Oops you’re not supposed to say it out loud.

Joy Everingham is a Methodist deacon in Canterbury. This isn’t a parody.

Now there’s a headline.

NWHL changes its name to remove ‘women’s’ from title

Yayyyyyyyyyyy wait what?

The National Women’s Hockey League is history. Welcome, Premier Hockey Federation.

North America’s first women’s professional hockey league to pay players a salary announced on Tuesday it is adopting the new name as part of a rebranding strategy.

Well then why not name it the Hotties Hockey Federation? Or how about the Pumpkin Spice Latte Hockey Federation?

“We felt it’s time for our players to be defined by their talent and skill,” Tumminia said. “It’s not like they’re female phenomenal. You’re just phenomenal.”

And the way to underline that point is, as always, to delete the word “women.” Sure.

Metropolitan Riveters captain Madison Packer said the new name levels the playing field.

“Respectfully, I don’t know if men always understand, especially for me, because I encounter it a lot,” Packer said. “We play with the same-sized puck, in the same-sized rink, the same nets. … So to remove that label, not only remove it but in the logo erase the ‘W,’ I think is empowering.”

Oh yes, erasing the W is so empowering.

In billing the change “No Labels, No Limits,” the federation also focused on having its new title be more inclusive by respecting the various gender identities of its players and fanbase.

So they’ll be more inclusive by including men, who will swiftly exclude women altogether? That’s the path to empowerment is it?

H/t Sackbut

Greg Olear starts with the Texas law and the Supreme Court’s “Sure, go right ahead.”

After a day of excruciating silence, the Court voted 5-4 to let it be, citing some pusillanimous procedural technicality. Chief Justice Roberts sided with the three “liberal” justices, but the five other Federalist Society stooges on the bench—Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh—gave Texas the green light to go full Fascist, thus confirming what most of us feared all along: that Roe v. Wade is not safe, that the government is at war with women, that the radical Catholics who took over the Court are pro-tyranny.

We’re stuck with them except maybe for Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh is different. There is a clear playbook to removing him from the bench. And this is what must be done. Not because we don’t like his politics, although we don’t; not because we think he’s an asshole, although he is; not because he had a hissy fit at his confirmation hearing, although he did. No, we must remove him because at least twice in his life, some unknown entity endowed him with major infusions of cash, and Kavanaugh lied, under oath, about the provenance of that cash (he said it came from his Thrift Savings Plan)—and about several other things besides. He’s compromised, six ways from Sunday, and we simply can’t have that on the Supreme Court, no matter which way he votes.

While all of Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are beholden to some degree to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society, and the other dark money organizations that helped install them, only Kavanaugh is owned. And we still don’t know who holds the paper.

Earlier this year, in Part Two of our five-part series, LB and I produced a painstakingly detailed examination of the red flags concerning Brett Kavanaugh’s finances, which show two enormous and out-of-the-blue influxes of revenue. The first, the down payment on the Chevy Chase house, came through just before his nomination to the D.C. circuit court in 2006; the second, the payment in full of his onerous credit card balances, immediately preceded his nomination to SCOTUS in 2018.

But apparently the Democrats can’t or won’t summon up the will to investigate.

I’m reading Jesse Singal’s review of Helen Joyce’s book in the Times, and I’m interrupting my reading to say this one thing.

A primary goal of those who adhere to gender-identity ideology is to enact “gender self-identification,” or the idea “that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology,” into norm and law. According to self-ID, as I’ll call it henceforth, once an individual reveals their gender identity, that trumps anyone else’s understanding of it. If you say you are a man or a woman, or both or neither, that is exactly what you are.

When followed faithfully, gender-identity ideology has important implications. 

Yes, it does, but this is why I had to interrupt my own reading – it does, but I would hate the ideology even if it didn’t because I hate being bullied into endorsing a lie. The implications are important, but the claim itself is also important. It’s important because things like that are important. We do need to be able to see what we see, to rely on our own senses and perceptions, to have a stable sense of some basic realities.

