Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on These questions take on new urgency.

Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?

What a leading way to put it. No, women won’t all have a “shared set of adventures and exploits.”

What we will share is the fundamental fact of existence in a female body as opposed to the other kind.

From that it follows that the vast majority of us will share at least some experiences unique to women. Menstruation, for example. The possibility of pregnancy. Pregnancy itself, and childbirth. From that follows the sociopolitical consequences of being female, which vary quite a lot by nation, ethnicity, and class but consistently over the past few millennia have meant subordination to those other people–the male-bodied ones.

Why have women historically been seen as subordinate, inferior, the second sex? It ain’t because we share “a set of adventures and exploits.” Biology, evolutionary psychology, and history all converge on an answer: It’s because we’re the ones who have the babies. We’re the ones who have the babies and males are the ones who want to the babies we have to be theirs. Add in the fact that we’re smaller and therefore can be bullied and the origins of male supremacist social structures are not hard to trace.

I doubt that chimps believe that females are inferior to males, but the males are dominant. (Bonobo females’ dominance over males is collective, not individual–sisterhood can indeed be powerful.) Our species developed language and our peculiar narrative tendency and then invented stories to account for a pre-existing state of affairs. Probably. (I’m skeptical about Golden Age tales of peaceful Matriarchal civilizations and Noble Savages living in perfect equality with one another and harmony with Nature.)

I’m oversimplifying. I could be wrong. But you don’t have to have an amateur interest in primatology and evolutionary biology to notice that there are some profound physical differences between the sexes, and that these differences have consequences. It strikes me, not for the first time, that people like Carol Hay, for all their “sex positivity,” must live in profound alienation from their bodies.

This reads like parody but apparently isn’t. Dear god.

I’ll just quote the rest to make things simple.

And here’s the abstract: Who counts as a woman? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?

The relatively recent visibility of and sensitivity to the experiences of trans people gives us new reason to return to questions that feminists and other gender theorists have been grappling with for decades.

These questions take on new urgency in light of the increasing violence and discrimination trans people face across the world—in one of the most recent instances of this discrimination, for example, Ukrainian trans women are reportedly being denied passage out of the country, despite their legal status as women and the imminent danger they face at the hands of Russia’s transphobic policies, because they are being misgendered as men.

What, and Ukrainian women are having a fucking picnic??! And Ukrainian men are having a fucking picnic having to stay behind and fight to defend their country??!

According to the account I defend, womanhood is best understood as a family resemblance concept. I propose a normative reading of this view that recognizes that decisions about which features are taken to make up paradigmatic cases of womanhood are fundamentally political. This makes possible a conception of womanhood that does not continue to center the experiences of traditionally femme, non-disabled, straight cis white women, while simultaneously making sense of actual historical failures in this regard.

Oh yes those stupid femme, non-disabled, straight cis white women, those Karens, who should all be replaced by men who call themselves women.

I’ll argue that when a TERF complains that trans women haven’t had the same experiences as “real” women who were assigned female at birth, what she’s really saying is, “Trans women haven’t had the same experiences as women like me.”

Very academic, calling women “TERFs.” She might as well call us doo-doo heads.

If 30-plus years of intersectional feminism has taught us anything, it’s that this is precisely the move that feminists need to stop making.

Yes but as Aristotle always said, woman doesn’t intersect with penis.

Linda Riley has a venomous hit piece on lesbians at Stonewall.

Two years ago, I came to the conclusion that a single day for lesbian visibility was simply insufficient. We needed, and deserved, more time to shine a light on some of the amazing women in our community, and to celebrate who we are without fear of prejudice, harassment or vilification. As the publisher of DIVA, the leading magazine for LGBTQI women and non-binary people, I wanted to use our platform to create a unique space.

There are no such women. There are no LGBTQI women, there are no LGBTQI men, there are no LGBTQI people. Nobody can be all of those things, so it’s a stupid label, but on the other hand it makes it easier for quislings like Linda Riley to do their quisling work.

Pause for commercial:

I decided to look at extending the day to a week and, with the help of a brilliant team at DIVA Media Group, in less than two years the week has already become an unmissable event in the LGBTQI calendar.

