Andy Lewis aka Le canard noir is doing a letters-debate thing with Embrace the void aka Aaron Rabinowitz. The latter defines some terms at the outset:

The other important term here is moral panic, which I’ve discussed in a few places but just briefly refers to a substantial overreaction to a small or nonexistent problem.

Mm. It’s a small or nonexistent problem – the fact that we (women) are being told we have to redefine ourselves in a way that entails including men as women on demand. If a man tells us he’s a woman we have to agree, or at least comply; if we refuse, punishment is swift. To us that is not a small problem.

Often the problem is treated as an existential threat to some part of civilization, and often there’s a special emphasis on harms to women and children.

I find that extremely snide. He probably didn’t mean it that way, but then that’s the problem, isn’t it. He’s hinting that it’s a sentimental slushy ploy to emphasize the harms to women and children, which requires ignoring the fact that the harms to women and children are worse and that that’s because adult men have a lot of genuine advantages over women and children. Yes, we women are yipping about it a lot but that’s because it’s kneecapping our ongoing struggle to be treated as fully equal human beings along with men. Excuuuuuse us for objecting.

The other way it’s snide is that it implies there’s nothing real to object to, it’s just “oh won’t somebody please think of the [designated victims]??” Easy for him, but he’s not as easily beaten up as a woman is.

So, I’m not optimistic about this exchange.

Girls can’t “identify” their way out of having their genitals sliced off.

The death of a young woman in Sierra Leone, almost immediately after undergoing female genital mutilation, has sparked outrage and revived calls to end the practice.

The body of 21-year-old Maseray Sei was found on 20 December at Nyandeni village in Bonthe district, southern Sierra Leone, a day after the FGM took place. Sei’s family said that after the procedure the mother of two boys complained of a migraine and was in pain, with complications from FGM thought to be the cause, according to activists working on the case.

Maybe pointless mutilation of genitals isn’t such a good idea after all.

Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world, with nine out of 10 women and girls aged between 15 and 49 affected, according to Unicef. …

Rugiatu Turay, an activist and former deputy minister for gender in Sierra Leone, said the case was another shocking example of the toll of FGM on women.

“It’s a tragic case and, in a way, shows how many more people like her have died or are suffering, because the majority of cases are unreported,” she said.

Turay chairs a coalition of 21 national groups fighting FGM which is now putting pressure on the authorities to carry out the postmortem.

Meanwhile, in the “developed” world, mutilation of genitals is all the rage.

Dress your people in lacquer and rubber:

The sexology department at a Norwegian university headed by a trans-identified male and his wife prompted backlash after requiring students to participate in a fetish club as part of their research.

Zoologists can do research on animals without dressing up as animals. I don’t see why sexologists can’t do the same.

Tonje Kristin Jensen, a student at the University of Agder, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that she decided to forego a study trip in Oslo after receiving a letter providing a required dress code that included fetish gear on the theme of “lacquer and rubber.” The memo encouraged students to attend in erotic clothes, such as lace and thigh-high stockings.

Erotic for whom?

It wrote: “We have a dress code which relates to rubber, lacquer, leather, and the like. Or one can choose the erotic dress code, where lace, corsets and the like dominate. Girls can also not wear denim.”

What if girls want to wear a denim corset?

The university trip was planned for a fetish club called Cat People in Oslo. On its Facebook page, the club features several sexualized photos of women in bondage.

Not men in bondage though. I think we’re beginning to detect the vague outlines of the answer to “erotic for whom?”

In 2018, The World Health Organization (WHO) removed Fetishism, Transvestic Fetishism and Sadomasochism as psychiatric diagnoses in response to lobbying by Norwegian group FRI. The new ICD classification defines Fetishism, Fetishistic Transvestism and Sadomasochism as variants in sexual arousal, in direct contradiction with research that has consistently correlated sadism with violence, including homicide. Some research suggests that as much as 50% of sexual killers are sexually sadistic, and even higher rates have been found in serial sexual killers.

Nah it’s just a harmless kink. What’s with all the moral panic, laydeez? Come on, get your corset on and put your hands behind your back.

A letter to the Glinner update from Matt Osborne:

Mr. Linehan,

The following comment from an Alabama Democratic Party insider was just passed along to me:

“How are we going to talk to voters with a straight face after setting a quota for non-binary party officials?”

I have been sounding the alarm all this time, and now the pigeons are coming home to roost. This midterm election year is going to be awful for Democrats. I was just discussing the poor polling on all this gobbledygook with my local-political friends and said “every time another man cheats women out of their sports, Democrats lose ten House seats.” One of them responded by conveying that comment, which is less than a day old.

It’s a desperately sad joke, isn’t it. We have climate change and a pandemic and the usual life or death matters to deal with, including the continuation of democracy itself, and we could lose everything because of this stupid frivolous narcissistic belief system that lets grown men pretend to be women and push real women off the cliff in the process. It’s Swift’s boiled eggs all over again.

