Bazelon on the new WPATH guidelines part 2:

When WPATH released the draft of the SOC8 for public comment, Leibowitz and his co-authors braced for the inevitable conservative attack. For teenagers who have parental consent, the draft adolescent chapter lowered to 14 (from 16 in the previous guidelines) the recommended minimum age for hormone treatments, which can permanently alter, in a matter of months, voice depth and facial and body hair growth and, later, other features like breast development. It set a minimum recommended age of 15, for breast removal or augmentation, also called top surgery. (The previous standards didn’t set a minimum age.)

It’s interesting that she admits the alterations from hormone “treatments” are permanent (while still calling them “treatments”).

Opponents of gender-related care did, indeed, denounce all of this. But Leibowitz and his co-authors also faced fury from providers and activists within the transgender world.

…

Assessments for children and adolescents have long been integral to the Standards of Care. But this time, the guard rails were anathema to some members of a community that has often been failed by health care providers….In a publicly streamed discussion on YouTube on Dec. 5, activists and experts criticized the adolescent chapter, with the emotion born of decades of discrimination and barriers to care.

Notice the inserted excuses for “the emotion,” which others might describe more specifically. Maybe the “emotion” (i.e. rage and abuse) is born not of decades of discrimination but of the nature of the movement/activism/ideology itself. Maybe narcissistic rage is characteristic of trans activism, and encouraged by it, and flattered and embraced and imitated.

The small group of clinicians who wrote the first Standards of Care were all cisgender. After WPATH was created in 1979, transgender advocates increasingly gained influence in the organization, but many transgender people viewed subsequent versions of the standards as imposing paternalistic and demeaning barriers to treatment.

But that assumes the “treatment” really is treatment. That assumes it cures something. Does it? What does it cure? What does it treat?

The NY Times magazine has a long piece by Emily Bazilon on “gender therapy” and the controversies around it. The language is so shaped by the current ideology that clarity is all but impossible. Like the first sentence for instance:

Scott Leibowitz is a pioneer in the field of transgender health care.

But what is transgender health care? Is it ordinary health care, for trans people? Or is it health care specific to transness? If the latter, what does that include? Blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries? If so, is that really health care, or is it something else? Given the drastic nature of it, and the disconnect from actual disease or injury, isn’t it more like attempted psychological care rather than genuine health care? That’s a real question, not a snark. Given the fact that being trans is in the head, and blockers & hormones & surgeries change the body, it’s reasonable to ask if changing the body is really medically advisable.

He has directed or worked at three gender clinics on the East Coast and the Midwest, where he provides gender-affirming care, the approach the medical community has largely adopted for embracing children and teenagers who come out as transgender.

That hints at the problem right there. Medical care is supposed to fix illness or injury. It’s not supposed to “embrace.” It’s certainly not supposed to “embrace” new and peculiar ideas about trying to change one’s sex. When and how and why was it decided that “the medical community” has to “embrace” people who “come out as transgender”? Maybe the medical community doesn’t have to do that. Maybe it ought not to. Maybe it ought to be a lot more cautious about all of this. Maybe it ought to recognize that it’s more political than medical, and decide to stay out of it.

He also helps shape policy on L.G.B.T. issues for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. As a child and adolescent psychiatrist who is gay, he found it felt natural to work under the L.G.B.T. “umbrella,” as he put it, aware of the overlap as well as the differences between gay and trans identity.

Yes, well again that just underlines the problems. There is no such “umbrella.” It’s doubtful that there is much “overlap.” The differences are a lot more consequential than the overlap.

In short all of this buys into the ideology in the act of trying to report on it. It’s more careful than most such reporting, but it still buys in.

So, Leibowitz is leading “a working group of seven clinicians and researchers drafting a chapter on adolescents for a new version of guidelines called the Standards of Care to be issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).” It’s the first update since 2012. A lot has happened in those ten years.

What Leibowitz and his co-authors didn’t foresee, when they began, was that their work would be engulfed by two intersecting forces: a significant rise in the number of teenagers openly identifying as transgender and seeking gender care, and a right-wing backlash in the United States against allowing them to medically transition, including state-by-state efforts to ban it.

