Trivia, but too funny to pass up.

There’s plenty of ahem ahem Chuck Berry HELLO – and I would add Motown I mean come on – but also when did Obama ever say young white men (or any other people) aren’t allowed to have angst? When did he ever say anything that even vaguely resembled it?

I will say this: a lot of rock & roll is about what whores women are. That aspect can get pretty annoying.

Funny how states and provinces that are particularly heavy on the anti-vax trend are also heavy on the getting Covid trend. Alberta for instance:

A surge in coronavirus cases has pushed the healthcare system in the Canadian province of Alberta to the verge of collapse, as healthcare workers struggle against mounting exhaustion and a growing anti-vaccine movement in the region.

More and more cases, so let’s get more and more people campaigning against vaccinations. Brilliant. As the fire consumes more and more of the house, throw more and more stones at the firefighters.

The province warned this week that its ICU capacity was strained, with more people requiring intensive care than any other point during the pandemic – nearly all of them unvaccinated.

…

Alberta has long boasted of its loose coronavirus restrictions – including advertising the previous months as the “best summer ever” as it rolled back those few restrictions. It has also been the site of North America’s highest caseloads.

Weird thing to boast about under the circumstances. “Look at us, we’re the best at letting people get the deadly virus!”

In a province with a long history of skepticism towards government, the pandemic has become fertile ground for protests and anti-vaccine rhetoric, including from elected officials, firefighters and police officers. During the ongoing federal election, the People’s Party of Canada, a fringe rightwing party that has come out against public health measures has seen its largest support base in rural Alberta.

That skepticism towards masks and vaccines has come at a steep cost, say frontline workers.

…

In recent weeks, a number of anti-vaccine protests have been held across the country, including out front of hospitals in Calgary and Edmonton, compounding the exhaustion and frustration of frontline healthcare workers.

“I don’t have the energy to make sense of it any more,” said the nurse. “I’m barely functioning as it is, because we’re pouring from the cup that has a hole. We never get to fill it.”

Instead, nurses say they are left pleading with a narrow minority of the public that increasingly is ending up in the hospital.

And they get told it’s all their fault.

No shit. In a world that still watches placidly as cruise ships burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day each, it turns out that nobody, nobody, is living up to the Paris climate agreement.

Every one of the world’s leading economies, including all the countries that make up the G20, is failing to meet commitments made in the landmark Paris agreement in order to stave off climate catastrophe, a damning new analysis has found.

Less than two months before crucial United Nations climate talks take place in Scotland, none of the largest greenhouse gas emitting countries have made sufficient plans to lower pollution to meet what they agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

This means the world is barreling towards calamitous climate impacts.

But that’s the future; right now people are enjoying those cruises. There are 323 of those ships toddling around.

Under the Paris deal, nations vowed to prevent the world’s average temperature rising 1.5C above pre-industrial times in order to avoid disastrous heatwaves, flooding, storms, drought and other consequences that are already starting to unfold. But the new analysis, by Climate Action Tracker, finds almost every country is falling woefully short of that commitment.

Well you can’t expect people to give up cruises. It would be inhuman.

This intransigence comes despite the looming climate talks and increasing signs of the climate crisis manifesting itself in catastrophic weather events, including massive floods in Germany and China, severe wildfires in the US and dangerous heatwaves sweeping several countries.

108F here in Seattle in June.

“An increasing number of people around the world are suffering from ever more severe and frequent impacts of climate change, yet government action continues to lag behind what is needed,” said Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, another partner in the new study.

Elected governments can’t do much, and unelected ones don’t give a shit.

[John] Kerry risks entering the talks with no major climate victory to brandish, with emissions reduction provisions as part of a huge $3.5tn piece of Biden’s legislative agenda still a matter of disagreement even among Democrats in the US Congress.

This is what I’m saying. Reducing emissions isn’t popular, and elected governments are necessarily about what’s popular.

We’re just walking through an increasingly hostile wilderness toward the edge of a cliff.

She’s still at it.

That’s a stupid way to describe Joan Smith. I don’t know if Rafia Zakaria is really stupid or not but by god she says a lot of stupid things. That’s one of them. Joan Smith is the author of the classic Misogynies. She’s a feminist thinker and columnist and activist. She’s a star. She’s not “anti-trans,” she’s skeptical of some of the claims of the ever-expanding trans ideology.

