This is from an hour ago, 6 p.m. Pacific time, 9 p.m. Eastern time. The ACLU social media fools have learned NOTHING.

It’s not a PERSON who seeks abortion, it’s a woman. If it were men seeking it no one would interfere with them.

Having to agree (mostly) with Reason again:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is very sorry for rewriting a famous quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that it would be gender neutral.

Well, no; unfortunately that’s what they didn’t say. It’s what Romero didn’t say. He said he regrets that it was said, but that’s different from saying he’s “very sorry” – which is apology language as opposed to regret language. I know it’s subtle but the subtle items are exactly the ones we have to be careful about.

“It was a mistake among the digital team,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”

That’s what he said. It’s not an apology, not a “very sorry”; it’s an explanation of what happened (what other people did).

Regardless of one’s position on trans issues and the rapidly evolving demands of progressive activists with respect to conscious language choices, it is wrong to go back in time and pretend that people used different words.

Mind you, the social media twerps didn’t pretend that RBG used different words. That would have required leaving off the brackets, which would have made it an outright lie. No, what they did is indicate what she should have said, and would have said if only she had been as enlightened as the twerps who handle social media for the ACLU. What they did is change her wording to something they liked better.

At least the ACLU is admitting that the RBG tweet was a mistake, though the apology Romero offered was a weak one. 

So weak that it wasn’t in fact an apology. He left the apology bit out altogether.

Not again.

Not “everybody,” every woman. Men don’t need access to abortion. Not “anybody that has a uterus,” any woman. No man has a uterus.

It’s because it’s women who need it that we have to fight for it.

It’s because women do the childbearing that women are subordinated.

It’s because men want to control women and their childbearing that access to abortion is something we have to campaign for and defend.

Another book by another Trump ex-employee with yet more detail on what a walking pile of garbage he is.

In her book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” [Stephanie] Grisham recalls her time working for a president she said constantly berated her and made outlandish requests, including a demand that she appear before the press corps and re-enact a certain call with the Ukrainian president that led to Mr. Trump’s (first) impeachment, an assignment she managed to avoid.

Trump of course is saying it’s all lies.

“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Tuesday. He said she had become “very angry and bitter” after a breakup. “She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”

It was obvious from the beginning yet he hired her and didn’t fire her. He’s so stupid, saying that about former employee after former employee without ever noticing that it shows up how stupid he is.

Ms. Grisham lands on a well-documented theme when she explores Mr. Trump’s love of dictators. But she says Mr. Trump went out of his way to please one in particular: Mr. Putin, whose cold reception of Mr. Trump, she writes, seemed to make the president want to impress him even more.

“With all the talk of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and for various human rights abuses, Trump told Putin, ‘Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave we’ll talk. You understand,’” Ms. Grisham writes, recalling a meeting between the two leaders during the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019.

I bet Putin was super impressed by that.

There’s some waffle about how angry Melania Trump was at him, which who cares. She’s a worthless person herself.

In the end, the first lady sided with her husband, doubting the election results — “Something bad happened,” she told Ms. Grisham — and declined to invite Jill Biden, the incoming first lady, to the White House for tea.

Remember how kind the Obamas were to them? Remember how, when Trump just walked away from Melania to greet them, they went around him to rescue her from looking like the forgotten tag-along? And this is how she reciprocates. Lie down with dogs get up with fleas – she’s every inch a trump. Selfish, callous, vindictive, bad.

As she tries to please Mr. Trump, whose press coverage was relentlessly negative, she describes his anger toward her and others as “terrifying”: “When I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras,” she writes, “I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.”

She says one frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire was Pat Cipollone, who served as White House counsel: “He didn’t like them telling him that things he wanted to do were unethical or illegal. So he’d scream at them. But then he’d usually listen. And then yell at them again later.”

Bad people are bad.

A tweet by Ex-Muslims of North America inspired me to seek out the Quran Verse 53. It’s very amusing.

