Jennifer Bilek talks about gender ideology as corporate fiction:

The creation of this corporate fiction is one step toward attempting to overlay a virtual reality onto the natural world and to construct a religion out of technology.  Elites at the highest levels of our technocracy have been speaking about technologies so advanced that they provide us with god-like qualities for at least fifty years, probably longer. 

Ring a bell? Sound like Elon Musk at all with his cheery plans to move humans to Mars?

The current iteration of this ideology, established by the technocracy we live in, is meant to ensconce us in a virtual or cyber world to which the natural world is subjugated. With its massive propaganda apparatus, it has only taken a decade to convince the populace that there is a unique type of human, untethered to the biosphere like the rest of us, mere “biological people.”

Let’s just put the magic helmet on and spend the rest of our lives dreaming.

Corporations, banks, international investment houses, governments, legal institutions, and influential non-governmental organizations (NGOs) market the idea that we are not a sexually dimorphic species. They don’t care about the identity issues of a minuscule part of the population. It is patently ridiculous to think so.  They are marketing disembodiment. “Gender,” currently being promoted as a revolutionary human rights movement to set us free, is an industry posing as social progress for the people.  It seeks to deconstruct human reproductive sex for profit and human engineering. It is posited that our freedom will emerge when technology takes over where human reproduction ends. When this purported dead weight of human reproduction ends, male & female will be obsolete. We can then live as our “authentic selves” beyond male and female, youth and adult, beyond material existence and its limitations.

I know little or nothing about this but it’s an interesting thought. It sounds like Avatar. I found Avatar extremely creepy and gruesome, a geeky boys’ fantasy run amok. Yay we can sit comfortably on flying horses without being snapped off by physical forces because it’s all just a video game we live in forever. Who the hell wants to?

Maybe the gender-is-magic people do.

The male sexual fetish of transsexualism, a compulsion to own female biology for oneself, has been rebranded to “transgenderism” because a male fetish would be a tough sell to any population.  “Transgender” sounds cool and edgy & feels mutinous for teens filled with the rebellious spirit of youth who are clueless about the repercussions of being sterilized by the drugs & surgeries being marketed to them. Claiming synthetic sex, a corporately manufactured illusion, has become the medical-tech generation’s counterpart to getting a secret tattoo.  These kids adopting synthetic sex identities have grown up online with cyber identities & have had their personalities medicalized since they were old enough to talk, while previous generations were out exploring the real world.

It sounds horribly plausible, doesn’t it.

Technocratic elites have spent years discussing the virtual reality they seek to create. We will be enclosed and connected to everything and everyone else via bodiless minds without any roots in the biosphere.  Elon Musk promotes his Neuralink, Ray Kurzweil, a Singularity, Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem movement, and Lifenaut organizations tout immortality in cyberspace. Mark Zuckerberg promises a utopia in his Metaverse, and Yuval Harari’s technological god will rid us of the cumbersome world of nature for something much more significant.  Elites and corporations are investing in humans framed as otherworldly and not like the rest of us, rooted in biology, because they see profits and believe this is our future. The fascination of elites in “gender ideology” takes on a new light when seen in context. 

A lurid new light. To repeat, I know little or nothing about this, but I think there’s at least something to it. It’s pretty grim.

Originally a comment by Sastra on They are appalled.

I just watched the film. It’s mostly just talking heads with a few sometimes awkward special effects thrown in, but still worth seeing. It’s worth seeing even if you believe TWAW, so you understand the concerns. I’ve read enough of the other side to guess what they’d object to, and why.

… it endangers trans* people on campus and beyond, erasing their identities and encouraging the spread of hateful portrayals.

Sometimes hyperbole like this makes it harder to maintain my natural sympathy and respect for trans people because it diminishes their stature. Instead of ordinary human beings struggling with difficult problems and searching for meaning and happiness, they start to sound like emotional basket cases on the verge of a breakdown, incapable of coping with disagreement or thinking straight. They, on the other hand, seem to think this fragility ought to move our sympathy for what must surely be such a horrible situation it would break down even the strongest.

I’m reminded of a time when PZ announced he was going to desecrate a blessed communion wafer and this got picked up by some online Catholic groups. The devout started pouring into the comment section of Pharyngula in various stages of distress. One overwrought woman informed us that treating the Consecrated Host with disrespect caused her so much anguish that she’d rather her 6 year old daughter was raped, then for that to happen. That little revelation didn’t inspire pity. It inspired contempt for the system, yes — but also for her. She’d lost her perspective.

Thinking about this, I’m starting to wonder how the transgender-identified male would deal with this Sophie’s Choice. Would they rather 1) be socially thought of as men who believe they’re woman and consequently denied a right to enter at least some single-sex spaces or 2) be raped, beaten, and left for dead? If they honestly think it’s the latter, well, I think they ought to sort out their priorities, as Ron would say.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What does bullshit mean?

And there’s no obligation to “trust” that anyone is “who they tell you they are.” Do banks and government institutions do this when you’re filling out forms? No. They require proof of identity; that is “identity” as in being the individual human being you purport to be, not the “identity as inner sense of self=personality.”

Being compelled to believe what people tell you to believe is not a thing, unless you’re living in a dictatorship. Even then, in your heart of hearts, you have the right to doubt, the right to say “no.” Whether you can say so out loud is a test of your freedom.