To be the subject of a book review by Joan Smith is a high honor and a massive thrill. I don’t like to brag, or at least I don’t like to be too obvious about it, but I’ll brag about this: Joan Smith reviewed Does God Hate Women? and to me that was a very big deal.

Of course, it’s less pleasing if she thinks the book is crap, as she did Zakaria’s book, but then that’s the problem with writing a crap book. Zakaria’s bone-headed description of Joan as “committed to the status quo” just gives us all the more reason to think she (Zakaria) is uninformed as well as abusive. Women committed to the status quo don’t tell the Mayor of London why he should not have removed her from her position as co-chair of the violence against women and girls board. Women committed to the status quo don’t have such positions in the first place, because the status quo is that violence against women and girls is just part of life, not worth objecting to, not all that serious.

The voting rights struggle continues:

Senate Democrats united on Tuesday around a pared-down voting rights bill, escalating their efforts to build a case for aggressive action by Congress to push past Republican opposition and counter a rash of new G.O.P.-written ballot restrictions in states around the country.

Why do Republicans write all these voting restrictions? Because they can’t win if everyone can vote without interference.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, quickly dismissed the measure, reiterating his view that the legislation represented unnecessary federal meddling in elections that have historically been the province of the states.

Yes and historically some of the states allowed slavery, too. Fuck “historically.”

“There is no reason for the federal government to take over how we conduct elections,” Mr. McConnell, a longtime foe of Democratic election and campaign proposals, told reporters on Tuesday. “It is a solution in search of a problem, and we will not be supporting that.”

Oh really? No reason at all for the feds to protect voting rights?

I was listening to a useful and interesting conversation on Fresh Air about the Supreme Court’s intention to kill Roe v Wade and then I hit a bump.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Let’s get back to my interview with Ian Millhiser, who has been writing about the recent Supreme Court order allowing a restrictive Texas abortion law to go into effect. He’s also been writing about the court’s voting rights decisions, the increasing use of the shadow docket and the court’s larger move to the right. In his new book “The Agenda: How A Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America,” he writes that while Congress has become increasingly polarized and dysfunctional, the Supreme Court has become the locus of policymaking in the U.S., and the policies are largely conservative. Three of the six conservative justices were appointed by President Trump. Millhiser says some of the court’s least understood and most arcane decisions are fundamentally reshaping our nation. He’s a senior correspondent for Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution and threats to liberal democracy in the U.S. Millhiser is a lawyer and clerked for a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

So if the Supreme Court either out and out overrules Casey or Roe or uphold restrictions that are so severe that it leaves no time to get an abortion, that would be a federal ruling, but states would still be able to make their own laws, right?

MILLHISER: That’s right. So for the moment, the fight that we are having is over whether or not states can pass abortion bans or very severe abortion restrictions. I suspect that the next chapter in this litigation fight, you know – anti-abortion groups, there are some that believe in a theory called fetal personhood, which – you know, basically what fetal personhood means is it’s a way of reading the Constitution to say that the Constitution bans abortions. And so if fetal personhood were to become the law of the land, that would mean that abortions would be banned in all 50 states.

But I think the thing to understand here is that we are primarily talking about rulings that impact poor women and, you know, women who do not have means – I shouldn’t just say women, you know, women, trans people, nonbinary people, people who can become pregnant – who do not have the means to cross state lines.

There, obviously, is the bump.

Yes you damn well should “just say women.” It’s women who get pregnant, including when they don’t want to. It’s women who need abortion rights. It’s women who will be harmed if Roe is overturned. Women, women only, “just” women; not men. No you shouldn’t say “people” instead or in addition, because that just obscures the reality that attacks on abortion are attacks on women’s freedom and autonomy. Don’t obscure the reality.

Billingham continues his persecution of feminist women:

He hopes they will silence ALL the feminist women.

Astounding. And horrifying.

Inc “work to ensure LGBT is embedded across South Yorkshire” ….they intend to target all commissioners

“At Edinburgh rape crisis we had to cleanse our history of not being trans inclusive” JFC – Wadwha is talking about “cleansing” the women’s movement.

Not sure of the stats on this…. “The rape crisis movement is largely run by white, cis, heteronormative women”….

No, really?! The rape crisis movement is run by women? What an outrage!

Desperately want to say something …. Wadwha talking about how Scotland is engulfed in transphobia and suggesting *this* is why service users are afraid to access rape crisis! They have to learn not to be “transphobic” @ForwomenScot

Now framing it as opposition from the right wing. Wadwha talking about Scottish women “exposing themselves in recent weeks …as right wing and …working with fascists” @ForwomenScot

Wadwha “there was a protest outside Scottish Parliament the week before last – organised by those who oppose the GRA reform …and also those who oppose the existence of trans people”

Liar.