Pay at the cashier.

gathering support from other LGBTQI organisations was fairly straightforward. As a former board member for GLAAD, I was delighted when they became involved, alongside Stonewall, Kaleidoscope Trust, UK Black Pride, Albert Kennedy Trust, LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, the Peter Tatchell Foundation and many others.

These organisations all agree that lesbians need to be given space to be visible and shown to the world on our own terms. For too long, we have been fetishised by the heterosexual male gaze, as little more than the stuff of fantasy. At the same time, a small number of cis lesbians, whose opposition to the rights of our trans siblings has become ever louder and more toxic, have led some to believe that the lesbian community is not an inclusive space.

Lesbians need to be given space to be visible and shown to the world on their own terms but at the same time they have to include men who call themselves lesbians, or be held up for bullying and shunning by this poisonous worm. Yay for lesbians on their own terms as long as their own terms are approved by Linda Riley. Yay for lesbians on their own terms except they’re toxic if they don’t include men.

What a crock of shit.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist on the pronouns campaign, one front in the larger Gender War:

There are two sides in this war. They call each other various names, but we can call them – fairly neutrally – genderists and gender criticals.

The genderists claim that sex doesn’t matter. Whether you’re a man or a woman depends not on your body, but on your inner sense of identity. A male person who says that he is a woman should be treated, referred to – and even thought of – as a woman for all purposes; and vice versa.

Meanwhile, though, the rest of the world will go on treating women the way it always has.

Gender criticals think biological sex does sometimes matter: for healthcare, for safeguarding, for everyday privacy and dignity, for fairness in sport, and so on. They think sex is determined by whether you have a male or a female body, and that it’s no more possible literally to change sex than to change species. 

In other words one could swap genderists/gender criticals for fantasists/realists or loonies/not-loonies.

The attentive reader will have noticed that the “gender critical” viewpoint is made up of commonsense propositions that until about ten minutes ago no sensible person – whether on the political left or right – would have dreamed of contesting. The genderist beliefs are novel, and surprising.

And – this is important – wrong.

So what about pronouns?

This takes us to the manner in which genderist beliefs have been promoted. You can’t defend irrational beliefs with reason. By and large genderists don’t try: instead, their strategy has been to attempt to leapfrog over the usual campaigning, lobbying, arguing, persuading phases of bringing about profound cultural and legal  change, and to pretend instead that the desired outcome is already accepted by all right-thinking people – and to silence dissent by visiting dire consequences on anyone who questions that claim. That, I believe, is the whole reason for the vitriol and toxicity that surrounds this subject. Anyone who points out the absurdity of propositions like “some women have penises” must be howled down as a bigot, shamed, no-platformed, hounded from her job, kicked off her course, etc.

Yes, it’s easy to see how that would work in theory, except for the fact that so few people would be motivated to promote the genderist beliefs in the first place.

Kidding. It turns out way more people than I ever realized are susceptible to this kind of cognitive engineering.

The more insidious part of the strategy is the first part: the pretence that the contentious  propositions that form genderist beliefs are already accepted without question by all educated, right-thinking people. Genderists make determined efforts to weave their claims seamlessly into our language and the fabric of our workplace culture, with the aim of converting contentious claims into the kind of tacit knowledge that doesn’t even need to be stated or formulated. 

And that’s where the stupid “pronouns” come in. Nudge nudge, shape shape, warp warp.

Oh she did, did she.

Days before Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared [in a text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows] to press for Donald Trump to overturn his 2020 election defeat by invoking martial law, new messages show.

Brackets added. MTG didn’t actually appear in a text to Meadows.

“In our private chat with only Members several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call Marshall [sic] law,” Greene texted on 17 January. “I just wanted you to tell him. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next.”

Eleven days after the attempted coup she said that.

Greene – one of Trump’s fiercest far-right defenders on Capitol Hill – also texted Meadows days before the Capitol attack asking about how to prepare for objections to Biden’s win at the joint session of Congress, the text messages show.

“Good morning Mark, I’m here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th,” Greene wrote on 31 December. “I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn’t get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board.”

