The Community is Offended.

Comedian Dave Chappelle’s show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent jokes about transgender people.

Because jokes about trans people aren’t jokes, they’re blasphemy.

The venue had faced blowback for booking the legendary comedian for a surprise, sold-out performance in the months that followed his 2021 Netflix special, “The Closer,” in which Chappelle doubled down on jokes about the LGBTQ community after past accusations of homophobia and transphobia.

There’s no such thing as “the LGBTQ community.” The T doesn’t belong. The T is a wrong turn, which should fade away.

The storied venue, which is best known for its appearances in Prince’s 1984 film “Purple Rain,” added that while it believes in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression, “we lost sight of the impact” booking Chappelle would have on the community.

What impact? The storied venue doesn’t say.

See? No explanation, no detail, no information – just “we hear you, we’re sorry about the thing, we regret the thing, we feel guilty about the thing, we believe in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression but there’s the thing.”

The Post is a little more informative.

Chappelle has faced criticism for comments that LGBTQ advocacy groups say could incite harm against transgender people. As part of “The Closer,” Chappelle joked about transgender genitalia, said “gender is a fact” and told his audience he was on “team TERF,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. The comedian also defended J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” books, who has been criticized for making statements seen as transphobic. Chappelle has joked about the transgender community in the past, including in his 2019 special, “Sticks & Stones.”

The horror.

A tale of two news items:

First, Citrus County [Florida] Chronicle:

Inverness woman arrested for having inappropriate relationships with minors

An Inverness woman was jailed for allegedly having inappropriate relationships with several minors she also sent explicit images to.

Citrus County Sheriff’s Office authorities arrested Diana Elizabeth Guevara July 13 on a warrant charging the 33-year-old with transmitting harmful materials to minors, having unlawful sexual activity with minors, and four counts of lewd and lascivious battery.

…

A second victim, a teenage boy, told investigators Guevara performed a sex act on him in June while he was at her home, and a third teenage boy told Ricci that Guevara had sexual contact with him four separate times.

Both teens said Guevara told them she was younger than her actual age.

Second, Reduxx:

Trans-Identified Male Arrested After “Manipulating” Minors Into Sexual Abuse

A trans-identified male who “manipulated” children into sexual activities was arrested last Wednesday in Citrus County, Florida. According to police, 33-year-old Diana Elizabeth Guevara fostered a relationship with one child in order to “identify [his] next victims.”

Guevara sent multiple explicit photos and videos on social media to children between the ages of 12 to 17, law enforcement officials said, adding that he also had sexual relations with a number of the children at his home in Inverness.

…

Guevara’s crime received little coverage by mainstream outlets, and he was referred to as a “woman” by both police and local news.

In 2017, Guevara, a former Miami-Dade Police Officer, was featured in both print news and television reports advertising the benefits of ‘gender affirming’ medical interventions through the LGBTQ Clinic at the University of Miami. In an article published by the Miami Herald, Guevara lauds having a breast augmentation as “life-changing” experience.

The Citrus County story never once mentions that Guevara is a man or that he is trans.

Someone said what?

The intersection of Twitter and Reddit begets monsters, or something.

Let’s tease out the meaning.

Well, there’s a lesbian walking group (advertised on meetup.com) near me and I really want to go out and meet other dykes so I decided to sign up…

‘this group is for LESBIANS ONLY. Lesbian is defined as same-sex attracted biological woman.’

WHY DO PEOPLE EVEN DO THIS. The absolute nastiness of a group of lesbians, who ought to know better, saying, in essence, ‘haha we’re going to go out and have fun and you can’t come because you’re trans and we don’t want to get trans germs all over us.’ I’m really pissed off and quite frankly upset and I’m not even trans!

But that absolutely isn’t what the group is saying, not in essence or in any other way. It’s not “because you’re trans,” it’s “because you’re men.” LESBIANS ARE ALLOWED TO GET TOGETHER WITHOUT MEN.

