Stonewall and The Good Law Project are really determined to make sure women have no rights that would trump the invented “rights” of men to invade all our spaces, take all our prizes and jobs, destroy our sports, and bully us into silence.

Britain’s human rights watchdog faces a legal challenge to its status over a row about transgender rights.

A row over “rights” that aren’t “rights” at all.

In documents shared exclusively with the BBC, campaigners say they want the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s status as an independent group revoked. It comes after the EHRC was criticised for asking Scotland to pause its plans to make it easier for people to change their sex on their birth certificate.

But hey guess what: there are problems with forcing everyone to pretend that men are women if they say they are. Quite a few problems.

LGBT charity Stonewall, backed by the Good Law Project, has drawn up a submission to the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, calling for the EHRC to lose its “A rating”.

This would prevent it from being able to make representations at the UN Human Rights Council, or its committees on human rights.

Jolyon Maugham is shockingly determined to destroy women’s rights once and for all.

Jolyon Maugham, of The Good Law Project, told BBC News: “The EHRC is subject to a level of oversight and micro-management from the department which is just not consistent with being a UN Human Rights Institution.”

Jolyon Maugham suffers from a level of misogyny which is just not consistent with labeling himself Good.

Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall, told the BBC she believed there was “credible evidence” that the EHRC no longer met the criteria of a national human rights institution.

Nancy Kelley is happy to see women’s rights ground to powder.

Yup yup yup that’s all fine, this mediocre male swimmer can pretend to be a woman and compete against women so that he won’t be mediocre any more, no problem whatsoever. Nobody will be harmed except women so full speed ahead guys.

Penn swimmer Lia Thomas will be allowed to compete at the 2022 women’s swimming and diving championships as long as she meets the NCAA’s current testosterone thresholds.

This despite the fact that everyone knows testosterone is not like a lamp or a food processor – it doesn’t just stop when you switch it off. Most of the benefits of male puberty are permanent, and women don’t have them. The NCAA knows this, so it’s just saying “Fuck women, we don’t care.”

Ah what a brilliant invention, how odd that no one’s ever thought of it before. A private army which will “apprehend” all the politicians and media people who “have been found to have committed crimes.” This will go very well, there will be no problems at all.

Yet more “blah blah because trans rights” without spelling out what “trans rights” are:

Female hospital patients’ dignity, privacy and safety is being “diminished significantly” by the imposition of transgender rights in the health service, it has been warned at Westminster.

Speaking in Parliament Tory peer Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne argued the provision of single-sex wards, exempted from equality legislation, was being undermined by updated NHS guidance.

That’s even more of a misleading disaster than usual, because Baroness Nicholson is reported saying one thing but the lede cites a quite different thing. The reporter, Nick Lester, seems to have translated exemption from equality legislation to “trans rights,” but is that accurate or fair? Is such exemption a right?

Reporters should be more careful than that on such a contested subject.

Annex B states that trans people should be accommodated “according to their presentation: the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use”, rather than their biological sex at birth.

Is that a “trans right” though? Is it a right, or just an ad hoc solution to a particular problem, one that consulted one set of people affected but not the other. It’s not just obviously a “right” for men who identify as women to invade all women’s spaces. (“Invade” is a tendentious word to use there.)

[Lady Nicholson] said: “Traditionally female patients in the NHS and in private hospitals have been allocated beds in single-sex wards accommodating only women patients.

“Transgenderism, and I speak as a women, has undermined that provision with the 2019 NHS guidance authorising self selection of patient gender on arrival in hospitals, something neither enshrined in law nor backed by public demand, and overriding the exemption for hospital services in the 2010 Equalities Act.

“Yet Parliament and our ministers have consistently declared that women both need and should have privacy dignity and safety in their most vulnerable of situation such as when sick or pregnant.”

Which means that it can’t really be a right for men to override women’s need in that situation. The purported need for validation or recognition shouldn’t be overriding women’s need for safety.

… health minister Lord Kamall said NHS England was currently reviewing the single-sex accommodation guidance “to ensure that it remains focused on privacy, safety and dignity for all patients”.

Yes but you can’t. If some men are insisting on ignoring the privacy, safety and dignity of women then NHS England can’t remain focused on the privacy, safety and dignity of all patients. If men insist on forcing themselves on women in the same old way then that’s an end of women’s privacy, safety and dignity.

Lady Nicholson said: “The rights of another group does not supersede the rights of the group that is already there.”

