Kathleen Stock explains to us about immersive fiction:

Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box-set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, you’re doing it.

I did it in all my spare time (time not at school, not around grownups or for that matter children, time not doing homework) as a child. I was always “being” someone out of a book or a tv show. My way of playing was basically just to roam the countryside while “being” Mary Lennox or whoever – there was no plot, no dialogue, no story, that I recall, there was just the “being.” Immersive fiction was my happy place.

Being trans is a form of immersive fiction. Why do non-trans people immerse themselves in trans fictions? To be “kind,” to seem kind in order to earn social capital, to avoid shunning, and…

And fourth, there’s a desire to undo human sexed categories with the power of words, because you heard from some whackjob academic that this was a coherent and politically desirable thing to aim for.

Why does this matter?

[I’t seems to me that transactivism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead.

Kathleen gives a fascinating account of the way academics are providing “surrounding details for the foundational fictions of the trans industry.”

The game for some academics is to provide convincing-looking backgrounds for predetermined fictional conclusions such as “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”. Since the system currently rewards them for doing this, I think their unconscious motive is often career advancement and social recognition from peers, though it’s inevitably dressed up as something moral.

I picture them like the animators at Disney or Warner Brothers, cranking out the furniture for the immersive fictions of the day.

In the area I’m most familiar with, academic Philosophy, a dedicated band of thinkers seek to provide complex and technical post hoc rationalisations for mantras first expressed by adolescents on Tumblr in 2011. The fact that truth in its traditional sense is not their object of inquiry could not be made plainer.  See, for instance, philosopher Katharine Jenkins, who starts her 2016 article on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journal Ethics, by declaring: “The proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid—that trans women are women and trans men are men—is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.”  (It’s telling that “valid” is used here in the Tumblr sense of identities being validated like passports or parking tickets, and not in the sense of logical validity more traditional for academic philosophy).

I’m going to stop now, lest I quote the whole thing. It’s all that good.

Jolly is taking the war to the phobes again.

That’s a very peculiar argument, or attempt at an argument. There doesn’t have to be any “link of logic” between three claims to preserve them from being bigotry. There can just be three claims that are all true, without being particularly linked to each other. There can be three (or two or five) claims that are linked in some ways and separate in others. There can be a lot of things. Joly’s first two claims are linked, actually, but if they weren’t that wouldn’t make them untrue or proof of bigotry; you need more than that.

Let’s look at them.

Maybe you think trans women shouldn’t compete in women’s sport.

I do; of course I do. Why? Because men have many physical advantages over women.

Or trans women are a danger to cis women.

That’s the wrong way to put it. Trans women are potentially a danger to women for the same reason all men are potentially a danger to women, which is the same as the reason trans women shouldn’t compete in women’s sport. Men are stronger than women. There’s more to it than that – some men like to bully women, some men like to terrorize women, some men like to assault women, some men like to rape women. Men who disguise themselves as women are potentially a threat, yes. That’s not saying all trans women are a threat, it’s saying women have no way of knowing which ones are, so we can’t just assume they’re all safe the way women are (generally) safe.

Or being trans is a mental illness requiring therapy.

Again, wrong way to put it. Thinking you’re the other sex can be a mental illness, or something between mental illness and perfect mental health – in short it may benefit from therapy. It is after all a delusion, in the sense that no one is literally the opposite sex, so why wouldn’t it sometimes benefit from therapy? That, again, is not bigotry. I suppose Jolyon is taking the line that being trans is fabulous and joyful and no one would hesitate to be it for a second if it weren’t for all the bigotry, but that can’t really be right, given the fact that people can still see what their bodies are.

Zero for three.

“Natalie” Washington’s claim that Lia Thomas is only 5’8″ is not holding up very well.

Who ya gonna believe, your lyin’ eyes or “Natalie”?

The Guardian Live is reporting from the Supreme Court hearing.

Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas and a presidential aspirant, is speaking now in remarks peppered with conservative talking points and grievances.

