What’s wrong with this headline.

Too easy, I know. BZZZZZZZZZZT. Lia Thomas is not a female athlete. Lia Thomas is a male athlete systematically, and laughing all the way, cheating female athletes out of the prizes and rewards they’ve earned.

After that we get a row of three photos: woman, Thomas, woman. Thomas’s photo is bigger and, all too obviously, so is Thomas. Those shoulders.

We’re told about Olympic runner Helen Stephens, who was framed as not girly enough in the 1930s. Definitely interesting, but nothing to do with Lia Thomas – the opposite of Lia Thomas.

While much has changed for female athletes since Stephens’ day, suspicion surrounding their gender and sexuality — from offensive remarks to sex verification tests — remains. Several historians argue that the heated debate surrounding transgender college swimmer Lia Thomas, whose record-breaking season has thrust her unwillingly into the national spotlight, is a continuation of that century-old legacy.

But it isn’t, because he’s a guy.

Decades after Richards became the first, only a handful of trans athletes have managed to break sports barriers. In 2019, track star CeCé Telfer became the first openly trans person to win an NCAA title. And last year, New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard became the first out trans woman to compete in the Olympics, where she did not win any medals. Fewer than 30 trans athletes have competed openly in the NCAA, according to the LGBTQ sports publication Out Sports, and few have made headlines. 

But men aren’t “breaking barriers” by transing their way into women’s sports, not even if they’re genuinely dysphoric and have “transitioned.” It’s not a barrier in the sense of arbitrary and unreasonable for women’s sports to exclude men, including men who are trans. Women need their own sports because of sexual dimorphism, which puts women at a huge disadvantage. It’s not a good thing or an unjust barrier falling that CeCé Telfer won an NCAA title or that Laurel Hubbard cheated Samoan women out of the Olympics.

She’s on the plane and the plane is in the air.

War crimes continue.

In the last few hours, [Mariupol] city officials have told the BBC that a theatre in the city where more than 1,000 people had been sheltering – taking refuge against the incessant Russian shelling – came under bombardment.

And the continuing bombardment was making it impossible for rescue workers to reach the theatre.

We’ve just heard from the Russian defence ministry, they have denied that they struck this theatre. So again we’re left with who caused what, who is to blame. And in a city which is suffering.

If they did bombard the theatre that’s a war crime. Biden has just told reporters that Putin is a war criminal.

Civilian buildings where people are sheltering from the bombs, and oh yes also hospitals and the like.

Healthcare facilities are becoming a target of war, the World Health Organization has warned, as it says Ukraine’s health system is “teetering on the brink”.

The WHO has verified 43 attacks on hospitals and medical facilities in Ukraine and 46 elsewhere in the world in other conflicts – the highest ever rate of attacks on healthcare, which are illegal under international law.

Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, says “unaccpetable” attacks on healthcare are “becoming part of the strategy and tactics of war”.

One war crime after another.

Hey kids, it’s deplatforming Wednesday!

Still libel if you ask me.

But wait! Excitingly, Julie isn’t even the only one today.

Cancel all the feminist women. Every last one.

On their way, the BBC reports.

British-Iranian nationals Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori are on a plane leaving Iran after being freed, the government has said.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe will be reunited with her husband and seven-year-old daughter, who plans to show her mother new toys when she returns to the UK.

“It’s going to be the beginning of a new life,” Richard Ratcliffe said.

Mr Ashoori’s family said they could now rebuild the foundations of their family with their “cornerstone back in place”.

…

Cuddling his daughter, Gabriella, Mr Ratcliffe told journalists they would really believe the news when they saw “mummy”.

So not quite yet, but close.

Updating to add:

Breaking news –

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian woman detained in Iran nearly six years ago, has been released and is on her way back to the UK.

The 43-year-old was arrested in 2016 and accused of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government, which she denied.

Her MP, Tulip Siddiq, tweeted that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was at the airport in Tehran.

She had been under house arrest and was given her UK passport back this week.

Her husband Richard Ratcliffe, who lives with their daughter Gabriella in Hampstead, London, had campaigned for her release, including by going on hunger strike in October last year.

Mazel tov.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on How to personalise care.

There is a meme (in the classical sense of the word) circulating among some young people, especially young men, that “hard times create hard men, hard men create soft times, soft times create soft men, soft men create hard times”. And this sentiment, while chauvinist and not true in the strictest sense — exigencies of political economy, the natural environment, and ever-present arseholes gaming social systems at those systems’ expense to the arseholes’ personal advantage are almost always at fault for “hard times” — it does reflect a true-ish instinct one gets from the cyclical nature of stability and collapse.

