What Owen Jones always ignores:

What? What is it that Owen Jones always ignores? What are these tweets examples of Owen Jones ignoring?

Women. Women’s rights. The rights of women. The fact that women have rights, and are constantly having to defend them.

He interprets everything gender critical feminists say as “transphobia” and “anti-trans activism” when in fact for feminists it’s women’s rights that are crucial. We say that our point is that much of trans ideology is in direct conflict with women’s rights, and he invariably ignores that and just calls it “transphobia.” We reply a billion times that it’s not, it’s about women’s rights and how much of trans ideology tramples all over our rights. We might as well save our breath and our typing, because he never ever pays the slightest attention.

Originally a comment by latsot on Define “hate”.

The BBC ran a piece on Hubbard yesterday, which I overheard from another room. NOTE: distance from source does not mute rage. They were doing the usual dance around all of this to avoid screaming, wide-eyed into the camera “IT’S A BLOKE!!!! WE CAN ALL SEE IT’S A BLOKE!!!!! IT’S OBVIOUSLY A GADGIE!!!* HE’S JUST CHEATING!!!!!”

Then they seemed to change the subject and had a correspondent phoning in to talk about something else and they asked him what they thought of the whole men cheating in women’s sports thing. The correspondent was very careful to explain that he didn’t know anything about the subject and couldn’t possibly comment but that inclusion is good.

I won’t go into everything wrong with that statement, preaching to the choir. But the BBC knew that he wasn’t going to say something like “well, I don’t think women should be forced to compete against men, because that’s obviously grossly unfair.”

It was a setup, in other words, deliberately constructed to make it look as though some supposedly independent sport expert agreed with their pretend-neutral attitude.

This is what we get for the license fee that so many women are in prison for not paying, probably because their male partners insist the women have their names on the register but won’t cough up their fair share of the bills so the women have to make tough decisions about whether to let their kids go hungry or go to jail, where there’s a chance they will be raped by a man who says he’s a woman.

That license fee.

* Geordie for “man”.

Oh it’s all so complex.

As the first openly transgender female athlete to compete at the Olympics, Laurel Hubbard was making history and huge controversy in the Tokyo International Forum. It certainly looked like the weight of the world was on her shoulders.

If you believe that he really does have gender dysphoria. If you believe he’s just cheating, it looks a bit different.

Hubbard had met all the requirements set by the International Weightlifting Federation, though those rules — requiring athletes to demonstrate their total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months before their first competition — are regarded as wholly inadequate by a battery of sports scientists. At the most basic level, they point out that the normal testosterone range for women is between 0.3 and 2.4 nmol/L.

The most basic level is the one that counts.

Fiddling nervously with a tracksuit top, she made a short speech of gratitude to journalists — an unusually large amount were present for women’s weightlifting — which did serve as a reminder that there is a human story here of an athlete seeking a place in the sporting world, and in the world in general.

Again, only if you believe that he believes all the nonsense, and isn’t just taking advantage. I don’t believe that, so I don’t think that’s the human story here at all. And for that matter even if you believe he believes, you damn well ought to keep in mind the woman he displaced. What about her human story? She not rich or white or male.

Hubbard thanked the IOC for reaffirming “their commitment to the principles of Olympism”, but the organisation could hardly hail this as a triumph as it grapples awkwardly with the science and talks of a shift away from a framework based on testosterone.

There is also the hard reality that it will never please everyone. Fairness and inclusion can never be fully reconciled in this debate.

But the Olympics are all about exclusion. That’s the whole entire point. They’re about the very best, and they exclude everyone else from competing. That’s how athletic competitions work.

How about a little feel-good item for a change.

US right-wingers are rejoicing that the US women’s soccer team lost.

All because they kneeled (or knelt). The horror.

From last week but still of interest:

House Republicans on Wednesday angrily criticized a new order from the Capitol Hill physician to wear masks inside the Capitol due to the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus, leading Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy a “moron” over his argument that the decision was not based on science.

Oh that’s why she called him a moron. Well, yes – that is a moronic thing to say. The whole anti-mask pageant is strikingly stupid and perverse.

“This is some serious nanny-state stuff that will only breed resentment. No kidding,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said on the floor, complaining that the House should be focusing on border security. He added: “This institution is a sham. We should adjourn and shut the place down.”

But it isn’t nanny-state stuff. It’s what you do when there’s a contagious lethal virus cutting a swathe through the population. It’s the other way around – whining about preventive measures to avoid catching and spreading a lethal disease is childish. There should be nannies smacking them all and putting them in a corner, but there aren’t.

When Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) entered the chamber, a Democratic staff member handed her a mask. Boebert grabbed it and dropped it on the floor…

According to people who were there but didn’t want to go on the record because Republicans might do another insurrection.

Boebert is among the most outspoken Republicans against mask requirements, arguing that they are a sign of authoritarianism rather than an attempt to prevent the spread of a disease that has killed more than 611,000 Americans.

For what purpose? What authoritarian goal is it that masks will help forward? What do Democrats gain from mask requirements other than what we all gain by stopping the pandemic?

“We might as well start calling this a Perma-demic,” she tweeted Wednesday morning. “Permanent masking. Permanent state of emergency. Permanent control. This will go on until the American people just say enough is enough. The tyrants aren’t giving this up!”

It isn’t control though. Masks are irksome, for sure, but that doesn’t make them “control.” It’s not like: step 1, mandate masks, step 2, get everyone marching in lockstep, step 3, profit. It’s just not that easy.

“Make no mistake — The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” McCarthy tweeted shortly after Monahan sent his email Tuesday night.

