The Times talks to Graham Linehan:

Over the past four years he has lost almost everything, campaigning obsessively, not against trans rights, he insists — “I know more trans people than the people who call me transphobic” — but for women’s rights.

Of course he insists, because it’s true. The defense of women’s rights is framed as an attack on trans rights via the expedient of never bothering to explain what “trans rights” are and who says so and why we have to defend them at the expense of women’s rights. There is no “right” to force the world to pretend to believe your fantasy about yourself.

With his wife he was part of the writing team behind the 2016 pilot episode of Motherland but Linehan left midway through the creation of the first series, broadcast the following year. By then he was becoming embroiled in sexual politics and he links his rising interest in the trans rights debate to his work during the campaign in Ireland to decriminalise abortion.

He and Helen took part in a short film made by Amnesty International, which focused on their own tragic case. After an 11-week pregnancy, Helen was advised by doctors in London to terminate the pregnancy because her foetus had been found to have a condition known as acrania, and there was no chance that the baby would survive longer than an hour after birth. In Dublin Helen would have been forced to carry the pregnancy or face a 14-year prison sentence for procuring an illegal abortion. The film about their experience, says Linehan, “helped to moved the needle in many ways”.

See also: Texas.

Then something took him by surprise. “It was such an odd thing but I was in Dublin at a protest. Someone was going, ‘Women’s right to abortion!’ And we went, ‘Yeah!’ Then they said, ‘And trans people need to have their operations paid for by the state!’ And we went, ‘What?’

So they went “Terf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“I did what everyone does: you’re very polite, calling for debate. You say things that you cannot imagine anyone would disagree with, like ‘a lesbian does not have a penis’. And yet the pushback was so ferocious.”

…

He emphasises repeatedly that he has trans friends and says many agree with his views. He distinguishes them from the activists, who he reckons take their cue from Donald Trump, to achieve their ends at any costs.

Part of the bully class, he explains.

He cites two of the best known trans women sports competitors. “Laurel Hubbard is Trump; Rachel McKinnon, the cyclist, is Trump,” he says. “Anyone who can get on a bike, or beat women easily and take the money, and take the crown, that’s a narcissist, that’s a narcissistic psychopath. These are the people who are being emboldened by activists who think they’re helping transsexuals”.

Ok but why can’t he just go back to comedy? Huh? Huh?

“And do what? Dance round the maypole? I’m not in the mood. I’m happy to put on the hat with the bells on it but only when the house isn’t on fire, but the house is on fire. The. House. Is. On. Fire.”

Women’s rights are on fire, and the right to tell the obvious truth is on fire.

No, I don’t think that’s right.

If it doesn’t include violence in some form, including the form of a permanent inescapable situation/relationship in which the woman does not have the option of saying no, then it’s not rape. But a relationship in which the woman can’t say no is a rape-relationship, for sure. And they’re not rare, of course – arranged marriages with no consent for the woman are all too common in some parts of the world.

Maybe that’s what she’s thinking of? A life in which consent to sex isn’t an option and isn’t even thinkable? But that is rape; lifelong rape.

If that’s not what she’s thinking of, then she’s just wrong, as so often.

Slate’s trans guru Evan Urquhart had to correct a sleazy piece she wrote for Slate in July about the Wi spa exhibitionist.

Update, Sept. 2, 2021: The New York Post reports that on Aug. 30, “charges of indecent exposure were discreetly filed against a serial sex offender for the Wi Spa incident, following an investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department.” The accused, Darren Agee Merager, denied the allegations in an interview with the Post, but indicated that she plans to turn herself in to authorities.

“She” is a man – a man who preys on women.

Urquhart tells us in the July piece that the police were treating the Wi spa incident as a hoax.

Soon after the video began to go viral in transphobic corners of the internet, members of the trans community began to raise questions about it…

Not trans people, you notice, but “members of the trans community,” as if they’re all members of a club. “Victims of the trans cult” would be more accurate.

Person charged.

They not only do no soul-searching, they do more evasion and obfuscation and changing of the subject. They’re not journalists at all.

