Ah yes, if the science says fossil fuels are cooking the planet the thing to do is…lobby to change what the science says.

A huge leak of documents seen by BBC News shows how countries are trying to change a crucial scientific report on how to tackle climate change.

The leak reveals [that] Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels.

Similarly, if your house is on fire, the thing to do is take the phone away from the damn fool who is calling the fire department and call for pizza instead.

The leaked documents consist of more than 32,000 submissions made by governments, companies and other interested parties to the team of scientists compiling a UN report designed to bring together the best scientific evidence on how to tackle climate change.

“Dear Science Talkers, please say coal and oil are good for us, thank you very much, The Coal and Oil Interests.”

The leak shows a number of countries and organisations arguing that the world does not need to reduce the use of fossil fuels as quickly as the current draft of the report recommends.

An adviser to the Saudi oil ministry demands “phrases like ‘the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales…’ should be eliminated from the report”.

One senior Australian government official rejects the conclusion that closing coal-fired power plants is necessary, even though ending the use of coal is one of the stated objectives the COP26 conference.

Saudi Arabia is the one of the largest oil producers in the world and Australia is a major coal exporter.

It’s like driving at top speed toward a cliff saying “We’re fine!”

Australia asks IPCC scientists to delete a reference to analysis of the role played by fossil fuel lobbyists in watering down action on climate in Australia and the US.

“Hello, we’re here to lobby you to remove insulting references to lobbying.”

I started re-reading Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye last night and there’s a very resonant passage about girls and puberty in chapter 17. The adult narrator starts with her childhood friend [it’s complicated] Cordelia:

Breasts fascinate Cordelia, and fill her with scorn. Both of her older sisters have them by now. Perdie and Mirrie sit in their room with its twin beds and sprigged-muslin flounces, filing their nails, laughing softly; or they heat brown wax in little pots in the kitchen and take it upstairs to spread on their legs. They look into their mirrors, making sad faces – “I look like Haggis McBaggis! It’s the curse!” Their wastebaskets smell of decaying flowers.

They tell Cordelia there are some things she’s too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway. Cordelia, her voice lowered, her eyes big, passes on the truth: the curse is when blood comes out between your legs. We don’t believe her. She produces evidence: a sanitary pad, filched from Perdie’s wastebasket. On it is a brown crust, like dried gravy. “That’s not blood,” Grace says with disgust, and she’s right, it’s nothing like when you cut your finger. Cordelia is indignant. But she can prove nothing.

I haven’t thought much about grown-up women’s bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous. We hang around outside the room where Perdie and Mirrie are peeling the wax off their legs while they utter yelps of pain, trying to see through the keyhole, giggling: they embarrass us, although we don’t know why. They know they’re being laughed at and come to the door to shoo us away. “Cordelia, why don’t you and your little friends bug off!” They smile a little ominously, as if they know already what is in store for us. “Just wait and see,” they say.

This frightens us. Whatever has happened to them, bulging them, softening them, causing them to walk rather than run, as if there’s some invisible leash around their necks, holding them in check – whatever it is, it may happen to us too. We look surreptitiously at the breasts of women on the street, of our teachers; though not of our mothers, that would be too close for comfort. We examine our legs and underarms for sprouting hairs, our chests for swellings. But nothing is happening: so far we are safe.

That all sounds kind of familiar to me, although I don’t remember that time with anything like the clarity and detail Atwood gives. I don’t remember much but I do remember that it felt alien and strange and sometimes repulsive.

The writing is brilliant, obviously (I think this is perhaps her best novel), and I think it’s relevant to the gender dysphoria issue. The onset of puberty is ook, at least for some (apparently some girls await it impatiently and are delighted when it arrives), but mostly you get used to it. You don’t feel hairy, squashy, monstrous forever.

The quislings emerge.

Her “overarching concern for vulnerable people,” she says, as if women were invulnerable. Men who pretend to be women are not more vulnerable than women. They’re not as vulnerable as women either. If our overarching concern is for vulnerable people then it’s extremely bizarre to choose people brandishing flares and shouting threats from behind masks over one woman being abused and harassed by the masked shouters.

And what is “the harm caused”?

