Ah good it’s helpful to have this cleared up by an expert.
So he gets to use all the toilets, right?
More from the expert:
Men who claim to be women must be allowed into all spaces set aside for women on pain of being called unambiguously transphobic by this Montgomerie dude.
Behold EQ7-9:
EQ7 Defend trans and non-binary people’s rights North West regional committee
Congress notes:
1. Government hostility towards Stonewall for its support for trans rights, including disaffiliations by the BBC and government bodies;
2. Government’s refusal to implement Self-ID in the Gender Recognition Act;
3. Government’s failure to recognise non-binary as a legitimate identity;
4. The EHRC’s attempts to delay anti-conversion therapy legislation for trans people and undermine the Scottish government introducing Self-ID;
5. The Tories’ anti-conversion therapy Bill that dangerously presents equivalence between oppressive anti-trans conversion therapy and pro-trans affirmative intervention.
Congress:
a. Congratulates Sussex University UCU for their solidarity with student protests against ‘gender critical’ views;
b. Welcomes the founding of the Feminist Gender Equality Network, committed to opposing transphobia on campuses and more broadly;
c. Resolves to oppose ‘gender critics’ and transphobes promoting ‘gender ideology’ and trying to undermine trans and non-binary people’s rights and promote divisions between women’s and trans people’s rights.
Solidarity forever! Except with you, of course.
And wait, there’s even more.
Julie Bindel on male violence dressed up as “protection” of women:
Sexism is a funny thing, because it presents as its own opposite. Describing women as vulnerable and in need of male protection is actually about male dominance and attempts at ownership.
…
Has [Will] Smith ever spoken out publicly and passionately against sexism? Would he have kicked off if [Chris] Rock had made similar remarks about another woman? Of course not: only his property gets protected. I make no distinction here between Smith and any other posturing, macho male.
Unlike, she adds, commentators who call that racist.
TeenVogue magazine, for example, continued its valiant tradition of promoting anything harmful to young women by publishing a piece that describes criticism of Smith as “weaponized white womanhood”.
Oh lord. Now I’ll have to read that one too.
“Teen Vogue” ffs. What could be more capitalist and status quo-embracing than a fashion magazine for laydeez? Yet they keep putting on this pseudo-radical disguise to tell us girls have to enjoy anal and must embrace their trans sisters and are racist if they criticize male violence.
A Guardian op-ed on the incident actually included the term “performative pearl clutching” to describe white women objecting to violence when perpetrated by a black man. I can only assume that in the imagination of the writer, black women don’t mind violence being perpetrated on black men, so long as black men are the ones doing it, and also that white women should only comment on the behaviour of white men.
Correct, because Karens.
I have heard excuses for both Rock and Smith about how both men come from communities where when words are ineffective in solving a problem, fists can be. I also come from a community where this was the case, but there lies the problem. To varying degrees, so do all women. That community is patriarchy, and how it works is that when women can’t be manipulated into compliance, violence is always an option.
Nailed it. As usual.
It seems this is not a parody.
It sure as hell looks like a parody, wouldn’t you say? But it seems it’s not. The BBC is treating it as not-parody.
Mr Wallis was arrested last year on suspicion of driving while unfit, following an incident where a car hit a lamppost at Church Road in Llanblethian, Vale of Glamorgan.
What car? Driven by whom? What does the incident have to do with Mr Wallis?
“When I crashed my car on the 28th November I fled the scene. I did so because I was terrified,” he wrote.
Oh, so it was his car, and he was driving? Then why did the BBC say “a car” as if owner and driver were both a mystery?
“I am sorry that it appears I ‘ran away’ but this isn’t how it happened in the moment,” he said.
He identifies as not having run away.
Women’s Equality Party is quite overcome with emotion.
The NY Times also obscures the issue in the same old way.
