I read Glosswitch’s take on Laurie Penny’s fatuous claims this morning (this morning my time, Hellfire West Coast time) but got too entangled with LP’s nonsense to point it out here. Let this be a lesson to you: if you can read either Laurie Penny or Glosswitch, don’t choose Laurie Penny.

Glosswitch starts with the “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude” tweet. The issue is not penises, she assures us.

The issue – highlighted in another of [the] well-known feminist’s tweets today, in which she told feminists who think biological sex is politically salient “your feminism is bad and you should feel bad” – is making other women feel ashamed of their feelings, their fears, their boundaries, their entire inner lives.

This is not about trans people. It is not about questioning the authenticity of someone’s self-perception. It is not about gender identity, or genitalia, or  “being one’s true self”. It is about the absolute patriarchal basics: power, shame, blame and control. It is about rape culture, domestic abuse, coercive control. It’s about all the things certain feminists claim to want to stop, then go on to reinforce.

Like, you know, men intruding on spaces for women, and ignoring women’s discomfort or fear, and getting their sexual jollies from that discomfort and fear. Those patriarchal basics.

When you recommend shaming a young woman for any potential discomfort  – when you insinuate that it is somehow voyeuristic, rude, obsessive not to want to be in close proximity to the naked male bodies of strangers – you are doing what abusive men have always done to women and girls: shaming them into feeling their distress is their fault.

I bet you anything Laurie Penny had no idea she was doing that when she did it. You can kind of see what she thought she was doing – being funny, being clever, turning things around so that she comes out funny and clever and the woman talking about her teenage daughter comes out timid and “sex-negative” and boring as well as transphobic. She thought she was being hip. It didn’t occur to her that she was being just another “Stop fighting, bitch, or I’ll break your fucking jaw.”

If only women felt nothing – or, failing that, if only they could resolve never to acknowledge or express their own pain – then we might see an end to all the struggles. Come on, girls. Just give in.

Don’t cry; your tears are manipulative, deceptive, the weaponisation of toxic femininity against people more vulnerable than you. Don’t speak; don’t be a Karen complaining to the manager, exploiting your experience of trauma to prop up carceral norms. Don’t acknowledge distress at the things that are done to and taken from your body; it’s all just penetration, just gestation, just meat, just nothing at all.

It’s just a guy getting naked next to you, smirking at you, watching you flinch.

I see women absorbing these lessons, believing there might be virtue, some ill-defined liberation, in following these heartless rules, never putting themselves first, but never putting other women first, either. Vying to be the best at not feeling anything, condemning those who foolishly slip up. It is so cruel, and so rooted in active dislike for women as people.

It’s all that good. Read the whole thing.

The same failure throughout.

No, what’s utterly disingenuous is to ignore the (surely blindingly obvious) fact that no one knows who is a guy who identifies as a woman getting changed in a changing room and who is a flasher. No one knows who is which and no one knows how to find out. If you were a flasher wouldn’t you be in those changing rooms like a shot, unable to believe your luck?

But we don’t know whether the man changing his clothes is a sex criminal or not. We can’t tell. It’s not that he automatically is, it’s that we have no way of knowing.

She can’t really be this stupid can she?

But, no, we really don’t know that. How could we?

But even if we assume that’s true (and crystal clear, and easy to understand, and universally acknowledged), how does anyone know who is which?

This is surely a very basic question, and it seems to be one that no trans “ally” will answer. It sure as hell seems that Laurie Penny will never answer it.

Just to clarify, nobody can tell who is which.

It’s not? What did she say?

Well, ok, she didn’t say “she’s rude for staring,” she said “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude.” It’s not the identical wording, true, but the meaning? The meaning is the same. I think Laurie Penny is the one who is being “silly” here.

Putative feminist puts her putative feminism to work standing up for men again.

If your claim to feminism includes telling feminist women not to focus on women but instead to focus on men who claim to be women, your feminism is moronic and you should feel like a damn fool.

But instead, putative feminist feels confident and clever enough to keep right on telling feminist women to focus on men who claim to be women.

