Hilary Mantel:

Mantel also waded into the controversy surrounding Rowling’s beliefs on transgender rights which have divided the literary world.

The Harry Potter author wrote a personal essay last year which included examples of where she believes demands by transgender activists were dangerous to women, which were described by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups as divisive and transphobic.

Later Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood and others wrote an open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” was leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.

Mantel said the online attacks on Rowling after her essay were “unjustified and shameful”.

She added: “It is barbaric that a tiny minority should take command of public discourse and terrify those who disagree with them.”

She said: “I recently found myself ‘misgendered.’ I received a university publication, with news items relating to alumni, where I was referred to as ‘they’, not ‘she.’

“My books were ‘their books.’ I wasn’t singled out – the other alumni were similarly treated.

“I thought: ‘Being a woman means a lot to me. I do not want my womanhood confiscated in print.’”

And women in general don’t want women erased in print. We’re already erased, we’re struggling to be unerased, and along comes gender ideology to erase us all over again. Sick of this shit.

To go all nostalgic for a moment…again Trump is padding the books by paying himself out of his PAC.

Tenants at Trump Tower have been floundering, which means he’s not collecting those high high rents.

But through all that — as Trump Tower has dealt with imploding tenants, political backlash and a broader, pandemic-related slump in Manhattan office leasing since last year — it has been able to count on one reliable, high-paying tenant: former president Donald Trump’s own political operation.

Starting in March, one of his committees, Make America Great Again PAC, paid $37,541.67 per month to rent office space on the 15th floor of Trump Tower — a space previously rented by his campaign — according to campaign-finance filings and a person familiar with the political action committee.

This may not be the most efficient use of donors’ money: The person familiar with Trump’s PAC said that its staffers do not regularly use the office space. Also, for several months, Trump’s PAC paid the Trump Organization $3,000 per month to rent a retail kiosk in the tower’s lobby — even though the lobby was closed.

Sly. Of course it’s not efficient, it’s not meant to be efficient. The word you need is lucrative. It’s money in Trump’s pocket. Efficiency is neither here nor there.

Trump is continuing a practice that was a hallmark of his presidency by exploiting loose regulations — and his own supporters’ trust — to convert political donations into private revenue for himself.

So surprising!

The fraudulence and hucksterism of this bit are particularly shiny.

One floor up from Marcraft, on Trump Tower’s 19th floor, are the offices of the Legacy Business School, which once boasted Kris Jenner as its chairwoman. (She reportedly resigned a few months after the school opened in 2016.) The school is expensive — its $70,000 annual tuition is $19,000 higher than Harvard University’s.

But Harvard doesn’t hold classes in Trump Tower.

“It is not just an educational campus,” the school’s website says, making the tower one of its main selling points. “It is studying at the most powerful building in the world.”

laugh-vomit

Never mind your Harvard in those boring educational unpowerful old brick buildings in Cambridge. Yuck. For a mere 19k a year more you can study in The Most Power Full Building!! Obviously that Power rubs off on you because of your mere presence in the Building – as long as you “study” [wink wink nudge nudge] inside it. Power Full Empowermenting Powery Buildings Forevaaaaaa!!!!

The “school” is a flop though, and owes Trump a lot of back rent. So much for Power.

But Trump still has the dear reliable PAC.

At Trump Tower, the former president’s PAC appears to be a quiet tenant. Under typical office conditions, with about one worker per 175 square feet, that much space might hold 30 people. But the PAC’s latest campaign-finance filing only listed three employees at that address as of June. And even those three don’t always work there, according to the person familiar with the PAC: They work from home, or follow Trump to his clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J.

Never you mind. They have to water the plants.

Glosswitch on abortion and pregnancy and women:

Whenever I try to write about abortion, I feel one thing is holding me back: the absence of the perfect analogy. It’s similar to the way I used to think that if only I tried hard enough and spent enough time on social media, I’d conjure up The Tweet That Stops Brexit.

As always with Victoria I had to pause to savor that before I could read on.

