No, his shirt needed no improvement.

Abortion Access Front explained:

No matter who you are, if you have a uterus, abortion is only and always YOUR choice. We are sure @DaveBautista will approve of our fix to his shirt! #AbortionAF

No matter who you are, if you have a uterus, you are a woman or girl. It’s women who get pregnant, not people in general. Women are subordinated and dominated and denied basic rights for exactly that reason, so no, it’s not a generic “you” who needs abortion rights, it’s women.

H/t Sackbut

Rewire News is also avoiding the word “women” when it reports on abortion and the campaign to make it illegal again.

“Even though the legal question doesn’t have to do with abortion, the stakes here are still incredibly high, especially for people in Kentucky,” said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, who will argue the case on October 12.

But Kolbi-Molinas doesn’t mean people in Kentucky, she means women in Kentucky.

If Cameron is able to intervene and the law gets upheld, it could effectively ban abortion after 15 weeks in a state that has just two clinics and multiple restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period and bans on insurance coverage of the procedure. Both clinics are in downtown Louisville, which means access is limited for people in other areas of the state.

It’s not people who need access, it’s women.

On both sides.

Dominic Raab has rejected the idea that misogyny should become a hate crime in the wake of the Sarah Everard murder, but then appeared confused about its meaning as he suggested it could apply to abuse against either women or men.

You can’t make misogyny itself a hate crime – that’s just stupid. You can point it out and fulminate against it and try hard to convince people to get rid of it, but you can’t make it a crime. It would be like making atheism a crime, or theism, or belief in reincarnation, or not liking grapefruit.

Perhaps the idea is to make it an aggravating factor in crimes against women? That would make a little more sense, I guess.

The justice secretary, who has said he is not a feminist and previously complained about the “raw deal” men are getting, said it was his “number one priority to make sure women feel confident in the justice system”.

I bet it’s not though. I bet he said that because it seemed politic, but I bet it’s not.

However, pressed on BBC Breakfast about whether misogyny should be a hate crime, he appeared not to understand the term as he said “misogyny is absolutely wrong, whether it’s a man against a woman or a woman against a man”.

Well yes, there’s no mere “appearance” about that; he clearly doesn’t understand the term. You can use “sexism” that way but not misogyny, because of the “gyny” bit. The “mis” is hatred and the “gyny” is women. The word he wants is “misanthropy,” hatred of humans.

Graham Linehan tells us that David Lammy told a whopper about the silence of his constituents on the trans issue. It’s quite a startling whopper.

Speaking to Rachel Burden on Radio 5 Live, 29th September, Lammy criticised the BBC for focusing on  “identity issues” and denied that voters are concerned about gender ideology, saying to Burden “you have chosen to ask me about an issue that has never, ever been raised on the doorstep”.

He took an almost identical line while talking to Nick Robinson of BBC’s Today programme on the same day. “Nick you are deliberately asking me about an issue which you know does not come up on the doorstep. It’s a bit of a trap to get caught up on identity politics.”

It’s maddening in more than one way, that claim. It’s maddening in its dismissiveness about the concerns of women, and it’s maddening in its absolutist nothing to see here take when we know there’s everything to see.

Now, activists from Lammy’s own constituency Labour Party (CLP) have revealed they told him that former Labour voters had expressed despair that the party is ignoring women.

Graham gives four examples of such expression, the final one being that Lammy

Met with women party activists who spoke with him for three hours, detailing their concerns about the Labour party’s support for Self-ID. He agreed that the women in the party should be widely consulted on the issue.

There could be an argument that Lammy is justifying this in his head with the fact that he said on the doorstep, which means the public in general, as opposed to Labour activists…until you scroll down and read the conversation with one of those activists.

Now I’d started to meet a lot of women… I was already aware of all of this, by the way, I am a signatory of Labour’s Women’s declaration. So I have lots of friends within that group…and I knew what was happening and what was going on. And then I started to meet people on the doorstep. And there were more and more women, and we have quite a high lesbian ratio of women in this area. A lot of them moved here thirty odd years ago and found it a good place to stay and they liked it. So they were being very open on the doorstep and saying “we’re just not voting for them. What do they think they’re doing?” And I’d say you know “I’m totally on board with you and I’m not the only one. There’s loads of us fighting.”

