More book-sniffing:

A Republican state lawmaker has launched an investigation into Texas school districts over the type of books they have, particularly if they pertain to race or sexuality or “make students feel discomfort.”

State Rep. Matt Krause, in his role as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an Oct. 25 letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.

Krause’s letter provides a 16-page list of about 850 book titles and asks the districts if they have these books, how many copies they have and how much money they spent on the books.

I don’t think state legislators are supposed to micromanage schools’ book choices that way.

His list of titles includes bestsellers and award winners alike, from the 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates to last year’s book club favorites: “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot” by Mikki Kendall and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

But race is not the only thing on the committee chair’s list. Other listed books Krause wants school districts to account for are about teen pregnancy, abortion and homosexuality, including “LGBT Families” by Leanne K. Currie-McGhee, “The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to their Younger Selves” edited by Sarah Moon, and Michael J. Basso’s “The Underground Guide to Teenage Sexuality: An Essential Handbook for Today’s Teens and Parents.”

It seems he’s doing all this under the umbrella of the No Critical Race Theory law.

Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law”designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools. Critical race theory, the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals, is an academic discipline taught at the university level. But it has become a common phrase used by conservatives to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools.

Unless what’s taught is that there were a few hiccups but now everything is fabulous and anyone who says otherwise is a far-left wild-eyed anarchist demon.

State Rep. Victoria Neave, D-Dallas, who is vice chair of the committee, said she had no idea Krause was launching the investigation but believes it’s a campaign tactic. She found out about the letter after a school in her district notified her.

“His letter is reflective of the Republican Party’s attempt to dilute the voice of people of color,” she said.

Neave said she doesn’t know what Krause is trying to do but will investigate the motive and next steps.

Meanwhile schools are trying to figure out how the hell to comply when they’re already busy dealing with the effects of the pandemic. Is our children learning?

Meanwhile Peter Tatchell steps up.

Notice that “a significant number of” isn’t the same as “all” yet he leaps from the first to the second for his stupid analogy. Also notice how glibly he simply shrugs off the part about men pressuring lesbians for sex. Not a problem for Peter so he’s not going to take it seriously or even discuss it honestly, in fact he’s going to try to shut down discussion of it. Male privilege much?

Updating to add:

That clip is revolting.

Joan Smith on Sussex’s failure to hang on to Kathleen Stock:

The Vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, has written to all staff at Sussex, insisting that the university ‘has vigorously and unequivocally defended [Stock’s] right to exercise her academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech, free from bullying and harassment of any kind’.

Stock has responded by saying that the university leadership’s approach ‘more recently has been admirable and decent’, leaving open the question of what it did when she was first targeted. Because Stock and other gender critical academics, such as Professor Jo Phoenix of the Open University, have faced slurs and bullying for at least two years — so much so that Phoenix is raising funds to take the OU to an employment tribunal.

Selina Todd is another who springs to mind.

For too long, other academics have looked the other way, afraid of being targeted themselves, or in some cases even joined in the harassment. Who could forget the posters around Sussex demanding that Stock should be fired? Yet those of us who denounced the gender extremists behind the bullying of feminists, after our meetings to defend women’s rights were picketed by screaming trans activists, have been primly told that the issue is ‘toxic on both sides’.

It is hard to sustain this nonsense when you have seen the venom with your own eyes. Earlier this month, when women from all over the country gathered in Portsmouth to discuss violence against women, we had to walk past trans activists bearing posters that threatened us with sexual violence in the most obscene language imaginable.

On the ‘other side’ are lesbians like Stock and Phoenix, who simply ask to do their jobs — to ask awkward questions in a polite manner — without threats. On the ‘other side’ are women who highlight the conflict between the rights of vulnerable women in prisons and men who demand the right to be housed with them.

And who do so without obscene bullying and threats.

Aw yeah, direct action, comrades – bully those pesky women out of their jobs.

Scum of the earth.

Behold: an asexual-themed “lingerie” campaign. (Side note: what even is that stupid word? I’ve never had any “lingerie” in my life, I have underwear. Just one more way women are treated as the Designated Sex Toys.)