O you who believe, do not enter the houses of the Prophet, unless you are permitted for a meal, not (so early as) to wait for its preparation. But when you are invited, go inside. Then, once you have had the meal, just disperse, and (do) not (sit for long) being keen for a chat.

Heeheeheehee it’s so pious, so spiritual, so disinterested. Listen, guys, don’t keep showing up at my place hoping I’ll give you some lunch, wait until you’re fucking invited. And if I do invite you don’t fucking show up early – what am I supposed to do, give you a pre-lunch lunch? Then you’d show up early waiting for that!

And when I’ve given you the fucking lunch and you’ve eaten it, then go already. Get out. I don’t have time to “chat” with you, I’m a prophet for fuck’s sake, not one of your card-playing buddies.

This (conduct of yours) hurts the Prophet, but he feels shy of (telling) you (about it), but Allah is not shy of the truth.

Yeah I’m shy, I’m a real shrinking violet, but Allah isn’t shy, motherfuckers. Get out of my house. And as for the bitches…

And when you ask any thing from them (the blessed wives of the Prophet), ask them from behind a curtain. That is better for the purity of your hearts and their hearts. It is not allowed for you that you hurt Allah’s Messenger, nor that you ever marry his wives after him. Indeed, it would be an enormity in the sight of Allah.

Those tight pussies are not for you, mofos. Not now not ever. Allahu akbar.

This isn’t in the news yet so a tweet will have to do.

Shouts of “shame” and boos because women say that women are women.

The Times, annoyingly, says in the headline that Romero “apologized” for re-writing Ruth Bader Ginsburg. No he didn’t.

That’s not what happened.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday that he regretted that a tweet sent out recently by his organization altered the words of a well-known quote by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Yes he regretted it, but he didn’t apologize. Regretting something isn’t the same as apologizing for it. You can regret forgetting to get coffee at the store without apologizing for it.

The tweet by the A.C.L.U. occasioned mockery and some anger on social media from feminists and others.

Some anger? Lots of anger. White-hot anger.

“We won’t be altering people’s quotes,” Mr. Romero said in an interview on Monday evening. “It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”

Again – not an apology.

Mr. Romero has spoken recently of the cacophony of liberal and left views that now and then spills into the A.C.L.U.’s social media feeds and sometimes requires correction. While he vowed that the A.C.L.U. would not repeat this error, he insisted it “was not a mistake without a thought.” There are people who are pregnant and who seek abortions, he said, who do not identify as women.

“My colleagues do a fantastic job of trying to understand a reality that people who seek abortions are not only women,” he said. “That reality exists.”

The A.C.L.U., he said, could have touched on this emerging reality, one that involves identity, gender and language, without tampering with Justice Ginsburg’s quote. “In today’s America,’’ he said, “language sometimes needs to be rethought.”

None of that is an apology. It’s Romero wishing that tweet hadn’t been tweeted, it’s not Romero apologizing to women or to Ruth Bader Ginsburg or to members of the ACLU.

Michelle Goldberg in the Times yesterday on the ACLU’s insult to RBG and women:

This was a mistake for two reasons, one that’s easy to talk about, and one that’s hard.

The easy one is the “it’s bad to re-write the past this way” reason.

What’s more difficult to discuss is how making Ginsburg’s words gender-neutral alters their meaning. That requires coming to terms with a contentious shift in how progressives think and talk about sex and reproduction. Changing Ginsburg’s words treats what was once a core feminist insight — that women are oppressed on the basis of their reproductive capacity — as an embarrassing anachronism. The question then becomes: Is it?

Of course, I don’t find that one difficult, except in the sense of endlessly beating one’s head against a wall of determined stupid AND misogynist. But difficult in the sense of difficult to explain or argue? No. Difficult morally? Oh hell no. Difficult politically? I don’t give a fuck. Difficult socially? Also no fuck given.

Goldberg then gives a much friendlier version of the trans dogma reasons for re-writing RBG’s words than I would, before politely dissenting.

Yet I think there’s a difference between acknowledging that there are men who have children or need abortions — and expecting the health care system to treat these men with respect — and speaking as if the burden of reproduction does not overwhelmingly fall on women. You can’t change the nature of reality through language alone. Trying to do so can seem, to employ a horribly overused word, like a form of gaslighting.