Ahhhh that’s nice isn’t it? It’s not the man’s fault for getting naked in a women’s changing room, it’s the teenage girl’s fault for perceiving that a man is next to her and naked. The man has every right to get his dick out, the girl has no right to notice that he’s done so. He’s not intruding and perving, she is.

But how does anyone know who is which?

The determined stupidity is hard to believe. The determined transfer of feminism from women to men who call themselves women is enraging.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on 408 times on Fox News.

I confess to finding, Nullius, little to grow exercised about in the link you provide to ‘Critical Theory’. It speaks of The Frankfurt School, Kant, and of a liberal thinker like Habermas. It also refers to Karl Marx’s polemical assertion in ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ I would say two things: first, thought about political and social structures has, pace Marx, never been a view taken studiously from the outside, as though thinkers about these matters were dispassionately studying, say, an ant colony. Read Plato, read Aristotle, Confucius, Lao-tse, Kautilya, Sir Thomas Moore, Locke, Hume, Burke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu (who had such an influence on the founding fathers of the USA), Karl Popper… Political thought is not a natural science, to be compared with physics or chemistry, and it never has been. This is not to say that techniques derived from the sciences and from mathematics (statistical analysis, say) are not useful in what are called the political & social sciences – Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ comes to mind, as does Mark Moffett’s ‘The Human Swarm’, in which some interesting and enlightening comparisons are made between animal (including insect) societies and human societies. Nor to say that political thinkers such as the ones you appear to dislike renounce objectivity. The fact is that when one is talking about politics or social structures one is necessarily implicated in them, which is not to say that all works of political thought are or should be mere calls to arms, nor to say that their calls for change or calls for maintaining the status quo are not grounded in an understanding of reality.

The second matter is that one can learn from works of political thought with which one profoundly disagrees. I disagree with Marx, while appreciating many of his insights, just as I disagree with Hegel, against whom Marx wrote, again while appreciating, and being stimulated by, some of his insights. I have also read works by that nasty old Nazi, Carl Schmitt, in which I find, though I loathe Schmitt’s politics, many things of interest (as did that very good liberal historian Reinhart Kosselleck); and so with Michael Oakeshott and other conservative thinkers whose work I have read with interest.

And a third thing is this: it seems to me to be a complete exaggeration to assert that thinkers like Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno et al were not seeking understanding as well as change. Had their calls for change not been grounded in some sort of understanding of what their societies and what the politics of their time were like, nobody would have listened to them and we should not bother to read them still now.

Yes, Virginia, this could be the new normal, and yes it is scary.

The dangerous heat wave enveloping the Pacific Northwest is shattering weather records by such large margins that it is making even climate scientists uneasy.

You mean especially. Not even, but especially.

Infrastructure, including heating and cooling, is built according to expectations of a “normal” climate. Human-caused climate change is quickly redefining that normal, while dramatically raising the likelihood of events that simply have no precedent.

All the air conditioners are running practically nonstop. Does that put a strain on the electricity grid? Gee, I wonder.

“Because of the fact that climate change has made heatwaves like this much more likely and intense, we might very well reach the tipping point of what our infrastructure and other societal systems are able to deal with,” Friederike Otto, of the University of Oxford, told Axios.

Roads are buckling here too, some so badly that they have to be closed.

“If our decision makers do not take this heat wave as a harbinger of things to come and act quickly to adopt the climate change policies we all know are needed, I fear for the future of humanity,” Jean Flemma, an oceans policy expert living in Portland, told Axios on Sunday.

Sure sure but meanwhile lets panic about Critical Race Theory some more.

Judd Legum on that critical theory that everyone’s talking about.

Between now and November 2022, you will be hearing a lot about Critical Race Theory (CRT). On Saturday night, former President Trump bashed CRT during his first rally since leaving the White House. Last week, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the “END CRT Act.” In the first two weeks of June, CRT was mentioned 408 times on Fox News. 

Andrew Sullivan is obsessed with it.

It’s all because Republicans see it (see their distortions of it) as election magic.

Trump, Cruz, Bannon, and many other Republicans say that CRT is an insidious force that is being imposed in schools, corporations, and the government. This is how Cruz describes CRT in his new bill. 

