The BBC Radio 4 program The Moral Maze discussed abortion yesterday. Unfortunately the head of Abortion Rights UK, Kerry Abel, had to weaken and muddle her own argument by doing the usual. Starting at about 11 minutes:

Anne McElvoy: “You believe very strongly in bodily autonomy, because it’s a woman’s body, am I correct?”

Kerry Abel: “Women n pregnant people, yup.”

AM: “That there is bodily autonomy and – so far it is women who have babies isn’t it?”

KA: “It depends if they refer to themselves as a woman [inaudible]”

AM: “That is a different show, but let’s” – she asks about fetal viability and the moral issue, whether there is one.

KA: “The campaign that I head up, we take the position that it has to be the woman or pregnant person’s point – that they are they are the you know the person with control over that so we would say they need to make that decision.”

They they they they – maybe that’s why she stumbled so badly, all that they-ing. It should all have been she, and then the fact that it’s women would have been underlined, but nooooooooooo, it had to be they, as if this legislative rape were happening to men too.

I didn’t listen to any more of it so can’t tell you how it went.

There literally are Savita Halappanavar cases happening in the US now. Lindsey Tanner at the Associated Press reports:

Even in medical emergencies, doctors are sometimes declining immediate treatment. In the past week, an Ohio abortion clinic received calls from two women with ectopic pregnancies — when an embryo grows outside the uterus and can’t be saved — who said their doctors wouldn’t treat them. Ectopic pregnancies often become life-threatening emergencies and abortion clinics aren’t set up to treat them.

In an ectopic pregnancy the fetus is doomed no matter what, so deciding to wait until the woman is hemorrhaging is futile as well as murderous.

Dr. Jessian Munoz, an OBGYN in San Antonio, Texas, who treats high-risk pregnancies, said medical decisions used to be clear cut. “It was like, the mom’s life is in danger, we must evacuate the uterus by whatever means that may be,” he said. “Whether it’s surgical or medical — that’s the treatment.’’

Now, he said, doctors whose patients develop pregnancy complications are struggling to determine whether a woman is “sick enough” to justify an abortion. With the fall of Roe v. Wade, “the art of medicine is lost and actually has been replaced by fear,’’ Munoz said.

Munoz said he faced an awful predicament with a recent patient who had started to miscarry and developed a dangerous womb infection. The fetus still had signs of a heartbeat, so an immediate abortion — the usual standard of care — would have been illegal under Texas law.

“We physically watched her get sicker and sicker and sicker” until the fetal heartbeat stopped the next day, “and then we could intervene,’’ he said. The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine “all because we were essentially 24 hours behind.’’

That’s exactly how the people at University Hospital Galway let Savita Halappanavar die. They watched her get sicker and sicker and sicker and then she died.

The Boston public radio station WBUR did a conversational show several months ago about dinosaur emojis.

Emoji might not be 66 million years old, but they are pretty much everywhere. Join Ben and Amory as they explore the history of dinosaur emoji in LGBTQ+ communities and their more recent use as an online dog-whistle for anti-trans activists. What happens when one symbol is used for conflicting reasons? And can the dinosaur emoji avoid redefinition — or extinction?

…

Ben: So I want us to explore this. This specific thing that is happening with this specific set of emoji that’s really become this heated debate involving who gets to own the meaning of symbols, specifically the symbols that we all use to make meaning on our phones.

…

Ben: And we’re gonna start with this one: The saga of those innocent little dinosaur emoji that ended up getting used for something not so innocent.

…

Amory: This is Riley Black.

Riley: I’m a science journalist and author. I’ve written books like Skeleton Keys and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs. 

Ben: Riley LOVES her some dinos.

Riley: Big and loud, for whatever reason, was my jam. 

They chat a bit about paleontology and dinosaur art, then say there are other people who like dinosaur art.

Riley: Many people who are queer, whether they are trans or some other form of genderqueer or whatever it is…We love dinosaurs.

Ben: Along with being a dinosaur expert, Riley is, herself, transgender. And according to Riley, there is a whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts online. We had no idea. So we checked it out. Sure enough, they’re there. We found dozens of paleoartists online that identify as queer.