H/t Sackbut

That’s an amazing story.

Innocent on grounds of inability to sweat m’lud.

Lawyers for a US woman who has accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault are seeking proof of the British royal’s alleged inability to sweat.

Virginia Giuffre’s legal team made the request as part of a civil case against the prince in a New York court.

Ms Giuffre, 38, alleges that Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager at the homes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Prince Andrew has consistently denied the allegations.

In a 2019 interview with BBC Newsnight, he said a “problem” with her account was that a medical condition at the time meant he could not have been sweating, as she claims he was.

So now they want him to produce evidence of that there medical condition.

This minor detail is funny in its way, but the story as a whole is utterly revolting – filthy rich adults sex trafficking teenage girls. Those girls couldn’t identify their way out of that prison.

They just straight-up shamelessly lie about her.

When HBO announced its upcoming reunion special “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts,” the star-studded lineup did not include You-Know-Who.

In the weeks leading up to the highly anticipated program, streaming New Year’s Day on HBO Max, not a single teaser, trailer or poster has featured “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, who has come under fire in recent years for repeatedly expressing anti-transgender views.

That’s a lie.

Rowling has been known to object to lies of that kind, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Los Angeles Times (normally a respected newspaper) issue a correction with apology.

She hasn’t “expressed anti-transgender views.” It’s not “anti” to point out that only women are women and thus men are not women.

Despite her absence from HBO’s marketing campaign, however, Rowling does appear in the special, which samples footage from a 2019 interview with her. The archival clips of Rowling are fleeting, accounting for less than 30 seconds of the nearly two-hour-long show.

So, insultingly minimal. The whole gigantic enterprise came out of her head, but they simply have to pretend she doesn’t matter. That’s “anti” if you like.

An HBO spokesperson told The Times that Rowling was invited to do a new interview but that producers felt the previously captured footage was adequate. HBO did not respond to requests for clarification as to whether Rowling declined the interview or filmed a new interview that producers then decided to leave out of the special. 

Which hints that she probably did do an interview at their request and that they insultingly dropped it in the trash.

More than 20 years after “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” hit theaters, Rowling’s anti-trans rhetoric has continued to fuel discourse about separating art from the artist…

It’s not anti-trans and it’s not “rhetoric.”

Speaking of people who disagree –

Genius is still at it.

Ulrika in York is a Twitter comrade; she gives him a good pasting, and he keeps coming back with “Yes but other people disagree!!”

You don’t say. What the hell does he think we’ve been doing all this time? We know other people disagree, and that they’ve been dismantling women’s rights because they disagree, and that’s why we’re fighting back.

Other people always disagree. That doesn’t mean they’re right. People can be wrong about things. You’d think talk radio personalities would be well aware of this if anyone is.

But maybe we should side with the people who disagree, because they are so much more marginalized than women are?

That seems to be James Max’s belief. Guess what: he’s wrong.

A random accident?

Knoxville’s Planned Parenthood building was engulfed in flames early Friday morning and is a total loss.

Fire crews were called about 6:40 a.m. as heavy smoke was coming out of the back of the structure, Assistant Chief Brent Seymour said. There were no injuries to report. The building was being renovated and the clinic had not been used in some time.

Seymour said it’s too early in the investigation, with parts of the building unsafe to enter, to be able to say what caused the fire.

We can make some educated guesses though.

In January 2021 someone fired a shotgun at the doors of this Planned Parenthood clinic, shattering the glass and lodging bullet holes in the reception area. At the time of the shooting, the clinic was closed and unoccupied.

Pro-life eh?

My god, this guy!

Shrill. You couldn’t make it up.

Oh sir, please sir, sorry sir, we’re sorry our shrill squeaking voices hurt your ears, but you see sir, we’re made that way sir, we have higher voices than you strong wise large better people do, which is why we have such a struggle to get people like you to listen to us, and why we don’t want to share all of our spaces and prizes and protections with the deep-voiced kind of people. We’re afraid they might assault us you see sir, because some of you have been known to do that sir. It’s probably because of our shrill voices sir, for which again we apologize sir, but we can’t help it sir.

I wouldn’t call it reflection, exactly.

He doesn’t reflect on it so much as explain why he was right about it.

He tells us he found what Kellie Jay said deeply uncomfortable, and compared it to “the stereotypes and tropes that were used twenty years ago to describe gay people and to um not allow them the human rights that thankfully we have in today’s world” – about what’s taught in school, and predators, “it was all being repeated.”

And he thinks it’s the same thing, exactly the same thing, as we’re all supposed to think, as we’ve been coached to think by the addition of the T to the LGB. But it’s not the same thing. And he’s too uninformed to know that, so he just went with his gut, and talked a lot of ignorant dreck. And now he’s telling us how right he was, in defiance of our awareness of how completely wrong and uninformed he was.