Only a decadent society can collapse, because only a wealthy society can collapse, and only a wealthy society can afford to become decadent. In turn, only a collapsed society can grow out of its ashes and rise to heights where decadence is possible. After the most recent collapse which began with the Great Depression and ended with a hundred million people being immolated across Europe and Asia and Africa for no good reason, our own society has been on an upswing for three generations with only temporary setbacks that have thus far been made up for with higher and higher levels of debt. This upwelling of prosperity and peace has peaked and is now beginning to ebb once more, as conflicts inch closer and closer to the heartlands of the West and we have less and less confidence in our ability to carry our collective debts.

There are social forces at play which we are witnessing get taken over by sociopathic narcissists in real time, whose dogmas are spreading to every corner of influence, where the sociopathic narcissists are sure to follow. We have myopic technocrats bragging openly of effectuating a “Great Reset”, after which “you will own nothing and you will be happy”, once the entire economy is on a pay-as-you-go seigneurial model that resembles nothing so much as feudalism for us with trips to the Moon for them.

Not for nothing, but these fly-me-to-the-Moon billionaires are also busy buying up as much of the world’s most productive farmland as they can, in countries where their money can help them write the rules on how that land is used; during the pandemic, for example, Bill Gates became the world’s largest agriculture magnate. Because, as much as the mid-tier tech-lords and genderists and anti-racists seem to think that food magically shows up at the supermarket and the economic system upon which their fantasy lives are predicated is inviolable, anyone who knows anything about how the real world works knows that land and its cultivation are the true keys to a society’s long-term stability and prosperity.

After the United States, Ukraine has some of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, which are responsible for feeding an enormous number of people in the Old World. That this land is as we speak falling under the control of one of the world’s last powerful gangster statesmen is perhaps not an accident, after Ukraine’s revolution ushered in a government much more amenable to the West than to Russia. As unknowable as Putin himself is, it is possible he understands that everything flows from the food supply; without that, all the social games in the world dissolve into dust.

Without a stable supply of food, in other words, the “hard men” show up with their friends and their weapons and take what they want, until more “hard men” show up to stop them. Perhaps the techno-feudalists know this and will, out of their own sense of survival if not out of the goodness of their hearts, ensure a stable and ample supply of food enough to keep the “hard men” away. But that is a lot of faith to lay in the hands of a few men, who even with the best of intentions can still be quite wrong.

Either way, the view from Germany is getting interesting these days.

Last May, an interview with a woman who founded a company:

Daniella Peri is the Founder of Yoppie, a DTC subscription-based, organic period care and PMS solutions provider. As part of our FemTech Founder series, FemTech.Live interviewed Daniella about her mission to improve menstrual health care.

So Daniella, tell us a bit about yourself and Yoppie.

I’m the Founder and CEO of Yoppie – a FemTech company that enables women to take control of their menstrual health. It’s my one and only experience in the FemTech world.

Yoppie is a DTC subscription-based, organic period care and PMS solutions provider that uses smart tech to enable women to not only personalise and manage their menstrual care but also to better educate themselves while they do it. From convenient product delivery to content personalisation, we’re helping women to sync menstruation with the modern world using a tech-driven approach.

Ok. Sounds slightly unnecessary to me (it’s not that much trouble to buy a box of tampons), but ok. However…someone must have Said Something.

So much for “fem tech.”

Taunty McTauntface.

A few days ago Jolyon Maugham gave the world his views on the Cass report on gender identity services, in great detail and at much length, because he is…an expert on the subject? No, but he plays one on Twitter. The final point he makes is that doing nothing is not doing nothing.

And so on and so on. This will mean “a lifetime of people discriminating against you and sneering at you.” By not giving blockers “you scar someone with that life.” The purpose of blockers is “to stop those changes from happening whilst the teenager reflects, before further medical interventions which are irreversible.”

That’s all true enough. Not giving blockers has consequences just as giving them has. Sure. You could say that about anything. Not setting fire to people has consequences just as setting fire to them has. But his take on it leaves a lot out. He himself is making blockers sound more neutral than they are – he claims that blockers just “stop those changes,” but it’s not like pausing a podcast or stopping in the middle of a walk. Stopping the changes itself has consequences, major ones. It’s not the case that one can just resume them a few years later and all will be as if there had been no pause.

There’s been a lot of discussion of this lately, especially since the Keira Bell case, so he can’t be unaware of it. So he’s framing himself as sounding a note of caution about this dangerous refusal to give puberty blockers, but what about the possibility that it’s at least as reckless to give them? What about kids who think they’re “gender incongruent” for a year or two and then adjust to puberty and realize they’re not? Are they better off if they get blockers or if they don’t?

The tribunal is looking into the issue of the hostile work environment too.

A level of fury. There always is, isn’t there. There’s always a Karen.

And the “belief,” let’s remember, is that a trans woman is not literally a woman. In other words compared with the contrary belief it’s not really a “belief” at all but just the default. It’s the contrary view that’s a belief, but the CGD view is that the default is not worthy of respect while the fanciful contrary view is. Backwards in short.

