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.

Another woman bullied out of attending:

Elected in April 2020, Starmer will be hoping his initial year and a half leading his party will be enough to ensure a standing ovation.

One person who won’t be in that audience however is the MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffield. A poster girl for Labour’s surprise successes in the 2017 election, Duffield has attracted both praise and opprobrium for her views on transgender issues. Back in August last year, LGBT+ Labour demanded Starmer ‘take action’ against Duffield after she wrote on Twitter that ‘only women have a cervix.’

How does one go about “taking action” against an MP who states an anatomical fact? And why does one attempt such a thing? Why does anyone think it’s desirable and progressive to take revenge on a woman who says men don’t have a cervix?

More rows have followed since, with a member of Duffield’s staff resigning over what they called her ‘openly transphobic’ views and LGBT+ Labour criticising her Twitter activity. For her part, Duffield has insisted that she continues to support to trans rights and believes that ‘people have the right to live with dignity and be treated with respect in an equal and inclusive society.’

Why isn’t that enough? Why is there a requirement to buy into the absolute nonsense of the Gender Dogma?

Steerpike understands that Duffield will be missing her own party’s conference over concerns about the threat to her personal security. It comes just a day after the MP complained on Twitter about the ‘mostly male aggression and verbal abuse’ which ‘has resulted in changes to my personal safety and security arrangements.’

Like missing her own party’s conference. Very progressive.

Craig McLean promoted the open access copy of his paper on July 27, apparently to universal indifference; the turphs found it on September 4. They all say what we all say – the paper is remarkably bad for a working academic and it’s mystifying that it was accepted.

From the abstract of an academic article by a sociologist…

This article examines the development of anti-transgender debates within the United Kingdom, which have gained traction due to proposed amendments to the country’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA). A group of determined lobby groups, taking their lead from like-minded organizations in the United States, has protested vigorously against the proposed changes to the GRA, especially with respect to “single-sex spaces”. As a result of this furor, the lives of transgender people have become the subject of open debate.

“The lives of transgender people have become the subject of open debate”? Is that academic language? Is it the language of sociology? Surely “the lives of” various categories of people is a core subject in sociology? And thus a subject of open debate? That sentence sounds more like a Twitter blurt than an academic truth-claim.

And anyway, of course they have, because changing the meaning of “single-sex spaces” to “not-single-sex spaces” is naturally subject to open debate. Why wouldn’t it be?

Trans people now see their legitimacy questioned, and their ability to access services increasingly being placed under the microscope.

What does “their legitimacy” mean? What does it mean within the discipline of sociology? Going back a step, what does “trans” mean?

This article argues that the literature on radicalization – developed in response to domestic terrorism – can explain these developments. UK lobby groups are successfully pushing a radical agenda to deny the basic rights of trans people…

It’s not a “basic right” for men to be in women’s spaces. It’s the other way around – the basic right is that of women to be away from men when they need privacy. Women are vulnerable to men in ways that men are not vulnerable to women. It’s repellent for some smug academic to pretend otherwise in order to berate women for wanting to be safe.

Aw yeah, coupla men who beat up women.

Bina Shah tweeted on September 8:

I just really need to know how Judith Butler’s definition of women applies to Afghan women who are being beaten on the streets by the Taliban. Have you ever considered that your academics really don’t fit the lives of women in the global South?

And if they don’t fit in the lives of those women (which they don’t), how well do they fit women anywhere?

She expanded on her thoughts the next day:

But it was Judith Butler’s statement that “we need to rethink the category of women” that got me going. It coalesced from quite a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about gender identity theory as it is being adopted in Western countries. And it comes at the same time as I’ve been watching Afghan women getting beaten by the Taliban as they protest for their rights, for safety and security and for inclusion in the government, and for the freedom to work and study.

The Taliban don’t beat women because the women “identify as” women. The women the Taliban beat can’t escape the beating by saying they “identify” as men. They can’t even escape it by saying they are non-binary.

Taliban: Hahaha nice try.

Bina was asked (or, probably, told) to clarify her thinking.

In Afghanistan (extreme example) but also in Pakistan, where I live, in India, in Nepal, Bangladesh, Middle Eastern countries, North Africa, women (or people with female bodies) are being abused, harassed, assaulted and killed not just because they have female bodies, but because they refuse to hand those bodies over to men to do with as they please.

Nigeria, too, also Indonesia…The list is long.

Because this possession and ownership of female bodies is absolutely tied to female biology and the production of children and sexual comfort for those men, separating sex from gender completely negates this form of oppression which is hugely insulting to all of us who are still fighting to end sex-based discrimination in our countries and regions. 

