The ACLU wants to force people to use weird counter-intuitive inaccurate pronouns. Force them. That’s a civil liberty?

To be more accurate myself, the ACLU isn’t actually trying to do the forcing itself, it filed an amicus brief explaining why it’s wrong and evil not to.

There’s no such thing as “trans and non-binary students’ pronouns.” Nobody owns pronouns. We don’t each have our own pronouns. In English the convention is to call female people she or her and male people he or him. That’s it, it’s just the convention, it’s there to make communication flow. It’s meaningless to talk about “using a student’s pronouns.”

Also the cutesie goggly eyes don’t add anything. This isn’t a fucking joke. This is the ACLU helping maniacs try to force us to use Special Words just for them. Not going to happen.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The climate has no pronouns.

Yes, the climate disaster is here, and it is going to get worse, especially for people who aren’t lucky enough to make it to rich Western countries. Some smart dude has a couple of posts about how it isn’t going to be end-of-civilisation bad which have caused me to re-think my own position slightly from “humans will probably go extinct in the next thousand years” to “billions of people will remain a permanent underclass while a small percentage of the species explores and colonises space”.

I’m just thinking out loud here, too.

I think humans as a species are tough and resilient; it’s civilization that is fragile. For the forseeable future, as long as Earth remains to any degree habitable, humans are going to be inhabiting it, albeit in far smaller numbers, as iknklast noted. Supporting billions of people requires civilization, and if that collapses, then you can’t feed billions of people, so there won’t be billions of people, “underclass” or no. The surviviors of such a collapse will be those who are able to exist within the limits of natural, living systems rather than artificial, industrial ones. The West’s dependence on a small number of industrialized monocultures requiring massive inputs of industrialized chemicals and machinery for planting, growth, and harvesting is a weak point, not a strength. The few human communities which have managed to remain unentangled with and dependent upon modern civilization may have a better chance of survival if they can adapt their lifeways to the changing world around them.

As temperatures rise, climate zones and biomes will tend to shift northward. If they can. Not all of the things that make up a given biome can just get up and trek north. Like soil. There will be massive disruption. Some species and combinations thereof will be squeezed out as they run out of “north” to go, or leave conditions upon which they’d depended behind them. This will be as true for human agriculture as it is for natural ecosystems. The Canadian Shield is not noted for its crop-ready acreage.

Life on Earth is actually pretty resilient, too, if not particular species and ecosystems. We are disrupting the current configuration of plants, animals and climate, but we are not destroying the foundations for life itself. A new balance will emerge, but not necessarily on a timescale convenient for human lifespans, or conducive to human civilization, but life will go on, with or without us. As for putting our hopes on space for continued human survival, even a post-nuclear-holocaust, post-climate-change world will be far more hospitable to life than anywhere in the solar system we can get to or build. Any space colony will always be a few critical technical failures away from extinction.

But it seems…funny, to me, how so many people in the West can look at the most prosperous and healthy and free and equal society in the history of the world and only see doom and gloom and evil and suffering. Yes, doom and gloom and evil and suffering all exist, but they have existed everywhere, for all time. And every generation has had lots of people who were absolutely certain that theirs would be the last generation, or at least would be the apex, with nothing but chaos and dissolution and destruction to follow. It has been that way at least as long as we have written records, and likely far longer. Yet we are still here, and we have made a civil society out of the chaos of nature, regardless.

The problem is how much of Western prosperity, freedom and equality is dependent upon the infliction of doom, gloom and evil upon others? As iknklast noted, humans are operating beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Earth cannot support seven billion people living at a North American or European standard of living; it’s just not possible. Stripmining asteroids only works for some materials. It doesn’t address the destruction of biodiversity brought about by expanding agricultural production. Either we reduce our numbers, or it will be done for us. We are swiftly destroying the natural systems upon which our own civilization depends, before we’ve had a chance to figure out how they all work and interact. We are in fact, entirely dependent on “the chaos of nature.” As we diminish the natural world, we destroy the very foundations upon which civil society is built. That society is only possible because of nature, not in spite of it.

Previous collapses of cultures and civilizations have been relatively local. This time it’s global. There will be no safe havens. Western wealth and power will insulate us from disaster for only so long. Grotesque levels of inequality can be maintained for only so long. We are animals. We have to eat. We can’t eat money. We are dependent upon the air, water and soil just like everyone else. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.

