Victoria Smith starts by thanking the men who tell women what we’re allowed to be afraid of for wading in to correct our perceptions of reality when they must be so busy.

To be fair, it is not our fault. We are not authoritative; we are not you. We are taught from an early age to doubt ourselves, to see our own versions of reality as suspect, requiring external confirmation from the experts, the men. When you are not considered a reliable witness to your own experiences, things become very confusing. This, I guess, is where you step in.

And, of course, this very stepping in is part of the process of teaching female people from an early age that we don’t know our ass from our elbow.

What do we fear most of all? Hard to say. That is, the answer is obvious, but it’s very hard to say it without having one’s sanity or one’s morality — one’s capacity for kindness — questioned. It’s easier to defer to you. We can do this for years. We can even start to believe it.

I think the mention of kindness is a nod to Robin Ince’s generous help yesterday.

Do you know how many abusive men are considered lovely men, gentle men, kind men, by those who don’t witness what happens behind closed doors? To be fair, you probably have heard this; that’s another cliché. But also, how many abused women defend these men, doubt their own perceptions, have been beaten down so many times they’re not sure if it isn’t their fault? Do you know it’s possible to be ashamed of your own fears? To think, well, maybe this does mean I’m a bad person? You reinforce that shame each time you lecture women on fears you deem to be misplaced. Still, you’re the expert.

…

That you — male people — are complicit in the creation of our fear, that you benefit from it, that it’s your dominance that enables you to breeze in, puffed up with pride at your own magnanimity, to tell us we’re allowed to feel threatened by this, but not that … I imagine you don’t really think about this.

The Robin Inces certainly show no sign of ever thinking about it. If they did they wouldn’t pat themselves on the back for being motivated by kindness while we are motivated by sheer evil.

You think it an act of generosity to allow us to be fearful of some male people, but not others. As though fear itself is a luxury. We mustn’t be greedy; mustn’t take too much. That you should be offering safety — that a kind, empathetic response to female fear would be to look at the violence from which you benefit, question the class to which you belong — does not cross your mind. You think you float above the worst things men do.

Naturally – because they are all about the kindness.

Yet another man telling feminist women how to feminism.

It is shocking. I used to like Robin Ince.

But, you know – it’s all about kindness. We’re not kind enough. It’s only men who know how to be kind.

Women are such bitches, such Karens, such terfs.

Jawad Iqbal asks an important question.

Why is the BBC, which takes pride in lecturing everyone else on its commitment to impartiality, determined to keep working with Stonewall, the LGBT charity that’s pushing an agenda on trans issues that is anything but impartial? Other public sector bodies, including the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Cabinet Office, have withdrawn from Stonewall’s diversity programme. But not the BBC, which thinks it knows better.

I have another question to go along with that one. Is there any feminist charity that has that kind of hold on the BBC and the police and other public bodies? In other words is there any feminist equivalent of Stonewall? Is there any anti-racist equivalent? You could say the Muslim Council of Britain has in the past been the Stonewall equivalent for whatever you take the MCB’s mission to be – promotion of Islam, promotion of tolerance for Muslims, promotion of a particularly theocratic and conservative Islam, anti-xenophobia. Are there Stonewall-equivalents for all the categories of persecuted or neglected people?

Stonewall has wrapped its tentacles around so many of Britain’s workplaces despite being at the centre of an increasingly vicious and intolerant debate about trans rights. The Stonewall scheme has been signed up to by about 850 organisations, including many public bodies, which pay the charity to accredit their diversity policies. Stonewall advises on equalities law, even though it has faced accusations of misinterpreting or misrepresenting the legislation — something it denies.

Do all these public bodies have a whole list of charities that do (or claim to do) that kind of advising? One for women, one for disabled people, one for people with no money, one for immigrants, one for BME people, one for Jews, one for Muslims, one for Sikhs, one for Catholics?

Stonewall believes people should be able to self-identify with the gender they choose and has been frequently accused of labelling anyone who disagrees with this position — for example, people concerned about allowing trans women to use women-only facilities — as transphobic.

We can skip the “has been frequently accused” bit. Of course that’s what they do – they do it all the time, as a matter of firm, indeed absolute, policy. Men are women if they say they are and women are cunts if they don’t agree.

I find I haven’t said enough about that response from Police Scotland.