It’s insulting and it’s damaging to that fight against sex-based discrimination. It’s a lose-lose.

I’m afraid the trans rights activists are acting like Western colonisers and imperialists all over again, imposing their ideas of gender and sexuality on us the same way their Empire was imposed on us for a good part of the 20th century. I don’t really want gender colonialism in the 21st century. Do you?

Thank you for coming to my TERF Talk.

Thank you for giving it.

Another exciting first – a man beats a woman in mixed martial arts.

Transgender mixed martial arts fighter Alana McLaughlin made a successful start to her career by choking out her opponent in the second round last night.

McLaughlin, who was born a man, was the first openly-transgender MMA athlete to compete in the US since 2014.

And having been rocked by opponent Celine Provost in the first of three scheduled rounds, McLaughlin fought back the second session to submit Provost by rear-naked choke.

In stepping into the cage, McLaughlin, 38, became just the second transgender woman to compete in the sport, following in the footsteps of Fallon Fox who was cageside in Miami.

Ah yes the footsteps of Fallon Fox, who broke a woman’s skull.

Before her bout, McLaughlin, a former member of the US Army Special Forces, said: “I want to pick up the mantle that Fallon put down.

“Right now, I’m following in Fallon’s footsteps. I’m just another step along the way and it’s my great hope that there are more to follow behind me.”

More more MORE men breaking women’s skulls. How progress we are.

Are books just clutter you should get rid of or an essential or something in between? Julian Baggini leans toward the first.

Having recently put everything into boxes for the less terminal adventure of a house move, we decided to strictly limit how much came out of them at the other end. However, we knew that there is one kind of object that defiantly resists the cardboard coffin: books. Like so many, we would happily decimate our wardrobes, clear out our cupboards and gut our garages, but would struggle to liberate our libraries. Why is it so hard?

For a lot of reasons. We want to read a lot more books than we get around to reading. Some books merit re-reading, some multiple times. It’s good to have a wide choice. Reading actual books as opposed to articles (or ahem blog posts) is a good workout for the brain…even if you do swiftly forget what you’ve read, at least I hope so.

But more than that – more, and vaguer. A deflating reason Julian talks about is showing off, displaying how clever you are, trying to impress. Maybe, but I think there’s also a less tacky version of that, which is an actual love of books, and what they stand for (not just in the sense of flattering your vanity). They look right – they look more right than a wall filled with a screen. If you grew up on books, and remember your first trips to the public library and finding great heaps of book that you took home and devoured, you like having a wall of them even if no one ever sees it.

This doesn’t apply to books as books, though; they have to be books you care about, books you want to read or re-read. Acquiring 10 boxes of books you have no interest in from a garage sale is no use at all.

This is clearly what Julian meant too, since he didn’t get rid of all of them, but just thinned them out.

We still have more than enough books left, though maybe not enough to impress a true library-builder. But nearly 500 books have been boxed, and I am already feeling lighter. As my better half said, before there were so many books it was as though you couldn’t see the trees for the wood. We couldn’t delight in any of them because we were overwhelmed by all of them.

Ah, a mere 500, ones he didn’t actually want to read. That’s another matter.

Freedom! Private enterprise! The boss is always right! Innovation!

Except when…

Texas has made it illegal for social media platforms to ban users “based on their political viewpoints”.

Prominent Republican politicians have accused Facebook, Twitter and others of censoring conservative views. Former US president Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after a group of his supporters attacked the Capitol in January.

The social networks have all denied stifling conservative views. However, they do enforce terms of service which prohibit content such as incitement to violence and co-ordinated disinformation.

Well no wonder Greg Abbott doesn’t like that.

(What about jurisdiction though? Can states pass laws that restrict global communications? I wouldn’t have thought Texas has the power to tell Twitter and Facebook what to do.)

Critics say the law does not respect the constitutional right of private businesses to decide what sort of content is allowed on their platforms.

“This bill abandons conservative values, violates the First Amendment, and forces websites to host obscene, anti-semitic, racist, hateful and otherwise awful content,” said Steve DelBianco, president of NetChoice trade association.

“Moderation of user posts is crucial to keeping the internet safe for Texas families, but this bill would put the Texas government in charge of content policies.”

Along with obscene, anti-semitic, racist, and hateful, social media content is often threatening, stalkerish, bullying, intimidating.

Texas is just showing off at this point.

When Republicans take credit for the civil rights movement…

Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who previously served as Donald Trump’s press secretary, has released her first television ad, which is entitled “Who We Are”.