Cruz began by recounting the history of Supreme Court nominations and lamented how contentious they have become, though he notably left out the controversial and unprecedented decision by then-majority leader McConnell to deny Obama the opportunity to fill a supreme court vacancy, which infuriated Democrats and poisoned the already-poisoned well…

Echoing his Republican colleagues, he said the hearings would be different [from] the Kavanaugh hearings. “No one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits. No one is going to ask you with mock severity, do you like beer.”

And why is that? Because she doesn’t have a history of sexual assault or of alcohol abuse. Kavanaugh has such a history. It matters.

Yes I definitely want to listen to this guy explaining how it’s fine for Lia Thomas to steal women’s prizes.

Heels, again.

Women have long bemoaned the unfair and sexist norms that require many of us to wear heels at the office – from the physical discomfort of having to work in stilettos for hours, to the misogynistic tropes that get projected on to women who wear high heels, especially in male-dominated spaces.

Finally, though, there’s new research to validate those experiences. To find out how heels really affect women’s careers, University of North Carolina professor Sreedhari Desai and her team conducted a series of studies looking at how people evaluated women in a variety of work settings. These scenarios included leading a class, giving a presentation, interviewing for a job, and taking part in a negotiation, with the only variable being whether the woman was wearing high heels or flats.

The results? Women wearing flats were deemed more capable and prepared, and earned higher evaluations from both men and women in their 20s through their 50s.

It’s not really surprising, is it. What messages do high heels send? What do they suggest? What do they look like? Not things like capable and prepared, but rather sexy plus hobbled. They don’t actually suggest work attire at all, yet they’re mandated in many work places. The same applies to skirts, by the way – they’re not very practical and they’re the opposite of protective.

There’s truly no winning. On the one hand, women working in corporate jobs, retail and the hospitality industry are often required to wear heels as part of their dress code. It’s a norm that’s built on centuries of dressing women according to the male gaze, and forcing them to subscribe to misogynistic standards of femininity. But, as the study proves, women in heels are also taken far less seriously at work than women who wear flats.

Double bind. You have to dress in a way that will make the rest of us see you as both sexual and weak. Now get to work.

Trans woman says why can’t women be more ladylike god damn it?

I was sad that, yet again, JK Rowling is using her fame to campaign against trans women (“JK Rowling rounds on Starmer”, News, last week). As a trans woman myself I am angry and frustrated that the media debate has deteriorated into an argument about whether I can use a ladies’ lavatory. The argument that a public lavatory can be classed as a “safe space” is frankly bizarre.

Not if you’re a woman it isn’t, not if its comparative safety is being taken away from you.

High-profile women should stop using megaphone tactics to whip up transphobia: using words like “scared, angry and disillusioned” creates a climate that is extremely dangerous for trans people who, like me, just want to be accepted and allowed to cope with their gender dysphoria in the best way they have found.

Gee, he should see the kinds of things that are said about and to us.

I love being a woman (or trans woman, if you insist) and support the feminist movement, but I am disillusioned that some women are using masculine behaviour to aggressively promote their agenda in an uncompromising way…

Ahhhhhhhhhh yes why can’t we be more gentle and hesitant and polite and shy and apologetic the way women are supposed to be. Thanks for the pointers, bro.

Parents have written a new letter on the Lia Thomas question.

As parents of Ivy League swimmers, from men’s and women’s teams across the league, we have witnessed firsthand the utter abandonment of women and girls this year.

Ironically, during Women’s History Month, the subjugation of our daughters continues at the Women’s NCAA Swimming Championships when Lia Thomas, a biological male, took a lane and a podium from a deserving female swimmer on Thursday. Lia has now broken female legacy records across pools and in the Ivy League. 

We are furious and most everyone in our community is furious as well. Parents, coaches, swimmers, and rational, logical people know this is grossly unfair. Female swimmers have not consented to this. In fact, many of them expressly said no. What response did they receive?

