Representation:

I’m always hungry for historical queer representation,” says Charlie Josephine, the non-binary playwright of I, Joan, a sweaty, heady, joyously queer new drama about the patron saint of France. “Because our history has been erased – particularly transgender people’s – there is very limited documentation of us throughout history, even though we have existed since the beginning of time.”

Whose history? “Queer” people’s? So the fix is to erase the history of women?

To Josephine, Joan being written as non-binary felt both obvious and natural. “I could have written this play as a cis woman who is feminist and passionate about expressing themselves in this way,” says Josephine, shrugging the idea away. “But the more I read about Joan, the more I think they’re what we would now call non-binary or trans.”

Because feminism is so yesterday, so your mama. Non-binary and trans are so much more up to the minute and exciting…until they too become your mama.

There was, however, one part of the backlash that caught Josephine by surprise. “I forgot I was blaspheming a saint!” they say with a laugh, hands lifting to their head and almost forming a halo. When first considering how to write the play, they add, Joan’s devotion did prove a challenge.

All those confusing theys – I have every sympathy.

Originally a comment by Rob on Watch out: too girly!

I’m not at all convinced that the style of learning has a big impact on whether boys or girls do better. As a purely anecdotal point, I always did much better with internal assessment and assignments, because my technique and discipline for a single end of year exams swot absolutely sucked.

I suspect the biggest factor in declining male academic success is simply that over recent decades male heroes and role models are no longer scientists, engineers, academics, poets or ‘elites’ generally. They’re anti-heroes, the fighters, drinkers, womanisers, sneerers. In fact, engineers, scientists, or educated males in popular culture are more likely to be cast in either the role of the bad guy or a sidekick. It’s not just Bond films. Popular culture, the current zeitgeist, just doesn’t push boys to want to become highly educated and expert men, so fewer of them do. Girls by contrast have been told loud and clear – and have seen – that the way to get ahead and not be stuck in the kitchen or working as a cleaner or in a shop, is to become educated. They’ve done so in droves.

Now, what happens when some activity becomes seen as a ‘girl’ thing to do? It becomes even less attractive to boys, because sexism (at best) and misogyny (at worst) is the air we breathe and the water we swim in.

You can make pathetic excuses about how boys need to be taught differently, but frankly, until society gets over itself and values education and doesn’t denigrate anything and everything girls do as icky, pointless or loserish, male under-performance will be the result.

Pick a country. Keep the education system exactly the same, but ban woman from education. Simultaneously increase academic and professional salaries by 30%, and make such people societies heroes. I guarantee that within a generation boys will be falling over themselves to succeed academically.

Climate crisis/rising energy cost solved – just do everything at the office.

This is apparently meant as serious advice:

Office workers could be better off at their desks than working from home from October because of the money they will save on heating, making coffee and charging devices.

Becoming an energy freeloader who outsources the bulk of their consumption to their office, local café or gym over the next few months could save you about £28 a week, roughly £120 a month, from October.

This assumes you worked in the office five days a week and charged a phone, laptop and smart watch while you were there, made two cups of tea or coffee and reheated your lunch, and that you could shower there or at a gym or sports centre five days a week.

But who the hell wants to shower at the office instead of at home after leaving the office to get the office stink off you? Who the hell wants to go home stinking of office and go on stinking of office until you go back to the office the next day?

This would outweigh the average of about £22 you could spend on petrol driving to and from work over five days, based on the average UK commute of 59 minutes a day published by the TUC in 2019. If you cycle to work you will save the full amount, but train commuters could be better off staying home.

In other words you’d save £28 but lose £22 in the process, leaving you with a triumphant £6 savings at the small small cost of going to the office instead of not going to the office. Also you’d have to do all your coffee-making and lunch-heating and device-charging and even showering at the office. Does that sound worth £6 to you? Or to anyone?

Not to mention of course the strong likelihood that the boss would not be particularly thrilled to have you showering and washing your undies and cooking your dinner at the office.

The BBC craps on lesbians from a very great height. Headline:

No place for hate, says Pride Cymru after Cardiff protest

So it was a homophobic protest?

Pride Cymru has said there is “no place for hate” after protesters interrupted an LGBTQ+ march in Cardiff.

A video emerged on social media showing police asking a group to leave for safety reasons on Saturday.

