They’re just complying with local law…

Amazon quietly removed criticism of President Xi’s books by scrubbing bad reviews, ratings and comments from its Chinese site, it has emerged.

The US retail giant agreed to Beijing’s demand to have anything below a five-star review of Xi Jinping’s book The Governance of China removed from Amazon.cn about two years ago, Reuters reported, citing two unidentified sources.

The US retail giant is just being polite.

An Amazon spokesman said that the company “complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception.”

If there’s a law that all Jews must be reported to the government for deportation and elimination, who is Amazon to argue?

Last year, Zoom shut down a paid US account after it hosted an online forum on Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, citing the need to comply with “local laws.”

About 250 people attended the forum, including some from China who dialled in to listen to speeches by a mother of a slain protester and former student leaders in exile.

Zoom said that it shut down the US account, which was set up by Chinese dissidents, because participants from China had violated “local laws”. It later reactivated the account without providing a reason.

That’s interesting. Zoom is not based in China, unless you consider San Jose part of China. The account was a US one, and some people in China joined the forum. It’s a pretty zig-zaggy road to get from there to “Zoom has to shut down the account because of the law in China.” I suppose that’s why they furtively reactivated it.

Ground-breaking! Giant leap!

Rachel Levine has shattered not one but two major glass ceilings this year. In March, she became the first openly transgender person to win confirmation in the US Senate after Joe Biden nominated her as assistant secretary of health.

Then in October she was sworn in as the first openly transgender four-star officer as an admiral and head of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. At that exalted rank she gets to wear the blue uniform of the corps, which though non-military is one of eight uniformed services.

First! Glass ceiling smashed! Twice!

Until you remember – this is a man. It’s not smashing any glass ceiling to appoint a man to an important government position. It’s just one more man added to all the other men.

Levine said her starting point when thinking about trans youth was how at risk they are. “Transgender youth are very vulnerable,” she said. “They are vulnerable to being bullied, to discrimination and harassment.”

You know who else is very vulnerable? Girls. Female youth are very vulnerable to being bullied, to discrimination and harassment.

Jim Banks, a Republican congress member from Indiana, was temporarily suspended from Twitter in October for willfully misgendering Levine. In a tweet, he said: “The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man”

Much as I hate to agree with a Republican congress member, on this one he’s right.

In addition to such politically laden hatred, Levine thinks that fear plays a large role in driving much of the transphobic agenda. “People fear what they don’t understand and have experience of. I’m hoping that my appointment, and my being open and out and working for the nation’s public health, will lead to less fear and more acceptance. That’s my goal.”

But people also fear what they do understand and have experience of. Fear is not always a mistake. I fear the way men like Levine are stealing firsts and prizes and honors from women. I fear Levine’s complete lack of shame about doing that – I fear the way he’s wallowing in it instead of refusing it. I fear the unembarrassed way he displaces women and then accepts flattery for doing so.

No independent thought allowed.

Russia’s supreme court has ordered the closure of Memorial International, the country’s oldest human rights group, in a watershed moment in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent thought.

The court ruled Memorial must be closed under Russia’s controversial “foreign agent” legislation, which has targeted dozens of NGOs and media outlets seen as critical of the government.

Just define “critical” as “foreign” and your work is done.

Memorial International’s closure marks an inflection point in Russia’s modern history, as efforts to publicise crimes under Soviet leaders such as Joseph Stalin have become taboo 30 years after the secret government archives were opened after the end of the Soviet Union. While not quite seeking a return to the Soviet past, Putin has become deeply sensitive to any criticism of it by groups including Memorial.

Gee I wonder why that might be.

The decision also follows a sustained assault on Russian civil society this year that has led to opposition leaders such as Alexei Navalny being imprisoned, prominent activists and journalists fleeing the country, and NGOs and media outlets hit with fines and closures under Russia’s “foreign agents” and “undesirable” laws.

…

The Russian prosecutor portrayed the organisation as a geopolitical weapon used by foreign governments to deprive modern Russians of taking pride in the achievements of the Soviet Union. Those arguments dovetail closely with the Kremlin’s use of Soviet history as a rallying point for society and reinterpretation of key historical moments in its confrontations with European countries.