By teaching that certain individuals, by virtue of inherent characteristics, are inherently flawed, critical race theory contradicts the basic principle upon which the United States was founded that all men and women are created equal.

This is a false description of CRT. (It is also an inaccurate historical description of the Declaration of Independence, which states “all men are created equal.” And it was referring only to white men.) 

So what’s a not-false description?

Critical Race Theory emerged from a group of legal scholars trying to answer a question: Why, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created formal legal equality between racial groups, does substantive racial inequality persist?

Let’s explore how this works with a concrete example. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. But Black Americans are incarcerated at far greater rates than whites. As of 2018, the latest data available, Blacks represented 12% of the general population and 33% of the prison population. Conversely, whites represent 63% of the general population and 30% of the prison population. 

I bet we can think of reasons before reading further. There’s more surveillance of black people, more stop and frisk, more arresting. There are different sentencing patterns. There are differences in who can get better lawyers. Stuff like that.

One explanation could be that Black Americans commit more crime. The data, however, does not fully support such a conclusion. About a quarter of the prison population is serving time for drug crimes and “[b]lack and white Americans sell and use drugs at similar rates.” Nevertheless, Blacks are 2.7 times more likely to be arrested, and more than 6 times more likely to be incarcerated, for drug-related offenses than whites. 

CRT scholars look at these statistics as evidence of structural racism. Specifically, they seek to identify “laws, policies, and procedures that function to produce racial inequality.”

And that’s not a wicked thing to do.

I think that’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Law should be more impartial than that, yeah?

The purpose of CRT is to understand the structural causes of racial inequality — large and small — in order to dismantle them and create a fairer society. CRT scholars use similar analysis to explain how the law creates racial inequality in health, education, and other areas. 

Is there a good reason we shouldn’t do that?

It’s not being taught in schools.

Anyone with a basic understanding of CRT understands that it is not being taught in K-12 schools. The reason is simple: The concepts underlying CRT are generally beyond the scope of undergraduate education, much less elementary school students. A website set up by CRT critics to document “the negative impact Critical Race Training has on education” does not even cover K-12 curriculum because it’s “more difficult to track.”

And then there’s the “downstream” claim.

Some critics of CRT acknowledge that CRT itself is not being taught in schools but students are being taught concepts derived from CRT. Pundit Andrew Sullivan, for example, says that students are being taught “a whole new epistemology that is directly downstream of academic critical theory.” For example, Sullivan claims, schools are teaching “white kids to internalize their complicity in evil.” 

Oh “downstream of”…but that could mean anything. Go far enough downstream and you can end up in a different country altogether. Go downstream on the Mississippi and the landscape changes a lot.

CRT, by contrast, is about how structures — not individuals — create racial inequality and injustice.

This is what I keep saying. It’s not about individual psychology, and it’s not the same as the annoying HR “trainings” a lot of people are exposed to.

CRT scholars reject the idea that inequalities between races can be explained through genetics…But CRT scholars also reject the idea that you can fix these inequalities by ignoring race. 

Too nuanced for the Andrew Sullivans of the world, I guess.

God the confident Do What I Say of them!

And it’s Laura’s business what Lizzie retweets why? I don’t care if they’re sisters, I don’t care if they’re married, I don’t care if they’ve been best friends since infancy – nobody gets to micromanage what other people say in public that way.

Ok there are some exceptions, employers can if it’s work-related, I think, and similar items, but just “You may not do that because I disapprove,” no. No and fuck off, no in thunder.

“Do you want to reconsider?”

The gall of them.

Imaging having to work around people like that.

Updating to add – she’s another Impactful Ivanka!

Looping in AND thought leaders – I think that’s BINGO.

So it looks as if Princess Ivanka may have perjured herself.

The Trump family has trouble with depositions. In 2007 testimony, Donald Trump was repeatedly shown to be a liar. In February, Donald Trump Jr. was deposed in the Trump inauguration scandal lawsuit, and on several key points, under oath, he provided false testimony. A review of documents filed in that case and other material obtained by Mother Jones shows that Ivanka Trump also testified inaccurately during her deposition in this lawsuit. 

“Testified inaccurately” meaning “perjured herself.”