That text message from Greene, who had not yet been sworn in as a member of Congress, a week before the Capitol attack also underscores her close relationship with the Trump White House and an extraordinary level of coordination to obstruct Biden being certified as president.

In other words an extraordinary level of attempted sedition.

Suzanne Moore on Stonewall’s grotesque desertion of the very people it’s supposed to be for:

Last October it was agreed that Bailey could pursue her claim against her employer and Stonewall for direct discrimination against her gender critical beliefs, as well as indirect victimisation. The case is due to start tomorrow. 

[Now yesterday.]

So what did Bailey do so wrong that has caused Stonewall to complain to her employers? She has done “wrongthink”. She will not swallow the dogma. She believes that biological sex is immutable and that conflating sex with the made up notion of “gender identity” will leave women with no legally enforceable boundaries against men. She does not think womanhood is just a feeling in one’s head. She was not assaulted as a child because of “feelings in her head”. She does not think men can become women because of these feelings. She is concerned, above all, with male violence. 

And for those reasons Stonewall is trying to wreck her life. With friends like these who needs enemies?

Stonewall wrote to her chambers complaining about Bailey’s views. She was a founder of the LGB Alliance, posited as an alternative to Stonewall. Surely gay people have the right to organise politically as they see fit. Some gay people ally themselves to the trans cause, and some don’t. Sexual orientation and gender identity are separate issues. 

Very separate. Very very very separate, and sometimes in conflict.

Any ideology that cannot be questioned is dangerous and yet that is how Stonewall have infiltrated so many of our institutions.

In picking on Bailey they have found a woman who has fought her entire life. Is this really a good look, Stonewall? Trying to destroy a black lesbian? 

We watch agog. Bailey, like any other woman, gay or straight, can think what the hell she likes. Is she really your enemy, Stonewall? Seriously, who do you represent now? 

We know the answer to that all too well.

Never in a million years would you…

But what you would have in a million years, indeed in a few seconds, is a man telling women that men are women if they say they are, and telling women we have to agree with that on pain of relentless bullying, and telling women what we can talk about and how we can talk about it. That’s what you would have. That’s what we do have, and we’re beyond tired of it.

Simon Edge at the Glinner Update starts with Linda Riley’s tweet bashing JK Rowling and moves on to that other bully:

Also yesterday, Owen Jones tweeted that ‘transphobes’ – by which he means people who think sex is real, gender ideology is harmful, and lesbians and gays have the right to organise separately from the trans movement – should be banned from ‘every lgbtq bar’.

“We’re overwhelmingly united behind our trans siblings,” he said cloyingly. “An attack on them is an attack on all of us.”

Solidarity forever blah blah blah. Imagine a workers’ organization saying “We’re overwhelmingly united behind our billionaire boss siblings; an attack on them is an attack on all of us.” Imagine a BLM activist saying “We’re overwhelmingly united behind our white supremacist siblings; an attack on them is an attack on all of us.” Imagine an environmental activist saying “We’re overwhelmingly united behind our ExxonMobil siblings; an attack on them is an attack on all of us.”

The interests, the goals, the claims of trans activists are different from those of lesbian and gay activists, and some of them are at odds with those of lesbian and gay activists. Just pasting the T on at the end and then hammering in a lot of nails doesn’t change that.

This is a community at war with itself – with ex Stonewall insiders Matthew Parris, Anya Palmer, Kate Harris and Simon Fanshawe all saying the charity has become a danger to lesbians and gay men – but where one side is desperate to keep that war a secret.

For example, the LGBT+ Consortium is an umbrella group comprising hundreds of organisations. They can be marshalled to sign joint letters whenever Stonewall asks, and it looks like stunning display of unanimity, with only the hated LGB Alliance in the carpers’ corner.

But it’s more casuistry. You’re only allowed into the LGBT+ Consortium if you support the official line. These organisations form a bloated establishment with a massive vested interest in convincing their funders – overwhelmingly the taxpayer – that they represent their community.

“Their community” that doesn’t exist as a community – “their forced team” is what it is.

More of the great erodification of everything provided the everything belongs to women: “Lesbian visibility week…and when we say ‘lesbian’ we mean everyone.”