She added: “My contention is that the dignity, the privacy and the safety of women patients which has been fought over for several decades… is now being diminished significantly and their health undermined, their recovery from illness significantly undermined, by the imposition of new rights of others on top of women’s rights.

“It amuses me that nobody is suggesting they should be on top of men’s rights. This is a matter of great concern to all women.”

I think by “amuses” she means “disgusts.”

No kicking or slapping involved.

It’s Lia Thomas / Laurel Hubbard / Rachel McKinnon all over again.

Eddie Izzard will lead the cast of Joe Stephenson’s UK feature Doctor Jekyll, a modern interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde which places a woman in the lead role.

That is, Joe Stephenson is rethinking Doctor Jekyll as a woman, but then casting a man in the part, so not rethinking it as a woman at all.

Talk about having it both ways. “I’m making Jekyll a woman! And I’m casting a man as that woman! Am I original and quirky or what?!”

A new and more convoluted way to take away one of the few opportunities women have.

“It’s wonderful to be able to reimagine this classic story in a modern way,” said Izzard.

It’s wonderful to take a female part away from a woman, said Izzard.

Some numbers:

Top-grossing 100 films:

• 66% of speaking or named characters were male and 34% were female. This is a gender ratio of 1.9 males to every 1 female.
• Only 28% of all speaking characters in action films were girls and women, which was not meaningfully different. A similar pattern emerged for female characters in animation (33.3%).
• Only 14 of the 100 top movies in 2019 featured a gender-balanced (45%-54.9% of all speaking roles filled with girls/women) cast.

But hey, no doubt Eddie Izzard plays a woman much better than any woman could possibly do it.

Can you imagine the uproar if someone decided to do a new movie version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joad family is African-American and then cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Tom Joad?

Actual Vice headline:

Leaked EHRC Guidance Reveals Plans To Exclude Most Trans People From Bathrooms

First of all they don’t mean “bathrooms,” because in the UK that means literal bath rooms; they mean public toilets. But second and more to the point, of course they don’t. There are no plans to exclude people from public toilets.

Subhead:

Under unpublished guidance leaked to VICE World News, Britain’s equalities watchdog wanted to restrict the lives of trans people unless they held a Gender Recognition Certificate – despite only 1% of trans people in the UK having one.

No it didn’t. People don’t live in public toilets. It’s not in any meaningful sense “restricting the lives” of men to tell them they can’t use the women’s toilets. The obverse is not so true: women’s lives are restricted if they can’t safely use public toilets (which they can’t if men are allowed to use them too).

Trans people in Britain would be excluded from single-sex spaces unless they possess a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) under unpublished guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). GRCs are currently held by as little as 1 percent of trans people in the country. 

VICE World News has been leaked sections of an unpublished guidance pack dated from the end of 2021 from Britain’s equalities watchdog, which advised businesses and other organisations such as shops, prisons and gyms to “protect women” by barring most trans people from their single-sex spaces, including toilets, wards and changing rooms. 

They just will not word it honestly. It’s not “trans people,” it’s men who identify as trans. It’s about men.

A trans person looking for legal recognition of their gender identity currently requires medical assessments and psychiatric interviews in order to “prove” their gender and receive a GRC. Non-binary identities are not recognised in UK law.

Well what would recognition of “non-binary identities” have to do with single-sex toilets? Which ones would they use? Which ones does Vice want them to use?

Funny how much lying they have to do to make their case.

Helen Dale explains why so many people need self-help books: because they weren’t taught or didn’t learn enough growing up. The piece as a whole isn’t among her best work, because there’s way too much self-conscious meta, too many clauses commenting on previous clauses, too much performance, but the final full paragraph is unclotted and So True.

If you are emotionally devastated by the leftward lean of science fiction to the point of launching a campaign to “take back” the genre; if the moral struggle that gets you out of bed each morning is purging racism from young adult fantasy novels; if you feel besieged by the political predilections of self-declared gamers (or betrayed by the politics of game reviewers); if you use films about comic-book characters to form your worldview; if you cast about for a metaphor to describe your deepest beliefs and find only Harry Potter . . . you are still a child. You need to step back and work out why your identity is so invested in escapist fancies designed to appeal to confused children halfway through puberty.

Exactly so.

The QC does it again.

It’s considered not just bad form but very dangerous to make claims about suicide like that – dogmatic assertions of a single cause.