I’ll say that again, this time without shouting. Lesbians are allowed to get together without men. That’s legal, and acceptable, and reasonable, and not unfair or discriminatory or any other pejorative. By the same token, gay men are allowed to get together without women.

It’s nothing to do with “trans germs.” It’s to do with sex, and who is which, and the power differential between the two. Men who identify as lesbians remain men, and thus are not in fact lesbians. Men can identify as traffic lights if they want to, but nobody else has to pay any attention.

The comments on the Reddit post all share the poster’s shock-horror at this monstrous exclusion of men from a lesbian group. The Reddit groups is called…”butch lesbians.”

Girl Guides is “inclusive.”

We want every member of Girlguiding to feel like they belong.

Well that makes sense. There wouldn’t be much point in having members you make feel as if they don’t belong.

It’s why we have an Equality and diversity policy, training for volunteers on how to include everyone, and why we love to share stories from all our members on what it means to feel included. We hope it helps you as volunteers feel empowered to welcome everyone to our organisation.

Well they can’t welcome everyone to their organization, surely. It’s Girl Guides – so they can’t welcome adults or boys. Right?

We’re sharing the true story of Rainbow (all names have been changed), a girl who joined our youngest section and knew Girlguiding was a space for her.

‘My husband and I are lucky enough to be parents of a seven-year-old girl, Rainbow,’ says Jane. ‘She loves LEGO, climbing trees, reading, playing with her friends and not listening to us when we ask her to wash her hands before dinner.

‘She might sound very much like your children, and she is the same, except when she was born, we assumed she was a boy.’

Ah. In other words Rainbow is a boy. “Girl” Guides is being inclooosive by incloooding a boy, which means all the girls are deprived of being in a Guides group for girls. Why is one boy privileged over a group of girls?

The rest of it is the usual fatuous drivel.

Be sure to report all this in a cheerful optimistic manner:

About 100 million Americans from California to New England were sweating through heat advisories and warnings from the National Weather Service on Wednesday, with a brutal heat wave across the central part of the country showing no signs of letting up.

Oh that sounds harsh. Let’s not say brutal heat wave, let’s say misunderstood heat wave.

Heat warnings and advisories were in place for parts or all of 28 states. People in the Southeast and the Southern Plains faced the most oppressive temperatures, with triple digits forecast for Wednesday and beyond across parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, said Andrew Orrison, a Weather Service meteorologist.

Oklahoma City broke a daily heat record dating back to the Dust Bowl era on Tuesday with a temperature of 110 — tied for the state’s highest-ever July temperature, the Weather Service said — and Austin is set on Wednesday to see its 40th straight day of highs over 100 degrees.

“These are definitely dangerous heat conditions,” Mr. Orrison said.

Well, only if you’re not a reptile.

It’s only slightly less bad in New York and New England.

It’s difficult to blame any particular heat snap on climate change without extensive scientific analysis, but heat waves like the ones in Europe, Asia and North America this summer are typical of what scientists expect as the globe warms — more frequent, longer lasting and more dangerous.

Heat waves in the United States jumped from an average of two per year in the 1960s to six per year by the 2010s. And it’s all part of an overall warming trend: The last seven years have been the warmest in the history of accurate worldwide records.

But don’t talk about it, because that’s a downer.

So – John – I want us to be happy about the weather and everything is – I don’t know whether something has happened to meteorologists to make you all a little bit fatalistic and and [giggle[ harbingers of doom.

Gee I can’t imagine what it might be.

Originally a comment by Papito on Can’t a guy get a sunburn in peace?

I see three things going on here:

Sound familiar? I definitely hear echoes of that old, regressive belief that sinister people are responsible for weird weather in today’s attempt to pin heatwaves on the rich or on coal-mining or on motorists. Environmentalism has rehabilitated in pseudo-scientific form the age-old instinct to find the witch or the sinner who is to blame for society’s misfortunes.