That’s asexual-themed??? Boy you coulda fooled me. It looks entirely sexual. The posing is sexual and the “lingerie” is sexual, as are the gloves. (Gloves???) The open mouth is not sexual? Come on. The cocked leg, the boots, the weird straps, the hair, the shooting from below, the thrown back head? There’s not one thing about it that’s not sexual.

But hey, #ThisIsWhatAsexualLooksLike! Who am I to argue?

They don’t usually say it quite so bluntly.

Books deemed ‘harmful to staff and students’ are being removed from region’s public school libraries

And…”harmful” how? Oh you know…just not the kind of thing the reader would have written. Which reader? Any reader, obviously. If someone says “I don’t like this,” out it goes.

The Waterloo Region District School Board is undertaking a multi-year review of its library collections to identify and remove any texts deemed “harmful to staff and students.”

Graham Shantz, coordinating superintendent in human resources and equity services outlined the ongoing work during Tuesday’s board meeting as part of an overview of the board’s 2021-2022 strategic and operational plan.

“We recognize as our consciousness around equity, oppression work and anti-racist work has grown, we recognize some of the texts in some of the collections that we have are not appropriate at this point,” Shantz said. He explained how the board developed a framework last year for reviewing its collections in elementary and secondary school libraries.

“We’ve done a great job over the years of adding collections that promote the diversity both of our workforce and our students and our community as a broader point, but we haven’t spent the concentrated effort that we need to spend on ensuring that we’re removing inappropriate or texts that are questionable and don’t have the pedagogical frameworks that we need,” Shantz said.

School libraries can’t have all the books there are, of course, so they have to be selective, but I’m not sure screening out every book someone considers “inappropriate” is the right filter to use.

Shantz said the process to edit school libraries will involve educating teachers about the board’s framework so they can consider removing texts from their classroom collections.

In the new and better tomorrow they will have removed all of them, and peace will settle over the land.

Earlier this year, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board removed William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies from its curriculum after its advisory committee on equity agreed with a student who said the book’s themes were outdated and too focused on white, male power structures.

Well now almost all books are outdated, aren’t they, because that’s time for you. It just keeps passing, and so books keep getting older. Maybe we should class them with apples and eggs and other things that go bad over time? Give them a shelf-life stamp?

Other books recently removed from Canadian school libraries and/or curriculums in response to complaints about racist, homophobic, or misogynistic language and themes, include Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Er…I think somebody somewhere missed the point.

GOOD NEWS FOR A CHANGE!

More Ash. (She’s like a splinter that you can’t…quite…dig…out.)

One, but it’s not all we do. Obviously. It’s not all anyone does. It’s something we talk about when it comes up, and the rest of the time we do other things.

Second, we don’t generally say it’s disgusting…unless she means we say the coercion is morally disgusting. That is something I say, and it’s quite possible I’ve said it about this subject. I do think it’s morally disgusting – worse than bad, worse than wrong, actively repellent and horrifying. Could Ash be confused about that? No, because what she says is “about who you find disgusting,” meaning “too disgusting to have sex with.” She’s translating the absence of sexual attraction into “disgusting,” which is a cheap trick, and in fact kind of homophobic, if you ask me.

Third, and most glaring, it’s not “lesbians don’t want to have sex with trans women because of their minority status” now is it. Of course it’s not. Lesbians don’t want to have sex with trans women because they have male bodies. Having a male body is very far from being a minority status, especially a downtrodden or exploited minority.

Any accusation she can think of in order to justify calling women bigoted, it seems.

Trump has written a letter to the Wall Street Journal. It’s about a brand new and exciting subject.

In your editorial “The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court” (Oct. 25), you state the fact that a court wrongly said mail-in ballots could be counted after Election Day. “This didn’t matter,” you add, “because Mr. Biden won the state by 80,555, but the country is lucky the election wasn’t closer. If the election had hung on a few thousand Pennsylvanians, the next President might have been picked by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out.

He’s still got it! The old elegance, the wit, the learning, the flare. I think it’s the “which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out” that impresses me the most. Person, man, woman, camera, tv.

He then does bullet points. Many many many bullet points.

• Attorney General Bill Barr ordered U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain to stand down and not investigate election irregularities.

Whoosh there’s Bill Barr overboard!

• Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook poured over $17 million to interfere in the Pennsylvania election, including $5.5 million on “ballot processing equipment” in Philadelphia and $552,000 for drop boxes where the voting pattern was not possible.

Mark Zuckerberg too? Jeez it will be Lindsey Graham next. They’ll be out there pouring money to interfere until your eyes bleed.

Hilarious, in its own way.

Well, you can surely order a sandwich without any pronouns other than first person, but Gad Saad later explained that his wife had wanted to say “he’ll get the hang of it” to another server (server # 1 is new to the job) but felt nervous about the “he.” But what’s funny, in a frustrating way, is all the explaining that you don’t have to use third person pronouns at all.

WE KNOW!!

We know, we know, we know. We’ve been saying that for years. It doesn’t matter – we still get the pronoun dramatizing.

Originally a comment by Laurent on 8 years.

When I advertised a project at work to plant fruit trees and thus asked people to bring us back seeds or plantlets from their garden, out of 250 people, 1 gave 3 seeds and another one gave 6 young trees. That’s how people commit to a very easy task that would have sucked up tonnes of carbon over 20 years.

Eventually I did and do contribute to planting trees at work, currently possibly worth a commercial value exceeding several thousand bucks (and I don’t count my time).

I’m really amazed, because everywhere there is room for tree planting, even if we avoid places where trees falling are a potential risk. (Though when people argue about the cost of lumberjacks I ask them about the cost of climate change).

There is room for mitigation, quite room, and actually quite mitigation. We won’t avoid the disaster, but we certainly can attenuate its strength. Now.

There isn’t even the need for trees to grow up huge, even if we cut them down after a few years and maintain dense cover and use the wood even for composting it will still displace carbon from the atmosphere.

Saying it and saying you didn’t say it.

Bad Ash. Dishonest Ash. Ash is pretending to think Berrelli’s tweet contained quotation marks, as in: Ash, you said “lesbians were” etc. But there are no quotation marks. Berrelli summarized what Ash said, and she summarized it accurately. Saying “it’d be fair to ask if racism plays a part” is more than close enough to “equivalent to racists.” Accurate summarizing is not “making shit up.”

Bad bad bad Ash.

Another version of the X on passports news:

The US has issued its first passport with an “X” gender designation – a milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who don’t identify as male or female – and expects to be able to offer the option more broadly next year, the state department said on Wednesday.

What rights? What are the “rights” of people who don’t identify as male or female that are different from the rights of anyone else? Spell them out and explain why only people who don’t identify as male or female have them. Is there a “right” to be called neither male nor female? What kind of right would that be? What would it be based on?

And even if it is a right (which I obviously don’t think it is, at least not without further explanation), how is the right squared with the need for passports to do what passports exist to do? How is the right squared with the need for accuracy on official documents?

It’s funny how seldom any of this is even mentioned, let alone discussed. It seems quite obvious that passports with meaningless fake details about ID are less useful than passports that are accurate (because why else do we have to go to all that trouble to get them?), yet we mostly politely don’t mention it in the news accounts.

The US special diplomatic envoy for LGBTQ rights, Jessica Stern, called the moves historic and celebratory, saying they brought the government documents in line with the “lived reality” that there is a wider spectrum of human sex characteristics than is reflected in the previous two designations.

No there isn’t. She means gender characteristics, and passports don’t record those. Passports aren’t about personality or clothes, they’re about a very short list of documented facts. Which of two sexes one is is one of those facts.

“When a person obtains identity documents that reflect their true identity, they live with greater dignity and respect,” Stern said.

Except that in the real world it’s their false identity, however much they feel it reflects the True Ineffable They. Again, for those in the back, passports don’t exist to reflect people’s “true” (i.e. fictional) identities, they exist to record their plain factual ones, for the inspection of officials at airports and border crossings. This is the real world, it’s not fucking high school.

So stupid it burns.

The State Department announced Wednesday that the U.S. has issued its first “X” gender marker on passports, marking a step toward making passports available for non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people throughout the country.

Then what is the point of having sex markers on passports at all? If they’re going to have some that are meaningless why have any?

Passports don’t exist to give people tingly validation feelings. Passports have not until now been unavailable to non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people. Passports are official documents and they’re supposed to tell the truth about the people who have them; that’s pretty much their whole point.