Huh. Does that sound familiar at all? The uproar about “Critical Race Theory” along with the sweeping of all exploration of race and racism into the “CRT” box? It sounds way too familiar to me.

Speaking of Christine Burns (who participated in that cozy chat about terfs on Al Jazeera)…here’s a think-piece from 1996:

On a Saturday afternoon in a pleasant English University suburb I went along to find out the hard way. To argue, as both advocate and plaintiff, that transsexual women have more in common with the experience of their sisters than they blandly imagine.

Sorry for being bland, but I still get to think that we don’t have the experience of being a woman in common with men.

Under debate was the question of whether the group I was visiting should argue the case with their peers for other women like me to be admitted to their women-only space.

The air was thick with irony as I politely answered question after question. Corrected lie after lie. Defended my client’s very existence and justified their (and my) course in life.. as though I should be expected to succeed in communicating a personal experience that’s no easier to describe to the uninitiated than a panic attack or childbirth. … As though the court before me, drawing its’ authority from the shape of genitals they were born with, had the intellectual right to weigh up and judge the evidence which I’d spent much of my life studying and experiencing first hand. At stake, not just my client’s but my own self image and status as a woman in a club which I didn’t personally want to join. The charge, that my client (and by implication I) would make them feel uncomfortable.

It’s not a question of “drawing authority” from one’s genitals, it’s just a matter of definition. The disdain and hostility are noted however.

That majority would join with me in being horrified by the notion that, after being raped by a man, a woman like myself would be turned away from a politically correct Rape Crisis Centre. Told, in the ultimate act of cruelty, that she was a man. That she should seek counselling from a man. That she made her sisters feel uncomfortable. In a bizarre way rapists have a better line in manners. At least they treat their victims, without prejudice, as women.

Those last two sentences are currently being passed around on Twitter by some of those wicked heartless women who don’t think men can magically become women.

An elegant beginning:

Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.

You know who else is like that? Donald Trump senior. Empty suits beget more empty suits.

Trump spoke at a Turning Point USA gathering on December 19. He displayed seething, nearly pathological resentments; playground insults (he led the crowd in “Let’s Go, Brandon” chants); tough guy/average Joe shtick; and a pulsating sense of aggrieved victimhood and persecution, all of it coming from the elitist, extravagantly rich son of a former president.

Yes but where’s the respect? Why can’t empty suits get respect any more?

The Taliban pinch women ever harder.

The Taliban have said Afghan women seeking to travel long distances by road should be offered transport only if accompanied by a male relative.

Right. If she’s going only a mile or two she won’t flop down and open her legs, but if she’s going far, down she’ll go, the whore.

The majority of secondary schools remain shut for girls, while most women have been banned from working.

Of course. Women are for fucking, and for dealing with the sons that result. It’s a big mistake to let them do anything else, the whores.

The latest directive, issued by the Taliban’s Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, said women travelling for more than 45 miles (72km) should be accompanied by a close male family member.

To keep those legs closed. Only a close male family member can do that.

Female people are not valued in India.

Laali’s unborn daughter is among India’s estimated 46 million “missing females” over a period of 50 years, ten times the female population of London. A deepening gender bias, breeding rampant sex-selective abortions and female infanticides, means that India accounts for nearly half of global missing female births.

“The traditional pattern of marriage and customs dictate an inferior position to women in Indian societies,” says Prem Chowdhry, a gender activist and retired professor at the University of Delhi. Since girls leave their birth family after marriage, she says, the dowry and cost of raising a girl is considered an unwelcome obligation, and sex-selective abortions are common.

Not a problem. Just abort the female ones and let the male ones proceed. There will be no more female people and everything will be perfect.

Laali was 19 when her marriage was arranged with a farmer in 2009. In the next three years, she gave birth to two daughters. During her second pregnancy, she was regularly drugged by traditional and faith healers in order to “make” a boy.

When her baby girl was born, no one from her family came to see them in the hospital. Returning home was worse. “My mother-in-law refused to see my daughter’s face,” Laali said. “She refused to take care of me, saying: ‘you are giving birth to girl after girl. How far can I take care of you?’”