The inauguration probe was launched last year by Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC. He has alleged that Trump’s inauguration committee misused charitable funds to enrich the Trump family. As Racine put it, the lawsuit maintains “that the Inaugural Committee, a nonprofit corporation, coordinated with the Trump family to grossly overpay for event space in the Trump International Hotel… The Committee also improperly used non-profit funds to throw a private party [at the Trump Hotel] for the Trump family costing several hundred thousand dollars.”

That’s so Trump, isn’t it. “Hey this is a fabulous opportunity – just charge them 10 times the going rate, they won’t mind and we get to keep it.”

During a December 1 deposition—in which she swore to tell the truth—Ivanka Trump, the eldest daughter of Donald Trump who was an executive at the Trump Organization before becoming a White House adviser to her father, was asked if she had any “involvement in the process of planning the inauguration.” She replied, “I really didn’t have an involvement.” Ivanka testified that if her “opinion was solicited” regarding an inauguration event, she “would give feedback to my father or to anyone who asked my perspective or opinion.” And that was as far as her participation went.

She’s got the pseudo-intelligent jargon down – if anyone “solicited her opinion” she would “give feedback” on her “perspective.”

Anyway it’s not true, there are documents that show she was directly involved.

On November 29, 2016, Rick Gates, then the deputy chairman of the Presidential Inauguration Committee (known as the PIC), emailed her the current schedule of inauguration events. He noted that Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a lead producer working with the PIC, “is going to call you to discuss some additional ideas she has about some other events that we would like to see if you would be willing to do based on our meetings.” Ivanka replied to Gates and Winston Wolkoff, “Great. I am looping in my assistant Suzie who can coordinate a time for us to connect.” 

Snerk. She can’t talk normally for a second. “Looping in” “coordinate a time for us to connect” – ooooh isn’t she grown-up and businessy.

And perjured.

There was another email, and another Business Speak reply.

“As mentioned, my interest in hosting [the dinner or reception for women entrepreneurs] depends on the quality and theme of the event. ” She added, “I would love to bring together an incredible group of female entrepreneurs and thought leaders and integrate young girls in the programing. If we can make it an impactful event, I would love to do it.”

Thought leaders! Impactful event! Hahahahahachoke god she’s a nightmare.

There’s an even better one in an image of her email:

“Maybe after you are aligned on an impactful idea we could meet again as a collective?”

Yeah and they should call themselves The Impactful Collective.

I don’t even care about the perjury any more, I think she should be locked up for her abuse of the language.

What we’re talking about when we talk about freedom of expression:

What is it to “dissociate” from people “vigorously”? Does he mean he punches people before shouting “It’s all over between us!”?

I wonder because if not, what he’s talking about isn’t what I would consider a sanction. Jolyon Maugham turning his back on us isn’t the horror he seems to think it is.

Meanwhile, of course, he’s pushing the big lie, as he always does – equating the defense of women’s rights and boundaries with “transphobia.”

Women have to be able to refuse to share or live or pee with men if they need to because women are not always safe from men. It’s that simple. Women need to be able to keep those boundaries because we’re not always safe from men, and we can’t know in advance which men we don’t know are safe and which are dangerous. Our safety is not Jolyon Maugham’s to brush off, and our defense of it is not his to call “transphobia.”

What does he mean “trans people are literally dying because they can’t get healthcare”? Not that they can’t get treatment for diseases, presumably, because that’s not true. So does he mean they can’t get cross-sex hormones or amputations to fit their purported gender and are killing themselves as a result? That claim would be both reckless and silly.

It seems like such a silly teenagery thing for an adult barrister with some fame to be saying. “You bitches are making trans people kill themselves!!1” Oh come on.

Trans people can’t get a word in edgewise? Really???

The meaningless piety-language again. What does he mean “traduce a minority”?

There are after all plenty of “minorities” who should be traduced – rapists, murderers, tyrants, cheats, bullies, frauds, anti-vaxxers, hustlers. The word “minority” is value-neutral.

In short he’s a manipulative bully as well as the other kinds. He uses slippery, dishonest wording to defend his fatuous ideology, and it makes me want to traduce him.

I wrote an unoptimistic column for The Freethinker. I think about the paradox a lot.