And how are the group in question more “vulnerable and marginalized” than women? Since when do women hold all the cards? Since when are women made of stone while men are made of gauze and smoke?

Miserable sneaking coward.

Sarah Ditum points out what a disaster it is when a lobby group is also providing training to public bodies on the very issue it lobbies for.

And behind the scenes, let’s say this lobby group is influencing the policies of the BBC, so that before the debate can ever take place, one side has already written the terms in which it will happen. If you wanted to complain about that to the ombudsman, don’t bother: the lobby group also has the ear of Ofcom.

Quite an advantage, isn’t it.

It’s already happening. The issue is the introduction of gender identity in law; the lobby group is Stonewall, the LGBT rights group; and the consequence has been one of the worst ever interludes for public debate in this country.

Stonewall wants “people are what they say they are” to become law, and doesn’t care about the effects on women.

You might consider those consequences good, bad or irrelevant. But as a society we never got the chance to discuss them, because rather than wait for parliament to pass a bill, Stonewall simply wrote its own version of the law as it would like it to be, and then disseminated it through the training it provides to various public bodies, which have promptly fallen into line.

The Nolan report goes into this with energy, so that it sticks in the mind. Stonewall claims that “gender identity” is a protected characteristic, and that’s not the law.

Why would organisations comply so carelessly with such radical proposals? Because as well as inviting Stonewall to tell them what to do, they’ve also given it the power to tell them how well they’re doing, via Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme and equality index. Institutions that want to perform well on those (and what institution likes to give the appearance of failing at diversity and equality?) need to show they’re acting in line with Stonewall’s principles.

I still wonder, though, how Stonewall managed to corner the market on diversity and equality. Pink hair on a man isn’t really all that diverse.

Harry Lambert at the New Statesman on Sussex and Stock:

On Saturday 16 October nearly one hundred people took over an open day at the University of Sussex to protest the employment of Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy. “Stock out!” “Get Kathleen off our campus!” “No Terfs here!” rang the chants. “Don’t come to Sussex!” they warned visitors.

They handed out an illiterate leaflet to explain their “reasons.”

When I visited Stock recently, she spoke haltingly of the slow burn of her social isolation at Sussex, punctured as it has been by the discovery of new online attacks and internal emails undermining her in the wake of any publicity she attracts.

Oh that must be nice – knowing her colleagues are abusing her in internal emails.

“This month is just the endgame. Some of my colleagues have been spinning a line against me for a long time,” she told me.

I asked Nehaal Bajwa, the diversity officer at Sussex Students’ Union, how Stock was contributing to the “dire state of unsafety for trans people in this colonial shit-hole”, as the leaflet put it. Stock’s views created “an unsafe atmosphere” for trans students, Bajwa said, as protesters overtook the campus square, setting off pink and blue flares, Stock cancelled her courses and followed police advice to stay off campus and secure her home. I asked a protester whether the demo was designed to be intimidating. “We’re standing still,” they said. “Her presence to us is intimidating.”

No it isn’t. She’s not the one brandishing flares.

But the university did not act to address this culture of harassment, despite one fellow professor regularly hounding Stock online in all but name, and another academic openly tweeting “shame” on Stock and her “fellow transphobic ilk”. Instead, administrators gave Stock’s critics access to the internal email system to send school-wide messages without offering Stock a right of reply. And those in managerial roles supported her critics rather than remaining neutral. Stock became ever more socially isolated.

Emphasis added. Good god.

Three of Stock’s four fellow professors of philosophy at Sussex told me that they supported her academic freedom, but none would say so publicly, despite more than 200 UK academic philosophers signing an open letter supporting Stock’s and others’ “right to raise concerns on this matter”…

The outgoing Sussex vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, declined to speak to me. In a statement, the university said it had spoken out “against bullying and harassment”. Tickell recently made a clear statement in support of Stock on BBC radio. Yet he and his team are acting late, having left the accusation that one of their professors is “transphobic” unaddressed for years. Stock is now likely to leave her post.

They will succeed in bullying her out for the crime of being a feminist who disputes some (not all) claims of current trans dogma. It’s sickening.

This is of course what they all think.