One part is just sticking his thumb in the liberals’ eye. This is a big part of why we got Trump in the US and you got Brexit in England. There’s no real calculation among these followers, just spite. I thought of them as the “South Park Republicans,” people who wanted to be offensive, cuss, and make fun of people, and resented Mommy and Daddy for telling them it wasn’t nice. There is no end to their rhetoric: it can always be made more hyperbolic, more ridiculous, and the mob will scream all the louder. Nor is there any need for consistency among the verses, as long as the refrain remains “F the Liberals!”

Another part is the way in which the left makes a kind of religion about every putatively correct belief. We all deal with this in the case of gender ideology. Witches to be burned, starting with JKR. The left also has its mobs of dumb followers who just repeat whatever cant they’re told to. Black Lives Matter! Trans Women Are Women!

In the case of climate change, we have some folks on the left who are very much “Ready, Fire, Aim!” In my area, where most heating is provided by natural gas if not oil, there’s a town that’s working to outlaw installation of natural gas heating and cooking in new buildings. Everybody is supposed to use electric heat pumps. But the state as a whole gets the vast majority of its electricity from gas, which is half as efficient when burned to produce electricity as it is when burned to produce heat. Virtue-signalling about dubious improvements (the recycling bin in my town really just gets dumped in with the trash at the other end of the ride) does not improve anything, and inflames the opposing mob more.

I agree that the evidence supports the idea that coal burning should flat out stop. But the left also got nuclear power dismantled in Germany, which is what put Germany in the bind it’s in today, beholden to Russia for natural gas and burning far too much coal. Germany tore down nuclear plants and built coal plants, and that was not really an improvement. Let’s get the policy right before we enact it.

A third thing going on here, which we can’t discount, is the differential burden of higher fossil fuel taxes. In my family, we are firmly in the zoomocracy. Nobody in my house has to go to an office very often, and we use cars only for out of town travel and shopping trips for large things. I live in a nice part of a nice city, and my kids can ride their bikes to school, camp, college, everything. I can go two weeks without getting in a car. Does this make me virtuous? No. I’ve got a contractor coming today to see about fixing a bathroom that has some problems. Will he ride his bicycle here? No. Will any one of the guys working for him not drive here if he takes the job? No; they’ll commute, by car, from even farther away, because it’s very expensive to live in my city. This means that the cost of gas falls most heavily on them, not on me. This is the reason the gilets jaunes got all rowdy in France.

Ritualistic blaming of the wealthy does nothing to solve global warming; they can laugh it off, or buy a tropical forest and claim absolution for their yachts. Meanwhile, the people who actually have to go to jobs – who can’t do their jobs from the other side of the internet – pay at the pump. And if their jobs happen to be mining coal, then they’ll pay twice. Global warming is a problem, and we have to respond to it, but it is politically – and morally – idiotic to put the heaviest burden on the working poor. We have to solve social problems at the same time we solve environmental problems. The working poor must be lifted up by our policy solutions to global warming, or they will be self-defeating.

And, yes, that puts us in a terrible position, because we have other political factions who don’t give a damn about either problem, and are counting on us to screw up one or both.

Brendan O’Neill’s empty formulaic “Look at the lefties making a big fuss about climate change which everyone knows isn’t a thing” piece:

Is anyone else tiring of all this green hysteria over the heatwave? There is something medieval about it. There is something creepily pre-modern in the idea that sinful mankind has brought heat and fire and floods upon himself with his wicked, hubristic behaviour. What next – plagues of locusts as a punishment for our failure to recycle?

Cute, but beside the point. Literary criticism isn’t the right tool for doing away with global warming. It really doesn’t matter whether or not Brendan O’Neill is bored by talk of climate change, what matters is that it’s happening and there is a great deal of research that shows how it’s happening. It’s not something people just kick back in their chairs and say, it’s what climate scientists discover by digging up core samples and measuring the Colorado River (when they can find it) and comparing weather statistics. It’s not a story. The permafrost isn’t thawing to annoy Brendan O’Neill, it’s just thawing.

The unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become. Climate-change activism is less and less about coming up with practical solutions to the problem of pollution and more about demonising mankind as a plague on a planet, a pox on Mother Earth.

It’s not just about “pollution” ffs, and there are no “practical solutions” that will just make climate change disappear. Tipping points can’t be untipped.

To my mind, there could be no better proof that climate-change activism has become an End of Days cult than the fact that its chief ideologues are now even incapable of enjoying hot weather. 

Oh ffs. He’s not really this thick, it’s an act, but it’s such a stupid act.

That one weird trick of saying something self-involved and ridiculous, and then answering all questions with variations on “Why would you ask that?”

“Overeducated.” Really? Any evidence for that? I’d have said under.

He asked in response to your absurd tweet!

Because you’re not over-educated. You come across as quite under-educated and incurious.

Your tweet implies it.

This game is stupid, let’s play something else.

Later…

“Objective statement of fact”???

She’s like Brendan O’Neill turned inside out…which is funny because Brendan O’Neill is also like Brendan O’Neill turned inside out.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room 8.

We as a species are now taking part in a real life version of a particularly fiendish iteration of the “trolley problem,” in which we are pondering whether or not to throw the switch, riding in the trolley, and tied to the tracks all at the same time. We are the dinosaurs and the asteroid. Our current situation is an unprecedented superposition of disasters and catastrophes reinforcing each other and reverberating around the globe. The greatest threat to our way of life comes from our way of life. Climate, biodiversity, water, food, resources, war. The people who are in the position to control the situation (to the dwindling degree that such control remains at all possible or effective) are ultimately going to be subject to many of the same dire consequences as those riding the trolley or caught in its path. The timing might vary depending on locale and wealth, but like some nightmare moebius strip, but we are all on the trolley, and we are all on the tracks. As the seconds tick, the power of the switch to do anything at all ebbs away.

This has been your daily reminder that we are all so very, very fucked.

Sure, kids, go play with the chainsaw, just wear a sunhat and you’ll be fine.

It was with some trepidation that I set off into the hills of Pyrenees Orientales on Saturday. The temperature was forecast to rise to 37°C by the afternoon – a level that is lethal, according to British news sites, even if you are sitting around in the garden. Apparently, today and tomorrow’s heatwave is going to kill thousands of Britons. 

Haw haw, aren’t people stupid for understanding that excessive heat kills.

Was I going to end up being recorded in the local French newspapers as the foolish Englishman who perished after going out in the midday sun? I needn’t have worried. I didn’t see many people at first, but by the time I reached the more used paths, there were plenty of locals out enjoying the weather, including at least one family who had taken their young children on a stroll of several miles. Take a sunhat and plenty of water and there is nothing to be afraid of.

So there you go! The Spectator columnist has spoken! Just take your kids out in dangerous heat and hope for the best! He saw some people who did it and they weren’t corpses so that’s research enough, yeah? Of course.

The heatwave is just the latest manifestation of our own public authorities’ obsession with doom. Dominic Raab was in trouble on Sunday for merely suggesting that people might enjoy this week’s weather. In the grim orthodoxy of climate panic, sunny weather is not something to be enjoyed; it is a portent of doom, punishment for our excessively wealthy lifestyles and capitalism in general.

The trouble is, climate doesn’t read the Spectator. Climate doesn’t care how far the Spectator columnist walked or didn’t walk, it doesn’t care how much he taunts people who understand that excessive heat can kill, it doesn’t care whether he enjoys sunny weather or not. Climate isn’t political in that sense; climate just does what it does.

The relative humidity at Heathrow Airport – a contender if any records are broken today or tomorrow – at 10 a.m. this morning was a perfectly pleasant 41 per cent. Britain is essentially in the same body of air as down here in South West France. 