I say “basic” because once we go beyond “basic” our senses and perceptions are helpless or wrong or both. We have no idea how big the moon is or how far away it is just from our own perceptions, and you can apply that to an infinite number of other realities, so I’m not saying our perceptions are infallible, but I am saying there are some basics that shouldn’t be thrown out the window on a god damn whim.

Sexual dimorphism is one of those basics, and I resent being ordered to pretend otherwise. I take it personally, and so should everyone. Don’t tell me to repeat a lie and call it true. Just don’t. Back off.

That’s it, that’s the interruption.

Brazil could be having its own insurrection moment.

Supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro pushed through police barriers to advance towards Congress in Brasilia on Monday night, the eve of a day of planned demonstrations to back the far-right leader in his dispute with the judiciary.

Trucks honked their horns as hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters dressed in the green-and-yellow national colors cheered them through, videos posted on social media showed.

But they failed however to reach their target of surrounding the Supreme Court, which some demonstrators have planned to occupy in a protest modeled on the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

…

Thousands of demonstrators are expected to march in the capital on Tuesday – Brazil’s independence day – and in the financial center Sao Paulo to support Bolsonaro in his clash with the judiciary over changes to the voting system.

Critics fear the president is encouraging supporters to the point that they might try to invade the court.

Change voting systems to keep the fascist in power, and unleash violence to underline the point. Belarus, Brazil, the US – following the playbook.

More than 150 left-leaning former presidents and party leaders from across the globe signed an open letter criticizing Bolsonaro for encouraging what they called an imitation of the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, staged by Trump supporters after he gave a speech falsely claiming his election defeat was the result of fraud.

The demonstrations are “stoking fears of a coup d’état in the world’s third-largest democracy,” the letter said.

Bolsonaro said on Friday the demonstrations will be an ultimatum to the Supreme Court justices who had taken what he called “unconstitutional” decisions against his government.

Let’s ask Judith Butler what she thinks.

It’s announcing plans day north of the border.

Nicola Sturgeon is to set out the Scottish government’s plans for the year to come at Holyrood.

So she did that and @theSNP tweeted them all.

Yes of course the biggest threats women face come from abusive men, one way and another, but how can she possibly know that none of those abusive men will simply declare themselves trans under the SNP “reforms” of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill?

She can’t. That’s all: she can’t.

Eliza speaks the truth.

For the sake of the Twitter haters I’ll just arrange the rest of what she said as an essay.

Gender identity problematizes, denounces, and confuses what women need to make clear: Our sex matters.

Women’s healthcare depends on the recognition of sex difference on the part of medical providers, scientific researchers, health communicators, and patients.

Gender identity trades clear language and targeted research into how sex differences affect health and medical care in exchange for “non-prostate-havers” and medical records that don’t even record the patient’s (objective, unchangeable) sex.

To organize politically in our own interests, women must be able to define ourselves as a sex class and focus our time and energy on issues that affect women on the basis of sex.

Feminism is not and cannot be the movement for the liberation of “all marginalized people” or it will fail to meet the unique needs of women and girls. There are many worthy causes in the world but it’s OK for one movement to focus exclusively on women and girls.

Trans activism demands that women redefine ourselves in a way that cuts sex out of the picture altogether. When women are redefined as feminine stereotypes, rather than female humans, the constituency and targets of advocacy change.

Under gender identity ideology, the ways that sex matters to women’s lives becomes not just unfashionable but unspeakable. But the inequalities and injustices women and girls face on the basis of sex don’t go away just because we’re not supposed to talk about them anymore.

When women have to constantly defend our decision to focus on the rights of women and girls, that saps time and energy that could have gone elsewhere: to fighting for abortion access and paid maternity leave in the US, curbing sex-trafficking, preventing child marriage…

The consequences of “rethinking” the category of “woman,” as Judith Butler so coolly puts it, are clear: gender identity is a contrived attack on the rights, ability to organize, & very language of the People Previously Known As Women. It makes *everything* we need to do harder.

Speaking of that interview with Judith Butler…

And so she did. It’s an excellent letter.

Judith Butler doing her tedious thing:

…what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of “women” to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.