It’s what they all think, but it’s stupid. Which “social justice warriors” are we talking about? Lots of people see themselves as on the side of justice, including social justice in some sense. They don’t all call themselves social justice warriors (but then neither do all “social justice warriors”), but they of course see themselves as on the side of the right and good and true. The passage of time has not shown all such warriors “to be in the right.”

It’s Whig history again: the road always goes in the direction of progress, and we never ultimately fall off it or turn around and go the other way. Except, of course, when we do. There were quite a few years back in the last century when Nazis were quite confident that the passage of time had shown them to be in the right.

I get where the idea comes from, of course. The Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the movement for lesbian and gay rights, were all sharp attacks on a status quo, and they all had considerable (though far from complete) success. The status quo was The Older Generation and attacks on it were the younger one, therefore, trans activism is the younger generation being right while the older one is wrong, again. The kids have found another status quo that needs overturning, and the stupid oldies just can’t see it, because we’re so stupid.

That could be true, but on the other hand, if feminists were right when they changed the status quo, but they’re wrong now, doesn’t that make the pattern too eccentric to follow? If feminists were right then and are wrong now, how do the kids now know they won’t be wrong in forty years? If it’s all just Inevitable Progress why not just kick back and wait?

Anyway, even if there is such a pattern, the particulars matter. We still need to figure out exactly what kind of social justice we’re talking about, and for whom, and whether all relevant parties are being heard. We still need to know what constitutes being “in the right.” We still need to know how “anti-trans” is being defined.

Nope.

Not the first female four-star admiral. The first trans four-star admiral, not the first female. There has been no first female four-star admiral yet.

The Times itself got the headline right but somehow got the tweet wrong? Another case of the social media intern erasing women?

Ellen Pasternack at The Critic tells us of a terf-spotting guide for the imperiled students at Cambridge.

… just last week, Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) published a guide to identifying something called “TERF ideology”, featuring section headings such as Spotting TERFS in the Field and Signs Of A TERF. We learn from this guide that “the language of TERFS is ever changing” and that “the unique danger of TERF rhetoric is that it is styled to sound like feminism”.

Nah it’s not styled to sound like feminism, it is feminism. That’s what the F is for. It’s also not rhetoric, it’s critical thinking.

This eight page guide, intended for incoming students at the Freshers’ Fair, is an expansion of an earlier version published in 2019. It sits on the student union website alongside guides to exams, careers and student finance. There are no guides to spotting racist, sexist, or homophobic ideology: detecting TERFs is apparently a matter of unparalleled urgency.

Why? Why are trans people The Most while everyone else is barely on the radar?

Let’s have a look.

Trans liberation is part of feminism. Fighting for autonomy and freedom must be a fight for everyone, and there should be no room for transphobia or TERFs in feminist organising.

That’s stupid. Trans “liberation” isn’t part of feminism at all, and is in fact intensely hostile to it. Feminism has its own work to do, and helping men pretend to be women is not part of that work. The absurd idea that it is is yet another reason we need feminism.

The core characteristics of TERFs are a conservative, binary, essentialist conception of sex as the be-all-end-all, and a deep hatred for trans women, couched in the language of feminism and feminist theory.

No, stupid, not “the be-all-end-all,” just the reality. Women are women: they have women’s bodies. It’s not a religion, it’s just what the word means. If trans people take it we’ll just have to replace it with one that means the same thing.

The first thing is to try and figure out where they got it from. Did they hear it from a friend, or read a news article? If they’ve read something. and it’s the first thing they’ve heard about trans people or the first time they’ve taken an interest, it may be relatively easy to inform them about where they’re going wrong, and why what they’re backing is harmful. If they’ve heard it from someone they trust and care about, consider how you frame the argument to avoid it becoming about personal relationships, which may make them defensive.

Don’t look them in the eye, that makes them very aggressive. Move calmly and slowly. Always carry treats in your pocket, you may be able to coax them to listen to your lecture if you toss them a few olives or pistachios.

Seriously though, is there anything like the conceit of kids age 20 who think they invented the world?

Worcester News:

A GROUP of men who dress in women’s clothing to raise money claim they have been told their fundraising is potentially offensive by charity bosses.

