Moira Donegan doesn’t mince words.

The draft opinion, authored by Samuel Alito, the most rabidly hateful member of the court’s arch-conservative wing, will upend 50 years of precedent and undo a landmark ruling that has profoundly shaped legal doctrine, popular conceptions of the law, and millions of American lives. It will make women prisoners to their own bodies, and to men’s ideas of what those bodies must mean. It will make our country weaker, crueler, stupider and less vibrant.

We’re all prisoners to of in our own bodies, of course, but unwanted pregnancy is a particularly intrusive and disruptive demonstration of that imprisonment.

In a way, the leaked opinion didn’t tell us anything we did not already know: these are the last days of reproductive freedom in America, and most states will soon ban abortion outright, or restrict it so onerously that it is inaccessible within their borders. But Alito’s draft opinion nevertheless represents about as odiously maximalist an approach as the court could have taken.

The opinion does not just overturn Roe and Casey; it expresses outright contempt for the notion that the constitution protects bodily autonomy for women.

Because after all what are women for if they’re not baby factories? What is even the point of them?

The end of legal abortion will not be where the court’s reactionaries stop. They aim to hurt, punish and narrow the lives of Americans in many more cruel and inventive ways.

…

The state compelling a person to be pregnant is not like compelling her to pay taxes. The event doesn’t occur in a courtroom or on a balance sheet; it occurs inside her body.

It is, perhaps, somewhat like the draft. Draft laws are also controversial, for obvious reasons.

In making abortion illegal, the court is imposing a legal status that is so cruel, so personal and so life-altering on half its population, that those subject to this imposition cannot be called free. Is there any condition more essential to democratic citizenship than a person’s control over her own body? Can we call ourselves a free country without it?

Could 1950s Ireland call itself a free country? (Spoiler: no.)

What next? The Post says likely a push for a nationwide ban on abortion.

Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.

…

A group of Republican senators has discussed at multiple meetings the possibility of banning abortion at around six weeks, said Sen. James Lankford (Okla.), who was in attendance and said he would support the legislation.

…

One top advocate, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List, has spoken privately with 10 possible Republican presidential contenders, including former president Donald Trump, to talk through national antiabortion strategy. Most of them, she said in an interview, assured her they would be supportive of a national ban and would be eager to make that policy a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.

Falling all over themselves to enchain women.

Guy takes it upon himself to try to change the subject from abortion rights to The One Important Subject.

This is about women, and our right to decide whether or not to gestate an infant. Just that, nothing else. It doesn’t need to be about anything else; it’s massively important all by itself.

But clearly way too many people think otherwise. Apparently women are the trivial sex, the silly sex, the sex that doesn’t need the right to make its own choices about its own life. Apparently women always have to have some variety of men added to make their rights seem to matter.

Some thoughts.

Politico reports:

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

But even now – women’s organizations are still talking about “people who get pregnant.”

From a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Average maximum temperatures.

Dr Forrest said Mr Malinauskas had “experienced the incredible power of zero emission green hydrogen when he drove FFI’s huge haul truck, seeing with his own eyes, how a massive 6mhigh mining truck can operate without using a polluting fuel like diesel”.

Perhaps his irony metre is broken, as the reduced pollution from a hydrogen-powered truck is more than outweighed by the coal in each load it carries.

How much of the process that mkes the hydrogen that goes into the truck is “zero emission?” If it’s only the bit that gets burned in the vehicle that’s “green,” then that’s not quite the solution it claims to be. As Mike B. pointed out above, the real problem is ecological overshoot. Even if we were to change all our energy use to renewables, we’d still be fucked, beacuse we’d still be overconsuming. Energy conversion without energy use reduction (amongst many other things), just puts us on a slightly greener road to hell.

The overall global response to the pandemic gives a very slight cause for hope. If the current ecological/biodiversity/energy crises could be seen and acted upon in a similar manner, with equivalent speed and robustness, we could make more progress than we are currently. Unfortunately, we need to do a good deal more than wear masks and keep farther apart. We would have to reinvent our economies, learn to live with less, and reduce wealth disparities. There is little that we do that would not be touched by the need to restructure and scale back our economies. Ophelia has pointed out a number of times that no government promising to do what needs to be done would ever be elected, and that those inclined to dictatorship would probably accelerate in the opposite direction. Countries have found the will to make sacrifices in times of war, but this time the war we are fighting is against our very way of life. The greatest threat to our way of life is our way of life. We have met the enemy and he is us.

