they want all the time. That may identify as feminism but it isn’t feminism.

Mike has another excellent post:

I could understand why there are kids who want to avoid puberty, especially if they are gender non-conforming. The whole masculine – feminine gender expectation thing is very hard to navigate. It is for everyone, because it’s hard to understand exactly what is going on when it comes to gender. Kids are taught through examples of their family, external socializing and through all of the media they have access to, that boys and girls are different. They learn not only the physical differences, such as the external genitals, but the toys they have available to them and the choices in dress they are presented. They learn that girls wear bows and boys wear caps.

They learn that girls are made of sugar and spice, like pink, and carry dollies around. Boys are made of snakes and snails, like blue, and play with toy tractors. They are learning that masculinity comes with expectations, but also with benefits. Boys are favored by adults and receive privileges over girls, even among those adults who try to avoid sexism.

Girls grow up to be The Real Housewives of Wherever while boys grow up to be a long long list of things, all of them more interesting than being Real Housewives.

The parents who are fully committed to avoiding gender-based play for their kids are not doing so in isolation. Children play with other children, meet other adults, watch television, listen to radio, overhear parents talking, have older brothers and sisters. Gender has social momentum with millennia propelling it.

And the older the kids get the less the parents can do to replace or contradict the external socializing.

“Everyone” doesn’t need access to abortion.

It’s interesting that the ACLU shows us a photo that’s all women but doesn’t say the word.

It matters that it’s women who need abortion rights. It matters to say it. Women are the sex that’s shoved out of the spotlight all too often. Women are the sex that have to fight for equal rights with men. Women are the sex subject to forced gestation and childbirth. It matters that women exist and have rights and are deprived of those rights in all too many places and situations.

Fresh Air did an entertaining and informative discussion of Elon Musk’s bull in a china shop approach to Twitter yesterday with tech journalist Casey Newton.

Terry Gross: SpaceX and Tesla have been considered such big success stories, and credit has gone to Elon Musk. Twitter is showing a different side of him – indecisive, making decisions then retracting them. Twitter is losing money and advertisers under his leadership. He’s making decisions that are driving away Twitter users. Are you surprised by what kind of leader he’s turned out to be as the owner of Twitter?

Newton: You know, I really am. I had not paid a lot of attention to what Musk was doing at Tesla and SpaceX, but as you note, he was having a lot of success with those companies. And the Twitter that he inherited, while it had its challenges, was not a company in crisis. It made about $5 billion last year, has hundreds of millions of active users. And while it clearly needed to evolve, there was sort of no pressing need to blow it up and start over. And yet from the moment that he stepped into that job, that seems to be exactly what he decided to do.

He has now eliminated close to three-quarters of the staff. He has implemented a bunch of ideas and then quickly reversed himself. And more than anything else, I think he’s given the impression that rather than operating according to some set plan, he’s really managing Twitter more by whims and what seems to him to be a good idea in the moment. And so that’s led to a lot of chaos.

Chaos is good, chaos is creative, yadda yadda. Let’s blow up some hospitals and start over.

GROSS: One of Musk’s strategies that seems to have backfired is dealing with verification. Can you describe what verification is and what Twitter’s policy had been before Musk took over?

NEWTON: Yeah. So Twitter started a verification policy in 2009, and the basic idea was that it needed a way to verify that the owner of an account was who they said it was. So if you were a politician, a journalist or a celebrity, if you were really that person, Twitter would verify that, and then you would get this little blue check mark on your profile. That’s how it had always worked. Musk came along and said he wanted verification to be open to a much wider number of people, which, by the way, I thought was a pretty good idea. I think there are a lot of good reasons why you might want people to be able to optionally verify their identity on Twitter. It can just sort of be good for the service overall.

But he made one really bad decision, which was that not only did he offer everyone a verification badge, it was no longer actually connected to any sort of idea of verification. All you needed to do was pay $8. You could create any account; you would get that little badge. And so people started to pretend to be brands. They started to be celebrities. They started to pretend to be Elon Musk. And that same blue verification badge that had only ever meant you are who you say you are all of a sudden now meant I have $8.

I laughed as hard as Terry Gross did.

GROSS: So getting back to the idea that Musk is kind of blowing up Twitter to remake it his way, he’s losing so much money in the process. I mean, other ways that he’s losing money – ’cause you’ve pointed this out – is re-platforming people and making all these changes. They’re really expensive. It requires a lot of engineering changes in order to make these changes on Twitter. Plus, there’s no longer as many engineers there now. So it’s almost like he’s sabotaging himself in trying to remake Twitter.

