Department of really bad analogies department:

JK Rowling has hit back at Vladimir Putin, after the Russian president cited her in a wide-ranging speech that saw him criticise “cancel culture”.

Pause for correction: she hasn’t “hit back”; she has rejected the comparison.

At a televised meeting on Friday, Mr Putin compared recent criticism of the Harry Potter author to that faced by pro-war Russian composers and writers.

“Pro-war” is sloppy too, since the issue isn’t war in general but this specific “war” which is an unprovoked attack by a massive nuclear-armed country on a much smaller one with no nukes.

In the lengthy speech, which was given to the winners of various cultural prizes, President Putin claimed Russian composers and writers were being discriminated against.

“They are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country,” he said.

No we’re not. Tolstoy and Turgenev remain on our shelves, Chekhov plays still fill theaters, Balanchine is still an influence on ballet. We wouldn’t dream of canceling them, it’s Putin we’d like to cancel.

Rowling’s response:

So the thing is, the wife of a Supreme Court justice tried very hard to overturn the presidential election last year, which is…kind of criminal? Probably impossible to prosecute but not therefore legit? Criminalish?

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful [Mark] Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

…

Trump spoke publicly during this period about his intent to contest the election results in the Supreme Court. “This is a major fraud on our nation,” the president said in a speech at 2:30 the morning after the election. “We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

But of course he was lying about that; there was no fraud. Trump on the other hand pursued the fraudulent claims that the election was stolen. It’s all very scuzzy.

In her text messages to Meadows, Ginni Thomas spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and congressional Republicans who had resisted arguments that the election was stolen.

What “hard line”? Like, bullying, pressure, coercion? Threats? Punishment? What? What right does this person have to urge a White House official to coerce staff to overthrow an election?

It’s interesting how…commonplace, trashy, unintelligent it all is. She comes across as barely literate and shockingly credulous. Just another Fox News oversharer.

Cultural differences.

She says, not taking herself at all seriously, not bragging at all, not boasting about how self-deprecating she is, not accusing other people of what she’s doing herself.

I see this claim a lot, in fact: the claim that people in the UK are massively self-deprecating. It’s a self-defeating claim, because it’s self-flattering. You can’t convince us how self-deprecating you are by bragging about how self-deprecating you are.

It seems Clarence Thomas’s wife plotted with Mark Meadows to help Trump steal the election. That’s interesting.

Jane Mayer in the New Yorker in January:

Many Americans first became aware of Ginni Thomas’s activism on January 6, 2021. That morning, before the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., turned into an assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people, she cheered on the supporters of President Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “love maga people!!!!” Shortly afterward, she posted about Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech. Her next status update said, “god bless each of you standing up or praying.” Two days after the insurrection, she added a disclaimer to her feed, noting that she’d written the posts “before violence in US Capitol.” (The posts are no longer public.)

Later that January, the Washington Post revealed that she had also been agitating about Trump’s loss on a private Listserv, Thomas Clerk World, which includes former law clerks of Justice Thomas’s. The online discussion had been contentious. John Eastman, a former Thomas clerk and a key instigator of the lie that Trump actually won in 2020, was on the same side as Ginni Thomas, and he drew rebukes. According to the Post, Thomas eventually apologized to the group for causing internal rancor. Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and a co-author of “Sorcerers’ Apprentices,” a history of Supreme Court clerks, believes that the incident confirmed her outsized role. “Virginia Thomas has direct access to Thomas’s clerks,” Ward said. Clarence Thomas is now the Court’s senior member, having served for thirty years, and Ward estimates that there are “something like a hundred and twenty people on that Listserv.” In Ward’s view, they comprise “an élite right-wing commando movement.” Justice Thomas, he says, doesn’t post on the Listserv, but his wife “is advocating for things directly.” Ward added, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”

The January 6 Committee has those texts.

These text messages, according to sources, took place between early November 2020 and mid-January 2021. Thomas recently revealed that she attended the pro-Trump rally that preceded the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, but says she “played no role” in planning the events of that day.

The text messages, reviewed by CNN, show Thomas pleading with Meadows to continue the fight to overturn the election results.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” Thomas wrote on November 10, 2020.

It’s all very dangerous, and horrifying. It’s also very dumb. This great president? Trump? That dimestore bully who can’t utter an adult sentence? But very dumb can be just as lethal as brilliantly Machiavellian, so these stupid pipsqueaks are no less dangerous for being thick as a plank.

There was a Woman’s Place UK meeting in Manchester tonight. Apparently the usual happened.