Humans are so clever in some ways. We came up with poetry, music, airplanes, the Mars Rover – but at the same time we’re too stupid to stop sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.

Stupid as a species, that is. It’s not really because individuals are stupid that we can’t stop the march to the cliff, it’s because individuals are individuals. It feels futile to try to do anything about the approaching doom when everyone else is still merrily building apartment towers and driving cars and burning down the Amazon rain forest. What’s the point?

So we’ll keep on drilling for oil and flying around the world for business meetings and building houses in flood plains and wildfire zones until the last condo disappears under the waves.

If we could just get all 7 billion of us together in a room…

Priorities…

Guest post by tigger_the_wing.

A lot of people do not know that the T in LGBT no longer stands for ‘transsexual’. In fact, people are these days called ‘transphobic’ for using the word ‘transsexual’ – even those who refer to themselves as ‘transsexual’. The ‘trans’ people in the recent posts I have made are those who consider themselves to be ‘under the transgender umbrella’. Here is a graphic from an information leaflet [pdf] which explains who counts as ‘transgender’:

Note: People with disorders of sexual development KEEP asking trans activists to leave them out of it and to stop using the outdated term ‘intersex’. Just as the trans activists ignore women’s boundaries, they ignore them, too.

Note 2: Male transvestites and drag performers are a MUCH bigger demographic than transsexual men. So much so that they had no difficulty changing the T to the meaningless ‘transgender’, nor changing the whole focus of the LGBT charity Stonewall to centre straight misogynist men.

Note 3: Gender variant/Gender queer is utterly without a coherent definition. Literally anyone can fit in here because *no-one* completely conforms to their society’s gender ‘norms’; partly because those change from year to year, and mostly because we all have individual personalities and tastes in clothing, hobbies, etc.

Note 4: Since gender critical feminists DEFINITELY don’t follow gender norms, by the trans activists’ own rules that makes us all ‘gender variant’, and so trans. Calling us ‘cis’ is MISGENDERING US. The worst crime anyone can commit, according to them; worse than murder.

Note 5: Trans activists have distorted Stonewall’s original mission to support the LGBT, to kick out the LGBT altogether, and bring in performers and fetishists instead.

The Observer points out that free speech is a fundamental human right and basic to democracy.

So it should concern anyone who claims to be a democrat that there is growing evidence that women who have expressed a set of feminist beliefs that have come to be known as “gender-critical” have, in some cases, faced significant professional penalties as a result.

Growing evidence, yes, as in there’s always more of it, but it’s been quite hefty for several years now.

The belief that the patriarchal oppression of women is grounded partly in their biological sex, not just the social expression of gender, and that women therefore have the right to certain single-sex spaces and to organise on the basis of biological sex if they so wish, represents a long-standing strand of feminist thinking. Other feminists disagree, believing that gender identity supersedes biological sex altogether.

That’s not right. It wasn’t a “strand” of feminist thinking, it was all of it. This idea that gender identity supersedes biological sex is comparatively new.

And that’s for obvious reasons. What kind of labor movement can you have if you think that being working class is a matter of identity rather than the brute facts of the matter? What kind of anti-racism is it that thinks it’s all a matter of choice?

As a society, we need to resolve the question of how to protect the privacy, dignity and rights of trans women while also respecting the privacy, dignity and rights of those born female.

But trans women are men, so their need for privacy isn’t quite as urgent as women’s need is.

Yet there have been clear and significant attempts to interfere with women’s freedom to express gender-critical beliefs.

The Observer then lists the recent examples we’re familiar with – Maya Forstater; Rosa Freedman and Jo Phoenix; Jess De Wahls. (They skipped Marion Millar though.)

These are just a few examples but there have been many more of women being harassed, punished, censured – and even physically assaulted – for their gender-critical views. Meanwhile, the chief executive of Stonewall has likened gender-critical beliefs to antisemitism. The chilling result is the frightening of women into silence because they fear the consequences of expressing their feminist beliefs.

Yes, and that’s been going on for several years, intensifying all the time.