To undertake the transformations required would be painful and expensive; failure to do so will result in even greater pain and expense, on an unimaginable scale, greater than all previous human conflicts combined. It could be slow and gradual, or it could involve massive, abrupt changes to previously reliable, stable systems and processes. Most likely it will be a combination of both. By refusing to choose the lesser of two evils, we ensure the inevitable manifestation of the greater.

We are in uncharted territory, leaving the envelope of conditions within which our civilization arose, and upon which it is based. We are travelling at great speed without a clue as to where we are heading. Cultural inertia makes changing direction on a global scale slow and awkward, if not impossible. There are powerful forces actively working to block any change at all. We are running out of water; we are running out of food. If you think things are bad now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Wait wait wait – Mhairi Hunter tripped herself up with this one.

See it? Of course you do. Why does no adult really need to ask what a woman is? Because we already know, right? That has to be what she means?

But what do we already know? That women are adult human females – the sex that isn’t male, just as men are the sex that isn’t female.

But Mhairi Hunter’s whole thing is that we don’t know that, that in fact that is wrong and evil.

So, what the hell is she talking about?

The wheels really are falling off this rusty wagon.

As hundreds of gigantic cruise ships belch their way around the planet, people in India struggle to survive a heat wave.

Thousands of Indians have turned to umbrellas, fruits and swimming pools as they try to cope with a brutal heatwave that has hit the country.

Average maximum temperatures in March and April in northern and central India were the highest since the country’s weather office started keeping records 122 years ago.

The heat has sparked an increase in demand for electricity, leading to outages in many states and fears of a coal shortage.

That’s the Catch 22. When it gets hotter we use more power to cool ourselves, so it gets even hotter. Repeat until only the reptiles survive.

While summer temperatures have always been high in many Indian states, experts say India is now recording more intense, frequent heatwaves that are also longer in duration. The “root cause”, says climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll, is global warming.

But it’s worth it for the cruise ships, right?

Let’s look at some cruise industry stats (presented by someone who seems to think the cruise industry is an excellent thing):

In 2019, the global cruise industry welcomed 29.7 million passengers, created jobs for 1.8 million people around the world and contributed over $154 billion to the global economy. 

And added huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere. Yay.

Cruising was suspended worldwide in mid-March 2020. July 2020 saw a resumption of sailing in parts of Europe, Asia and the South Pacific with around 200 cruises departing in the second half of the year.

In 2021, the cruise industry bounced back further, welcoming almost 13.9 million passengers worldwide. However, this is still only 46% of the passengers that cruised in 2019.

And we want to keep those carbon-dumping figures up, dammit.

Work on building new cruise ships slowed in 2020 and some ships such as Royal Caribbean’s Odyssey of the Seas which were due to be completed in 2020 were delayed until 2021.

Fewer shipyard closures in 2021 meant that 24 brand new cruise ships were delivered, compared to just 15 in 2020. However, this is still behind the target of 28, as the builds of four new ships were pushed back into 2022.

More, more, more; we can never have enough.

This is why I see zero reason to think humans are going to be able to do anything about global warming until it burns up everything. We can’t even stop building fucking cruise ships so what are the odds we’re going to do anything more difficult than that?

Your mega cruise ship burns 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day when traveling. I assume it’s significantly less when tied up at the pier, but it ain’t nothing. All of this is pure recreation, and thus optional, and thus when the result is the heat death of the planet, you’d think we could decide we should maybe stop. But no.

Worth letting the planet catch fire? I wouldn’t have thought so.

It’s always surprising and alarming to see academics this pugnaciously dogmatic in enforcing belief in absurd fictions. The belief itself is ridiculous, like believing in flying elephants or talking snakes, and the rudeness and contempt with which the belief is asserted is unbecoming to anyone and appalling in an academic.

“Fascists.” Because we understand that men are not women.

And she can’t defend her claim.

“I can’t hear you, lalalalalalalalala.” Grown-up academic, teaches at an actual university.

When she does hear it’s even worse.

My point exactly. I’ve learned to expect this kind of crap from very young random ideologues on Twitter, but I can never not be surprised to see it from people with academic reputations to protect. This Yvette Russell sounds like Rhys McKinnon on crack.

Charming.

NEBRASKA CITY, Neb. — Former president Donald Trump is making a closing pitch for a Republican gubernatorial candidate who has been accused of sexually assaulting multiple women, stepping deeper into a primary that has divided Republicans in this staunchly conservative state.

When in doubt, always go for the rapey guy. Rapey guys gotta stick together.

Trump appeared at a Sunday afternoon rally in Greenwood with Charles Herbster, a businessman who has advised the former president on agricultural policy and has donated to his campaigns. The visit comes after a recent Nebraska Examiner report in which eight women, including a state senator speaking on the record, accused Herbster of touching them inappropriately. Last week, another one of the eight women alleged on the record that Herbster had groped her. He has denied the accusations.