Powered by

Diva

Stonewall

There’s your problem right there.

Ready? All strapped in safely? Ok here’s your lesbian visibility week:

Our aim is BOTH TO celebrate lesbians and show solidarity with all LGBTQI women and non binary people in our community. We believe in unity, and lifting up those who are most marginalised.

Their aim is BOTH to celebrate lesbians AND to spit in lesbians’ faces by instantly, I said INSTANTLY, changing the subject to people who aren’t lesbians, especially men. You can have your lesbian visibility week for as long as it takes to say the three words, but then it all gets handed over to the real people.

What the fuck are “LGBTQI women” anyway? How can a woman be lesbian and gay and bi and trans and queer and intersex? And how can “lesbian visibility week” both celebrate lesbians and change the subject to people who aren’t lesbians?

Lesbian Visibility Week aims to show our solidarity with all LGBTQI woman and non binary people in the community, as well as celebrate lesbians. It is essential that Lesbian Visibility Week is a voice for unity and lifts up ALL women, especially those who come from marginalised communities. 

Like for instance men who call themselves women.

There has been a Lesbian Visibility Day since 2008.

Building on this, we want to create a week that recognises, celebrates and importantly supports lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer women across the UK and beyond to be their true selves at work, at home and socially.

They want to create a week that forces lesbians to team with men who identify as women. This is Linda Riley’s claim to fame: expanding the day to a week and forced teaming with men.

I’m seeing people saying Reich is contradicting himself here, but I say he’s not.

The first is just pointing out a fact: the First Amendment limits what government can do, it’s not about everyone else. The second is talking about how the free market works, it’s not about government.

What am I missing?

I think I know this one.

I think I know what happened to it, because it happened to me and to lots of other people.

It’s because it was never enough. It was never ever ever enough. More was always required.

It’s almost as if living whatever way felt comfortable was never actually the point. The point turned out to be demanding endless attention and love and hugs and ValiDation. The point turned out to be “center me at all times no matter what.” The point turned out to be to keep ratcheting up the claims of “marginalization” and bigotry and excloosion, while also ratcheting up the threats and insults and misogyny and harassment.

That’s what happened. It turned out this isn’t a social justice movement at all, but a campaign to bully women into submission and make feminism a movement for men who claim to be women.

Trump is in contempt of court.

A New York judge is holding Donald Trump in civil contempt after the state’s attorney general’s office said he did not comply with a subpoena for documents as part of its investigation into the former President’s company.

Judge Arthur Engoron said Trump failed to abide by his order to comply with the subpoena, and that his attorneys failed to show how a search of materials held by Trump was conducted. Engoron said Trump would be fined $10,000 a day until he complies.

He won’t care. He’ll just send more “gimme money”s to his adoring fans and they’ll empty their savings accounts to help him defy the law.

Andrew Amer, with the attorney general’s office, said that Trump has failed to produce “even a single responsive document” for a subpoena that was issued to him in December.

Well if you send just one you’re capitulating to The Man. Trump is a rebel.

His lawyer is saying Trump doesn’t keep records. Yeah right. There’s no need to keep track of where the money comes from and where it goes, it’s all scribbles on a napkin at McDonald’s which then get thrown out with the half-eaten fries.

One for the “humans are a mistake” file:

Forensic doctors carrying out postmortem examinations on bodies in mass graves north of Kyiv say they have found evidence some women were raped before being killed by Russian forces.

Naturally. When you invade a country you obviously have to torture the women before you kill them.

Following the withdrawal of Russian troops from towns and suburbs around the capital, dozens of women have told police, the media and human rights organisations about atrocities they say they suffered suffered at the hands of Russian soldiers. Investigators have heard testimony of gang-rapes, assaults taking place at gunpoint and rapes committed in front of children.

Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Lyudmila Denisova, has officially documented the cases of 25 women who were kept in a basement and systematically raped in Bucha, a town north of Kyiv now synonymous with Russian war crimes. Authorities have warned those cases could be the tip of the iceberg and accused Russian troops of using rape as an instrument of war.

