Moira Deeming won her case!

Ousted Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming says she expects to rejoin the party room after winning her defamation case against Opposition Leader John Pesutto.

Ms Deeming brought the lawsuit against Mr Pesutto, alleging he had defamed her as a Nazi sympathiser in the wake of an anti-trans-rights rally on the steps of Victorian parliament last year that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.

In the aftermath of the rally, Mr Pesutto failed in a bid to have Ms Deeming booted from the parliamentary Liberal Party — she was instead suspended for nine months.

…

On Thursday, Federal Court judge David O’Callaghan ruled Mr Pesutto had defamed Ms Deeming on multiple occasions, including in radio and TV interviews which “caused or is likely to cause serious harm to her reputation”.

“The imputation found to be conveyed is that Mrs Deeming associates with Nazis and is thus unfit to be a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party,” Justice O’Callaghan said of an interview Mr Pesutto did with radio station 3AW in the wake of the rally last year.

“With respect to the ABC interview, the imputation found to be conveyed is that Mrs Deeming knowingly associates or sympathises with Neo Nazis and white supremacists, and is thus unfit to be a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party and Liberal Party.”

Read the whole thing.

She was awarded 300 k for non-economic losses; compensation for economic losses is still being worked out.

Onward!

They flop over the instant he looks in their direction.

FBI Director Christopher Wray became the latest public official to remove his own spine and dissolve into a puddle of genuflecting goo for the greater glory of MAGA with his announcement Wednesday that he’ll resign before Trump’s inauguration.

FBI directors are supposed to be independent, and Wray still has more than two years left on his term. But Trump loathes Wray, who, among other things, pursued an investigation of Trump’s mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House.

Which is slightly ironic, because Trump appointed Wray in the first place.

As Trump mentions in his post, he plans to replace Wray with unqualified craven bootlicker Kash Patel, who has promised to use the agency to target Trump’s enemies, terrorize the media (including imprisoning journalists), and crush political dissent.

Wray’s resignation enables Trump’s authoritarian designs. It means he can install Patel without having to pay the political price that would have come with firing Wray, who has clearly done nothing to deserve it. It will make it easier for Republican senators who might have been on the fence about voting for Trump’s new henchman to go along with the program.

…

Wray is a Trump nominee in his own right who rose to the top of the bureau in 2017 during one of the orange menace’s previous power plays, when he ignored the norms protecting FBI directors and fired James Comey for refusing to stifle the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Wray was suitably supine for most of Trump’s term; at Trump’s behest, he undermined the FBI investigation into sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

So now we’ll get someone even worse.

It doesn’t though.

It isn’t “gloating” to be glad children won’t be given puberty blockers for frivolous reasons. Blocking puberty isn’t “healthcare” except in the case of premature puberty. Gender skeptics are relieved that the harm of blocking puberty will be stopped. Hines doesn’t agree that it is a harm, but she ought to be able to grasp that many other people do.

I suppose for people like her trans ideology is like being in a club or a sorority or a cult, rather than a coherent set of ideas. It’s a badge, a secret handshake, a wink, a clubhouse, a mechanism for excluding the uncool.

The issue is the healthcare of a vulnerable group of young people, but not in the way Hines means it. It’s about keeping that healthcare out of the hands of gender fanatics before they ruin any more lives.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

We have all heard trans activism, or wokeism in general, described as a cult. On the other hand there are people who seem to suggest that because these movements don’t exactly meet the formal definition of cult, there is nothing to learn from the study of cults that’s at all relevant to the issue. Regardless of whether or not you think TRAs are a cult, I hope we can all agree that this is not a very compelling argument. Even if we accept the premise, the conclusion clearly doesn’t follow.

Robert Jay Lifton provided what still seems to be the most widely accepted definition of a cult in his article Cult Formation in 1981:

Cults can be identified by three characteristics:

1. a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose their power;

2. a process I call coercive persuasion or thought reform;

3. economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.

The most obvious way in which trans activism differs from this definition is that there is no clearly identifiable single leader with the authority of someone like Jim Jones or L. Ron Hubbard*. Also, while there is plenty of exploitation going on, I think there’s a fair case to be made that it’s less coordinated or organized than what we have seen in the case of, say, Scientology. Rather than one large confidence scheme, there are many smaller ones.