One could ask if people like the QC ever stop to think about what they are doing to trans people. What about the ones who get the surgeries and take the blockers and/or cross-sex hormones, and then regret it a year or two or five later? One could ask if it even occurs to him that it’s not a matter of zero possibility of regrets on the one hand and massive inevitable regrets on the other,

Fox News is selling the anti-vax truckers in Ottawa as freedom fighters. Of course it is.

Fox News’ effort to discourage its viewers from vaccinating themselves against COVID-19 has gone international. The network’s stars have in recent weeks fixated on our neighbor to the north, regaling their audiences with fawning coverage of Canadian truckers protesting their country’s COVID-19 vaccine requirements – and encouraging the development of similar activism in the U.S.

It still seems like a very weird flag to fly. Join us, we’re the ones in favor of deadly pandemics! If we’d had our way there would be no polio vax, no measles vax, no smallpox vax, and your kids or your friends or you could get a deadly disease at any time!

Since January 29, a group of truckers and their allies has effectively crippled downtown Ottawa by using vehicles to block traffic, leading the city’s mayor to declare a state of emergency. Similar protests have occurred in cities across the country, and on Monday truckers blocked a major international crossing. 

That’s the one between Detroit and Windsor. I saw some news coverage of it last night, with the bridge packed solid with trucks.

This so-called “Freedom Convoy” originally assembled to oppose a newly implemented rule requiring them to either be vaccinated or quarantine after returning from trips across the U.S. border, but organizers now say they will continue their demonstrations until the national and provincial governments “end all mandates.” 

Again, though, it’s a stupid idea of “freedom.” Getting vaccinated is not slavery or servitude or imprisonment, and not getting one isn’t a form of freedom. Claiming it is is like claiming that stop signs and red lights are barriers to freedom. The freedom to walk into traffic isn’t a freedom worth having.

Fox hosts are extremely excited about the protests, even as they quietly labor under the network’s own stringent vaccine requirements. The network devoted 7 hours and 59 minutes to the story from the first mention of the convoy we found on January 18 through noon on February 9. Prime-time stars Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are among the convoy’s biggest fans at the network, giving it 51 minutes and 47 minutes, respectively. And Fox’s coverage is escalating, with more than 3 hours of trucker coverage coming on Monday and Tuesday this week combined.

Why? I guess because “sticking it to the libs” has become the new freedom, and the libs are foolish enough to think public health measures are preferable to no public health measures. Or, more crudely, it’s just childish “whatever they do we do the opposite because we hates’em.”

I wonder if Fox people lie awake at night fuming at the fact that the right and the left agree on more things than they disagree on. Fox doesn’t want to demolish interstate highways, or hospitals, or schools, or airports, or the military, or the police, or fire departments. Fox people must know just as well as anyone else that a public sector is necessary for a comfortable productive life, so…?

So they pretend they don’t, because that’s their brand. It’s stupid.

Fox’s propagandists have cheered on the truckers as “freedom fighters,” “civil rights hero[es],” and “the face of individualism and rebellion,” while denouncing the purported “totalitarianism” of the Canadian government. 

Like Stalin and Hitler, right? No. Of course not. They know that, and yet they say it. It’s not the tyranny of vaccination mandates we need to worry about, it’s the tyranny of stupidity for ratings.

This focus on Canadian anti-vaccine mandate protests comes amid a spike in U.S. deaths from COVID-19 due to the spread of the omicron variant. Those deaths are largely occurring among the unvaccinated, fueled in part by anti-vaccine coverage from right-wing outlets like Fox.  

In other words they’re encouraging people to do what will kill them. For the ratings.

Those cats are safe from Zouma.

Animal charity the RSPCA has taken West Ham defender Kurt Zouma’s pet cats away after videos emerged on social media of him kicking and slapping one of them.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is liaising with Essex Police about the incident.

“The two cats are now in RSPCA care,” said a charity spokesperson.

The Premier League club say they have fined Zouma “the maximum amount possible” and the fee will be donated to animal welfare charities.

In addition, German sportswear firm Adidas has ended its deal with the 27-year-old.

I hope the cats get a vastly kinder human for their next home.

Gotta keep the women out somehow.

The disqualification of five ski jumpers at the Winter Olympics because of the suits they wore didn’t just result in an unexpected podium for the inaugural mixed team event. The abrupt ouster of those participants — all women — also resulted in howls of protest and outrage directed at the International Ski Federation (FIS).