South Wales Police said no arrests were made after a “small protest group” had “assembled themselves on the route to block the procession”.

Bigots, right? A small group of fundamentalists perhaps?

Protest organisers Get The L Out were carrying banners, including one which read “transactivism erases lesbians”.

Ohhhhh…not god-botherers, not the God Hates Fags crew, but lesbians. How odd for the BBC to set it up that way, as if lesbians were aliens and outsiders at a Pride march.

Pride organisers said the group was “drowned out by shouts of solidarity from the community and spectators”.

Solidarity with what? Excluding and bullying lesbians? Trying to force lesbians to pretend men can be lesbians? That kind of solidarity?

“There is no place for hate at Pride. And as our parade said today loudly and clearly ‘trans rights are human rights’,” said Gian Molinu, chair of Pride Cymru, in a tweet posted by the organisation on Saturday evening.

Then why is Molinu whipping up hate for lesbians?

And nobody is claiming trans people shouldn’t have human rights. The issue is pseudo-rights, like the pretend “right” to be “validated” as a woman when you’re a man.

Hannah Blythyn, Deputy Minister for Social Partnership, tweeted: “There can be no place for hate – we stand together with and within the LGBTQ+ community.”

She says, tacitly encouraging people to hate lesbian protesters.

Julie Bindel on lesbians and Pride:

The lesbian group Get The L Out UK, founded to protest gender ideology and the pressure on same-sex attracted women to date trans women, joined Pride Cymru yesterday to make their voices heard amidst a sea of hostility. Ever since the trans movement decided that lesbians who reject sleeping with trans women are somehow morally deficient, same-sex attracted women have been harassed, defamed and abused in the name of trans equality. Get the L Out represent those old-fashioned lesbians that reject the penis and all that is attached to it.

“All that is attached to it” is witty.

The women at Pride Cymru were carrying banners adorned with the words, ‘trans activism erases lesbians’ and ‘lesbians don’t like penises’, which caused a major kerfuffle amongst the crowd. Rather than having a word with the individuals that were screaming abuse, police decided to eject Get the L Out. So, lesbians were kicked off a so-called Pride procession whilst the rest of the LGBTQQIA2Spirit+ crowd, many of whom will doubtless be heterosexual kinksters, stayed.

In other words Pride, like the rest of the world, is male-dominated, and bullies or expels women whenever it feels like it.

The hostility towards any lesbian that stands her ground amongst the new cool queers has been building for some time. In 2018, at the first Get the L Out protest, the gay male MC joked on stage that the protesters should be dragged off the parade ‘by their saggy tits’.

New boss just like the old boss.

A brief history lesson: the very first pride-type march I attended was Lesbian Strength, in 1981. The majority of lesbians involved in the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s had walked out, having become fed up with the sexism from the men in the organisation. It would appear that sexist stereotypes are not only confined to heterosexuals. The women have since reported that their needs are always placed second to the men; demeaning and often misogynistic comments were made about women; and that they were pretty much expected to make the tea and take care of the men, just as straight women were.

In other words, sadly, being gay doesn’t automatically block being a sexist pig. Misogyny is pervasive, and being gay isn’t a magical shield against it.

Lesbian Strength was a wonderful antidote to Gay Pride. It meant that lesbians, many of whom did not wish to be lumped in with men, could be front and centre of our own liberation movement. We argued back then, and I would argue now, that lesbians have very little in common with gay men, except that we are same-sex attracted. Gay men don’t face the double bind of sexism along with anti-gay prejudice. And, like it or not, some gay men hate women, just as do some of their straight brothers.

Emphasis mine. Gay men don’t face that double bind, and because they don’t face it, they’re not aware of it. That makes a difference.

Andrew Weissmann, who was a senior prosecutor in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, clarifies some things.

The release of the redacted affidavit provides further clarity on why Attorney General Merrick Garland took the extraordinary step of approving the search of certain locations at Mar-a-Lago. The short version is that nothing else had worked and top-secret information was at stake.

Trump tried to leverage the search of Mar-a-Lago into a shocking violation of Trump’s rights and privileges and holy status as god-emperor, but it’s the other way around – the necessity of searching Mar-a-Lago underlines Trump’s repeated criminal refusals to return the documents he stole. It was a crime to take them and it was another crime to refuse to return them on request – a crime he repeated over and over as the feds kept asking him to return them. Each refusal is a crime.