“I’ll never forget being a student at Little Rock Central High and watching my dad – a Republican governor – and Bill Clinton – a Democrat[IC] president – hold open the doors for the Little Rock Nine, doors that forty years earlier had been closed to them because they’re Black,” Sanders says in the ad.

…

“Good triumphed over evil,” Sanders says of the Little Rock Nine in her ad. “That is who we are. The radical left wants to teach our kids America is a racist and evil country, but Arkansans are generous, hard-working people.”

What does she mean “that is who we are”? Does she think the people who resisted the desegregation of Little Rock Central High were Martians? Those people were Arkansans and Americans too, and there are millions more like them right now. They are the ones who will be voting for her.

What does she mean “that is who we are”? Does she think the 52 years that Little Rock Central High was all-white never happened? Does she think those years were simply nullified the day the Nine made it through the doors? Does she think the mob in the streets screaming at them were not “who we are”?

If she does think that she’s dead wrong. “Who we are” still includes a huge contingent of proud racists, including the evil ignorant racist man she worked for when he was squatting in the presidential mansion.

I have a feeling that’s not what Labour said.

Barnard says in her letter to NEC members that the letter gave her notice that she’s “under investigation for challenging transphobia online.” Again, it seems unlikely that that’s what the letter said.

The trouble is that activists of the Owen Jones/Jess Barnard type treat the word “transphobia” as self-evident and universally understood, when in fact it’s a recently invented pejorative for anyone who doesn’t believe and enforce every article of trans dogma, including the ones that contradict each other.

The Joneses and Barnards can see themselves as “challenging transphobia” when in fact they’re bullying and shaming women for defending women’s rights.

So it would be interesting to know what the investigation really is, but we probably never will.

It isn’t my womb that makes me a woman, Natasha Devon writes

Because it’s the large non-motile gametes?

Hahaha no don’t be silly.

Trans people have always been present in human society. Famously Marsha P Johnson, an American activist and trans woman, threw the first brick during the Stonewall riots in June 1969.

“Famously” inaccurate. Johnson was a drag queen.

Binary notions of gender – the idea that there are only men and women and everyone fits neatly into one of those two categories – are also a Christian invention, which spread across the globe as Christian countries colonised it.

Huh. So how were there humans before Christianity? If they had no idea which was which how did they reproduce?

Yet, there is an additional layer of complexity when it comes to the trans discussion, which is confusing even some people who would consider themselves liberal and progressive – Namely, that trans women are erasing the rights of cis women (people who were born with a girl’s body).

That is indeed a complication; good that she admits it.

As a cis woman, I am supposed believe trans women are a threat to my rights to sex-specific healthcare, as well as being terrified that men wearing dresses are going to invade my private spaces (like toilets and changing rooms) to assault me. I’m also meant to worry transwomen might beat me at sports with inherent superior ability.

Oh I see, she wasn’t admitting it, but she’s too bad at writing to say that.

All very well to be glib about these obvious drawbacks to trans ideology, but the facts remain what they are.

Which, amusingly, she goes on to admit, while waving it away with “but surely we can figure out some way to have everything we want.”

Trans people in sports is more of a nuanced discussion in my opinion, particularly when considering physical education in schools. Pre-puberty, it shouldn’t be too much bother to just let anyone of any gender play any sport they like, with anyone they like.

Yes, we know.

However, factors such as male bodies having (on average) stronger skeletal structures post-puberty, larger lung capacity and of course the impact of testosterone all make this more complex with teenagers.

And adults. Laurel Hubbard is 43.

I don’t think it’s unresolvable, however, if we really put our thinking caps on.

Ohhhhhhhh cool, that’s that fixed then. If only we’d thought of that!

I think we’ll never reach satisfactory conclusions if we allow ourselves to be side-tracked by a combination of blatant transphobia and the fabricated notion that cis and trans women’s rights are at odds.

She says, having just admitted that in at least one area they are.

After all, that’s not how right’s work: They aren’t a zero-sum game and we should always be cautious when we’re led to believe that showing humanity towards one demographic comes at the expense of another.

She says, having just admitted one area where “showing humanity” to men who say they are women decidedly does come at the expense of women.

There is zero thought or argument or effort here, it’s just repetition of three or four stupid mantras plus oops an admission that even she knows they’re not true.

But LBC thought it worth posting.

Katie makes a good point.

Well it’s not helpful to trans people but it’s very helpful to the rabid “allies” in whipping other “allies” into a frenzy of rage at those evil radical feminists.

Peter Boghossian has quit his job at Portland State University and published his resignation letter on Bari Weiss’s Substack.

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.

He’s taught it even though it’s not his field. He has an EdD, a doctorate in education. I’ve never really understood why he gets to teach philosophy at a university without the usual advanced degree.