My focus in this analysis is on Lifton’s second characteristic. Perhaps the real issue isn’t whether or not TRAs are a “cult”, but whether or not they engage in thought reform (or “brain washing”). The latter does not presuppose the former. After all, Lifton’s original work on the topic was about the re-education of political prisoners in Communist China rather than cult indoctrination. In Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961) Lifton breaks down the thought reform process into 8 “themes”. So let’s see how well these apply to gender ideology.

1. Milieu Control

The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also—in its penetration of his inner life—over what we may speak of as his communication with himself.

The applicability to gender ideology is obvious. What are the endless cancellations, dis-invitations, de-platformings, and book-bannings, not to mention mandatory DEI programs (all presupposing a gender ideology framework), demands for “safe spaces”, the endless days, weeks, or entire months dedicated to “trans something“, etc., other than milieu control on an industrial scale? If you can just coerce people into talking and acting as if they held the required beliefs and opinions, they have a stake in defending them which creates an incentive to make themselves actually believe them (“I’m not the kind of sucker who would cave to external pressure, so if I did say those things, they have to be true!”). The justification spiral does the rest.

2. Mystical Manipulation

The inevitable next step after milieu control is extensive personal manipulation. […]. Initiated from above, it seeks to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that these will appear to have arisen spontaneously from within the environment. This element of planned spontaneity, directed as it is by an ostensibly omniscient group, must assume, for the manipulated, a near-mystical quality. […] Included in this mystique is a sense of “higher purpose,” of having “directly perceived some imminent law of social development,” and of being themselves the vanguard of this development.

Among Lifton’s themes this is probably the hardest one to pin down since the manipulation, in order to make the planned behavior seem spontaneous, by necessity has to rely heavily on non-verbal social cues. Rainbow flags, gender-neutral restrooms, casual use of preferred pronouns or Genderspeak in general (#6) etc. may be among the less subtle ways of signaling what the officially “approved” beliefs and attitudes are. The part about “having ‘directly perceived some imminent law of social development,’ and of being themselves the vanguard of this development” seems to fit nicely with TRA rhetoric about being on the “right side of history”.

3. The Demand for Purity

In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure.

Again the applicability to gender ideology is obvious. It doesn’t matter how far you go out of your way to stress that trans-identified people are entitled to the same rights, protections, dignity, and respect as everybody else. Unless you are prepared to uncritically accept the whole package of sex denialism, gender realism, the self-ID criterion of womanhood, the affirmation-only approach to gender dysphoria, the forced teaming of “LGB” and “TQ+” etc., not to mention tons of highly dubious postmodernist philosophy, Queer Theory, identity politics, social constructivism, standpoint epistemology, linguistic determinism etc. (#5), as part of the deal, you might as well be advocating for re-opening Auschwitz and resuming the mass-production of Zyklon B!

4. The Cult of Confession

Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tendencies. In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.

This fits nicely with the obligatory public displays of owning up to your “cis privilege” and how you, as a member of the oppressor class, can never understand what trans people are going through, how nothing you can possibly do to compensate for this alleged shortcoming will ever be enough etc. The same goes for the obligatory groveling apologies and self-denunciations (very similar to the “self criticisms” demanded in Mao’s China) required by anyone accused (rightly or not) of insufficient ideological purity (#3). Having conceded that the TRAs were right and you were wrong, you once again have a stake in proving your commitment to “doing better”.

5. The “Sacred Science”

The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. […]. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute “scientific” precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas, becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also “unscientific.”

Once again gender ideology gets full marks. Obvious examples of sacred science include the “sex spectrum”, the idea that a person’s “brain sex” (a.k.a. “gender”) can be different from the sex of their body, the alleged infallibility of a person’s ability to know his/her own brain-sex, the idea that the only way to solve the supposed mismatch between gender identity and physical sex is medically “correcting” the latter, the idea that “changing sex” is even possible etc. Other examples might include the claim that the “sex binary” is a recent Western invention and remains alien to indigenous peoples uncontaminated by Western cultural imperialism. And, once again, all of it ultimately rests on tons of highly dubious postmodernist philosophy, Queer, Theory, identity politics, standpoint epistemology, social constructivism, linguistic determinism etc.

6. Loading the Language

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. […] Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “the language of nonthought.”