NEWTON: Yeah, I think, you know, for some leaders, it’s not a good idea unless they came up with it, right? And so people who worked at Twitter had all sorts of ideas about how you could improve the service, make it more profitable. Elon has gotten rid of most of those people, and he’s fixated on a few core ideas that he thinks are going to be spectacular. Subscriptions is probably the biggest one although there are others. And he’s just going to go for it.

You know, this is probably one of the most self-confident people in the entire world, right? Elon Musk does not have impostor syndrome. He wakes up every day convinced that he is the only person who knows how to fix this company. And, you know, as me – for me, an observer, I just sort of sit back and think, like, none of this is working, you know? And so to me, the question is, will he ever acknowledge that other people have better ideas for this company than he does? Or will he just sort of continue to charge ahead with his own ideas, you know, regardless of if they’re successful or not?

Probably.

So they’ve noticed.

UK ministers have called on Nicola Sturgeon to scrap plans to let Scottish people “self-declare” as the opposite sex over fears it could lead to “legal chaos” and undermine women’s rights in England. 

Of course it “could undermine women’s rights in England.” Of course it can and does and will continue to undermine women’s rights everywhere. It renders them nonsensical. If men can become women by saying so then what are women? Nothing; just another word for “people.” They don’t need women’s rights because they have people’s rights. Rape, childbirth, child care, differences in size and strength, are all irrelevant, because everyone is a person. Giving away women’s rights slightly more gradually than Scotland is still giving away women’s rights.

Senior UK government figures fear the move, which is not available to people in England, could allow biologically male Scottish prisoners in English jails to demand to be placed in female-only prisons.

So what’s the problem? Just because they’re a risk to the people formerly known as women is no reason to trample on their True Selves.

Currently anyone wanting to change their sex in the UK needs to apply for a gender recognition certificate. To be successful applicants need to have been medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria and been living in their affirmed gender for at least two years.

Blah blah blah. But what real difference does that make? It slows things down but that’s all. Slowing things down is better than speeding them up, to be sure, but it’s still bad for women to pretend that men can become women by “affirming” their “gender” for two years.

The Scottish move would remove the need for a medical diagnosis and reduce the time limit to six months. It would also allow under-18s to change their gender for the first time.

But it’s basically the same in both. The core claim is the same.

Serial suitcase guy who works for the government:

An energy department official is accused of stealing luggage from Harry Reid International Airport, the 8 News Now Investigators learned Thursday.

A felony warrant was issued for Sam Brinton, a deputy assistant secretary, sources said. The charge is for grand larceny with a value between $1,200 and $5,000, records showed.

Brinton is a deputy assistant secretary of the office of spent fuel and waste disposition, according to the Office of Nuclear Energy’s website.

Brinton faces charges for a similar incident at the Minneapolis airport. He was on leave after charges were filed in connection with that incident, an energy department spokesman said in November.

Brinton is a non-binerrreeee lifter of other people’s suitcases. Pride! The Daily Beast is more polite about his pronouns than the AP:

 Sam Brinton, who was recently appointed head of spent nuclear fuel management, has allegedly been accused of grand larceny with a value of between $1,200 and $5,000, 8 News Now reports. The accusation comes after Brinton—who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns—was charged with stealing someone else’s bag from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in April. Court filings in that case claim Brinton said they initially denied taking the suitcase belonging to another person before later contacting airport authorities to say they were “tired and took the suitcase thinking it was theirs.”

The airport authorities are adamant that they were not tired and did not take the suitcase thinking it was theirs.

She Identifies As an independent.

Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced Friday that she now has registered as an independent…

But she was elected as a Democrat. Wouldn’t it be more fair to the voters to wait to go all mavericky up in there until her next election?

In a video explaining her decision, she said: “Registering as an independent and showing up to work with the title of independent is a reflection of who I’ve always been. … Nothing’s going to change for me.”

Then why did she run and get elected as a Democrat?

I found myself thinking about topsoil and the west so I went to the search engine. Nebraska Public Media has a piece from last April:

A few years ago, Isaac Larsen attended a wedding at a pioneer church in Minnesota. After the ceremony, he wandered around a cemetery by the church.

He noticed the cemetery, which had never been tilled, was at least a foot higher than a corn field just on the other side of a fence.

Tilling erodes soil.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst geosciences professor and his co-researchers have released a new study that found topsoil in the Midwest is eroding at an average rate of 1.9 millimeters per year. They measured elevation differences between native prairie and farm fields at about 20 sites, the majority in central Iowa, with some in Illinois, Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska.

The researchers estimate the Midwest has lost 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil since farmers began tilling 160 years ago. This erosion, Larsen said, makes it more difficult and more expensive to grow crops.