There is a side-effect to ordering us all to stay indoors during the heatwave. All we will soak up is the usual climate hyperbole being fed to us via our TV and websites  – that we are being boiled alive in a man-made cataclysm. Fortunately, for now, I am somewhere where life is going on in spite of high temperatures, and people are allowed to enjoy, rather than feel guilty about, hot weather.

Speaking of southwest France…

Researchers are investigating how humans deal with extreme heat.

One thing is for sure, scientists say: The heat waves of the past two decades are not good predictors of the risks that will confront us in the decades to come. Already, the link between greenhouse-gas emissions and sweltering temperatures is so clear that some researchers say there may soon no longer be any point trying to determine whether today’s most extreme heat waves could have happened two centuries ago, before humans started warming the planet. None of them could have.

…

When the mercury is high, we aren’t as effective at work. Our thinking and motor functions are impaired. Excessive heat is also associated with greater crime, anxiety, depression and suicide.

Being cooked isn’t good for us. Who knew?

Dr. Venugopal gets frustrated when asked, about her research on Indian workers, “India is a hot country, so what’s the big deal?”

Seriously. I get frustrated by that and similar questions and remarks too. “We’re just not used to it, to people in India this is nothing.” Wrong. People can “get used to” things that are bad for them.

Nobody asks what the big deal is about having a fever, but heatstroke puts the body in a similar state.“

That is human physiology,” Dr. Venugopal said. “You can’t change that.”

What I keep saying.

Europe is getting it in the neck.

Scientists say the persistent extreme heat already this year is in keeping with a trend. Heat waves in Europe, they say, are increasing in frequency and intensity at a faster rate than almost any other part of the planet, including the Western United States.

Global warming plays a role, as it does in heat waves around the world, because temperatures are on average about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) higher than they were in the late 19th century, before emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases became widespread. So extreme heat takes off from a higher starting point.

But beyond that, there are other factors, some involving the circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean, that may make Europe a heat wave hot spot.

It has to do with changes in the jet stream, and maybe with faster warming in the Arctic, and maybe changes in a major ocean current. Also, the first heat wave is the parent to more of them.

As in other parts of the world, a heat wave in Europe can make it more likely for others to occur in the same area, because a period of extreme heat dries out the soil.

When there is some moisture in the soil, some of the sun’s energy is used in evaporating the water, leading to a slight cooling effect. But when one heat wave wipes out almost all the soil moisture, there is little left to evaporate when the next wave of hot air arrives. So more of the sun’s energy bakes the surface, adding to the heat.

Bad and getting worse and will continue getting worse. We’re the egg slowly frying.

It occurs to me that “mother” and “father” (and their equivalents in other languages) must be the most emotionally loaded words in any language. We all have them and many of us grow up to be one or the other. We wouldn’t exist without the people behind the words. The words matter. Right? I’m not suggesting some weird incomprehensible notion, yeah?

Now this:

A government bureaucracy pretends there is no such thing as a “mother.”

Promoted on Facebook.

This important procedure – yes what could be more important than doing expensive surgery on the face of a man who wants to look like a woman. Prosthetic limbs for children who have stepped on mines in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, to name one category.

Another way the lunatic right is destroying everything:

Through a wave of pandemic-related litigation, a trio of small but mighty conservative legal blocs has rolled back public health authority at the local, state and federal levels, recasting America’s future battles against infectious diseases.

Because that’s what we want, right? To be helpless in the face of pandemics?

Galvanized by what they’ve characterized as an overreach of COVID-related health orders issued amid the pandemic, lawyers from the three overlapping spheres — conservative and libertarian think tanks, Republican state attorneys general, and religious liberty groups — are aggressively taking on public health mandates and the government agencies charged with protecting community health.

Because it’s bad to protect community health. What we want is more disease and early death!