See this is how we know nobody who could is going to do anything to slow global warming:

The most powerful part of President Biden’s climate agenda — a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy — will likely be dropped from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, according to congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.

Why? Because Joe Manchin doesn’t like it. One guy who is beholden to the coal industry is all it takes, and we have the one guy. We’ll always have the one guy, or whatever equivalent for want of a nail the war was lost it takes. There will always be some missing nail.

Senator Joe Manchin III, the Democrat from coal-rich West Virginia whose vote is crucial to passage of the bill, has told the White House that he strongly opposes the clean electricity program, according to three of those people. As a result, White House staffers are now rewriting the legislation without that climate provision, and are trying to cobble together a mix of other policies that could also cut emissions.

One guy. Just one guy, who puts his career interest ahead of the planet and the beings that live on it. Joe Manchin might lose the next election if he voted for the bill so go ahead, planet, keep getting hotter.

It will always be like that. One person’s self-interest versus the planet. One person’s self-interest will always win.

Democratic presidents have tried but failed to enact climate change legislation since the Clinton administration. During a year of record and deadly droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that scientists say are worsened by climate change, Democrats had hoped to finally garner enough political support to enact a strong climate law, even as scientific reports say that the window is rapidly closing to avoid the most devastating impacts of a warming planet.

Short-term self-interest is always going to win.

Julie on the misogyny of trans activists:

To the annual FiLiA conference in Portsmouth. A 1,000-strong gathering of women of all ages and viewpoints, united by a desire and commitment to ending male violence, oppression and domination of women and girls.

Everyone there is interested in dipping their toes in the water of the women’s liberation movement. A big focus is the campaign to end rape, domestic abuse, commercial sexual exploitation, and femicide, the killing of women and girls by men because they are women and girls.

As I approach the Guildhall where the conference is taking place I hear the now only-too familiar chants by trans activists: “Trans women are women!”, “No TERFS on Pompey”. One sign reads: “Imagine calling yourself a feminist while trying to dismantle the rights of a marginalised group of women and girls.”

But of course that sign is talking about men and boys, ones who say they identify as women and girls. However marginalized they are, they are not a group of women and girls. Only women and girls are women and girls; men and boys are not women and girls. Feminism is for women. It’s not for men. Also, we (feminists) are not trying to dismantle any rights of men and boys who call themselves women and girls. There’s no such thing as a “right” for men to force women to agree that men are women.

During my session on the themes in my book on feminism, trans activists positioned themselves directly outside the windows, and attempted to drown out my words with “Blow jobs are real jobs” (they also object to any critique of the sex trade).

…

At the end of today’s conference, there will be a vigil to honour the many victims of femicide. The plan was to be outside, in the weak autumn sunshine, reading out the names of the women who died at the hands of men and to call for an end to deadly male violence. The fact that we will have to do this on a pavement defaced with such misogynistic graffiti is as heart-breaking as it is infuriating.

The pavement was covered with a feminist colors flag.

That doesn’t make the misogynist graffiti one bit less disgusting or infuriating or heartbreaking.

More on That conference.

“SUCK MY DICK YOU TRANSPHOBIC CUNTS” has certainly convinced me that trans women are women.

The kitchen table is always there.

Senior academics protesting a feminist conference. Is it 1950?

From That conference;

Ok now I have to pause to mop my eyes.

Tom Ball in the Times:

Students calling for the resignation of Kathleen Stock have said their campaign has been “cloak and dagger” in order to protect their own members from online harassment.

Ahhhhh I see – they want to protect themselves from harassment…so that they can harass Kathleen Stock. Interesting take.

But after all, Kathleen is the tyrannical unelected head of state who tortures and imprisons protesters and poisons her critics, and is protected by a heavily armed military.

Just kidding. She’s an academic, a professor and writer. She tortures and imprisons no one and is protected by no one. She has opinions on the fungibility of sex that the brave “cloak and dagger” students don’t like, so they hide their identities while they try to bully her out of Sussex University.

Organisers of a protest planned in the centre of campus have advised attendees to “conceal your identity to protect yourself and others”. One of the campaign leaders said that activists did not want to reveal their identities for fear of opening themselves up to abuse or potential defamation claims.

Just as bank robbers don’t want to reveal their identities for fear of ending up in prison.