As a matter of politeness, one might give a stranger the benefit of the doubt, that they are what they say they are. In casual conversation you’re not going to ask for diplomas and licences if someone tells you they’re a lawyer, a doctor or a pilot. But if you’re going on trial, under the knife, or stepping onto a plane, you’re assuming that someone, somewhere has asked for, and been provided with, the requisite credentials that certify that the person holding them has the training and knowledge entitling the lawyer, doctor, or pilot to plead your case, wield the scalpel, or fly the plane. Any time someone succesfully cons their way into any regulated profession without the proper training and vetting, it is treated as a major failure of the system in question, and rightly so. We regularly place our lives in the hands of such individuals; such fields of trust, skill, power and knowledge should be off limits to frauds, charlatans, and amateurs.

This is the danger of the so-called “right” to change one’s sex on a birth certificate or passport. Being “officially” declared the sex you are not is a legal fiction carried too far, and one that should be reversed. Immediately. Governments would never allow someone to “legally” claim to be a different height, or age, or species. Claiming to be the sex one is not is equally as impossible and nonsensical. Even without documentation, we’re supposed to believe that males who claim to be female are as safe to be around as women, that they are no longer men, so no longer a threat. “Trust me when I tell you who I am!” To quote some Olympic women weight lifters, “No thank you.”

Trans activists might wave around their wee scraps of paper that “declare” they are actually female when they are not, using them as licences to access facilities, spaces and opportunities to which they should have no right. but these doctored documents do nothing to change the facts of the matter, any more than the “incorporation” of a company magically creates an actual person, ex nihilo. Unlike the professions, there is no “training” or “skill” that lets you change sex. Things just don’t work like that, and all the lipstick and high heels in the world can’t change it. Such an edit might be validating and affirming on paper, but reality isn’t listening. Neither should we.

There are many larger issues at stake, alongside the safety of women and girls (which is large enough in itself.) Do we really want official government documents to be as malleable as a Wikipedia article? Do “gender fluid” folk get to have the sex indicated on their passports in pencil? Do we render our statistics and book-keeping null and void because some men are now legally “women?” It is a bad idea, a legal fiction taken too far. It’s not “kind” it’s not “inclusive” it’s just stupidity that will redound upon the legitimacy of government institutions themselves, rendering the basic identification information we are supposed to trust less believable and authoratative than one of those novelty certificates you can buy that grants you ownership of real estate on the Moon, or even a star. At least the Moon and stars actually exist.

Yet another FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYONE burble, this time from The Irish Examiner.

When I discuss feminism with my students, I stress that feminism is for everyone. It is a social and political ideology intended for all human beings. Feminism is about equality, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or creed.

No, it is not. Of course it’s not. Look at the “fem” part. Take as long as you need.

In a way, all rights struggles and equality struggles are about everyone. The core ideas of equality, fairness, rights, justice are for and about everyone. Human rights benefit all humans, yes. But the reality is that rights and equality struggles are struggles: they have to be struggles because we don’t in fact have perfect human rights and freedom and justice. Many categories of people have to struggle harder for their share. Those categories of people get to carry out that struggle, without being told that their struggle is for everyone.

I go on to explain that this fight for equality is blighted by male violence. I explain that male violence is also a problem for men, who are attacked by other violent men. But more so for women.

But more so for women plus male violence toward men isn’t a feminist issue and isn’t a problem women are required to solve. But Jennifer Horgan thinks it is, because otherwise the men won’t listen. She says we must raise our boys to be allies.

There is a brand of feminism now, stuck on an anti-trans argument, that seeks to destroy this alliance, thereby returning us to an unhelpful and overly simplistic ‘us versus them’ gender-focused struggle.

Yes, sure, it’s frightfully simplistic, but it’s also frightfully simplistic when men beat up women or rape women or refuse to promote women or take over women’s spaces.

Hayley Freeman wrote in the Sunday Times last week that feminism is becoming a dirty word. 

Great job. She means Hadley Freeman, not Hayley. Top quality feministing here.

Why? Well, according to Freeman, it is becoming a dirty word because it is no longer OK for biologically born women to criticise trans women (born male) accessing female-only spaces. She claims that LGBTQ+ rights are trumping women’s rights.

Liar. She does no such thing. She doesn’t lump trans people in with LGB people.

She goes on for several more paragraphs, dismissing concerns about men in women’s prisons with the breezy confidence of the safe and comfortable, and telling us more about “dirty feminism.” It’s grotesque.

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

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

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

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

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

Weird (and long) headline.

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

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

…

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

Where to begin.

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

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

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

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

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

Man is expert on feminism again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike has another excellent post:

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

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

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

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

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

“Everyone” doesn’t need access to abortion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I laughed as hard as Terry Gross did.

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

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

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

Probably.

So they’ve noticed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Serial suitcase guy who works for the government:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She Identifies As an independent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tilling erodes soil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump has been staying home lately.

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

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

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

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

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

A hilariously scathing thread on That Report:

I’ll just quote the rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wallop!

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

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

Her mates all agree.

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

What a shower.

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

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

A good idea! But so briefly.

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

With a full beard and Fabulous eyelashes.

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

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

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

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

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