It’s not just “right-wing” though, and some or much of the reason for the relative absence of the left is the crazed bullying that greets any resistance to this novel and reckless idea that it’s “medical care” to surgically alter people’s genitals because they have “come out as transgender.”

As they worked on a draft of the adolescent chapter of the Standards of Care, the big debate among clinicians was how they should respond to the thousands of teenagers who are arriving at their doors. Some are asking about medication that suppresses puberty or about hormone-replacement treatments. Leibowitz and his co-authors thought that the timing of the rise in trans-identified teenagers, as well as research from Britain and Australia, suggested that the increased visibility of trans people in entertainment and the media had played a major — and positive — role in reducing stigma and helping many kids express themselves in ways they would have previously kept buried.

Or, that increased visibility played a major and destructive role in nudging kids to think being trans is cool.

As they wrote in their December draft chapter, part of the rise in trans identification among teenagers could be a result of what they called “social influence,” absorbed online or peer to peer. The draft mentioned the very small group of people who detransition (stop identifying as transgender), saying that some of them “have described how social influence was relevant in their experience of their gender during adolescence.” In adolescence, peers and culture often affect how kids see themselves and who they want to be.

Ya think???

To make matters more complicated, as a group, the young people coming to gender clinics have high rates of autism, depression, anxiety and eating or attention-deficit disorders. Many of them are also transgender, but these other issues can complicate determining a clear course of treatment.

But what does “are also transgender” mean? How can these purported experts even know there is such a thing? Is it ever really a matter of actually being transgender as opposed to thinking one “feels like” the opposite sex? Is it ever anything but a feeling in the head?

From what I can tell the answer is no, and if that’s the case, how are medical people so confident that it’s their job to reify this feeling in the head by drastically altering the bodies? If people start saying they feel like birds will surgeons start altering their arms into crude wings?

To be continued.

Same paper, same day, same front page:

New data reveals extraordinary global heating in the Arctic

New data has revealed extraordinary rates of global heating in the Arctic, up to seven times faster than the global average.

The heating is occurring in the North Barents Sea, a region where fast rising temperatures are suspected to trigger increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. The researchers said the heating in this region was an “early warning” of what could happen across the rest of the Arctic.

…

“We expected to see strong warming, but not on the scale we found,” said Ketil Isaksen, senior researched at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and who led the work. “We were all surprised. From what we know from all other observation points on the globe, these are the highest warming rates we have observed so far.”

“The broader message is that the feedback of melting sea ice is even higher than previously shown,” he said. “This is an early warning for what’s happening in the rest of the Arctic if this melting continues, and what is most likely to happen in the next decades.” The world’s scientists said in April that immediate and deep cuts to carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases are needed to tackle the climate emergency.

Yes yes yes, we hear you, but right now we need to produce more gas to bring prices down.

This is what I’m saying.

Biden calls on US oil refiners to raise gas and diesel production to tackle prices

Climate change? What’s that? Ohhh right, that; yes well that’s a concern but it’s long-term, gas prices are now.

Now trumps long-term, and that’s that.

Joe Biden on Wednesday called on US oil refiners to produce more gasoline and diesel, saying their profits have tripled during a time of war between Russia and Ukraine as Americans struggle with record high prices at the pump.

“The crunch that families are facing deserves immediate action,” the president wrote in a letter to major oil refiners. “Your companies need to work with my Administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions that address the crisis.”

By producing more of the stuff that fuels global warming.

It’s not just the Yale philosophy department (or one member of it). Yale Medicine advertises its “Transgender Glossary: Terms You Can Learn” on Facebook. It was published in March.

An entire vocabulary has evolved around people who are transgender, and if you’re not familiar with the latest terms, you can easily hurt someone’s feelings, even if that’s not your intention. Figuring out a person’s terms can be challenging—the lexicon includes words with meanings that have changed over time and could change again. And because each transgender person is navigating their own path, the best words to use in a conversation with them could vary depending on their circumstances.

It’s funny how no other oppressed or marginalized group has ever made such a nonsensical demand. It’s funny how all this Reform Your Language is for trans ideology and nothing else.