After that he starts burbling about treating minorities badly, which allows him to ignore the fact that women are treated badly, because hey after all we’re not a minority, we’re just treated badly, and you have to tick both boxes for it to count. Yes, Mister Max, some minorities are treated badly, and so are women. (Not all minorities. Not billionaires. Not royals. Not clueless male radio hosts.) He never does grasp that point though. He mentions it, but as a grievance, not as a thing he needs to take into account.

Points still being missed.

It doesn’t have to be a trans person, it doesn’t have to be a man who identifies as a woman, it can be a man who has no delusions about being a woman at all but uses the new rules to prey on women.

He really has no idea what he’s talking about but he’s busily talking about it anyway. Oh for the confidence of a mediocre man…

I have to say, full marks to Kellie-Jay for that interview. Starred double first. I have different political views from hers in general, but she’s exactly what’s needed for the James Maxes of the world. She’s direct and calm and decisive, and men like him can’t stand that. He interprets it as “she is evil” when all she’s doing is telling the truth, very crisply. Her performance and his freakout over it are a master class in The Marriage of Trans Dogma and Misogyny. He would take her presentation for granted in a man, but in a woman it looks like creepy supernatural power.

James Max is responding to people on Twitter and with each response he underlines how clueless he is about the issue and how contemptuous he is toward women. He must be peaking people in their hundreds and thousands.

Baroness Nicholson has asked to do an interview with him. It must happen.

No YOU’RE the baddy.

“The hostile argument KJ deployed” – except of course she didn’t. This is an absolutely textbook example of women being framed as aggressive and evil for knowing what they’re talking about and saying it without simpers or apologies or disclaimers. He would take her manner for granted in a man, but when a woman does it, to him, he can feel his testicles shrinking as if he’d jumped into a freezing pond.

He’s doing us a service, in a way, putting it all out there so shamelessly.

This guy – honestly.

To be fair, he was somewhat taken aback by the fact that KJ is sharper than he is and knows a lot more about the subject than he does and was not shy or deferential about it. In short he reacted to her the way your average clueless sexist bloke does react to an uppity woman who is cleverer than he is.

Kellie-Jay eviscerates that smug conceited prat in the Spectator:

‘I just get the impression she hates men’, said a wound-licking James Max, on TalkRADIO, after he interviewed me on Wednesday. It’s a familiar accusation from those who fail to drum up rational arguments for the destruction of women’s rights.

He got that impression because she’s a great deal more intelligent than he is, not to mention skilled at arguing on live radio. Naturally a woman who makes him look stupid by being cleverer than he is must hate men.

The tone was set when Max tried to link the views of J.K. Rowling to the notorious outing of George Jamieson by the Sunday People in 1961 — four years before to Rowling’s birth. He claimed that Rowling’s recognition of women as adult human females contributed to the suffering of trans people.

It seems too obvious to point out, but Max is talking about men who claim to be women, rather than women who claim to be men. That is the nature of most of the conversations I ever have on this topic. Be in no doubt, this is a men’s rights movement.

James Max did an outstanding job of underlining that.

Unfortunately, as I tried to point out, we have yet to be able to tell which men are the bad ones — and until we do, we must ensure the best possible safeguarding for women by keeping all of them out. Men who do not wish to harm women, or cause us any discomfort, are okay with staying out of our spaces.

For making that point, Max called me hateful, disturbing and unpleasant. I am not any of those things, but I am also not afraid of these tactics to bully me into surrendering the rights women before me fought for. I am not fearful for any legal repercussions either. I am fearful for women across the country who can no longer guarantee a female-only rape crisis centre, a female-only domestic violence shelter, for the girls in schools losing their right to female-only changing rooms and toilets, who are threatened with accusations of unkindness for feeling uncomfortable. I am fearful of the great untruth being fed to us through our media, government and institutions.

Via puffed-up mediocrities like James Max.

Look behind the curtain, see how they plot the manipulation.

It’s all about them there “effective opening values” – which turn out to be the inevitable banal “freedom to be ourselves” – which in fact is not any kind of progressive (let alone left-wing) value at all but sheer narcissism.

Also, it’s funny how they say “a race class gender narrative” but then go on to ignore class entirely…as they always always do. Class just doesn’t have the glamour of race n gender, and it doesn’t offer the same opportunities for bullying women. Mention class at the outset and then ignore it entirely in the substance.

James Max is still digging.

What is the “much darker truth”? He doesn’t say. I guess we’re supposed to surmise that she wants them all killed, or something. Very respectable way to argue.

So he thinks the “physicalities” don’t exist? So, what, then? We’re all just spirits?

Really not a clever man.

Ghislaine Maxwell found guilty on all but one of the charges.

Maxwell has been found guilty on five of six counts – including the most serious charge, that of sex trafficking of a minor.

This carries a possible 40-year sentence, which means the 60-year-old could spend the rest of her life behind bars.

This charge relates to the testimony of Carolyn, who testified about being paid for sex during visits to Epstein’s Florida home between 2001 and 2004.

At the time of her first visit, she was just 14.

Maybe she should decide she’s a man.