Amory: Type “dinosaur” into the LGBT subreddit. Hundreds of results, with pride dinos, rainbow dinos, dino moms, dino dads, and a LOT of puns. Like, Ally-saurus.

They speculate on why dinosaurs are a “genderqueer” thing.

Riley: And I think that aspect of falling into more than one category at once and some of these threads of sort of transformation through time are just naturally appealing to people like me and other people in the trans community. 

Ben: This community might not be gigantic. But it is strong and undeniably present. And along with art and expressions of pride, you will definitely see dino emoji.

Ben: Were you using the dinosaur emoji relatively frequently before all of this stuff happened?  

Riley: Yeah, I mean, I would use dinosaur emojis for emphasis just to share things I was excited about, especially when paired with other emojis like I have a book that’s coming out in April about the extinction of the dinosaurs that occurred 66 million years ago. Whenever I talk about it, I use a little dinosaur emoji, a comet emoji, a plant emoji and a raccoon emoji to kind of tell that story of like the dinosaurs going extinct and plants and mammals coming back afterwards and just having fun like with storytelling. 

Amory: But a few months ago, Riley started to see dinosaur emoji that weren’t so fun.

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

Ben: The T. Rex and brachiosaurus were showing up in the profiles of a different online community. Kind of as a badge. A dog whistle to say to others within that community: I’m one of you.

Riley: 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. 

Amory: Riley refers to the group of co-opters as TERFs, as in T-E-R-F. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who call themselves “gender critical.” In other words, anti-trans.

Except no, not “anti-trans.” Anti the ridiculous ideology of Swappable Sex, but not Determined To Harm Trans People.

Broadly speaking, TERFs promote the idea that trans women are really men—that, unlike cisgender women, trans women have benefited from being a part of the patriarchy and thus are a threat to cis women. Above all, they say that, unlike sex, gender identity is an ideology and is not grounded in science. We’ll come back to this.

We “promote the idea” that men are really men. Can you believe it?! Aren’t we silly.

Ben: Anyway, TERFs using dinosaur emoji was a problem for Riley.

Riley: To see, you know, our social enemies for lack of a better term taking, you know, these symbols and trying to use it as their dog whistle, it was something where it’s just like, Where’s this even coming from? This makes zero sense. And also dinosaurs are ours. I hate to speak for the entire trans or genderqueer community but, like, no. We’ve already been wondering about them and drawing them and interested. 

Then why not find out where this is even coming from? Too much work?

Amory: No matter who you are, if you see something beloved taken over by someone else, that can be hard. Suddenly, genderqueer fans of dinos everywhere felt under attack as TERFs kept dropping the emoji into their feeds.

Ben: And we know how these things go. Just think of Pepe the frog. Or the Punisher skull. Or the swastika. When outsider groups latch onto a symbol, that symbol is often changed. Irrevocably.

Except that it wasn’t “taken over” by “someone else.” It was a retort to a stupid dismissive remark by David Lammy MP calling feminist women “dinosaurs.” The hosts finally get around to mentioning the pesky facts that undercut everything they’ve just been saying.

Ben: It’s not clear if TERFs knew they were co-opting something beloved to this slice of the genderqueer community. As far as we can tell, dinosaur emoji began showing up in anti-trans Twitter bios around October of last year.

And the catalyst may have been the UK’s Parliament… which reminds one of Muppets in more ways than one.

There’s no “may have been” about it. We watched it happen.

Ben: And back in September, Lammy was asked in a meeting about transgender rights. So, he responded … calling out his colleagues on the right and in his own party for being anti-trans. He called them dinosaurs. As in, behind the times.

Amory: This was not big news. Except on Twitter, where a little pocket of the internet was blowing up. TERFs were offended by the analogy. And then, they embraced it.

Like one person who goes by the handle @LilyLilyMaynard. She started tweeting videos of her fellow TERFs outside the Labour Party’s headquarters.

