Science museum makes changes at the behest of science-denying loonies.

The Science Museum is set to alter its Boy or Girl? display following complaints over a “lack of mention of transgender”.

The museum in question is the science museum, just as it says in the name, the one in South Kensington, inspired by Dear Albert in the wake of the Great Exhibition. It matters, the way the one on Central Park West matters.

Curators will make changes to a gallery covering human biology in order to “update (the) non inclusive narrative”, it can be revealed. 

But science has nothing to do with being “inclusive” at the expense of being accurate. Science isn’t a club or a gang or a party, it’s a form of systematic inquiry and testing which creates bodies of knowledge. It’s not there to be “inclusive” for the sake of it.

A display on sex characteristics titled Boy or Girl? has received complaints “due to the lack of mention of transgender”, according to internal documents, and there are plans to make alterations to the exhibit which asks “how are boys and girls different?” … Boy or Girl? had previously been altered to remove a sign which stated “your X and Y chromosomes define your biological sex” following complaints in 2016.

X and Y are such non-inclusive letters.

The Supreme Court knows who is a woman and who isn’t. Women are those people the government gets to force to bear children against their will. Women are those people who can’t make their own decisions about their own lives. Women are those people whose bodies belong to the state.

Until now, all the court’s abortion decisions have upheld Roe‘s central framework — that women have a constitutional right to an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb, until roughly between 22 and 24 weeks.

But Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks. A separate law enacted a year later would ban abortions after six weeks, and while the six-week ban is not at stake in this case, the state is now asking the Supreme Court to reverse all of its prior abortion decisions and to return the abortion question to the states.

And since Donald Trump (who is a fan of abortion when the fetus is his) appointed three anti-abortion justices to the Court, Roe v Wade is screwed.

[Lawyer Julie Rikelman of the Center for Reproductive Rights] argues that under the amendment’s “explicit protection for liberty,” the court has protected marriage, contraception and intimate relationships, even though those words are not in the Constitution, “just as it has protected the ability to make basic decisions about our bodies for over 100 years.”

“What’s critical to remember,” she contends, “is that the court has long said that a woman’s liberty interests are unique when it comes to pregnancy. Her body and health are deeply affected by pregnancy, as is the course of her life, her ability to work, go to school and to prosper.”

And it’s her body and her health – not the state’s and not the fetus’s.

But the Court is what it is, so we’re going backward.

So I searched the posts archive and found the last time I had occasion to mention Matt Dillahunty: it was in February and March 2018 and it was about the fact that he and Sam Harris were booked to do an event with Lawrence Krauss despite accusations of sexual harassment against Krauss.

It makes me tired all over again, just reading the posts. The whole idea of going anywhere – even from one room to another – to listen to those three wowing us with their giant male brains makes me want to hibernate. The one from February says why:

I suppose this is a built-in hazard of having these all-male Celebrations of All the Brain Things That Women Can’t Do Because They’re Stupid – one or more of the men will turn out to have a long string of sexual harassment and downright assault in his or their past or pasts.

Do they go together to some extent? This peacocking vanity of pretending to be movie stars Thought Leaders and this unfortunate tendency to trip and fall onto women?

Yes, I think so. If they get a little fame they get a lot of immunity and looking the other way along with it. “Oh Doctor Professor Man sells tickets, we can’t possibly not invite him when he’s so kindly willing to perform, we’re sorry about the gropes or the insults or both but THE MAN SELLS TICKETS thank you for understanding.”

Bros protecting bros

The allegations that convinced him are not public

I don’t see anything about Dillahunty and “transphobia” – I don’t know if I missed it or just didn’t say anything about it.

The ego-dogmatism soup here is something to behold.

Loud domineering guy tells the world that being biologically female isn’t relevant to being a woman. Not his to give away, yet again.

