Chapter 47 million of Women Are Fair Game (as long as you can pin some other label on them like “white” or “cis” or “gender critical” or “Jewish” – the list is long):

Ohhhh they shed white women tears – well let’s wipe them all out then. First let’s nod vehemently in agreement, that they do indeed shed white women tears, and then let’s all jump on top of them until they stop breathing.

These Jewish women knowingly play the role of summoning white mobs to lynch black and brown women’s voices.

In other words Noah Strauss hates women.

Singal’s dry “mazel tov” refers to the fact that Herzog isn’t Jewish. I know, I know, how can that be when there’s a whole novel by Saul Bellow titled Herzog, but nevertheless, it is so. (I’ve always found Herzog unpleasantly misogynist, ironically enough.)

The resistance begins!

On Friday, the Justice Department ordered the Internal Revenue Service to hand over former president Donald Trump’s tax returns to Congress. On Monday, Ronald Fischetti, a lawyer for Trump, said that Trump intends to fight the order.

“There is no evidence of any wrongdoing here and I object to the release of the returns not only on behalf of my client but on behalf of all future holders of the office of the president of the United States,” Fischetti said in statement. He added that “this politicization and harassment of Mr. Trump is uncalled for and outrageous” and that he had “never seen anything like this.”

He doesn’t really object on behalf of all future presidents though. That’s just window dressing, and self-flattery. He couldn’t care less about that, and neither could Trump. If anything Trump would probably like it to happen to future presidents, out of spite.

One problem with the statement, Teri Kanefield says, is that of course there’s evidence of wrongdoing. Remember all those news stories about the unreported apartments and cars and school tuitions? Evidence of wrongdoing. And then there’s Michael Cohen’s testimony. And there’s that massive story the Times did.

Fischetti’s “no evidence of wrongdoing” is an insult to Americans who have been bombarded with such evidence for years.

To be expected from Trump and his enablers.

Also, Congress does get to ask the Executive questions; the two branches are supposed to be equal.

This brings me to the third hole in Fischetti’s defense: the idea that Trump is objecting on behalf of “all future presidents.” Rule of law literally means that the law applies to the president as much as it does to anyone. Anything else is autocracy.

Plus they don’t mean it anyway.

Would the pardon have been forthcoming if the roles had been reversed?

A US couple who gained nationwide notoriety after they pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters last year have been pardoned.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey were filmed holding weapons outside their home in St Louis, Missouri. They were fined after pleading guilty to misdemeanour charges this year.

But Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson has now pardoned them, something he had promised after US conservatives began to support the couple.

They weren’t filmed just “holding their weapons,” they were filmed (as the first paragraph says) pointing them at protesters who were marching past. Pointing them. That’s threatening. I’d be petrified if someone pointed a gun at me.

“When the angry mob came to destroy my house and kill my family, I took a stand against them,” he reportedly said in a recent campaign video. “I will never back down.”

Except that’s not what the angry mob came to do.

Very even-tempered.

The small-minded bigoted fuckwittery of course is skepticism about a magical ability to change sex.

There are a lot of things I don’t care for, but I don’t threaten to push people down a set of stairs and laugh at the bounce because of them.

It’s all in the bounce.

Originally two comments by Seth on Fair and includey.

If you believe that he really does have gender dysphoria

See, this was the first step on the road to getting where we are now, this notion that someone having “gender dysphoria” makes them “really trans”, as opposed to a faker. But in its own terms, “gender dysphoria” is a mental illness, a delusion, either very starkly akin to or actually the same as the body dysmorphia which afflicts anorexics or compulsive exercisers.

The proper treatment for the latter two expressions of body dysmorphia, you’ll note, is not to completely reform society to give the stick-thin girl the “validation” that she is “in the wrong (obese) body” and is a hero for making radical changes to show the “real authentic” waif she is “on the inside”, nor the muscle-bound boy the “validation” that he is “in the wrong (shrimpy) body” and is a hero for making radical changes to show the “real authentic” hulk he is “on the inside”.

It is highly unlikely that the proper treatment for the former is to reform society to the extent being done now in order to indulge their delusions. Of course, someone being delusional is not in itself a moral failing, and it *is* worth treatment, with compassion and respect and empathy. But compassion and respect and empathy are sorely lacking by the TRAs and their “allies”, even (or perhaps most especially) for and toward the very dysmorphic people whose mental illnesses were exploited to catapult us into where we are in the first place.

So, even if one does believe that Hubbard has gender dysphoria (or body dysmorphia expressed through secondary sex characteristics), the appropriate response is almost certainly not to humour him in his delusions for the rest of his life. And it’s certainly not to turn people who refuse to humour him into thought-criminals and pariahs simply because they cannot pretend to believe in the impossible.