“We’re going to need to feed more people in the future,” he said, “and degraded soils that have lost their organic rich horizons just aren’t as productive.”

We might not need to feed more people in the future though. The consequences of the other ways we’ve eroded and degraded the world we live in are already thinning populations and it’s not looking as if we’re going to slow that down much.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights continues to talk complete nonsense about women and our rights.

Feminism isn’t a fucking narrative. Human rights are not a narrative. You’d think the UN High Commissioner for them would know that. Gender is a trap that is getting narrower and tighter by the day. Of course women’s rights are human rights but what on earth does “Gender equality must be addressed holistically” mean? That women should “holistically” forget about our rights and focus on men’s right to pretend to be us instead? If so, fuck that.

Trump has been staying home lately.

He spoke at a friendly think tank conference held at Mar-a-Lago and a for-profit gala, also at Mar-a-Lago. He had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with two prominent antisemites, drawing widespread criticism, including from top Republicans.

Conference at Mar-a-Lago, gala at Mar-a-Lago, dinner with anti-semites at Mar-a-Lago. Festive but samey.

He’s done some video appearances and some fundraising and some dropping in, but it was all still at Mar-a-Lago. No heads of state to push out of the way, no royalty to bore, no rallies in half-empty arenas.

The early announcement [that he’s running again] — which advisers said was planned in part to clear the field of potential rivals and help Trump get ahead of a potential indictment — appears to have failed or backfired on both fronts. Rather than declining to run against Trump, a crowd of other Republicans have become more vocal about their possible moves to challenge him for the nomination. And Trump’s formal declaration of his candidacy prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to oversee the federal criminal probes circling the former president into his campaign’s efforts to submit phony electors in 2020 and into the mishandling of sensitive government secrets at Mar-a-Lago.

Maybe we finally get to watch him taken apart bit by bit over the next few months.

A hilariously scathing thread on That Report:

I’ll just quote the rest.

1. The paper is, presentationally, very poor with numerous typographical errors and infelicities of expression. May we kindly suggest that next time you proof read your paper prior to submission. Our readers are not there to provide copy editing services.

2. The paper has a tendency to assert rather than argue the case, indeed so much so that the paper veers towards unsubstantiated monologue. There are several places where instead of using authoritative sources on the law – or indeed even academic concepts – your paper relies on dictionary definitions. See particularly the definition of gender critical. Quite frankly, there is no excuse in academic work to rely on a dictionary definition when there is both case law (please see the EAT in Forstater V CGD) or a reasonably extensive body of academic literature. We are happy to provide a reading list of appropriate sources to help improve your thinking on this matter. See also your footnote 29 where you assert – without further discussion – that gender critical beliefs contain the same logic errors as those espoused by members of the BNP – namely trading in negative and highly prejudicial stereotypes of an entire category of individuals. Had you argued rather than merely asserted your case here, you might have seen the irony in your footnote.

More concerning however is the fact that you state that your paper provides a balanced analysis of the situation viz-a-viz balancing academic freedom, freedom to protest and harassment in universities viz trans inclusivity. The problem the reviewers had is that your description of the law contains far too many factual errors for the paper to be treated seriously. Please see the very illuminating analysis of @akuareindorf (whose work I believe you may be familiar with) and @AudreySuffolk. Both these analyses show that your understanding of the Equality Act 2010 is highly problematic – in fact we suggest your demonstrated understanding would not even merit a bare pass at UG level. There are three more issues though that lead to the decision to reject.

One would assume in any attempt to publish an authoritative analysis of the balancing that Universities must do in this area would require at a minimum a detailed consideration of s26(4) Equality Act 2010. Yet this is wholly absent.

Your inclusion of the concept of ‘contagion’ and ‘contamination’ goes beyond legal analysis and veers into the realm of rhetoric.

Your chosen examples seem to work against you. We believe that at @Uni_of_Essex there were indeed campaigns of the type you describe that resulted in unlawful actions. #ReindorfReport

Thus, the substandard presentation, combined with lack of authoritative sources and lack of informed discussion of key legal framework means that this report is simply not up to the requisite academic standards for peer review. That said, it is a great exemplar paper that can be used for teaching purposes. It provides students with a great example of what not to do.

Wallop!

Now the gender fundamentalists are doing the “don’t you just hate women’s screechy voices???” thing. So progressive it makes me dizzy.

Oh no, she’s onto us! We’re shrill. We whine. We sound like a dentist’s drill – as in the My Fair Lady lyric: “I’d be equally as willing For a dentist to be drilling Than to ever let a woman in my life.” [“Than” should be “As” but never mind.]