I bet I know which set of people they were told it’s potentially offensive to, and I bet it’s not women. It’s been seen as perfectly fine for centuries, whether women saw it as offensive or not, but now…well there are more important people who might find it offensive. Women, you see, aren’t important. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Members and supporters of Upton Rugby Club have dressed in drag for the Leo Sayer All Dayer, and also held other fundraisers for 18 years, to raise more than £40,000 for St Richard’s Hospice.

But times have changed, amirite?

But the group claim they have been told their latest efforts cannot by promoted by the hospice because it might offend the LGBT community.

June Patel, St Richard’s chief executive, said they appreciated the group’s fundraising but were “striving to be mindful of equality, diversity and inclusion.”

When it comes to men, that is. Obviously not women.

I think they look ever so nice, I do reely.

Also, seriously? This is stupid. They’re now looking for fundraise for a different organization.

Hmm, interesting argument.

“They” have been warning us about global warming since the late 70s, and sure enough it’s been getting worse and worse, therefore it’s time to stop believing in it.

Uh…what?

Breathtaking.

Bystanders who stood by and failed to help a woman raped on a Philadelphia commuter train last week may face criminal charges, authorities have said. Authorities say that CCTV cameras show that bystanders on the train “did nothing” as the assault took place.

Police added that some of the bystanders may have been filming the incident instead of calling police.

Wtf???????

A man has been arrested for the rape.

The alleged rape took place last Wednesday on a train belonging to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (Septa). In a statement, Septa said that “there were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may [might] have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911″. A Septa employee who boarded the train called police, who found the victim and took the suspect into custody.

While the passengers sat around watching the rape on their phones, I guess.

At a news conference on Monday, police said that they do not believe any witnesses called 911 as the woman was harassed and eventually raped over the course of more than 40 minutes.

…

“I can tell you that people were holding their phone up in the direction of this woman being attacked,” Septa police chief Thomas J Nestel said on Monday. “What we want is everyone to be angry and disgusted and to be resolute about making the system safer,” Mr Nestel added.

Timothy Bernhardt, superintendent of the Upper Darby Police Department, was quoted by the New York Times as saying that bystanders who failed to help could face criminal charges if they recorded the incident.

Before reading this horror story I was reading another one, about the shift from spiking women’s drinks when they’re not looking to INJECTING them.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Clue: Devi Sridhar is a professor.

JL at the Glinner Update reported on an attack on feminists in Portsmouth way back last March.

On Saturday afternoon Reclaim These Streets organised an event in Portsmouth to protest male violence against women and campaign for female safety.

Two young feminists taking part in this protest were threatened, taunted and even physically attacked by some of those in attendance.

“You’re protesting violence against women?? We’ll give you some violence against women to protest about!!!”

The two extremely brave young women stood on the Guildhall steps, holding a flag on which was written the dictionary definition of the word ‘woman’. Adult human female.

For this they were vilified and assaulted and the crowd jeered at them.

When the women were eventually forced from the steps, the crowd taunted them, made threatening gestures and shouted “Fuck off, c*nt!” as they walked away.

Compelling argument.

Solidarity forever yeh?

We spoke to Chinzia, one of the two women involved. She told us:

“We pulled a stunt to show what is being destroyed, our female sex, our meaning. They charged towards us on the guildhall steps, we were pushed, shoved, while we clung for dear life to the meaning of what we are. I shouted ‘The definition of what a woman is is in our curriculum’. They shouted back, ‘White supremacy is in our schools’.

Councillor Claire Udy encouraged the crowd to shout ‘Terf scum out!’. The crowd did not find it chilling to see men aggressive towards women at a protest against male violence. Young feminists applauded this moment”.

Councillor Claire Udy is an interesting character.

Incidentally, the Claire Udy to whom Chinzia refers is an independent councillor for Portsmouth’s Charles Dickens ward and a vociferous ‘trans ally’. She describes herself as ‘queer’, used to advertise a link to Pornhub in her Twitter bio, and parted company with the Labour Party after being caught out making anti-Semitic comments.