The trouble is, pregnancy is not like anything else. If it was, the whole edifice of patriarchy wouldn’t exist. There would be no singling out and controlling of one half of the human race by the other, because we wouldn’t have something that couldn’t be replicated in any way. Attempts to make pregnancy into something else – the equivalent of paid work, or unpaid work, or blood donation, or being a violinist who can’t play due to being hooked up to another human being – never quite succeed. What you demand of someone when you insist that they continue a pregnancy against their will cannot be demanded of another person in any other context, in any other way.

Which is why it’s demanded so ferociously, which explains a lot.

The uniqueness of pregnancy, the fact that it can’t be categorised, makes people uncomfortable around it. Not just your stereotypical anti-abortion right-wingers, but pro-choice left-wingers, too. They will make the abortion debate about anything but pregnancy itself, and what it means for the status of women as a sex class in relation to men…

For several years now, it’s slightly horrified me that liberal feminists in the US have taken to dressing as handmaids in order to protest abortion restrictions, while simultaneously cheering on the rise of commercial surrogacy, ignoring the class exploitation and replication of racialised reproductive injustice, and viewing states which remove the right of surrogates who change their minds after giving birth as more, not less, progressive.

…

I don’t think it’s possible to understand why abortion is so important without understanding, equally, why pregnancy is. How can you make the case that the alternative to abortion is life-changing if you are also invested in draining it of meaning?

Just read the whole thing.

Always bring your zip ties with you.

Police arrested a 40-year-old Arizona [father] after he stormed into an elementary school principal’s office with a friend wielding plastic handcuffs, insisting the administration broke the law by asking his child and six others to wear a mask and quarantine after being in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

Ya know, even if he’d been right about the administration’s breaking the law, it’s not his job to do the arresting.

“I can tell you the end result of that incident was we did make one arrest for trespassing,” Sgt. Richard Gradillas of the Tucson, Arizona, Police Department told The Daily Beast, identifying the dad arrested as Rishi Rambaran.

So it wasn’t the administration that got arrested.

Two men accompanied Rambaran on Thursday as he ambushed Principal Diane Vargo while she sat with another educator at the Mesquite Elementary School in Tucson. One of the men, Kelly Walker, livestreamed the incident on his Instagram, explaining that Rambaran, who is also known as “Reese,” had called him and asked him to be there in case he needed backup.

The third man, who has not been identified, stood in the doorway of Vargo’s office with a fistful of “law enforcement-grade” zip ties at the ready—as the trio was prepared to make a citizen’s arrest, Walker said. (The livestream video has since been deleted.)

The school has no right to try to keep a lethal virus out of the school!

Walker owns a coffee shop that hosts luminaries like Dinesh D’Souza.

Next month, Walker, who compared Thursday’s elementary school dust-up to Rosa Parks’ struggle for equal rights, will be welcoming Matthew Lohmeier, a disgraced Space Force lieutenant colonel who was relieved of his post in May over a self-published book warning of an impending “white genocide,” as well as a “neo-Marxist agenda” within the military “designed to patiently and methodically overthrow the US government and replace it with a communist dictatorship.”

But don’t you see? It’s all joined up! Masks – grumpy checkers at the supermarket – Denny’s closing early – people earning FIFTEEN DOLLARS an hour – masks – Joan Crawford – masks –

Walker also claims to believe that the U.S. is “on a sure and certain path to democide,” as he wrote in late August, comparing government mask mandates and vaccine guidance to the “Holocaust in Germany, the Warsaw Ghetto genocide, the murder of millions of Russians and Chinese under Communist regimes, the Killing Fields of Cambodia.”

Anti-government sentiment aside, Walker asked for—and received—a PPP loan in May 2020 for nearly $13,000. It was fully forgiven by the Small Business Administration, according to ProPublica’s PPP tracker.

Yes but people make FIFTEEN DOLLARS AN HOUR working at McDonalds! It’s sheer Nazism and democide.

Oh god maybe we haven’t sufficiently taken into account the role of sheer stupidity.

Pink News headline:

Trans adults twice as likely to die as cis adults, eye-opening study finds

Very eye-opening.

The author of this howler is the reliable Vic Parsons.

Trans adults are twice as likely to die as cis adults, according to an analysis of almost 50 years of medical records from an Amsterdam gender clinic.