Ben: They’re dressed in cheap, inflatable dinosaur costumes, singing off-key about genitals, which, we’re not going to play for obvious reasons. But if you Google “Labour Party Head Office,” the main image representing the building is of these dinosaurs. It would be comical… if it weren’t in service of one group rejecting another’s identity.

Except it’s not their identity, it’s ours, and they’ve helped themselves to it. Ben and Amory would be all over it like a rash if it were Black identity being expropriated that way, but when it’s just stupid whiny women they’re full of contempt.

When satire is all too much like reality. The Babylon Bee:

Cigarette maker Marlboro has announced that they have added puberty blockers to cigarettes to make them legal for kids.

“Now that our smooth Marlboro cigarettes can block puberty, 13 and 14-year-old kids should be able to use them legally, without parental consent,” said a spokesperson for the company. 

Cited as “lung-affirming care,” the cigarette manufacturer’s decision to supplement their products with puberty blockers has caused progressives to praise Marlboro as a true advocate for children’s health.

…

Critics have pointed out the cigarette manufacturer’s sordid history of using deceptive marketing tactics to make young, susceptible populations think cigarettes were cool. But these critics were quickly and violently silenced by trans activists for daring to question a child’s desire to please woke parents by changing genders.

Just don’t inhale.

H/t Peter N

The utter patronizing stupidity of these people.

Of course by “inclusive” they don’t mean what sane people mean by “inclusive.” Of course they mean exclude women by talking about people instead of women.

No it is not “exclusionary” to “center” i.e. talk about women and women only in pro-abortion “messaging.” Why? Because men don’t need abortions, that’s why. Why don’t men need abortions? Because they can’t get pregnant. Most adults know this kind of thing.

It doesn’t matter if some women “don’t identify as” women. That’s just childish trivia. A few adult women want to play let’s pretend, ok, that’s embarrassing but it’s their business, but the rest of us do not have to avoid using the word “women” to humor them. Abortion rights are deadly serious business, and this frivolous nonsense about make-believe genders is a grotesque intrusion. Go all the way away.

“We just ask that you remove all mention of women from your protesting.”

Fuck all the way off.

For your reading enjoyment, a comment by philospher Daniel Kaufman in reply to a comment on a guest post at his blog Electric Agora:

Let me just be very clear, since I keep getting pulled into this imbecile conversation with the Manne Fan.

1. If you think that the abortion catastrophe we just experienced calls for referring to women as ‘impregnables’, you are either batshit crazy or too stupid to count your toes.

2. If you think this is a good idea politically; that it will strengthen the pro choice coalition, you are a fool and should be kept far away from politics if the Democrats are to have a chance of winning.

3. Telling your elders and betters that they should heed you or be “held accountable” will only earn you the following: contempt; mockery; and dismissal. Ditto with calling them ‘phobes and ‘ists of every variety.

4. No one deputized you for jack shit.

Enjoy your Saturday.

This is even more terrifying – by a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University:

Earlier this week I was preparing to write a guest essay with my colleague Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an OB-GYN here in Indiana. We wanted to write about the chilling effect that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has had on medicine in our state and around the country in just a few short weeks. But then Dr. Bernard became a target of a national smear campaign for speaking out about her 10-year-old patient, a rape victim from Ohio who needed an abortion and had to travel to Indiana to receive one, given the restrictions in her home state.

On Wednesday night, our state’s attorney general said his office would be investigating Dr. Bernard. So I’m writing this essay myself — not only to bring attention to the chilling effect on medicine we’re seeing at this moment but also because I’m terrified that I or any one of our colleagues could soon face what Dr. Bernard is going through after delivering care to our patients.

Investigating Dr. Bernard for saving a ten-year-old girl’s life. This is hell, nor are we out of it.

On Wednesday, a suspect in the Ohio rape case was arraigned after reportedly confessing. But the attacks against Dr. Bernard have continued. Indiana’s attorney general said on Fox News on Wednesday evening that his office is investigating her, despite the fact that the abortion the 10-year-old patient received was legal in the state. 

Indiana’s attorney general should be impeached and then prosecuted.

The New England Journal of Medicine tells us that Texas is hell-bent on letting women die if their pregnancies go wrong. Two, three, many Savita Halappanavars.