And, those people who have wombs, those people without whom none of us would exist, are women. That’s the word for them. If the Matt Dillahuntys and Adrian Harrops succeed in their efforts to make that word not mean “the ones with wombs” then we’ll just have to get a new word which will mean the same thing. What’s the point of that? We already have the word. If the Harrahuntys want a word that means “men who playact being women” they should get a new one instead of stealing ours.

There are a lot of scornful quote tweets.

We’re not the ones who have “bought into the confusion.”

A stupid counter-factual assertion doesn’t become less stupid or less counter-factual because you add a “Period” to it. Matt Dillahunty is Lauren Boebert’s second-best espresso machine. Period. See? It doesn’t work. Trans women are men who say they feel like women inside. That’s what “trans women” means. It’s the word “women” that means “women”; the phrase “trans women” means something else. The “trans” part of “trans women” indicates “not” or “opposite” or “fantasy.” It doesn’t indicate “real” or “literal” or “genuine.” And the “Period” is just decoration.

And he’s wrong that it’s not remotely like believing the bread turns into Jesus. It’s really quite like it. Granted bread is a different kind of thing from a man who thinks he has the “identity” of a woman, but the belief in a miraculous change from one kind of thing to another kind of thing is plenty similar enough.

But it gets worse.

“It’s right there in the name” – oh come on. “God” is right there in the name too, but that doesn’t make the claims about “God” true. Of course it’s right there in the name: it’s right there in the name because the “trans women” put it there, because they’re hell bent on taking our ability to name ourselves away and giving it to themselves. The claim doesn’t become true because the people who want us to believe it’s true worded the claim so as to trick us into believing it’s true. Language isn’t magic that way.

We’re not paying attention to Dillahunty’s saying some people with penises are women? And if we were paying such attention, we would Understand and Believe?

What a buffoon.

Harrop was worse than I knew. Graham Linehan and ripx4nutmeg share some revolting details of what he and Stephanie Hayden did to Caroline Farrow:

Not your average caring GP.

Caroline’s husband is a Catholic priest at two parishes and in 2019 Harrop asked Stephanie Hayden for a game of golf, using a picture of one of her husband’s churches. Hayden famously has a conviction for attacking a man with a golf club.

Taunts and “jokes” that went on and on, and more. Targeted sadistic relentless harassment of a woman he disagrees with over trans dogma. One month really doesn’t seem like enough after reading all that. (The worst harassment shown here was by someone else, but Harrop’s was only relatively less foul. The man’s a sadist.)

The BBC picks up a very long pair of tongs to talk about [whispers] hijab.

Europe’s top human rights organisation has pulled posters from a campaign that promoted respect for Muslim women who choose to wear headscarves after provoking opposition in France.

See it? The very long pair of tongs? It’s the “choose to” bit. It’s tendentious to talk about Muslim women “choosing to” wear hijab when in fact women are forced to wear it, and tortured or even killed for refusing to wear it, in many places where Islam has not liberalized even slightly.

It’s probably the case that many Muslim women in Europe do have a choice, but it’s also well known that many of them don’t – that their parents or brothers or husbands don’t let them. We know that rules about female “modesty” are enforced with violence in France and the UK as well as in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It’s certainly more than well known enough for a news organization like the BBC to be aware of it. But still they insert that “choose to” even though they must know better than that.

The Council of Europe released the images last week for a campaign against anti-Muslim discrimination.

That doesn’t actually look like freedom though, does it – that tight muffling thing wrapped around the head and neck, and notice also the long sleeves on what the hijab-free woman seems to find a warm day.

Several prominent French politicians condemned the message and argued the hijab did not represent freedom.

But some Muslim women who wear headscarves said the reaction showed a lack of respect for diversity and the right to choose what to wear in France.

France’s youth minister, Sarah El Haïry, said she was shocked by one poster, which showed a split image of one women wearing a hijab, and one not.

In an interview on French TV, the minister suggested the poster had encouraged women to wear headscarves. She said this message jarred with the secular values of France, which had expressed its disapproval of the campaign.