Of course there were men with megaphones outside. Can’t let women talk unopposed.

Yglesias is really making me cross, I must say.

Come on. This is not primarily (or secondarily and you could go through quite a lot more numbers) an issue of linguistic change. The word is not some relatively unimportant vocabulary item, it’s the word that names the female half of the set of human beings, the half that is the source of all human beings. That’s what matters about it. The fact that “language changes over time” is not central to this controversy and he must know that perfectly well.

Mar nails it.

Yet another man telling us yet again that we have to accept the “new” meaning of the word that names us. Language changes, you fools! Live with it!

Funny how he’s not talking about people with XY chromosomes. Funny how people like him always know which people to lecture and bully.

The BBC has a long piece about life on the front lines in Kharkiv:

Russia invaded at 05:00 on 24 February. The night before, 22-year-old Vlad and his brother-in-arms Mark, also 22, were at a fellow private’s wedding. Columns of Russian tanks, howitzers, armoured vehicles and troop transports rolled across the border, just 40km (25 miles) away. Despite the long build up of Russian forces, the move was a shock – Ukrainian troops scrambled to defend the city.

When they learned of the attack, Vlad and Mark joined their battalion – the 22nd Motorised Infantry – and headed straight to the front lines. They have been there ever since. I have visited them there twice on the city’s northern edge – a once pleasant suburban neighbourhood, which has now become a muddy battlefield strewn with corpses and burned-out Russian tanks and vehicles.

It’s so easy, and disturbing, to picture – a suburb just outside the city, suddenly a war zone.

On that first day, one group of Russians made it into the centre, but were repelled after three days of hard, bloody fighting – with heavy casualties on both sides. The Russians were forced out beyond Kharkiv’s edge.

A month on, while Russian missiles still strike at the city centre and at least half the 1.4m population have fled, there are neighbourhoods that remain untouched.

But, the city’s eastern and northern residential neighbourhoods, which were largely intact when I arrived here three weeks ago, are unrecognisable. A tree has an unexploded Russian shell in its base; an apartment block has a 500kg bomb resting on its roof – if it had detonated, the whole building would have been brought down.

Mark and Vlad keep this grimness of war from family ears on the calls home they make most most days, just a couple of minutes each to mothers and girlfriends. So there is no mention of the dead bodies at the back door and in the next garden, no mention of the colleagues killed by Russian shelling, or of the tank commander who died the previous day. And nothing that could reveal operational details.

There were expectations that the invasion of Britain would be like that – village by village and town by town, with the local people resisting to the bitter end.

The Ukrainian soldiers might have it rough, but the Russians seem to have been particularly unprepared for anything other than the shortest possible campaign in Ukraine. The corpses I have encountered in the snow have been poorly dressed for a winter campaign, and Ukrainian soldiers say they found the most meagre of rations with them.

Now that is truly startling, given the fact that it was the Russian winter that foiled both Napoleon and Hitler. How ironic if Putin ends up being the Napoleon Q. Hitler of Ukraine.

A purported intercepted phone call, along with Western intelligence reports, may provide some of the answers. It is from a Russian commander in Mykolaiv, south of Lviv in western Ukraine, to his superiors on 11 March. It was released by Ukrainian officials and has not been independently verified. It paints a picture of Russian misery and incompetence in the Russian campaign that both the US Pentagon and the UK’s Ministry of Defence have, in part, detailed.

Troops lack basics such as tents and body armour – and are digging trenches in freezing ground to sleep. Two weeks ago, at another front line position in the city, I asked a young Ukrainian commander if his men slept in trenches. “Why would we sleep here when we can sleep in houses. The Russians sleep in trenches, but we sleep over there,” he said, pointing to a well-heated house filled with men. He explained that the dead Russians had Kevlar body armour but many lacked the armoured plates that make the vest effective.

…

A video of a captured Russian army cookhouse gives an unappetising glimpse of the meals served to troops. Servings piled high with onions and potatoes – all held together with congealed fat. Russian army rations – Meals, Ready-To-Eat (MRE) – with an expiry date of 2015.

An army marches on its stomach, remember?

When I met Mark and Vlad the first time, their commander gave me one of their sturdy green packs of Ukrainian daily rations – a leaving gift, he said.

There were 17 different things inside: wheat porridge with beef; rice and meat soup; beef stew; chicken with vegetables; pork and vegetables; crackers; biscuits; tea bags; coffee; blackcurrant drink; honey; sugar; black pepper; chewing gum; bar of dark chocolate; plastic spoons; moist wipes.

Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all this stuff.

Beardy bro wonders why there are so many more bitches in the UK than in the US and Canada. Fellow beardy bro helps him out.

Turns out it’s because…uh…we have such excellent social support for women in the US compared to the UK. Yes, sure, that’ll work.

Oh no, that’s all too kitcheny, too Mumsnetty, too of the earth earthy for them. Zack can hold a baby but he’s not going to do any of the gruntwork now is he.

Janice Turner noticed a certain…something…about this pleasant chat among beardies.

What would we do without them?

The Women’s Aid statement:

Our roots are in the international women’s rights movement, and our federation developed in the 1970s and 1980s in response to patriarchy, sexism, and male violence against women. Domestic abuse organisations and refuges were originally created by and for women – many of whom were survivors themselves – as spaces free from men for safety, healing, mutual support, and solidarity.

We have been at the forefront of shaping and coordinating responses to domestic abuse for nearly 50 years. We have done so by placing the needs of survivors at the heart of our work and by responding to their needs and many of our staff, board members and supporters are survivors of domestic abuse. Together with our members, we support women and children experiencing domestic abuse, challenge the root causes of violence, and address women’s experience of intersecting and overlapping systems of oppression.

But that was then. Now it’s been decided that the purported needs of men who identify as women come first.

Today, it is still widely acknowledged by expert service providers that single sex, trauma informed spaces are crucial in providing safe spaces for recovery from abuse and violence for women and their children. However, there is a trend towards gender neutral commissioning of services and its abandonment of commissioning the specialist domestic abuse services which are needed for all parts of the population. A consequence of this is that woman-led, single sex services are losing funding, which results in local communities losing the deep expertise and decades of experience these services provided. This is part of a worrying move by commissioners to disregard the sex-specific nature of domestic abuse.

Additionally, there is an ongoing exchange of different views on the inclusion of trans women in single sex spaces including with commissioners, within feminist movements and organisations, and across society at large.

So they decided to do a clarification.

Our members are a diverse group of organisations providing a range of high-quality support and services. Some members offer support to women and children only, while others support all victims of domestic abuse. Most member organisations deliver at least some women only (single sex) services, most commonly through refuge accommodation and groups.

Members routinely use exceptions within the Equality Act 2010 to provide single sex services. They do this because survivors have told them that they and their children experience trauma responses when in contact with males, particularly at the point of leaving an abusive relationship but also for some time afterwards.

Many members provide responsive and effective community support and emergency accommodation to trans and non-binary survivors. A relatively small number of trans women need to access emergency accommodation. Where they do, some member organisations provide this within their accommodation on a case-by-case basis while others provide alternative dispersed accommodation or signpost to other organisations.

So…let’s punish them, yeah?

Women’s Aid said a thing yesterday:

They have both – single sex and those that meet the needs of trans and non-binary people. But oh no, that can’t be allowed – women can’t have anything that’s just for women.

They just said that they have services that meet the needs of trans and non-binary people – but let’s bully them anyway, just for the hell of it.

Scotland Women’s Aid sides with the bullies.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Now that the word’s been taken away. [Title by Sastra]

That’s exactly it! As I keep saying we know for a fact that many of the people now riding the gender ideology bandwagon used to say things that would now get them labeled as TERFs and demonized any time. E.g. I have personally been referred to as both “man” and “him” by “trans allies” who, in the absence of telepathic powers, couldn’t possibly know anything about my “inner sense of self”. I have also heard some of these same people say things like “douches are really bad for women”, talk about abortion rights as a “women’s issue”, refer to vaginas as “lady bits”, talk about the Bechdel Test and how a certain movie only had x “women” in it (when the movie in question didn’t offer any clue about the “gender identity” of these people) etc… etc… The list is practically endless.

This was less than 10 years ago, and even today they keep slipping up and making revealing blunders (e.g. Silent Bob’s taunt about Ophelia’s “overwhelmingly male commenters”) showing that even they are unable to consistently live up to their own demands. When specifically talking about trans issues words like “man” and “woman”, or even “male” and “female”, refer to an inner sense of self etc., but for all other purposes (in good Orwellian fashion) they still talk, think, and act as if they knew perfectly well how to tell a biological female from a biological male. It also goes to show that (despite claims to the contrary) gender critical feminists and their allies are not the ones who have betrayed their cause. My concern was for biological females whatever you prefer to call them ten years ago, and my concern is for biological females whatever you prefer to call them today. The “gender uncritical” side, on the other hand, may still claim to stand up for people called “women”, but that’s just a bait and switch since the people called “women” now are not the same as the people called “women” back then.