Health systems and clinicians planning their responses³ can look to Texas, where we have already witnessed the impact of strict abortion bans on the provision of evidence-based, essential health care for pregnant people. Since September 1, 2021, Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB8) has prohibited abortions after the detection of embryonic cardiac activity, which occurs around 6 weeks after a person’s last menstrual period. After that point, SB8 allows abortions only in physician-documented medical emergencies. Anyone suspected of violating the law or aiding and abetting a prohibited abortion can face a civil lawsuit with monetary penalties of at least $10,000.

(Even here, where clarity is so urgent, even the NEJM censors the word “women,” as if this vicious, murderous policy were an injustice to everyone as opposed to very specifically women.)

We interviewed 25 clinicians from across Texas about how SB8 has affected their practice in general obstetrics and gynecology, maternal and fetal medicine (MFM), or genetic counseling. We concurrently interviewed 20 Texans who had medically complex pregnancies and sought care either in Texas or out of state after September 1, 2021. Although aimed at clinicians who provide abortion care, SB8 has had a chilling effect on a broad range of health care professionals, adversely affecting patient care and endangering people’s lives.

…

Clinicians we interviewed recounted a variety of circumstances in which a patient could have received hospital-based abortion care before SB8 but was now denied that care. Patients with a life-limiting fetal diagnosis, such as anencephaly or bilateral renal agenesis, are only being counseled to continue their pregnancy and offered neonatal comfort care options after delivery. All hospitals where our respondents practiced have prohibited multifetal reduction, even though in some cases (e.g., complications of monochorionic twins) failure to perform the procedure could result in the loss of both twins.

Patients with pregnancy complications or preexisting medical conditions that may be exacerbated by pregnancy are being forced to delay an abortion until their conditions become life-threatening and qualify as medical emergencies, or until fetal cardiac activity is no longer detectable. An MFM specialist reported that their hospital no longer offers treatment for ectopic pregnancies implanted in cesarean scars, despite strong recommendations from the Society for Maternal–Fetal Medicine that these life-threatening pregnancies be definitively managed with surgical or medical treatment.

That’s just plain terrifying. Ectopic pregnancies can explode and cause the woman to bleed to death before the medics can stop the bleed.

Some clinicians believe that patients with rupture of membranes before fetal viability are eligible for a medical exemption under SB8, while others believe these patients cannot receive an abortion so long as there is fetal cardiac activity. In multiple cases, the treating clinicians — believing, on the basis of their own or their hospital’s interpretation of the law, that they could not provide early intervention — sent patients home, only to see them return with signs of sepsis.

Like Savita Halappanavar.

Take a deep breath.

Swimming World reports:

Lia Thomas, Brooke Forde Among 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Nominees

Man who cheated women out of swimming medals nominated for woman of the year. The insults just never end, do they.

NCAA champion Lia Thomas and American Olympian Brooke Forde were among the nominees for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year, released Thursday.

The duo is among 577 graduating student-athletes in Division I, II and III nominated for the award. Schools nominate their athletes for the award, and conferences select up to two from each school. The preliminary list will be narrowed down to 10 athletes from each division, 30 in total. The Woman of the Year award was created in 1991, honoring “female student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves in their community, in athletics and in academics throughout their college careers.” This year’s class of nominees coincides with the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

So Penn decided to insult all its female swimmers by nominating a man – a tall hulking man with enormous shoulders, at that – Woman of the Year. Penn might as well spit in their faces.

Jamal who?

President Joe Biden bumped fists with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman when the two men met for the first time in Jeddah on Friday, effectively putting an end to his efforts to shun the Saudi leader.

“Yo, buddy. That whole cutting up Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw thing is water under the bridge.”

The low-key greeting underscored the tense circumstances of the trip, with Biden seeking Saudi promises to help lower oil prices, but wanting to avoid any appearance of being too friendly with Prince Mohammed, 36, whom he’d vowed to ostracize for the 2018 killing of columnist Jamal Khashoggi. 

Look, we need the oil, ok? What are we supposed to do, figure out how to manage without it? Be realistic!