On Wednesday, the Council of Europe told the BBC that tweets related to the campaign had been deleted “while we reflect on a better presentation of this project”.

Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there just is no good way to frame the hijab as a “choice” when for millions of women it’s no such thing.

The Times quotes Stonewall:

A Stonewall spokesperson said: “It is not true that Stonewall looks to shut down debate. Meaningful, constructive debate and discussion around complex policy ideas are at the heart of what we do as a charity. The one thing we do not debate is whether trans people exist. They do, and what we need to discuss is how to make a world where all LGBTQ+ are free to be themselves.”

Even if it’s true that Stonewall doesn’t look to shut down debate, it sure as hell does muddy it. That spokesperson spokement is some very wet sloppy mud.

Nobody is saying “trans people don’t exist.” That’s not the issue at all. We all know there are plenty of people – who exist – who say they are trans. Of course we know that, we see them saying it every day. The issue is what that means, and whether or not it’s true, and what implications it has for everyone else.

We don’t dispute or “debate” that some people say they are trans. We dispute the claim that saying you are sex X or Y means you are that sex. We dispute the idea that declaration supersedes physical reality. We dispute the magic-like belief that words=a change of sex.

We also dispute the claim that it’s possible to change sex. We may agree that people can perform or “live as” the sex opposite their own, but we don’t agree that that makes them the sex opposite their own in every sense, and that not believing that claim is the height of evil and violence.

But of course Stonewall doesn’t want to put it that way, because then the fantasy becomes all too obvious. It has to pretend that we’re skeptical of existence as opposed to attributes. It’s all a big tedious lie.

As for “a world where all LGBTQ+ are free to be themselves” – the whole point is that they want to be not-themselves – they want to be other people’s selves. They want to pretend to be the sex of other people and to force everyone to endorse their fiction. That’s not a reasonable demand. We get to debate the fuck out of it.

Such a nice man, and (as he doesn’t mind saying himself) such a feminist.

Huh. Tell that to a woman giving birth. Tell it to a woman in her 35th week of pregnancy. Tell it to a woman who’s been raped. Tell it to the women who lost medals to Veronica Ivy and Laurel Hubbard. Tell it, as another person on Twitter said to him, to the Taliban.

So as you’ve seen Harrop received a one month suspension.

That sounds like nothing but word is it’s not. It’s on his record and will limit his career from now on.

It’s on the record that he engaged in inappropriate, insulting and at times intimidatory communications on Twitter – in short that he’s a bully.

There’s an odd thing about Matt Dillahunty’s trans dogma though.

Ok so trans women are women in the sense of having (or being or living or some other verb) female gender, but not in the sense of being of the female sex. But in that case, what makes it ok for trans women “to access spaces where women and girls are undressing, such as changing rooms?” How does gender, a social construct, make that safe and reasonable?

And for that matter, how can someone who concedes that trans women are female according to gender but not according to sex also say flatly that trans women are women? How can it be that simple and self-evident and absolute? If women are women physically as well as socially while trans women are men physically but women socially, why are we called terfs for saying that that difference matters? If Dillahunty himself concedes that trans women are not physically women then why is he so abrupt and belligerent and absolutist that all the same they are women so shut the fuck up?

It doesn’t really make any sense. I mean even in his terms it doesn’t make any sense.

From the Shut Up I Win files:

I feel lucky that I never wasted any admiration on Matt Dillahunty. Never listened to the podcast, only ever heard him speak once, at the American Atheists jamboree in Austin, and found him obnoxiously macho-loud and overbearing. Stamped CONFIRMED.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on All the rights.

There is only one trans “right” being asserted by activists, and that is the “right” to have everyone else in the world affirm their particular religious beliefs, at all times and in all places.

The incoming government of Germany has recently signed an agreement in principle on their governing priorities, which must now be referred to the coalition parties at large for approval before that government can be put into effect. When the agreement is approved, the measures within it will not automatically become law, but they provide a roadmap for what the government wishes to accomplish during its reign.