“We have been listening but at that protest there were people – that group of women were joined by fascist groups” @ForwomenScot

“They have given that space to them and that’s quite scary” …. Lies are scary Wadwha. Lies are really scary.

Absolutely incredible, and disgusting.

Importantly Wadwha was just discussing what you do to be more inclusive as an org. The language used terrified me. Talked of transphobic views surrounding us in society so Wadwha knows those views have been absorbed …

“We have to acknowledge those views in our organisations and see if they are views that can be changed or if they are permanent…. Can do this anonymously… it’s a journey”

The implication here is that anyone not in favour of admitting trans identified men to a women’s single sex service must be “found” and “changed” …. Honestly the most sinister talk I’ve been at

Laurie Penny decided to go all-in.

Imagine you’re throwing a party and somebody kicks off. It was going so well. You spent ages deciding on drinks and making a playlist, and now some blowhard is off on a homophobic rant. He’s not holding back, either. He’s getting loud and mouthing off with the vilest bigotry you can imagine, and people are getting uncomfortable. It’s your party. What do you do?

Well, one, it wouldn’t happen, because I don’t throw parties, and I have zero interest in drinks or playlists. Two – why would you invite “some blowhard” to your own party? If he’s “some blowhard” to you – some random unpleasant guy you don’t even know – what’s he doing at your party? So, three, I don’t believe your little thought experiment in the first place. Never mind, it’s not a real thought experiment. It’s a circuitous path to calling Graham Linehan names in a Substack post.

This is my first post on Substack, and it’s partly about why I’m on this platform, given that Substack continues to host and profit from the propaganda of, among others, transphobic hatemonger Graham Linehan.

Like that.

She’s a bit of a “hatemonger” herself, isn’t she – at least, those four words certainly look like hatemongering.

But wait, she’s not finished.

The best and most comprehensive breakdown of Linehan’s behavior and why it’s so abhorrent comes from Grace Lavery, also on this platform. I share her conviction that Substack ought to throw this deranged bigot out of their party right now, before anyone else gets hurt.

Does “deranged bigot” count as hatemongering? Or is that only when They do it?

I told my contacts at Substack that they ought to ban Linehan, along with anyone else doing deliberate, wilful, hateful harm to any oppressed minority.

Item 3. I think accusing someone of “doing deliberate, willful, hateful harm to an oppressed minority” is hatemongering.

What does it mean, then, when a company like Substack chooses to host this sort of malicious hate speech…?

She says “this sort” as if she had provided examples, but she hadn’t. She gave zero examples, she simply asserted – and in very strong language at that. This is childish. “Joey said bad things. Horrible things. Really really mean things. Joey must be expelled right now for this sort of malicious hate speech.”

Graham responded a couple of days later.

Grace Lavery is all excited.

Not just “vile bigot” I think. That could perhaps be defended as opinion (I don’t know enough about UK law to skip the “perhaps”). But hatemonger? Doing deliberate harm? Those claims look much harder to defend.

A pretty story:

A former Met Police counter-terrorism officer has admitted using spy cameras to secretly film naked models.

What kind of models?

Pretending to be a pilot, Det Insp Neil Corbel arranged fake photoshoots in hotel rooms, flats and Airbnbs.

Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard he hid devices in tissue boxes, phone chargers, an air freshener and glasses to video his victims.

He was caught after a woman became suspicious of a digital clock and found it was a spy camera.

Oh a woman – that kind of model. I wonder if he asked them how they identified first.

Police found images of some 51 women on Corbel’s hard drive and were able to identify 19 victims willing to make statements against him.

51! He’s industrious about it.

“He set up the rooms well in advance with covert devices planted in strategic places capturing the women while they were undressing before the shoots,” said the prosecutor.

Mr Alabi said Corbel manoeuvred the models so that intimate parts of their bodies were filmed.

Uh huh; right up between the legs, no doubt.

Never mind, they were probably all Karens.

Ah well who would know better than Amy Coney Barrett?

Claiming the supreme court “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”, Amy Coney Barrett told an audience at a Kentucky center named for the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties”.

For sure, and she was not nominated and approved for the court by partisan hacks from a political party but by disinterested legal experts like for instance Mitch McConnell. Yup yup yup yup.