The headline you could “meh” because headlines are notoriously prone to error (and are usually composed by an editor), but now we’re in the subhead and still saying it. And all the way into the article…

Trans women had particularly high risks of death, and are nearly three times more likely to die than cis women and twice as likely as cis men, with the most common causes including HIV-related illnesses, heart disease, lung cancer and suicide.

Trans men had similar mortality rates to cis men, but were twice as likely to die as cis women, especially from non-natural causes like suicide.

Still he doesn’t spot it.

Thick as a brick.

It will be all over Twitter before the paint has dried.

A win for safeguarding:

A whistleblower who claims she was “vilified” by an NHS gender identity clinic after raising concerns about the safety of children undergoing treatment has been awarded £20,000 in damages.

Sonia Appleby, 62, a social worker and psychotherapist, was “seen as hostile” and subjected to “quasi-disciplinary” proceedings after raising issues with managers at the Tavistock and Portman Trust, a tribunal ruled.

Appleby, who started working at the trust in 2004 and is the safeguarding lead for children, was awarded damages for “significant” injury to her feelings in a judgment handed down by a central London employment tribunal on Friday.

A few more cracks in the edifice.

Appleby had raised concerns about what the Gender Identity Development Service was doing to children.

Run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the service — the only one of its kind in England — has been at the centre of controversy over its treatment of young people, including the provision of drugs known as puberty blockers to children as young as 10.

In December, the High Court ruled that children under 16 considering gender reassignment were unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to use of the drugs, and said court authorisation should be sought for the treatment.

The ruling is being challenged by the Tavistock, and at an appeal hearing in July, the trust said the drugs gave children distressed by their birth sex time to consider “options”.

Yes but the “time to consider” comes at a high price. It’s now more widely understood that it’s not a simple pause: the drugs cause irreversible effects…or more bluntly, damage. Maybe for some people it’s worth it, but it’s not something to do lightly.

Referrals to GIDS have risen sharply in recent years, from 1,408 in 2016-17 to 2,728 in 2019-20, the tribunal heard, leading to individual caseloads rising and putting “considerable pressure” on staff.

Also hinting that maybe just maybe there is some social influencing going on.

Last night, Appleby said taking the NHS trust to an employment tribunal was an “overwhelming decision”.

“I am naturally extremely pleased about the outcome and want to thank my legal team and all those who supported me during the tribunal process,” she said.

Good.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on False marketing.

It’s fair enough to say that a single incident (or a small number of incidents) doesn’t change one’s overall view of what the optimal policy should be to a given issue. We don’t accept the anti-vaxxer argument that a single death from a vaccine means that vaccines are dangerous and should not be approved or mandated. We don’t think that men should be banned from leaving their homes at night, even if it might prevent some violent crimes. The “if it saves ONE life (or avoids ONE assault, etc.) then it’s worth it” argument doesn’t hold water.

But Penny really should be re-evaluating her position here, because this isn’t just a matter of cost-benefit analysis, or a “bad apple” or two. There seems to be a fundamental contradiction between Penny’s original position (it’s perfectly fine for a male-bodied person to strut around a women’s changeroom naked as long as they say they’re a woman, and the only blame should attach to the person, adult or child, who fails to avert her eyes from the penis) and her apparent concession now that this individual was a “predator” who is a “disgrace” and committed a “crime.”

After all, what, in Penny’s eyes, did this predator do at WiSpa that was wrong? There’s no indication that the actual conduct at WiSpa is different from what was previously alleged/reported. Only the known details of the perpetrator’s background have changed. How did he go from “poor innocent person being discriminated against despicably simply for being naked in a place where she had every right to be” to “predator who committed a crime,” when the actual conduct has not apparently changed? How did the complainants at WiSpa go from “evil fucking TERFs who should stop looking at other people’s genitals and oppressing minorities” to “victims of a crime”?

It’s not a coherent position to say “it’s ok to strut around a women’s changeroom displaying your penis, provided that you don’t have a history of convictions for sexual offenses.” The impact on the other patrons is the same regardless of the penis-waver’s personal history or subjective belief, neither of which they can really ascertain. And of course, savvy sexual offenders can now confine their exhibitionism to these situations, in which case the Laurie Pennys of the world will insist that they aren’t sexual offenders at all.