Every night, as she sat down for dinner after a day of labour in the field, someone would toss in a taunt. “When anyone had a son in the village, it was a nightmare for me,” she recalls. “My family abused me in front of my girls.”

…

For Laali, harassment is part of her daily life. By the time she was 15, her mother had aborted two female foetuses, and her younger sister has aborted at least three.

“You are brought up in an environment where this violence against women is completely acceptable and normalised,” says George. “The question is: how do you resist this on the ground? And that’s frightening.”

Without women there aren’t any babies, female or male. You’d think that would make females valuable to people who want babies, but nope.

If truth doesn’t matter in the courtroom then…?

Judges have been told that they should refer to criminal defendants by the gender they have chosen for themselves.

Just “gender”? What if criminal defendants have chosen to be called Duke? Doctor? Father? Sister? Lord? Admiral? Your honor? Why is “gender” the one category defendants get to force everyone to lie about?

New guidance instructs judges to consider whether alleged victims of sexual offences should be required to describe transgender defendants by the pronouns they self-identify with.

It will give rise to concerns that witnesses and alleged victims of rape, sexual offences and domestic abuse could be forced to refer to defendants as women, even if they view them as male.

The victims (who will be women) don’t “view them” as male, they know fucking well they’re male. It’s not a matter of “viewing as,” it’s a matter of blunt in-your-face fact.

Revisions to the “equal treatment benchbook”, a 540-page guide from the Judicial College, have told judges: “There may be situations where the rights of a witness to refer to a trans person by pronouns matching their gender assigned at birth, or to otherwise reveal a person’s trans status, clash with the trans person’s right to privacy.”

What does a right to privacy have to do with ordering people to call you by the wrong sex? That’s not privacy, it’s public narcissistic coercion.

Nancy Kelley’s “Ah the joys of throwing women and gay men under the bus chatting on Al Jazeera” tweet really isn’t winning her many friends except maybe in Qatar.

Replies of course are turned off.

Really not many friends at all, in fact I haven’t seen one single friend.

Well…

Unless the oppressed are women, of course. They don’t matter. Men who say they are women are the oppressed, but women, never.

Also, “those who abuse power” does not include Jolyon Maugham. Never mind the baseball bat, never mind the bullying of lesbians and gender critical feminists, those are not abuses of power. It’s women who say men are not women who abuse power.

Well…

Unless it’s women. Or foxes. Or the LGB Alliance. Don’t choose them, obviously. It’s the men who say they are women who are really LOVE; you have to choose them.

The Guardian invited us to nominate a Person of the Year.

Time magazine has announced that Elon Musk will be their “2021 person of the year”, citing the billionaire Tesla boss’s influence “for good or ill” as a “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman”. The choice has been criticised for Musk’s attitude to tax, opposition to unions and playing down the dangers of Covid.

With this in mind, we would like to hear about your own choices. Who would be your 2021 person of the year, and why?

A number of people said JK Rowling.

Maybe they just had enough, or…

Ah yes good old Al Jazeera. Qatar is notoriously queer-friendly right?

Yes it’s a “trans panic” to think women shouldn’t be erased from the language and shoved aside by men pretending to be women.

Oh damn, so sorry about all the bad faith arguments!

What’s wrong with this lede?

Nearly 250 people incarcerated in California prisons — the vast majority of whom are transgender women — are waiting for their chance to transfer out of a men’s institution. The longer it takes, the greater the odds that they could be raped, beaten or killed.

One major thing wrong with it is that it frames the likelihood of being raped, beaten or killed as something to “transfer out of” as opposed to something to stop altogether. I daresay men who aren’t transgender women also don’t want to be raped, beaten, or killed.

But of course the more obvious thing wrong with it is the hidden assumption that men who “identify as” women get to transfer out of men’s prison and into women’s prison, where they can be the ones posing the threat. The even more hidden assumption is that women get no say in any of this because they just don’t matter.

When in doubt, pretend women don’t exist.

A BBC television doctor repeatedly referred to mothers-to-be as ‘pregnant people’ on the popular daytime show Morning Live.