For centuries, patriarchal societies have tried to limit the free expression of women. For centuries, women have fought back against attempts to curb their fundamental human rights. It should not need stating that gender-critical feminists have the same free-speech rights as all other citizens. In a democracy, there is no debate to be had about women’s freedom of speech.

Better late than never.

It’s fine, it’s ok, don’t worry, nothing’s wrong.

Sometimes people are too damn quick to say that when they don’t actually have a clue whether it’s fine or not.

Days before the collapse, Stratton, 40, the model and yoga instructor who went silent after calling her husband in Denver, had told family members that “something was wrong” with the building, according to Dean, her older sister. Stratton, who remains among the missing, had seen water damage and worried about the heavy equipment she saw being lifted to the roof for repair work, Dean said.

Heavy equipment on the roof of an occupied apartment tower; what could possibly go wrong?

Other residents had expressed concerns, too. Elaine Sabino, a transplant from New York who had lived in the tower’s penthouse for two years, complained in recent weeks “about the construction on the roof,” said her brother-in-law, Douglas Berdeaux.

Sabino, who is also missing, “said it was vibrating her unit,” he said. “She even went up to talk to the construction manager and told them whatever they were doing was making her rooms vibrate. She said she was worried that the ceiling was going to collapse on top of her bed. She also said she heard water around the elevator. A manager went up to her unit with her and looked around, and told her they’re doing some work, but everything was okay.”

Oh really. How did he know everything was okay? How could he tell everything was okay by looking around her “unit”? Was it that he didn’t see any heavy equipment actually poking through the ceiling?

He didn’t know, he just wanted her to shut up.

Résistance Lesbienne on Facebook, a public post so anyone can see it.

La vidéo des hommes transidentifiés qui noues ont agressées pendant notre action de visibilité lesbienne à la Marche des Fiertés Paris 2021 #resistancelesbienne #lesbiennepasqueer #lesbiannotqueer #gettheloutfrance #Interlgbt #Marchedesfierte

Translation: The video of the trans-identified men who attacked us during our lesbian visiblity action at the Pride March Paris 2021.

H/t Sackbut

The BBC needs better editing.

A Tongan weightlifter – and rival to transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard – who missed out on an Olympic qualifying berth has been awarded a wildcard entry to the Tokyo Games.

Nini Manumua, 21, has been handed a tripartite place by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF). She finished in 14th in the women’s +87kg division, one place short of an automatic qualification berth. New Zealand lifter Hubbard finished seventh.

Well, he finished seventh competing against women. Manumua is an actual woman.

She [Hubbard] competed in men’s events before coming out as transgender in 2013.

That is, Hubbard competed in men’s events (being a man and all) before he decided to pretend to be a woman in order to cheat his way to medals.

Her inclusion has generated significant criticism with some groups claiming Hubbard has an unfair advantage, but others see the 43-year-old as a figurehead for greater inclusion at the Olympics.

Oh we’re not just claiming he has an unfair advantage, we’re saying with emphasis that he’s cheating. It should be obvious to everyone over the age of 6 that he’s cheating.

Trump is doing a Revenge Rally. How adult.

Several hundred supporters of former President Donald Trump lined up for a rally on Saturday in Ohio, his first since the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, as he aims to bolster allies, berate his enemies and cement his influence over the Republican Party.

Several hundred, eh. There’s glory for you.

It also marks the start of his public events lashing out at elected Republicans who he views as having crossed him. He will campaign for former White House aide Max Miller, who has launched a primary challenge against Representative Anthony Gonzalez, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters that left five dead including a Capitol Police officer.

Trump has vowed to campaign against all 10. He has also endorsed a challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski, the only one of the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict him in his January impeachment trial who is up for re-election in 2022.

The guy missed his calling. He would have enjoyed his life a lot more as a Mafia boss.

Peter Tatchell trying to bully women into agreeing that men can be women. Men can’t be women. That sex is already taken.

Walk grabbed; back to Lucy Bannerman’s article.

More than 500 organisations, including councils, police forces, fire and ambulance services, NHS Trust and universities across the UK, applied to the 2020 Index last year. The 31-page application form vets organisations across a wide range of topics, from their HR policies and procurement processes to their social media activity.