We

gave away the ballgame when we collectively allowed TRAs to recategorise gender dysphoria as indicative of something like a physical birth defect rather than a mental illness. That seems to me to have been the first step over the line, imperceptible as it was for most of us at the time, which has led us to this cultural moment. And most of us were more than willing to nod along with this at the time, in the hope of being good and supportive and decent people if for no other reason.

This is, I believe, the “root” of the trans issue, the floodgate-opener that precipitated the deluge which has swept away the skepticism and thoughtfulness of so many self-professed free-thought-loving skeptics. This is the “radix” which the original trans-exclusionary radical feminists excluded from their feminism, and which set them up as the assailable Other for all right-thinking progressives circa 2014 or so. It is a demand to believe the impossible, a leap of faith, a mental hurdle so high that every subsequent demand is all the easier for having already surmounted it. In hindsight, we should have listened more to the radical feminists, and less to the faith-based activists.

The Telegraph:

Male-born sex offenders who self-identify as women can be placed on female-only NHS wards, hospital trusts have said in guidance.

Devon, Oxford and Nottinghamshire hospitals all tell staff that a criminal history should be part of a risk assessment when placing male-born people on female-only wards, but do not say it is a bar to admission.

There’s a funny thing going on here…Men can be placed on women-only wards, but women can’t. Men can request women-only but women have to put up with women and men who claim to be trans.

I’m not sure that’s entirely fair.

It comes as The Telegraph has found that NHS Trusts across the country have issued guidance that says patients should be admitted based on the gender they identify with and therefore can choose which ward, lavatory and shower facilities they use.

Which means that women can’t choose. “Women-only please.” “We don’t cater to TERFs here, bitch.”

Some trusts have labelled those patients who express discomfort as transphobic, compared them to racists in official guidelines and ordered staff to report them to police for hate crimes.

But all they’re doing is choosing women-only wards, which you just said…

Until 2019, one hospital group instructed medics to withdraw treatment if a female patient refused to accept a physically intact male on women-only wards.

They what???????????

Dr Jane Hamlin, president of the Beaumont Society, a trans support group, said: “If anyone starts off with an assumption that a trans person is a sex offender – or even a potential sex offender – that is discrimination and transphobia.”

The hell it is. Trans women are men, and men are potential sex offenders when it comes to protecting vulnerable women. That’s the whole point. It’s not that all men are, it’s that men are the ones who potentially are. There’s a reason parents tell their daughters not to get into a car if a man they don’t know invites them to.

Devon Partnership NHS Trust says that patients “will be admitted based on the gender which they identify as at the point of admission” and it will not be based on physical characteristics or the person proving they have legally changed their gender or name, as they claim this is illegal.

It states that risk assessments must be carried out but indicate that this does not prevent male-born sex offenders being placed on a female-only ward.

“Where a transgender woman is admitted and has a history of sex offending, decisions regarding risk should include consideration of whether they are being prescribed anti-libidinal medication that would be expected to reduce sexual risk,” the document states.

Oh would it, well that’s fine then. It would be expected to but hey it might not but that’s fine, because it’s the feelings of the sex offending man who says he is a woman that count. Nothing else matters, especially not the safety and peace of mind of a bunch of stupid women.

Oxford states that “if the service user has a sex-offending history, risk should be managed in the same way as it would be with any other client, irrespective of gender”.

Right, because sex-offending is notoriously gender-neutral. No difference in the stats at all. In fact women probably do it more, because they’re such good liars.

When hospitals were ordered to eliminate mixed-sex wards more than a decade ago, patients were hopeful it would mean that they would have privacy and dignity during a difficult time.

But hahaha no it was all a trick.

But since then female patients have been accused of hate crimes, placed in seclusion and even threatened with their treatment being withdrawn for questioning why men who self-identify as women are placed in single-sex accommodation.

TERFs should just die.

Dr Lucy Griffin, a frontline clinician, has warned MPs and peers that doctors “are really worried about the toolkits that have gone out within individual organisations largely about things like single-sex wards”.

“Some of them are so punitive,” she said. “One organisation is suggesting that any woman who objects to a male on a single-sex ward is put in seclusion, as in a psychiatric setting.”Other policies state that trans people have “equal access” to single-sex facilities, which includes “male or female-only support groups”…

And the extra problem with that is, a man who goes along with that policy is a shitty human being, and who the fuck wants to be in a bed next to or a support group with a fake woman who is a shitty human being? It takes a real sadist and egomaniac to force himself on women in a hospital in that way, so how can it possibly be fair to force such men on women who are ill?