Feminist, lesbian and survivor, Sally Jackson, was also harassed and bullied at the Portsmouth event, seemingly also at the instigation of Claire Udy. The crowed chanted at her and she was called a TERF. After intervention by Udy, she was told by a steward that she may not be able to speak because the organisation she represents (Filia, a group with charitable status which campaigns for women’s rights) is ‘transphobic’.

Way back last March.

Imagine the cognitive dissonance of attending an event to protest male violence against women and then physically attacking, or cheering the attack on, two young women taking part.

Indeed, and yet we keep seeing it, over and over and over.

Here’s Claire Udy on October 7:

In other words stand with us in harassing a feminist conference. Rad!

The Telegraph on Stephen Nolan and Stonewall and the BBC.

Stonewall said it works for LGBTQ+ equality and that it is “deeply disappointing” that this can still be thought of as controversial.

“Equality” is just a manipulative buzzword there, in exactly the way “trans rights” are a manipulative slogan. What is “trans equality” exactly? What Stonewall campaigns for, and tells people to do if they want to be “Stonewall champions,” is a mess of pandering and flattering, that has nothing to do with equality. It’s not “equality” to order people to use Special pronouns, or agree that men are women, or nod enthusiastically at the claim that children know who they are. Gender critical feminist are not arguing against equality for trans people, either. It’s all deception. The push to bully us into agreeing that people can change sex is a million miles from equality.

Stephen Nolan, one of the broadcaster’s own journalists, has now spoken out, claiming that “there is a fear factor” among colleagues who disagree with the broadcaster’s alignment with the charity.

Of course there is. The trans ideologues are fanatics, and vindictive with it.

It’s because we trigger such strong feelings.

Female reality TV contestants are far more likely to be targeted for abuse by online trolls than men, research reveals.

Women of colour are particularly vulnerable to extreme and violent threats online, according to a report from the Demos thinktank, which looked at contestants on reality shows Love Island and Married at First Sight.

…

The researchers noted a particular recurrence of gendered tropes in the social media posts, including those which characterised women as devious, mentally unstable, emotionally volatile, evil, annoying or attention-seeking. Women were also much more likely to be “the subject of extreme misogynistic sexualisation and objectification” than men, they said.

And much more likely to be called cunts if they express an opinion.

Cindy Southworth, the head of women’s safety at Facebook, which also owns Instagram, said: “Women should feel safe everywhere, no matter what space they’re in. We don’t allow gender-based hate, misogynistic attacks or any threat of sexual violence on Facebook or Instagram, and just last week we announced stronger protections for female public figures, journalists and activists.”

Is that a fact?!

Spoiler: no.

What was that about death threats again?

On the one hand down with hate speech, on the other hand “suck my dick you transphobic cunts” is just strong feelings. Libby Purves in the Times:

Several evangelists have been convicted for lumbering around with placards against homosexuality, a chap got six months suspended for leaving a stupid cartoon in an airport prayer room and a peerlessly silly YouTube comedian got arrested for teaching a pug to do a Nazi salute. Quivering with sensibility, we proudly cherish our disapproval of “distressing” anyone, even if that distress is theoretical and caused by some harmless stranger’s moral opinion. There is little backing now for the tough old saying, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me.”

Unless it’s about women defending their boundaries.

Yet as we have been rightly reminded by weary MPs after the killing of Sir David Amess, real and explicit death threats are commonplaces of public life. Every few weeks Tulip Siddiq finds herself informed by some random fellow citizen that she will be raped and murdered, her family butchered. Jess Phillips has to report similar messages “all the time” to the police. The mayor of London needs 24-hour security and Rosie Duffield missed the Labour conference because of the danger posed by transgender activists. Elected officials at every level and public health scientists have had their addresses published with explicit violent menaces, often mentioning or involving their families…

Being gender critical deserves all the abuse it gets, but genuine explicit death threats are ok.

Only very occasionally is someone brought to book for such threats: only four prosecutions can I find from last year. Meanwhile the learned, thoughtful academic philosopher Kathleen Stock, who again wields no actual power, has been advised by the police to teach online, install CCTV and take bodyguards on campus.

The people bullying her, on the other hand, wear masks.

They just never get the point.

The first tweet should begin “One of the protesters,” not “Thanks be” – autocorrect struck again.

“Emotions had run high”=it’s understandable and forgivable to call women “cunts.”