So that’s…you know…the doorstep.

Read on.

Apparently the hospital situation is as bad as ever.

NHS trusts are “gaslighting” patients over the inclusion of transgender patients on single-sex wards, a whistle-blower nurse has warned.

Dr Sinead Helyar said that in at least one trust if patients question why there is a male-bodied person on a female-only ward, medics have been told to “reiterate… that there are no men present”.

I don’t know why the Telegraph calls her a nurse and then a doctor, but anyway, we’ve heard this story before, and it’s pretty sick-making that it hasn’t been fixed.

Official NHS trust policy documents also compare patients who ask for single-sex spaces to racists and label them “transphobes”, “offenders” and “perpetrators”, she said.

Staff who raise safeguarding concerns may be threatened with disciplinary action or even criminal charges, according to Dr Helyar who warned that the NHS is influenced by controversial LGBT charity Stonewall.

That doesn’t sound like “influenced by” so much as “taking dictation from.”

Speaking in a personal capacity to a panel organised by parliamentary campaign group Children and Women First at the Conservative Party conference, Dr Helyar said that NHS policy is “formulated and enacted to the detriment of women”.

She said that many trusts, often under the influence of Stonewall, had developed transgender accommodation policies that “have failed to consider the rights and needs of women” and instead of equal treatment “prioritise male transgender patients in the very spaces set out for women”. 

You can’t have “equal treatment” in this situation when the whole issue is separation. If women want to be separate from men while men want to be in women’s spaces, you have to pick one or the other, you can’t provide “equal treatment.” Equal treatment isn’t always the right answer to a question. The rich and the poor alike are free to sleep under bridges.

A spokesman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said that their guidance “aims to strike an appropriate balance” and the trust “strives to treat all people in its care and all staff with dignity and respect.”

No, that’s your problem right there. There is no “appropriate balance.” If I come to your house and grab a wheelbarrow load of your stuff, you’re not obliged to strike an appropriate balance such that I get to keep half of your stuff. Women should never be pushed to “balance” their right to safety and privacy with men’s desire to take that right away.

A Stonewall spokesperson said: “Trans women should be able to access dignified and high-quality healthcare in the same way as everyone else.

“Inclusive healthcare practices make us all safer and, in 2021, it should not be controversial to ensure that all LGBTQ+ people get the healthcare and support that they deserve.”

At Stonewall, we’ll continue to work with public sector organisations, including NHS trusts to ensure that their LGBTQ+ staff are supported at work.”

Blah blah blah waffle waffle evade evade. Notice that spokestwerp carefully never says what’s at stake. Dignified and high-quality healthcare, fine, but the issue is men insisting on being on women’s wards because they identify as women. If men can force their way onto women’s wards then where is the dignified and high-quality healthcare for them? Stress doesn’t help with healing, so forcing women to accept men on their wards is not high-quality anything for them.

The Catholic church knew and did it anyway, Facebook knew and did it anyway.

Facebook’s internal research found that Instagram, which it acquired in 2012 for $1 billion, makes eating disorders and thoughts of suicide worse in teenage girls, whistleblower Frances Haugen said in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday.

Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, gathered internal documents as she grew frustrated by the company’s prioritization of growth and user engagement over its negative impacts, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.

Well, look at it this way: Instagram is just one of many. Women and girls are constantly bombarded by images and videos and marketing that tell them how fabulous they’re supposed to look and how disgusting they are if they don’t look fabulous in that correct way.

“And what’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. It actually makes them use the app more,” Haugen said. “They end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more.”

And from Facebook’s point of view the key bit there is not “hate their bodies more and more” but “use the app more.” Which one puts more money in Facebook’s pocket? There you go.

Maybe it’s something about the Catholic church? Is that possible?

An estimated 330,000 children were victims of sex abuse within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years, according to a report released Tuesday that represents the country’s first major accounting of the worldwide phenomenon.

