Where oh where oh where are the adults? Where did they all go? What are they doing? Why are they hiding? When will they get a fucking grip?

First the boring obvious for the millionth time: there’s no such thing as “people’s chosen pronouns” because people don’t get to “choose” special personal meanings for public language.

Much more to the point, humoring people about “their pronouns” absolutely does not affirm human dignity, it treats people as if they were toddlers. There is no dignity in playing let’s pretend in public forever. Trying to impose one’s personal fantasies about one’s personal self is just about the most embarrassingly childish thing one can do and get praised for it.

How does it foster inclusivity? Do people want more and more friends with special pronouns they have to memorize? More and more friends insisting on playing out their fantasies in real life? More and more friends pretending they have no idea what female and male bodies are?

How does it foster respect? Isn’t it far more likely to foster anxiously concealed contempt?

Where are the adults??

Billy Bragg writes in the New Statesman about how “reactionary” people have to be accountable, apparently to people like for instance Billy Bragg.

When pressed on whether his idea of accountability included the abuse suffered by JK Rowling following her statements on trans women, [Graham] Norton suggested that it might be more illuminating to talk to trans children and their parents, rather than merely amplifying the opinions of a celebrity or author – even a very good one. 

Says a celebrity writing in the New Statesman, which he probably wouldn’t be able to do if he weren’t a celebrity.

But more to the point: what are “trans children”?

What if there are no “trans children,” but only children swept up in a fad for pretending that people can be “in the wrong body” and can know that from earliest childhood? What if “talking to trans children” simply means talking to children who have been misled by their gullible parents and teachers? What if children are better off not being told that if they don’t conform to gender norms they are actually the other sex? What then?

I have long believed that what right-wing media call “cancel culture” is nothing more than the tendency of reactionaries to cry wolf when caught conducting a rearguard action against the progress made by minorities over the past half-century. 

But what if we’re not the “reactionaries”? What if it’s not actually reactionary to say that children should be free to ignore the stupid gender norms instead of making permanent drastic changes to their bodies? What if the fans of gender ideology are actually not on the same team as the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement? What then?

Rowling retorted, Bragg didn’t like that, Norton suspended his Twitter account.

I believe that freedom of expression gives us the right to offend, provided that our statements are generalised rather than directed at an individual, but those who offend should expect to be held accountable for their behaviour – and celebrity confers no protection.

Then why did Norton hide when he was held to account?

He doesn’t say.

Victoria Smith in The Critic:

Self-censorship is like housework: the vast majority of it is done by women, and men only notice when they think we’ve missed a bit. 

She’s writing about Graham Norton and his ill-informed views on JK Rowling, but of course the pattern is ubiquitous.

This is true not just about discussions of sex and gender, but female experience both in the home and in public space: there is so much we do not say, to which men remain completely oblivious. They do not appreciate all our silences, all our accommodations. All they notice are the inconvenient truths we do choose to utter. For those, we are damned. 

One comfort here is that that makes being silent kind of pointless, so let’s not be silent. If we don’t get any points for shutting up why should we shut up? There’s no payoff. Fuck it then.

I suppose the thing that appals me most is the lack of gratitude. Graham Norton and his friends have no awareness of just how restrained and polite women have been whilst being told we are nothing more than ambulatory penetrable holes or ideas in men’s heads. Why should I write thousands of carefully considered words explaining why I’m more than that? Yet I, and countless others do, whilst many more women never get that far. 

Again, it is just like housework. You get a whole room — a whole lifetime — of pristine female politeness and all men notice is that one speck of dirt, that one moment when we women choose to say “no”. They’d best get used to it, though. We have no more silence left to give. 

That last line is such a gem.

But we were told this never happens.

A woman was allegedly raped by a sex offender at a women’s shelter in Ontario, Canada after the predator identified as transgender in order to gain access to the facility.

Shane Jacob Green, 25, was arrested on August 24 by Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). At the time, the OPP issued a notice stating Green had been charged with two counts of sexual assault, four counts of failing to comply with a probation order, and one count of failing to comply with a release order.

But new details have emerged through the Toronto Sun revealing that Green’s crimes occurred while he was staying in a women’s emergency shelter in Parry Sound.