Utah Legislature Overrides Governor’s Veto of Transgender Athlete Bill
No, not transgender athlete, male transgender athlete. Generic “transgender” makes it sound like random cruelty, but preventing the sabotage of girls’ athletics is not random cruelty…unless of course you think girls just don’t matter, or don’t matter as much as the feelings of boys.
The Utah State Legislature voted on Friday to override the governor’s veto and enacted a bill that would bar young transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports, making the state the 12th in the country to enact such legislation.
That would bar young male transgender athletes.
Most Republicans in the Legislature who voted for the override said they were concerned about fairness in girls’ sports, while Democrats who voted against it argued that transgender youth would feel unnecessarily targeted and that their mental health would suffer.
Why don’t Democrats care about girls, and what they feel, and how their mental health would suffer? Genuine question; I have no idea what the answer is.
Look! Over there! Or there! Or how about over there?!
Trump’s 47 millionth frivolous lawsuit:
Former president Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Thursday against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and others, alleging that they “maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative” that his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race.
He’s a funny guy. He can’t open his yap or move his thick fingers without uttering a false narrative.
Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, responded to the lawsuit with a one-word statement: “Nonsense.”
Let me add a second one-word statement. “Horseshit.”
Hmm. Sometimes sniffing out concealed hatred or “bigotry” can accidentally reveal one’s own.
“We do not condone violence.” “Assault is never the answer.” These words have echoed through all of my social media accounts since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making a poor-taste joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Most people agree the slap shouldn’t have happened. But there’s something that feels precious at best, and downright racist at worst, about white people’s reaction to the now-infamous smack.
I don’t think I understand the continuum here – from precious to racist? Maybe “petty” was the idea? At any rate, “something that feels” itself “feels” like a reach. That whole sentence “feels” like someone struggling to beef up a flimsy case.
The Hollywood director Judd Apatow declared in a deleted tweet that Smith “could have killed” Rock (seriously?), calling it “pure out of control rage and violence”. Apatow later confirmed he wasn’t even watching the show when he made the remarks. The radio host Howard Stern compared Smith to Donald Trump, while white women on Twitter somehow decided that Smith’s actions meant he must be beating his wife.
And this is where the flimsiness becomes downright embarrassing. A named famous man, a named famous man, and then – “white women.” White women wrote a tweet? How would they even coordinate that? And the linked tweet is by a white man, who went to all the trouble of finding four tweets by the dreaded Karens white women. Four random women, not famous like Judd Apatow and Howard Stern. You gotcher racist white famous dudes and then you got your white bitches.
While it’s justifiable – important, even – to interrogate his motives for delivering the slap (was this really all about defending his wife or more about his own ego?), it’s clear that the backlash against Smith is rooted in not just anti-Blackness, but respectability politics as well.
No it isn’t. It isn’t clear at all. It could be true, but it isn’t clear from 2 celebrity dudes and 4 uncelebrity women.
Then the subject suddenly changes and becomes about Black men punching down on Black women.
Still, this kind of punching down on Black women remains typical of many Black male comedians who, like the rest of the world, don’t see Black women’s struggles and experiences as real or legitimate. And this lack of care for Black women also partly explains why people were so taken aback by the image of Smith standing up for his wife in that way. The world is so used to seeing Black women as unworthy of being protected and fought for that it can’t see any merit to Smith’s actions or the emotions that spurred them.
Not the most tightly argued think-piece I’ve ever read.
Oh interesting. Another gap. There was that 18 minute gap on the Nixon phone tapes, and now there’s a seven hour gap on the Trump ones. You’ll never guess which seven hours.
Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.
The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.
Oh those hours. Pure coincidence I’m sure.
The records show that Trump was active on the phone for part of the day, documenting conversations that he had with at least eight people in the morning and 11 people that evening. The seven-hour gap also stands in stark contrast to the extensive public reporting about phone conversations he had with allies during the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — seeking to talk to Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) — and a phone conversation he had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
The House panel is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as “burner phones,”…
Or just flushed the records down the toilet.