The figure includes abuses committed by some 3,000 priests and other people involved in the church — wrongdoing that Catholic authorities covered up over decades in a “systemic manner,” according to the president of the commission that issued the report, Jean-Marc Sauvé.

Of course they did. They’re the church, God’s own representatives on earth, so obviously they get to decide. Raping children is just God’s reward to all these goddy celibate men for managing his propaganda.

Olivier Savignac, the head of victims association Parler et Revivre (Speak Out and Live Again), contributed to the investigation. He told The Associated Press that the high ratio of victims per abuser was particularly “terrifying for French society, for the Catholic Church.”

Savignac assailed the church for treating such cases as individual anomalies instead of as a collective horror.

Kind of like the way the police treat Wayne Couzens as an individual anomaly.

Sauvé denounced the church’s attitude until the beginning of the 2000s as “a deep, cruel indifference toward victims.”

That’s one of the problems with godbothering: the focus is on the imaginary Boss Man and the Boss Man’s deputies, and the mere human beings are just his slaves.

You know…if most of your police despise women, then your police are not going to be very good at pursuing cases of violence against women. They’re more likely to decide it was actually her fault, or a “sex game,” or a misunderstanding, or too trivial to bother with.

The father of a woman who died after being choked by her abusive partner has accused police of paying “lip service” to the protection of women and girls and called for a public inquiry into the culture of UK policing.

West Midlands police apologised last month for a number of failings in the case of Suzanne Van Hagen, 34, who suffered months of domestic abuse before she died in February 2013.

They were called nine times, but somehow they just couldn’t figure out what was going on.

A neighbour, who was asked by police to keep a log of suspected abusive incidents at Van Hagen’s flat, made a note of 27 occasions before she was found dead with bruising around her neck.

…

Officers said that bruising around her neck was the result of a sex game and ruled the cause of death was an accidental drug overdose.

Suppose it was indeed “a sex game” – why is it her neck that was bruised? Whose idea was it to play that particular “game”? Why are men never found dead as the result of a “sex game” i.e. choking? Why is it always women who are choked and men who explain to the police that they were playing a game?

On one occasion, a police family liaison officer told Van Hagen’s younger sister: “Your sister had two legs and she should have used them.”

Wayne Jones, the detective who led the failed investigation into Van Hagen’s death, was sacked two years later for sexually harassing four female colleagues.

There it is. You have your sexual harasser cops, so you put them in charge of investigations into violence against women. That will work out beautifully.

Owen Jones:

Also Owen Jones:

Speaking of Dillahunty and dogmatism and the infallibility of personal beliefs…from last year:

Jonathon Van Maren writes:

French clinicians are also now taking a stand. In an open letter published four days ago on the L’Express website (and covered almost nowhere in the international press), over fifty medical professionals and prominent academics, including doctors, legal experts, educational experts, philosophers, sociologists, psychiatrists, judges, and psychoanalysts, excoriated transgender ideology and condemned “sex reassignment” in children. Published in association with the Observatory of Ideological Discourses on Children and Adolescents, the letter is worth reading in full:

The link doesn’t work, but we can read the translation JVM shares.

We can no longer remain silent about what appears to us to be a serious drift committed in the name of the emancipation of the “transgender child” (the one who declares that he was not born in the “right body”). Radical discourses legitimise requests for sex change on the basis of feelings alone, which are set up as the truth.

That right there is an important point that doesn’t get enough attention. Feelings are…not necessarily reliable as to the truth of a matter, even the truth of one’s own physical or mental state. Feelings can mislead. I think we all know this if we think about it, which often takes some nudging. Mere lack of sleep can cause very bleak moods, and if we don’t know this we can draw wild conclusions, then wake up the next morning wondering what the hell got into us. Feelings are not necessarily the truth, not even our own feelings about our own inner state, however paradoxical that may sound.

Perhaps thinking it might provide an answer, the Scottish Government has issued new LGBT inclusion guidelines since 12 August, under which children from primary school age will be able to change their names and gender at school without their parents’ consent. Without their consent and even without their parents being informed if the child requests it.

Sure, because children of six or seven know so much more about “gender” than their pesky stupid benighted parents do.