Dr Xand van Tulleken was discussing the various groups who have so far declined to have the Covid jab when he said: ‘Pregnant people, for instance, early in the pandemic there were very mixed messages [on whether expectant mothers should be given a shot] so people didn’t get vaccinated when they were pregnant and they haven’t got it subsequently.

‘Pregnant people are not unreasonably nervous about putting things into their bodies.’ 

Whatever you do, don’t let on that it’s women who get pregnant, especially if you’re a doctor, even more especially if you’re a doctor saying things on the BBC. The word “women” is a foul obscenity, so don’t ever say it.

In 2016, the British Medical Association recommended that its staff use ‘pregnant people’ instead of pregnant women.

And in February last year, midwives at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust were told to start using terms such as ‘chest milk’ instead of breast milk.

If you mention “women” they get all uppity and confident, as if they’re real people instead of brainless dress-dummies.

Why do they get to shame? Why isn’t it the other side who gets to shame? It’s not shameful to recognize a male when you see one. It’s definitely shameful for a man to steal a woman’s place and win the top prize by claiming to be a woman.

Planned Parenthood with a new and exciting story about what doulas do for “people”:

Doulas support many different types of people going through a range of life experiences — including death, gender transition, birth, and abortion. Some doulas have a specific focus, while others provide a range of care. But all doulas advocate for and support their clients in situations where they may feel alone, ignored, or dismissed.

Oh yeah? The rest of the world seems to think they’re assistants to women giving birth. They’re not medically trained, so they’re not midwives, they just do the supporty helpy hand-holdy stuff – for women giving birth. Not “people” transitioning, not people dying, just women giving birth. PP is talking as if they’re just giving us the facts, but actually they’re redefining the word without saying that’s what they’re doing.

They quote a “death doula” telling us what that is, then a “transition doula” telling us what that is, then indigenous doulas ditto, then finally actual doulas, which they call “birth doulas.”

What is a birth doula? 

Makina Table, MPH, CD (DTI) – she/her – Labor and Birth Doula

Birth doulas provide different types of support to pregnant people during the various stages of pregnancy such as the prenatal period, labor, and delivery.

Not doula not doula not doula, then actual doula but those are for “pregnant people.” It’s such elaborate erasure of women. First expand the job so that it “helps” everyone, then belatedly mention the actual job but pretend it’s not specific to women.

Doulas can also help reduce the impacts of racial bias, gender bias, and other types of inequity in health care settings. In many cases, particularly in Black, Latino, Indigenous, low-income, and/or LGBTQIA+ communities, we advocate for the pregnant person navigating a health care system that often discriminates against them or doesn’t meet their needs. We help ensure their voices are heard and that any medical information they get is clear and thorough. 

Really? While pretending that “people” give birth – that pregnancy and childbirth are not specific to women? I don’t see how people as confused as this can even know what medical information is, let alone helping ensure pregnant “people” get a clear and thorough version.

It’s become a kind of religion.

In the year since the first shots began going into arms, opposition to vaccines has hardened from skepticism and wariness into something approaching an article of faith for the approximately 39 million American adults who have yet to get a single dose.

To be fair, there’s also a kind of faith involved in thinking people should get the shots. I don’t have any medical expertise, and most people who get vaxxed also have little or none. Why do I trust the people who say get vaxxed more than I trust people who say don’t? I guess largely because of the record – there’s a pretty long record now of vaccinations working. The choice is binary, and getting vaccinated seems quite a lot safer than refusing to get vaccinated, in the way Anthony Fauci seems more trustworthy than Lauren Boebert.

But unvaccinated people like Eric Dilts, 45, a DoorDash delivery worker in St. Joseph, Mo., said he felt like the imperfect nature of the vaccines and shifting messages from public officials about boosters and breakthrough infections had validated his skepticism.

“Now you need a first shot and second shot, and now they’re talking about all these boosters,” he said. “How many shots do you need? It seems like a joke to me.”