It’s not just the BBC and the Guardian doing the evasive dishonest framing of “trans athletes” and the like; the Times does it too.
Headline: Trans cyclist Emily Bridges faces Olympic winner Laura Kenny
Bridges isn’t a “trans cyclist”; Bridges is a trans woman, aka a man.
Lede:
A transgender athlete who has recently become eligible to compete in women’s events is set to compete against some of Great Britain’s leading female cyclists this week.
A trans woman athlete, i.e. a man, will be competing against women this week.
Journalism really needs to stop obscuring the realities this way.
Emily Bridges, 21, has been included on the entry list for the National Omnium Championships, to be held at the Derby Arena on Saturday, along with Dame Laura Kenny, the five-time Olympic champion.
Last month, Bridges, who began hormone therapy last year, won the men’s points race at the British Universities’ championships in Glasgow.
And he obviously should not be competing against women.
She is now able to comply with British Cycling’s requirements to have had testosterone levels below 5 nanomoles per litre for a 12-month period.
British Cycling’s requirements are complete bullshit.
Bridges recently told Cycling Weekly that she had always hoped to be able to compete against women. “It was always the plan,” she said. “After starting hormone therapy, I didn’t want to race in the male category any more than I had to. It sucks, racing as a man when you’re not one. It was quickly apparent that that was the wrong category for me.”
Me. Me me me me me me me. I am all that counts. I alone matter. My feelings matter, and no one else’s do. Me me me me me.
Rhys McKinnon should just move to the UK; the policy of British Cycling would suit him perfectly. (No one else, but who else matters?)
British Cycling members have been warned that they will be censored and reprimanded if they have any criticism of their [British Cycling’s] newly updated 2020 “Transgender and Non-Binary Participation Policy.”
…
In reply to their Tweeted publication announcement the organization stated:
“We take a zero-tolerance approach to instances of hate being targeted at individuals because of their views or gender identity. This thread will be moderated, and if you’re aware of inappropriate or offensive behavior by our members please email compliance@britishcycling.org.uk.”
“Inappropriate” and “offensive” probably means saying men are men.
There’s a list of Roles and Responsibilities:
…all British Cycling employees, members, volunteers, affiliate clubs and Participants should:
• Welcome all Transgender and Non-Binary Participants, just as you would any other Participant;
• Treat all Transgender and Non-Binary Participants with dignity and respect, just as you would any other Participant;
• Respect the private and confidential nature of all Transgender and Non-Binary Participants’ situations and information;
• Accept all Participants in the gender they present; verification of their identity should be no more than expected of any other person;
• Report any incidents of inappropriate or offensive behaviour and language to the British Cycling Integrity and Compliance Department;
And so on and so on. Don’t you dare notice that men are competing on the women’s teams, don’t you dare object, don’t you dare ask any questions, and if anyone else does, rat’em out.
More Ronny:
No, I don’t. He’s right about that. I don’t care about Rhys McKinnon and people like Rhys McKinnon one iota. (That is, I don’t “care” in the sense he’s using it – anxiously wanting them to have novel extra “rights” so that they can get what they want at the expense of other people. I do care about him in the sense of considering him both a menace and a grotesque example of “trans activism” who is well worth discussing.) Why should I? Why should I care about him and people like him especially? There’s nothing about him to motivate such extra caring – he’s not interesting or thoughtful or eloquent or amusing, and he is belligerent and ruthless and selfish and demanding. Why should I care about him? Why should anyone? There are better people to care about, and there are vastly needier people to care about, the refugees fleeing from Ukraine and the people trapped there for two examples.
I don’t care about him one iota and yes I’d be happy just “excluding” him altogether from women’s competitions and letting him figure out whether to compete against men or just give up competing.
I guess Rhys has finished sulking over quitting his job because everybody hated him.
Except no he’s not so no he doesn’t. Again, lies don’t become true through repetition.