Indeed, as I keep repeating ad nauseam, everything about gender ideology ultimately comes down to a “bad pun”. If you have what it takes to detect a pun when you hear it, you know everything you need to know to debunk all of gender ideology: If the person formerly known as Ellen Page is a “man”, then I’m not. You can’t define that person in without defining me out, certainly not while insisting on a non-trivial distinction between “men” and “women”. After all, you have just taken the only thing that ever made me a “man” out of the definition of “man”. On the same note any definition (if they had one) of “woman” designed to make it true that TWAW also makes it no longer true that biological females are “women” in any sense of the word that’s relevant to the issue. Yet the whole justification for why transwomen TIMs need to be included in all the spaces previously reserved for biological females ultimately rests on the premise that both groups are the same in some real sense (as opposed to in name only).

And this explains, once again, why everything about gender ideology is “best left unspecified”. I have often invoked the metaphor of a boat full of holes where the water leaks in. You might be able to plug some of the holes some of the time, but there are too many holes and not enough plugs, so in the end the only way to stop a leak in one place is to remove a plug from somewhere else, thus opening up another leak. If they were upfront about which plug they are using to stop which leak at any given moment, the bait and switch would be obvious to everyone, so the compromise is to keep everything perpetually in the air and try to have it both ways, e.g.:

• For the purpose of making it true that biological females are “cis women”, “cis” simply means “not trans” and doesn’t come with any implicit claims about what’s going on inside other people’s heads. But for the purpose of making it true that “cis women” are whatever they have to be to make “cis women” and “trans women” subsets of the same group, there are distinct and identifiable “feminine” ways of thinking/feeling/behaving/”presenting” (best left unspecified) that both groups supposedly have in common, thus making them the same “kind” of people.

• For the purpose of arguing that TWAW, physical traits are totally irrelevant to “gender”, no body type is any more or less “aligned” with being a “woman” than any other, any body belonging to a person who identifies as a “woman” is by definition a “woman’s body” etc. But for the purpose of arguing for the necessity of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, surgery etc. changing one’s body into a bad imitation of the other (supposedly non-existent or at least totally irrelevant) biological sex is so vitally important that anything other than automatic and unconditional affirmation is “literal violence” or even “murder”.

• For the purpose of making TRAs a legitimate social justice movement “trans rights” simply means “the same kind of kind of rights as everyone else”. But for the purpose of making it true that “TERFs” are “denying the rights” of trans people, “trans rights” means 100 % blind, uncritical, unconditional, unthinking acquiescence to all their demands in advance.

• Etc… etc…

The Guardian frowns on Ron DeSantis for saying that men shouldn’t compete in women’s races.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has issued a proclamation that a resident of his state is the “rightful” holder of the NCAA 500m freestyle title won by trans swimmer Lia Thomas last week.

Trans swimmer? So Thomas isn’t a real swimmer but just identifies as one?

Also, we can do the scare quotes thing too. DeSantis said a resident of his state is the rightful holder of the NCAA 500m freestyle title “won” by trans swimmer “Lia” Thomas last week. Thomas didn’t actually legitimately win that title, because it was a women’s race and he has a male body.

The Guardian does the careful wording thing throughout – generic “trans” instead of trans woman, to make the story less clear; LGBTQ+ to disguise the fact that it’s purely T. It’s sneaky, and it kind of reveals that they know they’re not being honest.

Thomas made history last Thursday as the first known transgender athlete to win a US college swimming championship when she took the title in Atlanta.

Like there. The issue isn’t transgender athlete, it’s intrusion of a man into a women’s competition.

However, her victory caused a backlash among right-wing politicians as well as groups that oppose transgender athletes taking part in women’s competition.

Not “transgender athletes”; specifically male transgender athletes. We object to it because of the obvious grotesque unfairness, which you’d think the Guardian could mention right up front.

DeSantis’s proclamation has no power to change last week’s result and is a continuation of policies in Florida that target the LGBTQ+ community.

That’s probably true, but the fact remains that Thomas should not have been in that race, for the obvious reasons that the Guardian has still not bothered to mention.

In June, he signed into law the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which bans anyone assigned as male at birth from competing in girls and women’s sports.

Yes, and why is that? Believe it or not the Guardian still doesn’t say.

Thomas has received both support and criticism. On Monday, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said transgender athletes pose a risk to the integrity of women’s sport.