It’s such a ridiculous trap, and thus such an impertinent, indeed outrageous demand. The vocabulary is always changing, and if you don’t memorize it and stay up to date you will hurt someone’s feelings. Hey what about our feelings? What about our feelings of rage and disgust on being told such things?

Learning the jargon may be difficult, because it has changed before and could change again, but don’t you dare get it wrong. Hahaha sucks to be you. It varies with each person so actually there’s just no way you can get it right, but you have to, hahaha, sucks to be you.

No one is expected to get this right at first, but you could make a huge difference to a transgender person by being knowledgeable and sensitive about language, says Christy Olezeski, PhD, director and co-founder of the Yale Pediatric Gender Program, which cares for transgender and nonbinary people up to the age of 25.

Hey I have an idea! How about if, instead, a transgender person makes a huge difference to me by not making any of these demands and just getting on with life like the rest of us? How about if nobody demands that we use a special vocabulary that shifts constantly, just for Special Them?

“It’s really about respect,” Olezeski says. “This isn’t anything new. Transgender and nonbinary people are everywhere.”

It’s the opposite of respect. It’s pandering. It’s babying. It’s wrapping in cotton wool and indulging. It’s not good for people.

Queer: An umbrella term for those who think of their gender identity or sexual orientation as being outside of societal norms. Once considered a derogatory term, “queer” has been reclaimed by many within the LGBTQIA+ community as a term of empowerment, but still may be considered offensive by some, especially if used by a person who is not in the community.

No shit, so what are you telling us? Use it but don’t use it? Use it but be aware that “some” of those pesky Ls and Gs may hate it and hate you for saying it? How do we know who is “in the community” and who isn’t? Especially when it’s such an incoherent “community” and so riven with conflict over exactly this issue?

It’s one long cringe.

It turns out there’s a downside to setting up a bomb factory in your house.

A man’s arms were blown off by an explosion at a property that had allegedly been stuffed with an arsenal of guns, ammunition and bombs.

Oops.

The victim, who is in his 30s, was reportedly left in critical condition after the blast at around 3:10 p.m. in Warren, Michigan, on Saturday, June 11.

The explosion ripped apart the garage with a subsequent fire engulfing other parts of the house on the 20700 block of Gentner Street, Warren Police Commissioner William Dwyer said.

It’s almost as if all this playing terrorist nonsense is a danger to other people as well as the bomb-maker they-self. I daresay the neighbors aren’t enormously pleased.

The man, who Dwyer said was already under investigation before the explosion, is now in a coma and undergoing treatment at the Detroit Receiving Hospital.

He has a long criminal history, involving weapons charges and manufacturing explosive items, according to Dwyer, who alleged that an illegal weapons operation was being run from the property.

He was defending our freedom.

After the blast, police executed a search warrant and found small explosive devices, a dozen guns, including rifles and handguns, loaded automatic rifle-style magazines, and about 4,000 rounds of ammunition, according to The Detroit News.

Just the basics.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on None of the above.

It is a movement full of people who think that because bigots accuse the group of various misbehaviors, anybody accusing them as individuals of that behavior can be dismissed as a bigot, thus giving them some cover to act according to the stereotype.

One of Jason Stanley’s twitter-troll defenders has pointed out, in reference to Jane Clare Jones that “most scholars don’t have PowerPoints on hand to explain why they aren’t Nazis.”

So one is supposed to stay silent in the face of baseless accusations? Because no genderist has EVER made unfounded claims of hatred, violence and trans-genocide. They would NEVER do that. Never ever. But “misgender” them and they’ll fucking bury you.

The simple accusation of “bigotry” allows any critique or comment from the accused to be ignored, with no need to provide any evidence for the validity of said accusation. At all. In fact, ignoring the points made by people accused of being “Nazis” or “Fascists” or “TERFs” becomes a moral duty. “NO DEBATE!” Blanket, pre-emptive accusations of ultra-right association saves trans activists a lot of work, in the short term, but it keeps them from having to sharpen their debating skills. Maybe not the best strategy in the long run, though. Somehow, somewhere along the line, you’re actually going to have to argue your case to someone and convince them.* Use it or lose it. Some people have been lulled into a false sense of unanswerable moral superiority while they’ve let their debate muscles go soft and flabby, as evidenced by how well Mr. 200 Years has been faring.