A complete analysis of the TRA use of loaded language would fill, not just a whole book, but an entire library. Not only are thought-terminating clichés (“Trans Women are Women!”, “Trans Men are Men!”, “Non-Binary Identities are Valid!”, “Trans Rights are Human Rights!” etc) ubiquitous, but hardly anything they have to say makes sense except in the light of a million unstated (and very shaky) premises and impossibly sloppy inferences. Even the most central premises of their arguments, including such obviously relevant “details” as the definition of “woman”, what is meant by “trans rights”, and how said “rights “ are supposedly violated by, say, women’s right to female only spaces, are best left unspecified. Apparently simple words and phrases like “trans”, “cis”, “gender”, “gender dysphoria”, “man”, “woman”, “(non-)binary”, “trans rights”, “transphobia”, “trans medicine/healthcare”, “LGBTQ+” etc. are all short-hands and Trojan horses for tons of extremely dubious truth claims, value judgements, tortured inferences, circular definitions, “bad puns” etc. that have to be accepted unconditionally and without asking for specifics. E.g. it is always framed (without the analysis to back it up) as a matter of being for or against “trans rights”, the right of “trans children” to “healthcare” etc. as if the specific content of said “rights” had already been more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics, when, in fact, this is very much a point of contention. Woke standpoint epistemology and the obligatory admonishments to “educate yourself” (which is “not the responsibility of marginalized people”, remember!) provide a blanket excuse for not bothering with evidence and placing the burden of proof squarely on your opponents.

7. Doctrine Over Person

This sterile language reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience—between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguing of feelings. It has much to do with the peculiar aura of half-reality which a totalist environment seems, at least to the outsider, to possess.

Once again, the applicability to gender ideology is only too obvious. If all your senses, as well as instincts evolved over millions of years to identify potential threats or mates, are telling you that that 7 feet tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, bearded person in the pink dress and blond wig is an obvious male, but the doctrine requires you to see “her” (with her “lady-cock”) as a “woman”, you have to reject the evidence of your senses and not only pretend to see a woman, but work to make yourself honestly mean it.

8. The Dispensing of Existence

The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right. […] Surely this is a flagrant expression of what the Greeks called hubris, of arrogant man making himself God. Yet one underlying assumption makes this arrogance mandatory: the conviction that there is just one path to true existence, just one valid mode of being, and that all others are perforce invalid and false. Totalists thus feel themselves compelled to destroy all possibilities of false existence as a means of furthering the great plan of true existence to which they are committed.

Labeling opponents as “TERFs” and “transphobes” (#6) does not just offer a convenient excuse for dismissing anything they might have to say in advance, without addressing the actual substance of their arguments, but serves to mark them as beyond the pale, even undeserving of life (“Kill TERFs!”, “Die Cis Scum!”, “Die in a Grease Fire!” etc.). Any concern about, say, allowing biological males to self-identify into women’s changing rooms or medical experimentation on vulnerable children and teenagers is not seen as sincere, but only as an arbitrary excuse for blind, genocidal hatred and evil for the sake of evil. Anyone who fails to take on board all the baggage supposedly implied (for reasons best left unspecified #6) by “trans rights” is not just seen as misguided or wrong, but as a naked existential threat with whom no negotiations, compromise, or even peaceful co-existence is possible, someone who simply has to be crushed and defeated by any means necessary.

Lifton goes on to write:

The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform (or “brainwashing”).

I seem to remember cult-expert Rick Ross arguing that at least 6 of Lifton’s 8 themes need to be present for a coercive persuasion effort to be considered thought reform or “brainwashing”. If so, I think there’s a strong case to be made that gender ideology qualifies. I strongly suspect that theme 2 (Mystical Manipulation) is applicable to some degree, although it is hard to conclusively demonstrate for reasons I have already mentioned. As far as the other themes are concerned, I say TRAs have earned a perfect score.

* Not all cult experts see this as a necessary criterion being a cult, however. E.g. Steven Hassan seems to argue that any group that engages in coercive persuasion qualifies as a cult.

Julie Bindel on the toppling of Pink News:

[T]oday’s revelations are grimly unsurprising: the outlet has reliably targeted any feminist who dares speak out publicly against the misogyny of trans activism, publishing a seemingly endless stream of baseless hit pieces about nasty, bigoted Terfs.

Many of the allegations against Cohen and James concern misogyny. Female members of staff say they were badgered to act as surrogates for the couple — a horrible abuse of power by bosses in a workplace, even if it were meant in jest. Given that some men have wombs, according to the ideology PinkNews promotes, it remains a mystery why they never asked any male employees to bear their child.