He’d already spent 114 days in prison, for assaulting a woman in 2018. How convenient for him to be able to move into a women’s shelter for greater ease of access.

According to the Sun, Green, who is homeless, had approached the Parry Sound shelter on August 22 and declared he was a woman in order to get a place to stay. While in the home, Green had allegedly been making sexually inappropriate comments to staff and residents, his behavior culminating in a sexual assault that occurred just two days later. He was arrested on August 24, the day of the assault, and is currently at Parry Sound Jail awaiting trial.

You’d think staff at the shelter could and would have told him to get out when he started making those comments – or perhaps that’s against the law? Idenniny trumps behavior?

According to the Sun, Green was known for leveraging his knowledge of gender self-identification policies both with police and women’s resource centers. Green sometimes uses the name “Stephanie” when claiming to be transgender. Staff at the women’s shelter where the rape allegedly occurred may have been too afraid to turn Green away due to the risk of running afoul of Canada’s notoriously pro-trans human rights law.

All going according to plan.

And fourteen billion eyes rolled in unison.

Primum non nocere.

There’s so much wrong with this one tweet from an ACLU lawyer.

One thing wrong with it is that trying to change people’s sex isn’t “medical care.” Even if it treats something (misery, anxiety, self-hatred) it isn’t medical – it doesn’t cure any illness or mend any bone. I don’t know exactly what it should be called, but I think “medical care” is way too misleading, not to say dishonest. It’s a kind of tinkering. “You’re unhappy in your sex, so we’ll tinker with it to help you think you’re the other sex, in the hope that that will make you more happy.” It’s groping in the dark.

Another thing wrong with it, and a much bigger thing, is the threat. The implied threat is that if this form of “medical care” is banned then people will die as a result. The implied claim is that Chase Strangio would have died if trans “medical care” had been banned. That’s using the threat of suicide as a lever to make people stop trying to protect children and adolescents from the craze for tampering with puberty and amputating healthy body parts. It’s a pretty awful thing to do, even for Chase Strangio.

And speaking of Saudi Arabia and grotesque levels of suppression and punitive absence of rights, meet Ron DeSantis’s Florida:

I stopped breathing while watching this clip. You know how you do, in shock and disbelief? Like that.

The Tampa Bay Times has details:

When police went to arrest Tony Patterson outside his Tampa home in August, he couldn’t believe the reason.

“What is wrong with this state, man?” Patterson protested as he was being escorted to a police car in handcuffs. “Voter fraud? Y’all said anybody with a felony could vote, man.”

Body-worn camera footage recorded by local police captured the confusion and outrage of Hillsborough County residents who found themselves in handcuffs for casting a ballot following investigations by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new Office of Election Crimes and Security.

The Aug. 18 arrests — conducted hours before DeSantis called a news conference to tout his crackdown on alleged voter fraud — were carried out by state police officers accompanied by local law enforcement.

We have been here before. We were here for years and years; for decades.

Romona Oliver, 55, was about to leave for work when police walked up her driveway at 6:52 a.m. and told her they had a warrant for her arrest.

“Oh my God,” she said.

An officer told her she was being arrested for fraud, a third-degree felony, for voting illegally in 2020.

“Voter fraud?” she said. “I voted, but I ain’t commit no fraud.”

This is literally how it was done in the many decades after Reconstruction was terminated. Rules and regulations designed to entrap black voters which were never invoked for white voters. This is the playbook.

Whichaya gonna choose, human rights or the ability to gas up the ol’ SUV every couple of days?

It’s the SUV every time, of course.

A US national held in Saudi Arabia has received a 16-year jail sentence for writing tweets critical of the government, his son has told the BBC.

Saad Ibrahim Almadi, 72, who also has Saudi citizenship, was arrested in November after he travelled from Florida to Riyadh to see his family. His son has now spoken out for the first time publicly, going against what he says has been US official advice.

Ibrahim Almadi said he did not want to see his father die in prison. He alleged that Saad had been held in conditions that amounted to torture since his arrest by Saudi authorities.

The Saudi court that issued the prison sentence found him guilty of trying to destabilise the kingdom and of supporting and funding terrorism. Ibrahim says the only evidence finally presented to the court consisted of 14 tweets.