The chairman of the US House intelligence committee, a Democrat, wasn’t buying it.

“If we ever needed a visual reminder of the continuing grip oil-rich autocrats have on US foreign policy in the Middle East, we got it today,” Representative Adam Schiff tweeted. “One fist bump is worth a thousand words.”

Torturers on the one hand, climate change on the other – our hands are tied. Tied, I tells ya.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Split the girl.

Local Ohio news outlets: Pregnant 10-year-old is forced to go to Indiana for an abortion because it can’t be done in Ohio

Conservatives: This can’t be true! This story is false!

Glenn Kessler, WaPo “fact checker”: Hmm, yes, this story seems very dubious, where is the criminal charge against the rapist? (Because we all know that all rapes result in criminal prosecutions) And this doctor is an activist, because she performs abortions, unlike GOP state officials, who are objective and trustworthy.

Local Ohio news outlets: Uh, yes, it’s true, we attended the rapist’s arraignment today, where were you guys?

Kessler: Hm. Well. Nevertheless. It’s all about ethical practices in journalism.

Liberals: Excuse me, can we get back to talking about how this is exactly what forced birth assholes have spent 50 years trying to bring about? It happened, and it’s going to happen again and again and again!

Jon Turley: Oh, don’t be silly. States aren’t going to go after doctors for terminating the pregnancy of a 10-year-old

State AGs: We’re totally going after this doctor and any others.

Forced birth advocates: We’re totally banning abortions for 10-year-olds

NY Times: Today’s hot topic in the abortion debates — did Ohio journalists err in trusting the word of a doctor?

It’s been quite a week. Can’t wait for happy hour, I need a drink.

Always be sure to fact-check the rapes. Bitches lie, you know, especially when they’re ten years old. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler was on the case:

This is the account of a one-source story that quickly went viral around the world — and into the talking points of the president.

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a right to abortion, has led a number of states to quickly impose new laws to restrict or limit abortions. Ohio was one of the first, imposing a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape and incest.

On July 1, the Indianapolis Star, also known as the IndyStar, published an article, written by the newspaper’s medical writer, about how women seeking abortions had begun traveling from Ohio to Indiana, where less restrictive abortion laws were still in place. “Patients head to Indiana for abortion services as other states restrict care,” the article was headlined.

That was a benign headline. But it was the anecdotal beginning that caught the attention of other news organizations. The article said that three days after the June 24 court ruling, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, Caitlan Bernard, who performs abortions, received a call from “a child abuse doctor” in Ohio who had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio, “the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care,” the Star reported.

We get several more paragraphs on the lack of corroboration for this story, and at the end he sums up:

This is a very difficult story to check. Bernard is on the record, but obtaining documents or other confirmation is all but impossible without details that would identify the locality where the rape occurred.

With news reports around the globe and now a presidential imprimatur, however, the story has acquired the status of a “fact” no matter its provenance. If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding.

Below that there’s an update saying the story has been confirmed.

Fact checking is obviously a good and necessary thing, but it’s not equally obvious why Kessler saw fit to single out this one for an actual story.

Yes, journalism is, among other things, an accumulation of facts, but it’s a lot of other things too. It’s a choice of what to cover, for instance, and a choice of how to cover it, and sometimes even a questioning of reasons for covering it.

H/t Screechy Monkey

This may be the stupidest ever.

Here’s your daily reminder that the universe is made of custard.

Here’s your daily reminder that sheep have 47 legs.

Here’s your daily reminder that Thomas Jefferson got a PhD in astrophysics at Stanford.

Here’s your daily reminder that it takes 5 hours to walk from Boston to San Diego.

In short, no, not everyone gets abortions. Let’s break this down to make it easy to grasp: there’s a whole large category of people who can’t get abortions, so that’s those people off the list right at the start. Here’s the funny thing: they’re roughly half of all people, so our tweeter made quite a big mistake!

Ok so roughly half of all people – men – can’t get abortions. Nor can either sex before puberty, for that matter, so the category of people who can get them (leaving aside for the moment whether they do or not) is post-puberty females.