During my 18 months of litigation against PinkNews, someone close to the company told me Cohen wanted to cave, but was worried that the publication’s “brand” would be compromised if he were to back down and issue me an apology. This brand rested, naturally, on being able to say absolutely anything about “transphobic” lesbians.

It’s so interesting how many formerly feminist lefty dudes just cannot believe their luck getting to say absolutely anything about noncompliant women.

The BBC reports further developments in the Benjamin Cohen/Anthony James story.

PinkNews director Dr Anthony James has been suspended from his job in the NHS, after a BBC News investigation heard allegations of sexual misconduct at the publisher.

Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said they made the decision to suspend Dr James from his role as associate non-executive director pending further information.

…

Following the publication of the investigation, more than 10 former PinkNews staff members have come forward to share their experiences of working there.

Their good experiences of working there, or the other kind?

Is sanity slowly creeping back?

Puberty blockers for under-18s with gender dysphoria will be banned indefinitely in the UK after experts warned of an “unacceptable safety risk”.

The government said that following recommendations from independent medical professionals, existing emergency measures banning the sale and supply of the drugs outside of clinical trials will stay in place.

Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said there was a need to “act with caution” and “follow the expert advice” in caring for this “vulnerable group of young people”.

Of course both sides of this dispute consider the young people vulnerable, but they seem them as vulnerable to different perils. To the trans ideologues they’re vulnerable to the evil transphobes who want to deprive them of the joy of changing sex. To the trans skeptics they’re vulnerable to trans ideologues who want to convert them.

It apparently didn’t occur to Peter Tatchell that we can all see the quoted bit and the image. They don’t mention any T+.

We can see it. We can read it. It’s right there in the Working Class History tweet. Lesbians & Gays support the miners. NO T IS MENTIONED.

I can’t get past this truth thing. I can’t get past the fact that official bodies are telling us we have to lie about who is a woman and who is not. The IPSO ruling makes it horribly clear that we are under orders to lie. How did we get here?

IPSO itself is incoherent.

Relevant Clause Provisions

Clause 1 (Accuracy)

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text.

So, surely, the press must take care not to publish assertions that some men are women.

And yet:

Findings of the Committee

9. The Committee first considered whether the article had breached Clause 1 in reporting that the complainant, who has a Gender Recognition Certificate, was “a man who claim[ed] to be a woman”.

10. When making its decision, the Committee had regard to the context: this was a comment piece, clearly distinguished as such by the inclusion of the columnist’s prominent byline, author’s illustration, and the tone, which expressed the author’s opinions of Nicola Sturgeon and her stance on transgender rights. The publication had explained that the author held gender critical views and asserted that these constituted a philosophical belief and were therefore protected under the Equality Act 2010.

But all that should be beside the point! The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, therefore the press should not be publishing claims that men can be women, nor should it be publishing specific claims by specific men that they are women, because they are not. It’s a question of truth. It’s not true that men can be women. It’s not true that trans women are women. It’s not true that Juno Dawson is a woman because he has a damn certificate.

The Press, while free to editorialise and campaign, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.

Yes and it must also distinguish between lies and truth, between fantasy and reality.

I’m studying the IPSO ruling, and one item jumps out at me.

4. The complainant said the article breached Clause 12 as she considered the claim that she was “a man who claim[ed] to be a woman” to be discriminatory as she legally changed her gender in 2018. The complainant considered she was deliberately misgendered with the intention being to offend her.

No no no no no. That’s what they refuse to get – or what they pretend not to get. The intent is not to “offend” him. It’s not about him. The intent is to say what’s true. The intent is to reject a major societal lie. The intent is to refuse all these orders to pretend a lie is true. The intent is to go on being able to talk about women without being constantly interrupted by men pretending to be women.

The vanity and narcissism and self-obsession keep announcing themselves. You’d think the “activists” would want to hide all that, wouldn’t you, but no, it’s their party piece.

Sometimes one branch of progressive awareness cancels out another branch of progressive awareness, revealing a hierarchy of disprivilege.

For example, the government of Northern Ireland on period products:

Period inequality contributes to the poor mental health and wellbeing experience of those who are unable to access the basic health essentials of period products. This is a growing issue particularly in light of the increased cost of living.

Period products are essential items for personal care to address a normal biological need and should therefore be available to everyone who needs them, regardless of their economic status.

First two paragraphs, and already the problem is obvious. The people who wrote this get that women and girls are disadvantaged by heavy bleeding between the legs every month, but they also get that they’re not allowed to call girls and women “girls and women.”