Anyway, his point is, he’s dedicated to free inquiry and he likes to invite speakers with all kinds of views to his classes so that the students can learn to think and question.

But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly. 

There’s probably a lot of truth in that, but Boghossian isn’t just a Socratic asker of provocative questions.

Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined. 

As an aside, it’s funny that he calls Christina Hoff Sommers an “author” when she, unlike him, has an actual PhD in philosophy. Much more centrally, calling Carl Benjamin “popular cultural critic” is highly misleading. Benjamin is better known as Sargon of Akkad, a misogynist Twitter bully. He’s the one who “jokingly” threatened to rape MP Jess Phillips. He’s basically a professional misogynist, and the fact that Boghossian covered that up with “popular cultural critic” tells me he doesn’t believe his own self-advertising.

In short the story isn’t quite as simple as he says.

Originally a comment by Sastra on To promote well-being.

Phoenix has regular counselling with the psychologist, who judges that Phoenix’s distress is significant and enduring, and is not a symptom of an underlying psychopathology.

No, it appears that the psychopathology is draped right over the top, holding sparklers and dancing the Can-can.

I remember when the goal of enlightened feminism was for women, and the society they lived in, to minimize the significance of their sex and emphasize instead the importance of their character.. Yes, you are a woman, but that says little to nothing about your interests, capacities, talents, and goals, which constitute who you are. To constantly worry about whether you are WOMAN ENOUGH in the way WOMEN SHOULD BE was unhealthy. That’s a restrictive box. Be yourself.

Yet here is Phoenix, barely able to function if they don’t get into the RIGHT BOX and look the RIGHT WAY and get the rest of the world’s approval and recognition that they’re doing it RIGHT so they can finally relax and maybe start to think about developing a personality. Assuming there’s any room left for one.

“Tell us 5 interesting things about yourself.”

“1.) I’m nonbinary 2.) I need to look nonbinary 3.) This is all I think about 4.) The distress is significant and enduring 5.) nonbinary means neither male nor female, but not in a intersex way, more like being neither describes my personality.”

So the Lee statue is down and cut in half.

A crowd erupted in cheers and song Wednesday as work crews hoisted an enormous statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee off the pedestal where it has towered over Virginia’s capital city for more than a century.

One of America’s largest monuments to the Confederacy, the equestrian statue was lowered to the ground just before 9 a.m., after a construction worker who strapped harnesses around Lee and his horse lifted his arms in the air and counted, “Three, two, one!” to jubilant shouts from a crowd of hundreds. A work crew then began cutting it into pieces.

Two pieces, that is: it was too tall for transport so they sliced it.

“Any remnant like this that glorifies the Lost Cause of the Civil War, it needs to come down, said Gov. Ralph Northam, who called it “hopefully a new day, a new era in Virginia.” The Democrat said it represents “more than 400 years of history that we should not be proud of.”

Exactly so. Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind are not the best sources for understanding that history.

The decisions by the governor and Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney to remove the Confederate tributes marked a major victory for civil rights activists, whose previous calls to remove the statues had been steadfastly rebuked by city and state officials alike.

An item from the Journal of Medical Ethics:

In this article, we analyse the novel case of Phoenix, a non-binary adult requesting ongoing puberty suppression (OPS) to permanently prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a way of affirming their gender identity. We argue that (1) the aim of OPS is consistent with the proper goals of medicine to promote well-being, and therefore could ethically be offered to non-binary adults in principle; (2) there are additional equity-based reasons to offer OPS to non-binary adults as a group; and (3) the ethical defensibility of facilitating individual requests for OPS from non-binary adults also depends on other relevant considerations, including the balance of potential benefits over harms for that specific patient, and whether the patient’s request is substantially autonomous.

It’s interesting that a technical paper of this kind treats the term “non-binary” as transparent and “medical” – i.e. a straightforward descriptor useful to medical professionals and ethicists.

It later turns out that Phoenix is hypothetical, which reduced my tension a good deal. Having said that…

Phoenix, 18, was assigned female at birth but has identified as gender non-binary (not entirely/exclusively male or female) since age 5.

Wait. Children of 5 don’t know from “identifying as.” When I was 5 I identified as all kinds of people (and probably animals) I saw on tv. This is all adult ideology being insinuated onto children who don’t know wtf the growns are talking about.

Anyway Phoenix hated puberty, especially the start of breasts. I hated that too – I think it’s pretty ordinary and humdrum to hate it. It’s weird. Children of 14 or 12 don’t necessarily love weird things happening to their bodies. But anyway Phoenix hated it so puberty blockers, and then Phoenix wanted to stay on them forever.