*Though the degree of success the movement has achieved through institutional capture and backroom dealing has been extraordinary. But someone was bound to complain, and complain publicly. Women. They forgot about women.Trans activists sought to do a quiet end run around the rights of women. Turns out that was the easy part. They thought that once their fait was accomplied, that would be the end of it, they would have their way unopposed. They completely underestimated the anger and organizational skills of women, who’ve had centuries of practice dealing with being fucked over, figuratively and literally.

Whatever success you’ve had in secret, once the doors are opened and lights are turned on, you’ve got to make your case. If you have no case to make, then the jig is up, and you’re left with nothing but brute power and emotional blackmail to hold onto whatever gains you’ve made. I believe we are, in some jurisdictions at least, well into the beginning of this phase. I believe the tide is turning, with women in the UK in the vanguard.

No not that kind of Christian:

A growing number of prominent Christian leaders are sounding alarms about threats to democracy posed by ReAwaken America rallies where Donald Trump loyalists Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and rightwing pastors have spread misinformation about the 2020 elections and Covid-19 vaccines, and distorted Christian teachings.

But of course “Christian teachings” is a very large, and mixed, category. Many Christian teachings fit right in with people like Flynn and Stone and even Trump.

Several well-known Christian leaders, including the president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners and the executive director of a major Baptist group, have called on American churches to speak out against the messages promoted at ReAwaken America rallies that have been held in Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, California, South Carolina and other states.

…

“This ReAwaken tour is peddling dangerous lies about both the election and the pandemic,” Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners, told the Guardian. “Jesus taught us that the truth will set us free, and these lies hold people captive to these dangerous falsehoods. They also exacerbate the toxic polarization we’re seeing in both the church and the wider society.”

Jesus is quoted as saying a lot of things, some of which are brutal. People who are not Jesus have said things about truth that are better than anything Jesus is quoted as saying. “Jesus said” is just a brand name, and not a very reliable one.

Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which has organized Christians against Christian nationalism, said: “Christian nationalism is a threat to the church because those peddling it wrap this ideology in biblical language and imagery. Christian nationalism is wrong as a matter of Christian ethics. The Bible is not confined to a nation much less a party or list of policy positions.”

Yes it is. The Bible is jam-packed with nationalist rhetoric and exhortations. There are parts that seek to rise above that but more parts that wallow in it.

The Art Newspaper reports:

Unveiled as part of this year’s Parcours section at Art Basel is a work being described as the first ever public sculpture depicting a nude, openly trans woman. Designed by the American trans artist Puppies Puppies (aka Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), the work is a life-sized bronze statue in the tradition of classical sculpture, based on a 3D scan of the artist’s body. Written on the work’s plinth is the word: “woman”.

This statue:

Not “Woman”.

“Trans women are erased, murdered, arrested and exiled every day,” Kuriki-Olivo says. “When you look at trans history you see so many blank spots which can only be recovered through storytelling. In this context, my continued existence is revolutionary, and I need to be hyper-present in the world. It is important for me to have this sculpture in the public sphere.”

That first claim. It sounds as if all men who claim to be women experience erasure, murder, arrest, and exile every day. It’s an absurdity, a melodramatic self-pitying thought-free absurdity.

That second claim – a “history” full of blank spots could just mean a history that doesn’t exist. The blank spots could be not wicked conspiratorial censorship but just an absence. Maybe there just haven’t been all that many men who thought they were women until very recently.

Blank spots that can only be recovered through storytelling are…stories. They’re like stories of Loki and Balder and Freya, Athena and Artemis and Apollo. They’re not “recovered” in the sense of being hidden truths brought to light; they’re inventions.

In the context of all these blank spots and stories his continued existence is far from revolutionary. Another word for being “hyper-present in the world” is narcissism. He doesn’t “need” to be hyper-present in the world any more than the rest of us, and saying he does is sheer narcissism.

It’s not at all important for him to have that tawdry insulting sculpture in the world or anywhere else.

I thought about doing a post on TullipR’s thread yesterday but it’s so grim I couldn’t face it.

It’s a detransition story, and it’s painful to read…because it’s so beyond painful to experience.