It can’t be done, chums. You can’t draw our attention to a handicap particular to women and girls while refusing to mention women and girls.

Those two dirty words never appear in this government summary of provision of free period products.

To address this gap the Period Products (Free Provision) Act (NI) was made by the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2022 and requires that period products will be made available from May 2024. The requirements of the Act go beyond seeking to make provision for those in financial difficulty. Rather, as stated above, there is a recognition that period products are necessary and essential items that should be available free of charge and accessible by all persons who need to use them.

This consultation seeks your views on how best the Executive Office (TEO) can ensure that period products are “obtainable free of charge” by “all persons who need to use them”, “while in Northern Ireland”.

My view: step one: delete “persons”; substitute “women and girls.”

Too late, of course; the consultation is over.

Michael Gove, the new editor of The Spectator, on truth and prejudicial or pejorative reference:

On 21 May this year we published an article by the brilliant writer Gareth Roberts headlined ‘The sad truth about “saint” Nicola Sturgeon’. Gareth was reporting on the former Scottish first minister’s appearance at a literary festival in Sussex. Ms Sturgeon was discussing the controversies which had attended her time in office – including her views on independence and gender recognition laws. Gareth noted that she ‘was interviewed by writer Juno Dawson, a man who claims to be a woman, and so the conversation naturally turned to gender’. 

Dawson complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation aka Ipso.

It was claimed the words were inaccurate, a breach of section 1 of the Editor’s Code, which governs inaccuracy; a breach of section 3, which covers harassment; and a breach of section 12.1, which holds that ‘The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability’. 

Ipso found there was no breach of section 1 or 3. Gareth’s words were not inaccurate and were not harassment. But Ipso concluded they were a breach of section 12.1. In its judgment, the article had included a reference to the complainant’s gender identity that the committee considered to be both pejorative and prejudicial.

As a general thing that is of course entirely possible. It can be true that someone is X and still be pejorative and prejudicial to say so. Imagine a dialogue:

“Why didn’t I get the promotion?”

“You’re a woman.”

But the thing about trans ideology is that there is no context in which it’s permissible to tell the truth about the sex of a person who claims to be trans. It’s never not seen as a provocation or insult or act of aggression.

The committee had expressed its concern that this reference was personally belittling and demeaning toward the complainant.

But that’s because the ideology has ruled that any and all such reference is personally belittling and demeaning. We don’t ever get to say it, even though it’s true.

Respecting the right of people to live as they wish, and exercising consideration and sensitivity towards them, is a virtue.

Well, that depends. What if people wish to live as murderers or rapists or abusers of children? What if men wish to live as women and thus take their jobs, promotions, prizes, competitions, and even their feminism? Gender ideology has taught us that there is no blanket rule that people have “a right to live as they wish.” As with most things, it depends.

Society has, understandably, sought to accommodate and make changes to ensure people who wish to live as trans women, even though they were born biological males, have every opportunity to find the happiness they seek in their assumed identity.

Quite so, and that’s a problem. It’s not all that “understandably” when you pause to remember that it entails giving away everything women have been fighting for for the last half-century and more.

The BBC takes a break from promoting trans ideology to report on the pair of bullies who run Pink News:

The couple who run PinkNews, the world’s largest LGBT news website, have been accused by staff of multiple incidents of sexual misconduct.

Several former staff members told the BBC they saw Anthony James, a director at the UK-based company and husband of its founder, kissing and touching a junior colleague who they say appeared too drunk to consent.

And more than 30 current and former members of staff said a culture of heavy drinking led to instances when founder Benjamin Cohen and his husband behaved inappropriately towards younger male employees.

I’m sure they identify as having behaved flawlessly.

Run by family members of Mr Cohen – his husband and former GP Dr James is chief operating officer, and his father Richard is the chief lawyer – PinkNews says its mission is “to inform, inspire change and empower people to be themselves”.

I didn’t know Pink News was a family op. I thought it was…you know…a news outlet, like other news outlets.

…multiple former staff members have told the BBC they had experienced bullying and sexual misconduct which made some of them feel unsafe to be alone around Mr Cohen and Dr James. Allegations of misogyny have also emerged and several people told us that some young female members of staff had been asked to act as the couple’s surrogates.

That is disgusting. The surrogacy craze is disgusting, and this illustrates why. Women are not machines that can be rented for purposes of gestating other people’s babies.