And by the way, while we’re on the subject of supporting terrorism, hello, this is Saudi Arabia. Remember Jamal Khashoggi?

The tweets, which the BBC has seen, include criticism of the demolition of old parts of the cities of Mecca and Jeddah, concern over poverty in the kingdom, and a reference to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Yeaaaaaahhhhhhh that’s not terrorism, it’s dissent. That’s all it is. It’s criticism.

[Ibrahim] also criticised what he sees as lack of action over his father’s case by the US government. He said that only two meetings had been conducted with his father by US officials in Saudi Arabia during his detention – the first came a full six months after he was arrested.

Ibrahim also alleged that his efforts to contact the White House directly had been rebuffed.

He first revealed his father’s story to the BBC when President Joe Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia in July. The visit confirmed that de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been welcomed back into the fold of world leaders, almost four years after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi tarnished his image.

It’s those SUVs, man. Gotta keep them suckers moving.

Even Amnesty International stopped short of calling it a right, in fact it explicitly disavowed calling it a right.

Amnesty International has formally adopted a policy calling for the decriminalisation of adult sex work and repeal of most laws around the world controlling prostitution.

The organisation’s stance on protecting sex workers is set out in a global programme published on Thursday that draws on fresh research about the industry in Argentina, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea and Norway.

“This policy does not argue that there is a human right to buy sex or a human right to financially benefit from the sale of sex by another person,” Amnesty said. “Rather, it calls for sex workers to be protected from individuals who seek to exploit and harm them and recognises that the criminalisation of adult consensual sex work interferes with the realisation of the human rights of sex workers.”

Not arguing that there is a human right to buy sex? Well we can do better than that!

The incel’s age-old dream: the right to have sex. The fact that such a right would obliterate the right to refuse sex is neither here nor there.

Alexandra Hunt is running for Congress. Here’s hoping she fails.

Oh good, another man reports on a man in charge of a rape crisis center and the evil women who don’t want men running rape crisis centers. The man reporting is Adam Ramsay at Open Democracy, and the man in charge of the rape crisis center is Mridul Wadhwa. Adam Ramsay just can’t say enough about how evil these women are for objecting to men forcing their way into women’s spaces.

Warning: this piece discusses transphobia.

Warning: this piece is hostile to women.

“It’s only recently that I’ve really stopped looking over my shoulder or not thinking actively that I could be harmed,” Mridul Wadhwa, the [Edinburgh] centre’s director, told us. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think I will be harmed. Even now, I do believe that I will be harmed. I believe it is almost inevitable.”

It’s all about him, you see. It’s not about the women who need the center’s services, it’s about him.

Wadhwa has dedicated the last 14 years of her professional life to supporting women who are victims of sexual violence. But for the last three years, she’s faced torrential abuse including unfounded smears that she’s a sexual predator and numerous threats of violence – all because she is trans.

No. That’s just a straight-up lie. It’s because he’s a man and because he took a job running a rape crisis center. Trans shmans; the point is that he’s a man.

The abuse began in 2019, when Wadhwa was director of the Forth Valley rape crisis centre in Stirling. It intensified in October 2020, when she launched a bid to be an SNP candidate in the 2021 Holyrood elections, and again when she was appointed director of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) in April last year.

Because women think men should not be in charge of rape crisis centers, for reasons that should be obvious.

We get many more paragraphs of bleating about “abuse” of Wadhwa.

One of the main groups leading these attacks is For Women Scotland, whose Twitter account has repeatedly promoted the hashtag #AskRapeCrisisScotland, and stories about Mridul Wadhwa.

…

“I find this misinformation painful to read,” said Mridul Wadhwa. “I see it as the erasure of my womanhood, denying my existence, my privacy and my ability to contribute to society. I say my, but really I mean all trans women. Their dangerous messaging makes all women who provide services in these settings suspect; their messages seek to reinforce stereotypes of what women must look and behave like, and also suggest that employers must share the personal histories of their female staff.”

It’s all about him, you see, and his “womanhood”; the women who need the service are just there to “validate” his “womanhood.”

