Yale philosophy bro Jason Stanley tweeted a faux-naïve question about why it’s always women who dispute claims about trans women, and never men. I’m giving the gist because he’s now deleted it (and of course insulted the feminist women who replied) and I don’t have a screenshot handy.

The question was so faux-naïve (he must know perfectly well why), and the deletion so quick, that it seems highly likely he did it on purpose – a tiny little one act drama in which Yale stud asks thoughtful question, transphobic witches respond with their phobic witchery, and he deletes the innocent tweet with regret about all the witchy phobicry. Misogynist prick. I daren’t say that on Twitter but I can say it here.

He compares feminist women to Hindutva and white supremacists. Misogynist prick.

Oookaaaaay…

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) said this week that he opposes gun control in response to mass shootings because the country did not ban airplanes after they were used in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The country didn’t ban them but it sure as hell did put a lot of new restrictions and checks in place, which, funnily enough, is what gun control means. It means control, not elimination.

Also: guns have one purpose, which is to shove metal slugs into living flesh at high speed. That’s not the purpose of commercial airplanes. The purpose of commercial airplanes is to move people and goods around. The people who flew them into buildings were not using them for their designed purpose. The people who use AR-15s to shoot a lot of people in a short time are using them for their designed purpose.

I hope that clarifies.

Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater at the Times a couple of weeks ago:

Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.

Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged.

Because he was dragging his feet on the whole steal the election thing.

It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.

His narcissistic rage at being unable to steal the election in broad daylight.

Mr. Pence resisted weeks of pressure from Mr. Trump and some of his allies to use his ceremonial role in overseeing Congress’s certification of the electoral votes on Jan. 6 to block or delay Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Despite being told by Mr. Pence and his advisers that they did not believe that the vice president had that power, Mr. Trump continued to apply pressure, privately and publicly, through that morning.

As any mob boss would.

Mr. Trump denounced Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with the effort during his rally at the Ellipse just before the Electoral College certification began in the Capitol.

“We want to be so respectful of everybody,” Mr. Trump said in a slashing speech in which he attacked various people and institutions for not cooperating with his desires. “And we are going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country. Because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.”

Which of course was why he wouldn’t do it. Trump too was sworn to uphold the Constitution, and never had the slightest intention of doing so at the expense of his own wants.

Mr. Trump made his displeasure with Mr. Pence clear not just to his aides but to the public when he tweeted, at 2:24 p.m., as the rioters were swarming the building, that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Narcissism is in the driver’s seat in too many vehicles.

What’s wrong with this headline? (Aside from the fact that it’s too long for a headline.)

‘I’d be BANNED from swimming if I had as much testosterone as Emily Bridges’: Olympian Sharron Davies slams trans cyclist as ‘NOT female’

It’s not a slam. It’s just a simple, humble, obvious fact. Men are not women. Women are not men. Adults are not children, children are not adults. Stones are not flowers. Squirrels are not hammers.

Anyway. The Mail goes on:

Between 1975 and 1985, Davies missed out on a string of medals while competing against East German drug cheats. She now believes there are parallels between the state-sponsored doping campaigns of the Cold War and transgender athletes taking hormone-suppression medication in a quest to win medals in women’s categories. 

Again: that’s not a belief, it’s a fact. Here’s one very big clue: women lose in both cases. Some women take testosterone: the other women lose. Some men compete against women: women lose. It’s never men who lose in these manipulations, it’s always women.

Owen Jones gets a little ahead of himself.

It’s not a fact that X people will read this and not care about that. You can’t call a prediction a fact. You especially can’t call a prediction a fact when it’s as tendentious as OJ’s. He doesn’t know what gender critical people will or won’t read, and he doesn’t know how we will or won’t react to what we read. In short it’s a really stupid argument to claim that This Evil is underlined by my prediction that X people will do Y and react Zly. You can’t underline current evils with your claims about what will happen tomorrow.

Bros before hos, I guess.

Of course I don’t. Nobody does. That’s not “courage,” it’s triumphant cheating. It’s a man cheating women, and courage is not the quality it requires. Narcissism and entitlement, yes, courage, no. Utter contempt for women, yes, courage, no.

David Bradford is the fitness editor for Cycling Weekly. Men helping other men cheat women in sports: what a picture.

Updating: Forgot his follow-up.

What has the reaction been? Anger at his flattery of Bridges’s “courage,” of course, from women pointing out that Bridges’s “courage” is actually his effrontery in cheating women in their own sport. He simply brushes that off as if it means absolutely nothing, and admires the cheater’s “courage” even more.

