A pretty story:

A former Met Police counter-terrorism officer has admitted using spy cameras to secretly film naked models.

What kind of models?

Pretending to be a pilot, Det Insp Neil Corbel arranged fake photoshoots in hotel rooms, flats and Airbnbs.

Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard he hid devices in tissue boxes, phone chargers, an air freshener and glasses to video his victims.

He was caught after a woman became suspicious of a digital clock and found it was a spy camera.

Oh a woman – that kind of model. I wonder if he asked them how they identified first.

Police found images of some 51 women on Corbel’s hard drive and were able to identify 19 victims willing to make statements against him.

51! He’s industrious about it.

“He set up the rooms well in advance with covert devices planted in strategic places capturing the women while they were undressing before the shoots,” said the prosecutor.

Mr Alabi said Corbel manoeuvred the models so that intimate parts of their bodies were filmed.

Uh huh; right up between the legs, no doubt.

Never mind, they were probably all Karens.

Ah well who would know better than Amy Coney Barrett?

Claiming the supreme court “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”, Amy Coney Barrett told an audience at a Kentucky center named for the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties”.

For sure, and she was not nominated and approved for the court by partisan hacks from a political party but by disinterested legal experts like for instance Mitch McConnell. Yup yup yup yup.

Speaking alongside McConnell a little more than a week after she and four other conservatives on the court declined to block a Texas law which all but outlaws abortion in the state, the devout Catholic also insisted the panel does not judge cases based on personal beliefs.

Right, except that they do.

Barrett’s remarks met with widespread skepticism.

Gee I can’t think why.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, wrote: “Not ‘partisan hacks’? Then explain 80-0 partisan 5-4 record for big donors. And explain judicially conservative principles rolled over to get those wins for donors who put you on the court.”

She can’t, she’s looking at a squirrel.

Rafia Zakaria apparently deleted the stupidest of her tweets from yesterday attacking Joan Smith for her review of Zakaria’s book on “white feminism.” Or most of them, but not quite all.

She doesn’t really care what the review says, which is why she composed all those childish “nyah nyah Karen na na Boomer” about them.

I’ll grant her one point: she didn’t care enough to find out who Joan Smith is.

“They’re”?

So Zakaria knows Joan Smith is a woman long enough to call her a Karen, but not long enough to refrain from calling her “they.”

Yay feminism. Feminism is for everyone except terfs, boomers, Karens, white women, and women who write unflattering reviews of Rafia Zakaria’s book.

“And likely all her entitled and racist views”? Name one. Document it. Show us your work.

No, that’s incorrect. It could just be that Zakaria’s book is not a good book – and judging by her tweets it’s hard to see how it could be much good. Her thinking is crude at best.

Yes I think I’ll just skip reading Lol White Feminism Lol.

Updating to add one that I missed:

At what age does Rafia Zakaria think women should be put to death? 70? 65? 55? At what age, exactly, are we too old to be useful and too repellent to be allowed to continue cluttering up the place?

Is she aware that, barring accident, she will reach that fatal age herself in due course?

Update 2:

Zakaria’s book sounds only slightly less contemptuous and hostile than her social media persona. Joan Smith reviewed it in the Times (so Zakaria thought it would be clever to lob stupid insults at her on Twitter in response, which is very adult and sensible).

“White feminism” as a derogatory term, caricaturing it as a movement that imposes its preoccupations on women who are not white or middle class, has been around for a while. People claim it is reflective more of a state of mind than skin colour; even Pragna Patel, a founding member of Southall Black Sisters, has been accused of being a “white feminist”.

In other words it works pretty much the way “terf” does – as an excuse to shit on women without seeming like a common or garden misogynist.

Building bridges is definitely not what this book is about, and everywhere she finds feminists who accept “the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of colour”. Defining people in terms they would not recognise or accept is a key ploy of identity politics, and feminists are lumped together and traduced throughout.

Much the way Katie Edwards did in the Independent today, then.

The book’s most serious flaw lies in its singularly ill-informed account of modern feminism. If the movement has a single unifying feature it is an analysis of the way oppression of women is linked to female bodies, regardless of race, class, age, religion or sexual orientation. Yet this is precisely what Zakaria denies: “An aversion to acknowledging lived trauma permeates white feminism, which in turn produces a discomfort and alienation from women who have experienced it.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. In this country refuges for victims of domestic and sexual violence were built by feminists who insisted they should be open to all women.

Never mind that, they were white feminists just the same.

Identity politics is rife with such facile judgments, designed to make its advocates feel superior. Zakaria appears to have missed the irony of dismissing every species of feminism but her own in the name of a supposedly more egalitarian politics. But when I see feminists being pitted against each other in this mean-spirited way, I can almost hear the patriarchy laughing.

So I guess Zakaria decided to use Twitter to demonstrate just how mean-spirited (and fatuous) she can be when she really puts her mind to it.

Many people clearly pride themselves on being unpleasant.

No she doesn’t. That’s Joan Smith, and no she doesn’t. “pol” is short for political, and in any case “pol” doesn’t mean pale in the first place. But being told that wasn’t going to stop the snide pissy Zakaria.