Who and what Murray Blackburn Mackenzie are in case you’ve forgotten (which I had, embarrassingly):

Established in late 2018, MurrayBlackburnMackenzie is an independent policy analysis collective, made up of Dr Kath Murray, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Lisa Mackenzie. Between us, we have extensive experience in policy-making, research and communications.

How the police responded to their question about why they ask people about their gender identity but not their sex:

So they know that the gender [identity] of a person is a key factor which shapes people’s experiences of local policing…but they apparently don’t know that the sex of a person is a key factor which shapes people’s experiences of local policing? That’s definitely implied, since they’re saying why they do ask about the first and don’t ask about the second. They also think gender [identity] is relevant while sex is not. How could they possibly believe that? What is going on here? When was it decided that the fact of being a woman doesn’t matter much and doesn’t make much difference to one’s experience of various things? Why weren’t we consulted?

It’s just bonkers. Bonkers bonkers bonkers. And not in a good way.

Or, better, instead of “gender identity.” Who cares what people’s fanciful “gender identity” is? Besides marketers of Gender Accessories, who are many and greedy.

Oh my god the police in Scotland think they don’t need to know that a suspect is a man or a victim is a woman!

That needs fifty or so exclamation points but…you know…sometimes one just doesn’t have the strength to hold the key down.

And we second that suggestion.

Fucking lunatics.

Just for thoroughness, the Wall Street Journal take on Judge Parker’s ruling:

“This case was never about fraud—it was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so,” U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Detroit said in a 110-page ruling on Wednesday.

…

“Despite the haze of confusion, commotion, and chaos counsel intentionally attempted to create by filing this lawsuit, one thing is perfectly clear: Plaintiffs’ attorneys have scorned their oath, flouted the rules, and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary along the way,” Judge Parker wrote.

…

Judge Parker said that the attorneys must pay the costs incurred by state officials and the city of Detroit related to the lawsuit. The judge also said that the attorneys must each complete at least 12 hours of continuing legal education on pleading standards and election law within six months. She also referred her findings to the attorney licensing authorities in the lawyers’ respective states “for investigation and possible suspension or disbarment.”

Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet, a specialist in legal ethics said, “Sanction orders against lawyers are not uncommon, but this lambasting is quite unusual for its length, level of detail, and sheer intensity.”

Deservedly so.

Saying it before doesn’t make it true.

No it doesn’t work the same way with trans issues. At all. Especially if by “date” he means “fuck,” which I think it’s safe to assume. People are allowed to have a preference for one sex or the other. If they’re not allowed to have that, then sex becomes indistinguishable from rape. Straight people are allowed to prefer the opposite sex and gay people are allowed to prefer the same sex. That means no one is required to have Affirmation Sex with a trans person whose sex is not the preferred one. No one. Not even women!

The move to delete women continues.

Federal health chiefs [in Australia] have rewritten a Covid-19 vaccination pregnancy guide that bizarrely erases all mention of ‘women’ and replaces it with ‘pregnant people’.

The guide was originally published in February as ‘COVID-19 vaccination – Shared decision making guide for women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy’.

But it was republished last week under its new subtly-tweaked title: ‘COVID-19 vaccination decision guide for people who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy’.

Which is not only insulting to women, but also significantly less useful as an actual COVID-19 vaccination decision guide. You want such things to be as clear and easy to follow as possible, and deleting the word “women” doesn’t do that.

The document does not mention woman or women anywhere except in links to other websites or in the title of footnote references to other publications. 

The word ‘mother’ is used just twice in the entire eight page booklet. In all, more than 50 different mentions of women have been deleted from the original version and replaced by ‘people’ or ‘those who are pregnant’, sparking fury among some women.

Included in the changes are non-specific sentences like: ‘Pregnant people are a priority group for Covid-19 vaccination’ and ‘Those who are pregnant have a higher risk of severe illness from Covid-19’. 

No debate, understand?

Kathleen Stock and Peter Tatchell were going to discuss, but now they’re not.

Tatchell tweeted a statement that simply reiterates the fanatical dogmatism and hostility to women of the trans movement.