This is what’s being called “affirmation” and urged on distraught teenagers who aren’t equipped to understand all the consequences.

It’s often pointed out that one area of life that needs to be absolutely clear about who is a woman is medical care, including pregnancy.

The NHS on miscarriages:

In most cases, a miscarriage is a one-off event and most people go on to have a successful pregnancy in the future.

…

Among people who know they’re pregnant, it’s estimated about 1 in 8 pregnancies will end in miscarriage.

Many more miscarriages happen before a person is even aware they’re pregnant.

Losing 3 or more pregnancies in a row (recurrent miscarriages) is uncommon and only affects around 1 in 100 people

The words “woman” and “women” don’t appear once on that page.

H/t Milli Hill

When the choice is between Proud Boys and Drag Queen Story Hour:

Authorities in the San Francisco Bay area are investigating a possible hate crime after a group of men stormed into a library where a drag queen was hosting a children’s reading event, and allegedly shouted homophobic and anti-LGBTQ+ slurs.

Why do children’s reading events need drag queens?

I suppose it could be like the old panto Dame, or Edna Everidge, but we’ve seen too many reports of such “reading events” that were not that. I don’t think there’s really any burning need for drag queens to do events at the children’s section of the library.

But I certainly don’t want Proud Boys to be the ones making that point.

Panda Dulce was hosting a Drag Queen Story Hour at the San Lorenzo library on Saturday in celebration of pride month when a group of five men disrupted the event, shouting “tranny” and “pedophile”. The men “attempted to escalate to violence”, Dulce said, and “totally freaked out all of the kids”.

Law enforcement believes the group is affiliated with the far-right Proud Boys.

But what does Pride Month have to do with kids? Kids don’t have sexualities yet. I don’t think Pride Month is for kids.

There are several drag queen story hour programs in the Bay Area, which organizers say offer kid-friendly entertainment while teaching children about diversity and community. “I thought the closet was the loneliest place, but I was wrong. It was being out in the open, vulnerable and alone. Drag Queen Story Hour is so important to me, and for our youth, because it converts our differences from shame into power,” Dulce told the Guardian in 2017.

So in other words it’s for the adults.

Let’s not do that. Let’s not use kids to make adults feel good. There’s plenty of time to learn about drag after puberty; they should have space to be children until then.

Which is not to say the Proud Boys should be breaking up the party.

But the story hours have long faced backlash and criticism from the right and conservative publications, who claim the events are indoctrinating children. This weekend’s story time event was shared by Libs of TikTok, a rightwing anti-LGBTQ+ social media account with more than a million followers, SFGate reported.

Hmm. I’m pretty sure that’s a lie. I’m pretty sure Libs of TikTok is opposed to trans dogma, but that doesn’t make it either right-wing or anti-LGBTQ+MNOP.

Originally a comment by Djolaman on Rock climbing without ropes.

There’s a trope about militaries building their strategy for any war according to what worked or conspicuously didn’t in the last war, based on the people in charge often having been in more junior roles learning how things worked at the time. Examples include the US treating Vietnam as a rerun of Korea and coming unstuck very badly, or the French preparing the Maginot line to deal with another iteration of world war 1 and finding it was utterly unsuited to the technological and tactical advances that had taken place by thectime world war 2 broke out.

To a great extent we see what we expect to see, and build that expectation on resemblances to things we’ve seen before. The 1960s and their representation in popular culture have provided a lot of people with a convenient model of virtuous, socially progressive political movements ; they’re driven by the younger generations, they use the language of justice and equality, they’re disapproved of by social conservatives and the religious right, and supported by artists and musicians. Heuristically, that provides a simple way of spotting a familial resemblance to the civil rights movement, which acts as as the archetypal progressive movement and tells you how to orientate yourself with regards to this new movement – with the goodies, obviously.

Considerations of the truth or wider implications of the claims being made then get bypassed by the apparent familiarity of what you’re seeing. Whether the passage of time and the growing number of regretful detransitioners expose people to the reality of their faulty reasoning with the same clarity as military miscalculations tend to is for now an open question.

So Trump casually said his daughter committed perjury when she testified the other day. Dear ol’ dad.