What is happening in our neighbouring countries could very quickly happen in France: the protean diffusion of these beliefs has resulted in a considerable inflation of requests for sex changes among children and more particularly among teenage girls in recent years...

Trivialised speeches claim that we could do without the biological reality, the sexual difference between men and women, in favour of chosen singularities based solely on “feelings”. These misleading ideological discourses are transmitted on social networks where many teenagers with identity problems come to seek solutions to their malaise. In the name of “self-determination” – a slogan that appeals to all progressives — children and teenagers are convinced that they can change their sex with the help of hormone treatments or even mutilating surgery. This rhetoric, spread by activists in many Western countries, uses fallacies designed to deceive.

How did we get here? And do we (still) have the right to react without being insulted or threatened? How can these rights to self-determination be a fulfilling progress? This phenomenon, the “transgender child”, is in reality a contemporary mystification that must be vigorously denounced because it is a matter of ideological embrigadement [recruitment]. They would have us believe that, in the name of the well-being and freedom of each individual, a child, freed from the agreement of its “reactionary” parents, would be able to “choose” its so-called gendered identity.

But the child is a being under construction, his or her future is in constant evolution before reaching a stage of maturity. Neuroscientists, developmentalists, psychoanalysts, child psychiatrists, paediatricians and all specialists in early childhood are unanimous on this subject.

So the child doesn’t necessarily have a stable “gender identity,” and anyway we don’t really know what “gender identity” is. Where does gender identity stop and marketing begin? Is gender identity really anything more than the accumulated ideas of what women wear and look like and say and do, ditto men? If it’s not, can we really be confident that it’s a thing as opposed to a string of impressions?

We denounce this abduction of childhood. It is now urgent to inform as many citizens as possible, of all professions, of all sides, of all ages, about what could well appear tomorrow as one of the greatest health and ethical scandals, which we would have watched happen without saying a word: the commodification of children’s bodies. For by persuading these children that they have been “assigned” a sex at birth, and that they can freely change it, they are made lifelong patients: lifelong consumers of hormonal chemicals marketed by pharmaceutical companies, recurrent consumers of ever more surgical operations in the pursuit of the chimerical dream of a fantasy body. 

Don’t we think pharmaceutical companies have already made a pretty decent haul, what with the opioids and everything?

Confusion reigns, largely maintained for the purpose of manipulating humanity in its deepest substratum: its evolution, its temporality, its wanderings and its doubts. In the name of rejecting a supposed gender assignment, we are in the process of witnessing, embarrassed, without understanding anything, an identity assignment. Thus Claude from the Club des cinq, once described as a tomboy, is now presented as transgender. We could laugh about it if it weren’t symptomatic of our era, which is struck by political radicalisms that pre-empt all debate.

We could laugh about it if it weren’t trashing so much of the world we need to live in.

Where vaccine-resistance gets us:

The United States surpassed 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Friday, a milestone that few experts had anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available to the American public.

An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered broad access to shots, were unvaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an ample supply of vaccines.

Why? Because we also have one of the highest rates of stupid.

The new and alarming surge of deaths this summer means that the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, overtaking the toll from the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which killed about 675,000 people.

That’s absolute numbers though, so it’s debatable whether the rona is the deadliest. Deadliest in absolute numbers but not per capita.

Not that that’s anything to brag about.

“This Delta wave just rips through the unvaccinated,” said Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. The deaths that have followed the wide availability of vaccines, he added, are “absolutely needless.”

This is why I stare in disbelief at Twitter warriors raging at vaccination.

The recent virus deaths are distinct from those in previous chapters of the pandemic, an analysis by The New York Times shows. People who died in the last three and a half months were concentrated in the South, a region that has lagged in vaccinations; many of the deaths were reported in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. And those who died were younger: In August, every age group under 55 had its highest death toll of the pandemic.

…

Vaccines have been proven highly effective in preventing severe illness and death, and a study from the C.D.C. that was published in September found that after Delta became the dominant variant, unvaccinated people were more than 10 times as likely to die of the virus as the vaccinated were. The study, which spanned from April to mid-July, used data from 10 states, New York City, Los Angeles County and King County, Wash., which includes Seattle.

