There’s a petition we can sign in support of the University of Southern Maine professor under attack for saying there are only two sexes. I just signed it.

There’s a conversation about the effort to get her fired at Why Evolution is True.

It hasn’t sunk in yet, has it.

WHAT “vital helpline”???

Mermaids isn’t helping, it’s harming. Puberty blockers are harmful. Cutting off breasts or penises is harmful. Telling children they’re in the wrong body and can change that with drugs and surgeries is harmful. Mermaids doesn’t help; instead of helping Mermaids gives children terrible, dangerous advice.

The brutal recklessness of these ideologues is a sight to behold.

Meet “Critical Childhood Studies”:

Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) is an emerging academic field that has developed over the past two decades. The field belongs in the same ballpark as Critical Race Theory or former Women’s Studies (now Gender or Queer Studies). Established to examine the histories and provide cultural context for people oppressed on the basis of race and sex, these fields have morphed.

Rather than helping oppressed communities, critical scholars often promote ideological views on race and “gender” that ultimately do the exact opposite: further fuel racism and sexism. Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) has fallen into the same trap — deconstructing childhood to a degree that, if applied outside of an academic setting, would put children in danger.

“Herm herm. What is childhood really? Who decides? Where does it begin, where does it end? Aren’t we all in a very real sense children? At the same time aren’t children in a very real sense adults? So that means we get to fuck them. Good luck on the exam.”

In the words of CCS academics, they explore “the history and construction of childhood” and “textual and visual representations of childhood.” Adding a postmodern flair, there’s “childhood as metaphor, and children as agents of cultural production,” as well.

Some of it is helpful, some of it is the usual pretentious word-mongering, and some of it…

Third, we arrive at the harmful community of Critical Childhood Studies scholarship: one that seeks to tear down the fundamentals of child safeguarding.

For example, in his 2020 book, CCS researcher Jacob Breslow agrees with other scholars that there exist “queer children.” They’re defined as ones that “display interest in sex generally… in same-sex erotic attachments, or in cross-generational attachments.”

Not for the first time I wonder how Breslow goes about his “research.”

The claims that children wish to be sexually abused by adults form only a minor part of the field. But, the more popular theory that “childhood doesn’t exist,” despite being esoteric nonsense, can also lead to safeguarding issues. One dangerous result of this framework is “the concept of childhood is violence” theory.

A 2021 online book launch by Jacob Breslow, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, mentioned the “violence of childhood.” Three Critical Childhood scholars gave speeches at the event, hosted by LSE Gender.

In her contribution, Erica Meiners claimed that the “categorizations- adult, child, youth perform a kind of violence and ontological disqualification.” She added there is “ violence incurred by the ontological register of childhood.”

Because really children are small adults. The fact that they haven’t gone through puberty yet is neither here nor there.

Too bad girls in Iran can’t identify their way out of being killed by the security police.

Reports are emerging of the death of another teenage girl at the hands of security forces in Iran, as protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini looked set to enter their third week.

Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old who posted popular vlogs on YouTube, was killed when the security forces beat her with batons at a protest in Gohardasht in Alborz province on 23 September, according to Amnesty International.

This isn’t random or chance. A harsh punitive control of women is the core of Islamist theocracy. Islam sees women as nothing but walking temptations to men, who have to be bagged up and muffled for the protection of men.

Esmailzadeh’s YouTube videos, which have gone viral on social media networks, show her listening to music, dancing and talking about her dreams of travelling.

No no no. Women can’t have that. Women aren’t people who long to travel and dance, women are machines for the production of men and machinesfortheproductionofmen.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Feminism is for everyone except women.

I fully understand why many feminists say that men can’t be feminists, and I understand why they are suspicious of men who claim to be. It’s because we have a tendency to take over when we get involved, and when it comes to transactivists, they are living up to those expectations. What I don’t understand is how people can make declarations such as “MY feminism will be intersectional” as if people could buy a feminism and paint it any color that works best for them.

I think that moving Women’s studies over to Gender Studies has had an obvious and negative effect on people’s understanding of feminism, more of that “forced teaming” thing that has done so much damage to LGB activism. People really don’t know what feminism is anymore, and that is more detrimental than all of Rush Limbaugh’s years of making fun of feminazis. Many people don’t know the difference between female and femininity, thinking that femininity is what defines girls and women and that the actual body of a female human being is immaterial. And of course, this not a goal of feminism (in my understanding,) which is to break down the limitations of gender. Saying that a man who is feminine, or desires the feminine role, is actually a woman affirms that femininity is the defining property of a woman.

Never mind that men who desire this only act out simulations of their idea of femininity, and can have no idea what it actually is to be a woman.

Last year Michael Biggs wrote a piece for The Critic about…it’s simpler to quote.

Threats of violence against “trans exclusionary” or “gender critical” feminists — who do not believe that people can change sex merely by announcing preferred pronouns or wearing different clothes — have become ubiquitous on social media. It is nevertheless surprising to discover that such threats can now be submitted as academic work for a master’s degree.

The London School of Economics held a conference in April 2021 for students taking the MSc in Gender (Sexuality). One session was entitled “No Time, No TERFs, No Norms”; the disparaging acronym stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. A paper in the session concluded:

“If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism… Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”

Does that sound familiar? It did to me, so I searched and found that I wrote a brief post about it at the time.

Michael Biggs again:

The student’s paper was initially exposed by Sex Matters, the organization — founded by Rebecca Bull, Naomi Cunningham, Maya Forstater, and Emma Hilton — campaigning for sex to be recognized in laws and language. (I am one of its Directors.) The volume of criticism ensuing on Twitter forced the LSE to acknowledge that the paper “did not abide by the School’s Code of Practice on Free Speech” and to remove it from the conference website. This response is completely inadequate. For one thing, this student has made explicit sexualized threats of violence against women, and by his own admission poses a danger to students and staff.

Of greater concern is what this episode reveals about the culture of the Department of Gender Studies. It recently accused “those espousing gender critical perspectives” of making “transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly”. In this view, anyone who recognizes the reality of sex is inflicting harm on people who deny that reality: such harm justifies retaliatory violence. It is evident that such hyperbolic accusations have created an environment where a student can boast about butchering feminists who refuse to submit to his ideology.

You can read the whole paper if you want to.

Anyway, the punchline is, the paper is by one Matt Thompson, who is a student of Jacob Breslow’s. Of course he is.

From an interview with Maggie Haberman about Trump and her book about Trump and reporting on Trump:

He fixated on the paper and attacked me because of it. There were times when he attacked me over coverage — it was always over a story or something he saw me say on TV. One thing he got very upset about seeing me say on TV was that he watches a lot of TV, and then that became a fixation. He’s incredibly hostile to anyone suggesting he watches a lot of TV because he thinks it’s some knock on his intelligence.

Of course it’s a knock on his intelligence. It’s also a knock on his intellectual energy, his discipline, his abilities, his curiosity – it’s a knock on many things about him. Of course it is. He’s a profoundly stupid incurious lazy empty man who took on a job he had no intention of doing.

An online course at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is titled Who is Feminism For? The instructor is Sophie Lewis.

The seemingly uncontroversial idea that feminism is synonymous with “the women’s movement”—i.e., that feminism is “for women”—has in fact never been widely accepted, least of all among feminists. From the beginning, comradely holes have been poked in feminism’s myriad attempts to define itself, not to mention the word “woman.” For centuries, feminists have debated: what does feminism encompass? Who is feminism for?

No they haven’t. Not for centuries – the word hasn’t been current for that long, let alone the movement.

In this course, we’ll enter that debate, unpacking questions of feminism’s purpose, scope, and possible limits. Along the way, we will consider conflicting conceptions of feminism: that feminism is for “Woman”; that feminism is for colonized, lesbian and  working women (and children); that feminism is for “everyone”; finally, that feminism is for “no one” (i.e., feminism is for abolishing itself).

Why will we do that? Because women. Women have to offer to step back, to close down, to yield the floor. Women have to apologize and give way, because that’s what being a woman means. Women are not allowed to put themselves first.

We will read selections from First- and Second Wave feminist classics—for example, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique—as well as contemporaneous and current Black radical, womanist and transfeminist criticisms and counterexamples.

We will read transfeminist criticisms, in other words we will pay attention to men playing at being women who tell us to sit down and listen to them.

Our investigation will move towards accounts of feminism that, while still placing its focus on “women,” define the constituency of feminist struggle as both more specific and much broader: for instance, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, environmental, and family-abolitionist.

Feminism must be about everything, because women are simply not important enough to keep feminism for themselves.

We will, equally, engage with articulations of feminism as a movement against structures of oppression that adversely affect everyone: man or woman, able-bodied or disabled, migrant, indigene, citizen, or settler, straight or queer, white, black, trans or cis, etc. Finally, we will consider texts that seek to transcend feminism altogether.

Then we will sweep what’s left of feminism up and drop it in the bin, and that will be the end of that. You’re welcome.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

The BBC tells us:

Relatives of a girl who died during protests in Iran have been forced into making false statements, a source close to the family has told BBC Persian.

Nika Shakarami, 16, went missing in Tehran on 20 September after telling a friend she was being chased by police. On Wednesday night, a state TV report showed her aunt, Atash, saying: “Nika was killed falling from a building.” Her uncle was also seen on TV speaking against the unrest, as someone seems to whisper to him: “Say it, you scumbag!”

They apparently smashed every bone in her body.

Tehran judiciary official Mohammad Shahriari was cited by state media as saying on Wednesday that a post-mortem showed Nika suffered “multiple fractures… in the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, arms and legs, which indicate that the person was thrown from a height”.

Or that the guards were very thorough.

However, a death certificate issued by a cemetery in the capital, which was obtained by BBC Persian, states that she died after suffering “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object”.

Nika’s Instagram and Telegram accounts were also deleted after she went missing, according to Atash. Iranian security forces are known to demand that detainees give them access to the social media accounts so that the accounts or certain posts can be deleted.

Their god really hates women.

Nika is not the only young female protester to have been killed during the unrest that erupted last month following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained by the morality police for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict hijab law.

The family of Hadis Najafi, 22, have said that she was shot dead by security forces while protesting in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, on 21 September. Officials allegedly asked her father to say that she died of a heart attack.

Another 16-year-old girl, Sarina Esmailzadeh, died after being severely beaten on the head with batons by security forces during protests in Karaj on 23 September, Amnesty International cited a source as saying. The source also told the human rights group that security and intelligence agents had harassed the girl’s family to coerce them into silence.

Woman is the enemy.

Shambolic Neutral on The Divine Trans/The Trans Divine:

“Transpeople are sacred. We are the divine”. If that’s not cult-speak then I do not know what is. Some of us have been saying gender ideology is the new religion for over a decade. Finally, it clearly feels secure enough to make it blatant.

Or at least the branch of it that hangs out at the Globe does.

In a way of course that makes sense – it’s what drama and acting are all about. You could get up on a stage and say “drama is the divine” and I would see it quite differently. It would be a metaphor as opposed to a lunatic boast. There is something magical (metaphorically of course) about theater, about plays and acting and movies and tv dramas. The best of it can change you.

But substitute “trans people” for “drama” and we’re in a different country altogether.

In the fervent, overexcited voice of a cult leader addressing a fresh intake of acolytes, actor Isobel Thom – also non-binary, also using a terrible haircut to indicate that she is super progressive and has liberated herself from the shackles of patriarchy and is no longer a woman yadda yadda yadda because of course nothing says escaping the shackles of patriarchy like thinking womanhood is something to escape to become a real person – talks about how being trans is sacred and divine, full of multiplicity and creativity and all the usual seductive shit designed to make young people desperate to feel special and different and cool feel special and different and cool.

It always makes me laugh to remember that for a time when I was a young people, 15 or 16, I spent a few weeks being special and cool by being as nerdy as possible to annoy my classmates. What did I do? I wore ankle socks. It worked, too; they remonstrated with me. It’s not Wordsworth and the French Revolution, but it amuses me.

A year or so later I wore bangs (a fringe in UK-speak) when the fashion was all for long straight hair parted in the middle, no bangs. Divine, yeah?

The Globe has now deleted their tweets, after getting ratio-ed so hard that it could practically send them back in time to get a bollocking off the very real Jeanne d’Arc. It also deleted this stupendous (and I don’t mean that in a good way) poem, which was written by an actual adult and not a moody 14-year-old who’s just been sent to their room without pudding for being rude to their mum at the dinner table.

Again, it’s more of the same. Trans is beauty, trans is special, trans is no-one understands me… and then finding someone who will understand you and encourage you to be as transgressive and broken and boundary-less as possible. All of it, all of this shit, is just the sly, seductive, come hither of groomers. That’s all it is.

And it’s so dangerous. Curry has a YouTube video entitled I Cut My Nipples Off Today. Jesus Christ. That’s not normal, sane or healthy. That’s not what someone who is revelling in their own power, truth and beauty does. That’s not someone who is making others jealous does. That’s not what anyone does! That’s the behaviour of a deeply troubled or deeply depraved or deeply both individual, and either way, they should not be being encouraged to influence young people and encouraged by establishments like The Globe.

What next, videos titled I Poked My Eyes Out Today? I Got My Feet Amputated Today? I Severed My Spinal Cord Today?

Thinking you are divine and sacred is not a good thing. And it is not true or possible. You are just a person, same as everyone else. You have a sex, which cannot change. You get one life. This is all there is. Instead of trying to hide from reality by teaching children magical thinking, we need to teach them how to cope.

So sorry, you are not divine or sacred. No-one is. You’re normal. There is nothing wrong with your body the way it is. Coping comes from accepting reality. Welcome to the adult world, kids.

Welcome to the adult world and keep your bits, you’re going to need them.

Scotland goes full magic gender:

A Holyrood committee tasked with scrutinising the Scottish government’s gender recognition reform bill has given its support to the key principles for simplifying how transgender people can update their birth certificates – including the introduction of self-declaration.

Great. Let’s introduce self-declaration for everything. I’m Bill Gates, so give me the contents of his bank account.

Thursday’s report by Holyrood’s equalities, human rights and civil justice committee recommends, by a majority of five to two, the move to statutory self-declaration before the registrar general for legal gender recognition, thus removing the need for a psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

It also supports reducing the age at which people can apply for a gender recognition certificate (GRC) from 18 to 16, in line with wider Scots law on legal capacity, as well as reducing the time someone must have been permanently living in their gender before they can apply, from two years to three months.

That’s funny because living in a place for three months isn’t generally considered permanently living there; it’s considered pretty damn temporary. Having a job for three months isn’t permanent. Having a university library card for three months isn’t permanent. It’s pretty bizarre to consider “living in their gender” for three months “permanent.” But the whole thing is bizarre so the details might as well be.

The Gender recognition reform bill is supported by every party in Holyrood bar the Scottish Conservatives, but has been fiercely contested by some groups who argue it will fundamentally alter who can access women-only services, and believe they have not been adequately consulted.

Yeah, like women. Remember us? We used to be a thing, kind of, but now we’re just those dreary last-year actual women who are so inferior to the new flashy fake kind with a penis under the skirt.

As several hundred protesters gathered outside the Holyrood parliament building to demonstrate against the plans on Thursday morning, JK Rowling – an opponent of self-declaration – posted a photograph of herself on Twitter wearing a T-shirt reading: “Nicola Sturgeon destroyer of women’s rights” and declared her solidarity with them.

She did.

The Telegraph reports The Globe’s mad dash to pretend it never did call women bitches:

Shakespeare’s Globe has been criticised for sharing a “derogatory” poem challenging “transphobic Terfs”, as the theatre promoted a play about a non-binary Joan of Arc.

A play about one of history’s rare Famous Women that pretends she wasn’t a woman after all.

Verses that begin by using the word “bitch” to descibe feminists who are critical of gender ideology were shared on the Globe’s website and the venue’s Twitter feed to promote I, Joan, a play about the French heroine.

Well that’s what the good people do now – call feminists bitches and cunts. It’s The Monstrous Regiment of Women updated.

It also purged its website of a page titled “creative responses to I, Joan”, saying that promoting the piece of writing directed at “terfs” was a “misjudgment”.

No, that’s not a misjudgment, it’s a misogynistic attack on feminists and women in general. It’s not some bumbling mistake like grabbing the wrong glass in a dark kitchen. It’s one item in a deliberate calculated focused attack on feminist women and women in general. The Globe didn’t trip and accidentally promote that misogynistic “poem,” it did it the same way all the anti-feminists promote anti-feminist and misogynist tweets and posts and articles. No we don’t think The Globe just made a careless booboo.

Joan Smith, feminist writer and author of Misogynies, said: “It’s not a poem, it’s a vicious attack on women who disagree with a nasty, misogynist cult.

“Another institution captured – are there any adults at The Globe? Anyone who thinks this is reasonable behaviour has lost all sense of humanity.”

Woman’s Place UK, a gender critical campaign group, added: “Publishing such derogatory and deeply misogynistic language sends a very powerful message to women – know your place.

“We support and embrace artistic licence, but publishing offensive sexist tropes, whilst erasing a woman from her own life, only spotlights The Globe’s regressive attitudes towards women.”

A spokesman for the theatre said: “In sharing a selection of audience artistic responses to I, Joan on social media, we shared something in a moment of misjudgment. The tweet was promptly deleted, and we are sorry for any offence caused.”

Apology not accepted. That shrugging “any offence” only compounds the problem. Calling us bitches isn’t exactly subtle, so pretending they don’t even know what the “offence” might be is insult added to insult.

Throwing down.

Originally a comment by Freemage on A small but important right.

It always blows my mind how swiftly virtually the entire Left forgot about the phrase “Schroedinger’s Rapist”. It was the go-to for the explanation why women couldn’t just trust a random guy, even though he might seem all right – because rapists don’t wear neon signs on their heads, and thus you only know a guy is a threat when he actually reveals himself to BE a threat.

And of course, this was true even though the vast, vast majority of men not only aren’t rapists, but are repulsed and revolted by the idea of rape. The harm that can be committed by the small minority of men who are rapists vastly outweighs the ‘harm’ done to men by not having women’s immediate trust.

So even if trans women are less likely to rape than men (unproven, of course, but a frequent claim deeply believed by the TRAs), that doesn’t lower the risk to zero (we have actual proof of that, thanks), and therefore the principle still applies.

And Glosswitch shares another narcissistic display from the Globe:

Blah blah blah my right to proudly self-identify blah blah blah my beauty astounds them –

This is not social justice or anything like it. This is just an unholy blend of aggression and conceit. I can’t wait for it to fall over and end.

Ah so they’re admitting it.

The Globe’s current pinned tweet:

The dogma has been hinting it for ages, but not quite saying it out loud.

Eye-rolls aside, this is why the “movement” is so terrible and boring and ruinous. This conceit and megalomania and histrionic narcissism. No you’re not “the divine,” you’re just a very naughty cult.

Update: the Globe deleted the tweet so here’s the clip via a different tweet:

It started from Sally Hines ranting at Rebecca R-C on Twitter and led to a lot of eye-popping stuff I hadn’t seen before.

I’ve got his LSE page open and it’s true: first thing it says after his name, job, and department, is the sabbatical announcement.

For greater ease of reading, his wildly pretentious account of his “research”:

My primary area of research is on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them. Specifically, this work interrogates and thinks with Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements. My monograph on this research, titled Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child was published in 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. It brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with “the psychic life of the child” it combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements. Beyond Ambivalent Childhoods, my research in this area is published with Feminist Theory (forthcoming), American Quarterly (2019), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (2017).

One thing that emerges from that as clear as ice is that women are of no interest whatever to cutting edge geniuses now. That feminism is as dead as spats or monocles or tight lacing. The hippest researchers are into sexed-up children and deportations.

What the everloving fuck, you might wonder, do anti-deportation movements have to do with queer youth activism? What does it mean to “interrogate and think with”? What is “critical migration theory”? What is “the queer life of children’s desires” and what does it have to do with “the precarious status of migrants”? Let me guess: desires are hindered by wicked boundaries and so are migrants. Yeah? So children want to “transgress” those boundaries, and so do migrants, and bang there’s your research. I’m sure migrants languishing in filthy pens on the Texas border are just thrilled to have Jacob Bresslow interrogating and thinking with them.

It’s hideous preening self-admiring appropriation of real misery and injustice for the sake of baroque academic posturing. There are few things I despise more.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on About the emotional stunting.

I think part of the problem is that these pundits live in a different world than the rest of us. I don’t mean just “they’re the elite and we’re the common folk,” though that can be part of it. I just mean that the stakes are different for them, in both directions: they’re often insulated from the consequences of the other side’s policies, yet they feel conflict more sharply because of the work and social circles in which they live.

Example 1: Opinion columnists/pundits. I’m sure Ross Douthat is a swell guy and easy to get along with. He seems nice in the podcasts and dialogues I’ve heard him have with liberals over the years, and that’s quite a few since he used to be a semi-regular on Bloggingheads back when I followed it. I have no doubt that liberals like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias genuinely like the guy, and probably for good personal reasons. And if you’re Klein in particular, who is a NYT colleague, you kind of need to get along professionally. If I ever met him, I’d be polite and chances are we’d have a perfectly civil encounter. But that doesn’t change the fact that Douthat is (among other things) a theocrat who thinks The Handmaid’s Tale is an aspirational story. I don’t want to “unify” with someone like that, and as I’m unlikely to ever meet or work with Douthat, I couldn’t give a shit if he’s offended by people like me characterizing his views harshly.

Example 2: This has changed in recent years for reasons that are all too apparent, but it used to be the case that some people were surprised by how well some Supreme Court justices got along. I think Ginsburg and Scalia went to the opera together; some of the others were regular bridge partners. They all tended to speak highly of their colleagues and how well they got along personally. And I think that was a good thing for them, and did no harm to the causes they each supported. There’s no reason that, e.g., Ginsburg should have gone to work every day dreading seeing Scalia in the courtroom and avoiding him in the hallways and shooting nasty glances across the conference room table because they are ideologically opposed. It would have made the job really miserable, and wouldn’t have accomplished anything: Scalia wasn’t going to suddenly support women’s rights because of a scowl from a colleague. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us should mince words about what the conservative justices are doing. We don’t have to work with them, we don’t see them in the halls every day.

It reminds me of the old debates about Gnu Atheism. The anti-Gnus were always anxious to reduce everything to personal relationships: Richard Dawkins writing a book titled “The God Delusion” was supposedly the equivalent of telling grandma (it was always grandma for some reason) on her deathbed that her religious beliefs are silly, Christopher Hitchens being harsh in a public debate was the same as telling your uncle at Thanksgiving dinner that he’s evil for going to church, etc. etc.

I think this is another area where we’re still adjusting to social media. It used to be that if your neighbor had a yard sign for a political candidate you despised, that didn’t prevent you from having pleasant neighborly chats about how well their garden is growing this year, or inviting them to your BBQ, or whatever. If you were both the kind of people who liked the cut-and-thrust of political debate, you might engage them, but in most instances you just gracefully avoided the topic (and people who didn’t possess that skill/inclination, and would constantly inject politics into every discussion, you learned to avoid). That didn’t necessarily mean that you thought your neighbor was a swell person and that their political views didn’t affect your view of them, it just meant you exercised some discretion.

That’s all a little harder now when so many people are constantly broadcasting their views where their neighbors and colleagues and relatives can see them. It’s not just a yard sign any more. In some ways of course that is more “honest” — we aren’t engaging in so many polite fictions. But in other ways it feels like now most people have become that neighbor who injects politics into every discussion.

The misogyny gets more blatant by the day.

It’s a very long thread so I’ll quote some of it, to speed things up.

“Wider context: women increasingly face hostility for defending their rights as members of the female sex, or for simply acknowledging that being sexed female is a thing, despite sex being a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010. Lesbians are facing abuse, assaults and exclusion when they assert being same-sex attracted (i.e. females exclusively attracted to females), even though sexual orientation (based on sex) is also a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010. Women have even had to go to court to defend the right not to be discriminated at work for raising issues around their sex-based rights in personal capacity outside of their work environment.”

Misogyny is in fashion again. Women are the enemy. It’s cool to call women derogatory names in public. Women are cunts bitches TERFs Karens.

“It is within this climate of hatred against women who stand up for themselves as female people that GROOVE uses the term TERF to garner a ‘positive’ response from the audience. #everydaymisogyny

Within this increasingly hostile environment for women who have the temerity to state that their sex matters, @jk_rowling has emerged as a leading figure advocating for the importance of the female sex being recognised in language, policy and law.”

“Imagine if there was a show with an announcement saying “No trans people!” (but used another word that is considered derogatory) – would you @ace_london and @TNLComFund have funded that? If not, why not? How is a slur for women different?”

[“abhorred by it” in 20 is a typo for “appalled”]

“I went with 4 friends, our group was made up of 2 lesbians, 2 bisexual women and myself. As soon as we arrived alarm bells started ringing. I picked up a leaflet and it talked about the ‘queer’ dance floor and what it means ‘to be queer’. ‘Queer’ to many lesbians and gay men is a slur but now we’re supposed to accept it as our default label. The show also prides itself on being intergenerational, but what of the older generation to whom the word ‘queer’ is most painful?” #queerwashing

Oh we beat them up, the way we beat up Fred Sargeant.

Not even all that subtle.

“There are about 30 people in the audience, some in their 20s and 30s but mostly older. The show starts with slow pulsating, dreamy music. Coloured lights flash and the cast members come onto stage. There are 4 males and 2 females. For 6 and half minutes some dance on their own, one caresses a weave, one gazes into a handheld mirror, they strike poses as a group, then Sky addresses the audience:

‘We come to the club to get fucked up, to kiss strangers and to forget that sometimes the outside world hates us.’ No sooner has Sky exited than the stage is set for the “No terfs! No JK Rowling” announcement.

‘They’d put a lot of thought into it,’ says MrMenno, ‘It was pre-recorded and staged for maximum effect, like some grand proclamation of Groove’s values. It would’ve been scripted, rehearsed, recorded – they knew exactly what they were doing.’

One of the performers, Kim, appears upstage and adopts a dramatic pose, sequin dress shimmering under a spotlight. As the announcement plays, Kim mimes along while other performers dance near the front.

‘Good evening! Welcome to Groove tonight! Experience the love, the joy, the pain, the pleasure and ecstasy! Everybody is welcome to this house tonight! Except… conservatives, TERFs, religious bigots, Karens and JK Rowling.'”

Karens! That gives the game away doesn’t it. “Karen” doesn’t generally have anything to do with “TERFs”; it’s a different branch of casual misogyny. The fact that it’s included in this pageant of hatred for women is quite revealing.

Solidarity with Mr Menno and his friends.

Meet “belief perseverance”:

And in conclusion:

There will be more denial and obfuscation. Mermaids and similar groups will continue to claim they’re the victims of “anti-trans” campaigns, and dismiss legitimate concerns as “hate”. These ideologues have invested too much in their fantasies to give up without a fight.

It’s probably going to be a different sort of fight now, though. It probably won’t be quite as easy to shut people up by shouting “TERF!!!” at them. I mean us.