What does Penny advise a woman to do in the future if she’s confronted with a situation like this? Or the staff at a spa? Check the penis-haver’s identification and run a criminal background check to determine whether it’s ok to be upset, or to take any action? Not only is that impractical, but I suspect that Penny would insist it’s a vile discriminatory practice to insist on background checks for penis-havers in the women’s changeroom — indeed, the second quoted tweet says as much.

Democracy Now is all the way on board with erasing women.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn to a major setback for reproductive rights. As of midnight last night, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to go into effect that bans abortion after six weeks. No other six-week ban has ever gone into effect in the United States. At six weeks, many people don’t even know they’re pregnant.

If it were “people” the law wouldn’t exist. It’s not “people” who are controlled and bullied and sadistically punished in this way, it’s a specific subset of “people” who are. Amy Goodman is one herself so you’d think she’d get it.

The law is seen as a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that enshrined the right of women to choose to have an abortion, by striking down Texas laws that criminalized the procedure.

The new Texas law is unique. It empowers private citizens — not government officials — to file a civil lawsuit against patients, medical workers, or even a patient’s family or friends who, quote, “aid and abet” an abortion — or a taxi driver who drives a woman to a clinic…

There you go! You can do it. But do it passim, instead of forcing us to be grateful that you do it some of the time. Don’t erase us at all.

Anyway it doesn’t last long. She talks to Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, asking her if this is the most extreme law so far.

NANCY NORTHUP: Well, it’s the most extreme that’s ever gone into effect. And as you pointed out, this morning, unfortunately, in Texas, the clinics can’t be open to provide abortions any later than six weeks. And 85% of people seeking abortions in Texas do so after six weeks, since many people don’t even know they’re pregnant yet at six weeks.

…

You know, our client, Whole Woman’s Health, was open until 11:59 p.m. last night seeing patients, because people wanted to get in and exercise their right and make the decisions for their life, health and future, right up to the midnight hour.

How embarrassing that it’s called Whole Woman’s Health, when it’s people who wanted to get in.

This is a great time to shoot ourselves in the foot by obscuring the fact that attacks on abortion are attacks on women.

Heather Cox Richardson on Texas and the Supreme Court and civil rights:

The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right.

Since World War II, the Supreme Court has defended civil rights from state laws that threaten them. During the Great Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to use the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net—this is when we got Social Security—and promote infrastructure. But racist Democrats from the South balked at racial equality under this new government.

After World War II, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Republican appointed by Richard Nixon, the Supreme Court set out to make all Americans equal before the law. They tried to end segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools. They protected the right of married couples to use contraception in 1965. They legalized interracial marriage in 1967. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, they tried to give women control over their own reproduction by legalizing abortion.

They based their decisions on the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. Congress developed this amendment after legislatures in former Confederate states passed “Black Codes” that severely limited the rights and protections for formerly enslaved people. Congress intended for the powers in the Fourteenth to enable the federal government to guarantee that African Americans had the same rights as white Americans, even in states whose legislatures intended to keep them in a form of quasi-slavery.

Justices in the Warren and Burger courts argued that the Fourteenth Amendment required that the Bill of Rights apply to state governments as well as to the federal government. This is known as the “incorporation doctrine,” but the name matters less than the concept: states cannot abridge an individual’s rights, any more than the federal government can. This doctrine dramatically expanded civil rights.

Those who don’t like this expansion call it “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench.”

This is the foundation for today’s “originalists” on the court. They are trying to erase the era of legislation and legal decisions that constructed our modern nation.

An obstacle to that project is decades of Supreme Court precedent. The Texas law gets around that by making private citizens the enforcers rather than the state.

A state has undermined the power of the federal government to protect civil rights. It has given individuals who disagree with one particular right the power to take it away from their neighbors. But make no mistake: there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much of the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II years.

On September 4, 1957, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a crowd of angry white people barred nine Black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The white protesters chanted: “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”

In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower used the federal government to protect the constitutional rights of the Little Rock Nine from the white vigilantes who wanted to keep them second-class citizens. In 2021, the Supreme Court has handed power back to the vigilantes.

It’s a nightmare.