And then there’s trans journalist Evan Urquhart:

Lois Beckett and Sam Levin and Evan Urquhart should start their own “news” outlet.

The Guardian really seems to be having a Lie About Trans Issues day.

They are not “protesting against trans rights.” That’s such a malicious and incendiary lie it’s startling. What they’re protesting is the invention of new fictitious rights about being “validated” and “included” as something you’re not. That’s not a right. As I’ve said some 9 billion times by now, it doesn’t take much effort to see why that can’t possibly be a right: reasons to do with fraud, competence, safety, relationships, everyday functioning, and the like. If women have to agree that men are women just because they say so, then women can never have safety or privacy again.

I’m not the only one infuriated by that headline.

Dahlia Lithwick wonders why the fanatical conservatives on the Supreme Court opted to do it in such a sloppy and late-night haha sucks to be you way.

[A] careful look at the shoddy, contemptuous jurisdictional reasoning of the five justices in the majority suggests something even darker. It’s not just that the majority of the Supreme Court functionally ended abortion rights for most women in Texas last night merely because they could. And it’s not just that they did so because—as is so often the case with impressionistic, frayed shadow docket reasoning—their personal feelings about the constitutional right to abortion are quite robust. It’s almost impossible to not go one further and declare that the court opted to end virtually all abortion rights in Texas, in the full knowledge that they were blessing an unconstitutional and brutal piece of lawless vigilantism, because it’s only about women.

Well, yes. Women aren’t good for much but they are indispensable for making new humans, so if they won’t even do that…well really.

Forgive the hyperbole, but how else could the five justices in the majority—in the fullness of knowledge that by Wednesday morning Texas women would be isolated, terrified, and medically and psychologically endangered as a result of their own inaction—hide behind odious mansplaining about the “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” that force them to stand by as clinics are shuttered and frantic women beg for services? In 2016, the Supreme Court conceded that a woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by obtaining an abortion. The Texas law has no exception for rape or incest. And at six weeks of pregnancy—two weeks past a last missed period—vast numbers of women are unaware that they are pregnant.

[Shrug] It’s their lot. It’s what they’re for.

Don’t even bother asking what the five justices on the majority of this court would have done with a hypothetical California law that conscripted citizen bounty hunters into reporting their suspicions about a neighbor’s unlawful gun possession. That order would have been 20 pages long, full of robust and muscular constitutional claims and outraged howls about broken Second Amendment promises. But a court that comes to you in the dark of night, without logic or reason, whispering soothing words about how “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law” as it upends the constitutionality of Texas law? That is the stuff of ancient gaslighting, reserved for those moments in which Power is explaining to Women that they are just being hysterical, and to kindly lie back and enjoy it.

Zing.

Dave Hewitt is also unimpressed by that dishonest Guardian news story on the Wi spa predator.

This piece contains new information that was first revealed by right-wing outlets, and serves to demonstrate how The Guardian – by doggedly pursuing a specific ideological angle and denigrating anything that does not fit – has become wedded to a pernicious false consciousness that prevented them from breaking this news themselves.

These two reporters, specifically. They’ve been on the story all along. I’m wondering if they have any editorial supervision at all, and if their editor is afraid of them, because surely it’s not good journalistic practice to refuse to specify the sex of the Wi spa predator when it’s the core of the whole incident.

At the start of July, they reported on the protests that the incident kicked off, which they framed as triggered by hateful, baseless, viral conspiracy theories. They made completely unevidenced and partisan statements, such as:

Calls to defend “female spaces” and “women’s shelters” have become rallying cries of anti-trans groups, who have falsely suggested that trans-inclusive policies endanger cis women.

Unevidenced, partisan, dishonest, misogynist. Women are not “cis” women, we are women. We are, and no one else is. “Cis” is a lie of a word when applied to sex.

They did another bad slanted story in late July, which was cheered by the usuals.

So the Guardian assigns the same reporters to cover the story when it’s confirmed that the Wi spa predator is in fact a predator.

That’s an embarrassingly bad call.

The Guardian here is acting not as a purveyor of balance or truth, but of equivalent, oppositional disinformation.