How did more than 500 serious important grown-up organizations become convinced that they needed Stonewall’s approval so desperately that they would fill out a 31 page application???

And let’s not forget that Stonewall makes money from all this. Quite a racket, in the literal sense.

Here’s some of the explanation:

“Employers want to be one of the good guys,” an equality officer and former Stonewall volunteer told The Times who considered signing his organisation up.

I think there’s a word either missing or too many in that sentence, but I think I get it.

He knew that winning a spot on Stonewall’s Top 100 employers would bring bragging rights. If it won a place, his public sector employer would be celebrated and could woo the top talent with its stamp of approval as a discrimination-free workplace.

Useful as far as it goes but really it just pushes the question back a step. Why are those particular bragging rights so important? Why has there never ever ever been such a yearning for bragging rights about being a feminist workplace? Or an anti-racism workplace?

So the guy had a meeting with the goons representatives.

“There was a very manipulative tone. I remember being told, ‘well, you don’t have to apply, but if you don’t, do you really feel you have the expertise to deal with this in-house?’ It felt like emotional blackmail. The tone of the meeting felt quite high-pressured,” he said, “with a ‘We can sign you up today’ vibe — a little like a time-share presentation.”

Or even a lot like a time-share presentation.

It wasn’t the £2,500 Diversity Champion membership fee you had to pay, before being eligible to apply, that put him off; it was the “sheer volume” of work the application demanded. He had heard of another organisation that spent three months working on a submission of hundreds of pages. He declined, but plenty [of] others did not.

Organisations that wouldn’t spend half an hour on such an application for a feminist membership, I betcha.

Naomi Cunningham, barrister and chairwoman of Sex Matters said: “Stonewall sells its Workplace Equality Index as a scheme to help organisations comply with equality law. But what it offers is lobbying — it presents its own highly contentious understanding of what the law should be presented as ‘training’ on what the law is.

“It tells organisations to treat anyone who identifies as the opposite sex as if they have changed sex, and are therefore automatically entitled to use spaces such as toilets, changing rooms and showers that others rely on for privacy. That’s not the law. But Stonewall presents it as if it is and encourages organisations to treat any objections as a disciplinary matter.”

In other words Stonewall lies about the law and tells organisations to punish disobedient employees even though that’s not the law.

This paragraph made my head snap back in that “whaaaaaaat” way:

In its annual applications over the past four years, the Scottish government offered up screenshots of elected ministers’ social media activity for Stonewall’s approval, details of every Pride event attended by Nicola Sturgeon, and examples of “LGBT champions” silencing dissenting colleagues on internal forums as proof of its commitment to “equality”.

The government! Screenshots! Elected ministers’ social media activity! For Stonewall’s approval! It’s astounding. It’s like high school, only stupider.

When Stonewall asked for more, the Scottish government said it was hoping to make self-declaration the law.

Stonewall has lobbied for people to have access to single-sex spaces, on the basis of their self-declared “gender identity” instead of biological sex. The controversial proposal is opposed by many women, who fear it would open up spaces such as changing rooms, prisons, refuges and women-only shortlists to any biological male who says they are a woman.

For the simple and convincing reason that it would inevitably do exactly that, because that’s what the proposal means.

In an effort to win points, the government also described how it was “consulting on the detail of what should be included in a new hate crime bill”. The legislation, passed this year, created a new offence of “stirring up hatred” on grounds such as transgender identity, but attracted criticism for excluding women as a protected group.

Fabulous isn’t it? Women can be punished for not agreeing that men are women but everybody can stir up hatred against women with impunity.

Stonewall was thrilled.

“The sponsorship and support Scottish government provides to a diversity of LGBT groups is highly valuable and impactful…”

Of course they call it “impactful.” Stupidest word coined in the last 50 years.

The Scottish government did well one year but then slipped down the rankings the next. Oh dear. What to do?

Stonewall had advice.

“We have identified the following areas as priorities for the year ahead” came the Feedback. “Removing remaining gendered terms such as ‘mother’ from your maternity policy, and replacing these with gender neutral equivalents. Please refer to Stonewall’s Inclusive Policy Toolkit for further information.”

It erases women or it gets the hose.