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. You can interpret this to support the contemporary notion of sex and gender as largely matters of self-identification. Or you can interpret it as many older feminists have, as a statement about how the world molds you into a woman, of how certain biological experiences reveal your place in the social order, and how your identity develops in response to gender’s constraints.

That is, you can interpret it the way Simone de Beauvoir meant it rather than the way callow young hipsters misinterpret it.

Seen this way, a gender-neutral version of Ginsburg’s quote is unintelligible, because she was talking not about the right of all people to pursue their own reproductive destiny, but about how male control of women’s reproductive lives makes women part of a subordinate class. The erasure of gendered language can feel like an insult, because it takes away the terms generations of feminists used to articulate their predicament.

It can feel like an insult because it is an insult. If it doesn’t feel like an insult you’re not paying attention.

On Monday, Anthony Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., told me he regrets the R.B.G. tweet, and that in the future the organization won’t substantively alter anyone’s quotes. Still, he said, “Having spent time with Justice Ginsburg, I would like to believe that if she were alive today, she would encourage us to evolve our language to encompass a broader vision of gender, identity and sexuality.”

I would hate to believe that. I hate it that Anthony Romero said it. I despise him for saying it.

Goldberg continues to be milder (catch more flies with honey etc).

This may very well be the case. It’s also the case that she spoke specifically about women for a reason.

Yes and the reason she did continues to be a reason. It continues to be the case that male control of women’s reproductive lives makes women part of a subordinate class. Until that changes (ha, very funny), we need to keep on talking about women, not “people.”

Also…if Romero regrets the tweet, WHY HASN’T HE SAID SO? To us, not just to Michelle Goldberg? Why hasn’t he said so publicly? Why hasn’t he responded? Why has he ignored us as if we’re so many whining children in a sandbox?

Naturally this isn’t going down well.

It really is a terrible “apology” (and not a real apology at all).

“The Lancet is fabulous. I apologize to our readers who were OfFenDed. At the same time, after that perfunctory ‘sorry you’re so touchy,’ I want to spend ten times as many words talking about trans people trans people trans people trans people and how neglected they are and how much stigma they face and how urgent it is for us to EmPoWer them and to make menstruation all about them so suck it up bitches.”

It’s particularly infuriating that he doesn’t even mention the “bodies with vaginas” and its position on the cover, much less admit how insulting it is, much much much much less admit that THE LANCET DOES NOT TALK ABOUT MEN THAT WAY.

You’d think he was 19 years old and addicted to TikTok.

Labour List:

Shadow Justice Secretary David Lammy has told a Labour Party conference fringe event when discussing trans rights this morning that “there are some dinosaurs on the right” and also that “those dinosaurs exist in our own party” who want to “hoard rights”.

“Hoard rights”? Is that like hoarding sugar and butter during the war?

Asked at a fringe meeting today about the ongoing conflict in the party over the rights of transgender people, he said there is “always a debate when you’re extending rights to people who have been denied them for so long”.

What “rights” have trans people been denied for so long? The right to ignore gender conventions? Probably, somewhat, but then non-trans people have been denied those for so long too. What other rights? If he means the purported right to be validated on all sides as the sex you aren’t, that isn’t a genuine right. It can’t be, because it interferes with too many existing, and genuine, rights, like the right to see what you see, and the right not to have to spend any time and energy and attention on what pronouns other people want you to use to refer to them.

Lammy told the event that the “great story of the 20th century is “people who had no rights claiming those rights” – including the working class on the factory floor, and those fighting for LGBT rights and BME rights.

Yes but this is this problem again: you can’t talk about “LGBT” rights, because the T ones are sharply different, and in some ways in conflict with the LGB ones.

“I will always be on the side of minority communities kept out of the mix for having the freedoms everyone else has enjoyed,” the Labour frontbencher said. “I’m not in the business of inflaming a very small minority group.”