This continues in today’s story, which – despite finally conceding that the incident occurred and that it involved a male, repeated sex-offender – studiously avoids using the pronouns of the person at the heart of it, and returns focus to their initial obsession: that this propagated virally because of the far-right, proving their long-standing contention that those who are critical of self-id are at best far-right adjacent.

Actually they don’t finally concede that the incident involved a male. They contest it rather than conceding it.

It was not immediately clear if Merager had an attorney, and Merager’s gender identity was also unclear; an LAPD spokesperson said the department could not immediately comment on the suspect’s gender identity, and the Guardian’s attempts to reach Merager on Thursday were unsuccessful.

That’s not a concession.

You have to be really careful about what ideologies you subscribe to. I could just say don’t subscribe to any, but I’m not sure that’s possible, or desirable. It can be considered an ideology to think that other people exist and have rights, and that the self doesn’t have a right to trample other people’s rights. Maybe we have to have some ideology to avoid total ruthless self-interest. But we do have to be cautious. Unlike…

What’s her problem here? That she hasn’t paused to ask herself what “rights” she’s talking about. The “right” she’s talking about isn’t in fact a genuine right at all. Men don’t have a “right” to force themselves on naked women at a spa. That’s a made-up right – more made-up than the more sturdy rights that have been around a bit longer than the shiny new “trans” ones.

So there it is – Laurie Penny is saying never mind that this one guy who forced himself on naked women and girls at a spa turns out to be not trans but just a predatory man, we still have to protect the “right” of men who say they are trans to force themselves on naked women and girls.

But we don’t. We don’t have to. That’s not a genuine right, and it shouldn’t be declared a genuine right.

They just can’t tell the truth, no matter how obvious it becomes.

Person charged with indecent exposure at LA spa after viral Instagram video

“Person” ffs! When what he indecently exposed was a penis.

Charges filed two months after woman’s claims about Wi Spa sparked anti-trans protests

They can call the woman a woman, but they can’t call the man a man.

Los Angeles authorities have charged a 52-year-old with indecent exposure at a popular Korean spa that was the subject of a viral Instagram post earlier this summer.

A 52-year-old what?

The LA police department (LAPD) announced late on Thursday that it had put out an arrest warrant for Darren Merager, who is now facing five felony counts of indecent exposure at Wi Spa in the Koreatown neighborhood. The charges, filed on Monday, come two months after a viral Instagram video from a woman who filmed herself confronting Wi Spa staff about seeing a “man” naked in front of women and girls in the women’s section of the facility.

Because he was a “”man”” no matter how many scare-quotes you deploy. It’s not the woman who told Wi staff about the man who is in the wrong here.

In the 24 June video, another patron suggested the individual might be a trans woman, and the woman filming herself responded with transphobic language, denying that trans women exist.

She didn’t “deny that trans women exist,” she denied that penis-exposing guy is a woman.

The LAPD investigated and found enough evidence to charge the man with indecent exposure.

It was not immediately clear if Merager had an attorney, and Merager’s gender identity was also unclear; an LAPD spokesperson said the department could not immediately comment on the suspect’s gender identity, and the Guardian’s attempts to reach Merager on Thursday were unsuccessful. The prosecutor’s office declined to comment.

Why are these two Guardian reporters in such a sweat about the flasher’s “gender identity”? Why are they so brutally indifferent to the impact of what he did on a bunch of women?

The original allegations about what happened at the spa were quickly distorted online, leading to widespread misinformation and online abuse against trans women who spoke out and engaged in counter protests.

Blah blah blah trans trans trans, just ignore those whiny women saying things.

Tamara Lave, a University of Miami law professor and former public defender in California, said that prosecutors in indecent exposure cases have to prove a defendant not only “willfully exposed” themselves in front of others, but that the person did so with the intention of arousing themselves or sexually offending another individual.

“If somebody goes into a spa and sits naked in the tub, and all they are trying to do is relax, the fact that they are naked in public is not enough for them to be guilty of a crime,” she said, adding that she is concerned about the ramifications for trans rights. “The prosecutor has a duty to make clear that this is about one individual’s conduct, not about a class of people’s conduct.”

Trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans

There are 5 more paragraphs of transtranstranstrans. Not a word about women’s privacy or safety. The “reporters” are Lois Beckett and Sam Levin in Los Angeles. I’m sure they sincerely identify as reporters.

Pliny’s latest:

Can’t be shared too often.

We did tell you.

In perhaps the clearest example of #ThisNeverHappens since Karen White, a serial sex offender has been charged with indecent assault over the Wi Spa incident.

As you may remember, in June, Wi Spa customer ‘Cubana Angel’ posted a viral video to social media from inside the Los Angeles spa in which she told a front desk employee that a man had exposed his penis in a female-only steam room to women and girls, only to be told that there was nothing staff could do because the man claimed to be transgender.

Which is the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it, as we’ve pointed out at least 7 trillion times. Men can claim to be transgender any time any place, so why wouldn’t sex offenders take advantage of the new Rule that we must never say “Like hell you are” under any circumstances?

New York Post writer Andy Ngo has revealed that Darren Agee Merager, 52, has been charged with five counts of indecent exposure over the incident. Ngo has disclosed additional details that are both shocking and entirely predictable at the same time.

It has emerged that four women and a female child have alleged that Merager was ‘partially erect’ when he exposed himself. Also, he is a tier-one registered sex offender with—among other felony convictions for sexual offences—two prior convictions of indecent exposure stemming from incidents in 2002 and 2003. In 2008, he was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender. 

Incredibly, Darren is also currently facing six charges of indecent exposure over a women’s locker room incident at a swimming pool in 2018.

Now let’s ask him what his pronouns are.

Following that arrest, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued an internal flyer that stated: “Merager claims to identify as female so he can access women’s locker rooms and showers.”

He’d be a damn fool not to, wouldn’t he.

We keep saying this is how it works, and we keep being told we’re evil slags for saying it.

The author of the post, ripx4nutmeg, includes a bunch of screenshots of The Nation, The Independent, and other outlets saying it turned out to be a hoax and it caused anti-trans violence. Laurie Penny memorably observed that it’s rude to stare at penises in the women’s changing room.

National Equalities Convener for the SNP here.

Now don’t you dare say she’s claiming gender critical protesters are fascists. Not at all!! She’s saying fascists might show up to stand with anti-trans protesters. Completely different! Not at all meant to mislead people into thinking feminist women are anti-trans fascists!

“Ethnonationalist”? From an official of the SNP? Does she recall what the N stands for? And the S?

The core point though is that protesting some of the goals of the misogynist wing of trans activism is not “anti-trans.” Gender critical feminists don’t want to oppress or punish trans people, we want to protect women’s rights, including our right to talk about our rights without being told to be inclusive of men. That’s it. Trans people can flourish without telling women to shut up about women or include men as women. Fascism is nowhere on the map.

The dogma:

Please don’t erase “trans men” and “nonbinary people” and the rest of the list of navel-gazing narcissism, instead erase women, because let’s face it, women are garbage.

Use the preferred term. Apparently the “preferred term” for women is “people who menstruate”…which seems an odd preference.

Lots to notice here. One, the guy is a medical doctor. [shudder]

Two, he claims that ridiculous and insulting phrase is “the preferred term” – preferred by whom? Who the fuck prefers to say “people who menstruate” instead of women?

Three, he says it costs nothing. It costs fucking everything, you clueless male-centered oblivious creep.

By “today” I’m assuming he meant “today as Texas ends abortion rights” – in other words today when women abruptly lose basic rights over their own bodies and futures and lives, we have to shut up about women and talk about “people who menstruate” instead.

The installation was asking for it.

An appeal for information has been launched after a sculpture in a Sheffield park created to highlight violence against women was destroyed by arsonists.

A little too on the nose, perhaps. “You oppose violence against women? Here, have some symbolic violence against women!”

The six-foot tall hexagonal installation in Ponderosa Park, in Netherthorpe, was razed during the night of August 21.

It was created by students from and funded by Sheffield’s universities to protest violence against women and was only installed three weeks before the fire at an unveiling in late July.