During an appearance on MSNBC on Sunday afternoon, Mary Trump claimed that her uncle Donald’s dismissive comment that daughter Ivanka had “checked out” when he tried to undermine her taped testimony before the House select committee investigating the Jan 6th insurrection could be taken as an accusation she perjured herself.

…

Trump lashed out on TruthSocial at the hearing and included his daughter in his criticism claiming, “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” adding she, “had long since checked out, and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).”

[Trump chose Barr. If he sucks, why did Trump choose him? Does he think Barr was someone else’s choice?]

According to Mary Trump, while the former president didn’t entirely didn’t “throw Ivanka under the bus,” he did accuse her of a federal crime.

Asked by host Witt, “Is this what you expected from your uncle?” Mary Trump replied, “It’s exactly what I expected from both of them.”

“I think Ivanka walked a very fine line,” she elaborated. “She did not say anything necessarily incendiary but, as we thought would happen, she decided she needed to come down on the side of what the facts support.”

“Of course, the election was not stolen,” she added. “Also, as we knew would happen, Donald didn’t entirely throw her under the bus. But I think it’s really important to point out the fact he said that she checked out, although that is kind of rude, isn’t really the issue. He is accusing her of perjury, really.”

I suppose there’s an argument that he didn’t: that because he chose the escape-wording “checked out” he said she wasn’t really firing on all cylinders, as opposed to consciously lying.

Originally a comment by Colin Daniels on Many other women and girls.

Obviously this has been going for a very long time but here in the UK the situation was exacerbated a decade or two ago when the government introduced “league tables”, ostensibly to give the public a measure of how well various institutions were performing. They did it for things like education, health and policing.

What happened, in fact, was that institutions began to focus their efforts in areas that pushed them up the table, in order to increase the funding that they received. “Problem” children, that are difficult to teach; patients, that are difficult to treat; and cases, that are difficult to prosecute, are ignored in favour of easy wins.

And thus the police/CPS are extremely reluctant to spend time and effort on cases that they know will have a hard time getting through court proceedings.

And because these cases are hardly ever seen the impression is given that the problem is not large enough to warrant extra funding. And so the cycle continues.

Matt Taibbi talks to Kara Dansky:

Kara Dansky, a former WoLF board member and the author of The Abolition of Sex, may be the most outspoken feminist in America when it comes to criticizing popular current beliefs about gender identity. A former ACLU public defender, she’s focused heavily on the presence of biological men in women’s jails, and for her troubles has been essentially booted out of mainstream progressive politics.

Taibbi admits having sat on an interview with Dansky for months because of fear of we know very well what. He apologizes for doing that.

Matt Taibbi: I’ve known some people who identified as trans or as women in my life, who wanted to be called she. As somebody who’s grown up with a liberal sensibility, my first thought is, “Well, if that’s the way they feel, I respect that,” and so I go along with it. I always felt like that was the right moral thing to do. Is it not?

I grew up with a liberal sensibility too but that’s not my first thought, and never has been. My first thought, if it’s a man who wants to be called she, is the same as all the subsequent thoughts. It’s just no. Men are by definition adults; adults don’t get to tell or ask other adults to call them something they manifestly are not. Specifying the non-pejorative way to mention women, Black people, lesbians, gay men, and so on, is one thing, and asking to be called Your Majesty or Doctor or Admiral or Marilyn Monroe when you’re not any of those things is another. That’s first. Second is what Kara says: doing so conditions us to believe the lie.

Kara Dansky: Yeah, a couple things. I really think the use of so-called preferred pronouns, I think it messes with our head. Just as you were saying that, I noticed you kind of struggling with it, because I know that you want to use she to describe your male friends who identify as women to be kind, but it’s not easy. There’s a conflict in your own mind about that. I think that’s very deliberate, not by your friend. I think it’s a deliberate move by this whole gender identity movement to get us to be confused and to question our own understanding of the truth.

Such a simple little thing, but so powerful.

Matt Taibbi: Here’s the disconnect for me. There’s so much attention and sensitivity to the issue of violence against women in all other arenas — except this one. Do you have an explanation for that?