But what are “trans rights”? What does Tatchell take them to be? Putting it that way makes it sound as if skeptics of the dogma want to take human rights away from trans people, which is complete nonsense. The whole problem is that “trans rights” are such non-existent rights as erasing the word “women” from the language, as men forcing themselves into women’s spaces, as men taking jobs and prizes that were meant for women, as men competing against women in sport, including at the Olympics. Those aren’t rights – they’re violations of women’s rights.

He may think he doesn’t support misogyny, but unfortunately he’s dead wrong.

Updating to add: Kathleen of course zeroed in on the contradiction.

Well…he meant…there should be no debate there should just be Peter Tatchell challenging Her Views. It’s what they all mean.

And another one.

We can say what men are in 5 words but women are a whole different story, so different that they can be women while also being men, i.e. the sex that produces spermatozoa.

Updating to add: it’s still there.

The other one.

Spot the difference.

H/t maddog

Bam.

A federal judge in Michigan on Wednesday night ordered sanctions to be levied against nine pro-Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, ruling that a lawsuit laden with conspiracy theories that they filed last year challenging the validity of the presidential election was “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”

In her decision, Judge Linda V. Parker of the Federal District Court in Detroit ordered the lawyers to be referred to the local legal authorities in their home states for possible suspension or disbarment.

Declaring that the lawsuit should never have been filed, Judge Parker wrote in her 110-page order that it was “one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election,” but another to deceive “a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed.”

I look forward to reading the order.

The Michigan lawsuit, filed in late November, was one of four legal actions, collectively known as the “Kraken” suits, that Ms. Powell filed in courts around the country, claiming that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with by a bizarre set of characters, such as the financier George Soros or Venezuelan intelligence agents. In the suits, she complained without merit that those conspirators began a complicated, covert plot to digitally flip votes from President Donald J. Trump to his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In a pseudo-legal move technically known as “making shit up.”

Judge Parker’s order, which said Ms. Powell and her colleagues had “scorned their oath, flouted the rules and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary,” was the latest legal setback for the embattled group of lawyers who emerged from the postelection period as the most die-hard of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

“Embattled.” Try not making shit up and then you might not be so embattled.

H/t Screechy Monkey

And then there are those times when they just blurt it right out.

Shrill sirens – you couldn’t make it up. It’s cool because it labels us as both demonic witch-women who lure men in boats to their deaths and noisy horns that scream in your ear when something bad happens.

See also: Karens.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The same woo-woo bin.

If a particular grandiose claim is supported by science, the likelihood is that it would meet at least some of these criteria:

1.) It would have come out of science.

2.) It would answer more than one question.

3.) It would be testable and falsifiable.

4.) It would have been hotly debated for years.

5.) It would be consistent across disciplines.

6.) It would generate new hypotheses and research.

7.) It would use terms and explanations which are clear.

If the “scientific claim” can be brought to its knees by “define ‘woman,’” it’s not really a scientific claim.

The scientific consensus they talk about here involves DSDs: there are a small fraction of people who are very difficult to classify as either male or female due to malfunctions in the sexual development of the fetus. That’s pretty much it. It’s not new. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not controversial.

From what I can tell, the only thing new is science popularizers taking these facts and extrapolating some Grand Truth about how fuzzy borders within a category means the category is unreliable and can be ignored in favor of what people know to be true about their authentic inner selves. Which is NOT scientific.

Which party holds the wack belief and which party holds the other kind?

Other way around, I think you’ll find.

Our what?

Who is she? Canada’s Minister for Women and Gender Equality.

So, yeah…our brothers?

I think not.

Updating to add: see Sastra’s comment and Seanna’s for a better understanding.

Why now and not last year?

So why is Florida is experiencing its worst surge now, 18 months into the pandemic, when the vaccines are widely available?

In some ways, what’s happening in Florida is a microcosm of the current surge across America: a middling vaccination rate has collided with a more contagious version of the virus. And it’s doing so in a state where political leaders continue to insist people should act as though the pandemic is over — even as more people are dying every day than at any point in the past year.

It’s the “when in doubt, take the reckless approach” problem.

DeSantis, who has clear presidential aspirations in 2024, has positioned himself and his state’s Covid-19 response against the public health establishment throughout the pandemic and, more recently, the Biden administration.

He’s a rebel tralala – but if there’s one time you don’t want a preening “rebel” in charge of things it’s during a pandemic. Ok it’s also during a famine or a war etc etc etc but anyway a pandemic is pretty high on the list.