The Times talks to Graham Linehan:

Over the past four years he has lost almost everything, campaigning obsessively, not against trans rights, he insists — “I know more trans people than the people who call me transphobic” — but for women’s rights.

Of course he insists, because it’s true. The defense of women’s rights is framed as an attack on trans rights via the expedient of never bothering to explain what “trans rights” are and who says so and why we have to defend them at the expense of women’s rights. There is no “right” to force the world to pretend to believe your fantasy about yourself.

With his wife he was part of the writing team behind the 2016 pilot episode of Motherland but Linehan left midway through the creation of the first series, broadcast the following year. By then he was becoming embroiled in sexual politics and he links his rising interest in the trans rights debate to his work during the campaign in Ireland to decriminalise abortion.

He and Helen took part in a short film made by Amnesty International, which focused on their own tragic case. After an 11-week pregnancy, Helen was advised by doctors in London to terminate the pregnancy because her foetus had been found to have a condition known as acrania, and there was no chance that the baby would survive longer than an hour after birth. In Dublin Helen would have been forced to carry the pregnancy or face a 14-year prison sentence for procuring an illegal abortion. The film about their experience, says Linehan, “helped to moved the needle in many ways”.

See also: Texas.

Then something took him by surprise. “It was such an odd thing but I was in Dublin at a protest. Someone was going, ‘Women’s right to abortion!’ And we went, ‘Yeah!’ Then they said, ‘And trans people need to have their operations paid for by the state!’ And we went, ‘What?’

So they went “Terf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“I did what everyone does: you’re very polite, calling for debate. You say things that you cannot imagine anyone would disagree with, like ‘a lesbian does not have a penis’. And yet the pushback was so ferocious.”

…

He emphasises repeatedly that he has trans friends and says many agree with his views. He distinguishes them from the activists, who he reckons take their cue from Donald Trump, to achieve their ends at any costs.

Part of the bully class, he explains.

He cites two of the best known trans women sports competitors. “Laurel Hubbard is Trump; Rachel McKinnon, the cyclist, is Trump,” he says. “Anyone who can get on a bike, or beat women easily and take the money, and take the crown, that’s a narcissist, that’s a narcissistic psychopath. These are the people who are being emboldened by activists who think they’re helping transsexuals”.

Ok but why can’t he just go back to comedy? Huh? Huh?

“And do what? Dance round the maypole? I’m not in the mood. I’m happy to put on the hat with the bells on it but only when the house isn’t on fire, but the house is on fire. The. House. Is. On. Fire.”

Women’s rights are on fire, and the right to tell the obvious truth is on fire.

No, I don’t think that’s right.

If it doesn’t include violence in some form, including the form of a permanent inescapable situation/relationship in which the woman does not have the option of saying no, then it’s not rape. But a relationship in which the woman can’t say no is a rape-relationship, for sure. And they’re not rare, of course – arranged marriages with no consent for the woman are all too common in some parts of the world.

Maybe that’s what she’s thinking of? A life in which consent to sex isn’t an option and isn’t even thinkable? But that is rape; lifelong rape.

If that’s not what she’s thinking of, then she’s just wrong, as so often.

Slate’s trans guru Evan Urquhart had to correct a sleazy piece she wrote for Slate in July about the Wi spa exhibitionist.

Update, Sept. 2, 2021: The New York Post reports that on Aug. 30, “charges of indecent exposure were discreetly filed against a serial sex offender for the Wi Spa incident, following an investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department.” The accused, Darren Agee Merager, denied the allegations in an interview with the Post, but indicated that she plans to turn herself in to authorities.

“She” is a man – a man who preys on women.

Urquhart tells us in the July piece that the police were treating the Wi spa incident as a hoax.

Soon after the video began to go viral in transphobic corners of the internet, members of the trans community began to raise questions about it…

Not trans people, you notice, but “members of the trans community,” as if they’re all members of a club. “Victims of the trans cult” would be more accurate.

Person charged.

They not only do no soul-searching, they do more evasion and obfuscation and changing of the subject. They’re not journalists at all.

And then there’s trans journalist Evan Urquhart:

Lois Beckett and Sam Levin and Evan Urquhart should start their own “news” outlet.