“The Department of State is committed to promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people – including LGBTQI+ persons,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement announcing the move earlier this year.

So it’s issuing fake passports? How does that promote the freedom, dignity, and equality of anyone?

But also…how childish that sounds. How can a branch of government allow itself to sound like a fatuous teenager that way? It’s embarrassing.

The milestone is part of President Joe Biden’s plan to “advance LGBTQ+ equality in America and around the world.” 

How does this nonsense advance equality?

When laydeez are a little dangerous…

A convicted murderer and sex offender from British Columbia, Canada has been denied parole after seeking release from prison shortly after identifying as transgender.

Roger Dale Badour, 73, is currently serving a life sentence for the fatal shooting of a woman in 2011. Badour had been living on the property of Gisele Duckham, 56, at the time of the murder. Following an argument, he fatally shot her, hid her body, and then fled.

At the time, Badour was out on parole and supposed to be living in a halfway house in Victoria, British Columbia on conditions of ceasing contact with women. This condition came after Badour was released into the community from a 7-year prison term for the brutal sexual assault of a pregnant woman.

I guess they weren’t enforcing the “no contact with women” part very well. Or the “live in this halfway house” thing either.

Since identifying as a woman, Badour has already claimed his newfound gender identity has led to him being mistreated on his living unit in a male penetentiary. The question many are asking is whether Badour could potentially be transferred to a women’s prison due to Canadian self-identification laws.

I wonder if Badour self-identifies as not a murderer of women now.

There’s an open letter. Of course there is.

It’s a barely literate open letter, I must say.

An open letter to the BBC regarding an article published by Catherine Lowbridge

Dear BBC Upper Management and Editorial Staff,

The day this open letter is being written (26th October 2022), you published an article on the BBC News website by Caroline Lowbridge titled ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’¹.

Wait. Is it Catherine or Caroline?

You’d think they would at least get that straight before starting to type.

The article headline may use the word “some”, but the clear implication of the article and its headline is that transgender women as a minority group pose a threat to cisgender lesbians, and should therefor have their rights restricted in the UK.

Which rights? There is no “right” for men to try to bully lesbians into having sex with them. Which “rights” would have to be restricted to keep men from bullying lesbians for sex?

Do you mean the entirely fictitious “right” to lie about what you are and be believed? Not a right, pal.

The implications proposed by this article suggest that transgender women generally pose a risk to cisgender lesbians in great enough numbers that it is newsworthy, and something the general public should consider as a common occurence rather than a matter of incredibly rare, isolated experiences.

Define “incredibly.” Also, implications aren’t “proposed.”

Additionally, the article itself acknowledges that outside of this small sample size self selected study there is basically no evidence for the claim that this is happening in any sort of numbers that would justify generalising this as a widespread experience.

In other words “we claim that this happens only a little bit, therefore nobody should pay any attention to it at all.”

The article itself routinely implies that transgender women are not women, uncritically quoting people who call transgender women men without at any point clarifying that this is ignoring their legal status as women in the UK.

Even the law can’t actually make a man a woman. The law can declare a man a trans woman, but declarations don’t change anyone’s sex.

Also, there’s an ever-growing number of men who call themselves women who don’t fit the legal criteria, but we’re ordered to call them women regardless.

The fact that the people cited in this article largely do not acknowledge that transgender women are women, by refering to them as men, should make it clear that they are not representative of the wider community of cisgender lesbians.

When men bully women for sex, the women tend to see those men as men. It’s a hard habit to break, and many of us have no fucking intention of breaking it.

After that there’s a lot of JUST BECAUSE SHE HAS A DEEP VOICE AND IS TWICE AS BIG AS YOU DOESN’T MEAN SHE’S A MAN.

A transgender woman with a deep voice, a square jaw, and a penis that you do not want to have sex with is not a man. She is a woman that you don’t find attractive.

It’s sheer poetry.

The above cited woman also notes she would feel the same if the transgender woman in question had lower surgery. So, she would still feel that a transgender woman is a man, even if said woman had a vagina rather than a penis.

No, sport, because an inverted penis is not a vagina. She would still feel that the trans-identified guy is a guy.