Meaning what? How about the community of child molesters? The community of rapists? The community of woman-stranglers? Not all communities are benign.

Oh please.

Blah blah blah blah fucking blah but when have they EVER talked about bodies with penises? Show me the cover that has “bodies with penises” on it. I’ll wait.

Again. They’re appallingly consistent about this.

The ACLU has allowed the trans lobby – or maybe just Chase Strangio all by herself – to bully it into erasing women from its reporting and publicity.

Oh no, the ACLU had to name the bill and the bill has the word “women” in the title.

Ewwww women’s ewwwww they must have been feeling very sick having to say that.

But they fixed it in the subsequent tweets.

Whew, that’s better! No more mention of women. Patients, people, we, but no women. Purity restored!

The ACLU is still at it (aka “doubling down”).

We? Who’s we? Who are “all of us”?

They mean women, of course, but they’re hell bent on not saying so. It’s Chase Strangio’s world now, and the only women who matter are men.

The linked article uses the word once. One single time. I suppose the word appears that one time so that women like me won’t be able to say never. But the grotesquely sanitized language remains. It’s written by Paige Alexandria and was apparently carefully scoured by an ACLU editor, or perhaps Strangio herself.

The U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the law in June 2016, just months after I had my abortion, bringing relief to Texans seeking basic health care.

This month, Texans like me hoped our rights might be protected by the Supreme Court again. Instead, they let us down by allowing the most restrictive abortion law in the country to take effect. Now, in my work with a fund supporting Texans’ access to abortion, I’m hearing every day from panicked, confused patients who are trying to get an appointment as I did in 2016, and facing wait times as long as a month — too late for many to access care under SB 8. I’ve been reminding some patients to do what I did: keep calling each day to see if any cancellations open up earlier appointments.

Emphasis added to highlight all the places where “women” would be more normal. They’re Texans, they’re patients, they’re many, but by god they’re not women, because who knows how many of them identify as men??? It could be all of them!

SB 8 bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy — before many people even know they’re pregnant; roughly 85 to 90 percent of people who get abortions are at least six weeks into pregnancy….

This law is cruel, and it’s violating.

You know what else is cruel and violating? Removing all mention of women from discussions of their own rights and needs.

I’ve been hearing from many people with housing insecurity who are struggling to quickly figure out how to travel hundreds of miles out of state to access abortion care. And it was already difficult to access abortion as a Texan, especially for people with low incomes, Black women, Indigenous folks, people of color, undocumented folks, our queer and trans communities, disabled people, and youth.

There it is, that’s the one place where the word “women” appears – only to be swiftly choked by a torrent of people and folks and people and youth and communities.

SB 8 is racist, classist, and ableist, and these communities are the first to experience the impacts of abortion restrictions. Some folks living in Southern Texas have no way to even leave the state because of border patrol checkpoints. Getting abortion care is hard for everyone in Texas, but now it can be outright impossible, and will continue to be hardest for these Texans.

But of course getting abortion care isn’t hard for everyone in Texas, because it’s not everyone who needs it, it’s only women who do. But women can’t be mentioned. The word “women” is an obscenity.

While this assault on our rights would be terrible at any time, it’s especially dangerous during a pandemic. Texans were already forced to jump through these political hoops last year when our governor deemed abortion non-essential and banned it for over a month at the beginning of COVID-19. Patients were turned away from the clinic at the last second and forced to travel as far as Oklahoma and Colorado, much like now. At a time when Gov. Abbott should be protecting Texans, he is more concerned with regulating our bodies and putting our health and lives at risk — again…

Though things may feel isolating and scary right now, I want Texans to remember that abortion is still legal in all 50 states… We are here to help you sort through the confusion and get the resources you need.

…Everything I am as a person now is because I had an abortion. It allowed me to be the parent I wanted to be, led me to a career I love, and it was the first time I really understood what it meant to be a supporter of abortion rights. We may have a right to a legal abortion, but that doesn’t mean it’s accessible. Under SB 8, that’s more true than ever, but we are going to continue to fight for our right to safe and legal abortion, regardless of our zip code, and regardless of how much money we make, no matter what.