The Guardian really seems to be having a Lie About Trans Issues day.

They are not “protesting against trans rights.” That’s such a malicious and incendiary lie it’s startling. What they’re protesting is the invention of new fictitious rights about being “validated” and “included” as something you’re not. That’s not a right. As I’ve said some 9 billion times by now, it doesn’t take much effort to see why that can’t possibly be a right: reasons to do with fraud, competence, safety, relationships, everyday functioning, and the like. If women have to agree that men are women just because they say so, then women can never have safety or privacy again.

I’m not the only one infuriated by that headline.

Dahlia Lithwick wonders why the fanatical conservatives on the Supreme Court opted to do it in such a sloppy and late-night haha sucks to be you way.

[A] careful look at the shoddy, contemptuous jurisdictional reasoning of the five justices in the majority suggests something even darker. It’s not just that the majority of the Supreme Court functionally ended abortion rights for most women in Texas last night merely because they could. And it’s not just that they did so because—as is so often the case with impressionistic, frayed shadow docket reasoning—their personal feelings about the constitutional right to abortion are quite robust. It’s almost impossible to not go one further and declare that the court opted to end virtually all abortion rights in Texas, in the full knowledge that they were blessing an unconstitutional and brutal piece of lawless vigilantism, because it’s only about women.

Well, yes. Women aren’t good for much but they are indispensable for making new humans, so if they won’t even do that…well really.

Forgive the hyperbole, but how else could the five justices in the majority—in the fullness of knowledge that by Wednesday morning Texas women would be isolated, terrified, and medically and psychologically endangered as a result of their own inaction—hide behind odious mansplaining about the “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” that force them to stand by as clinics are shuttered and frantic women beg for services? In 2016, the Supreme Court conceded that a woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by obtaining an abortion. The Texas law has no exception for rape or incest. And at six weeks of pregnancy—two weeks past a last missed period—vast numbers of women are unaware that they are pregnant.

[Shrug] It’s their lot. It’s what they’re for.

Don’t even bother asking what the five justices on the majority of this court would have done with a hypothetical California law that conscripted citizen bounty hunters into reporting their suspicions about a neighbor’s unlawful gun possession. That order would have been 20 pages long, full of robust and muscular constitutional claims and outraged howls about broken Second Amendment promises. But a court that comes to you in the dark of night, without logic or reason, whispering soothing words about how “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law” as it upends the constitutionality of Texas law? That is the stuff of ancient gaslighting, reserved for those moments in which Power is explaining to Women that they are just being hysterical, and to kindly lie back and enjoy it.

Zing.

Dave Hewitt is also unimpressed by that dishonest Guardian news story on the Wi spa predator.

This piece contains new information that was first revealed by right-wing outlets, and serves to demonstrate how The Guardian – by doggedly pursuing a specific ideological angle and denigrating anything that does not fit – has become wedded to a pernicious false consciousness that prevented them from breaking this news themselves.

These two reporters, specifically. They’ve been on the story all along. I’m wondering if they have any editorial supervision at all, and if their editor is afraid of them, because surely it’s not good journalistic practice to refuse to specify the sex of the Wi spa predator when it’s the core of the whole incident.

At the start of July, they reported on the protests that the incident kicked off, which they framed as triggered by hateful, baseless, viral conspiracy theories. They made completely unevidenced and partisan statements, such as:

Calls to defend “female spaces” and “women’s shelters” have become rallying cries of anti-trans groups, who have falsely suggested that trans-inclusive policies endanger cis women.

Unevidenced, partisan, dishonest, misogynist. Women are not “cis” women, we are women. We are, and no one else is. “Cis” is a lie of a word when applied to sex.

They did another bad slanted story in late July, which was cheered by the usuals.

So the Guardian assigns the same reporters to cover the story when it’s confirmed that the Wi spa predator is in fact a predator.

That’s an embarrassingly bad call.

The Guardian here is acting not as a purveyor of balance or truth, but of equivalent, oppositional disinformation.

This continues in today’s story, which – despite finally conceding that the incident occurred and that it involved a male, repeated sex-offender – studiously avoids using the pronouns of the person at the heart of it, and returns focus to their initial obsession: that this propagated virally because of the far-right, proving their long-standing contention that those who are critical of self-id are at best far-right adjacent.