And then there’s another big category, which is women who are happy to be pregnant, and thus don’t need or want abortions unless there’s a serious medical issue.

So who gets abortions? Women and girls who want or need to stop being pregnant and have access to abortions. It’s a pretty small fraction of everyone really.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The genderist version of the German-Russian Non-Aggression Pact.

Getting clear definitions of these concepts is like nailing jello to the wall; that’s intentional. That nobody on the genderist side seems to care is interesting.

Indeed it is. It’s particularly interesting when the insouciance is coming from skeptic or atheist communities which up till now have been laser-focused on the weakness of poorly-defined concepts shoring up elaborate edifices of practice.

“Homeopathy works because (garble garble) … okay, whatever, the point is that it works.”

“God exists as (garble garble) … okay, whatever, the point is that He exists.”

“The ‘gender’ in ‘gender identity’ means (garble garble) … okay, whatever, the point is that trans people just want to be accepted as who they truly are.”

There are two common apologetic arguments based on the needs of the believer. The first is that the need of the believer to believe is good reason to think their belief is true. CS Lewis liked this one. The world fits together. We don’t have thirst without water to slake it; the desire for God could not exist without a God to fulfill the desire. Yeah.

The second apologetic is that the need of the believer to believe is good reason to play along with the belief. People who go to psychics who claim to talk to the dead are weak, damaged, and grieving. If they find some comfort here, why take it away from them? They can’t handle the truth. Stop investigating, stop talking. And again— uh huh.

I see both Arguments from the Needs of the Believer being used in transgender doctrine by those who reject them in other contexts. The strong desire to be the opposite sex means that person must actually be the opposite sex. Forget the definitions. No better way to account for it. And given how vulnerable, marginalized, and needy trans people are, why are we blathering on about consistency and coherency? What about compassion?

It’s possible that the (garble garble) doesn’t seem to bother them because something diverted the thought process into an emotional journey: it’s better to be nice than right. Sure.

Global hotting is real.

Residents and holidaymakers have fled towns and villages in France as fires are whipped up by high winds and tinder-dry conditions in several countries in Europe. More than 10,000 people have been forced to leave the south-western Gironde region in the past few days.

Dozens of fires are burning in Portugal and Spain where temperatures have surged above 40C. At least 281 deaths in the two countries were linked to the heatwave.

Meanwhile the cruise ships arrive and depart, the planes take off and land, the cars zoom, the container ships circle the globe.

Temperatures were set to top 40C in large areas of western Spain as well as Portugal on Friday. At Pinhão in the north, 47C was recorded on Thursday, a record high for July in mainland Portugal.

113F. It was 108F here last summer, and that was a record high.

Scum of the earth:

The 10-year-old Ohio girl who crossed state lines to receive an abortion in Indiana should have carried her pregnancy to term and would be required to do so under a model law written for state legislatures considering more restrictive abortion measures, according to the general counsel for the National Right to Life.

Would be forced to in other words. A female child would be forced to push out a baby: rape times a million.

Jim Bopp, an Indiana lawyer who authored the model legislation in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, told POLITICO on Thursday that his law only provides exceptions when the pregnant person’s girl’s life is in danger.

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday.

The reason is that some people are evil enough to think a pregnancy is worth more than the female child it’s in. Actual living breathing already here girls are worth nothing except as baby-extruders, but pregnancies are worth everything, including torturing and risking the life of a female child. Existing girl children are trash to be used, but their pregnancies are infinitely valuable.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on To pronoun or not to pronoun.