As well as interviewing 33 people who worked at PinkNews between 2017 and 2024, we have also seen a variety of evidence including official written complaints, private emails and WhatsApp messages sharing staff members’ concerns, plus doctors’ records referring to stress and mental health struggles attributed to the work environment at PinkNews.

Other than that, it’s been a fun ride.

Originally a comment by Sackbut on How about panvomit?

The city of Prattville AL is near Montgomery, and is populated by a lot of people who decided that Montgomery is too dangerous and crime-ridden. (Prattville is 73% white, compared to 29% in Montgomery; make of it what you will.) A common sentiment is that they don’t want to go to Montgomery for any reason, because of the danger. The city had a municipal Christmas parade recently, and Prattville Pride had a float. The city was not going to allow the float, because, they said, there were threats, and it would be dangerous.

At this point, liberal columnist Josh Moon chimed in, with a mostly well-put column about the cowardly actions of the city government. Clearly the Prattville police could not be spared to guard the parade, because they were busy fighting all the crimes in Prattville. So Montgomery residents are advised not to go to Prattville, because it’s too dangerous. Har, good turnabout.

Now, we know about the nature of the national Pride organization, and how it pushes “trans” everything at the expense of actually representing gay and lesbian constituencies. I don’t know Prattville Pride, but I assume they are not especially distinct from the national organization. Certainly there is a lot of trans advocacy in the area. But I agree that there is no particular reason Pride should not have had a float in the Christmas parade; I have more problems with there being a municipal Christmas parade in the first place. So long as other groups that might disagree are welcome, and they were, I don’t object.

A federal court intervened and required Prattville to allow the Pride float. The Catholic Church also was going to have a float (more reason I don’t like the idea of a municipal Christmas parade), but the Church decided to withdraw their float because of the presence of the Pride float. The parade happened, there were no problems.

Back to Josh Moon. He is very much captured by gender ideology, and he does not understand the nature of the opposition. What I find especially irritating about his viewpoint is something that he expresses on some other issues as well: those who disagree with him are derided as simply bigots of some variety or another, or perhaps all bigots are the same, and he has no interest in trying to understand where those opponents are coming from. On the parade issue, Moon posted on Facebook a transcript of a comment or a message from someone (I’ll call this the “correspondent”) who gave a very calm and reasonable explanation about their opposition to the Pride float, along with some opinions about keeping certain books out of the hands of small children, and keeping drag queens from reading stories or giving shows to young children. I don’t agree with everything this person said, but I agree with a lot of it, and I thought it was perfectly politely worded and well-expressed. The correspondent also complained about being called a bigot for expressing these opinions. How did Moon respond? By mocking the correspondent with something like “DoNT cAlL mE a BigOt”, and failing to address the actual statements in any way. The response seemed to me totally uncalled for and the opposite of what I’d expect from a decent journalist. He’s usually much better than this.

Aaaand we’re off.

Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has clapped back at [retorted to] President-elect Donald Trump after he threatened to imprison her and other members on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots.

In an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press that aired Sunday morning, Trump claimed that Cheney, along with a “committee of political thugs” deleted all the evidence from their investigation.

Another four years of endless stupid lying.

“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” the President-elect said, referring to Mississippi Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (the committee’s chairman). “They deleted and destroyed all evidence.”

…

In a statement reported by The New York Times, Cheney responded to Trump’s claims, describing them as an “assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” Cheney said. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.

This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history,” she continued. “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

And we can’t get rid of him.

He makes us all dirty.

The ACLU insists that “Gender-Affirming Care is Essential” – which is ridiculous.

The whole notion of “gender-affirming care” is silly jargon, in the first place. By “gender” they mean voluntary changeable personality label, and by “care” they mean medical care. There is no genuinely medical care for personality labels, because personality is not a medical issue to begin with.

There’s no such thing as gender-affirmation so there’s no such thing as medical care labeled “gender affirmation.” Deluded narcissistic people obsessed with their own glorious personalities don’t need surgeries or cross-sex hormones, they need to think better. They need to peel away the layers of trendy and pseudo-political and fake-lefty and histrionic junk that has built up in their brains.

Families should not be forced to move out of their home state to access the care their child needs. 

Indeed they shouldn’t, but trying to change a child’s sex is not care and their child emphatically does not need it. Their child needs to be safe from it.

Many don’t have the resources to move, and those who do should not have to leave their jobs, family, and community behind in search of essential health care.