All of them. All eight. Who ya gonna believe, a businessman or eight women? How about eight hundred women? It’s the businessdude every time.

According to state Sen. Julie Slama (R), Herbster reached up her skirt without her consent and touched her inappropriately as she walked by during a local Republican fundraiser in a crowded ballroom in 2019. 

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if his hand is up her skirt he’s already “touching her inappropriately,” no matter what bit he manages to grab en route, no matter if all he manages is the back of a thigh just barely above the knee. That whole thing is inappropriate. One doesn’t want strangers thrusting their hands inside one’s clothes uninvited.

Multiple women told the Nebraska Examiner that Herbster touched them inappropriately when they greeted him or posed for a photo.

Therefore Trump went all the way to Nebraska to urge the people to vote for him. What a mensch.

I hate the ACLU more than ever.

Women in prison forced to live with men at the behest of the ACLU.

On April 13, NJ News reported that at least two women became impregnated by men incarcerated in Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, the only female-only prison in the state of New Jersey. The men were placed there because they claimed to have a female gender identity.

I have a billionaire identity; can I be housed in a mansion?

The story was quickly picked up by several mainstream media outlets around the world. The Daily Mail reported that American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), once a respected human rights advocacy group, “managed” to house at least 27 people at the women’s prison, many of them men. The ACLU fought a long legal battle to transfer men to Edna Mahan and the prison, which started accepting male inmates in 2021.

The ACLU fought a long battle to force men on helpless women trapped in prison. The ACLU can go jump off a cliff.

Wales Online tries to monster a woman for not believing trans ideology:

A Cardiff Labour council candidate has come under fire after voicing her views on gender identity. Sue Lent, a Labour council candidate for Plasnewydd, posted to her public Facebook page suggesting that trans people are “brainwashed.”

And? Does Wales Online think all this transing just happened spontaneously? Nothing to do with social influence at all?

When questioned about her comments and views, Ms Lent told WalesOnline she found the topic of trans children “difficult” and said that people experiencing gender dysphoria “need counselling”, despite NHS Wales stating that they support the banning of therapy to change somebody’s gender and sexuality.

And? Are people not allowed to disagree with something NHS Wales says? Is NHS Wales infallible? Also it’s a large mistake to lump trying to change people’s sexuality together with questioning the new gender ideology.

“My main concern is the aspect of children being influenced to think that they’ve got something called a gender identity, which was an unheard of concept until fairly recently,” she explained.

“I have a sex, I don’t have a gender identity. I think the whole idea of gender identity is very regressive. We’re now seeing a whole generation of a whole group of girls who have damaged their bodies, and then are regretting it. Because as teenagers they’ve been led to believe that because they like their hair short or they’ve been disturbed by puberty or whatever that therefore, they’re really boys.

“Many of these girls are actually lesbians, but they’ve been made to think that possibly, they’re actually boys. It’s very anti lesbian as well. The whole gender ideology is, in the end, quite homophobic. I have every sympathy with anybody who’s got gender dysphoria, [and I] think they need counselling.”

She sounds like a comrade.

Updating to add: Yay, she accepted my friend request on Facebook. Solidarity foreva.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Stay away from the Tavistock.

How many children escape the vortex of unquestioning, unanimous, compulsory ‘affirmation’ at Tavistock?

Letting desistance run its course would cut down on the number of those children going on to “transition.” Desistance and detransition together present a huge challenge to the concept of “transness” as a thing. Referring to children being treated as “dysphoric” rather than “trans” decouples the child from the putative diagnosis. It also removes the instrumentalized power of the concept of “trans kids” which is thrown about so much by activists. Refusing or failing to see discomfort with “identity” as a phase or surmountable difficulty rather than a final, inevitable destination, immediately and infallibly discerned in the faintest, most hesitant expression of gender “non-conformity”, strips children and their caregivers of the possibility of different outcomes and resolutions than those favoured by the trans industrial complex. That it is sometimes the parents themselves pushing for this hasty foreclosure is particularly tragic and heartbreaking. All the more reason for experts to be cautious and open minded in their treatment of children in their care. The concept of “trans kids” locks these children onto a pathway that serves the political goals of adults pushing an agenda, rather than the health and wellbeing of the children so termed.