But the Twitter warriors shout that it’s the government wanting to control us.

But the recent deaths have left families and friends, some of whom said they had thought the pandemic was largely over, stunned and devastated. Weary doctors and nurses voiced frustration that many of the patients whose lives they were now struggling to save had shunned vaccines.

I’d be voicing more than frustration.

Vaccine mandates have begun to take effect in some states and within some companies, and on Friday, California became the first state to announce plans to add the coronavirus vaccine to other vaccinations required to attend school, starting as early as next fall. But only 65 percent of the eligible U.S. population is fully vaccinated. The nation’s vaccination campaign has been slowed by people who say they are hesitant or unwilling to get shots, amid a polarized landscape that has included misinformation from conservative and anti-vaccine commentators casting doubt on the safety of vaccines.

But why? That’s what I’ll never get. It’s like saying doctors are the enemy, or fire departments are stealing our souls, or clean water is the devil’s work.

More calls to fire and shun people who don’t believe men are women:

AN SNP politician has retweeted a message calling for Joanna Cherry to be expelled from the party.

Kirsty Blackman, the MP for Aberdeen North, appeared to endorse the post amid an ongoing row over trans rights.

Or trans “rights.” The issue gets wildly confused because of the chronic failure to specify which “rights” we’re talking about. Just saying “trans rights” makes it sound as if the issue is basic human rights, when in fact what is contentious is the claim that men who identify as trans have a “right” to invade women’s spaces and take women’s prizes and jobs with no questions asked. It’s not a basic human right to be “validated” as whatever you say you are. If it were we could all identify as the Queen and sleep in her bed.

Ms Blackman retweeted a message from another user which read: “If my party truly stands for trans rights and equality, if our stance is truly ‘zero tolerance’, then it has to start from within. Joanna C must be expelled from the SNP.

“Show the people of Scotland and the rest of the UK that ‘zero tolerance’ means exactly that.”

Yeah, show the world that the SNP has zero tolerance, that sounds like a great idea!

Zero tolerance of what, dumbfuck?

Zero tolerance of ignoring the rage of dumbfucks on Twitter?

The Edinburgh South West MP [Joanna Cherry] was sacked from the SNP’s Westminster front bench in February amid deepening divisions in the party.  

This morning, she tweeted: “As a lesbian & a feminist I’ve spent a lifetime campaigning for equality & to be clear I support trans rights.”

What I don’t support is the right of any man to self-ID as a woman & access the single sex spaces which the #EqualityAct protects for women & girls.”

What I’m saying. I too support trans rights, meaning the same human rights everyone has. I don’t consider it even slightly a “right” to self-ID as a woman and proceed to grab everything that belongs to women – it’s the opposite of a right, an anti-right, a force that steals other people’s rights.

Meghan Cook at Insider informs us that contestants on Survivor have just one set of clothes, so they can’t change into dry clothes after swimming. That’s not healthy.

Insider has previously reported on the potentially life-threatening consequences of wearing the same clothes and underwear for an extended period of time.

(Mind you, they could wear underwear and dry their clothes, then wear clothes and dry their underwear. But never mind, that’s a tangent.)

Gynecologist Dr. Mary Jane Minkin also previously told Insider that sitting around in damp clothes can create “a wet, moist, warm environment” that can lead to unwanted bacteria and yeast.

Specifically, competing in wet clothes for extended periods of time puts players with vaginas in an especially risky position since urinary tract infections disproportionately affect people with shorter urethras, according to Minkin.

Ahhhh yes, players with vaginas and people with shorter urethras.

I wonder if Dr. Minkin really did say that, or if Meghan Cook changed her words for her, the way so many helpful reporters do these days.

Shall we follow that link to players with vaginas? Yes let’s.

It’s straightforward until the last few paragraphs. Before that it’s about women who have to deal with menstruating while doing the survivor thing. They’re called women, the normal pronouns appear. Until…

According to multiple “Survivor” players, getting an extra pair of underwear is rare, even if you’re on your period. But it’s not unheard of.