How dare the white feminists point out a dishonest smear of the feminist author of Misogynies?

What a crude vulgar childish brat. I won’t be following her work.

Psychologist Ellyn Kaschak on the trans dogma:

… there is a deafening silence on the part of most individual psychologists and an enthusiastic, unquestioning and unresearched explosion of support for transgender motives, actions and people by others. I too want to offer support for human rights, but uninformed and unquestioning support may actually involve harm, so instead, I am asking for psychology to step up and take on its responsibilities in this regard.

Not only the conferences, but the classroom and the laboratory are appropriate places to be asking important questions. Yet the inhabitants of these venues are being silenced in the name of human rights and a purported bias named “transphobia.” Academics have been censored and in some cases, lost their positions for just using language deemed unacceptable by the transgender movement, words such as “women.” Yes, “women” is considered hate speech and this purported transphobic hate speech is being aggressively monitored and eliminated in our very universities.

It’s not just a personal preference or psychology now, she notes, but a movement, enforced by threats and punishment.

You are bound to have a relative, a friend or a co-worker bring this issue from the abstract to the personal, as proclaimed gender defiers are inventing more and more genders rather than attempting to abolish this social construction, as did feminists before them. More perniciously, their wordplay includes substituting the term “gender” for the sex change that they are attempting. The reason for this substitution is simply that sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality rather than a socially constructed idea. Sex is currently immutable; gender is not. The conflation of these human characteristics can and does lead to confusion at best and irreversible physical damage at worst.

This formerly personal psychological issue, which affected only 0.1% of the population, has exploded into a social movement with all the characteristics of social contagion.

Along with righteous fury and sadistic love of punishment.

The diagnostic of “gender dysphoria” actually came into existence as “gender identity disorder” and replaced the pathologizing of homosexuality (eliminated in 1973) in the DSM, the psychiatric bible. These diagnoses are adopted by popular vote of the American Psychiatric Association members, democratic rather than scientific. They have the strongest investment in construing psychology in terms of health and pathology. The association members had been convinced by lobbying groups and research, to vote to “normalize” homosexuality. In doing so, they wanted to leave a diagnostic possibility for those who remained conflicted about their sexual orientation. Diagnosis permits treatment via the official approval of the insurance companies, who today control the professions to a frightening extent. Thus was born “gender identity,” seemingly a harmless and even generous compromise.

I don’t think I knew that. The compromise outgrew its cradle and has started devouring the world.

Proponents of the transgender movement actually hijacked this diagnosis, along with the 50 years of feminist theory, practice and discoveries about the social construction and contextual nature of gender and spun them into a human rights movement, but not one for women. In fact, this movement actually infringes on many of the hard-won rights of women, including not only the right to assemble as a sex-based group but the right to call ourselves women, mothers and daughters. It even attempts to destroy the very concept of sex by conflating sex and gender, but make no mistake, lifetimes of research support unequivocally the difference between sex and gender. They may influence each other, but they are not the same thing. And sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality.

Quick, bring out the guillotine.

Here are some more important questions. If psychologists and psychiatrists are going to pathologize and diagnose, a questionable practice at best, then shouldn’t they diagnose carefully, as lives depend upon it? Are they then considering and eliminating such diagnoses as narcissism or sociopathic disorders, sexual fetishes, dissociative disorders or even delusional disorders? Is transitioning more like self-cutting or eating disorders than like homosexuality?

And if so is it really all that brave and stunning?

The usual complete indifference to the needs of women. Me first me me me me me me me me me.

By “women like me” he means men. He’s calling Labour MP Rosie Duffield “awful” (calling her thread awful, but you know we’re meant to think she’s awful for tweeting it) for saying that abused women need women-only services. It’s all about him and zero about the thousands of women who need such services.

You can’t build a progressive movement on this kind of blind relentless egotism and selfishness.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist:

Legal Feminist tweeted a short thread starting like this the other day:  

Cunningham first notes that the tweet hasn’t been verified, she doesn’t know who Mother Cecily is, she doesn’t know the story is true. But as a hypothetical, it’s what not to do.

It’s an extraordinarily bad idea. Any HR director tempted to organise training with this kind of content needs to catch up with the implications of the judgment of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Forstater. Gender critical beliefs are capable of being protected under the Equality Act: that means that someone with gender critical beliefs is entitled not to suffer discrimination on grounds of those beliefs, or harassment related to them. That protection works in the same way as protection from discrimination on grounds of other protected characteristics: sex, race, disability etc. If you want to make this real – well, run the thought experiment, substituting in groups defined by other protected characteristics for “TERF” in “Be less TERF.”  It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? 

What’s the difference here? It’s that “TERF”ism isn’t like racism or sexism or homophobia or exclusion of disabled people. It’s simply the formerly obvious view that men are not women. Employers shouldn’t be holding women who don’t believe men can be women up for rebuke and exclusion.