Well, you need as many as it takes, that’s how many. Why is that such a stumbling block? To drive a car you need a steering wheel and tires and an accelerator. There’s no law of nature that one vaccination is all anyone ever needs no matter what the virus is. They’re “talking about all these boosters” because that’s the nature of this particular virus.

Meanwhile Fox News personalities continue to tell people to defy the grownups and continue to refuse to get vaccinated. It’s quite sickening when you pause to think about it: they are telling credulous people not to do a thing that will protect them and others, and they’re doing it for the sake of ratings, their personal careers, a warped version of “politics” – in short for selfish frivolous reasons. It’s a kind of slow-motion onscreen mass murder, alternating with commercials.

Sue the bastards.

Two election workers who counted votes for the 2020 presidential election filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday against the parent company of One America News, senior staff at the far-right TV network, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a personal lawyer to former president Donald Trump.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who worked in Fulton County, Ga., allege that One America News and Giuliani, who frequently appears on the network, knowingly spread misinformation about them, including falsehoods that they logged illegal ballots for Joe Biden in the election.

The two women “have become objects of vitriol, threats, and harassment … because of a campaign of malicious lies,” their attorneys wrote in the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

I hope they win, and I hope they’re awarded an enormous sum in damages.

The lawsuit is the second filed by the women this month against defendants they say spread false and defamatory information about their role in the election. On Dec. 2, Freeman and Moss sued Gateway Pundit, a far-right conspiracy website, alleging that the site published false stories about them that they say instigated a relentless campaign of harassment and threats.

That legal action said that the abuse against the two women was so severe that they had to “change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety.” At one point, Freeman left her home for two months at the advice of the FBI.

I hope OAN and its bosses and Giuliani are all stripped of everything they own except their toothbrushes.

Eight minutes to launch:

Janice Turner prefers brave goats to placid sheep.

How must it feel to have your name airbrushed from the $8 billion film franchise born of your scribbling in a coffee shop, penniless, while your baby napped? Or to watch the trio of child actors you chose and nurtured 20 years ago recall the stories which made them many times richer and more celebrated than their ho-hum talents deserve, yet not once uttering your name? Or have fools who run around with broomsticks up their backsides in college leagues change the name of quidditch, the sport you invented for wizards?

That’s putting aside the threats. Just search for JK Rowling on Twitter and see the stream of invective, the gun memes, the intent to rape and kill, the address of her family home handily displayed for passing stalkers online. For what? I’d bet few of those denouncing her even know and have certainly never read her long, thoughtful, compassionate essay.

But it turns out an author told to publish under gender-neutral initials, since boys won’t read books by girls, was a woman all along. One of the bothersome, old-fashioned types, who won’t jettison all they’ve learnt from motherhood or sexual trauma to assuage bullies or cultural fads.

Or men who claim to be women but still feel utterly entitled to stomp all over actual women.

Just as Galileo refused to bow to the Inquisition and affirm the Earth is the centre of the universe, many women just don’t, won’t, can’t believe gender is real but sex is not.

Or that men are women just as we are, that men know just as much about being women as we do, that men are subject to bullying and abuse just as we are, that men get to take everything we have while we are obliged to shut up and take it.

Only the goats stand their ground. And this has been the year of the goat. A succession of women have upended their lives, been cast out and despised just to uphold a fundamental belief. Keira Bell, who took a judicial review against the Tavistock gender service which irreversibly medicated her teenage body rather than healed her troubled mind; Sonia Appleby, who exposed safeguarding failures at that clinic; Jess de Wahls, an embroidery artist, whose work was summarily removed from the Royal Academy shop; Professor Kathleen Stock, hounded out of academia by masked protesters while her colleagues and union stood by; choreographer Rosie Kay who lost her eponymous company because she refused to disavow the intricacies of the female body she inhabits in dance.

I’ve interviewed most of these women and prior to speaking out, all experienced long nights of the soul. Fear (of losing political allies, friends and peers) battled against a burning urge for truth. But in the end, they couldn’t not speak out. It didn’t matter what happened next. They were not prepared to deny material reality, even if they never worked again. They were happy to ascend that rock face, cold and alone. But instead they found themselves alive and free, up among the goats.

Goats forever!