Oh I don’t know, howls of protest and outrage sound awfully manly. I expect it was more whining.

“They destroyed women’s ski jumping,” said Germany’s Katharina Althaus.

Althaus, who helped Germany win the mixed team event three times at the ski jumping world championships, was among the women disqualified on Monday when FIS ruled that their suits were “too big and offered an aerodynamic advantage.” Bigger suits could increase the time ski jumpers are able to stay aloft, given the possibility of increased wind resistance.

Are we sure they looked this closely at the men’s suits?

None of the disqualified athletes’ teams made the medals podium, despite the fact that Germany, Austria, Norway and Japan entered Monday as the favorites, along with Slovenia, which took gold.

…

“I have been checked so many times in 11 years of ski jumping, and I have never been disqualified once, I know my suit was compliant,” the German star [Althaus] said, via Agence France-Presse.

…

Adding a layer to the expressions of disappointment and anger Monday was the history of sexism in ski jumping. The sport is among the eight that go back to the original Winter Olympics program in 1924, but women weren’t allowed to participate until 2014, after a group of athletes filed a lawsuit in 2009, ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Ok so it totally makes sense that women have to be intensely monitored and checked up on and wherever possible disqualified.

At this year’s Games in Beijing, the Nordic combined event remains the lone men-only holdout, mixing ski jumping with cross-country skiing. Male ski jumpers also have two medal events not available to women: large hill and a single-gender team competition. The mixed team event reflected an effort by Olympic organizers to be more inclusive, but its debut was marred by the disqualifications.

Hey, they’re being more inclusive, ok? Cut them some slack. More inclusive doesn’t mean totally inclusive. Women just aren’t good enough for that.

NPR adds an interesting detail:

As several of the athletes and coaches acknowledged, this is far from the first time women’s jumpsuits have been at the center of controversy.

“For years, every female ski jumper around the world was required to have extra panels sewn in around her hips,” Emily Russell of North Country Public Radio reported last week. “The International Ski Federation (FIS), which sets competition standards for the sport, said the additional hip panels were meant to fit a woman’s body better.”

But some athletes said the extra panels mainly seemed to emphasize the curves of women’s bodies. The FIS changed the rules about those panels in its 2020 specifications — but now women’s suits are again making headlines, on winter sports’ biggest stage.

Why would extra panels make women’s suits fit better but not men’s suits?

It sounds all too much like the “rules” that make it necessary for women who compete in beach volleyball to wear tiny bikini underpants and bras while the men…don’t.

H/t Sackbut

A letter from Amnesty UK:

It’s funny, in a way, that Nscribble first says that AmnestyUK stands against “those spreading hate” and then immediately mentions misleading and confusing people as a common tactic against their human rights campaigns. Poor befuddled Nscribble doesn’t seem to grasp that accusing gender critical feminists of “spreading hate” is itself misleading and confusing, or to put it more crisply, a lie.

Then Nscribble accuses the gender critical feminist side of “spreading vitriol or misinformation,” which is also misleading and confusing, not to mention vituperative and unfair. Then Nscribble brushes aside the very idea that labeling us vitriolic liars might be part of an attempt to remove or weaken our political representation.

And yet, of course, that kind of abusive rhetoric is removing and weakening our political representation, day in and day out. It’s what’s been happening these past ten years or so: calling us names, lying about what we think and what we’re campaigning for, summoning troops to amplify the names and the lies. It’s been working brilliantly from their point of view – we’ve lost jobs, lost friends, lost networks, and even been arrested and interrogated. Yes, oddly enough, that does have an impact on our political voice.

And then, insanely, Nscribble tells us there’s no such thing as a female body.

We’re standing on a tiny island and chunks of it are falling into the sea every hour. Sharks are circling.

The ACLU yesterday, UN Women today.

Laverne Cox is a man who calls himself a woman. Marsha Johnson was a drag queen who did not call himself a woman. Here’s a list of 15 women that includes 2 men; enjoy!

An ACLU promo on Facebook did what it’s supposed to do and got me to click the ACLU link and read and then to look for more. The second item is Ban Forced Pregnancy.

As the Supreme Court appears prepared to gut or overturn Roe v. Wade, the threat to our abortion rights has never been closer to becoming reality. Already, roughly half of all states are poised to ban abortion, and politicians could even push to ban abortion nationwide if they have the opportunity. As a result, people across the country could be forced to remain pregnant against their will, losing control over their own bodies and futures.