Anecdotally, it seems that large numbers of gender critical employees are suffering various kinds of discrimination and harassment at work because of these beliefs, or even being disciplined by regulators and professional associations for expressing them. A rash of employment tribunal claims following in the wake of Forstater seems inevitable. 

Punishment for not believing that men can be women. It still seems too grotesque to believe, yet it’s true.

But harassing your gender critical staff through the medium of your diversity training is taking things to another level. It has various snazzy features as compared to common-or-garden workplace harassment. 

First, it’s exceptionally efficient. You don’t have to bother to harass your gender critical staff individually. Instead, with a single document or training event, you can harass all your gender critical employees at once…

Bulk-harassment, as Legal Feminist called it.

The example given above is an extreme case, but employers should think seriously even about what may seem to them to be innocuous exhortations to “allyship,” like encouraging staff to wear a rainbow lanyard, or give their pronouns at the start of meetings or in their email sign-off, etc. The problem, in a nutshell, with pronouns and similar observances is that they are a public profession of belief. If you “encourage” your staff to profess a belief, you are in effect forcing them either to say a creed they may not believe (and which some may find profoundly menacing; for more on that, read this powerful blog),  or else to decline to say it, and thus to confess their unbelief in an environment where unbelievers may be unpopular. 

And it’s especially unpleasant to have your employer leaning on you to profess belief in a creed you consider absolute bullshit.

You say “being less trans-exclusionary, and more trans inclusive seems a reasonable viewpoint to be presented to employees.” That would be fine if “trans inclusive” just meant not discriminating against trans people. But gender critical people are slurred as “trans exclusionary” not because they want to exclude trans people from work or public life, etc. – which obviously would be terrible – but because they don’t accept that trans-identifying males are included within the definition of the word “woman.” So if HR say “be less trans-exclusionary”, they are making a demand that their staff believe something.

And the something in question is a crock of shit.

Meanwhile, if we get tired of banal formulaic denunciations of “white feminism” by white women who write columns for the Independent, we can turn to Ex-Muslims of North America for some real oppression.

The Islamist organization is Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the theocrat who answers the question says: “The ruling of apostasy of Islam is clear, again that’s one of the things the west doesn’t like and seeks to change the ruling of apostasy. As such in Islam it is clear that apostates do attract capital punishment and we don’t shy away from that.”

It’s telling that he shifts the agency onto the victim – it’s the “apostate” who “attracts” murder for leaving the religion. Islam is not to blame, enforcers are not to blame, the apostate is to blame.

There’s also, of course, the fact that it doesn’t matter what “the ruling of Islam” may be in countries that have laws against murder. Islam can “rule” what it likes but murder remains murder even if the perp is an Islamist fanatic like the guy at the mic.

There’s also the fact that it’s not ok to make laws mandating death for changing one’s mind.

Katie Edwards in the Independent:

Over 30 years ago now, Judith Butler wrote the gender studies classic Gender Trouble. Today, Butler expounded on those ideas in an interview with The Guardian.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her progressive approach over the decades, Butler suggested that we should rethink the category of “woman”. 

Progressive? What’s progressive about her “approach”? What’s progressive about suggesting that we should rethink the category of “woman”? Especially when what she means by that is “to include men”?

Butler advocates for trans women and their inclusion in the sisterhood.

Which is ridiculous at best, because trans women are men.

Although the “sisterhood” seems to have become something of an exclusive members’ club. Feminism, or more accurately, white feminism, has gone a bit Mean Girls – in the worst possible way.

More accurately how? Does she think it’s only white feminists who understand that only women are women? Because that would be awfully racist. And as for who is being mean…

White feminism already has a bad rep for being exclusive, divisive, and for deflecting attention away from its more insidious attitudes by targeting vulnerable groups for criticism.

She says, repeating and amplifying the stupid epithet, doing her bit to solidify the “bad rep” that is such a handy stick for misogynists to beat feminism with.

Whenever I write something critical of whiteness, I receive derisive responses from other white women, accusing me of self-flagellation.

No, I don’t think she’s flagellating herself, I think she’s flagellating other feminist women because misogyny has never gone out of style and she wants to be one of the popular kids. Talking about Karens and white feminists and terfs is the way to suck up to the bullies.

We’re all guilty of it – even if we’re trying really, really hard, and we’ve had horrible things happen to us in our lives, so we’re victims too, and we definitely think of ourselves as allies, and we’re actually very nice people and terribly misunderstood, so please don’t call us Terfs or racists or Karens because you’re hurting our fragile little white-woman feelings. Yup. We’ve heard it all before. Ad nauseam.

I’ve read this column before ad nauseam.

Another woman bullied out of attending:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the abstract of an academic article by a sociologist…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aw yeah, coupla men who beat up women.

Bina Shah tweeted on September 8:

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

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

She expanded on her thoughts the next day:

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

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

Taliban: Hahaha nice try.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for coming to my TERF Talk.

Thank you for giving it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except when…

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

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

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

Well no wonder Greg Abbott doesn’t like that.

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

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

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

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

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

Texas is just showing off at this point.

When Republicans take credit for the civil rights movement…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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