[Rio] Jacques, who is the first activist from the campaign to speak openly, added: “It’s very much cloak and dagger, but that’s not the way we want it to be. The masks — it’s not meant to be threatening. It’s just for the protection of the people that want to be vocal.”

It’s for the protection of the people who want to abuse and threaten Kathleen Stock with no cost to themselves.

“No one wants to lose their place at university, but at the same time we don’t want to sacrifice our right to defend ourselves with our words.”

Defend themselves from what? Stock doesn’t bully or threaten them. They are the aggressors here.

In its manifesto, Anti Terf Sussex describes Stock as “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes, espousing a bastardised variation of radical feminism”. It claims she is harmful and dangerous to trans people adding: “We’re not up for debate. We cannot be reasoned out of existence.”

The group’s suggested reading includes an essay by Christa Peterson, a PhD student at the University of Southern California. For the past two years years, Peterson has led a Twitter campaign against Stock, culminating in the essay published earlier this year.

Christa Peterson is an absolutely poisonous individual, and she does indeed spend an astonishing amount of time shouting at Kathleen on Twitter.

Much mockery about this story of a primary school canceling a Halloween parade:

An elementary school in Seattle has cancelled its annual Halloween parade this year as the event “marginalises students of colour who do not celebrate the holiday”.

The Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary School’s racial equity team decided to cancel the “Pumpkin Parade”, where students dress up in Halloween costumes, after deliberating for five years. Parents were told about their decision on 8 October through a newsletter.

…

In the newsletter sent to parents, the school noted that costume parties could become uncomfortable for some students and distract them from learning.

Halloween events create a situation where some students must be “excluded for their beliefs, financial status, or life experience”, the school said. “It’s uncomfortable and upsetting for kids”. According to nonprofit organisation GreatSchools, 15 per cent of the students at the elementary school belong to low-income families.

So it’s not so much about students of color as it is about students of not much money. Here’s a shocker: I don’t think this decision is absurd; on the contrary, I wonder why schools need “Halloween parades” in the first place. Halloween is a pseudo-holiday that’s been inflating absurdly over the past…I don’t know, decade? Couple of decades? So apparently schools are joining in, but that seems stupid to me. Halloween is basically about demanding candy from the neighbors. It’s also about the fun of dressing up, but what’s that got to do with school? Nothing.

Holidays are all, without exception, gigantic marketing opportunities, and that’s how they get so ridiculously inflated. Somebody is making a fortune out of conning people into buying yards and yards of white fluff that is supposed to suggest cobwebs and spoils the appearance of October front gardens. Schools don’t need to observe Halloween.

Happening now.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on A trouncing.

Note the sleight of hand from Sally Hines about how other cultures have “recognised” that sex is not binary.

To say that they’ve recognised it is to say that it is the case, otherwise there could be no recognition. But these other cultures having divvied up the world in another way is what Hines presents as evidence that sex is not binary. And that’s question-begging. In effect, she’s saying that we’re entitled to say that sex is not binary because other cultures have recognised it as such; but they can only have recognised it as such if it is, in fact, not binary. This point stands whatever we happen to think about sex and sex-categorisation.

Another, related, point: what entitles these other cultures to say that sex is not binary? Presumably, it’d be some appeal to a fact of the matter. But if that’s the case, we have two competing sets of claims: one built around sex’s being binary, and another built on it’s not being binary. The competing merits of these claims could then be assessed.

I will not offer odds on which set of claims is the more likely to be truth-tracking. And their truth-trackingness has nothing to do with which culture is making it. Sometimes, people are just wrong.

(And sometimes, they’re misrepresented by dimwit sociologists. But I digress.)

Maybe Hines is being sloppy with language: maybe “recognised” is the wrong word to use. But in that case, it’s not at all clear what she’s on about.

But that much we’d all guessed anyway.

The BBC reports on the BBC report on the BBC involvement with Stonewall.

Governments, Ofcom and the BBC have had their impartiality questioned after involvement in the lobby group’s diversity schemes.

A number of high profile organisations have left Stonewall’s schemes in recent months amid growing controversy about the influence of the group on public policy.

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

See that’s just the usual obfuscating they do by treating L and G and B and T as all one thing, as soup instead of shot [pellets]. No, lesbian equality and gay equality are not being treated or thought of as “controversial,” the issue is the T part. The T is not the same, and should be discussed separately.