The wooden sculpture was handmade and included poems by members of the Our Bodies Our Streets feminist organisation in Sheffield. It was built to light up at night and project the poems in the dark in support of the Reclaim The Night movement.

Well we can’t have that.

I expect the story will soon be re-written to say that a sculpture created to highlight violence against people was destroyed by arsonists and that it was created by students from and funded by Sheffield’s universities to protest violence against people.

Still at it. They should transfer their social media person to a different job – one that has nothing to do with women’s civil liberties.

Particularly for WOMEN of color and WOMEN without resources. The matter of who is affected by this is not random.

The average Texan WOMAN and HER abortion provider.

Women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women

Even NOW the ACLU won’t say our name. It’s as if they’d deleted the word “Jews” from their vocabulary in 1933.

People, people, Texans.

People, anyone, patients.

Not a woman to be seen.

Even Kamala Harris ffs. If even she can’t say it…

WOMEN of color, WOMEN with low incomes. Not generic communities, not generic individuals, but specifically and exclusively WOMEN.

Updating with

Even worse – not just “communities” and “individuals” but also “people’s access.”

But they have to exclude, no matter what.

Will new Olympics rules exclude or include transgender athletes?

Most athletes are not included in the Olympics. That’s why the Olympics are such a big deal: they’re a contest among the very best.

Backlash against transgender and non-binary competitors in Tokyo has highlighted the problems preventing inclusion in sports at all levels

But “inclusion” isn’t a goal of the Olympics. They’re not supposed to exclude for reasons irrelevant to the competition, but they are both allowed and supposed to exclude most hopefuls, because that’s the whole point – excluding competitors over and over until there are only three left, who win bronze silver and gold.

When Grace McKenzie decided to undergo gender transition and live openly as a woman three years ago, she resigned herself to giving up team sports. 

As a child, she played everything from baseball and soccer to karate, and these communities were crucial to her well-being. But transphobia is rife in mainstream sports, and she didn’t see how she could be accepted as a transgender woman. 

It’s not “transphobia” to exclude men from women’s sports. McKenzie was right not force himself on women, and wrong when he changed his mind.

…she’s become a committed player for the Golden Gate Women’s Rugby Club in San Francisco, and a fierce advocate for trans-inclusion in sports.

That “fierce” doesn’t sound as admirable when you remember this is a man, advocating for the inclusion of men in women’s sports.

“The community let me in, affirmed me and showed me I can define womanhood for myself and not let it be defined for me,” she said. “It’s one of the most beautiful gifts I’ve been given.”

What nonsense. Men can’t define womanhood for themselves. It’s insulting and damaging and all too “fierce.”

Across the world, evolving gender norms are challenging and reshaping the way we approach competitive sports, which have traditionally been segregated into ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories. 

No shit; that’s because of the physical differences between the two sexes. If you don’t segregate them then women can’t be in competitive sports at all.

While the participation in Tokyo of non-binary athletes such as American skateboarder Alana Smith and Canadian soccer player Quinn were deemed less controversial, they were also repeatedly misgendered by commentators.

“If you compare the conversation around Laurel to [that around] Quinn, the trans [women] misogyny is evident,” Mckenzie said. “It’s only trans women who are ‘unfair’ and ‘shouldn’t compete’. Quinn is [deemed] fine because cisgender women don’t necessarily support or believe in non-binary [identities].”

Of course it’s only trans women who are unfair: because they are men competing against women. The meaningless “non-binary” has nothing to do with it unless it’s a “non-binary” man competing against women.

The article goes on for many more words, all of them as stupid as the ones above.

Yet another of these patronizing “reminders” of utter bullshit, and in this case harmful bullshit.

Here’s your periodic reminder that it is ONLY women who need abortion.

(Abortion, not “abortion care.” Is she squeamish about abortion? So squeamish that she feels she has to try to veil it?)

It is only women who need abortion. That includes women who claim to be trans men, and women who claim to be the meaningless “non-binary.” Be trans or non-binary all you like, but if you’re pregnant, then you’re a woman.

Trying to hide the fact that it’s women and women only who need abortion rights just makes it harder to fight for those rights…those rights which just took a massive blow to the knees. Distracting people with gender lies will not help anyone.