In Wisconsin, a conservative legal center won a case before the state Supreme Court stripping local health departments of the power to close schools to stem the spread of disease.

Let the kids get sick and spread the sickness! That’s freedom!

In Missouri, the Republican state attorney general waged a campaign against school mask mandates. Most of the dozens of cases he filed were dismissed but nonetheless had a chilling effect on school policies.

Good good good. We don’t want schools trying to slow the spread of disease.

Although the three blocs are distinct, they share ties with the Federalist Society, a conservative legal juggernaut. They also share connections with the State Policy Network, an umbrella organization for state-based conservative and libertarian think tanks and legal centers, and the SPN-fostered American Juris Link, described by president and founder Carrie Ann Donnell as “SPN for lawyers.” In the COVID era, the blocs have supported one another in numerous legal challenges by filing amicus briefs, sharing resources and occasionally teaming up.

Their legal efforts have gained traction with a federal judiciary transformed by Republican congressional leaders, who strategically stonewalled judicial appointments in the final years of Democratic President Barack Obama’s second term. That put his Republican successor, Trump, in position to fill hundreds of judicial vacancies, including the three Supreme Court openings, with candidates decidedly more friendly to the small-government philosophy long espoused by conservative think tanks.

Just in time for global warming to kick into high gear. Genius.

Battlefront France:

Western France is facing a “heat apocalypse”, experts have warned, as extreme temperatures continue to hit much of Europe.

Temperatures could reach record levels in 15 regions of the southwest, with firefighters battling wildfires and thousands forced to evacuate. Blazes in Spain, Portugal and Greece have forced thousands more to flee.

Record temperatures are also expected in parts of the UK, which has its first ever red extreme heat warning in place. Wildfires in France in recent days have forced over 24,000 people to flee, with emergency shelters set up for evacuees.

It was like that in this part of the world a year ago. The town of Litton in British Columbia burned to the ground. This isn’t the distant future we can shrug off as the kids’ problem (which is a rather callous thing to do anyway), this is now.

Fires also broke out in Castilla y León, Galicia, Castille, Andalusia and Extremadura. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited Extremadura on Monday.

“Evidently, climate change kills,” he said. “It kills people, kills our ecosystem, the biodiversity”.

Temperatures in Portugal hit 47C (116F) on Thursday – a record for July.

One third of the mainland still remains at extreme risk of fire, according to the national meteorological office IPMA. This is due to severe or extreme drought conditions virtually everywhere.

This is all very horrible. Let’s ignore it and talk about stunning and brave trans women instead.

More on religious interference with medical treatment in Washington state:

For years, religiously affiliated hospitals have merged with secular health care systems, often with disruptions to services like reproductive health care. About half of health care systems in Washington are affiliated with religious organizations, which means that even with state-level and national protections for abortion, hospitals in Washington can deny or restrict reproductive health care based on religious protocols. The result is a patchwork of reproductive health policies that vary by hospital, and can leave patients confused or without care altogether.

It’s bizarre. It’s also evil and infuriating, but the bizarreness is puzzling. I don’t understand why they’re allowed to do this. I don’t think engineers get to design defective bridges “based on religious protocols,” and I don’t see why medical care is different. Medicine is technical; religion has nothing to do with it.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives, a set of theologically rooted guidelines for Catholic health care institutions, prohibit abortion entirely, but their limitations extend far beyond elective abortion, complicating a number of routine treatments and procedures. For example, if a patient has an ectopic pregnancy — a nonviable pregnancy that occurs when a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus — the directives forbid any intervention that includes an abortion. But termination, either through medication or surgery, is the only treatment for ectopic pregnancy. If left untreated, ectopic pregnancy can cause the fallopian tube to rupture, which is a life-threatening medical emergency. 

In other words Catholic bishops (by definition all men, of course) give themselves permission to kill women because of their “religious protocols.” It shouldn’t be allowed. The bishops should be in prison.

While some hospitals that don’t provide abortion care will refer patients elsewhere, a referral may not be possible in an emergency. In 2013, a Washington woman almost died at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham after being denied treatment for an infection following a miscarriage. Cases like hers, reported by Rewire News Group and documented by the ACLU, led the state Legislature to pass the Protecting Pregnancy Act in 2021. The law allows doctors working in institutions under the Catholic Church’s purview to override ethical-religious directives in the event that a medically necessary abortion is required. “Patients were in these situations, some of them very dire, and they were having their care delayed or denied, which is unacceptable,” said the ACLU’s Rutman.

To put it mildly.

Even before the rise of hospital mergers, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists documented a number of cases across the country in which patient outcomes were adversely [affected] by providers’ refusal to participate in reproductive health care. The professional organization has been clear in advocating that reproductive health care be upheld when hospitals merge, citing concerns about physicians’ ability to care for their patients. 

“Where reproductive health care services are prohibited, health care providers are put in the difficult position of having to withhold needed care until patients’ conditions deteriorate to a point at which care is permitted,” said the group in a position statement on reproductive health care restrictions, including those at religiously affiliated institutions. “Ultimately, the health of women and quality of the patient-physician relationship suffer.”

Because guess what, sometimes patients’ conditions deteriorate so much that they die before the doctors are finally allowed to treat them. Oops.

The state’s Reproductive Privacy Act ensures that even if Roe is overturned, abortion would remain legal in Washington state. But the confusion comes at a time when the state’s reproductive health care infrastructure is already strained, especially in areas where there are few clinics and high demand resulting from out-of-state patients. While 18 health centers provide abortion in and around the greater Seattle area alone, just 11 health centers operate east of the Cascades, only three of which are full-service clinics providing both onsite surgical and medication abortion in Yakima, Kennewick and Spokane.

The state east of the Cascades is huge geographically, and tiny in terms of population.

Clinics across the state are preparing to accommodate a growing influx of patients from states like Idaho, whose residents already routinely seek abortion care in Washington. While elected officials have pushed the idea that Washington will become even more of a haven for patients seeking abortions in world without Roe v. Wade, expanding actual capacity for care beyond those five clinics on the eastern side of the state would be complex, with so many of the state’s hospital beds under religious control.

This is the result of years of hospital mergers that have weakened the state’s ability to provide adequate reproductive health care. The true extent of that weakness will soon be determined if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Check.

It’s not just the Supreme Court ruling though.

Washington is just one of a handful of states in which more than 40% of hospital beds are controlled by Catholic doctrine. This shift became more acute with the 2021 merger of Virginia Mason and CHI Franciscan, creating Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, which operates 11 hospitals and 300 sites of care. With that merger, Virginia Mason said it would “not become Catholic,” according to reporting by The News Tribune, but it also would no longer provide “elective” abortions or participate in the state’s Death with Dignity process.

A distinction without a difference. Nobody gives a shit whether Virginia Mason is playing with rosary beads or not, the point is that it shut down abortions at the behest of a Catholic institution, in a state that has not passed laws forcing women to stay pregnant.

The new entity’s website now reads, “It is the policy of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health that all services rendered in our facilities shall be supportive of life. At no time may direct actions to terminate life be performed or permitted.”

Oh really? So they don’t use antibiotics? They don’t use germicidal cleaning materials?

This latest merger came nearly a decade after secular Swedish merged with Catholic Providence in 2013 and stopped providing most abortion care. Under pressure from reproductive health advocates in 2011 when the merger was being considered, Swedish partnered with Planned Parenthood to underwrite a clinic to provide abortion care near the hospital.

Why are secular hospitals merging with Catholic ones anyway? And why aren’t there laws preventing Catholic hospitals from imposing their religion on patients? Why aren’t all hospitals secular as a matter of course? What does religion have to do with medical care?