Many of the proposals are undoubtedly an improvement over the status quo; in particular, simplifications to immigration and legalisation of cannabis would materially improve the lives of millions of German residents, if and when these come into force before the next election.

More neutral, or at least less obviously good, are a few economic policies on offer; in particular, opening the German retirement fund to market speculation (supposedly with the equivalent of mutual funds in the US, though possibly a bait-and-switch to allow stock traders access to retirement funds for their individual bets) and a philosophy of austerity-for-all-seasons could have dramatic medium- and long-term negative consequences for the German and thereby the European economy.

But, more contentiously, the government proposes to bring in a raft of “trans rights” which ultimately amount to the reimposition of blasphemy codes in public and private life. As the incoming coalition is left-leaning, they all seem to have drunk deeply of trans activist dogma, at least their various youth wings. In particular, they are promising to enact some form of Self-ID (possibly with no-questions-asked statutory insurance coverage of any cosmetic procedures under the umbrella of “gender medicine”), along with a proposed fine of up to 2,500 Euros for instances of “misgendering” people.

Given the fervour of adherence to trans dogma and the promise of liberation and meaning it provides to its adherents, it is a virtual certainty that these measures will remain in the coalition agreement, and the chances are quite high that they will be among the first implemented by the new regime. Trans activists online are lustily promising to scour the timelines of suspected TERFs in search for wrong-think which they can then report in order to impose this fine, and some trans activists (with the barest cover of irony) are welcoming the construction of an anti-TERF “police state”.

I do not believe that the people proposing these measures have thought through the societal implications of them, nor of the reaction they are likely to engender across the voting public. The most likely danger is that these young activists accomplish this policy of compelling the speech they approve of and forbidding the speech they disapprove of with harsh penalties, and when enough people outside of the core of Berlin come into contact with these policies, they generate enough scandal to bring down the government and force a new election.

It could very soon be a reality in Germany, at least for a time, that such questions as drove Ophelia from FreeThoughtBlogs are no longer matters of philosophy, or interpersonal comity, or even personal politics; being asked “Meinen Sie, dass Transfrauen Frauen sind, ja oder nein?”, on the Internet or on the street or in the privacy of your own home, could well come with a hefty financial penalty for offering a negative answer, regardless of what you actually believe.

Trannish Inquisition, indeed.

The stars of Activism are really on fire today. Not entirely in a good sense.

Spaces set aside for other people aren’t a “right.” Puberty blockers and elective amputations aren’t “health care.” “Legal protections” that endanger other people aren’t “protections.”

He summoned the troops.

Well, really snarky, at least.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

On a visit to Paris earlier this month, Harris reportedly spent more than $500 on cookware at E Dehillerin, a shop near the Louvre museum. 

Well, yes, that Le Creuset stuff is expensive.

Republicans and rightwing media outlets seized on the purchase, attempting to use it to show that the vice-president, a former California attorney general and US senator, was out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Ahhhh yes because 500 whole dollars, in sharp contrast to Donald Trump.

That’s his very own tasteful understated man of the people living room. It cost $37.99 at Walmart.

Trump famously criticised Barack Obama for playing too much golf, said he would be too busy to play much himself, then spent considerable time on the fairways. Estimates of the cost to taxpayers vary. One dedicated website, Trumpgolfcount.com, put it at $149m.

And the kicker is that most of that public money went to Trump himself, because unlike any president before him he charged his Secret Service agents for housing in his own hotels at his own golf clubs. Profit profit profit.

Points of view.

Oh what was that? thought I, and it didn’t take much hunting to find out.

It was on PM on Radio 4, so I’ll be listening later.

Well that’s a stupid question for a psychologist, even a TV one. Of course we can debate what people claim to “know” and “feel.” If we couldn’t there wouldn’t be much debate about anything.

Surely one of the first and most basic things you learn in psychology is how very fallible human knowing and feeling are. It’s even a bromide – “the easiest person to fool is yourself.”