In any normal case, in my experience, with a responsible, upstanding citizen who may have inadvertently taken government documents, a simple voluntary request for their return would ordinarily suffice. If that failed, a grand jury subpoena would typically do the trick. In this case, neither approach worked. The attorney general had to resort to the most intrusive method of obtaining the return of the documents, a search warrant approved by a federal court.

Because Trump isn’t your normal responsible upstanding citizen, but rather a hardened criminal with no moral compass of any kind, even the most rudimentary.

The redacted affidavit is further proof that Mr. Trump’s flouting of criminal statutes persisted for a long time and gives every appearance of being intentional.

But with Trump the possibility of sheer stupidity is always there.

The head of Vale of Glamorgan Council calls lesbians at a Pride march “hate-filled protesters.”

Love? She calls it love? She calls a malicious lie about lesbians at Pride “love”?

Joan Smith reviews the new JK Rowling novel:

Like its predecessor, The Ink Black Heart is a doorstopper, giving Rowling space to explore the psychology of individuals who abuse women online, but it is evidence of her ingenuity as a writer that this intention only gradually becomes clear.

…

“He’s convinced people I worked as a prostitute when I was broke,” Edie tells Robin. “He sent me pictures of my dead mother, claiming I told lies about her death. And the fandom believes all of it, and they attack me for stuff I’ve never done, never said, things I don’t believe.” The final sentence is not just heartfelt, it could be Rowling speaking about herself after a couple of years of persecution by individuals posting wild misrepresentations of her work and views online.

It could be many many other women, too.

Academic debate 2022:

There is but one Idea, and many academics to exchange it.

Originally a comment by Army Ant on People became slotted.

This isn’t surprising at all. Anthropologists are very in love with all types of quackery (cultural relativism, post-structuralism, etc). It isn’t even a new phenomenon, BTW – they’ve been like this for several decades now. They also often seriously say things like (paraphrased, of course) “there’s no objective reality”, and basically that a cultural group’s emotional truth about its past/history is objective truth or at least should be treated as such.

This bullshit claim that sequential hermaphrodites (like clownfish and some arachnids) somehow “prove” biological sex isn’t real or that there aren’t just two of them is so utterly asinine. It’s akin to one of those “age sliders” claiming that since many organisms (including us) change from pre-pubescent child (juvenile, immature) to adult and then to old person/individual (senescence), biological ageing doesn’t exist – and we should totally accept that creepy 50-year-old who claims to be a 6-year-old as *~valid~* and let him play with the real 6-year-olds unsupervised. *facepalm*

A little history lesson…

All of the ancient cultures that used the oldest writing systems we’ve found and deciphered* (cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, oracle bone script -Chinese-) had terms/words for male and female (animals and humans). In fact, some ancient languages (notably Sumerian; sort of) used the same word to designate human females and their non-human counterparts. Others lacked an adult/non-adult distinction for human females (that is, no separate terms for “woman” and “girl”; IIRC Old Tamil was such a language, young or old, human or animal, everyone female is just called “pen”).

Anyway, none of the earliest cultures that wrote and whose writing we’ve deciphered were under the delusion that we’re a single-sex species, or that there are more than two sexes – or that people are whatever they say they are. The Sumerians especially (I’ve read a lot of the private letters they wrote) would have absolutely no patience for things like someone wanting to be addressed only by special snowflake pronouns that person just invented.

Most of these ancient scripts had symbols for “male” and “female” and/or “woman” and “man” that were completely unambiguous (case in point: Sumerian’s stylized penis and stylized vulva symbols, or the oracle bone script’s “seated person with protruding breasts” symbol). The same is true of the ancient languages written with those scripts/systems: in most of them, the terms for male and female were biologically descriptive (in contrast, the Nahuatl term for woman means “skirt and huipil”, the Mongolian one means “beltless”, and the one most Tibetan languages use means something like “a person of low birth”).

So, as a whole, the most ancient cultures with deciphered writing were a bunch of binarist, trans-excluding, heteronormative, allonormative** fucks.

* One of the scripts we haven’t yet deciphered (the Indus script; y’know, Harappa/Mohenjo-Daro) almost certainly had a specific sign/hieroglyph to refer to males.

** A term the asexual community uses to refer to people who aren’t under the delusion that everyone is asexual.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on People became slotted.