There’s another argument one could get into here, about whether this kind of humoring is in fact for others’ dignity at all. Does it really enhance the dignity of adults to play let’s pretend with them? Is there any end point? What if adults start saying they identify as snakes, aardvarks, trees, cars, planets? How much pretending must be humored and flattered?

So to sum up:

Boom.

Originally a comment by latsot on You conflate identity and reality.

One of the issues here is that ‘identity’ is such a heavily overloaded word. I mean ‘overloaded’ in the technical, computer science sense: it has lots of different meanings which can be used only somewhat interchangeably. The overall semantics might be broadly the same, but you’ll quickly run into trouble if you use the wrong one.

I think two different senses of ‘identity’ that are relevant here are:

1. Stuff I make up in my head. How I feel. What I want to be seen as. Let’s call this ‘idenniny’.

2. Assertions made about me by the proper official bodies, documents etc. Let’s call this ‘identity’.

So on the one hand, we have documents like my birth certificate which assert various facts about me and on the other, we have unverified things I assert about myself. The clue here is in the word ‘certificate’: the authority is certifying things like my date and time of birth, the name I was registered with at birth, my sex and my parents. If anyone ever needs to know any of those things, the government will certify the facts.

Now, I can change my birth name any time I like. I can suddenly start doing so right this minute without taking a single action other than making that decision. In fact, I have: my birth certificate records my name as Robert, but I absolutely never use that name; it’s always been Rob. That, you’ll have to take my word for because the government doesn’t care what I call myself.

(In fact, that’s not quite true in my case: my driving licence and passport both say “Rob” but since my birth certificate was used to apply for both, there’s a clear chain of evidence that all those documents refer to the same person. But this just illustrates my point even better: the relevant authorities are certifying my identity even though I have two different names.)

It seems to me that the problem in the above exchange is the common one of slipping between identity and idenniny without due care and attention. It’s a very common Motte and Bailey tactic. The problem is not just that a fact such as my sex is material reality when my ‘gender identity’ might be whatever I want it to be, it’s that the legal and social consequences of the two are not the same. That’s why one needs to be certified and the other does not.

Honestly, we should just put computer scientists in charge of everything, we’d soon have it all sorted out.

[In case it is not clear, absolutely do not do this.

It would be the worst disaster you could possibly imagine.]

More from Luke Easley:

“Offensive” he whines. Easy for him. Predatory men aren’t a threat to him.

He understands it now. He’s the HR guy, and was the HR guy when they pushed Maya out, but he didn’t understand that there are predatory men, and that women have to be cautious because there are.

Yes, “presence of TW would make uncomfortable” in some circumstances, because TW=men. Women are allowed to be cautious around men in particularly risky situations. We have to be, for our own safety, therefore we are allowed to be. It’s not “offensive.”

Yes, because some men are predatory. He’s not quick, this man. He doesn’t understand what’s said to him easily.

Excuse me, I have to go smash things now.

Joan Smith on Keir Starmer’s Message to the Estonians:

Employing the forensic skills that made him a QC, he homed in on the most significant issue of the day: “Trans women are women”, he declared. “And that is not just my view — that is actually the law”.

The Estonians may have thought they had bigger things to worry about, what with Putin having his tantrum right next door, but Starmer knew better.

To be cruelly frank, women are being gaslighted. Labour’s leaders say they believe in single-sex spaces, but what does that mean when they also insist that trans women are no different from natal women? Starmer’s own position is a statement of the law as he would like it to be, rather than as it actually is, as the barrister Naomi Cunningham pointed out at the weekend. Cunningham’s area of expertise is the interaction between the 2004 Gender Recognition Act and the 2010 Equality Act, both of which were cited by Starmer during his interview in Estonia. Asked whether the law says that trans women are women, her admirably concise answer was: “No.”

It is true that the GRA can change some people’s legal sex, but it obviously doesn’t change biological sex; it can say they should be treated as women for most legal purposes, but allows that a trans woman can be refused access to a female-only space if there’s a good reason.

Mind you, the idea that there’s such a thing as a “legal sex” that is different from a biological sex is pretty absurd in itself.

This goes to the heart of the mess Labour has got itself into. Starmer and his colleagues have confused a polite fiction — “trans women are women” — with reality. A piece of legislation that was passed almost two decades ago to make the lives of transgender people easier is now being used in a way that was never intended, making safeguarding of vulnerable women and girls difficult if not impossible.

And along with that, and as a result of it, creating a new and dedicated wave of misogyny that’s steadily wiping out all the gains we had made.

There’s just so much daftery in Luke Easley’s replies at the tribunal.