Be quiet. A new ideology ruled. “Transwomen are women” no exceptions; the girls’ concerns: “transphobic.”

They courageously spoke to coaches about the injustice they faced in the pool. They expressed how uncomfortable the locker rooms were with male nudity. When they were turned away, they went to their athletic departments and administration. They were turned away again.

As the public outrage grew, a propaganda machine that would make Russia jealous was wheeled out. If the girls had a problem, they were told to seek counseling. Team meetings were called at every school to communicate a singular message; coercive and emotionally blackmailing written instructions were distributed at Harvard and Penn. Everyone was cowed into silence while institutions spared no expense on T-shirts, banners and public statements supporting Lia.

Collective insanity.

Athletic associations are cautiously asking: How do we balance fairness and inclusion?

You don’t. Obviously. You can’t have blanket “inclusion” in competitive sports. If you want “inclusion” by all means have Swimming For Everyone at your schools, but the moment you make it competitive you rule out being inclusive, because the two are fundamentally opposed. You can’t give First Prize to everyone, because then it’s not First Prize any more, it’s just Prize.

But they are asking the wrong questions. These questions are misogynistic, degrading, and dehumanizing for women. There is no balance of fairness to assess. Women deserve fairness without caveat, and they should not be asked to shoulder the mental health of others at their own expense. A male body cannot become a female body. A woman is not a disadvantaged man.

Disadvantaged, ha – women are the source of all humans.

This is not just a swimming issue. Lia Thomas, Laurel Hubbard, Cece Telfer, Hannah Mouncey, Stephanie Barrett, Rachel McKinnon, Andraya Yearwood — the list continues — these are just some of the more publicly known male-bodied athletes that have robbed thousands of women of fair treatment in sport. Women pay a deep psychological toll, competing or not, when told they are undeserving of fair competition.

…

Where are the feminists, politicians and organizations that purport to support women?

Where are the National Women’s Law Center, the American Association of University Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Women’s Sports Foundation? They are standing by and cheering as women are redefined and minimized.

Where indeed? Gone over to the other side, the shits.

A lot of people think this way? And that’s supposed to be a bad thing?

It’s self-evidently shameful to say that men don’t belong in women’s sports?

One, we don’t want to say “trans people aren’t real.” Two, we are not the equivalent of or allied with Fox News-style racists. What a horrible man.

I don’t know what’s going on here but…you know…soldiers are soldiers, not commanders. Maybe they just didn’t want to mow down a bunch of civilians and so backed away.

Naomi Cunningham replying to a comment at Legal Feminist last September:

So it’s ok for the diversity training to emphasise that staff mustn’t harass trans colleagues or discriminate against them. It’s very far from ok for the diversity training to assert, for example, that “trans women are women”: that’s a highly contentious claim that many people reject. Similarly, it’s ok for diversity training to emphasise that staff mustn’t harass Christian colleagues or discriminate against them. It’s not ok for training to assert that Jesus is the Risen Lord.

I will add that if diversity training does emphasize that staff mustn’t harass Christian colleagues, it should also emphasize that Christian staff mustn’t harass atheist or secularist colleagues. It should cut both ways. I have had to work with god-botherers who didn’t keep their mouths shut about it, and it felt very much like an imposition.

You say “being less trans-exclusionary, and more trans inclusive seems a reasonable viewpoint to be presented to employees.” That would be fine if “trans inclusive” just meant not discriminating against trans people. But gender critical people are slurred as “trans exclusionary” not because they want to exclude trans people from work or public life, etc. – which obviously would be terrible – but because they don’t accept that trans-identifying males are included within the definition of the word “woman.” So if HR say “be less trans-exclusionary”, they are making a demand that their staff believe something.

That is a very interesting point. I tend to think of the “exclusionary” bit of TERF as meaning literal, physical exclusion, i.e. from women’s sports, locker rooms, conferences and the like, but of course it is also about the concept, and the definition. It’s about that first, really, since radical feminism is itself conceptual so the point is that terfs think radical feminism isn’t about men.