The situation has led to a sort of theater of the absurd, with DeSantis fighting local mitigation measures while at the same time promoting new treatments for people who get so sick they need to be hospitalized because of Covid-19.

A theater of the absurd rebel.

Guardian columnist Zoe Williams also dislikes John Cleese, it seems.

[I]t’s hard to find out when John Cleese was last funny. Some people think he had some moderately amusing lines in A Fish Called Wanda (1988). There was a period in the 2010s when he had an idiosyncratic vendetta and went around town saying “Michael Palin’s travel show” and then yawning, which a small niche found rather tickling.

Does that actually matter? He did some brilliant Being Funny before the 2010s, which thanks to technology we can still benefit from. Isn’t that good enough?

It would be fair to say it’s not a recent body of comic work that has recommended Cleese for a Channel 4 show about “cancel culture”…

But it probably is a not-recent body of comic work. I don’t know, maybe the Channel 4 show won’t be any good at all, maybe Cleese will just do some variation on the enraged fogey shtick (which may be all a lot of us do), but after all he did get some practice as Basil Fawlty. I don’t know if it will be interesting or not, funny or not, but neither does Zoe Williams.

Those vibes in full: they are outspoken gentlemen who refuse to be cowed by convention into staying silent on their sub-saloon-bar bullshit. They are fearless crusaders for freedom, so long as by “freedom” we mean the liberty to tell gags about male superiority that would have been too tired for Les Dawson.

Ok but at least he doesn’t tell us what his pronouns are.

Does “with force” mean “with force”?

What views? The usual.

Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner has been accused of being transphobic but defended by refuge organisers for women after she criticised LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall.

The campaign group’s vision is that people born male who identify as women should be able to attend women’s prisons and crisis centres, whether or not they have begun to transition.

Attend? One doesn’t “attend” prisons, as if they were meetings of the book group, one is locked up in them, aka imprisoned. That’s part of the problem: there’s no escape. If there’s a man in womanface sharing your cell you can’t get away from him.

Lisa Townsend, who has been the Conservative PCC role for three months, said in an interview for Mail on Sunday that pushing to allow pre-transition trans women in such female-only environments was a “dangerous ideology”.

Pushing to allow any trans women to force themselves on women is a dangerous ideology.

Pride in Surrey said they want to work with the PCC “to educate on the issue of transphobia”, while Surrey councillor George Potter (LD, Guildford East) accused the PCC outright of being transphobic.

But Pride in Surrey also said they wanted to correct the PCC “with force.” Don’t leave that part out. Don’t acquiesce in their bullying.

Marc Jones, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), came to her defence, saying: “Some services quite simply can’t function in a gender neutral way”, which Reigate MP Crispin Blunt said was an “evidence-free panicked response”.

How easy is it for Crispin Blunt to say that? This easy:

He has less reason to be afraid of being locked up with men than women have. Much less.

Simon Callow is fed up with the tyranny.

Simon Callow, the actor and veteran gay rights campaigner, has condemned the “strange turn to the tyrannical” taken by Stonewall on self-identification for transgender people.

Callow, who was involved in the anti-government protests that led to the foundation of Stonewall in 1989, said an “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” now surrounded its position. This uncompromising mood risked infringing women’s rights and could put pressure on young gay people to transition, he said, and it was a sign of the times that he felt nervous about the reaction he would stir up, simply for expressing his views.

The uncompromising mood [or rather stance, approach, method] emphatically already does infringe on women’s rights, including by bullying and punishing us for saying so. It’s tightly circular. We’re not allowed to say trans activism is deeply misogynist, and that not-allowing is enforced via intense punishment, which thus demonstrates how very true the thing we’re not allowed to say actually is. Callow says it’s tyranny, and he’s exactly right.

He went on: “They have taken a very strange turn towards the tyrannical, a dangerously prescriptive position on a complex issue. When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”

So do we, and it is.

As an aside: the editor who wrote the headline saw fit to word it thus:

Actor Simon Callow attacks Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ group, over trans self-identification

At least for once it’s not “hits out at,” but “attacks” is still a tendentious way of putting it. He thinks they’re wrong and doing bad things, but he’s not hitting them or throwing missiles at them.