Can men lactate enough to nurse an infant?

Or, it’s a man putting his kink ahead of the health of an infant.

The NY Times looked into it in 2019:

Is it possible for a man to breastfeed a baby? For millennia, this question has tickled people’s imagination. It has intrigued; it has disgusted; it has also remained largely hypothetical.

That is, until last year, when a peer-reviewed case report confirmed that a transgender woman, assigned male at birth, was able to breastfeed her child after she was put on a regimen of hormonal drugs. Weeks before the baby’s birth, she was able to produce eight ounces of milk per day, and for the first six weeks, the baby could be sustained solely on that milk alone.

But, onlookers wonder, is that regimen of hormonal drugs good for the baby? Do the drugs get into the milk?

Before the treatment, the patient had been receiving feminizing hormones for six years. We don’t know how long it would take for a cis man to induce functional lactation. But “we have a pretty good idea of the types of hormone cocktails that would be needed,” said Tamar Reisman, an endocrinologist with the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and one of the two authors of the case report.

And are hormone cocktails good for babies? Is anyone even bothering to find out?

Hooray hooray it’s not just sports, men also get to steal work and fame and money from women in tv shows.

Yasmin Finney is joining the cast of “Doctor Who” as a character named Rose, BBC announced Monday. Her role will debut in 2023, coinciding with the show’s 60th anniversary.

…

“If anyone would have told 8-year-old Yasmin that one day she’d be part of this iconic show, I would have never in a million years believed them,” Finney said. “This show has a place in so many people’s hearts, so to be seen as a trans actress by the legend himself Russell, has not only made my year, it’s made my life. I cannot wait to begin this journey and for you all to see how Rose blossoms. Get ready.”

…

The casting of Finney, who is transgender, follows the history-making turn by Bethany Black, who was the first openly transgender actor to be cast on “Doctor Who” when she debuted her role as 474 in 2015. Rebecca Root became the first transgender actor to play a Doctor Who companion when she took on the role of Tania Bell in the audio series “Stranded.”

History-making blah blah blah first openly blah blah first transgender blah blah – all tactfully disguising the fact that these are men taking jobs from women, in an industry where most of the jobs go to men already.

Another one:

A female skateboarding champion has said she is “done being silent,” and is speaking out about her experience coming in second to a biological male allowed to complete in a women’s competition.

On May 17, Taylor May Silverman, a professional skateboarder, posted a statement to her Instagram in which she called out the last Redbull Cornerstone skate event she took part in for allowing a biological male athlete to compete against women, and take the top spot.

In her statement, Silverman writes that she placed second in two previous competitions in which biological males were allowed to compete against female skateboarders, and notes that at the last Redbull-sponsored skate event, the female athletes lost out on financial awards because a transgender competitor took first place.

It’s not the validation, honey, it’s the cash.

Silverman’s instagram post has since been inundated with over 3,000 primarily hateful and abusive comments from trans activists, with many claiming she is being “transphobic” for having concerns about the fairness of the events she took part in.

How dare a female athlete expect only female athletes to compete in events for female athletes.

Mary Wakefield at the Spectator on Kirrin Medcalf and “emotional support animals”:

Kirrin appeared in court last week because Stonewall is currently being sued by a lawyer called Allison Bailey, who claims that they bullied her and cost her her livelihood as a result of her insistence that men and women have different bodies, which of course they do. Bailey has been harassed by the usual activists in the usual way – death and rape threats – but nonetheless it was Kirrin who appeared to feel most victimised. Although he appeared in court only online, via Zoom, he insisted on being accompanied by his mum and his support dog. Just the sight of Bailey was too traumatising for him without the dog.

He tried to insist on being accompanied by his mum and his support dog and his support person – who was actually a lawyer.

I can’t bear to think about what Stonewall’s weird ideology does to children: the unthinking glibness with which they tell kids they can choose their sex, then push them towards mutilating their bodies and taking drugs which will make them infertile. I can’t bear it for the adult activists either – all the restless, unhappy allies who will one day face the enormity of what they’ve done.