Russia still fighting dirty:

Ukrainian authorities have said Moscow’s forces bombed an art school in Mariupol where more than 400 people had taken shelter, amid further reports that civilians from the devastated southern city were being forcibly transported to Russia.

Days after Russian shells struck a theatre in the city also being used as a shelter, local authorities said Mariupol’s G12 art school had been destroyed while women, children and elderly people were inside. There was no immediate word on casualties.

A theater and an art school. Both full of non-combatants taking shelter. Meanwhile Russia is kidnapping Ukrainians.

As Moscow claimed on Sunday it had fired a hypersonic missile against Ukraine for the second time, the country’s human rights spokesperson, Ludmila Denisova, accused its forces of kidnapping Mariupol residents and taking them to Russia.

“In recent days, several thousand Mariupol residents have been deported to Russia,” Denisova said on Telegram. After processing at “filtration camps”, some were then transported to the Russian city of Taganrog, about 100km from Mariupol, and from there sent by rail “to various economically depressed cities in Russia”, she said.

Denisova said Ukrainian citizens had been “issued papers that require them to be in a certain city. They have no right to leave it for at least two years with the obligation to work at the specified place of work. The fate of others remains unknown.”

Russian news agencies have said hundreds of people Moscow calls refugees have been bussed from Mariupol to Russia.

Denisova said the “abductions and forced displacements” violated the Geneva conventions and the European convention on human rights and called on the international community to “respond … and increase sanctions against the terrorist state of the Russian Federation”.

Homo homini lupus.

I would post the tweet itself but he’s deleted it.

The fucking nerve of that guy. THEY aren’t going to be haunted by that photo. THEY aren’t the ones who showed horrendous sportsmanship. The one who should be haunted by the photo is Lia Thomas, fraud and cheat, but he probably won’t be.

Of course it makes sense for Rhys McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy to take this view, given his photo gallery.

So now they’re closing down actual training because “transphobia.”

Great Ormond Street Hospital has been forced to cancel a top trainee doctors conference after trans activists protested that speakers would make Zoom attendees feel “unsafe”, The Telegraph can disclose.

Note the “Zoom attendees” bit – how can you feel “unsafe” at a Zoom conference?

All trainee child psychiatrist finalists from across London were due to attend the day-long video conference on March 16 on how they can support gender-questioning young people.

High-profile speakers from across the trans debate were invited by a group of trainees at the hospital to speak on panels, including major trans charities, academics and gender-critical groups.

But the programme quickly descended into chaos as trans activists refused to appear alongside gender-critical speakers, trainee doctors sent dossiers of allegations about speakers they disagreed with, and two feminist writers were cancelled.

So, no need to bother then. They already know what to do, so why get further training?

Helen Joyce, an editor at The Economist, was due to discuss her best-seller, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, in a panel discussion alongside academics on the opposite side of her gender-critical stance about biological sex being binary and immutable.

But a trainee child psychiatrist sent a list of allegations to the organizers warning them about how “unsafe” it would be for Helen Joyce to say things.

Following a string of other internal protests, including a speaker refusing to appear alongside her, her invitation was revoked just five days before the event.

Also cancelled was Stephanie Davies-Arai, the director of Transgender Trend, a gender-critical website for parents, after two separate dossiers of allegations were sent to organisers by a trainee doctor and Mermaids, the child trans charity.

In her intervention, Susie Green, the chief executive of Mermaids who was due to speak alongside Ms Davies-Arai and other charities on a panel about support for trans youth, told organisers that Mermaids “cannot be a part of a conference that gives a platform to Transgender Trend, regardless of whether their work is in the public domain or not”.

She went on to tell NHS staff in an email that “in addition to Transgender Trend, I would suggest that CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services) stay clear of anyone involved with anti-trans pseudo-medical platforms that have been set up with the sole intention of attacking trans people (especially trans youth) and their healthcare.”