People! Actual people! I used to think it was just women, so meh, but now that I know it’s people, I see that this really matters.

Laws that prevent people from making their own decisions about whether to continue a pregnancy or have an abortion amount to forced pregnancy. … Long-term consequences include…Increased levels of poverty for people turned away from the abortion care they need and an inability to cover basic needs like food, housing, and transportation… Policies that force people to remain pregnant and give birth are unconscionable, cruel, and dangerous. Lives and futures are at stake.

Actual lives – the lives of people.

How are People Already Being Forced to Remain Pregnant?

Shortly after Roe established the right to abortion, politicians rushed to undercut the landmark decision by passing increasingly cruel abortion restrictions — including laws preventing people from using their insurance to cover abortion care, mandating care be delayed for a certain amount of time, requiring parental consent for young people

Etc etc etc in the same vein, scrupulously excluding the word “women.”

Fuck the ACLU.

How much bigger than a cat is a large football player?

Kurt Zouma is 6’3″ and 209 lbs/94.8 kg. An average cat is 8 to 10 lb, and only a few inches high. Not exactly a fair fight.

Police have opened inquiries into a video that shows West Ham’s Kurt Zouma kicking and slapping a cat. They are planning a joint investigation with the RSPCA, which has described the footage as “very upsetting”.

Zouma has now apologized. Because what, he thought it was ok to kick and smack an animal a small fraction of his size until people got mad at him?

Originally a comment by Freemage on Even dangerous ideas.

Above and beyond the offensiveness of the position, it’s a crap job of philosophy. I read the article in Daily Nous, and it contained a fairly extensive breakdown of Kershnar’s position, which while more nuanced than the clips being touted by the right wing social media ring, are still utter shite.

He has two prongs to his discussion–he says that sex with minors should be illegal if it is harmful or against their will, but then posits that since it isn’t always harmful or against the minor’s will, there might be cases where it shouldn’t be illegal.

This, frankly, shows a grotesque ignorance of both human psychological development AND legal theory.

First off, there’s an entire body of law that exists not because of the certitude of harm, but because of the extended probability of harm–every OSHA regulation in existence, most driving laws, etc, are all based on the idea that when a particular course of action has a heightened chance of harm (even to oneself–see seat belt laws for adults), it is reasonable for the government to enact regulations and prohibitions when necessary. The fact that some 14-year-old might’ve had sex with an adult and turned out okay despite that does nothing to mitigate the fact that there is a very great risk of harm to the child, which the adult is completely and recklessly ignoring in order to sate their own desires.

As for “against their will”, it’s like the man never heard of age-of-consent laws outside of the context of sex. The fact is, adolescents are not fully formed psychologically, and therefore cannot consent to a great number of things, including signing contracts. Therefore, to talk about ‘against the will’ of the child in this context is absurd–under the law, minors have no ‘will’ to speak of, and duty of care is bestowed on their parents for that reason.

So, fine, he has a free speech right to make these arguments, but by doing so he is demonstrating his complete incompetence as a man who is paid to think things through.

Eric Alterman in the Nation on Todd Gitlin:

Todd was no less devoted to activism and organizing than he was to scholarship. This was harder than it looks. To be an honest intellectual, as I once heard Susan Sontag—another friend and fan of Todd’s—say, is to make distinctions. To be a successful activist, however, requires the elision of such distinctions in the name of movement unity. By the time he died in early February at 79, Todd was the veteran of more movements than most of us can remember hearing of. He spoke at rallies, in classrooms, at dinners, and cocktail parties, just as he published in scholarly sociological publications, on op-ed pages and obscure political websites, in underground zines, student newspapers, and, on occasion, these pages. (During presidential elections, he would auction off private meals to raise money for whoever was the least worst Democratic candidate.) He also wrote books of sociology, history, current events, advice to young activists, as well as poetry and fiction. Todd had something to say about almost everything, and, as Kazin told The New York Times, he sometimes made his points rather testily. But in all these venues, he said the same things. He did not bastardize his views depending on the audience. He did not oversimplify. He made critical distinctions at rallies and spoke personally, from his heart, in graduate seminars. Whether the cause was to revive the 1930s’ labor/intellectual alliance, working to pressure his alma mater, Harvard, to divest from fossil fuels, or voicing his opposition to the academic boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement aimed at Israel, Todd told his complicated truth everywhere he went.