I wonder if they ever will. I guess my hunch is that they’ve already warped their thinking so much to accommodate the nonsensical ideology that the thinking will stay warped, and they’ll go on thinking they were right no matter how many former trans people say how much they regret what they did to themselves.

So instead, as we move into another week of Allison Bailey vs Stonewall, I’m going to focus on the animals – not just Kirrin’s dog, but all the thousands of emotional support animals, or ESAs, this anxious young generation requires.

ESAs are a big business now both here and in the States, which I suppose makes sense. If you’ve been persuaded that you’re not the fortunate inhabitant of a free and democratic country, but instead the victim of an oppressive tyranny, you might well feel more comfy clutching some form of teddy – and an ESA is laughably easy to acquire. Unlike service animals for the blind or deaf, emotional support animals don’t need to be trained or properly certified. All you need to designate your pet an ESA is a letter from a therapist saying that the animal contributes to your psychological wellbeing. No therapist? No sweat. Any number of online sites will offer you the same service for a fee and throw in some ESA dog tags and a smashing official-looking harness just like the one on Kirrin’s dog.

So…do they do the trick? Do anxious people become less anxious because they have a critter in a fancy harness with them?

Jeffrey Younggren at the University of New Mexico has written a number of scientific papers pointing out that there’s no real evidence that support animals help with anxiety at all: ‘An ESA is an example of a well-intentioned idea that has metastasised and developed into a world of nonsense.’

Why not have an emotional support stuffed animal instead? Cheaper, tidier, easier to schlep around. I saw a [probably] homeless guy yesterday [there are a great many in Seattle] with a backpack with a little white stuffed bear at the top, packed appropriately for breathing and observing what was going on. To put a hold on the sarcasm for a moment, I found it quite touching – not only that he had it but that he wasn’t embarrassed to carry it around fully visible. I muse sometimes on how difficult it is not to think of stuffed animals as semi-alive or -real or -conscious or all those. You know they’re not, but at the same time, they’re not like a sweater or a bottle or a tennis ball. It’s the deeply encoded response to faces, I think – humans can’t fully override that, no matter what we know.

Men still aren’t women though.

The BBC tells us:

BBC Eye investigates the disappearance of Sophia Huang Xueqin, a high-profile feminist journalist who kick-started China’s #MeToo movement.

Spoiler: it was the secret police.

In the summer of 2021, Sophia was awarded a prestigious Chevening scholarship funded by the British government to pursue gender studies at the University of Sussex.

Oh no. That’s the last place a feminist should go for further education. Actually it seems that any UK university is that, but Sussex has a record.

The Beeb goes on to say that China has detained tens of thousands of activists in recent years and that Sophia Huang Xueqin is expected to face trial for “inciting subversion of state power” and that her story is being erased.

I have to wonder if she realized the University of Sussex, had she arrived there safely, would have told her that men are women if they say they are, that women have no right to say that men are not women or to say women need spaces away from men and services for women only. I wonder if it would have warned her that women who refuse to agree that men are women are called “terfs” and subject to intense bullying and shunning.

The Scouts (UK) explain what “lesbian” means:

What’s the point of even having the word “lesbian” if that’s what it means? They might as well say “lesbian means attracted to everyone.” Attracted to women including men, says Scouts UK.

Meanwhile does anybody around here know how to put up a tent?

All of a sudden Fox News has gone quiet on the Great Replacement front. I wonder why.

Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.

The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.

The racist conspiracy theory, that is.

“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”

…

In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably leftwing or rightwing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of rightwing conspiracy theories.

Mmmyes, not really political at all, a white guy shooting a lot of not-white people. What could the politics of that possibly be?

Strangio is not honest.

That’s not why. The reason we upbraid the ACLU is the insistence on erasing the word “women” from all their advertising and commentary on abortion rights. We don’t think it’s possible to defend our rights effectively without ever mentioning us. We also don’t think there’s anything social justicey or otherwise admirable about shoving the subordinated sex back into the closet marked SUBORDINATE.