And Mermaids was set up with the sole intention of what now? Susie Green is a reliable source how exactly?

I wonder how many people have to have their bodies and lives ruined before this madness runs its course.

There’s a blog post dated March 10 on the National Women’s Law Center website, titled Women in Sports: The Good, The Bad, The Sexist. It starts with The Good.

Women coaches have had a moment, too. Iconic coaches like Dawn Staley and Kim Mulkey are leading incredible women’s programs and breaking records left and right. Coaches like Katie Sowers and Jennifer King broke barriers and paved the way for the NFL to have the most female coaches in their history last year. Becky Hammon left the San Antonio Spurs to be the head coach of the WNBA Las Vegas Aces, but there were still seven women on NBA coaching staffs this season!

And so on. No complaints. But then comes The Bad.

It is not new that women athletes are underpaid, underappreciated, and undersupported. WNBA star Liz Cambage has been one of the latest players to speak out about how so many WNBA players are forced to play overseas during their off-season to make enough money….[etc]

Instead of focusing on ways to improve women’s athletics, it seems that horrible people would rather focus on demonizing trans athletes. Swimmer Lia Thomas has had a powerhouse year but has been unjustly held as the token enemy of TERFs. State legislatures are passing bills left and right to ban trans kids from sports, fear-mongering and manufacturing division within sports teams that simply isn’t there.

It’s “unjust” to say that a male swimmer shouldn’t compete in women’s swimming. We’re “horrible people” for saying that. There’s no actual explanation of why it’s okay for a man to compete against women.

The National Women’s Law Center used to be actually about women and law. No more.

I would love to know how the fuck they think Thomas can “inspire” women. Inspire women to do what? Quit sport? Stay home? Learn to smile politely while men steal their opportunities and wins and medals?

And why does he deserve “celebration for [his] success”? Why would he deserve celebration for “success” he owes to a massive physical advantage over all his competitors? They might as well call it “success” to tie all the competitors to a bench and swim solo. His only “success” is at getting away with grossly blatant cheating.

I don’t understand how adults can see it any other way, and we know the NWLC is adults because it’s lawyers.

This person is an applied health scientist, with a primary focus on injury prevention and safeguarding in sport settings.

Rude. Rude way to begin. It’s not a “narrative.” That’s an insulting label.

No we don’t. She offers a few illustrations but they’re all (of course) from the few sports where size and strength don’t make a difference.

Shooting…where size and strength don’t make the difference.

Endurance and balance: size and strength not the deciders.

“Narrative” yourself.

More testimony:

Oh good, a statement on “transphobic abuse.” We need more of those.

Herstory Festival is a two-day celebration of women’s lives and experiences, bringing together different backgrounds, voices and experiences to support women’s rights and the historic progress made. The festival will incorporate the contributions and voices of over 400 women, and will feature the work of 17 poets, 8 musicians, 8 speakers and 30 artists.

Following online promotion of the festival, one of the artists featuring in the festival has been subjected to transphobic abuse on social media. Poet in the City has also been criticised for including this artist’s work as part of the range of perspectives that feature.

What this dishonest “statement” leaves out of course is that the artist in question is a man. Poet in the City was criticised for including a man in a festival it calls a “celebration of women’s lives and experiences.” Men don’t have women’s lives and experiences. Include men by all means if you want to, but then don’t say it’s a celebration of women’s anything.

Poet in the City is a progressive organisation working across a range of communities, and together with our partners, we condemn transphobia, and all forms of hate and discrimination in the strongest possible terms, and work to break down barriers where they occur. The Herstory Festival programme reflects on this, among many other narratives, through poetry, performance and discussion.

It’s not hate to say that men are not women. It is a kind of discrimination but only in the neutral, factual sense of telling things apart. There’s nothing wrong with saying men are not women, cats are not flowers, cars are not mangoes.

Wait who is it who’s “discriminatory” here?