Kara Dansky: It is astonishing. Well, I don’t really get to ask that question to people on the left or media. When I ask that question to conservatives, they’re blown away. They agree with the question, and they don’t understand it either. But you’re right. If a man exposes himself on a bus, he will be charged with a crime, rightfully so. The victim of that crime is going to say, “This is an example of Me Too.” But if a man exposes himself in the naked section of a women’s spa, under California law, he gets to be validated as stunning and brave.

So all the guys on the bus will just say they’re trans laydeez.

There’s much more: read the whole thing.

Hadley Freeman writes:

Young people have always believed that they know better than the older generation, and now the older generation agrees with them. Middle-aged and experienced editors working in journalism and publishing live in fear of printing something that might displease the twenty-somethings who work in their company’s digital and publicity departments. Parents defer to their teenaged children about the correct languages to use and opinions to hold.

There was that chunk of time when, broadly speaking, the younger generation did know better about some things. The Civil Rights movement, opposition the the war on Vietnam, the return of feminism, the LGB rights movement were all partly generational conflicts. That background left practically everyone with an impression that Progress Is In The Kids. There are other impressions that pull the other way, like the impression that Kids Don’t Know Everything, but still – I think that core idea lurks in most people who Identify As progressive or social justicey. It’s taking forever for people to grasp that it slammed into the barrier at 80 miles an hour with the trans thing.

Younger generations have always looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuffy old farts who came before – their parents, in other words – while also seeking an identity that confers upon them a set of ready-made beliefs and a supportive social group.

With Civil Rights and feminism and LGB rights that worked out well, even for the stuffy old farts. With trans ideology it’s a flaming smoking melting disaster.

In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?, provocateur Matt Walsh interviews American paediatric professor Dr Michelle Forcier, who is dressed in a toga and talks in the soothing, beatific voice of a cult leader. She says that children are ready to be put on medical treatment to change gender “when they ask for it”. By “medical treatment”, she means Lupron, which is now used as a puberty blocker on gender non-conforming children, but has been used in the past, Walsh rightly says, to chemically castrate sex offenders. Forcier wrongly insists that puberty blockers “don’t have permanent effects”, and ends the interview.

Forcier is not a teenager, but she’s caught fast in the current teenager Glorious Revolution. It’s a pathetic spectacle.

Forcier is not an outlier. Trans activists now argue that confused four-year-olds should be seen as analogous to trans adults. Not very long ago, I received an email from my children’s nursery to say that a three-year-old who I’ll call Daisy was now a boy and should be called Robert. As it happened, my three-year-old had, that same morning, informed me he was an astronaut, but it hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone (or NASA), and that’s because children’s identities are mutable. They are still discovering who they are, and that’s as true for three-year-olds as it is for 13-year-olds.

Discovering and playing with and being creative with. Here’s the deal: pretending is fun, and good for children, but adults absolutely need to know the difference between fantasy and reality. They can go on fantasizing, but they have to know that’s what they’re doing, and that they can’t force their fantasies on anyone else. It is not in any way progressive or life-enhancing to build a politics on the claim that whatever people say about themselves [unless they’re feminist women] is true.

I was a very unhappy adolescent girl who was treated for anorexia. So I know a little about unhappy and confused adolescent girls, and how much we attack our own bodies to express that unhappiness. I also know what it’s like to be a desperate parent who just wants their kid to stop crying, to be happy and healthy and safe, and to feel like I’m a good parent who listens. The baby-led approach is an expression of that because sometimes (often) we don’t know what’s best for our kids, especially when it comes to a new issue like gender. But guess what? Your kid doesn’t know either, and nor, it seems, does anyone else who is supposed to safeguard them. Our kids aren’t breaking down barriers, they’re rock climbing without any safety ropes, and we’re encouraging it. It’s time for my generation to grow up, and be the adults.

Way past time in fact.

Raskin says he knew.

I don’t disagree with any of that, it’s just that I think Trump is peculiarly skilled at going on believing what he already believes no matter what other people are telling him – skilled at not listening, in short. He simply pays no attention to things people say that are inconvenient to him, apart from blasting them with dragon breath. He ignores them, in short. That is not a legal defense, I’m pretty sure.

“Barr told you it was bullshit.”

“Barr was full of shit, he was disloyal, he was wrong.”