It’s astonishing.

Emily Bridges seems to feel terribly sorry for himself:

The transgender cyclist Emily Bridges feels comments made by Boris Johnson over whether she should race women were the catalyst for a wave of violent threats and has also revealed she wanted to compete at the Commonwealth Games this summer.

Maybe it was Bridges’s decision to race women that were the catalyst for a wave of threats. That’s not to say that threats are ok, but it is to say that his decision to race against women wasn’t Boris Johnson’s doing, and that maybe he’s not the innocent victim in this scenario. Maybe he should stop pitying himself for a minute and think about the women.

Some of those most vocal against Bridges’ potential inclusion in the March event pointed to the fact she had competed in the men’s points race of the British Universities’ Championships a month earlier.

…

After the UCI’s intervention and failure to grant Bridges a switch in licence, British Cycling suspended its transgender policy pending a review to “find a better answer”.

It meant any hopes the cyclist from Wales had of competing at the Commonwealth Games – where transgender females are allowed to race in the women’s event – in Birmingham this summer were dashed.

Bridges added: “I knew that my main goal for the season, the Commonwealth Games, was then out of the question because I couldn’t race this event, and it was unlikely I was going to be able to race any international events during the Welsh Cycling’s set timeframe for the selection.

“So the Commonwealth Games were gone. I feel a real pride about being Welsh and I wanted to represent my country.”

What’s missing here? What is Bridges leaving out?

The fact that if he had been able to race, a woman would have been unable to. He would have displaced a woman…from a women’s event. Enough about him; what about her? Why does he matter more than she does? Why does his desire to represent his country matter more than hers?

This is never explained in these puff pieces. Never ever ever ever.

ITV is really knocking itself out on the Emily Bridges front.

I forgot to comment on ITV’s provocation in the previous post about this one. Of course he wants special treatment: he wants to be allowed to compete against women even though he’s a man. That’s very special, and very unfair to women.

And of course they’re not his “fellow female athletes,” because he’s not female. He’s cheating them out of wins, and then he has the gall to demand “the same opportunities” they have. The opportunities to lose to opportunistic (see what I did there?) men who cheat by pretending to be women? No, he doesn’t mean those opportunities, he means the opportunities to compete against women. He wants to compete against women but he certainly doesn’t want other men to do the same, not in any competitions he wants to win.

Of course he can’t emphathise with women. If he could he wouldn’t be cheating by competing against women. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about women.

And no he’s not fighting against any patriarchal structures or attitudes. He’s fighting against feminist structures and attitudes.

Notice the weird gentleness in the voice of the interviewer – as if Bridges were not just a woman but a particularly fragile, traumatized woman who needs special sensitivity and care. I don’t think that’s how tv news interviewers normally talk to their subjects.

And Bridges claims his “performance has decreased massively.” He claims he’s lost more aerobic performance “than the gap is between male and female athletes.” I don’t believe him.

Kathleen Stock has a brilliant piece about Pride Month and the way “Pride” has changed over time to appeal to straight people to the point where straight people now get to attack lesbians for not being Inklooosivv enough. She includes, with some regret, her coming-out story, because it matters for the story of straight people – men in fact – attacking lesbians with the noisy approval of men like Justin Weinberg.

I learnt early on about the special feeling of being in a room that contains only other lesbians – a space unlike any other I’d ever known, and so thrillingly transgressive and exciting when you’ve never been in such a female place, with that unique kind of ambient energy in it before. Within a couple of years I was even marching at London Pride, holding one side of a banner for a lesbian volleyball team (and I don’t even play volleyball). Look look, I’m a real lesbian now! I may or may not have thought as I filed down Oxford Street. Yes, there was a lot of comedy in my early lesbian period, and a bit of tragedy too, but there was also a steady drumbeat of relief and joy accompanying it. For the first few years, I couldn’t get over the fact I was now in that wonderful secret garden – and I marvelled constantly that nobody could ever come along to take back the key.

And then along came a whole mob of people trying to take back the key.

In 2018 – when I first felt moved to throw a couple of rather repressed blog posts out into the void, on the problems with gender identity ideologies as I then saw them – I had been out as a lesbian for 6 years. The language of these rather amateurish posts was carefully chosen – rendered garbled and inelegant, even, in a desperate attempt not to offend if possible (so for instance, I even used “women-who-are-not-transwomen” to refer to women, though I wouldn’t do that now). I was keen not to take on the issue of whether transwomen were women directly, but only to try to argue more conservatively that there were clearly different groups of people here, who might have conflicting interests in some areas.  And one of those groups was obviously lesbians.