A spokesperson for Providence Swedish Puget Sound said in an email, “Elective abortions are not performed in Swedish facilities. However, Swedish does not deny emergency care. When a pregnant patient’s life is at risk, Swedish clinicians provide all necessary medical interventions, including pregnancy terminations, to protect and save the life of the patient.” 

How very generous.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Who stole the dino emoji?

As far as “ownership” of dinosaurs goes, the “genderqueer community” are at the end of a very, very long line of other people and institutions that got there first. Waterhouse Hawkins’ Crystal Palace dinosaurs (which outlasted the Crystal Palace itself) were unveiled in 1854, just a little more than a dozen years after Richard Owen’s coinage of the word “dinosaur” itself.

They’ve been up for grabs ever since, used by everyone from museums, gas companies (Sinclair), toy manufacturers, to movie studios, to make money. If the trans/queer paleoart community wants to make some sort of IP claim, they’ll have their work work cut out for them. The beauty is that dinosaurs “belong” to everyone. They are part of the very fabric of the story of life on Earth, which is our story. It’s not surprising that the “genderqueer” is ready to lay exclusive claim to something that doesn’t belong to them.

I think my initial knee-jerk reaction, um, was just like, Well, you can’t have them. Like dinosaurs are ours.

Ha ha, good one. Back atcha. You return the word “woman,” and maybe we can talk about dinosaur emojis later.

“I hate to speak for the entire trans or genderqueer community but…”

Liar. This isn’t something you hate. If you hated it so much, you wouldn’t be doing it at all. You’re relishing this chance to smear “[y]our social enemies.” You’re fine with taking this opportunity to muddy the waters, claiming feminist use of dinosaur emojis is some sort of secret handshake/dogwhistle.

It really just made zero sense to me whatsoever in terms of like, you know, they could have picked anything else and it might have made a little bit more sense to me.

Here, you’re pretending complete bafflement as to the motives and reasoning behind this move. As Ophelia points out, it was clearly too much work to uncover the real reasons that lead to this. It wasn’t random, capricious or arbitrary. Looking too closely would reveal ugly facts that would murder your beautiful theory of sheer bloody-minded, transphobic hatred. This amounts to the purposeful concealment of information that would ruin your story altogether, turning it into the opposite of what you’re claiming. It makes me wonder: are all of your articles and books as shittily researched as this? You might be able to frame the narrative for those only ever hearing about it from you, but you’ll never fool anyone who already knows the facts of the matter. This is a risky strategy for a science writer. It destroys the trust of knowledgible readers, who will now see you as little more than an unreliable, partisan hack. Where does that leave you when your product is reputation, and trust itself?

Eventually, grudgingly, comes the admission that there is in fact more to the feminist use of dinosaur emojis than the simple, dishonest explanation of hard-hearted anti-trans bigotry. That it is a snarky, political response to an attempt to shame women standing up for their rights. Trans activists can’t admit of any conflict between women’s rights and trans “rights.” They are forced to portray feminists’s legitimate interest in defending their rights and spaces against male appropriation as blind, hateful anti-trans spitefulness. To do otherwise opens the door to questioning and debate which trans talking points cannot survive.

Some years ago I met “Riley Black” when he was just plain old Brian Switek, bespectacled science writer. No blue hair, no head tilt. This was before he “came out” as a “furry” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/21/furry-wild-side-fursona-animal-nature Does the furry “community” get to claim “ownership” of mammals? No, though I’d say they’ve got a better claim to them than the “trans and genderqueer” one does to dinosaurs. At least “furries” are actually mammals themselves. The optics are a bit better too, since, save for birds, dinosaurs are largely known for being extinct, which is an ironically inapt choice of emblematic creature for a community constantly claiming that they are potential victims of “genocide.” As far as a better icon for the trans struggle for pretend “rights” goes, I would recommend they stick with unicorns, which are, appropriately, imaginary. It would be a perfect fit if they were also poisonous.