Yes, of course: what it means changes, the category changes, and obviously securing greater freedoms entails that, not least because it’s the same thing. We change the meaning by gaining the freedoms. That doesn’t mean we “change” it by including men in it. That’s not change but reversal, not change but obliteration.

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women.

Peak non sequitur. The “so” that could lift the Burj Khalifa off the ground with one finger.

It is very appalling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with rightwing attacks on gender. The anti-gender ideology movement is not opposing a specific account of gender, but seeking to eradicate “gender” as a concept or discourse, a field of study, an approach to social power. Sometimes they claim that “sex” alone has scientific standing, but other times they appeal to divine mandates for masculine domination and difference. They don’t seem to mind contradicting themselves.

Well that’s a pack of lies. No it isn’t, no we don’t.

The Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling) in favor of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism. So they will not be part of the coalition that seeks to fight the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.

Very scholarly, talking untrue shit about “the Terfs.”

Wow. Years of collaboration just torched as if they had never been.

They WHAT??

First, the claim:

Next, the email:

Is it August 2015 again? The echo is strong. There were three SBM editors and Hall was one of them, but suddenly a minor contributor becomes “an editor” to bolster the Gorski-Novella excuses for plunging the knife into Hall’s back.

Republicans in the spotlight for encouraging violent sedition resort to threats to avoid attention for encouraging violent sedition. It’s a bit like pouring ammonia on a burn.

Top Republicans under scrutiny for their role in the events of 6 January have embarked on a campaign of threats and intimidation to thwart a Democratic-controlled congressional panel that is scrutinizing the Capitol attack and opening an expanded investigation into Donald Trump.

It’s almost as if bullying is literally all they know how to do.

The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, decried the select committee’s investigation as a partisan exercise and threatened to retaliate against any telecommunications company that complied with the records requests.

Thus demonstrating what a law-abiding and conscientious guy he is.

[H]is remarks – which members on the select committee privately consider to be at best, harassment, and at worst, obstruction of justice – reflect McCarthy’s realization that he could himself be in the crosshairs of the committee, the source said.

…

The statement from McCarthy asserted, without citing any law, that it would be illegal for the technology companies to comply with the records requests – even though congressional investigators have obtained phone and communications records in the past.

…

Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee and the former lead impeachment manager in Trump’s second trial, said that he was appalled by McCarthy’s remarks, which he described as tantamount to obstruction of justice.

“He is leveling threats against people cooperating with a congressional investigation,” Raskin said. “Why would the minority leader of the House of Representatives not be interested in our ability to get all of the facts in relation to the January 6th attack?”

A question that answers itself.

It’s always worth being reminded of how illegitimate the whole situation is. Bush 2 lost the popular vote, Trump lost the popular vote, McConnell blocked Merrick Garland because he could and then rushed in Amy Coney Barrett because he could. A minority rules over us.

The confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett did more than install a supermajority of conservatives in the court. The locus of power on the court shifted from the more mainstream conservatism of Justice Roberts to the more ideological and rigid extremes of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

As the Texas ruling underscored, this is a court far more conservative than the nation whose constitutional meanings it is meant to protect. And it is a court that owes its composition to the triumph of anti-democratic processes, in which a majority of its members were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and/or were confirmed by a bloc of senators elected by a minority of voters.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

This one is hilarious – it’s so unabashed in its FOCUS ON ME rule for life. Hello world, unlearn everything you know to fit me into your worldview.

It’s 2021 people! You should have already been focusing all your attention on me! What’s the holdup?!

Also I love the time-sensitive aspect. What happens in 2022 I wonder? Will everything have been reversed so that we have to focus on “Them” in order to fit “Them” in our worldview all over again but opposite?

Huh. It’s not boys sexually abusing girls, it’s generic “children” doing it to generic “children” – according to the BBC.

Reports of sex abuse between children double in two years

Between children? Really?

Reports of children sexually abusing other children doubled in the two years to 2019, according to police figures obtained by BBC Panorama.

But were they reports of “children” doing this?

It’s not until paragraph 5 that we get

And overall, a big majority of cases involved boys abusing girls.

You don’t say.

Well of course they do.