That is in fact one of the things that irritates me the most about this idiotic movement, the sudden disappearance of this basic item from the toolkit of people who “identify as” skeptics and fans of reason and secularists and all the rest of it. It’s all right there in the question that started my departure from Freethought Blogs: “Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?” One, no, but two, more to the point, nobody expects a trannish inquisition. Since when do unabashed atheists interrogate other unabashed atheists about what they believe?

It makes people stupid. The whole “movement,” as a movement, makes people stupid, and then it makes them dogmatic and punitive.

I don’t understand what their point is, the people who write this kind of thing, whether in the Telegraph or on Fox News or on Twitter.

The PM says these measures are designed to prevent a lockdown, but I am utterly convinced they’re the beginnings of one. If they are necessary because the omicron variant’s mutations mean it travels fast, and it has already been spotted nesting in the UK, logic suggests that cases will jump – which means more pressure on the NHS and on ministers to act. How many times have we been told “thus far and hopefully no further”, only for the PM to appear on television days later and admit, with regret, that we have to shut up shop?

What is he, six? He’s complaining that the rules change as what we know changes. Well does he think they shouldn’t? Does he think it’s someone’s fault that knowledge about a constantly mutating virus changes over time? What is his point?

The Government says we should plan for Christmas as normal, but these are the same people who said we could travel to France or Spain earlier in the crisis only to reverse-ferret and give us a few days to get home.

But could that be because of new information? Granted it could be incompetence or politicking, but it could also be because what they know about the virus isn’t fixed in amber.

They don’t know what they’re doing because they don’t know what’s going to happen (we don’t have the data on how bad omicron is) and because there is no silver bullet for a pandemic. We are double-vaccinated. We have been offered a booster. We were encouraged to think that science would lick this thing, yet at the first sign of trouble, we return to the same blunt methods of disease control we introduced last summer.

And? What should they do instead? Just throw their hands up and surrender?

It’s true that we’re not fully locked down, and our rules aren’t as draconian as in parts of Europe, but don’t swallow the propaganda that these measures, however proportionate, are “light”. Cancelled travel means divided families. PCR testing and isolation on return from abroad will hit the travel industry hard. Isolation if you come into contact with a carrier is a recipe for another pingdemic. Then there are the masks, compulsory on transport and in shops, which might do some good and bring a little comfort, but are also irritating, uncomfortable and an invasion of our civil liberties. This matters, or should.

Or, rather, masks might do quite a good job of reducing transmission, and the “civil liberty” of not masking during a lethal pandemic is not one worth writing heroic poetry about.

There are a few paragraphs more of the same kind of childish “I don’t wanna and I don’t hafta” bullshit. It’s all so stupid I don’t know how it gets so much ink.

Other news:

The tribunal is deciding whether or not to suspend him.

Trans activist says what?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Oh is that what they call it.

The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, said on Saturday he had “reached out” to Democrats over Islamophobic comments made by one of his party, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, about the Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar.

Boebert apologised for the remarks, in which she likened one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress to a suicide bomber, on Friday, saying she wanted to meet Omar in person. 

No she didn’t. We saw this yesterday. She didn’t apologize. She did the “sorry you got so offended” thing. You don’t apologize for an insult by saying “Apologies to anyone who was offended by the insult.” That’s not an apology. It treats the insult as only contingently an insult, and it puts the onus on the targets of the insult as opposed to the trashy person who tweeted the insult. That’s not just not an apology, it’s a further insult, in painting the targets of the insult as whiny babies and the insulter as a patient adult telling them to calm down. Lauren Boebert is not that patient adult, she’s a trashy vulgar belligerent ignoramus.

In a statement to CNN, McCarthy said: “I spoke with Leader [Steny] Hoyer today to help facilitate that meeting so that Congress can get back to talking to each other and working on the challenges facing the American people.”

Never mind that, speak to your trashy vulgar member and tell her to stop with the insults.

McCarthy did not condemn Boebert’s remarks.

Of course he didn’t.