Given Phoenix’s severe distress, Phoenix’s paediatrician agreed puberty blockers should be given, but informed Phoenix and their parents he was not prepared to prescribe long-term puberty suppression, as this is riskier than short-term suppression. The paediatrician stated that, when Phoenix turned 16 and had a better sense of their gender identity, they would meet to discuss whether Phoenix wished to discontinue the puberty blockers and (1) revert to their endogenous (female) sex hormones or (2) commence testosterone.

When Phoenix turned 16, they informed their paediatrician that they did not want option (1) or (2). Rather, Phoenix was confident they would identify as non-binary for the rest of their life and wanted to stay on puberty blockers ‘forever’ to ensure their body remained in a ‘genderless’ state. Reluctantly, the paediatrician agreed to extend Phoenix’s time on blockers for another 2 years.

People of 16 are confident about a lot of things that they change their minds about later. More urgently, puberty blockers don’t just make the non-binary person bulge-free in the body, they also block brain development. They make the non-binary person childish, immature, stuck at an early stage.

Phoenix’s doctor refers Phoenix to a psychologist, who confirms that Phoenix continues to have significant distress about their body, similar in degree to that experienced by binary trans patients that the psychologist has seen. Phoenix has regular counselling with the psychologist, who judges that Phoenix’s distress is significant and enduring, and is not a symptom of an underlying psychopathology. The psychologist also reports that she does not see any signs that indicate Phoenix has a fear of growing up.

Phoenix tells the psychologist that they highly value having a body that matches their gender identity. Alternative options, including low-dose testosterone, menstrual suppression and future ‘top’ surgery, are unacceptable to Phoenix because they do not believe these alternatives would accurately reflect their non-binary gender identity.

But what is a “gender identity”? It’s contested that such a thing even exists, that the words even name something real as opposed to a fantasy about the self akin to other fantasies about the self that don’t get adopted into the medical lexicon.

It’s just strange, the mix of formal academic language and assumptions about the reality of “gender identity” and “non-binary identity.” The University of Twitter Philosophy Department.

No trespassing:

HOLYROOD is changing its legal status to make it easier for the police to remove protesters.

Scottish Parliament bosses have asked the Home Office to designate the building and its grounds as a “protected site” in the interests of national security.

Of course protests and protesters aren’t a threat to national security. Insurrectionists are, as we’ve recently seen all too vividly, but protesters, no.

Legislation has now been laid in Westminster under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which is due to come into force on October 1.

At present, the police have limited powers to intervene if there is no substantive offence taking place, such as protesters making a prolonged noise outside the entrances.

Yes well that’s freedom of speech and assembly, isn’t it. Arguably the police shouldn’t have powers to intervene in non-violent protests.

But from next month it will be a criminal offence to remain on the parliamentary estate “without lawful authority” punishable by a £5000 fine or a year in jail after a conviction. 

I wonder what “remain” means. Are people allowed to walk through at a fast clip to admire the grounds? Are they allowed to loiter for a minute or two to take some snaps? Are they allowed to linger for 10-15 minutes to drink in the atmosphere?

Public gatherings are are an almost daily part of Holyrood life, with groups gathering to protest against Government policy, demand change or support a particular cause.

In the last week alone, hundreds of people have held demos in support of women’s rights and against vaccine passports.

It’s the women’s rights wot done it. We can’t have demos in support of women’s rights – the monstrous regiment of women needs to stay home and out of sight.

On the other hand, the powers say this move is just to deal with protests that get too disruptive and that in practice it doesn’t eliminate protesting.

“The SPCB [the MSP-led Scottish Parliamentary Management Body] does not foresee invoking this power frequently, and only in cases where visitors are in breach of the terms and conditions for use of the parliamentary estate.

“At present, the police have limited ability to intervene if there is no substantive criminal offence taking place, and disruptive protests can become especially prolonged.” 

…

“Both the UK Parliament and Welsh Senedd are already designated as protected sites. 

“We were reassured to learn from their experience that having the designation as a protected site has not limited protest – far from – but has encouraged those engaging with the institutions to keep activities in line with their policies.”

One to keep an eye on.

DoJ gonna sue.

The Justice Department plans to file a lawsuit against Texas over its restrictive anti-abortion law that critics say is unconstitutional and has brought a halt to women’s reproductive rights in the state, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

…

Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Monday the department was urgently exploring all options to challenge the Texas law. The department will use powers under the so-called FACE Act to provide support from federal law enforcement when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is under attack, Garland said.

Note that Bloomberg News said “women’s reproductive rights,” something which is apparently out of reach of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.