Actually they don’t finally concede that the incident involved a male. They contest it rather than conceding it.

It was not immediately clear if Merager had an attorney, and Merager’s gender identity was also unclear; an LAPD spokesperson said the department could not immediately comment on the suspect’s gender identity, and the Guardian’s attempts to reach Merager on Thursday were unsuccessful.

That’s not a concession.

You have to be really careful about what ideologies you subscribe to. I could just say don’t subscribe to any, but I’m not sure that’s possible, or desirable. It can be considered an ideology to think that other people exist and have rights, and that the self doesn’t have a right to trample other people’s rights. Maybe we have to have some ideology to avoid total ruthless self-interest. But we do have to be cautious. Unlike…

What’s her problem here? That she hasn’t paused to ask herself what “rights” she’s talking about. The “right” she’s talking about isn’t in fact a genuine right at all. Men don’t have a “right” to force themselves on naked women at a spa. That’s a made-up right – more made-up than the more sturdy rights that have been around a bit longer than the shiny new “trans” ones.

So there it is – Laurie Penny is saying never mind that this one guy who forced himself on naked women and girls at a spa turns out to be not trans but just a predatory man, we still have to protect the “right” of men who say they are trans to force themselves on naked women and girls.

But we don’t. We don’t have to. That’s not a genuine right, and it shouldn’t be declared a genuine right.

They just can’t tell the truth, no matter how obvious it becomes.

Person charged with indecent exposure at LA spa after viral Instagram video

“Person” ffs! When what he indecently exposed was a penis.

Charges filed two months after woman’s claims about Wi Spa sparked anti-trans protests

They can call the woman a woman, but they can’t call the man a man.

Los Angeles authorities have charged a 52-year-old with indecent exposure at a popular Korean spa that was the subject of a viral Instagram post earlier this summer.

A 52-year-old what?

The LA police department (LAPD) announced late on Thursday that it had put out an arrest warrant for Darren Merager, who is now facing five felony counts of indecent exposure at Wi Spa in the Koreatown neighborhood. The charges, filed on Monday, come two months after a viral Instagram video from a woman who filmed herself confronting Wi Spa staff about seeing a “man” naked in front of women and girls in the women’s section of the facility.

Because he was a “”man”” no matter how many scare-quotes you deploy. It’s not the woman who told Wi staff about the man who is in the wrong here.

In the 24 June video, another patron suggested the individual might be a trans woman, and the woman filming herself responded with transphobic language, denying that trans women exist.

She didn’t “deny that trans women exist,” she denied that penis-exposing guy is a woman.

The LAPD investigated and found enough evidence to charge the man with indecent exposure.

It was not immediately clear if Merager had an attorney, and Merager’s gender identity was also unclear; an LAPD spokesperson said the department could not immediately comment on the suspect’s gender identity, and the Guardian’s attempts to reach Merager on Thursday were unsuccessful. The prosecutor’s office declined to comment.

Why are these two Guardian reporters in such a sweat about the flasher’s “gender identity”? Why are they so brutally indifferent to the impact of what he did on a bunch of women?

The original allegations about what happened at the spa were quickly distorted online, leading to widespread misinformation and online abuse against trans women who spoke out and engaged in counter protests.

Blah blah blah trans trans trans, just ignore those whiny women saying things.

Tamara Lave, a University of Miami law professor and former public defender in California, said that prosecutors in indecent exposure cases have to prove a defendant not only “willfully exposed” themselves in front of others, but that the person did so with the intention of arousing themselves or sexually offending another individual.

“If somebody goes into a spa and sits naked in the tub, and all they are trying to do is relax, the fact that they are naked in public is not enough for them to be guilty of a crime,” she said, adding that she is concerned about the ramifications for trans rights. “The prosecutor has a duty to make clear that this is about one individual’s conduct, not about a class of people’s conduct.”

Trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans trans

There are 5 more paragraphs of transtranstranstrans. Not a word about women’s privacy or safety. The “reporters” are Lois Beckett and Sam Levin in Los Angeles. I’m sure they sincerely identify as reporters.

Pliny’s latest: