Benjamin Cohen of Pink News is trying to salvage what he can, and it’s not going all that well.
Well of course Mermaids said that, but it isn’t true. “Safety” isn’t helping children ruin their bodies in pursuit of a trendy illusion.
Doesn’t he sound nervous.
Other than that…
I think truth is a defense in libel cases, no? Trump is suing CNN for “libeling” him by reporting on him.
Donald Trump has sued cable TV network CNN, claiming defamation and seeking punitive damages of $475m, according to a Florida court filing on Monday.
The US cable news station has attempted to smear the former US president “with a series of ever-more scandalous, false, and defamatory labels of ‘racist,’ ‘Russian lackey,’ ‘insurrectionist,’ and ultimately ‘Hitler’,” Trump’s lawyers claimed. The lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Fort Lauderdale.
I don’t think those claims will be very hard to defend as true. If CNN said he actually is Hitler that could be an issue, but I’m betting they compared him to Hitler as opposed to confusing him with Hitler. Just for a start Hitler has been dead since April 1945.
“Beyond simply highlighting any negative information about the plaintiff and ignoring all positive information about him, CNN has sought to use its massive influence, purportedly as a ‘trusted’ news source, to defame the plaintiff in the minds of its viewers and readers for the purpose of defeating him politically,” the filing states.
Welp, that sounds about as stupid as you’d expect.
Much is made of Mermaids’ promotion of puberty blockers, which halt children’s physical growth. In many ways I am far more concerned about the emotional stunting. The #NoDebate, #ProtectTransKids message refuses to acknowledge that our identities are shaped through constant negotiation with others.
By telling children that anyone who does not see them as they see themselves is a threat, Mermaids is preventing the development of mature individuals — adults who understand that we are all defined in the context of our relationships with others, including those with whom we may not always agree.
Exactly. It’s the worship of The Self that is so stifling and damaging.
Trump didn’t study for the exam, in fact he has no idea what the course even is.
He starts with saying he likes Liz Truss, then moves swiftly into claiming he and King Choss are close friends.
Trump said that King Charles would be “different now” and would do “very well” in his new role.
“I know him very well, quite well. And I spent a lot of time when I was over there as president with him. And with his wife [who] was absolutely lovely, by the way, and we had a good time together,” he said.
No he didn’t. He was there for a couple of days and he of course didn’t spend “a lot of time” with Choss and Cam, he simply met them formally and made stiff conversation. Of course they didn’t have a good time together.
“And I, you know, so I’m a little prejudiced when I say it, but, you know, he had a strong view on things.
“Probably difficult when you’re the King you want to have 100% of the people love you like the Queen did. The Queen had – everybody loved her, right? She didn’t have that kind of an agenda.
“And yet, you know, she was a very strong woman. I got to know her too. She was a very strong woman, a great woman. I think Charles is going to do very well. I think he’s got a great way about him.”
No he didn’t get to know her. He spent a few hours in her vicinity. That’s all.
Plus he spent those hours in a dress-up suit that didn’t fit him looking ridiculous.
Trump added that Charles would “probably keep it where it’s politically a little bit because he feels very strongly about certain things and not everybody agrees with that”.
He forgot to read that book all right.
Deep thought.
Yes you do.
Yes, you do. In some circumstances you most definitely do. Not all, but some.
It might make you uncomfortable to have a stranger come into your house uninvited and settle down in your living room, even if that stranger never harmed anything or shouted at you or stole one of the lamps. You do have a right not to be made uncomfortable that way.
The toilets situation is not exactly like that, but it’s not radically different, either.
The BBC works hard to minimize it:
A trustee of the charity Mermaids has resigned after reports he spoke at a conference organised by a group that promotes support for paedophiles.
Dr Jacob Breslow quit the transgender children’s charity after the Times revealed he had attended the B4U-ACT conference in 2011, as a PhD student.
B4U-ACT calls for paedophiles to have the right to live “in truth and dignity”.
Do the children get to live in truth and dignity?
B4U-ACT’s website says it holds workshops and gives presentations about the needs and rights of people “with an attraction to children and adolescents”, and runs support groups for both them and their friends and family members.
“An attraction to” is a very anodyne way of putting it. “Want to fuck” would be clearer.
A published summary of a presentation Dr Breslow is understood to have given uses the phrase “minor-attracted persons” instead of paedophile.
And the BBC obligingly echoed that by talking of “people with an attraction to children and adolescents.”
Mermaids told the BBC
“Safeguarding is of the utmost importance to Mermaids and the safety of the young people we support is our highest priority.”
It’s not though. The “young people” (i.e. children) they support are not safe from drastic interference with their puberties.
If we’d been…
Also…
“Desiring the Child”…and stalking the child, getting the child alone, putting the child on your lap, putting your hand in the child’s pants, putting the child’s hand on your penis…the possibilities are endless.
Graham has an encyclopedic post on the former Mermaids trustee which includes this fascinating item:
I wonder if this will be the end of the road for the fishy ones.
“Gender research” scholar resigns from Mermaids under a garish cloud:
A trustee of the transgender charity Mermaids resigned last night after it emerged that he had spoken at a conference hosted by an organisation that promotes services to paedophiles.
Aka child rapists.
Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student in gender research at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based B4U-ACT in 2011.
Breslow’s presentation appeared to be a critique of how paedophiles were understood.
You mean as child rapists?
He’s now an assistant professor of gender and sexuality at LSE. He became a trustee of Mermaids in July.
After The Times approached Mermaids about Breslow’s talk, he tendered his resignation as a trustee. Mermaids said that it was unaware of his appearance at the conference until contacted by this newspaper. B4U-ACT calls itself a “unique collaborative effort between minor-attracted people and mental health professionals to promote communication and understanding between the two groups”.
Starting by translating child-rapist and child-molester to “minor-attracted person.” The issue of course isn’t “attraction” but physical acts.
Its “scientific symposium” was hosted in Baltimore, Maryland, in August 2011, to address concerns about the way paedophilia was addressed in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a publication by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for the classification of mental disorders.
Breslow’s presentation was titled Sexual Alignment: Critiquing Sexual Orientation, The Pedophile, and the DSM V. A brief extract of the presentation, still available online, said: “This paper works through the DSM’s struggle to understand ‘the pedophile’ through an investigation of the highly questionable and deeply assumptive clinical, empirical and theoretical studies it cites.”
“Assumptive”?
Last week Mermaids became the subject of a Charity Commission investigation following claims that it was handing out chest binders to children as young as 13 and 14.
Age is a construction. Open up your minds. We’re all the same age underneath. Infants like sex too you know.
H/t Mostly Cloudy
Originally a comment by iknklast on A protean concept.
DiAngelo is following the pattern of other consultants. In corporations, and in academia, it has been a pattern for a long time to hire consultants who tell people if they are unhappy, it’s because they “let” themselves be. Not making enough to buy food for your family? Just think positively! It isn’t the fault of the boss, or the system, but you for finding that problematic.
Bosses ate it up, and hired these consultants to come tell their employees what was wrong with them – the employees, I mean. Wage too low? Don’t ask for a raise, that’s complaining. Figure out why you think it’s too low, and realize it is you making it too low, not your boss, not the system, not the fact that food and gas prices have increased.
I have sat through dozens of these. It’s infuriating. Don’t get at the root of the problem, just make people uncomfortable about being part of the problem. As one speaker put it, just don’t hang around with “poopy people”. First, I can’t believe anyone would hire a consultant to use kindergarten language to university faculty. Second, that would mean I couldn’t hang around with myself, since I would fit her definition of “poopy people” – anyone who thinks something in the system is broken and should be fixed.
Hari Kunzru wrote a brilliant piece on “whiteness” for the New York Review of Books a couple of years ago.
One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of “white privilege,” a protean concept that has found its way into conversations about political power, material prosperity, social status, and even cognition. Invoking whiteness can stand in for older leftist ideas about class and power, or it can be a way of modifying those ideas. Whiteness can name a specifically American caste system—a historical product of plantation slavery—or a set of unexamined beliefs about a person’s own centrality, neutrality, authority, and objectivity. It can also take on a transhistorical, even transcendental quality, naming something more like a spiritual condition, a fallen state that is paradoxically also one of culpable innocence.
…Many conservatives affect to believe that we are on the brink of an American rerun of the Cultural Revolution, or possibly even the Haitian one, with dark-skinned folk emerging out of the cane fields and the Amazon warehouses to execute a terrifying inversion of the social order. This fear certainly looms large in the political imagination of the far right, driving recruitment to militias and Boogaloo groups and giving license to the most extreme authoritarian impulses of the White House.
…Though some of the objections to the politics of white privilege are clearly performative, there is reason to be wary of this politics, particularly now that these ideas are being refashioned by corporate America. Whiteness is a concept that can be made to serve many interests and positions, not all of them compatible.
It can make for a nice career for white people, too.
Among the activists beginning to think about the complex interrelationship of race and class [in the late 60s] was Theodore W. Allen, a lifelong Communist who had been a coal miner and labor organizer in West Virginia. Allen took as a starting point a now famous passage from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935):
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.
I think that puts it brilliantly.
In an essay first published in 1967 by the Radical Education Project of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Allen identified the “Achilles heel of the American working class” as what he called “white-skin privilege.” Du Bois saw the “psychological wage” as a conscious strategy of the ruling class to co-opt poor whites and prevent an interracial solidarity that might have threatened their ascendency during the period of Reconstruction. Allen edged toward a more sweeping position, identifying this offer of a psychological wage as one of the motors of American history that went back as far as seventeenth-century Virginia. The first use of “white” that he could find was in a Virginia statute of 1691, and he contended that the construction of whiteness as a social and legal identity was a response to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, in which Blacks and whites, including indentured servants, combined to oppose the governor and burn Jamestown. The task of the radical white ally to the Black struggle was to repudiate this privilege, to reject the blandishments of the rulers and persuade white workers to follow suit, developing class unity across racial lines.
Black and white, unite and fight. That used to be a slogan.
In the early 1990s [Noel Ignatiev] cofounded a journal called Race Traitor, under the slogan “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The betrayal of whiteness was now firmly understood not as a repudiation of biology, or even culture, but of a particular kind of social contract. As the editorial for the first issue of Race Traitor put it
The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a determinant of behavior will set off tremors that will lead to its collapse.
I expect centuries of enslavement helped with that project quite a lot. Prison works the same way now.
In the early 1990s, as Ignatiev was working on Race Traitor, the historian David Roediger published The Wages of Whiteness, a book that expanded Theodore Allen’s account of whiteness as an organizing principle of American society, arguing that as new immigrant groups like the Irish arrived, they learned how to “become white” by aligning themselves with “white” interests. It was not just a question of adopting the manners or even displaying loyalty to the political priorities of the Anglo elite. Whiteness was earned by displays of performative “anti-blackness” (riots, lynchings, and so on), constituting and reinforcing a community that depended for its identity on differentiation from Blacks.
We don’t want to be black because we don’t want to be treated the way we treat black people. The loop has proven hard to break.
The “1619 Project” of The New York Times, created and led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which owes much to Roediger’s understanding of whiteness, asks what happens if we use the date of the arrival of the first Africans in the Jamestown colony to replace 1776 as the key to reading American history. Whether or not this thought experiment counts as “history” in an academic sense, the substantial claim is that if we look at the American story as one of violent struggle and contestation, formed to some large measure through the Atlantic slave trade, we arrive at a very different picture from the one that starts with a formal claim of rights and expands in the direction of an “ever more perfect union.”
And can we really deny that the American story is one of violent struggle? Really? What with slavery and the endless war on indigenous people and the seizure of lands and resources?
There is a hunger for information about the new civil rights movement, and many companies and institutions are beginning to feel that by ignoring it, they are exposing themselves to liability, or failing to get the best performance from their workforce. At the individual level, people who may not have thought much about racism are hurrying to educate themselves. This past June, the top five New York Times nonfiction best sellers were all books about antiracism. At number one was White Fragility, by a diversity consultant named Robin DiAngelo.
Who, let’s not forget, charges tens of thousands of dollars for her consultings.
Diversity consultancy is as much a product of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture as Black Lives Matter, but its lineage is not that of the New Left but the Human Potential movement, and the belief that the goal of existence is “self-actualization,” the apex of the famous pyramid described by Abraham Maslow in his “hierarchy of needs.” Much of the popular literature of antiracism, though it uses the lexicon of left politics (“whiteness,” “identity politics”), deploys self-actualization as its primary enticement to the reader. Follow these rules, and you too can grow into an antiracist. Antiracism is “the work,” and even if the goal is an antiracist society, the royal road runs not through organizing but through personal transformation.
Aw yeah. In short it’s basically about the precious self, as so many things are.
Regardless of DiAngelo’s personal politics, this truth remains. Her business model depends on making people uncomfortable, but not too much, or rather only along certain axes of discomfort. She will not get hired if she asserts that the problem she is proposing to solve may be structural and best addressed by the redistribution of power and resources, rather than maximizing the human potential of the marketing department. Of necessity, in a corporate forum, solutions need to be presented in ways that do not threaten the host organization, and that inevitably leads to their being framed as matters of personal, individual behavior.
A funny item in Pink News last January:
Trans Joy: 23 trans and non-binary people share what’s making them feel hopeful for 2022
Anonymous, Brighton: “In 2021, I and my Sussex Uni peers kicked up enough fuss about TERFism in academia to get the whole nation talking, and I couldn’t be more proud of Brighton’s trans community.
“We’ve started a long-overdue conversation about humanity and dignity that I want to continue throughout 2022 and beyond.”
So much dignity and humanity!
Sorry for late appearance! Internet problems again. I’ll be scarce for a couple of days.
Update: Just one day as it turns out. I’m ba-ack!
Originally a comment by Rob on Not needed on voyage.
I’m not a fan of constitutional monarchies, but I’m not convinced that democracies that place significant power in the hands of presidents or similar posts have covered themselves with glory either. Ceremonial presidencies seem just as pointless as a constitutional monarch, although I guess it’s less likely to become hereditary.
Getting to my rambling point, if Charles is ‘just another guy’ then why shouldn’t he have and express a view? If he’s technically head of state, then why shouldn’t he display leadership – even if we feel distaste for why he’s head of state? The point in this specific case is that now he’s head of state he’s by convention supposed to be a mouthpiece for the government and in this case the government has taken a lurch to the right and doesn’t want to pay the cost of going green because they’ve just torpedoed their own economy.
A part of me wants him to deliver a speech emphasising the importance and urgency of climate action anyway and convention be damned. On this issue it would be the right thing to do. That damages the convention of a puppet monarch though, which might be of more lasting damage to the system of government. Then again, the head of state is supposed to be the last line of defence against a rogue or incompetent government, which arguably the UK has here. Trickier than you’d think at first glance I think and people could reach different conclusions.
Mermaids instructs children on how to change their names. Obviously this is something some random goons on the internet should be doing rather than children’s parents. This is serious business, way too serious for parental units.
What obligation does my school or workplace have if I change my name?
Changing a name is almost always a momentous moment for trans and non-binary people and it is becoming more and more common for trans people want to change their first name during childhood and adolescence. The changing of a name is often an indicator that an individual is taking steps to, or proposing to move towards presenting as their true gender identity.