“Nobody cares. You committed crimes. Put your hands against the wall.”

The Times has noticed the ACLU’s determination to erase women from abortion rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union, whose advocacy on reproductive rights is of more than a half-century vintage, recently tweeted its alarm about the precarious state of legal abortion:

“Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black Indigenous and other people of color. The L.G.B.T.Q. community. Immigrants. Young people. Those working to make ends meet. People with disabilities. Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.”

But nothing to do with women. It’s not just the ACLU, the Times correctly points out.

From Planned Parenthood to NARAL Pro-Choice America to the American Medical Association to city and state health departments and younger activists, the word “women” has in a matter of a few years appeared far less in talk of abortion and pregnancy.

That’s a clumsy sentence. Over the past few years the word has been disappearing.

This speed of change is evident: In 2020, NARAL issued a guide to activists on abortion that stressed they should talk about a “woman’s choice.” Two years later, the same guide emphasized the need for “gender-neutral language.”

And many women objected and continue to object, and they all ignore us.

This reflects a desire by medical professionals to find a language that does not exclude and gives comfort to those who give birth and identify as nonbinary or transgender. No agency appears to collect data on transgender and nonbinary pregnancies, but Australia has reported that about 0.1 percent of all births involve transgender men.

And for that tiny number we have to erase women and women’s rights from the fight for abortion, which is kind of like taking on the Nazis with a few slingshots.

For those who fight in the trenches of reproductive politics, the surprise is that a turn to gender-neutral language surprises. Louise Melling, a deputy legal director for the A.C.L.U., noted that not long ago male pronouns and terms such as “mankind” were considered sufficient to cover all women. Language is a powerful instrument, she said, and helps to determine political consciousness.

Oh jesus fucking christ. Yes, exactly, not long ago male everything was used for everything, and we’ve only had about five minutes of people trying to remember to include women now and then and suddenly NO, STOP, we have to stop mentioning women ever.

“Language evolves and it can exclude or it can include,” Ms. Melling noted in an interview. “It’s really important to me that we think about pregnant people. It’s the truth: Not only women give birth, not only women seek abortion.”

On the contrary, that is not the truth, it is the opposite of the truth.

NARAL punctuated this point in a tweet last year defending its use of “birthing people”: “We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth.”

Yes it is. That’s exactly who it is. It is only women who can get pregnant and give birth. That includes butch women. It doesn’t matter how high on the butchOmeter they register, they are still women. Men cannot get pregnant or give birth.

Seeking pre-emptive pardons may turn out to be a mistake.

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack revealed at its inaugural hearing that Donald Trump’s top Republican allies in Congress sought pardons after the January 6 insurrection, a major disclosure that bolstered the claim that the event amounted to a coup and is likely to cause serious scrutiny for those implicated.

Why? Because “Pardons for what, Senator?”

The news that multiple House Republicans asked the Trump White House for pardons – an apparent consciousness of guilt – was one of three revelations portending potentially perilous legal and political moments to come for Trump and his allies.

Note to journalists: don’t ever write a sentence with “portending potentially perilous” in it. Come on now.

“It’s hard to find a more explicit statement of consciousness of guilt than looking for a pardon for actions you’ve just taken, assisting in a plan to overthrow the results of a presidential election,” Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, told reporters.

Also, Trump can’t claim not to have known.

The disclosure about the pardons came during the opening hour of the hearing where the panel made the case that Trump could not credibly believe he had won the 2020 election after some of his most senior advisors told him repeatedly that he had lost to Joe Biden.

As a matter of law he can’t. As a matter of personal psychology, I don’t know – he’s so stupid and so self-focused and so hardened that maybe there is a sense in which he didn’t “know” it. He could know he’d been told that but also be very sure in his own calcified brain that everyone who isn’t Donald Trump is wrong about everything until proven otherwise (by him). But legally speaking that shouldn’t count.

At the heart of the case the panel appears to be trying to make is the legal doctrine of “willful blindness”, as former US attorney Joyce Vance wrote for MSNBC, which says a defendant cannot say they weren’t aware of something if they were credibly notified of the truth.

Even if they’re Trump. Even if they’re the most narcissistic human being ever to stomp on the earth.