This is not an argument you ever see applied to the word “nigger” in internecine disputes among the left. No one on the left thinks that’s understandable and forgivable because of high emotions.

But when it’s women somehow that’s different. It’s just passion, it’s just excess zeal, it’s just emotions running high.

They don’t get it. They don’t ever fucking get it. The fact that when emotions are running high men start calling women “cunts” is the whole point. Yes of course it’s because the sign-maker was furious at the feminist women at the conference; that’s our point. Step one is calling us cunts, step two is beating us up. When men lose their tempers at women, violence becomes all too likely. It’s not mollifying to tell us that guy who called us cunts was just really pissed off. We already know that.

Julie Bindel on the conference and its misogynist enemies:

On arrival at the venue I saw the usual array of blue fringed students and other hangers on, some draped in trans flags, others with slogan T-shirts declaring themselves non-binary, genderqueer, he/him, they/them, zi/zir, idi/ot. They were protesting, yes, protesting, a conference with a key aim to campaign to end male violence towards women and girls, and to offer support and solidarity to the victims and survivors of that violence. Of course, the reason put forward by the blue fringes, including those that had waged a war against the conference venue from the moment it was announced, was that the organisers and attendees were anti-trans, as though everything is about them.

Specifically as though everything about women is about them – even more specifically as though everything about feminist women is about them. It’s feminist women who don’t “center” men who say they are women who really get their protest energies going. Men who don’t “center” women who say they are men? Pff, they don’t matter, because they’re men. Men’s hearts are always in the right place. It’s feminist women who are the real demons in the word – conniving, sly, cruel, witchy.

I met some women I had only ever seen on Zoom, such as the amazingly talented Vaishnavi Sundar, a filmmaker from South India and the founder of Women Making Films. Vaishnavi has worked with marginalised women all her life and campaigns against male violence. Her achievements are impressive – Vaishnavi successfully fought for women to be able to access morning-after contraception in the state of Tamil Nadu. In 2018 she began making a film about sexual harassment of Indian women, including the voices of lower-caste women in the workplace as a way to hold the Indian criminal justice system to account for the lack of implementation of its laws. The film, But What Was She Wearing?, was finished in 2020 and Vaishnavi secured screenings in North America before showing it in India. Her reputation is such that her work is always warmly welcomed in both the Global North and South. But shortly before a screening of the film in New York, Vaishnavi was emailed by the organisers and told that she was no longer welcome and the event was cancelled along with Sundar and her film, due to her ‘transphobia’. Their evidence? Tweets such as “A safe space for trans women is not inside a woman’s bathroom”, posted by Vaishnavi.

So the screening of a film about a film about sexual harassment of Indian women, including lower-caste women, was canceled because everything is about men who call themselves women. Men’s need to play-act being women is more significant and support-worthy than women’s need to be free of harassment and violence. What gruesome priorites.

Oh gosh the calendar has gotten away from me again. It’s just three days to International Pronoun Day!!

International Pronouns Day seeks to make respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace.

Referring to people by the pronouns they determine for themselves is basic to human dignity. Being referred to by the wrong pronouns particularly affects transgender and gender nonconforming people. Together, we can transform society to celebrate people’s multiple, intersecting identities.

One, no, referring to people by “the pronouns they determine for themselves” is not basic to human dignity. It really really isn’t. The whole idea is trivial as well as stupid. Things that are trivial and stupid can’t be basic to human dignity. Some things are basic to human dignity, but customized pronouns are not one of them. Treating language as an opportunity to impose personal whims on all other speakers of the language is itself undignified; it’s babyish and dopy. There’s no such thing as “determining” pronouns for oneself. That’s not how language works; that’s not what language is for. Failure to understand that is like a giant custard pie in the face. Dignity is nowhere to be seen.

Two, no, together we can’t transform society to celebrate people’s multiple, intersecting identities. It’s not that easy to transform society, and doing it in aid of something stupid and childish is extra difficult, and also not worth doing in the first place. Celebration of identities is a terrible goal for a transformed society. Identities are about the self, and the more people focus on their own precious selves, the less use they are to the world. Forget about fucking identities and just do something helpful.