Their “conceptions” of “gender” are “more nuanced” because that’s what’s available to them. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right. That question still has to be decided on the merits.

Sometimes teenagers are indeed in the vanguard in a good way: civil rights activists in the 1960s for example. Even then, though, there were plenty of teenagers on the other side, and besides that, not every vanguard is On the Right Side of History.

By “gender” Jack Turban means sex as well as gender. By “nuanced” he doesn’t mean “people can wear whatever they like” but “men are women if they say they are.” Some things shouldn’t be “nuanced” in that way. What “woman” means shouldn’t be “nuanced” in that way.

It would matter less if Jack Turban were not chief fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Elliot Kirschner on Lassen National Park, which he knows well from childhood summer vacations:

For those who have never been to Lassen, or maybe haven’t even heard of it, it is one of the true gems of the National Park system, although far less famous than its cousins like Yellowstone and Yosemite. It’s a place shaped by an active volcano, Lassen Peak, which last erupted a little over a century ago, and all the geothermal activity that goes with it. Its streams, lakes, meadows, and forests teem with wildlife and vistas both epic and intimate. As much as the sights, I remember the smells. Around the bubbling mud baths came the pungent odor of rotten eggs from the hydrogen sulphide rising from the bowels of the earth. But in the forests, the smell was sweet and full of life, a blend of the numerous species of trees. 

But not any more. Now it smells like smoke and destruction. Word is that more than half of it was eaten by the Dixie Fire.

Out West the climate crisis means increased droughts which turn even high-altitude forests into torch fuel. In other parts of the country, the effects are of course quite different. While we are praying for rain, swaths of the eastern half of the country are getting far too much of it. The scenes out of Louisiana, then up through the interior, and out to New Jersey and New York and the rest of the Northeast are heartbreaking. If only we could take some of that water out here. If only we could restore more of a sense of balance. If only we had done a better job of preparing. If only we were doing more now.

As I read the piece I can see a giant cruise ship heading out of Elliott Bay into Puget Sound and up to Alaska, burning through 80,000 thousand gallons of fuel a day. We could just skip that you know. I realize it’s a big industry that makes a lot of $$$ but cruises are not a necessity of life. We could make some effort to do something about the problem, but we’re not. I keep finding myself thinking about little energy-saving moves and then remembering those 80,000 gallons a day – for just one ship. We’re not even trying.

Bottom line? Women stink. Not just “stink”=are bad but STINK: smell of rotting fish.

The new misogyny is indistinguishable from the old misogyny.

There’s a very simple explanation.

Melania Trump, perhaps the most private first lady in modern history, has retreated more and more from the spotlight since departing Washington last January.

…She views her husband’s continued impact on the GOP landscape as his job, not hers. “You’re not going to see her at rallies or campaign events, even if he ‘officially’ says he’s running again,” said another person aware of the disinterest Trump has shown in supporting the former President.

Lack of interest, not disinterest.

…so often was the answer “no” when Trump was asked by then-candidate Donald Trump’s staff to appear at events that eventually, “We just stopped asking altogether,” said a political operative who worked on team Trump in the early days. Notoriously weary of public scrutiny and press coverage, Trump participated in fewer than five on-camera interviews and no print media interviews when she was first lady, an unheard of scarcity.

Yes and guess why she’s wary of public scrutiny and press coverage. It’s because there’s nothing there. She’s an empty shell. It’s not because she’s glamorously “private,” it’s because she has absolutely nothing to say. Her head is empty. So is her husband’s but he fills the void with yammering. She fills it with…I have no idea what. Looking out the window maybe.

“The Trump voter puts (Melania Trump) on a pedestal. They’re awed by the way she looks or the way she basically doesn’t express ideas or opinions, which they see as stoicism and loyalty. For them, that’s enough for fealty,” the operative said.

Hahaha yes sure that’s what it is. It’s not that she’s a blank, it’s that she’s loyal and stoical. She’s trans interesting.

Alex Massie points out the familiar inconsistency:

This Scottish government has no time for those who deny the reality of climate change but it is an administration busy enthusiastically denying the reality of biological sex. We must follow the science on one matter but abandon it on the other.