Speaking alongside McConnell a little more than a week after she and four other conservatives on the court declined to block a Texas law which all but outlaws abortion in the state, the devout Catholic also insisted the panel does not judge cases based on personal beliefs.

Right, except that they do.

Barrett’s remarks met with widespread skepticism.

Gee I can’t think why.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, wrote: “Not ‘partisan hacks’? Then explain 80-0 partisan 5-4 record for big donors. And explain judicially conservative principles rolled over to get those wins for donors who put you on the court.”

She can’t, she’s looking at a squirrel.

Rafia Zakaria apparently deleted the stupidest of her tweets from yesterday attacking Joan Smith for her review of Zakaria’s book on “white feminism.” Or most of them, but not quite all.

She doesn’t really care what the review says, which is why she composed all those childish “nyah nyah Karen na na Boomer” about them.

I’ll grant her one point: she didn’t care enough to find out who Joan Smith is.

“They’re”?

So Zakaria knows Joan Smith is a woman long enough to call her a Karen, but not long enough to refrain from calling her “they.”

Yay feminism. Feminism is for everyone except terfs, boomers, Karens, white women, and women who write unflattering reviews of Rafia Zakaria’s book.

“And likely all her entitled and racist views”? Name one. Document it. Show us your work.

No, that’s incorrect. It could just be that Zakaria’s book is not a good book – and judging by her tweets it’s hard to see how it could be much good. Her thinking is crude at best.

Yes I think I’ll just skip reading Lol White Feminism Lol.

Updating to add one that I missed:

At what age does Rafia Zakaria think women should be put to death? 70? 65? 55? At what age, exactly, are we too old to be useful and too repellent to be allowed to continue cluttering up the place?

Is she aware that, barring accident, she will reach that fatal age herself in due course?

Update 2:

Zakaria’s book sounds only slightly less contemptuous and hostile than her social media persona. Joan Smith reviewed it in the Times (so Zakaria thought it would be clever to lob stupid insults at her on Twitter in response, which is very adult and sensible).

“White feminism” as a derogatory term, caricaturing it as a movement that imposes its preoccupations on women who are not white or middle class, has been around for a while. People claim it is reflective more of a state of mind than skin colour; even Pragna Patel, a founding member of Southall Black Sisters, has been accused of being a “white feminist”.

In other words it works pretty much the way “terf” does – as an excuse to shit on women without seeming like a common or garden misogynist.

Building bridges is definitely not what this book is about, and everywhere she finds feminists who accept “the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of colour”. Defining people in terms they would not recognise or accept is a key ploy of identity politics, and feminists are lumped together and traduced throughout.

Much the way Katie Edwards did in the Independent today, then.

The book’s most serious flaw lies in its singularly ill-informed account of modern feminism. If the movement has a single unifying feature it is an analysis of the way oppression of women is linked to female bodies, regardless of race, class, age, religion or sexual orientation. Yet this is precisely what Zakaria denies: “An aversion to acknowledging lived trauma permeates white feminism, which in turn produces a discomfort and alienation from women who have experienced it.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. In this country refuges for victims of domestic and sexual violence were built by feminists who insisted they should be open to all women.

Never mind that, they were white feminists just the same.

Identity politics is rife with such facile judgments, designed to make its advocates feel superior. Zakaria appears to have missed the irony of dismissing every species of feminism but her own in the name of a supposedly more egalitarian politics. But when I see feminists being pitted against each other in this mean-spirited way, I can almost hear the patriarchy laughing.

So I guess Zakaria decided to use Twitter to demonstrate just how mean-spirited (and fatuous) she can be when she really puts her mind to it.

Many people clearly pride themselves on being unpleasant.

No she doesn’t. That’s Joan Smith, and no she doesn’t. “pol” is short for political, and in any case “pol” doesn’t mean pale in the first place. But being told that wasn’t going to stop the snide pissy Zakaria.

How dare the white feminists point out a dishonest smear of the feminist author of Misogynies?

What a crude vulgar childish brat. I won’t be following her work.

Psychologist Ellyn Kaschak on the trans dogma:

… there is a deafening silence on the part of most individual psychologists and an enthusiastic, unquestioning and unresearched explosion of support for transgender motives, actions and people by others. I too want to offer support for human rights, but uninformed and unquestioning support may actually involve harm, so instead, I am asking for psychology to step up and take on its responsibilities in this regard.

Not only the conferences, but the classroom and the laboratory are appropriate places to be asking important questions. Yet the inhabitants of these venues are being silenced in the name of human rights and a purported bias named “transphobia.” Academics have been censored and in some cases, lost their positions for just using language deemed unacceptable by the transgender movement, words such as “women.” Yes, “women” is considered hate speech and this purported transphobic hate speech is being aggressively monitored and eliminated in our very universities.

It’s not just a personal preference or psychology now, she notes, but a movement, enforced by threats and punishment.

You are bound to have a relative, a friend or a co-worker bring this issue from the abstract to the personal, as proclaimed gender defiers are inventing more and more genders rather than attempting to abolish this social construction, as did feminists before them. More perniciously, their wordplay includes substituting the term “gender” for the sex change that they are attempting. The reason for this substitution is simply that sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality rather than a socially constructed idea. Sex is currently immutable; gender is not. The conflation of these human characteristics can and does lead to confusion at best and irreversible physical damage at worst.

This formerly personal psychological issue, which affected only 0.1% of the population, has exploded into a social movement with all the characteristics of social contagion.

Along with righteous fury and sadistic love of punishment.

The diagnostic of “gender dysphoria” actually came into existence as “gender identity disorder” and replaced the pathologizing of homosexuality (eliminated in 1973) in the DSM, the psychiatric bible. These diagnoses are adopted by popular vote of the American Psychiatric Association members, democratic rather than scientific. They have the strongest investment in construing psychology in terms of health and pathology. The association members had been convinced by lobbying groups and research, to vote to “normalize” homosexuality. In doing so, they wanted to leave a diagnostic possibility for those who remained conflicted about their sexual orientation. Diagnosis permits treatment via the official approval of the insurance companies, who today control the professions to a frightening extent. Thus was born “gender identity,” seemingly a harmless and even generous compromise.

I don’t think I knew that. The compromise outgrew its cradle and has started devouring the world.

Proponents of the transgender movement actually hijacked this diagnosis, along with the 50 years of feminist theory, practice and discoveries about the social construction and contextual nature of gender and spun them into a human rights movement, but not one for women. In fact, this movement actually infringes on many of the hard-won rights of women, including not only the right to assemble as a sex-based group but the right to call ourselves women, mothers and daughters. It even attempts to destroy the very concept of sex by conflating sex and gender, but make no mistake, lifetimes of research support unequivocally the difference between sex and gender. They may influence each other, but they are not the same thing. And sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality.

Quick, bring out the guillotine.

Here are some more important questions. If psychologists and psychiatrists are going to pathologize and diagnose, a questionable practice at best, then shouldn’t they diagnose carefully, as lives depend upon it? Are they then considering and eliminating such diagnoses as narcissism or sociopathic disorders, sexual fetishes, dissociative disorders or even delusional disorders? Is transitioning more like self-cutting or eating disorders than like homosexuality?

And if so is it really all that brave and stunning?

The usual complete indifference to the needs of women. Me first me me me me me me me me me.

By “women like me” he means men. He’s calling Labour MP Rosie Duffield “awful” (calling her thread awful, but you know we’re meant to think she’s awful for tweeting it) for saying that abused women need women-only services. It’s all about him and zero about the thousands of women who need such services.

You can’t build a progressive movement on this kind of blind relentless egotism and selfishness.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist:

Legal Feminist tweeted a short thread starting like this the other day:  

Cunningham first notes that the tweet hasn’t been verified, she doesn’t know who Mother Cecily is, she doesn’t know the story is true. But as a hypothetical, it’s what not to do.

It’s an extraordinarily bad idea. Any HR director tempted to organise training with this kind of content needs to catch up with the implications of the judgment of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Forstater. Gender critical beliefs are capable of being protected under the Equality Act: that means that someone with gender critical beliefs is entitled not to suffer discrimination on grounds of those beliefs, or harassment related to them. That protection works in the same way as protection from discrimination on grounds of other protected characteristics: sex, race, disability etc. If you want to make this real – well, run the thought experiment, substituting in groups defined by other protected characteristics for “TERF” in “Be less TERF.”  It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? 

What’s the difference here? It’s that “TERF”ism isn’t like racism or sexism or homophobia or exclusion of disabled people. It’s simply the formerly obvious view that men are not women. Employers shouldn’t be holding women who don’t believe men can be women up for rebuke and exclusion.

Anecdotally, it seems that large numbers of gender critical employees are suffering various kinds of discrimination and harassment at work because of these beliefs, or even being disciplined by regulators and professional associations for expressing them. A rash of employment tribunal claims following in the wake of Forstater seems inevitable. 

