AND another:

Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has struck back after critics mocked her for using the phrase “menstruating person.”

In a CNN interview regarding Texas’ new anti-abortion law, Ms Ocasio-Cortez had carefully used the phrase to include trans men, non-binary Americans, and others who menstruate in addition to women. Some conservatives ridiculed her choice of words, but AOC fiercely defended it.

She “used the phrase” in talking to Anderson Cooper, and what she said is that she thinks Texas Governor Abbot “doesn’t understand a menstruating person’s body.” This isn’t a matter for ridicule but for outrage. Governor Abbot is ruining the lives of women; he’s waging war on women; he’s using state power to grind women into the dirt. It matters who is doing what to whom. The people harmed by Texas’s vile law are women, and everyone needs to be able to say that. Ocasio-Cortez is betraying women by not doing that.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez had used the phrase on Tuesday during an interview with Anderson Cooper, who asked her about some recent comments by Texas governor Greg Abbott. When a reporter accused the state’s new abortion restrictions of forcing rape victims to bear their rapist’s children, Mr Abbott said the law doesn’t do that.

“It doesn’t require that at all, because obviously it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion,” the governor said.

Where does he get that “at least”? There’s no “at least.” It’s six weeks, and after that it sucks to be you, bitch. And of course as thousands of people have pointed out, many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks. AOC made that point but she also obscured it, which is not a clever thing to do.

“I don’t know if he is familiar with a menstruating person’s body,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to Mr Abbott. “In fact, I do know that he’s not familiar with a woman – with a female or menstruating person’s body, because if he did, he would know that you don’t have six weeks.”

She almost said “woman” the second time but she corrected herself.

Bad move.

You can’t fire us, we’re incompetent!

The White House confirmed on Wednesday that 11 Trump appointees to military service academy advisory boards, among them former press secretary Sean Spicer and adviser Kellyanne Conway, were asked to step down – or be fired.

Imagine putting Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway on any kind of advisory board, unless it’s for the Institute of Lying Hacks.

Conway released a letter in which she criticised Biden’s performance in office and said: “I’m not resigning, but you should.”

She tweeted it, too.

What’s the “Honorable” doing in front of her name? Is that a usual title bestowed on former press secretaries?

Anyway, they’re all fired now.

You could pay for quite a few school lunches with $160 billion.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans are responsible for more than $160bn of lost tax revenue each year, according to a new report from the US treasury.

And they’re the ones who need it least.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans are responsible for more than $160bn of lost tax revenue each year, according to a new report from the US treasury.

Aw, spoilsports. All those nice billionaires do so much for the country, inflating the price of housing and useful shit like that.

Republicans in Congress and lobbyists for business are united in opposition to the proposal to shore up tax enforcement.

Law and order? Fiscal responsibility? One law for all? Pffffffffffffff, shut up and makeamericagreatagain.

H/t Dave Ricks

They just can’t get it right.

On Tuesday, the Guardian published an interview with the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, which included a scathing critique of so-called “gender critical” transphobes and trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who don’t believe trans women are women, and oppose the right of transgender people to exist in gendered spaces, such as a bathrooms.

We don’t oppose anyone’s right to exist anywhere. That’s a sly way of putting it that nudges people to think we want trans people dead. Trans people don’t have a “right” to be in women’s spaces if they are men. Men don’t have a “right” to intrude on women, no matter how they define their “gender.”

Then the Guardian removed that section of the interview, including Gleeson’s leading question.

According to Gleeson, who provided Motherboard with a written statement, the Guardian’s editorial team, and in particular its team based in the UK, “folded” under pressure from readers who took issue with the article and decided to “censor” Butler.

Gee, why would feminist women take issue with being called fascists? Women are so zany and irrational.

“Habitual bigots online are going to do their thing, and usually respond to pieces without even reading them,” Gleeson wrote in a statement sent to Motherboard. “What’s been more unexpected was how quickly the publication folded. I was expecting the Guardian US to stand by me as a writer, and while I have received apologies from their side, this has been a draining and consuming episode that I didn’t expect.”

Draining and consuming? Is it a plumbing issue or a grocery issue?

Gleeson told Motherboard that Judith Butler has also emailed the Guardian about its decision to remove that section of the interview, but has not heard back.

Gleeson said she last heard from the Guardian last night, and that her editor said “there’s not much I can do” because a decision has already been made. 

“I have not encountered anything like this,” Gleeson said of the Guardian’s decision. “A few people I’ve spoken to, including at the Guardian US, said this is unprecedented.” 

Maybe someone at the Guardian realizes that feminist women are not fascists? Just a thought.

Gleeson is nothing if not generous here.