Stott said she was able to change her underwear on “about day 30” after she lost a visible amount of weight.

She also said she heard that Beck received a second pair of underwear, adding that if “you have certain issues, they don’t just leave you hanging.”

Certain issues like chunks of endometrium in your knickers.

But Patel said this was an exception to the rule. She said that if competitors with vaginas readily received extra underwear, others might complain and “consider that an advantage.”

Did she? Did she really say that?

She told Insider that it was just another reason why players who menstruate had to “be tougher” to succeed on the show. 

Did she tell Insider that? Or did Insider change “women” to “players who menstruate”? Thus blithely obscuring the point that it’s women who have to be tougher.

Via a comment by WomenAreWomen.

Oh dear. That would be all the feminist women he’s blocked.

What a question from a guy who is so determined to ostracize and silence women who defend our own boundaries and our very definition. He wants to amplify our voices now after all these years of obsessive de-amplification? And he finds it obvious that he’s talking exclusively about women?

Catherine Bennett notes that judges and cops and politicians are still saying that some women deserve to be murdered:

[Sarah] Everard was, Lord Justice Fulford said, “a wholly blameless victim”. Ah. The other sort – the woman who contributes to her own death at the hands of a pitiless stranger – evidently lives on in the mind of the senior judiciary. Forty years after the police and prosecution virtue-rated victims of the mass murderer Peter Sutcliffe, the criminal justice system applauds a female victim who lives up to the highest patriarchal standards. Sir Michael Havers said at Sutcliffe’s trial that “perhaps the saddest part of the case” was that “the last six attacks were on totally respectable women”.

As opposed to whores, he means. Of course, if Sutcliffe had murdered any johns Sir Michael Havers wouldn’t have ruminated on their failure to be respectable – it’s only women who become suitable murder victims via transactional sex.

Turning to the mitigating arguments, Fulford acknowledged of Couzens that “some of his colleagues have spoken supportively of him”…But only thanks to the judge did we discover that even after he was known to have kidnapped and killed, the depraved Couzens – with his prostitutes and violent pornography – enjoyed support from colleagues. Are they among the officers now being investigated?

Is the Mayor of London reinstating Joan Smith as co-chair of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) board? No. I expect the same No applies to Bennett’s question. Are any male-dominated institutions doing anything about misogyny and violence against women besides uttering brief platitudes about it? No.

David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, was among the prominent men tweeting their abhorrence: “Enough is enough. We need to treat violence against women and girls as seriously as terrorism.”

Sometimes, you gather, it’s acceptable to discuss endemic male violence against women and girls and sometimes it’s not. Just before the Everard verdict, Lammy had angrily dismissed women exercised by this very subject as “dinosaurs”. Women who value women-only spaces – where they feel safe from male violence – he characterised as “hoarding rights”.

Hoarding rights at the expense of men who want to invade those spaces. We need to take violence against women and girls seriously, and we need to welcome men into women’s spaces and punish any women who object.

Lammy, along with some Labour colleagues, simultaneously denounces male violence, then, taking victim-blaming to as yet unprecedented levels, is furious with any women concerned about losing the few places that individuals he depicts as terrorists can’t access.

So which bit of it can we conclude they really mean?

Not the first bit.

Speaking of “people who need abortion rights,” I’m horrified to see that even Margaret Talbot is doing it. She does at least say “women” too, but there’s way too much peopleing.

Starting with a “women” passage:

Mississippi’s brief to uphold its law offers, among other rationales, the assertion that women’s lives are so much freer, more equal, and more replete with birth-control options now than they were in 1973, when Roe legalized the right to abortion nationwide, that we can let that right go by the wayside.

You know what that’s like? It’s like the Supreme Court saying, in the Shelby ruling, that voting rights are not an issue any more, so we can stop protecting them. It was RBG who said that’s like throwing away your umbrella because it’s not raining right now. Why are women’s lives freer and more equal? Partly because of abortion rights, duuuuuuuuuh.