Live Science on the collapse of the Conger Ice Shelf:
A massive Antarctic ice shelf that covered an area about the size of New York City or Rome just collapsed into the ocean. Scientists warn that while they do not expect significant impacts as a result of this event, melting ice in this historically stable region may be a foreboding sign of things to come.
Satellite photos reveal the sudden disappearance of the Conger Ice Shelf on East Antarctica between March 14 and March 16. “The Glenzer Conger Ice Shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years and it’s not ever going to be there again,” University of Minnesota glaciologist Peter Neff told NPR. While the Ice shelf had been slowly shrinking since the 1970s, recently accelerated melting preceded this month’s sudden and unexpected collapse.
West Antarctica has unstable ice, so collapsing ice shelves are not unusual. But
East Antarctica is one of the coldest and driest locations on planet Earth, and because of this, ice shelf collapses are unheard-of there. According to the AP, this is the first major ice shelf collapse in East Antarctica during human history.
…
While scientists don’t expect any major consequences as a direct result of the Conger Ice Shelf collapse, they do warn that this could be the beginning of a troubling trend. According to Neff, ice shelves act as a buffer to protect Antarctic glaciers from melting, as they insulate those glaciers from the warm seawater. If glaciers in East Antarctica melt, they could be a major driver of sea-level rise in the coming decades.
Ok, coming decades, so not our problem, so keep those cruise ships cruising.
Yes but how do you know?
Oh yes they are. But of course Tom is being evasive here, in the usual way. By “men” he means men who don’t identify as women, while we mean men.
Oh really. How do we know? How does anyone know? What’s the cutoff point? A week of claiming to be a woman? A month? A year? What are the criteria, what is the evidence, what is the test, who are the experts, how do we know?
It’s such bullshit. Of course it is. The whole thing is a fiction, and there are some ways it could be possible to accept the fiction socially, but that’s not good enough, we have to treat it as not a fiction, and as absolutely mandatory on pain of ostracism. Unless it’s a whim, of course.
First ever all-transgender team to play a football match!
There’s just one slight problem.
The transgender team is all trans women.
The other team is all women.
Of course the news article doesn’t admit that up front. They never do.
A local football club will play against a team of solely transgender women in a “world first”.
Dulwich Hamlet will compete against Trans Radio UK United FC (TRUK) on 31 March.
TRUK United’s squad will consist only of transgender women, who will take to the pitch against Dulwich Hamlet’s womens team.
Very validating for the trans women no doubt, but what about the physical safety of the women? Not to mention the fair competition aspect.
Event organiser Lucy Clark says the match, which will take place at Dulwich’s Champion Hill, will “make history” as it is the first time an all transgender female squad has been fielded in a football game.
Lucy Clark, “the world’s first openly trans referee”:
The game is in aid of Transgender Day of Visibility, an annual event dedicated to “celebrating transgender people.”
“[This] is an important date for the transcommunity and is the perfect day for this important match,” says Lucy, “not only because it is a first and is making history, but will also show, that despite all the anti trans negativity that seems to be everywhere, there is a place for transgender and non binary people in sport.”
And that place is in women’s competitions no matter what sex the trans players are.
Updating to add a snapshot of Referee Lucy:
H/t Blood Knight
Well but wait though.
Right, being same-sex attracted is not a choice and it’s homophobic to tell people it is. But then what about trans people? What are same-sex attracted people supposed to do here? Specifically, are lesbians allowed to be not attracted to trans lesbians (men who identify as lesbians)? If a radio presenter asked Benjamin Cohen that question what would he say?
Does he though?
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never mind Ukraine what about trans people?