A discussion of NATO and Putin and how we got here on Fresh Air yesterday:

My guest, Mary Elise Sarotte, is the author of a book about the history of NATO in the years just before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s called “Not One Inch,” and it helps explain how NATO, Ukraine and Russia got to where they are today. It’s based in part on papers she got declassified after fighting for years to get them released. Sarotte is the Kravis professor of historical studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and she’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She’s also the author of an earlier book about the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Knows her stuff.

Putin could move on a Baltic state next, and that would get NATO involved, and that would be…scary.

NATO came into existence in 1949 as an alliance of 12 countries against the Soviet Union. Basically, its job was to prevent Soviet tanks from rolling into Western Europe, and it tried to do that through a combination of nuclear deterrence and conventional forces on the ground, including in West Berlin, which was an island inside East Germany, where I was studying in 1989 as a student abroad, which is where my interest in this topic comes from. And that alliance is, in essence, a Cold War alliance. And Article 5 came out of that construct. But Article 5 endures to this day. NATO persisted through the end of the Cold War into the post-Cold War era. And the new member states all enjoy that very same guarantee. There were critics at the time that Naito was expanding to the Baltics. Of course, the decision to expand NATO in the post-Cold War world was a very controversial decision. And there were critics who said, among other things, we should not give Article 5 to countries on the assumption we’ll never have to live up to it.

But now we have given Article 5 to the United States, and NATO members collectively have extended it to 30 countries. And so we are bound by this article to defend the Baltics. And this is no small challenge. There was a war game conducted by the American think tank Rand in 2016. The goal of the war game was to estimate how long it would take Russia to conquer the Baltics, and the answer was measured in hours. So given, you know, that kind of challenge, if NATO really were to face a Russian, shall we say, incursion in Article 5 territory, this could swiftly become very difficult and be a very serious issue.

Let’s not do that. Let’s Putin not do that so that we don’t have to do that. Let’s not any of this.

We’ve had proxy wars with Russia, in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but not the in your face kind.

So the Cold War was, in many places, also a hot war, but there was no direct military conflict between, to put it bluntly, Americans and Russians. And so this is a new situation where we’re looking at Americans and their European allies directly fighting with Russians. That is something that has – did not happen in any serious extent. There might have been isolated incidents but not to any serious extent during the Cold War.

But then Bush 2 came along.

SAROTTE: Well, NATO actually stated Ukraine will become a NATO member at its Bucharest summit in 2008. By 2008, many countries had already joined NATO, and Ukraine and Georgia were showing interest as well. There was a NATO summit in the Romanian city of Bucharest, and at that summit, there was a fight essentially between President George W. Bush and his advisers, such as Condoleezza Rice, and Europeans who thought it would be a bridge too far, because of the friction with Moscow, to put Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. And so what resulted was a compromise, which was unfortunately the worst of all possible worlds.

NATO did not take any practical steps to make Georgia or Ukraine members. In other words, if a country is really going to become a member, once that’s clear, there’s a series of practical steps that immediately kick in. None of those happened. But as a compromise, the alliance issued a summit declaration with the words, Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO. The idea was on some distant day in the future, and we’re not actually going to take any steps to implement it. And so that was a compromise to make President George W. Bush and the Americans happy.

Except some of the Americans, such as Rice, opposed the idea.

The problem was that when President Vladimir Putin of Russia saw that, he took it at face value and said, Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO over my dead body, and immediately found an excuse to take military action in Georgia in 2008. And that de facto put an end to Georgian hopes of membership because the NATO alliance is loathe to take on a new ally that already has a preexisting conflict on its territory. And that makes sense because as we discussed before, if you take on a new country and you extend Article 5 guarantees to it, you’ve immediately made yourself party to that conflict. So in 2008, Putin took violent action in Georgia, and that, I think, is a clear precursor to then what followed in Ukraine.

So, perhaps, if Bush 2 hadn’t been all gung-ho in 2008 we wouldn’t be watching Ukraine being bombed into rubble today. Nice work, Dubya.