“It’s not just complex in the context of intersex … Our bodies are far more variable than our categories.”

This makes it sound like people with DSD (or “intersex” *as they would rather not be called), are more numerous than they really are, and their existence somehow blurs sex into a spectrum, ruining our ability to figure out who is male and who is female. It’s like saying that the existence of conjoined twins throws into doubt the classification of humans as bipedal tetrapods, and that to question that human limb number is anything but a spectrum is hateful bigotry.

Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions

…I’m pretty sure people have always and everywhere noticed that there are two!

They want to be able to say that the sexual binary is a Western, colonialist invention imposed on other peoples against their will. This allows activists to claim more woke cookies by being able to tar Western ideas further. Never mind that there are plenty of good reasons to oppose Western colonialism without having to add this genderist bullshit to the list of charges. It also implies that the poor, benighted Indigenous societies had no ideas of their own about sex, and that they would have been completely mystified as to why their society’s gender non-conformists weren’t capable of performing the biological functions of the sex they weren’t. If gender is primary and sex is “assigned”, shouldn’t all those Two Spirit people be able to have kids according to their inner feelings rather than the inconsequential details of their biology? Damn those Western Colonialists, ruining the Edenic Gender paradise where trans-identified men can menstruate and trans-identified females can be fathers. Talk about spoiler alert!

It’s telling that they say that the introduction of the completely imaginary and arbitrary sex binary helped enforce gender and racial divisions. First and foremost, gender divisions (i.e sexism) are used to enforce patriarchy. Sex comes first; beyond the basics of reproductive biology, the limitations and constraints on what women and men are allowed or expected to do (i.e. gender) are applied to the sexed bodies of humans under patriarchy.

*And transactivists will keep using the term because “intersex” suits their “sex is a spectrum” agenda much better than “differences of sexual development” or “disorders of sexual development” because the former suggests a huge unmapped territory between the sexes, while the latter indicates the failure to achieve the usual developmental endpoint of being one or the other sex.

There was a protest at the Hampstead Ladies Pond today. No doubt that’s why India Willoughby went there and took his gloating taunting misogynist selfie.

But at least the documents are totally secure at Mar-a-Lago, because it’s not as if anyone can just waltz in off the street.

According to an article from the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty is under [FBI] investigation after infiltrating the private members club under a false pretense.

Inna Yashchyshyn, 33, allegedly lied to members that she was a Rothschild heiress and mingled with Trump, US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and others at Mar-a-Lago functions.

OCCRP, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Gazette, reported that Yashchyshyn had demonstrated “the ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background” could bypass security at Trump’s club.

Darn. I thought they were on top of this whole security thing.

Yashchyshyn – the daughter of an Illinois truck driver – maintained that she was a Rothschild heiress while holding a position as president of United Hearts of Mercy, founded by Florida-based Russian oligarch Valery Tarasenko in Canada in 2015.

So you’ve got your posing as a Rothschild and you’ve got your Russian oligarch. Interesting recipe.

Typical Willoughby: taunting women with his ability to invade their spaces.

Hur hur heehee smirk smirk.

Update: Now he’s blocking everyone so I’ll add a grab.

Another battle between/among a children’s hospital and Libs of TikTok/Chaya Raichik:

Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said…

The recording, made by Libs of TikTok founderChaya Raichik, features twotelephone operatorsat the renowned D.C. medical facility stating — in response to Raichik’squestions — that a 16-year-old trans boy would be eligible for a hysterectomy at the hospital’s gender development clinic. Children’s has not disputed the authenticity of the recording but said the employees provided inaccurate information.

“None of the people who were secretly recorded by this activist group deliver care to our patients,” hospital spokeswoman Ariana Ahmadi Perez said. “We do not and have never performed gender-affirming hysterectomies for anyone under the age of 18.”

That’s nice as far as it goes, but note that they do think there is such a thing as a “gender-affirming hysterectomy,” in other words they remove women’s healthy uteruses [or uteri if you prefer] on the basis of a belief in magic gender. That’s actually quite scandalous on its own.

The scrutiny of Children’s comes just weeks after Libs of TikTok similarly targeted Boston Children’s Hospital over its care for transgender people. In that instance, the account highlighted a video produced by the hospital discussing “gender-affirming hysterectomies.”