But don’t you dare say so.

The first wave of aggression I received for these posts was in many ways the one that hurt me most, though it happened with the least general publicity, relatively speaking. It was from the philosophers, my tribe up until then – or the closest thing I had to one. The leaders of the online feminist pack quickly circled. These are people who spend half their working lives trying to develop complicated technical theories to justify whatever ethical mantras are presently socially expedient, and the other half hanging out online performing a simulacrum of goodness, or at least some degraded approximation of it.

Bolding mine, because I absolutely love that sentence. They’re also nearly all straight, she adds.

After my second or third blogpost – and recall that I was self-publishing these on Medium at the time, not yet promoted to Professor, and with no particular prior following or web presence – I received an email from Justin Weinberg, a US philosopher who ran a philosophy news website. This site was, and is, very popular with progressives in the profession internationally. Weinberg and I had never interacted before. Coldly but politely, he told me he had just commissioned a well-known transwoman philosopher to write a published response to my blog-posts, and would be putting it on his site later that day. He just wanted to let me know that this was being published – and to say that if I wanted to write a response to what was going to be written about me, he would be “open to considering it” (or something equally etiolated).

Later that day, the piece “When Tables Speak” by the famed Professor Talia Mae Bettcher of California State University appeared on his website. You can read it for yourself. If you are empathic, you can perhaps imagine how it felt for someone relatively lowdown the philosophy pecking order, in a humdrum position in a humdrum university, to be snidely dissected in public in this way by someone perceived as prestigious, in front of what felt like the eyes of the whole profession. (If you are not empathic – or if you have always wanted me to be wrong – you will no doubt conclude, as indeed many of the philosophers did, that I brought this all on myself).

I remember. I remember the rage, too. I wrote about one of Kathleen’s posts and a pseudonymous stranger turned up to try to enforce the party line; sparks flew.

This took my breath away for a moment.

And the merch she hands out says “YEET THE TEET” with a jolly T Rex cartoon. Wheeeeeeeeeee, hahaha, yeet the teet, by which she means amputate healthy breasts of a woman or teenage girl because she wants to pretend to be a man. Yeet the teet! What a funny fun-loving way to put it!

She calls these “procedures.”

What I’m saying. You can see this in newspapers and tv news reports every day – on the one hand uh oh climate change, on the other hand yay more oil.

More than £8bn of North Sea energy projects could now be given the green light rapidly as fossil fuel firms take advantage of a tax break in Rishi Sunak’s windfall tax, analysts have forecast.

…

However, campaigners warned ramping up North Sea production risked hindering efforts to tackle climate change. Mike Childs, the head of policy at Friends of the Earth, said: “The financial stimulus offered by the chancellor to encourage more oil and gas exploration means projects teetering on the edge of approval or rejection are now looking more likely.

“If there was ever confusion about whether the UK is a climate leader or laggard this has certainly removed all doubt. The science couldn’t be clearer that new oil and gas is incompatible with a safe and livable planet.”

But more oil and gas is now. Climate disaster is tomorrow. We have to pick now, every time.

Just plain evil. (Folksy evil, down home evil, evil that disguises itself as perky & outspoken.)

This is a member of Congress taunting a survivor of the Parkland mass murders. It’s vomit-inducing.

First, spoiler: the GMC has declined to investigate Az Hakeem.

Now the story of the former patient who tried to get him investigated:

A high-profile Harley Street psychiatrist who calls transgender rights campaigners “trans terrorists” has been reported to the General Medical Council (GMC) after a patient claims he was “attempting to practice transgender conversion therapy”, i can reveal.

Dr Az Hakeem, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, calls himself “gender critical” and “the only psychiatrist” to specialise in “exploratory psychotherapy to persons suffering from gender dysphoria”. He has denied being anti-trans, said his service is “neutral”, and denied offering conversion therapy.

But an 18-year-old former patient, a trans man, has accused Dr Hakeem of deploying “coercive strategies” in an attempt to “make me cis[gender]”.

Or in an attempt to persuade her not to wreck her body in pursuit of an impossibility. It all depends on the framing.

Lyle’s complaint to the GMC relates to an assessment he had with Dr Hakeem last year when he was 17. It alleges the psychiatrist used a range of tactics denying the validity of his gender identity – and that of trans people generally.

He felt that the psychiatrist “invalidated my opinions, then imposed his view of gender,” the complaint reads. “He made it clear from the very start that he was sceptical of my gender and expressed doubt that it could differ to [my] sex.”