Furthermore, even in an egalitarian society with reliable access to contraception and to child care for all, people will still want, and should be able to exercise, agency over the intimate, life-transforming decisions of when, or whether, to have children. Many people will still feel a need to end pregnancies for reasons—health risks and crises, destructive or failed relationships, personal economic hardship, the needs of other children—that have little to do with prevailing social conditions.

There it is (and not for the last time.) People. Why say people? It’s women. This burden falls on women.

The procedure that anti-­abortion lawyers want to portray as an unnecessary and outmoded privilege (and a shameful one) is a form of medical care that hundreds of thousands of people turn to each year, low-income people in particular. (Half of all abortions are obtained by people living below the federal poverty line.)

By women. Men never need abortions.

Not everybody can afford or obtain reliable birth control. And, ­despite Abbott’s absurd claim, there will always be people who become pregnant through coerced unprotected sex.

Women. It’s women that happens to. It doesn’t happen to men.

I’m wondering if an editor made her write it that way. She’s not your average trend-following dim bulb.

All those people shouting “freedom freedom freedom” in response to mask mandates? They’re stooges for the Koch brothers.

There’s a letter to school administrators going around, invoking the sacred institution of Parental Choice.

“I do not believe little kids should be forced to wear masks, and I urge you to adopt a policy that allows parental choice on this matter for the upcoming school year.”

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate over mask requirements in schools…

Ok ok ok but Parental Choice is sacred, you know. If parents choose not to take their kids to a doctor even when they’re desperately ill, that’s their Choice. So is masking during a pandemic. All Choice is sacred, and Parental Choice is Sacred Squared, only more so.

A pair of CDC studies published last month found that schools with mask requirements saw fewer outbreaks than those without them, and that pediatric cases rose faster in counties where schools had made masking a matter of personal choice.

Yes but do we want fewer outbreaks? Don’t we want more? Isn’t the idea that we want fewer outbreaks a fiendish liberal plot to destroy the family and make Critical Race Theory the national religion?

This is the kind of thing that makes this conflict so maddening.

First, “I’ve also discovered today, which I did not know, that @MForstater has publicly said women should be denied access to women’s spaces if other women think they look like men.”

Wrong. There’s no “think they look like men” about it. We all publicly say that men should be denied access to [at least some] women’s spaces. That’s it, that’s the say. Men should stay out of women’s spaces. It’s not so much “denied access” as “don’t ask in the first place.” It’s just no. Way too many men are deeply weird about women (see: Wayne Couzens), and we don’t want them in places where we pee or change tampons or nurse babies or recover from rape or heal from major surgery. We want privacy from men when we need it. It’s simple, and it has nothing to do with “if other women think they look like men.”

And that “has publicly said women should be denied access to women’s spaces” bit is the maddening ploy – pretending trans women really are women and that that’s obvious and that everyone accepts it and that there’s just nothing to discuss. It allows her to accuse us of being meanies to women, which is stupid but also tragically effective.

Two, “I can’t support the creation of an underclass of women who have no safe space away from men because they aren’t what people like @MForstater think a “woman” should look like.” The same all over again but 100 times more so. They aren’t women. Men are not an underclass of women. Women are the underclass here, not men.

It’s so gullible, and smug, and taunting, and bullying, and obnoxious.

Also Coppola had blocked Maya and then she did tweet after tweet tagging her after blocking her. What’s the point of that? To get her fans to bully Maya, presumably.

Class traitors. They suck.

Trump thinks Twitter should be forced, forced, to let him use Twitter to incite insurrection and civil war.

“Plaintiff Donald J. Trump respectfully moves for a preliminary injunction directing, inter alia, Defendant Twitter, Inc. and all persons acting in concert with Defendant, to reinstate Plaintiff’s access to Defendant’s social media platform(s),” the filing said.

It argued that Twitter was “censoring” Trump by indefinitely banning him from the platform, adding that the company “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate.”

Violent insurrection and civil war are not open democratic debate. Trump has zero interest in open democratic debate.

Twitter banned Trump from its platform on Jan. 8, stating that two of his tweets had violated the company’s policies and citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” The unprecedented move came after the riot on Jan. 6 in which hundreds of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attack that resulted in five deaths and left about 140 police officers injured.

Not open democratic debate.