If “non-binary” has any meaning at all, that meaning should utterly undercut the current notion of “trans”…

This has always been a marriage of convenience to bolster numbers. It’s like the genderist version of the German-Russian Non-Aggression Pact. The “trans umbrella” has so many identities that, if you look for very long at all, are completely contradictory. NB and gender fluid identities both go against the concept of gender as a fixed, internal sense of whatever it’s supposed to be a sense of, but in different ways. Nonbinary identities supposedly stand outside the male/female dichotomy. But how does that work with the trans/cis dichotomy? Meanwhile, gender fluidity involves moving back and forth between the male/female within the binary. How do you reconcile those with each other? How does that work? The same goes for agender or gender neutral. The whole “trans” and “cis” thing depends on everyone having a fixed gender identity which aligns, or doesn’t, with their “assigned” sex. To admit of a group of people who are outside, or beyond, or who slip back and forth kinda buggers up the whole idea. Getting clear definitions of these concepts is like nailing jello to the wall; that’s intentional. That nobody on the genderist side seems to care is interesting. As I noted elsewhere, if genderists were really interested in how this all works, they’d be conducting research on it before going all in on cutting kids up and pumping them full of drugs and hormones. But research and study might just end up showing there’s no there there, only wishful thinking and religious obscurantism.

Not that it’s ever likely to happen (as the unrelenting weight of Reality is likely to make the whole enterprise implode beforehand), but I could see further schisms, purity spirals, and purges if trans activists ever had enough power to be able to eject and discard those supposedly allied “identities” once they were no longer needed. We’ve seen this happen with the L,G, and B, who have been supplanted by the T in many groups and associations, their mission statements bent or rewritten in favour of the arrivistes. Given a chance, the rest of the alphabet soup would be dropped or dumped by the T too. The “validity” of NB “identities” is already a perfunctory, tail-end afterthought in the “TWAW, TMAM” mantra. Do so-called “intersex” or “two-spirit” people get anything at all in return for the instrumentalizing forced-teaming of trans activists? From the former, trans ideologues appropriate the “assigned at birth” terminology; from the latter, the ability to add “white, racist colonialism” to the arsenal of epithets available for use. How long would these other tag along “identities” be tolerated in the circles of trans power once they had outlasted their usefulness?

Trump shares his hearfelt sorrow at the death of one of his wives, the, the, you know, the blondy one, the foreign blondy one.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission seems confused (or worse).

Official bodies saying that knowing people can’t change sex is a “controversial belief” when it’s just a humdrum obvious known by everyone fact. Official bodies saying that in some circumstances it may be lawful to limit how “men are not women” is expressed. I await the heavy hand of the law falling on my shoulder because I’m aware that men are not women, and just typed the words. Julie Bindel should expect “consequences” for uttering the “controversial” “belief” that men are not women.

These people make me want to puke.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Gay men seeking abortions.

I detect a strong tone of bullying subjugation in HRC’s statement. I could be wrong, but I doubt other groups’ advocacy orgs are putting out tweets with such wording that could be interpreted as claiming ownership over abortion rights. But that’s par for the course for the gender movement: its objective is to annex and then dismantle anything that has to do with biological sex. First, they took over gay rights orgs, which, save for LGB Alliance, have been completely assimilated by the Gender Borg and are now overtly hostile to actual homosexuals like me. Now it’s abortion’s turn.

Any marginalized group that counts women within its population has an overlap with abortion rights, so of course it’s reasonable that advocates for those groups would state an allegiance with abortion rights. In that sense, abortion rights are African American women’s rights, disabled women’s rights, women labourers’ rights. But because abortion is centrally about biological sex, gender lobbies see this issue as a threat and a territory that must be conquered. It’s not an allegiance; it’s a hostile takeover, and that shows in the wording these groups are using. Abortion can’t be seen as about women’s rights because sex must never be acknowledged, so abortion must be seen as inseparable from and central to the gender movement instead. And look how far they’ve already gotten: by now almost no one will dare use the words “woman” or “women” when talking in public about abortion rights, thereby putting the concept of people’s made-up gender identities firmly in the centre and pushing biological sex off to the side in terms of which people are most affected by abortion restrictions. Abortion rights are LGBTQ+ rights, NOT women’s rights. By omitting the word women altogether, the emphasis is shifted.

A few years ago, before Graham Linehan got mired in the gender mess, he and his wife Helen were deeply involved in Ireland’s Repeal The Eighth abortion referendum campaign, and he’s talked about how puzzled he was when the people with the megaphones at pro-choice rallies started including “…and trans women are women!” in their otherwise strictly abortion-related slogans and speeches. That was only the beginning.

Resistance is futile.