Adam Ramsay is getting some skeptical responses to his “read my story” tweet.

Dammit.

An Iranian athlete who made headlines for refusing to wear a hijab while competing overseas has reportedly gone missing.

Elnaz Rekabi, 33, shunned the Islamic Republic’s restrictions while representing her country at the Asian Sport Climbing Championships in Seoul on Sunday.

Sources close to Rekabi told the BBC that they had been unable to contact her since Monday night.

I was listening to BBC World Service just now and they reported that she’s on a plane bound for Tehran, and the betting is she’ll be arrested on arrival.

All because she doesn’t wear a fucking blanket over her head while climbing a rock wall.

Another friendship broken over the endlessly escalating demands of trans ideology:

A schism has erupted in environmental politics after the Scottish Greens voted to cut ties with the UK party over claims of “trans abuse”.

Meaning abuse that identifies as abuse but is actually just a non-conforming opinion?

Members overwhelmingly backed a motion to suspend “formal association” with the Green Party in England and Wales on the second day of their Scottish party’s conference in Dundee.

Terfs in the sugar bowl was it?

The Rainbow Greens, a group representing LGBTQ+ members of the Scottish Greens, submitted the motion, accusing the Greens of “transphobic bigotry”, “homophobic bigotry” and disrespecting the devolution settlement.

I’m beginning to wonder of Scottish trans ideologues are a little bit too zealous even for other trans ideologues.

Guy Ingerson, who is vice co-convenor for Aberdeen Greens, proposed the motion as a temporary “tool” to demonstrate the Scottish Greens’ “intolerance of intolerance”.

Or their fanatical enforcement of a lunatic ideology.

The Scottish Greens’ accusations of transphobia follow co-leader Patrick Harvie’s call this year for the expulsion of Shahrar Ali from the party after the candidate for the deputy leadership of the Greens, who came third in the election, was compared to Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on the issue of trans rights.

In other words trans fanatics called Shahrar Ali names.

In February the Scottish Greens criticised the opinion of Emma Bateman, the co-chair of Green Party Women, who was suspended in February for her opinion that “humans can’t change sex”.

What hope is there for a political party that kicks people out for stating obvious impersonal facts?

The party claimed that her signature on the Women’s Declaration International, which aims to make rights “sex-based”, amounted to “asking [for] the removal of all rights trans people currently have under the European Convention on Human Rights”.

In other words fanciful new rights bestowed on trans people are incompatible with women’s rights, and the Scottish greens think women just have to take it and shut up.

Likewise the former MSP Andy Wightman resigned over a disagreement with the Scottish Greens about an amendment allowing victims of sexual crimes to choose the sex, rather than the gender, of the person who examined them.

The New Scientist last week:

New Scientist today:

Willful, determined stupidity from David Futrelle:

Does J.K. Rowling believe that trans people — or at least trans women — don’t deserve the presumption of innocence? That seems to be the clear implication of an op-ed she wrote for the Times (UK) today. But she is cagey enough in her wording that she can and probably will figure out a way to say, my goodness, I wasn’t saying anything of the kind.

Or to put it another way, she’s precise enough in her wording that she is in fact not saying anything of the kind.

Before we get to her wording – presumption of innocence isn’t a magic talisman that applies to everyone on all occasions in all contexts. It’s a legal term – defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That doesn’t translate to some magic formula that applies to everyone everywhere.

Here’s the relevant quote in context. She is — in the midst of a longer attack on First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon – insinuating that men routinely pretend to be trans women in order to get easier access to women to abuse:

No she’s not. What an idiotic thing for Futrelle to claim. What she does say:

The third argument Sturgeon uses is that it’s transphobic to suggest any man would fraudulently claim a female identity. This claim is extraordinary. Nobody but the very naive can fail to be aware that predatory men are capable of going to great lengths to gain easy access to victims, and have often sought out professions or special status that offer camouflage for their activities. Sex offenders have historically been found among social workers, teachers, priests, doctors, babysitters, school caretakers, celebrities and charity fundraisers, yet no matter how often the scandals break, the lesson appears never to be learned: it is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence.