In other words the head of HR at this economics research institution “had a problem” with renewing Maya’s contract because he thought she might possibly “misgender” someone even though she had told him she would not. Apart from anything else it’s just so tiny and childish.

“There was risk.” What risk? That a grown woman might refer to a grown man as “he.” What kind of “risk” is that?

Then there’s an interesting exchange about a report which was deliberately vague but not, you know, deliberately vague as in hiding anything from Maya. Just…you know…that other kind of deliberately vague.

Why…that sounds as if they were hiding something.

And this is the HR guy, remember. It’s his job to make sure Maya is treated fairly…but instead he appears to have decided to his own satisfaction that she was a threat and must be bundled out without a chance to defend herself. HR guy for some but not others.

Lia gonna make history this week.

This week, a male collegiate swimmer who identifies as a woman will compete in the women’s NCAA Div. 1 Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships. Lia Thomas is the top seed in both the 200-yard and 500-yard freestyle races and will make history as one of the first openly transgender athletes in women’s collegiate sports, no matter how he performs.

It’s a crappy kind of history to make though – embarrassing as opposed to glorious. Or not so much embarrassing as shameful. Shameful of him, and shameful of all the people letting it happen. People would get this if it were a huge muscular man “making history” by playing Little League baseball, but somehow we’ve been bullied into pretending Thomas’s grotesque cheating is a glorious moment for justice.

Now, in Thomas’ first year swimming against women, Sports Illustrated describes him as throttling the competition and says Thomas has “set pool, school and Ivy League records en route to becoming the nation’s most powerful female collegiate swimmer.”

Except for the “female” part. He won’t actually be setting any records at all.

One USA Swimming official has resigned in protest.

Cynthia Millen made the decision late last year after learning that Thomas was competing in women’s meets. She describes being stunned after working for years to ensure athletes had optimal and fair conditions in which to compete.

“I thought, ‘This is wrong. This betrays all of this fairness,'” she told CBN News. “I mean, if a swimmer was wearing an illegal swimsuit we would tell the swimmer ‘go change your swimsuit. That’s not the right fabric. It’s giving you an advantage.'”

Details matter, except just this one little tiny one…

Wait though. Hold the phone. We may have a case of corpsephobia here.

Corpsegender is a xenogender so surely Luke Easley is violating his own principles.

His view.

But then Luke Easley is denying Maya’s reality, and not only Maya’s but many other people’s too, many many many other people’s. Furthermore he’s denying an objective, material, factual reality, and furthermore again he’s denying an objective reality that is at the root of the fundamental human inequality, that between women and men. That’s a lot of reality-denial for a guy who wants to banish women for denying an eccentric new fantasy-based “reality” about being Born In The Wrong Body.

Life under Russian occupation:

Russian soldiers patrol the streets of Berdyansk in cars and armoured vehicles marked with the “Z” symbol that denotes the Russian occupying force.

Local government officials in this city in southern Ukraine, which has been controlled by Russian troops for the past two weeks, have been kicked out of their offices, and the local radio station plays Soviet ballads and Russian pop songs, interspersed with excerpts from Vladimir Putin’s speeches and news items about Ukraine being “liberated from Nazis”.

Many towns in southern Ukraine are already under Russian occupation.

In Berdyansk, a port city to the west of Mariupol with a population of a little over 100,000, the majority of city councillors have remained loyal to Ukraine. They continue work to run the city, in defiance of the Russian occupation. However, the Russians may be about to transition to more violent methods.

In nearby Melitopol, the similarly defiant mayor was reportedly kidnapped by Russian soldiers on Friday night, marched from his office with a bag over his head, and has not been heard from since.

The Nazis are who now?

It seems the Russian army expected large segments of the population in places like Berdyansk and Melitopol to welcome the Russian army as liberators, as happened in 2014 in Crimea.

“For years they have been lying to themselves that people in Ukraine were supposedly waiting for Russia to come,” said the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a video address released over the weekend. “They did not find collaborators who would hand over the city and the power to the invaders.”

…

“Of course, there are some fans of the ‘Russian world’ among the population, but every day they are fewer and fewer. People can see that the ‘Russian world’ is not what Russian propaganda promises. It’s poverty, violence and destruction,” said Anna Ukrainska, a schoolteacher in Berdyansk.

But we were told Putin’s a great guy.

From the Maya Forstater tribunal today [LE is Luke Easley, a Vice President at the Center for Global Development]:

It’s astounding stuff. This isn’t some random young “activist” on Twitter, it’s an executive at an economic research organization. This is adult world, yet the executive thinks identity is reality and people with no identity are corpses.

LE replies: “but you can have that discussion without offensive comparisons to Rachel Dolezal.”

What makes the comparison “offensive”?

Why should you have that discussion without the Dolezal comparison?

How, exactly, is Dolezal’s identity different from a trans identity?

It’s unnerving that adult executives are this confused.