Lyle accuses Dr Hakeem of disbelieving that his gender identity is male and of trying to encourage Lyle to unpick it in order that he could live as a woman.

Suppose Lyle had told Dr Hakeem her identity is giraffe, or eggplant, or stop sign, or Mongolia, or Donald Trump? Would it have been his medical duty to accept all those claims, one at a time or in a bunch?

There surely has to be some limit to this kind of bullshit in a medical setting. Medical professionals surely can’t – and shouldn’t and mustn’t – be expected to treat all reality-denying claims of patients as true and unquestionable? Especially not psychiatrists? Delusion is a real thing, and not automatically healthy or a guide to happier living.

“He suggested that there was little difference between my gender, and his teen Goth identity, implying that it might fade equally fast. He also likened gender-affirming surgeries to race-imitation surgeries,” wrote Lyle in the complaint. “He asked me ‘why’ I believed I had gender dysphoria, and would not accept that it’s because I’m trans.”

As he should. More of his colleagues should do the same.

Same old same old. It’s a dire emergency, and we won’t do anything to stop it.

The US envoy on climate change John Kerry has warned that the war in Ukraine must not be used as an excuse to prolong global reliance on coal.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Kerry criticised a number of large countries for not living up to the promises they made at the COP26 climate summit.

I can explain. Promises are easy. Living up to them is hard.

The fragile unity shown in Glasgow last November is likely to be tested in Bonn as countries deal with the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the cost of living crisis.

Mr Kerry told the BBC that despite these drawbacks, “as a world we are still not moving fast enough,” to rein in the emissions of warming gases that are driving up temperatures.

“We can still win this battle,” the former senator said, but it will require a “wholesale elevation of effort by countries all around the world”.

Which is not going to happen. Why? See above: “the cost of living crisis.” The immediate problems always take precedence. We’re just animals. We don’t have it in us to make radical painful changes for the sake of people who don’t exist, i.e. future generations. Our immediate needs always shove long term needs onto the back burner, and by “back” I mean somewhere in the middle of Antarctica, watching the ice melt.

So how much progress on climate has been made since COP26?

Bluntly, not a lot.

A BBC analysis shows that across a range of issues, very little has been achieved.

The world emerged from Glasgow into an energy crisis sparked by a rapid rise in the price of gas. This has been massively compounded by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and ongoing problems in global supply lines.

Shortages! Price rises!

Both put the climate crisis into deep deep shade, because that’s how we’re wired.

I thought publishers were responsible for publishing books, but apparently I was all wrong, apparently they’re responsible for how the writers of books talk and behave. Kind of parental, kind of tutorial, kind of policey? How did I not know this was the job of publishers??!

That bit about “whose only crime is to try and carve out a small safe space for trans people” means, when translated, “whose only crime is to try to create a blacklist of published writers who commit gender thoughtcrime.” He means “the Young Refuseniks,” who have now closed their Twitter account which called on people to help create that blacklist.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on A strange union.

If we were to replace trans exclusionary with racist, misogynistic or antisemitic would we be expected to define every word that would be included?

Expected to define each word that would be considered racist? No. Expected to define the list itself of words to be proscribed, as opposed to the words on that list? Yes, absolutely. Expected to be able to provide a coherent definition of racism consistent with common usage? You’d better goddamn believe it. If you’re going to curtail fundamental liberties like speech, then you are obliged to provide a full account of who, what, when, where, and why. I can define racism, sexism, misogyny, antisemitism, and homophobia in clear terms. I can define the extent and bounds of behavioral restriction I believe appropriate for any given context. It should be easy, and you should welcome the opportunity to clearly establish what constitutes transphobic behavior.

But y’all mah’f-kz won’t do that, because you can’t do that. You can’t, because your ideology is nonsensical, apophatic, self-justifying, self-negating, utterly incoherent bullshit. You can’t, because you know that definitions are inherently limiting, and having a fixed definition would mean being unable to deploy conflicting ones in rhetoric. You can’t, because clear definitions are easily communicated, and you can’t let normal people get a clear picture of your ideology’s tenets.

You can’t, because you’re lying liars who lie. God damn, this “I shouldn’t have to define my terms” routine is seriously craven.

Robyn Blumner, the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, has a much discussed editorial in the current Free Inquiry about a split that she describes as between identitarians and humanists. It starts with a couple of definitions, or a definition and an affirmation.