And who is this “we”? Why, people who need abortion, of course!

Another one of these. She barks like a seal at the sheer horror of being asked if women are allowed to talk about our own bodies now.

Child Psychiatry Fellow at Stanford Medical School Jack Turban to Jessica Taylor in response to her objection to a man, Mridul Wadhwa, as director of a women’s rape crisis centre:

Women “demanding” female staff at rape crisis centers is not repeat not comparable to white people demanding white staff at anything. Women are not dominant over men, women don’t rape men, women are not the oppressor class in relation to men, women are not comparable to white people and men are not comparable to black people in discussions of power imbalance or dominance/subordination or perpetrator/victim or violence/injury.

Something nice for a change!

In January 23, a group of five women climbers summitted Aconcagua, in Argentina, at 22,808 feet, the highest point in the Western and Southern Hemispheres. It took them seven days from when they started ascending the mountain’s flanks to when they safely returned to the bottom. This wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy if not for the makeup of the crew.

They’re all Bolivian Aymara indigenous women who until recent years worked as cooks and caretakers for well-heeled, and mostly male, mountaineers from around the world. These women had been working at high camps for years, catering to the crews headed to the high peaks of the Andes. Finally, they decided to strap on crampons and hike up to the top themselves.

They call themselves the “Climbing Cholitas.” “Chola” can be a derogatory term for indigenous women in some Spanish-speaking countries; the women took it back and have turned it into a point of pride. They climb in their traditional dress, with alpine boots, ice axes, helmets, and modern packs incorporated into their wardrobe consisting of colorful dresses called polleras (sometimes the dresses get caught in their crampons, the women say, but they’re used to hiking through mountains in long skirts). The women range in ages from 24 to 52 years old.

In the past four years, the Cholitas, a group of as many as sixteen women, have climbed seven significant peaks: Huayna Potosí, Illimani, Acotango, Pomarape, Parinacota, Sajama, and, now, Aconcagua. Initially, they climbed with no training. The women had learned enough to reach their first summit, Huayna Potosí, simply by watching experienced mountaineers in camp. Eleven of them set out to bag that first peak, which towers at 19,974 feet, and all eleven of them summitted.

“I had a long time of being a cook, I wanted to go up, to know how it felt there,” said Lidia Huayllas Estrada, the group’s coordinator, of what motivated her to first reach for the climbing gear. When she asked her husband, an Andes guide, what it was like to scale the region’s highest peaks, he suggested she give it a try herself.

So she gave it more than a try.

Sonia Sodha on “white feminism”:

Blaming women for the ills of the world might appear an odd feminist call to action. But an idea gaining traction is that the “white feminism” dominant in the United States and the UK is not only a driving force of societal racism, but responsible for a host of other bad things, from the war on terror to the hypersexualisation of women in popular culture, to the dreadful abuses of power we see in international aid. It’s part of a growing tendency on the left to look for scapegoats at the cost of building the solidarity needed for social change.

It’s that and it’s also part of a longstanding tendency on the left to treat women with just as much contempt and hostility as the broader culture does. The revival of feminism (aka “second wave” feminism) was born out of that contempt and hostility on the left in the 1960s and 70s.

[I]t’s quite a jump to move from the observation that women are no more immune to racism than men to holding the feminist movement accountable for the plight of women of colour around the world. A new book, Against White Feminism, by Rafia Zakaria, makes precisely this case. To stack up the argument, she stereotypes feminism beyond recognition as a shallow, consumerist and exclusionary movement dominated by selfish white women who care little about scrutinising the male violence perpetrated by white men.

…

The mainstream anti-racist left has a bad track record of hanging out to dry women of colour challenging misogyny within their communities, for fear of upsetting cultural sensitivities. Examples abound: the Newsnight investigation that revealed several Muslim female councillors who have experienced pressure not to stand from Asian Labour party members, which prompted the Muslim Women’s Network to call for an inquiry into systemic misogyny in the party that was met with overwhelming silence; the smears the MP Naz Shah has faced from local Asian men in her party; the negative response to the anti-FGM activist Nimco Ali from her local Labour party. The white privilege discourse makes this more not less likely, because it makes people more scared of being culturally insensitive.