Also, by the way, of course Strangio’s colleagues haven’t spent their entire lives litigating abortion cases. They didn’t start at birth, or at age 1, or at age 10, or at age 20. Entire careers is possible; entire lives is not. Lawyers are supposed to be precise with their wording.

The story of the bullied student appeared on Transgender Trend first, and the Times linked to it. It’s not well written, so I’ll quote only sparingly, but with all the anonymity and Owen Jones’s hunt for heretics, there’s an interest in sources.

Teacher John Rickards has written this account for us of how transgender ideology has infiltrated the girls’ school where he teaches, to the extent that the consequences are severe for any pupil who questions it. Recent government guidance on political impartiality in schools states:

Existing statutory requirements on political impartiality cover all schools, regardless of type or funding arrangement. This includes independent schools.

But there’s an invisible coda that says “except on trans issues.”

Anyway. There was

an ‘educational’ visit to a 6th form PSHE session of a member of the House of Lords. We will call her ‘Baroness A’. She is a well known LGBTQ speaker and activist with views on transgender issues not dissimilar to those of Mermaids and Stonewall (or to what its position has been in recent years). It’s worth noting that the school is a registered ‘Stonewall Diversity Champion’ and has in the past invited Mermaids in to address most of the school.

Why would a school invite Mermaids to talk? Inviting Mermaids to talk amounts to marketing trans idenniny to teenagers; why would a school do that?

It was during an after school activity on the day of the Baroness’s visit that the small group of 6th formers involved in the activity arrived very late and in an animated state. There had been, I learned, some major spat in the 6th form centre which they just ‘had’ to stay behind to witness. It involved a significant group of girls verbally ‘laying into’ one particular 18 yr old who had had the audacity to question the position of Baroness A during the Q & A. I later learned that the girl had pointed out that there was another person in the House of Lords, ‘Baroness B’ who held different views to ‘Baroness A’ and she wanted to know if they had debates or arguments about their differing positions.

It’s not at all clear why the Baronesses can’t be named. The sixth form can’t bully them.

So Owen Jones decides to bully her some more.

What is the story?

A girl who argued that biological sex is real after a talk about transphobia felt forced to leave her school after pupils hounded her for challenging the views of a visiting speaker.

She was treated like a heretic for questioning a politician’s assertions about sex, a teacher at the school said. The female member of the House of Lords visited the private girls’ school, a Stonewall diversity champion, to talk about transphobia in parliament.

They went back and forth a bit; after the lecture the student spoke to the guest and said she was sorry if she came across as rude; they parted amicably.

But on returning to the sixth form she was surrounded by up to 60 girls who shouted, screamed, swore and spat at her. She escaped and said she collapsed, unable to breathe properly.

Teachers were initially supportive but withdrew their backing after the other sixth formers accused the girl of transphobia. The teenager returned to school a few times but was told she would have to work in the library if she said anything provocative in lessons, and faced bullying and accusations of transphobia from pupils throughout the school. She also spent breaktimes and lunchtimes in the library. The girl left in December and is studying at home.

Great that Owen Jones is getting busy making her life even worse.

DOCTOR Jordan P. is mad now. You’ve dissed him one too many. He’s taking his genius and going home.

Ah yes the facts, such as “idiot philosophy” for instance.

Those are facts!!

There are no cynical manipulators where he’s going.

Jordan Peterson thinks talking about climate change is very bad for children. I wonder what he thinks escalating climate change is going to be for them.

He explained about climate change on Joe Rogan’s chat show a few months ago. Word is his explanation wasn’t all that correct.

Leading climate scientists have ridiculed and criticised comments made by controversial Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson during an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

During a new four-hour interview on Spotify’s most popular podcast, Peterson – who is not an expert on climate change – claimed that models used to forecast the future state of the climate couldn’t be relied on.

Ok so he’s not an expert on climate change but he is the smartest human who’s ever lived, so it comes to the same thing.