Sic. Mistakes theirs, not mine.
Any request for a change of name to be recognised on a system or within general interactions should be given due weight, as the consequences of not may have a serious negative social and psychological impact on a transgender or non-binary young person, as well as potential legal implications for a school/workplace should it be refused on an unlawful basis.
In other words: threat.
4. What do I do if someone is deliberately not using my new name or pronouns at work or in school?
If this is at work or in school and you believe this is deliberate/malicious, speak to someone you trust as soon as you can. Only challenge the individual should you feel it safe and productive to do so – your safety must always come first.
Yeah. Mostly trans people get murdered this way, so watch out.
We suggest that you, if you can, take a note of the time, location and details of what has happened (including the name of the perpetrator) so you can remember everything when you speak to the appropriate person. Make it clear to this person should you wish to make a formal complaint or grievance. Your workplace and school should have policies in place to deal with such situations and if they don’t, you can still insist that they work in line with their duties under equality law. If the reason you’re being harassed is because of who you are – for example, because you’re trans, it could be unlawful discrimination. If you’ve been discriminated against, you can take action under the Equality Act 2010.
You can tell Mermaids just longs to see people dragged off in handcuffs for not using Esmeralda’s new name and pronouns.
The use of the incorrect name or pronoun can also amount to a hate crime or incident – (even if it only happens once). It should be taken very seriously.
Very seriously. Very very seriously. This stuff is really serious. It’s like murder or genocide or nuclear war.
The government has told King Choss it doesn’t need his help at the environment summit.
I’ll say right up front I’m not consistent on this point. I think Choss has no standing to say anything on any subject, other than the ordinary human one. On the other hand turning the climate ship around is more important than keeping the monarchy in check. I think both that Choss should keep his opinions to himself because he has an arbitrary megaphone via birth, and that Choss should be allowed to warn about climate change because he has an arbitrary megaphone via birth.
Before his accession to the throne last month, the King – then the Prince of Wales – had indicated he would attend the annual conference.
But now he’s in the top job and that means he has to confine himself to the ceremonial bits.
In the past, the King has demonstrated his deep commitment to environmental issues and, as Prince of Wales, had a long history of campaigning to reduce the effects of climate change.
Only last year he made a speech at the COP26 opening ceremony in Glasgow, when the summit was hosted by the UK. The late Queen also gave a speech at the event, via video link.
Who wrote the queen’s speech though? Probably the government.
What happens when the weather tries to kill you.
Suzie Mack, a Fort Myers resident, told the BBC that her brother’s mobile home park saw water as high as 8ft during the storm.
Remember that stationary camera in Fort Myers? It was at 10ft and the waves kept submerging it.
“They got on their air mattresses inside their house, because it was too late to leave, and by the time the surge got to its peak, they had about a foot of air left in their homes,” she said. “Nobody died there, but it was a horrific story to hear.”
That’s what happened in Katrina. The water rose and rose and rose and people had to break through their roofs. Those who weren’t able to drowned.
While for the moment the scale of Ian’s destruction remains unclear, independent experts have warned that the economic impact is likely to be well into the tens of billions of dollars.
How many times can such expensive impacts be absorbed? I have no idea what the answer is but I’m pretty sure it’s not infinite.
In these conditions, many Florida residents have been left wondering what their future looks like – and whether to stay in the state or to leave.
Leave. Florida is at the front of the line on this.
Yellow stars ffs.
I have read some history.
Nobody is pinning yellow stars on trans people, or advocating for doing so, or advocating for anything that looks like pinning yellow stars on trans people. Knowing that men are not women is not comparable to pinning yellow stars on Jews.
Also, of course, it didn’t start with yellow stars, it started centuries before Hitler, with religious rivalries and popes and inquisitions and all the rest of the poison brew.
Two of these today.
Us, our, we, us.
Who?
US I tell you! WE!