[D]espite acknowledgement of the risks, the documents suggest that any patients who question the decision will be treated as “bigots”, a practising nurse who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals has said.

Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust states that “concerns alone are insufficient” to justify moving wards, adding: “Just as the Trust will not adapt practice in light of Racist concerns expressed as discomfort, so the Trust will not adapt practice in light of Transphobic concerns expressed as discomfort.”

It’s not the same thing.

I wrote a column for The Freethinker about stupidity that’s not genuine involuntary stupidity but chosen stupidity, deliberate stupidity, stupidity in aid of ideology or tribe or hatred. That’s what much of the anti-vax bullshit is: not really about the vax and not really a mistake, but just a kind of point-scoring.

It’s incredibly cut off your nose to spite your face, but it seems millions of people find it entirely worth it for the sake of irritating the libbruls.

Some of them stop finding it worth it once they’re gasping for breath though.

Here we are again.

Covid-19 hospitalizations are surging across the US and stretched hospitals are warning that the overwhelming majority of coronavirus patients are unvaccinated and their serious sickness preventable.

Preventable, yes, but then you turn into a Democrat and your dick falls off. (Applies to both sexes.)

Health officials are especially concerned about Florida, where cases are the highest they have been since the pandemic began.

On Monday, there were more Covid-19 hospitalizations in Florida than at any time in the pandemic. The chief executive of the Florida Hospital Association, Mary Mayhew, told MSNBC that about 95% of those hospitalized were unvaccinated.

Look, it’s Florida. Trump country. DeSantisland. Collapsing condo towers built on sand as sea level rises. Vaccination is for wimpy pinheads in places like New York and Yurrup.

What do you know, it turns out there’s a price to pay for disvaluing female people.

Men are set to dramatically outnumber women in coming decades, new global modelling of birth sex ratios has found.

Of course they are. Now that technology can tell people what sex the baby is, girls can be Prevented. Amartya Sen famously pointed this out decades ago.

Researchers warn that global long-term stability could be at risk due to the “cultural preferences” for boys in certain countries. Nations with skewed sex ratio at birth are set to “lose” another 4.7 million girls by 2030 — a figure that could reach 22 million by 2100.

The study, published in the journal BMJ Global Health, found that prenatal sex selection has helped skew the sex ratio at birth in favour of boys in several countries from southeast Europe to southeast Asia since the 1970s.

Result? More incels, more violence, most of it against women.

Janice Turner is doing her best to get Owen Jones to listen though.

(My surmise: because he doesn’t give a fuck, because he just doesn’t think women matter. It’s not an unusual take.)

What Owen Jones always ignores:

What? What is it that Owen Jones always ignores? What are these tweets examples of Owen Jones ignoring?

Women. Women’s rights. The rights of women. The fact that women have rights, and are constantly having to defend them.

He interprets everything gender critical feminists say as “transphobia” and “anti-trans activism” when in fact for feminists it’s women’s rights that are crucial. We say that our point is that much of trans ideology is in direct conflict with women’s rights, and he invariably ignores that and just calls it “transphobia.” We reply a billion times that it’s not, it’s about women’s rights and how much of trans ideology tramples all over our rights. We might as well save our breath and our typing, because he never ever pays the slightest attention.

Originally a comment by latsot on Define “hate”.

The BBC ran a piece on Hubbard yesterday, which I overheard from another room. NOTE: distance from source does not mute rage. They were doing the usual dance around all of this to avoid screaming, wide-eyed into the camera “IT’S A BLOKE!!!! WE CAN ALL SEE IT’S A BLOKE!!!!! IT’S OBVIOUSLY A GADGIE!!!* HE’S JUST CHEATING!!!!!”

Then they seemed to change the subject and had a correspondent phoning in to talk about something else and they asked him what they thought of the whole men cheating in women’s sports thing. The correspondent was very careful to explain that he didn’t know anything about the subject and couldn’t possibly comment but that inclusion is good.

I won’t go into everything wrong with that statement, preaching to the choir. But the BBC knew that he wasn’t going to say something like “well, I don’t think women should be forced to compete against men, because that’s obviously grossly unfair.”

It was a setup, in other words, deliberately constructed to make it look as though some supposedly independent sport expert agreed with their pretend-neutral attitude.

This is what we get for the license fee that so many women are in prison for not paying, probably because their male partners insist the women have their names on the register but won’t cough up their fair share of the bills so the women have to make tough decisions about whether to let their kids go hungry or go to jail, where there’s a chance they will be raped by a man who says he’s a woman.

That license fee.

* Geordie for “man”.

Oh it’s all so complex.

As the first openly transgender female athlete to compete at the Olympics, Laurel Hubbard was making history and huge controversy in the Tokyo International Forum. It certainly looked like the weight of the world was on her shoulders.

If you believe that he really does have gender dysphoria. If you believe he’s just cheating, it looks a bit different.

Hubbard had met all the requirements set by the International Weightlifting Federation, though those rules — requiring athletes to demonstrate their total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months before their first competition — are regarded as wholly inadequate by a battery of sports scientists. At the most basic level, they point out that the normal testosterone range for women is between 0.3 and 2.4 nmol/L.

The most basic level is the one that counts.

Fiddling nervously with a tracksuit top, she made a short speech of gratitude to journalists — an unusually large amount were present for women’s weightlifting — which did serve as a reminder that there is a human story here of an athlete seeking a place in the sporting world, and in the world in general.

Again, only if you believe that he believes all the nonsense, and isn’t just taking advantage. I don’t believe that, so I don’t think that’s the human story here at all. And for that matter even if you believe he believes, you damn well ought to keep in mind the woman he displaced. What about her human story? She not rich or white or male.

Hubbard thanked the IOC for reaffirming “their commitment to the principles of Olympism”, but the organisation could hardly hail this as a triumph as it grapples awkwardly with the science and talks of a shift away from a framework based on testosterone.

There is also the hard reality that it will never please everyone. Fairness and inclusion can never be fully reconciled in this debate.

But the Olympics are all about exclusion. That’s the whole entire point. They’re about the very best, and they exclude everyone else from competing. That’s how athletic competitions work.

How about a little feel-good item for a change.

US right-wingers are rejoicing that the US women’s soccer team lost.

All because they kneeled (or knelt). The horror.

From last week but still of interest:

House Republicans on Wednesday angrily criticized a new order from the Capitol Hill physician to wear masks inside the Capitol due to the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus, leading Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy a “moron” over his argument that the decision was not based on science.

Oh that’s why she called him a moron. Well, yes – that is a moronic thing to say. The whole anti-mask pageant is strikingly stupid and perverse.

“This is some serious nanny-state stuff that will only breed resentment. No kidding,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said on the floor, complaining that the House should be focusing on border security. He added: “This institution is a sham. We should adjourn and shut the place down.”

But it isn’t nanny-state stuff. It’s what you do when there’s a contagious lethal virus cutting a swathe through the population. It’s the other way around – whining about preventive measures to avoid catching and spreading a lethal disease is childish. There should be nannies smacking them all and putting them in a corner, but there aren’t.

When Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) entered the chamber, a Democratic staff member handed her a mask. Boebert grabbed it and dropped it on the floor…

According to people who were there but didn’t want to go on the record because Republicans might do another insurrection.

Boebert is among the most outspoken Republicans against mask requirements, arguing that they are a sign of authoritarianism rather than an attempt to prevent the spread of a disease that has killed more than 611,000 Americans.

For what purpose? What authoritarian goal is it that masks will help forward? What do Democrats gain from mask requirements other than what we all gain by stopping the pandemic?

“We might as well start calling this a Perma-demic,” she tweeted Wednesday morning. “Permanent masking. Permanent state of emergency. Permanent control. This will go on until the American people just say enough is enough. The tyrants aren’t giving this up!”

It isn’t control though. Masks are irksome, for sure, but that doesn’t make them “control.” It’s not like: step 1, mandate masks, step 2, get everyone marching in lockstep, step 3, profit. It’s just not that easy.

“Make no mistake — The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” McCarthy tweeted shortly after Monahan sent his email Tuesday night.

But they don’t. Republicans are the ones who are telling their voters not to mask, and thus prolonging and rejuvenating the pandemic.

Oh did they indeed.

What’s SRC? Student Representative Council. Apparently a misogynist racist Student Representative Council.

Who is the simpering “Anastacia” Tomson?

Mister Catchme-fuckme shoes, that’s who. The kind of pretend woman who thinks crippling “sexy” footbinding shoes are a metonymy for women.

News 24 reported last week:

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Student Representative Council (SRC) wants an open lecture by writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cancelled, accusing her of transphobia.  

“As an institution which actively promotes intersectional feminism through its curriculum, it is important for us to recognise that Ngozi Adichie enhanced the divide in the feminist community with her anti-trans remarks, instead of using her platform and influence to highlight how trans women also have a right to simply be recognised as who they are without having to defend their womanhood,” the SRC tweeted.

Instead of using her talent and recognition to highlight how men who pretend to be women have a right to be recognised as who they are not without having to defend their fictional “womanhood.”