The podcast reveals that a senior figure in the Diversity and Inclusion department described Stonewall as “the experts in workplace equality for LGBTQ+ people” in internal correspondence, in response to questions about the BBC’s Allies scheme.

Concerns have been expressed about Stonewall being regarded as “the” experts, given the diversity of opinion among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people over Stonewall’s policies.

And over a great many other things. Yes, exactly – who died and made Stonewall god? Nobody.

The department runs an “Allies training” course, which was set up in conjunction with Stonewall, to provide guidance to staff. In an Allies training meeting, BBC trainers used language and material around sex and gender which is contested. The “genderbred person” – a graphic used by groups like Stonewall to explain sex and gender issues – was presented to staff, with no alternate views presented.

An incredibly childish graphic used by groups like Stonewall to explain sex and gender issues to grown-ass adults. It’s cringe as well as wrong and stupid.

The Nolan Investigates podcast understands that the Diversity and Inclusion department had a role in the drafting of the latest BBC News style guide around issues of sexuality and gender. The style guide sets a standard for the language used by BBC News, often in contested areas.

The document defines homosexuality as “people of either sex who are attracted to people of their own gender”. This is similar to the definition used by Stonewall, and different from the standard dictionary definition, in that it defines attraction as based on gender rather than sex.

And in doing so it’s engaging in this familiar campaign of coercing people gay and straight to fuck people according to gender not sex.

Sam Smith, an investigative journalist who left the BBC recently after working there for 25 years, told the podcast she thinks that some people within the BBC are frightened to speak out to say what they really think about Stonewall.

It would be strange if they weren’t frightened.

She says: “The trouble is the impartiality element of this, for people who do not agree with Stonewall’s campaigning position on the gender identity issue, it is not nice for an organisation to align itself with Stonewall and Stonewall’s mission”.

She said she had queried the BBC’s use of “political” and “campaigning” language but was told “the BBC had checked this with Stonewall and Stonewall were fine they were fine with it and therefore the BBC was fine with it”.

Great. Perfect. So if I’m beating someone around the head with a bottle, and that someone tells me to stop, I just say I’ve checked with Stonewall and they’re fine with it, and I get to carry on with the beating.

In case you’ve been wondering what Robert Winston said on BBC Question Time yesterday (as I had been), zip ahead to about 6 minutes in.

Partial spoiler: the core of it is: “I will say categorically, that you cannot change your sex.”

Oh did they indeed.

The term “mother” was removed from Scottish government maternity policies after they were lobbied by a leading LGBT+ charity, it has emerged.

So we all emerged from a coconut. Not the same coconut, mind; each person xir own coconut.

Documents released under freedom of information (FoI) legislation confirm that the charity wrote to the Scottish government last year encouraging them to adopt terms featured in their inclusive policy toolkit. The word mother now no longer appears on documents outlining maternity leave.

I wonder if Stonewall also lobbied governments to remove the word “father” from everything.

Malcolm Clark, director of the LGB Alliance, which was founded in 2019 in opposition to Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues, claimed the changes were unnecessary and counterproductive.

“Gay people don’t want the word mother removed,” he said. “For a word that has such resonance, and is understood by everybody, to be cancelled by a lobbying organisation, without any public discussion, is just absurd.”

Absurd, misogynist, insulting…erasing. It’s literally a campaign to erase women from the language.

However, Benjamin Cohen, chief executive of the LGBT website Pink News, was supportive of the introduction of gender-neutral terms.

Well he’s not being erased. We are.

“The people who are concerned about this are actually a relatively small but vocal minority,” he said.

You know who else is a small but vocal minority? Trans people.

He added: “Having policy that is inclusive is actually really important to lesbians and gay couples who are starting families.

Does he actually think lesbians want to get rid of the word “mother”?

So I just listened to this and sure enough – Sally Hines does not come out of it well.

The link is to the clip, not the whole hour, so no searching is needed.

Speaking of “Stonewall language” as opposed to BBC language or ordinary language or non-drunk language, here’s economist Frances Coppola using it in a blog post bashing Maya Forstater a couple of weeks ago:

Forstater and her supporters aggressively promote their beliefs on Twitter, hijacking threads to grandstand their agenda, forcing their opinions on people who have not invited them, misrepresenting what people have said then gaslighting them when they object, using emotionally-loaded language to short-circuit rational argument, resorting to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority, insulting people who disagree with them, sealioning people who try to disengage. In short, behaving just like all the other cults that infest this increasingly toxic space. The effect of their behaviour is to prevent rational debate and silence dissenters. 