I can see doing that in some contexts – there are some where science is beside the point. Moral conflicts for instance aren’t a scientific issue, although science may be able to bolster a case. But when the core issue is as brutally physical as this one, just drawing a big X through the science is stupid.

Nicola Sturgeon, of course, is “a feminist to her fingertips”, which makes one wonder why she pursues an agenda that would redefine the idea and reality of womanhood so completely the term would, in effect, lose any and all usefulness.

She does it by saying there’s no clash of rights, none at all.

Any appearance to the contrary — such as the fact the majority of women’s organisations who responded to the government’s latest consultation on its plans opposed them — must be ignored or wished away. Women’s experiences and their fears are not so very important after all.

But then that is so often the case. The wonder is not that women are sometimes exasperated but that they are not, frankly, in a state of permanent revolt. 

Oh but I am.

Talking about “people with cervixes” or “people who menstruate” — as though “woman” has now become an inflammatory term — is a means by which women are stripped of their dignity and, worse than that, denied the experience of their own bodies, their own lives. There is something ugly, even something dehumanising, about such language and yet it is ever more fashionable and ever more widespread.

Hence the state of permanent revolt.

As a matter of justice and decency, trans people must have space and opportunity to lead their lives as they see fit. Neither they nor the government, however, has the right to corrupt meaning like this. Which, again, is why this is such a revealing argument. For it is one between those who think truth must matter and words must have meaning, however inconvenient this may be, and those who think wishful thinking may replace truth and by doing so make fantasy a new kind of reality.

I do think truth matters, as it happens.

This starts out seeming to be a serious and interesting analysis of a familiar slogan:

I’m a philosopher and bioethicist. My research suggests “my body, my choice” was a crucial idea at the time of Roe to emphasize ownership over bodily and health care decisions. But I believe the debate has since moved on – reproductive justice is about more than owning your body and your choice; it is about a right to health care.

I was interested because I got into a brief wrangle on Facebook by saying I’ve always thought the slogan was stupid, because it’s not true. Choices about one’s body are not always solely personal. A couple of men replied to call me stupid with no further argument so I deleted my comment, but I remain interested in what’s wrong with the slogan. But…I hit a bump all too soon.

It makes sense that “my body, my choice” gained steam in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade – a time when reproductive rights activists were fighting for the government to stay out of abortion decisions. Roe did just that by determining that abortion is a private choice between a pregnant person and their physician.

Sigh. So much for the serious analysis, so much for the philosopher and bioethicist. If we can’t even say precisely and accurately what we’re talking about, then what is the point?

We can’t possibly talk about abortion and reproductive rights and the politics around them if we throw a dropcloth over the fact that it’s women’s rights that are at stake. If we pretend it’s undifferentiated “people” who need these rights then we can’t talk about why they’ve been denied them for all these centuries. How a philosopher and bioethicist can think that matters less than pampering the projected wounded feelings of a few deluded women who are pretending to be men is beyond me.

And it clots up her language in the worst way.

As a private matter, the Supreme Court determined that the government cannot interfere with one’s right to an abortion prior to fetal viability.

Not “one’s right” – a woman’s right. As of course she knows, but apparently we’ve now decided that we can’t say that. If we can’t say that we can’t defend women.

The point is self-ownership is not worth much if there are no good or even available options from which to choose. This was true for the laborer in Locke’s day, and it is true for the person seeking abortion care now.

And why? Because that person is a woman, and her rights must be curtailed because she does the human-making.

Laws like mandated waiting periods for those seeking an abortion get enacted without evidence-based medical benefit… Clinic closures force those needing abortions to travel longer distances to find a provider… Accessing care in these states when it is restricted in one’s home state creates additional costs related to travel, child care and lost wages or time off work. Many abortion-seekers must also pay out of pocket for their medical care. For 40 years, the Hyde Amendment has prohibited federal spending on abortion. This impacts those insured through Medicaid…One could argue “my body, my choice” is meaningless if a person cannot enact their choice

All the marked words are replacements for woman or women or her.

This shit really needs to stop.