…

Todd’s legacy is larger than can be documented here. He deserves to be remembered not only for his writings about the ’60s but also for his pioneering media criticism and his early critique of academic and left-wing identity politics. It was way back in his 1995 book, The Twilight of Common Dreams, that he observed, “While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department.” But I would argue that his primary legacy rests in his ability to combine intellectual complexity and honesty with a lifelong commitment to liberal humanist values, applying all of these simultaneously to whatever collective malady we faced at that time.

Quite a good legacy.

No sooner do I upbraid one collection of strategically vague claims than I find myself reading another.

Louis Theroux has compared pornography to junk food and argued that sex work is a valid occupation in the modern world.

The film-maker returns to BBC2 on Sunday with Forbidden America, a three-part series that explores the adult entertainment industry as it grapples with its own MeToo movement.

Sigh. “Sex work” is feelgood for selling access to one’s body to strangers. “The adult entertainment industry” is feelgood for porn, including violent porn. If you’re going to talk about it, talk about it; don’t pretty it up.

Theroux, 51, told Radio Times that he has watched pornography for the sake of expediency. He admitted: “I’ve been a user of porn. I sort of see it as a bit like . . . maybe this sounds harsh, but it’s a bit like junk food, right?”

Wrong. It’s the opposite of harsh. It’s mollifying. It’s self-excusing. The “junk” in his junk food metaphor here is women – damaged exploited women.

“I genuinely see sex work as work, and valid work, and I know that’s controversial in some quarters,” he said. “These stories are hard to tell, because enlightened, thoughtful, intelligent people can disagree passionately about what it means to be paid to have sex.”

Fun fact: the word “women” doesn’t appear in the piece. Not once. You’d never know there was any power imbalance or exploitation at stake – in fact there’s nothing even indicating why his view is controversial.

Another cancellation?

Philosopher Stephen Kershnar of the State University of New York at Fredonia is barred from campus and teaching, pending an investigation into his recent comments about whether “adult-child sex” is always wrong.

A number of philosophers and free speech advocates have jumped to Kershnar’s defense, arguing that his words have been taken out of context and that academic freedom means nothing if it doesn’t protect even dangerous ideas. Yet other academics believe Kershnar’s comments are troubling enough to make his more than an open-and-shut academic freedom case.

What about this idea that “academic freedom means nothing if it doesn’t protect even dangerous ideas”? All dangerous ideas? No matter how dangerous? What about the “idea” that genocide is good? What about the “idea” that all the Xs should be killed? What about the “idea” that women deserve to be beaten up for disobedience? What about the “idea” that Trump should be forcibly reinstalled in the White House with elections suspended and Princess Ivanka named as his successor? What about the “idea” that the pandemic is a myth?

I’m not convinced that academic freedom is that absolute. Academics aren’t free to be incompetent or fraudulent, and I’m not sure they’re free to be dangerous either.

Fredonia’s University Senate, for instance, is today considering a resolution condemning Kershnar’s “straightforward but factually erroneous oration” as “troublesome, offensive and dangerous, with the potential to normalize attitudes and behaviors that cause great, emotional, psychological and cognitive damage to survivors of child sexual abuse.”

News of the Senate resolution was first reported by philosopher Justin Weinberg, editor of the philosophy blog Daily Nous, who condemned the proposal itself. “One hopes that Prof. Kershnar’s colleagues will not be among those who have fallen for the manipulatively edited video interview footage whose viral spread was initiated by a right-wing social media account known for hit jobs,” Weinberg wrote. “One hopes that these professors will take a moment to actually acquaint themselves with his views or understand the nature of his inquiries before rushing to condemn their colleague.”

Which is interesting, because Weinberg and Daily Nous aren’t generally quite so sympathetic toward “terfs.”

In its own letter to Fredonia, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education said that “Kershnar’s statements are protected by the First Amendment, which prohibits SUNY Fredonia from taking adverse action against faculty members for protected speech, however provocative or offensive it may be to others.”

Yes but “provocative” and “offensive” aren’t the only possibilities. There’s also harm. It’s easy to say that provocative and offensive speech should be free, but not so easy to say that speech that does harm should be free.

I don’t actually know what I think about whether Kershnar should be forbidden or allowed to argue that sex with minors is permissible, but I do think people arguing either way should be clear about what they’re defending.