It’s always interesting how this shite overrides the usual requirements of “intersectionality” – so much so that they not only treat women as the privileged class but even a black woman, which would ordinarily be unthinkable.

I wonder what they’ll be thinking of themselves in 20 years, with the mortgage and the kids needing orthodontia…if they’re not too busy struggling to survive in a heating climate.

The facts:

Transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard made Olympic history but failed to record a successful lift in the women’s +87kg weightlifting.

Stupid kind of “history” to make. He “made history” by being the first man to steal a woman’s place at the Olympics. Not something to brag about.

She became the first openly transgender athlete to compete at a Games in a different gender category to the one in which they were born.

Carefully worded to sound acceptable. The accurate wording would be “He became the first openly male athlete to compete at a Games in the women’s category.” It doesn’t sound quite as brave and stunning put like that, does it.

Why is the BBC wording it in that cautious, protective, misleading way? Why is the BBC trying to draw a veil over the obvious (grotesque) facts? Why is it calling our indignation at this massive insult to women “hate”? Why is it promising to turn us over to the police if we get too vocal in our indignation?

The questions aren’t purely rhetorical, because the BBC is a serious news organization and I genuinely don’t understand why it’s being so deceitful out in the open where everyone can see.

The BBC is mad at us. Livid, in fact. The BBC won’t have it. The BBC is taking names. The BBC will report us to the relevant authorities. It replies to its own tweet about “reluctant history maker” Laurel Hubbard:

There’s this CNN piece from four months ago that I don’t think I saw at the time, so I don’t think I’ve already ranted about it.

It’s irritating because CNN is a news outlet, so it’s supposed to deal in verifiable facts for the most part (along with a lot of political commentary, it’s true). Reporter Devan Cole wrote about trans athletes and there’s hardly a fact to be seen.

South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem banned transgender girls and women from competing on women’s sports teams at public high schools and colleges via a pair of executive orders issued Monday.

In other words she banned male people who claim to be trans from competing on women’s sports teams. It sounds rather different when you say it that way. The purported “trans women and girls” are men and boys. Maybe they genuinely identify as female, maybe they don’t, but the fact is they’re male. Once you remember that they’re male it’s quite obvious why they’re banned from competing on women’s teams. That of course is why Cole doesn’t say it that way.

Though the two executive orders signed by Noem do not explicitly mention transgender athletes, they ​reference the supposed harms of the participation of “males” in women’s athletics — an echo of the transphobic claim, cited in other similar legislative initiatives, that transgender women are not women.

But they’re not. They’re not literally women. Even if they sincerely “identify as” women that still doesn’t make them women. That’s the point. A news outlet shouldn’t be treating that fact as a wicked lie, and the fiction as obvious truth. News outlets shouldn’t be feeding us politicized lies that way. They also shouldn’t be calling it “transphobic” to say that men are not women, trans or not.

The orders also reference “biological sex,” a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students’ original birth certificates.

Disputed by whom? For what purpose?

It’s not disputed in life, for the most part. People mostly aren’t confused about how to make babies. We all know who is which really, it’s just that a few of us have ruled that we have to engage in this elaborate dance of thinking that biological sex is a “disputed” term.

It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and for some people, the sex listed on their original birth certificate is a misleading way of describing the body they have.

There’s no such thing as “a person’s gender identity.” That’s a silly invented concept meant to retroactively make sense of the whole “identifying as” nonsense. There is no “for some people” about who is female and who is male. It’s just a blunt fact. It’s gaslighting for a news outlet to be shoving this politicized gibberish on us.

While sex is a category that refers broadly to physiology, a person’s gender is an innate sense of identity. The factors that go into determining the sex listed on a person’s birth certificate may include anatomy, genetics and hormones, and there is broad natural variation in each of these categories. For this reason, the language of “biological sex,” as used in this legislation, can be overly simplistic and misleading.

All said as po-faced and solemnly as if it were instructions on how to build a fence, yet it’s just bafflegab.

Supporters of the ban have argued that trans women have a physical advantage over cisgender women (women assigned female at birth) in sports, but trans advocates and ​some Democratic lawmakers contend that they’re discriminatory​, citing the natural variations that appear in athletes at all levels and of all genders.

And they’re bullshitting.

I don’t know. There are doubtless a million more pieces just like this from news outlets, but it annoys me that we’re having this absurd jargon-ridden ideology forced on us disguised as factual.

At the bottom of the piece:

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to provide additional explanation as to the distinctions between gender and sex.

Because you’re just making it up as you go. None of it is true, so don’t bother with the updating to provide “additional explanation” of what can’t possibly make any sense.