…

Much of the evidence collected by Ukrainian prosecutors will soon be forwarded to the international criminal court (ICC), which has launched an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

Too bad the US won’t be able to help with the investigation. We’re not part of the ICC. What that says about us I’ll leave you to contemplate.

How sweet.

So how is sharing a photo of Allison Bailey marching for LGB rights in San Francisco in 1991 “a vehicle for stirring up hate”? Let alone “more hate”? Let alone “in our community”?

Why doesn’t Linda Riley consider lesbians “our community”? Why doesn’t she consider women “our community”? Why is she spitting bile at JKR for being a fan of Allison Bailey?

Well, we know why: it’s because Bailey doesn’t see men who call themselves lesbians as part of the lesbian community. It remains baffling that some lesbians denounce lesbians who “exclude” men from the lesbian community.

I learned a new thing about Jolyon Maugham’s bullying of the LGB Alliance via an article by Julie Bindel:

Eventually, activists found a way to get to the LGBA. The story is this: LGBA applied for funding to the Arts Council England’s, ‘Let’s Create Jubilee Fund’ for a film about gay men’s lives through the period of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Queens would have been an important record of the history of the fight for liberation from bigotry, prejudice and legal discrimination, and a celebration of gay culture.

In March the Alliance was notified that the application was successful, but then the sharks circled. LGBA was informed by the Arts Council that its charitable status had been under scrutiny and as such would embargo the grant decision. On the same day, the grant was suspended. Yesterday, on the 20^th April, the grant was officially rescinded. LGBA was instructed to return the money.

Much of the hatred displayed towards LGBA is fuelled by The Good Law Project, run by the infamous Jolyon Maugham, who bragged he had clubbed a fox to death whilst wearing his wife’s kimono in 2019. Maugham is a trans-activist who, when the funding for LGBA was announced, tweeted his strong disapproval to his 373,000 followers…

So I found the tweet in question:

What???

It turns out the source was:

That’s a malicious distortion of their meaning. The stupid + at the end of LGBTQ+ is what it is, i.e. a non-specific “et cetera,” which could mean anything…like, sex with children, sex with animals, telling children to Google masturbating animals, and whatever sunshiney item crosses someone’s mind. LGBA’s point is obviously that adding the “+” is a mistake because it’s undefined and therefore nothing is ruled out. LGBA’s point is not to “compare being trans to bestiality.” Jolyon Maugham is such a sleaze.

BBC Live:

The results: Macron beats Le Pen in presidential election

Projections show that Emmanuel Macron has secured a clear victory over far-right rival Marine Le Pen.

Macron sweeps away far-right rival

This is a dramatic victory for the sitting president, and a historic one at that.

Make no mistake, this was Marine Le Pen’s best chance of victory and yet it didn’t happen. Her campaign was slick, her focus on the cost of living chimed with the voters, and she performed well in the big TV duel days ago.

Macron didn’t even enter the election until eight days before the first round, prompting accusations of arrogance. But when he did take part, the voters clearly listened. Even though Le Pen offered tax cuts and no rise in the pension age, they decided his proposals were more realistic and they rejected hers. Softer they may have been, but they were still far right.

Not for 20 years has France backed a president for two terms, and never before has a president been re-elected with a majority in parliament.

Allons enfants.

Oh thank fuck.

Brendan O’Neill is not a huge fan of Grace Lavery’s book.

I have never liked the term male privilege, but it’s hard to know what other term to use to describe a man writing a book about his ‘bellend’ – he uses that word – while fully expecting that everyone will acknowledge his ‘womanhood’ – he uses that word, too. His womanhood is his most ‘cherished’ thing, he says, which I found shocking because I had assumed it was his knob. If male privilege means anything, surely it is the fact that a dude can publish a book whose front cover features a photo of him with a five o’clock shadow and an iffy wig and still demand that everyone refer to him as ‘Miss Lavery’.

It’s male privilege in a dress.

Lavery is an associate professor of English at Berkeley in California. (Jesus Christ.) This book is about his gender transition. It is one of the most misogynistic books I have ever read. The way it talks about women and their bodies is repellent. Lavery tells his doctor he wants ‘titty skittles’ – that is, progesterone supplements to ‘enlarge one’s breasts’. Hot tip for Mr Lavery: women don’t refer to their breasts as titties.