It’s not health care, so it’s not essential, and in fact what’s essential is to be protected from it.

Sadism or stupidity or both?

A trans-identified male serving a life sentence for murder who was quietly transferred in to a women’s prison is now sharing a shower with female inmates, causing them to feel “violated.” Bradley Richard Sirvio, 53, was transferred into Minnesota women’s prison MCF-Shakopee at the end of last year after claiming to identify as transgender and adopting the name “Aurora.”

In November of 1995, Sirvio beat a man to death with a hammer before setting the victim’s house on fire. According to court records, Sirvio was checking himself into a detoxification center when he “volunteered to a staff member during the intake process that he may have murdered someone named George and then set the house on fire to cover up what he had done.”

So, clearly, the Minnesota prison system has every reason to think it’s a good idea to put him in a women’s prison so that he can terrorize them instead of the poor helpless people in the men’s prison.

Sirvio has several other convictions that include multiple charges of assault, burglary, and theft. He was quietly transferred to MCF-Shakopee, Minnesota’s only women’s prison, in November of 2023. The move was made a full five months ahead of the date that a newly-drafted gender identity prison policy was set to take effect, meaning that the state of Minnesota voluntarily chose to transfer Sirvio.

Well, even states like a good joke.

He hasn’t had any surgeries. He was put in a women’s wing that has only one shower. There’s no lock on the shower door.

[Sirvio] added that since he was moved into MCF-Shakopee, female prison staff, rather than male guards, are required to perform strip searches and pat downs on his person. This is done as a result of the new gender identity policy, which states, “pat and unclothed body searches of incarcerated people who are transgender, gender diverse, intersex, or nonbinary must be done in accordance with the gender of the facility in which they are assigned… Incarcerated people who are transgender, gender diverse, intersex, or nonbinary may request that they receive pat or unclothed body searches from security staff of a specific gender.”

While women may not have a shower to themselves.

Commenting on Lusk’s transfer last November, Aaron Swanum with the Minnesota DOC remarked, “Minnesota has now joined 10 other states and the District of Columbia in approving transfers to facilities matching an inmate’s gender identity. The DOC is committed to providing supportive and safe environments for people of all gender identities and our new policy reflects this commitment.”

No no no no no it isn’t. That’s not true at all. The DOC is all too clearly not committed to providing supportive and safe environments for people whose genner idenninny is just the boring old woman variety. Fake women get those supportive and safe environments at the expense of actual women.

Trump doesn’t have a great big huge sky-concealing mandate. He barely has a grocery list.

On Election Night, with characteristic modesty, Donald Trump claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” He certainly won the contest legitimately, if more narrowly than many observers initially thought. With nearly all the votes counted, the most complete tabulation, from Cook Political Report, shows Trump’s popular-vote margin over Kamala Harris has dropped from around 3 percent on the evening of November 5 (or about two-thirds of Joe Biden’s margin in 2020) to 1.47 percent (about one-third of Biden’s margin) today. That’s also about 0.6 percent smaller than Hillary Clinton’s national popular-vote margin over Trump in 2016. To make some other comparisons: Barack Obama won the popular vote by 3.9 percent in 2012 and 7.2 percent in 2008, and George W. Bush won the popular vote by 2.4 percent in the very close 2004 election.

…

Given that perilous hold on power, Trump might want to reconsider his current strategy of ruling Washington like a devastated and occupied enemy city with a Cabinet largely composed of men and women who appear to intensely dislike the departments and agencies they are supposed to oversee, in addition to a governing plan that may rely on testing the tolerance of the federal judiciary for totally unparalleled assertions of supreme presidential powers. And Trump’s MAGA activists should also cool their jets a bit. There’s certainly a degree of triumphalism in the air that really isn’t justified by the election returns.

Well, Trump might want to do that, in another universe, if he were a completely different person, but in this one, of course he won’t. When does he ever? He just says what he wants to say and does what he wants to do until/unless forcibly prevented. He doesn’t pause to consider the odds or ponder the realities, he just says and does whatever he wants. That’s all there is to The Story of Trump.

You know, we’re told, endlessly and loudly, that trans is innate, it’s built-in, it’s real, it’s an infallible inner sense.

Well then why is it being advertised?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Which twin has the propaganda coup?

From the article

But Alito, true to form, did not confine his opining to the notion that discrimination against trans people does not count as sex-based discrimination: he went on to suggest that trans people are not quite real, peppering Strangio, in a scene that seemed intended to humiliate the trans attorney, with questions about whether trans identity was truly an “immutable” characteristic.