Punishment for not believing that men can be women. It still seems too grotesque to believe, yet it’s true.

But harassing your gender critical staff through the medium of your diversity training is taking things to another level. It has various snazzy features as compared to common-or-garden workplace harassment. 

First, it’s exceptionally efficient. You don’t have to bother to harass your gender critical staff individually. Instead, with a single document or training event, you can harass all your gender critical employees at once…

Bulk-harassment, as Legal Feminist called it.

The example given above is an extreme case, but employers should think seriously even about what may seem to them to be innocuous exhortations to “allyship,” like encouraging staff to wear a rainbow lanyard, or give their pronouns at the start of meetings or in their email sign-off, etc. The problem, in a nutshell, with pronouns and similar observances is that they are a public profession of belief. If you “encourage” your staff to profess a belief, you are in effect forcing them either to say a creed they may not believe (and which some may find profoundly menacing; for more on that, read this powerful blog),  or else to decline to say it, and thus to confess their unbelief in an environment where unbelievers may be unpopular. 

And it’s especially unpleasant to have your employer leaning on you to profess belief in a creed you consider absolute bullshit.

You say “being less trans-exclusionary, and more trans inclusive seems a reasonable viewpoint to be presented to employees.” That would be fine if “trans inclusive” just meant not discriminating against trans people. But gender critical people are slurred as “trans exclusionary” not because they want to exclude trans people from work or public life, etc. – which obviously would be terrible – but because they don’t accept that trans-identifying males are included within the definition of the word “woman.” So if HR say “be less trans-exclusionary”, they are making a demand that their staff believe something.

And the something in question is a crock of shit.

Meanwhile, if we get tired of banal formulaic denunciations of “white feminism” by white women who write columns for the Independent, we can turn to Ex-Muslims of North America for some real oppression.

The Islamist organization is Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the theocrat who answers the question says: “The ruling of apostasy of Islam is clear, again that’s one of the things the west doesn’t like and seeks to change the ruling of apostasy. As such in Islam it is clear that apostates do attract capital punishment and we don’t shy away from that.”

It’s telling that he shifts the agency onto the victim – it’s the “apostate” who “attracts” murder for leaving the religion. Islam is not to blame, enforcers are not to blame, the apostate is to blame.

There’s also, of course, the fact that it doesn’t matter what “the ruling of Islam” may be in countries that have laws against murder. Islam can “rule” what it likes but murder remains murder even if the perp is an Islamist fanatic like the guy at the mic.

There’s also the fact that it’s not ok to make laws mandating death for changing one’s mind.

Katie Edwards in the Independent:

Over 30 years ago now, Judith Butler wrote the gender studies classic Gender Trouble. Today, Butler expounded on those ideas in an interview with The Guardian.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her progressive approach over the decades, Butler suggested that we should rethink the category of “woman”. 

Progressive? What’s progressive about her “approach”? What’s progressive about suggesting that we should rethink the category of “woman”? Especially when what she means by that is “to include men”?

Butler advocates for trans women and their inclusion in the sisterhood.

Which is ridiculous at best, because trans women are men.

Although the “sisterhood” seems to have become something of an exclusive members’ club. Feminism, or more accurately, white feminism, has gone a bit Mean Girls – in the worst possible way.

More accurately how? Does she think it’s only white feminists who understand that only women are women? Because that would be awfully racist. And as for who is being mean…

White feminism already has a bad rep for being exclusive, divisive, and for deflecting attention away from its more insidious attitudes by targeting vulnerable groups for criticism.

She says, repeating and amplifying the stupid epithet, doing her bit to solidify the “bad rep” that is such a handy stick for misogynists to beat feminism with.

Whenever I write something critical of whiteness, I receive derisive responses from other white women, accusing me of self-flagellation.

No, I don’t think she’s flagellating herself, I think she’s flagellating other feminist women because misogyny has never gone out of style and she wants to be one of the popular kids. Talking about Karens and white feminists and terfs is the way to suck up to the bullies.

We’re all guilty of it – even if we’re trying really, really hard, and we’ve had horrible things happen to us in our lives, so we’re victims too, and we definitely think of ourselves as allies, and we’re actually very nice people and terribly misunderstood, so please don’t call us Terfs or racists or Karens because you’re hurting our fragile little white-woman feelings. Yup. We’ve heard it all before. Ad nauseam.

I’ve read this column before ad nauseam.