In other words it’s far less painful and damaging to be seen as misogynist than it is to be seen as racist. Lefty men have been choosing the first over the second as long as there have been lefty men.

[W]hite feminism critiques strengthen patriarchal forces by falling into the trap of the privilege Olympics. We need analysis of outcomes by class, race and sex to understand the extent of inequalities, but it should never be overextended to imply all white women are more privileged than women of colour…

Yet that is exactly what lazy polemics about terrible white feminism do: they empower men to use the fact that all white women are supposedly high up in the privilege pecking order to tell middle-aged women to shut up or, even worse, accuse them of weaponising their abuse and trauma. It doesn’t help women of colour, either: it implicitly posits Asian male crime against women as somehow lesser than white male crime, because Asian men are victims too.

…It is telling that Zakaria chose not to engage with a critical book review by Joan Smith, the longstanding campaigner against domestic violence, instead launching a personal attack on her “old and white” appearance.

Solidarity for…some.

You have got to be kidding.

It shouldn’t be said. It’s not right.

So I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that women are the ones who gestate and give birth to all human beings without exception. I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that men can’t do either of those things. I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that men have always sought to harness and control that ability women have. I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that men are also bigger and stronger than women, and that those two facts combined are why women still have to fight to get rights and freedom and equality and basic respect.

We might as well be hat stands for all men like Keir Starmer care.

So…

So that letter is here, and published with permission. Atwood sent it to several people.

Hi Steve,

Harriet has told me that you stated that her article “dragged SBM into a raging controversy.” She feels, and I agree, that it was your retracting that article and replacing it by very bad articles written by advocates of “gender affirmation” that dragged SBM into a raging controversy. I’ve attempted to explain why previously, but here I’ll mention a couple of the most obvious reasons. 

You claimed that Harriet’s article was below SBM’s minimal standard for “high quality scientific evidence and reasoning to inform medical issues.” Yet you replaced it with articles stating things such as the following: 

“Biology is a binary and differences of sex development (DSDs) are vanishingly rare”. False. DSDs are as common as 1 in 5,000 births, and increase to 1 in 200 or 1 in 300 if you include hypospadias and cryptorchidism. Biology is very, very well known to be a spectrum.

[Lovell attributes the sentence in quotes to Shrier; I’ve been unable to find it in her book]

Do you, Steve, think that sex is a spectrum? Yes, I know Lovell wrote “biology is a spectrum,” but that is an incoherent claim. Her implication is that sex is a spectrum. If that were true, it would upend all that we know about sex in mammals and many other life forms, including sexual dimorphism, reproduction, and selection. Do you think that Lovell’s statement constitutes “high quality scientific evidence and reasoning”? OMG, apparently you do. What’s happened to you?

Do you think that hypospadias and cryptorchism are DSDs? They are not, and to suggest that they are does not meet SBM’s minimal standard for reasoning about medical issues. 

The citation is to a paper that discusses real DSDs, not cryptorchism or hypospadias, and makes no claims about a “spectrum.” It supports the very statement that Lovell claims to be false (even though Shrier seems never to have made that statement). Where was the editor here? 

There’s more along the same lines. It’s stinging. He wraps up with:

Speaking of editors, it appears that there have been none at SBM other than the original five. Of those, two ruled to retract Harriet’s review, two (Harriet and I) would have kept it, and one is dead. I knew Wally well enough to feel confident that he would have voted to keep the review, and that he would have been shocked, probably to the point of resigning, when you published the embarrassments by Lovell and Eckert and when you banned Andy Lewis from commenting.  

No, it was not Harriet who dragged SBM into a raging controversy. It was you and David, because of some very poor choices, made worse by your doubling down after every reasonable objection by Jesse Singal, Andy Lewis, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, Abigail Shrier, me, and several others.  

Sincerely Yours,
Kimball

Stinger.