Well, is it? The Supreme Court could have called upon Sally Hines as a hostile witness. She has authoritatively* written

‘Gender identity refers to each person’s internal sense of being male, female, a combination of the two, or neither; it is a core part of who people know themselves to be.’

‘Genderfluid people experience their gender identity as changing over time or between different situations.’

‘Agender people identify as having no gender, or feel that their gender is absent or neutral.’

Doesn’t sound very immutable to me. And, given Donegan’s dishonest framing (see OP above), I wouldn’t trust her characterization of any of these proceedings. From the context, I’m guessing that Alito was doubtful if transness is “real” or “immutable” not that people claiming to be trans aren’t “real” . There is a big difference, and one which transactivists (and captured journalists) have a history of confusing and substituting. It’s the familiar trans cry wolf tactic of accusing critics of gender ideology of denying trans people’s “right to exist.” But refusing to accept a given putative explanation or hypothesis for some human behaviour or characteristic does not negate the existence of anyone. If it did, rejection of astrology would entail the denial of the right of all human beings to exist, as nobody is really a “Scorpio,” or a “Leo,” or anything else in astrological terms, because astrology is crap. That doesn’t mean that people born in the time periods ascribed to those “star signs,” or any other, somehow don’t exist, just that astrology’s explanatory scheme is invalid. Nobody makes that kind of “genocidal” accusation in regards to the defence of the validity of astrology, but trans activists mischaracterize any pushback against gender ideology in exactly this way all the time, having successfully used this excuse to float their “NO DEBATE” strategy for years. Here, it looks like Donegan is doing more of the same.

And as for “politicizing” and “weaponizing” trans “kids”, trans activists have been doing this for years, using them as human shields to deflect attention from the white male fetishists and unethical “clinicians” leading the trans “movement.” Even calling these disphoric children “trans kids” is political, because it’s jumping immediately from whatever type or degree of sexual or “identity” discomfort they might have, to a diagnosis of “born in the wrong body” that is supposedly only treatable through drastic pharmeceutical interventions and extreme body modification. This leap of terminology, and its accompanying rush to irreversible “treatments,” allows activists to ignore the existence of desistance, which would reduce the numbers of supposedly “trans” youth by approximately 75%, robbing the movement of future, committed activists, and the clinicians life-long customers. What was that about “innateness” and “immutability” again? One gets the distinct impression that the haste involved in pushing these children into the gender abbatoir is in order to prevent desistance. They don’t want these children to get away. Why else outlaw the “talk therapy” that would aid children’s personal growth and acceptance of their bodies just as they are as “conversion therapy”? Why else enforce “affirmation only” as the sole path of therapy? Why condemn so many children to a lifelong debilitation that they could have avoided by just growing up? If that’s not politicization and weaponization of children, I don’t know what is.

So there’s actually a whole lot of truth behind the (supposedly) “right wing” accusation of “They’re coming for your kids!” It turns out that they are. If not their actual bodies, then at least their minds. On the flag pole of the public school just a few blocks from where I live, more often thanot, “Pride Day/Week?Month or not, the “Pride Progress” flag flies right beneath the Canadian one. (And this is the “Intersex Inclusive” version with the yellow triangle and purple circle at the left hnd edge. Even though “intersex” is considered to be an inaccurate and offensive term for DSD conditions. That doesn’t matter if the old, inaccurate term is usefull to trans activism.) The teaching of important civic virtues such as tolerance and respect is being used as cover for teaching bullshit.)

And in the end there’s always this:

That’s so distorted it borders on lying. It’s not “organized animus” to try to stop people mutilating children at the behest of an ideology that claims sex is switchable. The rage is not, of course, directed at the children, but at the adults messing up the children’s bodies. Donegan can’t really be unaware of that.

What’s in it for her? What’s in it for the Guardian? What can trans activism give them in return for their souls? How can they not see the destructive, misogynistic, regressive, and fundamentally dishonest movement. In the normal course of events, you’d have expected crusading, investigative reporters and their courageous, supporting editors to sink their teeth into this kind story of a broad, multi-institutional, mutually-reinforcing, corruption rather than become cheerleaders and apologists for it. But what’s in the trough for them?

*Or at least as “authoritative” as anyone can get in the fields of Unicorn Husbandry, or the biogeography of Snarks