But climate scientists have described Peterson’s comments as “stunningly ignorant” and said he had fundamentally misunderstood the concept of climate modelling.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales Canberra, said Peterson’s description of how climate models work was fundamentally wrong. While weather forecasts do become less accurate the further out they go, this was a different process to climate modelling. He seems to think we model the future climate the same way we do the weather. He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong.”

He can’t be. He was on the Joe Rogan podcast. Obviously he can’t be wrong.

Prof Christian Jakob, a climate modelling expert at Monash University, said Peterson’s comments were “ill-informed” and that he’d “mixed up weather prediction with climate projections.

“People are entitled to their opinions, but science and climate modelling isn’t about opinion. If you’re not well informed about how something is done then it’s not right to make comments about it on a large platform.”

Especially when the something is as urgent as climate change. Peterson is like a guy telling people to walk in front of a moving locomotive.

It’s very like the Tucker Carlson situation. These guys do their performances for ratings and fame and $$$, and they don’t care if the world burns.

The seminar happens tomorrow; its title is Transitional Experiences: Understanding Embodied Stigma, Stress and Trans Resilience in the U.S.

The seminar-haver is Zachary DuBois (University of Oregon) IAS Visiting Fellow.

Although trans, gender diverse and gender non-binary people are increasingly visible in popular culture in the U.S., political backlash and entrenchment in a strict gender binary continue to contribute to enacted stigma and violence. This talk examines trans experience through a biocultural anthropological lens focusing on how stress and stigma become embodied and explores ways to understand trans lives, transitional experiences and “biologies of resilience.”

Entrenchment in a strict gender binary is it. Hm. Is that like entrenchment in a strict species binary? The one that says you either are human or you are not? The one that says you either are a woolly mammoth or you are not?

“Strict” is a useful nudge-word for this kind of thing. Oh dear, we don’t want to be strict, do we. That would be horrid – it summons up images of green Margaret Hamilton shaking her broom. Away with your uptight bourgeois strictness! Let a thousand flowers bloom! Torture anyone who doesn’t let a thousand flowers bloom!

Reality is strict though. It just is. It’s strict about flying – we can’t do it. Our bodies don’t have any of the right equipment – no hollow bones, no wings, no large flexible skin membrane between the fingers. It’s strict about drowning – if we stay under water for a long time we drown. It’s strict about heights – if we jump off them we smash. There’s a whole big set of rules like that which are sadly strict. We are “entrenched” in them because we have no choice in the matter. Sex is just one of those.

You’d think an anthropologist would know that…

One of the incidents in Manchester yesterday was this guy in the ninja costume physically attacking a woman holding a suffragette flag.

I didn’t post it yesterday because I couldn’t make out what the cop was saying to the woman, but now we know, from the woman herself.

So there you go.

Updating to add a clip where you can hear some of what the cop says. H/t NightCrow

Elise Stefanik is one of the “Great Replacement”ists.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the No. 3 House Republican, and other GOP lawmakers came under scrutiny Sunday for previously echoing the racist “great replacement” theory…

The one the Buffalo mass murderer embraces.

The baseless conspiracy theory claims that politicians are attempting to wipe out White Americans and their influence by replacing them with non-White immigrants. The theory was cited repeatedly by 18-year-old shooting suspect Payton Gendron in an online document that appeared to have outlined his intention to carry out his planned attack in Buffalo because of its significant population of Black people.

How dare Black people live in Buffalo, right? They should all live in Philadelphia, Mississippi, reliving all the horrors every day.

While Stefanik has not pushed the theory by name, she and other conservatives have echoed the tenets of the far-right ideology as part of anti-immigrant rhetoric that has fired up the Republican base ahead of the midterm elections.

Hmmm, Stefanik – looks kind of foreign, doesn’t it. Immigrants in the family tree possibly? Can we send her back?

Adam Kinzinger pointed out her replacementism in a tweet.

Kinzinger was referring to a series of Facebook ads published in September 2021 by Stefanik’s campaign committee that charged that Democrats were allowing undocumented immigrants into the United States as a ploy to outnumber, and eventually silence, Republican voters.

“Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” reads one of the ads, which shows a reflection of migrants in sunglasses Biden is wearing. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

It’s a similar argument [to the one] frequently espoused by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, leading the Anti-Defamation League to repeatedly call for his firing since April 2021 after he appeared to endorse the concept during one of his segments.

Oh well, she’s only in Congress; what harm can she do?

This is not a decent person.

There was a gathering of women today in Manchester, and the women were joined by some men in black hoodies and masks who wanted them to stop gathering.

The vibe is not “protest” but “threat.”

Well, women gathering. I mean to say.

Substitute a statue of Rosa Parks or John Lewis or Thurgood Marshall. Imagine a gang of white supremacists taking over said statue. Think about that. Mmhm.

Like adding a hoe for chopping cotton to a statue of Marshall, or a box of Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix in the hands of a statue of Parks.

We can’t have anything of our own.

Aaron Blake at the Washington Post last September:

As we wrote a while back, the Republican Party’s increasing embrace of replacement theory — the idea popular in white supremacist circles that immigrants are being brought in to replace native-born (read: White) Americans — has been a slow build. For years, it was an idea relegated to infrequent mentions by fringe Republicans who operated outside the political mainstream and weren’t generally welcomed in politer circles of the GOP. When it was mentioned, it was dressed up as something besides replacement theory, per se.

Well, sure. There are a lot of ways you can dress up such things. In fact “replacement theory” itself is a dressing up – it sounds thoughtful and academic-ish, when really it’s just Y U let all those darkies in?

[Tucker] Carlson last week doubled down and used the actual label favored by racist groups — “great replacement” — and more recently got some backup from a member of Congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Carlson had been disavowing “replacement theory” while also promoting it, then he dropped the disavowing part.

In a segment last week recapped by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump, though, Carlson explained that what Biden was doing was, in fact, not just replacement, but a great replacement.

“In political terms, this policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries,” Carlson said Wednesday.

And Matt Gaetz tweeted a Right on bro! Dressed up a little – the cleanest T shirt he could find.

So that’s two prominent figures on the right describing this as, in fact, “the great replacement” and “replacement theory.” And the former did so after his boss said he had “decried and rejected replacement theory.” This comes on top of certain congressional Republicans, including one who spoke to a group of white nationalists, floating the idea forming a caucus for which a draft document said immigrants were undercutting the “unique identity” of the country. (The idea was later shelved after an outcry.)

Let’s go full racism! Oops, wait, it’s not going over well – back off a little. [looks at watch] Ok try again!

Martin Pengelly in The Guardian last September:

After the Anti-Defamation League renewed its call for Tucker Carlson to be fired from Fox News for voicing the racist “great replacement” theory about immigration, the primetime host had a pithy response: “Fuck them.”

…

Claiming the Biden administration was trying “to change the racial mix of the country”, Carlson said: “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement’, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

That’s the one Nicholas Confessore cited on Fresh Air the other day. It’s definitely an attention-grabber. Goebbels-like.

The “great replacement theory” originated on the far right. Perpetrators of recent mass shootings have cited iterations of the theory in “manifestos” attempting to justify their actions.

The link is to the El Paso mass shooting aka local genocide.

Carlson raised the theory in April, claiming it was not racist but a matter of hardball politics. The ADL chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, called for Carlson to be fired.

That didn’t happen, as we know. It will go on not happening. Everything will just get worse.

Matt Gaetz says Carlson is correct.

Canadian Women and Sport think men belong in women’s sport.

I would link to the statement on their website instead of Twitter, but it’s not there. They posted it on Facebook and Twitter but not their website.

They bother to have a thing called Canadian Women and Sport but then they undercut it by making a public statement that they think men belong in it.

I wondered if there’s a comparable group for First Nations in sport and found Aboriginal Sport Circle. It’s unfortunately all male on the main page until the very bottom where it promotes a group that’s explicitly for women and men. At any rate, I wonder if they would ever issue a statement saying that trans-aboriginal people belong in Aboriginal sport. I wonder if the Trudeau government would issue such a statement. I wonder if it’s only women who are stabbed in the back this way.