“I’m not uncompromising here, I informed your editors that my question was flexible, but Judith’s answer was essential,” Gleeson said in an email to John Mulholland, editor of the Guardian US. “To me it seems perfectly clear that the ‘gender critics’ should not be beyond criticism, any more than the rest of the ‘anti-gender’ movement. And no discussion of the topic today can ignore them.”

Beyond criticism is one thing and calling people fascists is another.

“I’m loath to make an appeal to our identities at this point, but it seems a fine state of affairs when an intersex woman interviewing one of the few non-binary philosophy professors in the world is decried online as ‘misogyny,’” Gleeson said. “One last question for the editorial teams at The Guardian: why should ‘Gender Critics’ be beyond criticism?”

How does Gleeson know how few “non-binary philosophy professors” there are? Maybe there are billions!

All this while the planet is on fire. It’s so stupid.

Ok so I have to read the Nussbaum essay again, for the ___th time. I have to share some of the particular gems.

Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action.

See also: tweeting seditiously.

Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body.

Much more. Much much much more. People in literature and people on Twitter.

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are.

That one makes me laugh every single time.

Nussbaum goes on to discuss Butler’s habit of alluding to an array of “other theorists,” who are incompatible with each other, without ever explaining or giving enough context to let the reader understand the allusions. That’s not how philosophy is done, but it very much is how a certain kind of “Theory” is done.

Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler’s work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

In other words it’s all showing off. It’s a lazy, empty, pointless exercise in showing off.

Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. 

Turgid charisma. Five stars.

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding.

I hate that about it. Really hate it. I hate the fakery, I hate the conceit, I hate the imposition on the innocent readers, I hate the fraud, I hate the power-tripping – I despise it. And she gets away with it to this day.

When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

Obscurity plus name-dropping. It wouldn’t work without the name-dropping.

No, LP, anyone who is paying attention doesn’t know that, and neither do you.

Mind you “feed directly back” is confusing in itself – does she mean gender critical feminist talking points nourish right-wing extremist discourse, or does she mean they draw strength from them? Are we supposed to be aiding and abetting right-wing extremist discourse or is it supposed to be aiding and abetting us? Or both?

Or neither? Probably what she means is just that there is some overlap – but that doesn’t sound nearly as damning, does it, because naturally there’s some overlap, because we all overlap at some places. We all have a lot of shared beliefs and views, which we leave on the back shelf in favor of arguing over the ones we don’t share.

The funny thing is, the view that men are not women and women are not men used to be part of that vast boring taken for granted common ground, that nobody bothered to fight over because nobody thought otherwise. Now it’s equated with the murder of 8 million Jews.

Or as DaveDavidDave put it more succinctly –

JL at the Glinner Update has details on the guy who asked Judith Butler those leading questions.

Butler has, not surprisingly, become a pin-up girl of the gender identity cult. She can always be relied upon to throw proper feminists under the bus when gender zealots like those at the The Guardian need to wheel out a talking head who has at least a veneer of academic authority.

On this occasion, Butler was interviewed by Jules Gleeson, a trans identified male.

Gleeson is the co-editor of a book called Transgender Marxism. He has written in the past about the ‘noxious views’ of lesbians trying to defend their sex-based rights and has likened gender critical feminists to religious reactionaries. He’s also called for the abolition of the family unit because it is ‘transphobic’.

JL provides several screenshots of his bullying tweets, such as –

I have to wonder why the Guardian thought he would be the right guy to interview Butler. His question that elicited the three paragraphs the Guardian deleted a few hours after publication, on the grounds of unspecified “developments”:

It seems that some within feminist movements are becoming sympathetic to these far-right campaigns. This year’s furore around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobes followed by bloody protests organized by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?

That well is so poisoned the water is trying to climb out.

Quite a large chunk was cut, as it turns out.

Here’s one I can actually read. Thanks Roz!

There were “developments” you see.

It seems the Guardian edited that interview with Judith Butler.

It did?

So first thing I did was find that bit in my post from this morning, so that I could see how much was cut.

The Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling) in favor of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism. So they will not be part of the coalition that seeks to fight the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.

Here’s the surprise: they seem to have cut that entire paragraph.

I wonder if they will pause to think a little bit now. I wonder if they will pause to think and thus finally grasp that that’s not who we are. We’re not “the Terfs,” we’re not the enemy, we’re not in favor of regressive anything, and we’re most certainly not fans of racism, nationalism, xenophobia, carceral violence, femicide, or attacks on trans and genderqueer people.

How fucking dare she?

I’ll be interested to learn what else got cut.

Updating to add: I forgot the (possibly) best bit: their reason for editing.

• Jules Joanne Gleeson is a queer historian. She is also the co-editor of Transgender Marxism
• This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place

What “developments”? It’s an interview, so it’s not as if there were developments that changed what Judith Butler had already said. So what developments? What kind of developments? A lot of furious lefty women telling the Guardian that Butler told a pack of lies? Couldn’t they have figured that out for themselves?