Why? How? Guardian still doesn’t say.

“Gender cannot trump biology. As a federation president, I do not have that luxury. It is a luxury that other organizations not at the practical end of having to deal with these issues have,” Coe told the Daily Telegraph. “But as far as I am concerned, the scientific evidence, the peer-reviewed work we have done, those regulations are the right approach.”

Why? How? Guardian still doesn’t say.

We get four more paragraphs, and still it doesn’t say.

It’s quite extraordinary – a whole long piece on the subject and the Guardian never says why anyone thinks it’s unfair for men to compete on women’s teams.

Bozo is saying how much better he would handle it.

“I listened to him constantly using the N-word, that’s the N-word, and he’s constantly using it: the nuclear word,” Trump told Fox Business on Monday.

…

“We say, ‘Oh, he’s a nuclear power,’” Trump said. “But we’re a greater nuclear power. We have the greatest submarines in the world, the most powerful machines ever built …”

Idiot. It doesn’t matter whether we’re “greater” or not because a nuclear exchange with Russia would mean millions of people dead, whole cities destroyed, survivors if any poisoned and helpless.

“You should say, ‘Look, if you mention that word one more time, we’re going to send them over and we’ll be coasting back and forth, up and down your coast. You can’t let this tragedy continue. You can’t let these, these thousands of people die.”

No, that is not what he should say.

When Trump was in power, in 2018, he announced that the US would withdraw from a cold war nuclear weapons treaty which kept US and Russian nuclear weapons out of Europe. It duly did so. 

Very. bad. move.

In office, Trump also demonstrated a cavalier attitude to diplomacy regarding North Korea, another nuclear power.

Though he courted the dictator in Pyongyang, Trump also told Kim Jong-un he had a “much bigger and more powerful” nuclear button and would answer any threats “with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

He also asked the rapper Kid Rock and rocker Ted Nugent what he should do about North Korea.

It’s a mistake to give clowns access to the nukes.

I would share the originating tweet but he’s locked his account and I don’t follow him so I can’t.

He’s not some petulant and barely literate Young Person, he’s an adult academic at Oxford ffs. Yet he too considers it appropriate and useful to say publicly that Rowling is “spreading hatred” and far to the right of Marine Le Pen.

Updating to add:

Emphatic agree, except for the laugh part. It’s more disgusting than funny.

Oh gee golly guess what the Taliban have gone back on their promise to re-open high schools for girls. I thought they were sincere!

The Taliban on Wednesday abruptly reversed their decision to allow girls’ high schools to reopen this week, saying that they would remain closed until officials draw up a plan for them to reopen in accordance with Islamic law.

Well what’s the holdup? They’ve had months, in fact they’ve had centuries.

Tsss. We know what the holdup is. They have no intention of doing any such thing, and never did.

The keeping women in the dirt part is not some frill on the edge of their theocracy, it’s the whole point. It’s crucial. It’s central. It’s what makes them theocrats. Hatred of women is at the very core of their religion. God is a man and women are garbage.

Talk of their re-opening girls’ schools “in accordance with Islamic law” is nonsensical, because Islamic law=women are garbage, and sly crafty lying cheating garbage at that. Women are worthless, and also guaranteed to try to get away with doing their evil slutty womany things. Of course they can’t go to schools, which would be whorehouses where they learned how to get away with doing evil slutty rebellious womany things.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Culture wars in a blender.

There’s something about all this ostentatious word-swapping that gives up the game, that exposes the distinction between the reality which transactivists can see just as clearly as we can, and the performance that they put on. The words are so jumbled at this point: if the words “transgender female” are just as likely to refer to someone like Eliot Page (a female who identifies as a man) as they are to Eddie Izzard (a male who, at least some of the time, identifies as a woman), the activists end up having to fall back on their senses to make out which is which: they look at an image of the person or they suss out from context clues what sex the person is. It’s always there: the fact of a trans person’s true sex needs to be known in order to correctly perform the collusion in the trans person’s fiction.

And now that the words have been taken away, it just emphasizes how easily we can all tell — trans activists just as much as the rest of us — what someone’s true sex is, usually just by looking at them.

I imagine a scenario with a police lineup: four men and one rather masculine-presenting woman are lined up for a witness to identify.

Cop asks the witness, “Is one of these five men the person who robbed you?”

Witness says, “Wait a minute. I see four men and a woman.”

Cop points directly to the woman and says, “No! She’s a man!”

Witness replies, “Well then how did you know which one I was referring to?”