While I sympathise with their emotional intensity, reducing this complex and difficult subject to a simplistic binary definition solves nothing. All it does is arbitrarily exclude some of the most vulnerable people in our society from the rights and protections that others enjoy, at potential risk to their health and even their lives. 

See it? “the most vulnerable people in our society.”

Really? How? Why? In what sense? Who says?

No; no how; no reason; no sense; Stonewall says.

It’s bullshit. Vulnerable people are refugees, asylum seekers, religious minorities, peasants, exploited workers, trafficked women and girls, political prisoners, poor people, migrant workers, abused children, homeless people, people with severe mental health problems, people with chronic disabling medical conditions…and so on. I don’t think trans people are that kind of vulnerable unless they’re also trafficked or homeless or the like. Some are, but then their vulnerability is because of those circumstances and not so much because of their being trans.

I think the fervor and maudlin sympathy with which people recited the Stonewall “most vulnerable” creed is insulting to all the seriously vulnerable people out there and even insulting to trans people themselves.

There’s another odd thing about Coppola’s post and her comments in the discussion with Maya that followed it.

Currently, the law permits people who are born one sex to transition legally to another. Whether someone is a “woman” is no longer determined by their biological sex at birth.

It’s that. She says it again in the comments.

A person who has a GRC has gone through a process of gender reassignment that may or may not include surgery and/or medical treatment to make their physical characteristics resemble more closely the norms of the sex to which they have transitioned. They are thus legally female whether or not you or anyone else thinks they “look like women”. Whether someone is female or male is defined by the law, not your opinion, and the law says that someone who has a GRC is legally the sex to which they have transitioned.

…

The fundamental issue here is that you do not believe a man can ever become a woman, whatever the law says. Please don’t imagine that I haven’t noticed your weasel words. You “recognise the change of legal status”, but you don’t accept that the person has changed sex.

She thinks (or claims to think) that being legally declared a woman is being a woman. She thinks (or claims to think) that getting a Gender Recognition Certificate equals literally becoming a literal woman (or man) – that it’s not just a legal change it’s also an ontological change.

When Maya makes the distinction Coppola accuses her of “weasel words.”

The fundamental issue here is that you do not believe a man can ever become a woman, whatever the law says. Please don’t imagine that I haven’t noticed your weasel words. You “recognise the change of legal status”, but you don’t accept that the person has changed sex.

Well yes, because how could we? And why should we? Why do we have to agree that men literally turn into women the moment they receive the GRC? Why are we required to subscribe to fatuous, nonsensical beliefs?

Four years in prison for having a miscarriage.

On Tuesday, October 5, Brittney Poolaw, a 20-year-old Oklahoma woman, was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree for experiencing a miscarriage at 17 weeks and sentenced to 4 years in state prison.

Last year, Ms. Poolaw experienced a miscarriage and went to Comanche County Hospital for medical help. On March 17, 2020, she was charged with Manslaughter in the First Degree, arrested and incarcerated. The court set a $20,000 bond, an amount she could not afford. Ms. Poolaw has been incarcerated since her arrest over 18 months ago.

…

Contrary to all medical science, the prosecutor blamed the miscarriage on Ms. Poolaw’s alleged use of controlled substances. Not even the medical examiner’s report identifies use of controlled substances as the cause of the miscarriage. Even with this lack of evidence, the prosecutor moved forward with the charge. On October 5, after just a one-day trial, Ms. Poolaw was convicted and sentenced to a four year prison term.

You’ll be astonished to learn that Ms. Poolaw is not white.

Ms. Poolaw’s case is just one example of the troubling trend we are documenting in Oklahoma that replaces compassion and respect with criminal prosecution. In recent years, Oklahoma prosecutors, especially in Comanche and Kay Counties but also in Craig, Garfield, Jackson, Pontotoc, Payne, Rogers, and Tulsa counties have been using the State’s felony child neglect law to police pregnant women and to seek severe penalties for those who experience pregnancy losses. This use of prosecutorial discretion directly conflicts with the recommendations of every major medical organization, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, all of which know that such prosecutions actually increase risks of harm to maternal and child health.

Those risks are already shamefully high: the US has terrible stats on maternal health compared to other developed countries.