She’s comparing trans people to priests, social workers, doctors – and the point is not that they’re not entitled to the presumption of innocence in court, the point is that they’re not entitled to it in advance in situations that would be a honey pot for predators. It’s extremely sad and infuriating that it’s necessary to take precautions against predators, but it’s true all the same. This is not an insult to all priests or doctors or social workers, nor is it a call to remove their right to a fair trial: it’s a reminder of why we can’t just assume that no predatory male would ever pretend to be a trans woman for greater ease of predation.

Futrelle’s distortion of this is appalling.

Jennifer Rubin says don’t go thinking forced birthism isn’t part of Trumpism:

Pundits and politicians tend to observe a bright distinction between the Donald Trump MAGA movement’s assault on democracy and the right-wing evisceration of women’s reproductive rights.

Do they? I hadn’t noticed. I don’t. I suppose if asked I would say I think any opposition to abortion Trump claims is basically opportunistic, but then that’s true of nearly everything Trump says. I’m sure he’s quite happy to stick it to the bitches along with sticking it to the feminists and lefties and Democrats and yadda yadda, but I doubt he has a systematic worked-out plan as opposed to a determination to do whatever he feels like doing in the moment.

The attack on women’s self-determination and autonomy is as much a part of MAGA’s fascistic affinities as is the cult’s fondness for violence and white Christian nationalism.

Oh yes. Of course it is. People who love violence naturally love attacking women because it’s so easy.

One need only look at right-wing regimes present and past to see that they invariably include appeals to hyper-masculinity and demands for women to be limited to their roles as women and mothers. Modern authoritarian regimes — such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary or President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — and European fascists of the 1930s alike have sought to compel motherhood and limit women’s participation in society.

Fascism is about violence and force, so naturally it’s about hyper-masculinity, so naturally it considers women worthless apart from whelping more men and vessels to whelp more men.

The xenophobic right-wing movement in the United States today is obsessed with “replacement theory,” regarding women in the dominant group as essential to the preservation of white supremacy. 

Mainstream media coverage has no problem recognizing the link between the MAGA anti-democratic movement and racism/white nationalism. One need only look at the Confederate flags carried through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or listen to right-wing fearmongering about immigrants to understand racism is intrinsic to the MAGA movement. However, when it comes to women’s rights, we see little acknowledgment in mainstream reporting and commentary that misogyny and deprivation of women’s rights are central to a movement playing largely on White male hysteria.

I think I know why that is. I think it’s the same old reason we keep seeing: because women don’t matter that much. That’s why racism always precedes misogyny in news stories: because women don’t matter that much. It’s still considered fluff to talk about women’s rights and the hatred of women. It’s still an afterthought to talk about rape and domestic violence. It’s still considered dubious to talk about women’s rights in the same breath as real people’s rights. Lots of women are Karens, you know – probably most of them. The woman who complained to her husband about Emmett Till is far more to blame for his murder than her husband and brother-in-law who tortured him to death. Women are sly and sneaky and devilish, and also trivial and stupid and boring. Let’s put them at the bottom of the list every time.

We must not keep males out of women’s sports unless a male actually smashes a girl to the ground leaving her concussed.

“A wise legislature does not go out looking for social issues to tap,” said [North Carolina] Republican House leader Tim Moore when he declined to put the Save Women’s Sports Act up for a vote last year. Moore said the House would not consider legislation prohibiting biological males from competing against girls in school sports without examples.

Now the House has its example (but it said examples – how many does it need?).

During a girls’ tournament last month, a Highlands High volleyball player pelted a Hiwassee Dam High player in the forehead with the ball during a return.

I think “bashed” is the word rather than “pelted.”

The Hiwassee Dam player, a biological girl, suffered severe head and neck injuries, resulting in long-term concussion symptoms, including vision problems. The girl has still not yet been cleared to play again by her primary care physician or a neurologist.

Never mind. The validation of the boy is more important than the health of the girl.

When the cops are criminalish themselves:

Metropolitan [London] police officers suspected of serious criminal offences including sexual assault and domestic abuse have been allowed to escape justice, a damning review has found, with the force’s leader admitting that hundreds of racist, women-hating and corrupt officers have been left in the ranks.