It’s probably not helpful to make this about intelligence. I have been interested in cults for a while now*, and one particularly pernicious myth is that only weak or stupid people (or at the very least people who suffer from other major problems) join cults, when in fact cults are usually not interested in “damaged goods”: They are mainly interested in strong, healthy, intelligent, highly functional people who can go out there and recruit others (not a simple task!) and put down countless hours of voluntary work (including some highly specialized tasks that require great skill and competence) for the cults. In fact, I seem to remember former cult-member turned anti-cult activist and exit-counselor Steven Hassan once saying that when he was recruiting for the Moonies back in the 1970s, the ideal recruit was someone who thought they were too clever to be recruited by a cult. So, at the risk of sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut, that’s what they (i.e. cult recruiters) want you to think. It’s a mindset that only works in the cults favor and to your disadvantage.
It’s not just that being that overconfident means your guard is down and you’re less vigilant. But, perhaps more importantly, if you’re that invested in your self-image as too clever to be recruited by a cult, then, if the cult can just get you to make some small concessions (perhaps in your sleep-deprived state at four o clock in the morning after hours of relentless guilt-tripping and peer-pressure), you are that much more prone to rationalize it. The idea that perhaps you weren’t too clever after all simply doesn’t compute (think “Syntax error”, think “This program has performed an illegal operation and is shutting down”, think the “Blue screen of death”), so if you did make those concessions it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do: “Only a weak-minded dolt could be persuaded to make such concessions because of peer pressure and simple sleazy sales-techniques. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, and I did make those concessions. Therefore it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do!”
So you rationalize, i.e. you come up with some spurious, after the fact justification for why making those concessions were the smart, rational, clever thing to do. And of course, once made, those rationalizations don’t just exist in a vacuum: They now become part of the lens through which you view every other question. The same rationalizations used to justify concessions a,b,c make it very difficult to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconsistent and hypocritical even to yourself (practically the definition of cognitive dissonance). And if the inconsistency and hypocrisy is not immediately obvious to you, you can be damned sure the cult leader (as well as every other person in the room) is going to point it out to you: “We didn’t force you to make these concessions! You have agreed that this is the right way to look at it! These are your own words! By your own logic, you should be making concessions d,e,f, and yet you won’t? I see… so that’s what your word is really worth etc.. etc…”
So you get caught in the logic of your own rationalizations (what some have called a “justification spiral”): Going back and admitting you shouldn’t have made concessions a,b,c leads to cognitive dissonance (i.e. “syntax error”/”illegal operation”/”Blue screen of death”), but staying where you are and going no further leads to charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy and hence more cognitive dissonance. The only way to go is forward, and so you make concessions d,e,f which, by the same logic, make it very hard to resist concessions g,h,i etc… etc… In the end, by the time you get to x,y,x, even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats with syringes before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting to yourself “I have dedicated my life to an unworthy cause and a lie. And not only that, I have recruited others, and they are now in this same mess because of me. I have told malicious lies about others for telling the truth about the vicious cult I’m in. I have done inexcusable things and gotten my hands irredeemably dirty, all in the service of a lying megalomaniac, a psychopath, and a monster.” There is more too it, but ultimately I think this is how you get caught. This is when the cult owns you.
I think highly educated and intelligent people are often the easiest people to recruit, in part precisely because they think they’re too smart to be recruited, but also because their intelligence makes them even better at rationalization (according to Joachim Fest the one truly brilliant mind of the 3rd Reich was Josef Goebbels). Even back in my movement skeptic days I thought skeptics tended to over-emphasize logical fallacies and under-emphasize heuristics and biases, cognitive dissonance and rationalization, motivated reasoning and wishful thinking etc. It always seemed to be implicitly assumed that those things were limited to the “true believers” while skeptics were immune to that kind of thing. If you’re that surprised that people like Solnit and Myers could be persuaded to drink the Kool-Aid, it might mean it’s time to look closer at some of your own assumptions.
* I recently finished reading Tim Reiterman’s biography of Jim Jones The Raven. A real world horror-story if ever there was one!
** The cult Aum Shinrikyo, infamous for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, disproportionally recruited scientists.