This report comes from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Women! Right there in the name of the group! It’s like spotting an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Originally a comment by Rob on Concealing a rape for social justice.

The saddest thing of all is that a young girl has been raped. The manner of her rape, the fact it was in a place where she was vulnerable and should have been safe just makes things worse.

The whole awful saga gives us a lot to unpick about the current state of American society especially, but I suspect about all societies.

The fact that the rape was a non-story at all until the father being arrested became a right-wing cause. The fact that the school and Board administrations either attempted a cover-up and/or didn’t properly communicate something so seriously between them. The fact that the Board Chair either lied or stated as fact something he didn’t know. The fact that an activist felt empowered in a public meeting to accuse the rape victim of lying (presumably without any evidence at all).

The fact the understandably angry father was the one treated as being in the wrong and arrested to boot. The fact that the USAG just assumed the fathers arrest was related to anti-vax protests and used him as an example of ‘terrorist’ behaviour. The fact that the alleged rapist was shuffled off to another school without a safety plan that prevented him raping another girl under similar circumstances. In fact, I wonder if there are only two victims. Sodomy and violent oral sex seem kind of deep end for a first timer, but maybe?

Lastly, given the nature of the rape(s), I would put money on the boy being a habitual consumer of quite nasty hard-core porn, the freely available existence to minors of which causes me considerable concern. I suspect people often hardwire to their early arousal experiences. If those come about from watching hard-core non-consensual simulated rape/non-consensual porn, rather than consensual fumbling with a similarly aged partner – it’s begging for trouble at some point. I’m sure there are other things we could pick out of this. It just screams of a society that is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.

The Guardian says the climate disaster is here. Not on the way, but here.

“We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.

The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.

Until now, human civilization has operated within a narrow, stable band of temperature. Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have now unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet. The last time it was hotter than now was at least 125,000 years ago, while the atmosphere has more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in it than any time in the past two million years, perhaps more.

So the thing is, we didn’t evolve to live in this climate. We evolved to live in a different climate, which is now gone. Permanently gone.

“We are conducting an unprecedented experiment with our planet,” said Hayhoe. “The temperature has only moved a few tenths of a degree for us until now, just small wiggles in the road. But now we are hitting a curve we’ve never seen before.”

And it’s swimming in oil, and we have no brakes, and there’s a cliff just past the curve.

Nolan Investigates Stonewall is now available In Your Area so I’m listening. It starts with how can the BBC possibly claim to be impartial when it’s part of the Stonewall Says We’re Awesome scheme? Will it move down the league table because of this podcast?

And then a very important question: is the language they use when reporting on trans issues BBC language or Stonewall language?

Aha, thought I. Stonewall language. That’s why we keep seeing these stupid platitudes with their stupid wording. Of course it is. That’s why people keep babbling about “trans rights” without ever explaining what rights trans people have that the rest of us don’t. That’s why there’s all this Most Oppressed Most Marginalized Most Excluded hyperbole even though it is such bullshit. It’s all Stonewall Language.

I just saw someone I used to respect, tweeting about the guy whose daughter was (allegedly) raped at her school, calling him “anti-trans.” How is he anti-trans??? Because he wants his daughter’s school not to pretend her rape didn’t happen? Because he said the boy was wearing a skirt? Is he supposed to just accept his daughter’s rape? Does that hold even if the boy isn’t trans at all but just exploiting the new toilet rules?

Stonewall Language. A pox on it.

Cristina Beltrán in the Washington Post:

To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness

Or we could just recognize that conservatism is not exclusively white. We know this already. “The Hispanic community” in Florida is highly conservative, because of the flight from Castro’s Cuba. That’s not “whiteness,” it’s politics. I don’t see what’s gained by calling it Whiteness.

Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.

How is that different from class? It’s not as if the billionaires are eager to share their billions with working class whites.

Multiracial whiteness promises Latino Trump supporters freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition. For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one’s racial identity as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism. In the politics of multiracial whiteness, anyone can join the MAGA movement and engage in the wild freedom of unbridled rage and conspiracy theories.

In other words a lot of people vote against their own interests. We know. I don’t see what “Multiracial Whiteness” adds to that.

Call it power, hegemony, inequality – call it something reasonably exact. “Multiracial Whiteness” is just pseudo-clever academic paradox, which helps no one.