Jenkins seems to be under the impression that parental participation is allowed on his sufferance. Losing patients/clients/whatever is a numbers game to him. He’s shown by this highhandedness that he’s not interested in helping individual children find their own best solution. He’s more interested in recruiting them into “transness”, and if he thinks they’re trans, then by God, they’re going to stay trans. No questioning or doubt of the truth of his conclusions will be tolerated. Erosion or weakening of the very concept of “gender identity” threatens his position as CEO of an organization totally dependent on the reification and “development” of the idea of “gender identity.” You can’t be the man in charge of a unicorn ranch if there are no unicorns. There could be a slight conflict of interest, no? He’s made his choice. The perpetuation and security of the institution of which he is head is more important than the health and safety of the children in its care. Where have we heard that tune before? Does Jenkins engage in cosplay as the Pope?

Imagine a doctor who insisted on preventing a straightforward, successful, non-medical resolution of a disease or disorder because he wanted to keep them as “his” patients, and parents questioning this were cut off from further contact and involvement with regards to his “treatment.” Imagine a doctor disregarding and suppressing findings that suggested a safer, more cautious approach, which offered the choice of a broader range of diagnoses and better outcomes for patients, at the expense of giving up an unwarranted certainty in the correctness and efficacy of his current methods? What if such a doctor showed that he was more interested in supporting his own questionable practices rather than taking the time and effort to find what was best for people under his care? How long before such a practitioner was investigated and fired? What if this individual standing in the way of a better, higher standard of care and accountability wasn’t even a doctor, but some executive?

Well Mr. Jenkins? The clock is ticking.

I should have posted this first thing.

Mermaids is telling men to call the police if they’re not allowed into women’s spaces.

Transgender women should call 999 if they feel unsafe through a request to leave a women-only lavatory, Britain’s largest child transgender charity has said.

Men don’t feel “unsafe” in women’s toilets. That’s not a thing. Women feel unsafe with men there, but men don’t. See: human anatomy, passim.

The EHRC ruled last month that trans women, who are born as males, can be excluded from female-only spaces if there is a legitimate reason such as protecting privacy and dignity.

Well we can’t have that, can we. We are mermaids, with tails instead of genitals, so we get to defy the rules and call the police for backup. We don’t give a fuck what women want or need. Women aren’t mermaids.

But Mermaids has become the latest lobby group to issue its own guidance in response, saying it is “not happy” with the regulator’s approach “because we feel it is not inclusive enough of trans people”.

Therefore we will tell men to keep right on bullying and terrorizing women. We are mermaids.

The first tip, branded “grossly irresponsible” by lawyers, stated: “If you are at risk of harm, try and get somewhere safe and call someone you trust, or the emergency services if you feel comfortable in doing so on 999.”

Grossly irresponsible and also grossly insulting and offensive in the way it flips the realities of who is in danger from whom. Men aren’t “at risk of harm” from women. The risk flows the other way, and Mermaids is pretending not to know this and pretending that women are the aggressors here. It’s absolutely nauseating.

Amanda Jones, a barrister specialising in equality law at Great James Street chambers, told The Telegraph: “If an organisation is lawfully providing single-sex facilities, refusing to leave would certainly be a problem. The provider would be entitled to use security or call the police.”

…

Naomi Cunningham, a discrimination law barrister, added that “the advice to call 999 is grossly irresponsible”.

“Being entitled not to suffer discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment is not the same thing as being entitled to be treated as the opposite sex,” she said.

Why not? Because gender reassignment is not the same thing as being the opposite sex.

Men who identify as trans really need to get a grip on this.

First world problems…

Lately, I’ve been embroiled in what feels like constant conversations about pronouns. The wrong ones. The right ones. The preferred ones. Hint: That third category is defunct.

Of course, by “wrong” he doesn’t mean the kind of wrong where you’re learning the language and make mistakes sometimes, he means the kind of wrong where you forget or refuse to memorize anyone’s specialty pronouns.

As a nonbinary trans person who uses they/them/theirs pronouns as my terms of address, I suppose I should be celebrating this influx of discourse on the proper usage of pronouns. Truthfully, I’m exhausted.

That is, as a presumptuous narcissist he’s exhausted from trying to force people to use specialty pronouns for special him.

We don’t use pronouns that refer to us. He doesn’t “use” they/them/theirs pronouns as his terms of address, he tries to order other people to use them, which is both narcissistic and stupid. Then to make it even more so he writes an article about it. Climate change? Ukraine? Homelessness? Democracies falling to strongman dictators everywhere? Pfffff never mind all that, focus on this guy’s Luxury Pronouns.

In the six years since I have “come out,” I’ve witnessed the concept of pronoun inclusivity shift from fundamentally Martian to hotly contested.

Pronoun inclusivity! That’s a new one! Who knew pronouns were a select club?