Identitarian: A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. (Source: Urban Dictionary)

“The Affirmations of Humanism”: We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity and strive to work together for the common good of humanity. (Paul Kurtz, Free Inquiry, Spring 1987)

I think the Urban Dictionary is a less than ideal source of definitions if you’re trying to be fair to the side you oppose. For a start I think “identitarian” is a pejorative more than it is a standard noun, and for a continue I think the Urban Dictionary’s definition is not all that careful. Also, of course, the UD is not and doesn’t claim to be any kind of scholarly source.

I think I’d define “identitarian” as someone preoccupied with identity politics, but I would not go on to claim that identity politics=”group identity is the most important thing about a person.” I think that’s quite wrong (and I suppose that’s why I think Blumner should have looked for a better source). People who practice or perform or promote identity politics are aware that various identities are more or less favored, and they think life would be fairer if the most basic, comes-with-birth type identities didn’t have to overcome a Less Favored status. One doesn’t at all have to make that politics the most central thing in her life, let alone thinking a disfavored identity is the most important thing about a person. I’m a feminist, for example, and that’s an important thing about me, especially now when it’s all being thrown on the bonfire, but it’s not the most important. I think that’s true of most people.

So, in short, the editorial about identity politics v humanism starts with a non-scholarly definition of idpol from a famously non-scholarly source, and proceeds from there. The well is a tad murky from the outset. The dice are loaded.

And Kurtz’s affirmation sounds nice but it too has that ignoring the realities problem. It’s all very well to talk about transcending “divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity,” but the trouble is that some people – most people in fact – can’t transcend them, because everyone else remains fully aware of them. Jews in Nazi Germany couldn’t “transcend” their pesky Jewishness; you do the math.

It’s true that people can get very bogged down in the identity stuff, and it can be tedious or clogging or beside the point or all those, but still, we’re not free to “transcend” our identities in the eyes of everyone else.

Blumner says we need to work together particularly now, so this split is a bad thing.

The division has to do with a fundamental precept of humanism, that enriching human individuality and celebrating the individual is the basis upon which humanism is built. Humanism valorizes the individual—and with good reason; we are each the hero of our own story. Not only is one’s individual sovereignty more essential to the humanist project than one’s group affiliation, but fighting for individual freedom—which includes freedom of conscience, speech, and inquiry—is part of the writ-large agenda of humanism. It unleashes creativity and grants us the breathing space to be agents in our own lives.

It’s too Ayn Randian for my taste. In particular, “one’s individual sovereignty [is] more essential to the humanist project than one’s group affiliation” comes across as ruthlessly Me First. Yes, it’s good for people to have lots of freedom and independence, but it’s also good for people to take heed of others, and give up some freedoms in order to live and work with others. The freedom to have a rave on your front lawn at 3 a.m. isn’t a freedom worth protecting. The freedom to destroy the planet isn’t a freedom worth having.

Janice Turner mentioned a union in her Times piece on gender indoctrination in the civil service:

The head of the union says nuh-uh:

But what counts as “exclusionary” or “discriminatory”? That’s the issue, isn’t it. Trans dogma defines “exclusion” as “not including men in the category ‘women’.” We don’t agree that that’s a reasonable definition. It’s not “exclusionary” to exclude salmon from a recipe for chocolate cake, and it’s not exclusionary to exclude men from definitions of women. That ought to be obvious, but in the real world we are accused of being evil exclusionizers for not including men in our definition of women. That’s what unions shouldn’t be supporting.

But he seems to think it’s exclusionary to ask him to define “exclusionary.”

Good point except for the fact that “transphobic” is not comparable to racist or misogynist. This is the whole point. Trans proselytizing and ideology are parasites on older social justice movements, stealing their categories and vocabulary for a very different and non-progressive brand of politics.

That’s it. We’re called transphobic for saying that men are not women. This doesn’t work for us.

Heyyyyy I’ve found one that hasn’t made the big switcheroo. Meet National Advocates for Pregnant Women:

NAPW defends women who are pregnant and have abortions, experience pregnancy loss, use drugs or alcohol, and who continue their pregnancies and give birth. Our work, however, is not limited to criminal or parent defense work, nor is it limited to any single issue, strategy, or niche.

NAPW works to ensure that women do not lose their constitutional and human rights as a result of pregnancy; that addiction and other health and welfare problems women face during pregnancy are addressed through public health and social welfare systems, not the criminal law system; that families are not needlessly separated based on medical misinformation about pregnancy and drug use; and that all people, including those who can get pregnant, have access to all of the health care services they need, including abortion and maternity care.

A little wobble in that last sentence perhaps, but the word “women” appears 21 times on that About Us page, so I won’t quibble about it.