But there again, you see, calling it “care” is a little strange. It’s major surgery for no strictly medical reason. The reason is psychological, and the reality is it’s a very drastic kind of “care” in response to feelings and thoughts.

The uproar over transgender care at children’s hospitals comes as lawmakers in many states are seeking to curb LGBTQ rights in classrooms and on athletic fields.

That’s just meaningless slop. The issue here isn’t LGB rights at all, it’s specifically T “rights,” and it’s in dispute exactly what those rights are. Lawmakers are not trying to stop lesbians and gay men turning up on athletic fields. Precision is essential in journalism.

Raichik — a former real estate salesperson who has operated under various online pseudonyms — has amassed 1.3 million followers with posts that avidly stoke the nation’s culture wars, with a particular focus on LGBTQ issues. Her previous targets have included schools and Pride events, said Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director for Media Matters of America.

The new focus on children’s hospitals is particularly worrisome, Drennen said, bringing the potential for violence and harassment directed at families seeking medical care.

“I think most people should be able to agree that health-care decisions are not best made by angry internet mobs,” Drennen said.

Sure, but most people should also be able to agree that health-care decisions are not best made by people in the grip of a delusion about magic gender.

It seems the police removed lesbians from a Pride Cymru march today.

Just the lesbians. Not the men threatening the lesbians, just the lesbians.

Pride Cymru is proud of expelling lesbians.

Trans rights are human rights and lesbian rights don’t exist. Capeesh?

Also lesbians are cunts.

Oh really? What historians?

That’s an ambiguous, not to say sneaky, thing to say. Even if there are some historians who talk about a “two-sex model,” it’s absurd to claim that all historians do as a matter of course – it’s absurd to treat it as universally accepted professional jargon.

It’s actually one Thomas Laqueur, who made the claim in a book titled Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, in 1990. Some people were impressed, others were not. SciAm is being deceptive at best in saying “historians” say it, implying all of them do.

The Washington Post has an interesting detail:

Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart read the affidavit and approved the search on Aug. 5. Three days later, FBI agents dressed in polos and khakis executed the search warrant at the Palm Beach estate, carting away an additional 20 boxes of items from a bedroom, office and a first-floor storage room, according to an inventory of what was retrieved from the property that was made public earlier this month.

A bedroom and an office. I guess we should rejoice they didn’t find any in the lobby or the hotel dining room?

The affidavit says federal agents sought permission to conduct the search after reviewing the contents of 15 boxes Trump returned to the National Archives earlier this year and finding found documents with classification markings. Some were marked “HCS,” a category of highly classified government information; others related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and material meant not to be shared with foreign nations. The “HCS” acronym stands for “HUMINT Control Systems” and refers to the government systems used to protect intelligence gathered from secret human sources, the affidavit says.

Why would a former president even want that stuff? It’s not his business any more, so what would he think he was doing with it? Apart from selling it to the highest bidder?

The affidavit also includes a May 25 letter from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to the Justice Department, defending the president’s conduct by arguing Trump had the ultimate classification authority within the government. 

How could that possibly be true? The job doesn’t continue after you lose the election; you’re out, you’ve finished, you don’t get to play any more.

Former Trump people tell us he never did bother to learn how to handle documents.

A former Trump official told CNN that they were not surprised to hear that the National Archives found boxes with classified records that “were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly (sic) identified.”

According to this source, the former President was known to walk around both the White House and Mar-a-Lago and pull documents out of boxes and look at them, then put them in other boxes or to the side, often with no method or reasoning to it. One source said that Trump was constantly putting things into stacks and leaving them around his office to go through later. These stacks often included everything from newspaper clippings to the Presidential Daily Briefing. 

Sources also said Trump would write notes on the back of other presidential documents — even when aides told him not to.

Another source described how Trump would show off presidential documents to visitors including the letters between himself and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, indicating how lax the protocol seemed to be around these documents.

This is one consequence of being both stupid and lazy. Trump is too stupid to grasp that being president isn’t the same as being the crooked head of a crooked real estate swindle. Trump is also too lazy to figure out that he’s too stupid to understand his change of jobs and too lazy to do the work to become slightly less stupid on the subject. You have to be really dim and incurious to think you treat official papers like so much scrap paper left over from printing contracts.

Ah isn’t that adorable.

(He didn’t really get it from Marks & Sparks.)

Hur hur.