Personally, within several of my closest relationships, the fact that I require ungendered pronouns when referring to me in the third person has become the source of deep strain and disappointment.

He requires luxury pronouns? Like, what, the way fish require water? He’ll die without them?

Nah, he “requires” them in the sense that he orders other people – even, apparently, his closes friends – to use them. It’s a wonder he has any friends.

But I feel duped by some of the positive reactions from my friends and loved ones when I initially came out as transmasc/nonbinary. In retrospect, that was the easy part. I was the only one changing.

One, wtf is “transmasc/nonbinary”? I know of someone else – a woman – who claims to be that, but how do people know they’re that as opposed to, say, just plain a trans man?

Anyway. The piece goes on and on after that. Paragraph after paragraph, all about him and his pronouns. This ideology is an absolute poison pill for the whole idea that it’s a good idea to grow up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around Precious Self.

Natalya Lusty (a cultural studies academic) reviews Laurie Penny’s new book in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Disappointingly, we never get a clear sense of why “fascism” is the best term to describe the enemy of feminism’s protracted and diffuse battles. In spite of this incoherency, the stark choice presented at the beginning of the book is between feminism and fascism. There are no shades of grey.

Many of the topics Penny covers (heterosexual love, consent, unpaid domestic labour, reproductive rights, extreme misogyny, male abuse of power and privilege) are critical if not new issues but their intractability warrants renewed attention if not outrage. But fused with anecdotes (many about Penny’s or their friend’s own experiences of bad sex and relationships) and one-size-fits-all polemical solutions, there is little sustained attention or intellectual care here to make the personal political or even evocative.

That does sound like her – “start with me and then expand outwards…but there’s so much to say about me that we never actually get to the expand outwards part.”

Instead, the book gives us plenty of rhetorical outrage (265 pages), the kind that has become all too familiar on our social media feeds. On the first page alone we have “the crisis of white masculinity”, “a crisis of democracy”, “a crisis of care and of reproduction”, to be finally told that “sex and gender are [also] in crisis”.

Well if you don’t keep saying “crisis” people won’t understand that there’s a crisis. Or several thousand of them.

To further frustrate the reader, the book is littered with editorial errors, undigested ideas, and passages that are perplexing if not comical…Like bad sex, the book feels at once overly perfunctory and incessantly monotonous. And like a lot of meme-driven political culture, if not institutional diversity initiatives, it tends to flatten the various constituencies for which it otherwise advocates. For example, the repeated shorthand phrase “women and queer people” and occasionally “women and queer people and people of colour” nods to intersectionality without bothering to reflect on how the issues at hand have very different consequences for disparate minority or subordinated groups.

It sounds exactly like the Laurie Penny we know from Twitter. She doesn’t seem to bother to reflect on much of anything.

Freddie deBoer on the valorization of mental illness:

Marianne Eloise wants the world to know that she does not “have a regular brain at all”. That’s her declaration, on the very first page of her new memoir, Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking. The book catalogues her experience of a dizzying variety of psychiatric conditions…By her own telling, Eloise has suffered a great deal from these ailments; I believe her, and wish better for her. But she would prefer we not think of them as ailments at all. And that combination of self-pity and self-aggrandisement is emblematic of our contemporary understanding of mental health.

Actually it’s emblematic of our understanding of way too many things. I don’t think I’ve thought of it this way before but “that combination of self-pity and self-aggrandisement” is an excellent description of the trans ideology, and an indication of what’s so repellent about it. Both self-pity and self-aggrandisement give me the crawls, and I bet I’m far from alone in that. They’re qualities that are very unsurprising in children and teenagers but after that they need to be left behind.

Eloise is a champion of neurodivergence, an omnibus term that’s recently ballooned in popularity, which can include autism, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or indeed any other psychiatric condition that’s hot right now.

Ah yes – the “difference” approach. That explains why Laurie Penny got so indignant the other day when Ted Kuhner talked about autism as a severe disorder as opposed to Just Being Different.

The idea is that there’s a group of people whose brain chemistry differs, in some beautiful way, from some Platonic norm. And it’s an idea that’s taken on great symbolic power in contemporary liberal culture.

It seems to start from the unexceptionable idea that people shouldn’t be persecuted or neglected for being different, and to go from there to being different is always good no matter what. It’s a non sequitur, but try telling the LPs of the world that.

There is, for example, a thriving ADHD community on TikTok and Tumblr: people who view their attentional difficulties not as an annoyance to be managed with medical treatment but as an adorable character trait that makes them sharper and more interesting than others around them. (They still demand extra time to take tests, naturally.)

And as for gender dysphoria…

Hahahaha yes not unusual at all, very commonplace, you see it all the time.