There’s a lot more. It’s a very diffuse, wordy, pompous, boring letter. Trans dogma not good for the verbal skills, I guess.

Stonewall is losing friends.

In case your memory of it has faded that’s from the BBC report on the coercion of lesbians to have sex with men who call themselves lesbians.

Stonewall is the largest LGBT organisation in the UK and Europe. I asked the charity about these issues but it was unable to provide anyone for interview. However, in a statement, chief executive Nancy Kelley likened not wanting to date trans people to not wanting to date people of colour, fat people, or disabled people.

In other words ugly cruel bigotry. In other words Nancy Kelley of Stonewall is saying sexual orientation is ugly cruel bigotry. What do the L and the G stand for again?

She said: “Sexuality is personal and something which is unique to each of us. There is no ‘right’ way to be a lesbian, and only we can know who we’re attracted to.

“Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to. But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.

“We know that prejudice is still common in the LGBT+ community, and it’s important that we can talk about that openly and honestly.”

In other words if you’re a lesbian and you don’t want to have sex with men, you’re a bad person and you should feel bad. Says Stonewall in the person of its CEO.

Oh yes?

Let’s look up Morgan Page cotton ceiling then.

Let’s read My Trans Youth Group Experience with Morgan Page.

Morgan Page was the creator of the Planned Parenthood Toronto workshop “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women” in 2012. And although I had never heard about this until after leaving the trans community, years later, those of us in Morgan’s youth group definitely identified as members of our chosen sex class, which is the cornerstone of the Cotton Ceiling movement: that sex-based attraction can be reclassified as gender-based attraction.

The only context in which lesbians were ever discussed was in regards to “trans lesbians”. Most of the MTFs & male NBs there would lecture the few FTMs and female NBs about our “masculine/male privilege,” explaining to us that they experienced “transmisogyny” and therefore we needed to know when to be quiet and listen. These beliefs and attitudes were essential in the aforementioned relationships between FTMs and older MTFs in the group. I remember one time I was discussing how I didn’t pass somewhere and was treated like a woman and called “dyke”, but they insisted it was just transphobia, and that I could no longer experience misogyny now that I identified as male. The idea that I might be a lesbian or that I might have experienced lesbophobia never came up. Isn’t this the perfect group mindset to facilitate abuse? Is this really the right dynamic for teens trying to discuss their trans issues, family, school, and mental health problems?

Yes and yes, and it’s also the core reversal that is so infuriating about the whole thing – the insistence that men who call themselves women are the most marginalized and persecuted of all, while women are the sneering dominant aristocrats who kick the poor cowering trans women up and down the stairs. This is not correct. Men are bigger and stronger than women and women cannot be the dominant sex.

What I’m saying. They’re not going to do it. They probably literally can’t – in the sense that if they tried they would instantly lose the power to continue.

National plans to cut carbon fall far short of what’s needed to avert dangerous climate change, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Their Emissions Gap report says country pledges will fail to keep the global temperature under 1.5C this century.

The Unep analysis suggests the world is on course to warm around 2.7C with hugely destructive impacts.

But that’s in the future. We don’t do future.

The report finds that when added together, the plans cut greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 by around 7.5% compared to the previous pledges made five years ago.

This is nowhere near enough to keep the 1.5C temperature threshold within sight, say the scientists who compiled the study.

To keep 1.5C alive would require 55% cuts by the same 2030 date. That means the current plans would need to have seven times the level of ambition to remain under that limit.

“To stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C, we have eight years to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions: eight years to make the plans, put in place the policies, implement them and ultimately deliver the cuts,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of Unep.

Do you see that happening? I don’t. If people won’t even stop sitting in their parked cars with the engines running for hours, what’s going to stop them getting on planes and cruise ships? What’s going to stop them commuting to work by car? What’s going to stop them moving to Phoenix or Miami?

Ash Sarkar is also furious.

Not comparable. Race is not basic to sex. Sex, on the other hand, is basic to sex. What sex you are and what sex the other is are basic to whether both of you want to have sex or not. What sex you are is basic to sexual attraction. Race is beside the point.

In ordinary life I’m sure Sarkar knows this, but she’s pretending not to so that she can crap on the LGB Alliance, because that’s the done thing.