Her mates all agree.

That last one is a real gem – converting her ugly misogynist malice into girlish niceness with “cosy” and “big skies” and “our souls.”

What a shower.

JL at the Glinner Update goes into the BBC’s history of inclooooding men on its lists of women to celebrate:

In 2013 the BBC pledged that it would better represent women in its international news output and launched its 100 Women List.

A good idea! But so briefly.

But only a year later this initiative was totally undermined when the list included a drag character, Conchita Wurst, the onstage persona of an Austrian man called Thomas Neuwirth.

With a full beard and Fabulous eyelashes.

In 2016 The 100 Women List included trans-identified male, Seyan Arman, a DJ and entertainer from Turkey. In 2018 it featured trans-identified male, Ophelia Pastrana, “An outspoken transgender media personality” from Columbia. In 2019 it included trans-identified male, Nisha Ayub, a transgender rights campaigner from Malaysia.

So, a drag character, a DJ & entertainer, a transgender media personality, a transgender rights campaigner – in other words not one of them did anything useful or particularly noteworthy apart from campaigning for a cause that harms women. Soooooooo why are they on the list?

In 2020 The 100 Women List included model, Lea T. Amongst all the inspirational and pioneering female scientists, teachers, sportswomen, politicians, aid workers, artists and activists etc was a trans-identified male who performs stereotypical femininity to model swimwear in Vogue and Marie Clare.

What I’m saying. The women on the list do big things, often dangerous things, things that benefit others. The Beeb puts models and media personalities on the list simply because they pretend to be women. It’s doubly insulting and belittling. The women accomplish something (a lot), all the men have to do is pout.

Last year there were two, this year were two. Maybe next year there will be fifty.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Yes, really, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said this. Not a random “activist,” not a confused journalist, not a once reasonable science blogger, but the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said this.

Reading the Essex Report Universities’ Legal Obligations in the Context of Trans Inclusion, Trans Equality,
and ‘Gender Critical’ Activities on Campus [pdf]. It’s as annoying as I expected (and probably more so).

The right to freedom of expression, established under the European Convention on Human Rights, ensures that individuals can access information in order to form their opinions and identity…

Already we’re talking about idenniny.

Freedom of expression does not exclusively protect a monologue: it protects the exchange of ideas and opinions, including both speech and counter-speech…

That’s a stupid and tendentious way to put it. Of course it doesn’t exclusively protect a monologue; who said it did? That’s like saying “There will be no throwing of alligators at this table” before starting dinner with friends.

Public debates in the context of trans rights tend to focus on the (often ‘gender critical’) speaker’s right to freedom of expression.

Guess why! It’s because of those shouting screaming window-banging “protesters” who gather whenever a feminist dares to open her mouth. Trans “activists” are hell bent on removing freedom of expression from feminist women. Trans ideologues aren’t the ones being silenced and shouted down in this controversy.

Freedom of expression is also restricted when the expression violates criminal law: for example, because the speech is an explicit or implicit threat or encouragement to kill or to use unlawful violence against a particular (type of) person or group.

The threats and encouragements to kill are not coming from the feminists. These three should watch videos of trans “activists” confronting feminists as a matter of urgency.

Ah yes, women=pollution. Beware beware, bring plenty of bleach to throw in their faces.

Essex reports on the report:

In light of recent debates surrounding freedom of expression, trans inclusion, and ‘gender critical’ debates on university campuses, lawyers and academics at Garden Court Chambers and the University of Essex have prepared a new report: ‘Universities’ Legal Obligations in the Context of Trans Inclusion, Trans Equality, and ‘Gender Critical’ Activities on Campus’.

Already the asymmetry is apparent. Scare quotes on gender critical but no scare quotes on trans inclusion. Obligation in the context of trans inclusion and trans equality but nothing about female inclusion and female equality. Trans people matter; women are worthless at best, a demonic enemy at worst.

The report provides an accessible overview of how the law treats disputes on the limits of freedom of expression in a University, focusing in particular on issues relating to freedom of speech disputes in regards to trans inclusion, trans equality and ‘gender critical’ speech.

But what about issues relating to freedom of speech disputes in regards to inclusion of women, women’s equality, women’s speech?

Shut up. Nobody cares about that.

David Renton, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers, and the report’s lead author notes that, “Many university administrators are fearful of disputes spinning out of control, but actually their legal duties are straightforward. They must promote freedom of expression but not to the point where it becomes an excuse for the harassment of trans staff and students.” 

Trans staff and students only. The harassment of female staff and students is fine.