That’s the whole point though. The whole point is to do it better than we do, to set us straight on how to do it, to let us know how boring and lame we are compared to daring witty say it all him. Women are horrible, it’s only trans women who are any good. New misogyny just like the old but with more taunting.

It is testament to both transgenderism’s and porn culture’s degradation of women as people with ‘front holes’ – as people with titties, people who bleed – that men can now openly fantasise about having a ‘pussy’ and be praised as progressive for doing so. The dehumanisation of women as ‘pussy’ is the prerequisite to their exploitation in pornography and the means through which their biology can be caricatured and appropriated by men who claim to be women. Porn and trans activism, as Mr Lavery perhaps unwittingly demonstrates, are not unrelated.

Very wittingly, I think. Lavery’s whole thing is being more “paradoxical” and “ironic” and “startling” than the next guy.

Of course he has a pop at Mumsnet. The woke set’s loathing of Mumsnet is such a red flag. They just cannot believe that mothers and other ordinary women are allowed to associate freely and have critical conversations. Shouldn’t they be in the kitchen or chestfeeding their kids? Lavery goes on to say that there is ‘something stranger’ underneath ‘the whole phenomenon of British gender-criticals’ – he calls it ‘the problem [of] leaky boobs and the school run, the revenge of feminist grievance against feminist pleasure’. The ‘sourness’ of these harridans who dare to say men aren’t women represents a ‘loathing of the trans woman as a figure of pleasure embodied’, he says.

Nah not a figure of pleasure embodied, a figure of leaving all the cooking and dishwashing and laundry and childcare to that other person in the house, the one who doesn’t matter.

I was tempted to refer to Lavery as the Rachel Dolezal of transgenderism. But actually, he’s far worse than Dolezal. To be like Lavery, Dolezal would need to go on endlessly about the glistening skin of blacks, and how she longs to achieve their full-lipped look, and how she longs to see and grasp those famous full-bodied black cocks. If Dolezal did any of that, we would recognise it instantly as vile racism. So why are so few people willing to call out the sexism of trans activists who believe that blokes can become women simply by announcing that they are women, simply by imagining that they have a pussy, simply by taking some titty skittles so that they can look like those sluts in porn films? Ms Dolezal is white, and Mr Lavery is a man. We just have to start saying this now, out loud.

Been saying it out loud, for years now.

Kathleen Stock on the importance of being “queer”:

And what else is a a female-led theatre company fronted by a white woman and founded in a middle-class Cambridge Sixth Form to do these days, except announce itself as “queer”? Unlike being black or disabled, saying you are queer or do queer work is a completely unverifiable proposition. It’s entirely compatible with being straight and conventional in practice – but at the same time, it apparently gives you endless cultural clout. So it would be kind of stupid not to, no? I’m not saying that anyone deliberately sets out to mislead people here. I’m saying that you probably come round to thinking of yourself that way, little by little, and the world starts to reward you for it.

Emphasis added. See also: Laurie Penny and a thousand more like her.

This is very performative, very self-refuting, very watch this backfire, very corroborative of the thing it claims to deny. This is Trump telling a crowd he’s not stupid, and demonstrating how stupid he is by doing so.

I think it’s diagnostic, that inability to talk in complete sentences, the helpless self-interrupting whenever a new thought intrudes. Isn’t it? That’s not normal cognitive functioning, surely. He’s trying to tell the adoring crowd how not stupid he is, but he can’t not interrupt himself to say who “Doc Ronny” is and then to interrupt that to say he’s now a Representative and then to interrupt that to say how many votes he got – fifdee doo – and so on and on. He’s too stupid to realize how he’s coming across, too stupid not to reveal his own stupidity second by second.

Business Insider

During Saturday’s rally in Ohio, Trump detailed once again that he aced a cognitive test in 2018. “I don’t like being called stupid,” Trump said. 

…

The test Trump referenced is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. It is not an IQ test but rather a tool to spot early signs of dementia and other memory issues. 

Person woman man camera tv.