Oops you’re not supposed to say it out loud.

Joy Everingham is a Methodist deacon in Canterbury. This isn’t a parody.

Now there’s a headline.

NWHL changes its name to remove ‘women’s’ from title

Yayyyyyyyyyyy wait what?

The National Women’s Hockey League is history. Welcome, Premier Hockey Federation.

North America’s first women’s professional hockey league to pay players a salary announced on Tuesday it is adopting the new name as part of a rebranding strategy.

Well then why not name it the Hotties Hockey Federation? Or how about the Pumpkin Spice Latte Hockey Federation?

“We felt it’s time for our players to be defined by their talent and skill,” Tumminia said. “It’s not like they’re female phenomenal. You’re just phenomenal.”

And the way to underline that point is, as always, to delete the word “women.” Sure.

Metropolitan Riveters captain Madison Packer said the new name levels the playing field.

“Respectfully, I don’t know if men always understand, especially for me, because I encounter it a lot,” Packer said. “We play with the same-sized puck, in the same-sized rink, the same nets. … So to remove that label, not only remove it but in the logo erase the ‘W,’ I think is empowering.”

Oh yes, erasing the W is so empowering.

In billing the change “No Labels, No Limits,” the federation also focused on having its new title be more inclusive by respecting the various gender identities of its players and fanbase.

So they’ll be more inclusive by including men, who will swiftly exclude women altogether? That’s the path to empowerment is it?

H/t Sackbut

Greg Olear starts with the Texas law and the Supreme Court’s “Sure, go right ahead.”

After a day of excruciating silence, the Court voted 5-4 to let it be, citing some pusillanimous procedural technicality. Chief Justice Roberts sided with the three “liberal” justices, but the five other Federalist Society stooges on the bench—Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh—gave Texas the green light to go full Fascist, thus confirming what most of us feared all along: that Roe v. Wade is not safe, that the government is at war with women, that the radical Catholics who took over the Court are pro-tyranny.

We’re stuck with them except maybe for Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh is different. There is a clear playbook to removing him from the bench. And this is what must be done. Not because we don’t like his politics, although we don’t; not because we think he’s an asshole, although he is; not because he had a hissy fit at his confirmation hearing, although he did. No, we must remove him because at least twice in his life, some unknown entity endowed him with major infusions of cash, and Kavanaugh lied, under oath, about the provenance of that cash (he said it came from his Thrift Savings Plan)—and about several other things besides. He’s compromised, six ways from Sunday, and we simply can’t have that on the Supreme Court, no matter which way he votes.

While all of Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are beholden to some degree to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society, and the other dark money organizations that helped install them, only Kavanaugh is owned. And we still don’t know who holds the paper.

Earlier this year, in Part Two of our five-part series, LB and I produced a painstakingly detailed examination of the red flags concerning Brett Kavanaugh’s finances, which show two enormous and out-of-the-blue influxes of revenue. The first, the down payment on the Chevy Chase house, came through just before his nomination to the D.C. circuit court in 2006; the second, the payment in full of his onerous credit card balances, immediately preceded his nomination to SCOTUS in 2018.

But apparently the Democrats can’t or won’t summon up the will to investigate.

I’m reading Jesse Singal’s review of Helen Joyce’s book in the Times, and I’m interrupting my reading to say this one thing.

A primary goal of those who adhere to gender-identity ideology is to enact “gender self-identification,” or the idea “that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology,” into norm and law. According to self-ID, as I’ll call it henceforth, once an individual reveals their gender identity, that trumps anyone else’s understanding of it. If you say you are a man or a woman, or both or neither, that is exactly what you are.

When followed faithfully, gender-identity ideology has important implications. 

Yes, it does, but this is why I had to interrupt my own reading – it does, but I would hate the ideology even if it didn’t because I hate being bullied into endorsing a lie. The implications are important, but the claim itself is also important. It’s important because things like that are important. We do need to be able to see what we see, to rely on our own senses and perceptions, to have a stable sense of some basic realities.

I say “basic” because once we go beyond “basic” our senses and perceptions are helpless or wrong or both. We have no idea how big the moon is or how far away it is just from our own perceptions, and you can apply that to an infinite number of other realities, so I’m not saying our perceptions are infallible, but I am saying there are some basics that shouldn’t be thrown out the window on a god damn whim.

Sexual dimorphism is one of those basics, and I resent being ordered to pretend otherwise. I take it personally, and so should everyone. Don’t tell me to repeat a lie and call it true. Just don’t. Back off.

That’s it, that’s the interruption.

Brazil could be having its own insurrection moment.

Supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro pushed through police barriers to advance towards Congress in Brasilia on Monday night, the eve of a day of planned demonstrations to back the far-right leader in his dispute with the judiciary.

Trucks honked their horns as hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters dressed in the green-and-yellow national colors cheered them through, videos posted on social media showed.

But they failed however to reach their target of surrounding the Supreme Court, which some demonstrators have planned to occupy in a protest modeled on the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

…

Thousands of demonstrators are expected to march in the capital on Tuesday – Brazil’s independence day – and in the financial center Sao Paulo to support Bolsonaro in his clash with the judiciary over changes to the voting system.

Critics fear the president is encouraging supporters to the point that they might try to invade the court.

Change voting systems to keep the fascist in power, and unleash violence to underline the point. Belarus, Brazil, the US – following the playbook.

More than 150 left-leaning former presidents and party leaders from across the globe signed an open letter criticizing Bolsonaro for encouraging what they called an imitation of the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, staged by Trump supporters after he gave a speech falsely claiming his election defeat was the result of fraud.

The demonstrations are “stoking fears of a coup d’état in the world’s third-largest democracy,” the letter said.

Bolsonaro said on Friday the demonstrations will be an ultimatum to the Supreme Court justices who had taken what he called “unconstitutional” decisions against his government.

Let’s ask Judith Butler what she thinks.

It’s announcing plans day north of the border.

Nicola Sturgeon is to set out the Scottish government’s plans for the year to come at Holyrood.

So she did that and @theSNP tweeted them all.

Yes of course the biggest threats women face come from abusive men, one way and another, but how can she possibly know that none of those abusive men will simply declare themselves trans under the SNP “reforms” of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill?

She can’t. That’s all: she can’t.

Eliza speaks the truth.

For the sake of the Twitter haters I’ll just arrange the rest of what she said as an essay.

Gender identity problematizes, denounces, and confuses what women need to make clear: Our sex matters.

Women’s healthcare depends on the recognition of sex difference on the part of medical providers, scientific researchers, health communicators, and patients.

Gender identity trades clear language and targeted research into how sex differences affect health and medical care in exchange for “non-prostate-havers” and medical records that don’t even record the patient’s (objective, unchangeable) sex.

To organize politically in our own interests, women must be able to define ourselves as a sex class and focus our time and energy on issues that affect women on the basis of sex.

Feminism is not and cannot be the movement for the liberation of “all marginalized people” or it will fail to meet the unique needs of women and girls. There are many worthy causes in the world but it’s OK for one movement to focus exclusively on women and girls.

Trans activism demands that women redefine ourselves in a way that cuts sex out of the picture altogether. When women are redefined as feminine stereotypes, rather than female humans, the constituency and targets of advocacy change.

Under gender identity ideology, the ways that sex matters to women’s lives becomes not just unfashionable but unspeakable. But the inequalities and injustices women and girls face on the basis of sex don’t go away just because we’re not supposed to talk about them anymore.

When women have to constantly defend our decision to focus on the rights of women and girls, that saps time and energy that could have gone elsewhere: to fighting for abortion access and paid maternity leave in the US, curbing sex-trafficking, preventing child marriage…

The consequences of “rethinking” the category of “woman,” as Judith Butler so coolly puts it, are clear: gender identity is a contrived attack on the rights, ability to organize, & very language of the People Previously Known As Women. It makes *everything* we need to do harder.

Speaking of that interview with Judith Butler…

And so she did. It’s an excellent letter.

Judith Butler doing her tedious thing:

…what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of “women” to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.

Yes, of course: what it means changes, the category changes, and obviously securing greater freedoms entails that, not least because it’s the same thing. We change the meaning by gaining the freedoms. That doesn’t mean we “change” it by including men in it. That’s not change but reversal, not change but obliteration.

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women.

Peak non sequitur. The “so” that could lift the Burj Khalifa off the ground with one finger.

It is very appalling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with rightwing attacks on gender. The anti-gender ideology movement is not opposing a specific account of gender, but seeking to eradicate “gender” as a concept or discourse, a field of study, an approach to social power. Sometimes they claim that “sex” alone has scientific standing, but other times they appeal to divine mandates for masculine domination and difference. They don’t seem to mind contradicting themselves.

Well that’s a pack of lies. No it isn’t, no we don’t.

The Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling) in favor of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism. So they will not be part of the coalition that seeks to fight the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.

Very scholarly, talking untrue shit about “the Terfs.”

Wow. Years of collaboration just torched as if they had never been.

They WHAT??

First, the claim:

Next, the email:

Is it August 2015 again? The echo is strong. There were three SBM editors and Hall was one of them, but suddenly a minor contributor becomes “an editor” to bolster the Gorski-Novella excuses for plunging the knife into Hall’s back.