Not really what you want in a police force. Cops who hate women aren’t the ideal people to call if you’re a woman reporting a rape.

Massive failings in how Britain’s biggest force roots out wrongdoing were exposed in a report by Louise Casey, which found “systemic” racism in the Met, and misogyny.

One officer faced 11 claims including sexual assault, harassment and domestic abuse, but remains in the force, the report found.

It’s interesting that the Guardian keeps naming racism first, as if it’s automatically and obviously more important than misogyny, even while citing a cop accused of sexual assault, harassment and domestic abuse. It’s as if misogyny is kind of a mild, lifestyle thing, while racism is the real deal.

Lady Casey was commissioned by the Met in the wake of the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer. This was her interim report purely focusing on the Met discipline system, and complaints from officers and staff about their colleagues.

It reveals Met officers and staff trying to fight toxic colleagues were betrayed by the force’s discipline system, and fear an “anything goes” culture.

The findings are among the worst faced by any police force and Rowley said he felt shame and anger reading the report, and conversations with female and ethnic minority staff about their experiences had left him in tears. He added the report showed the Met had been “too weak” facing down wrongdoing in the ranks.

Oh well, it’s not as if it’s a big important city.

Originally a comment by Sastra on It’s a war on multiple fronts.

The identity theft of an entire sex (both of them) could never have been pulled off without guilt: guilt over the way we for so long refused to accept homosexuality as a perfectly normal and natural orientation; guilt over the way we for so long put women and men into restrictive “boxes” of attitude and behavior; and guilt over the way we for so long allowed children to be mercilessly bullied on the supposition that it made them “toughen up.” By “we,” I mean modern Western society. We ought to have known better. We should have been heroes.

And so we — some of us, that is — overcorrect by experiencing a social justice version of pareidolia, seeing Faces in the Clouds of fuzzy concepts running up against an incoherent concept propelled by soppy thinking. Trans people “know who they are” in a secret inside way. Don’t they look like gay people? Trans identities defy traditional ideas of men and women. Doesn’t this appear to be sexual nonconformity? Trans folks are fearfully dependent on being accepted by their peers. Isn’t this resembling fragile youngsters trying to navigate a schoolyard filled with popular kids gatekeeping who’s in and mean kids intimidating who they can? Look at the shapes. No way that’s a coincidence.

And, for the rainbow coming out of the clouds, we have the same group responsible for our wicked past re gay people, sexist roles, and bullying now coming out against trans identities: the conservative religious right. It’s like the voice of God telling us “Yes, that’s totally a face in the clouds.” Hero time. This is how we’re going to get it right.

Pareiodolia is an evolved instinct. I think it’s not really a mystery why people see a resemblance between solid social justice issues and the nebulous, undefinable, innate sense of transgender self billowing itself around their shapes. The interesting thing is how we are able to second guess ourselves, look closer, and accurately see nothing.

Leicester Police issue a Statement on a previous Statement (or collection of tweets) about Hate Crime:

Temporary Chief Constable Rob Nixon said: “Over the past week, a number of social media posts were issued on our Leicestershire Police Stay Safe account aiming to raise awareness of hate crime. This was as part of National Hate Crime Awareness Week.”

Twitter, that is. He means “our Leicestershire Police Stay Safe Twitter account” but forgot to say so. “Social media” isn’t just another word for Twitter. It includes Twitter but it isn’t limited to Twitter.

“While we recognise that people have strong and often conflicting views regarding this issue, we should not forget the seriousness of hate crime and the devastating crimes that as a country we have seen in the past which have happened as a result of hate crime.”

As a result of hate, he means. Not crimes that have happened as a result of hate crime, but crimes that have happened as a result of hate. If you’re going to issue statements at least make them clear.

“Hate crimes are acts of violence or hostility directed at people because of who they are. Hate crime law in England and Wales have developed in various phases over the past two decades and the law recognises five protected characteristics; race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity.”

But not sex. Trans women are protected, but women are not. Lesbians are protected, but women as a whole are not. Women are not protected as women though some can be included under one of the protected characteristics. It’s old news, but that doesn’t make it ordinary or acceptable news. Misogyny is pervasive, yet somehow sex is not a protected characteristic.