Human Rights Watch on the situation in Mariupol:

Thirty-two civilians who managed to escape southeastern Ukraine’s besieged city of Mariupol last week told Human Rights Watch how they struggled to survive in below-freezing temperatures as Russian forces relentlessly attacked the city. They described men, women, and children sheltering in basements with little to no access to running water, power, heating, medical care, or mobile phone service since the siege began on March 2, 2022.

Russian forces laying siege to Mariupol should immediately ensure that civilians in Mariupol are not being denied access to items essential for their survival such as water, food, and medicine, and should facilitate safe passage to areas under control of Ukrainian forces for civilians who choose to leave the city.

“Mariupol residents have described a freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. “And these are the lucky ones who were able to escape, leaving behind thousands who are cut off from the world in the besieged city.”

It’s a long, detailed report, well worth reading.

All 32 Mariupol residents interviewed by Human Rights Watch described periods of sustained and often intensifying attacks with explosive weapons, from the beginning of fighting on February 24 to the moment they fled the city. Witnesses described attacks that killed and injured their neighbors as they took shelter in their homes, prepared food, and fetched water, throwing them from buildings and piercing them with fragments. The attacks also destroyed and damaged homes, businesses, and critical civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, collapsing and burning buildings in numerous parts of the city. The descriptions of the attacks and their effects are consistent with the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects.

There’s a section about medicine, a section about electricity, a section about food, a section about water and elimination, aka 50 people sheltering in a basement having a single bucket to crap in. There’s a section about leaving.

It’s only girls.

The governor of Indiana governor on Monday vetoed a bill banning transgender females from girls school sports.

The ACLU called it hateful. I guess girls don’t have a civil liberty to have their own sports.

Republican sponsors of the bill said it was needed to protect the integrity of female sports and opportunities for girls to gain college athletic scholarship but pointed out no instances in the state of girls being outperformed by transgender athletes.

Well, good that it hasn’t happened yet, but what if it does?

The law would prohibit K-12 students born male but who identify as female from participating in a sport or on an athletic team designated for women or girls. It would not prevent students who identify as female or transgender men playing on men’s sports teams.

Which shows that it’s not a “transphobic” bill, because if it were it would ban students who identify as female or transgender men playing on men’s sports teams.

Democrats argued Republicans were following a national conservative “culture war” with the transgender girls sports ban.

Why is it conservative to protect women’s sports and liberal to allow them to be damaged? In other words why aren’t Democrats protecting women’s sports with or without Republicans?

“Signing House Bill 1041 into law would have put the lives of our children in jeopardy,” said the state Democratic chairman, Mike Schmuhl. “However, this unnecessary debate has set a tone with kids that being transgender means something is wrong with them.”

See above. It’s not about “transgender”; it’s about males invading female sports.

Yes yes yes apartment blocks and art museums and theaters full of people sheltering from the bombs are being smashed but let’s wring our hands about the trans women who aren’t being allowed to leave Ukraine.

As strange hands searched her body and pulled back her hair to check if it was a wig, Judis looked at the faces of the Ukrainian border guards and felt fear and despair.

…

Judis is a transgender woman whose birth certificate defines her as female.

Legally, there is no reason why she should not be allowed to pass with the thousands of women who are crossing Ukrainian borders to safety every day.

Yet, on 12 March at about 4am, after a long and humiliating search, border guards determined she was a man and prevented her passage into Poland.

…

When Ukraine imposed martial law on 24 February, all men aged between 18 and 60 were banned from leaving the country. Since then, it is estimated that hundreds of Ukrainian trans people have attempted to cross the border. The Guardian has been told by activists and aid workers that, despite their legal status as women, dozens have been mistreated and pushed back at the borders, with many fearing for their lives in the event that Russia’s transphobic regime takes over.

Russia’s transphobic regime. Yes, that’s definitely the standout thing about the Russian regime: its transphobia.

It’s extremely grim that men old enough and young enough to fight are not allowed to leave Ukraine; it’s one of the few ways female people have privilege compared to men. It’s horrible and, cosmically speaking, grossly unfair, but war is like that. War is unfair. I find it simply repulsive that the Guardian bothers to whine about trans women not being allowed to leave in these circumstances. Have sympathy for all the men by all means, but to single out the ones who like to wear skirts is revolting.

The Guardian even took the trouble to take a snap of the trans woman who Wasn’t Allowed To Leave.

Excellent snap. Captures how womany he is. How could the border guards be so cruel?

All those people in the background – they don’t matter, they’re just cis people.