But they don’t. Republicans are the ones who are telling their voters not to mask, and thus prolonging and rejuvenating the pandemic.

Oh did they indeed.

What’s SRC? Student Representative Council. Apparently a misogynist racist Student Representative Council.

Who is the simpering “Anastacia” Tomson?

Mister Catchme-fuckme shoes, that’s who. The kind of pretend woman who thinks crippling “sexy” footbinding shoes are a metonymy for women.

News 24 reported last week:

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Student Representative Council (SRC) wants an open lecture by writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cancelled, accusing her of transphobia.  

“As an institution which actively promotes intersectional feminism through its curriculum, it is important for us to recognise that Ngozi Adichie enhanced the divide in the feminist community with her anti-trans remarks, instead of using her platform and influence to highlight how trans women also have a right to simply be recognised as who they are without having to defend their womanhood,” the SRC tweeted.

Instead of using her talent and recognition to highlight how men who pretend to be women have a right to be recognised as who they are not without having to defend their fictional “womanhood.”

It’s always interesting how this shite overrides the usual requirements of “intersectionality” – so much so that they not only treat women as the privileged class but even a black woman, which would ordinarily be unthinkable.

I wonder what they’ll be thinking of themselves in 20 years, with the mortgage and the kids needing orthodontia…if they’re not too busy struggling to survive in a heating climate.

The facts:

Transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard made Olympic history but failed to record a successful lift in the women’s +87kg weightlifting.

Stupid kind of “history” to make. He “made history” by being the first man to steal a woman’s place at the Olympics. Not something to brag about.

She became the first openly transgender athlete to compete at a Games in a different gender category to the one in which they were born.

Carefully worded to sound acceptable. The accurate wording would be “He became the first openly male athlete to compete at a Games in the women’s category.” It doesn’t sound quite as brave and stunning put like that, does it.

Why is the BBC wording it in that cautious, protective, misleading way? Why is the BBC trying to draw a veil over the obvious (grotesque) facts? Why is it calling our indignation at this massive insult to women “hate”? Why is it promising to turn us over to the police if we get too vocal in our indignation?

The questions aren’t purely rhetorical, because the BBC is a serious news organization and I genuinely don’t understand why it’s being so deceitful out in the open where everyone can see.

The BBC is mad at us. Livid, in fact. The BBC won’t have it. The BBC is taking names. The BBC will report us to the relevant authorities. It replies to its own tweet about “reluctant history maker” Laurel Hubbard:

There’s this CNN piece from four months ago that I don’t think I saw at the time, so I don’t think I’ve already ranted about it.

It’s irritating because CNN is a news outlet, so it’s supposed to deal in verifiable facts for the most part (along with a lot of political commentary, it’s true). Reporter Devan Cole wrote about trans athletes and there’s hardly a fact to be seen.

South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem banned transgender girls and women from competing on women’s sports teams at public high schools and colleges via a pair of executive orders issued Monday.

In other words she banned male people who claim to be trans from competing on women’s sports teams. It sounds rather different when you say it that way. The purported “trans women and girls” are men and boys. Maybe they genuinely identify as female, maybe they don’t, but the fact is they’re male. Once you remember that they’re male it’s quite obvious why they’re banned from competing on women’s teams. That of course is why Cole doesn’t say it that way.

Though the two executive orders signed by Noem do not explicitly mention transgender athletes, they ​reference the supposed harms of the participation of “males” in women’s athletics — an echo of the transphobic claim, cited in other similar legislative initiatives, that transgender women are not women.

But they’re not. They’re not literally women. Even if they sincerely “identify as” women that still doesn’t make them women. That’s the point. A news outlet shouldn’t be treating that fact as a wicked lie, and the fiction as obvious truth. News outlets shouldn’t be feeding us politicized lies that way. They also shouldn’t be calling it “transphobic” to say that men are not women, trans or not.

The orders also reference “biological sex,” a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students’ original birth certificates.

Disputed by whom? For what purpose?

It’s not disputed in life, for the most part. People mostly aren’t confused about how to make babies. We all know who is which really, it’s just that a few of us have ruled that we have to engage in this elaborate dance of thinking that biological sex is a “disputed” term.

It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and for some people, the sex listed on their original birth certificate is a misleading way of describing the body they have.

There’s no such thing as “a person’s gender identity.” That’s a silly invented concept meant to retroactively make sense of the whole “identifying as” nonsense. There is no “for some people” about who is female and who is male. It’s just a blunt fact. It’s gaslighting for a news outlet to be shoving this politicized gibberish on us.

While sex is a category that refers broadly to physiology, a person’s gender is an innate sense of identity. The factors that go into determining the sex listed on a person’s birth certificate may include anatomy, genetics and hormones, and there is broad natural variation in each of these categories. For this reason, the language of “biological sex,” as used in this legislation, can be overly simplistic and misleading.

All said as po-faced and solemnly as if it were instructions on how to build a fence, yet it’s just bafflegab.

Supporters of the ban have argued that trans women have a physical advantage over cisgender women (women assigned female at birth) in sports, but trans advocates and ​some Democratic lawmakers contend that they’re discriminatory​, citing the natural variations that appear in athletes at all levels and of all genders.

And they’re bullshitting.

I don’t know. There are doubtless a million more pieces just like this from news outlets, but it annoys me that we’re having this absurd jargon-ridden ideology forced on us disguised as factual.

At the bottom of the piece:

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to provide additional explanation as to the distinctions between gender and sex.

Because you’re just making it up as you go. None of it is true, so don’t bother with the updating to provide “additional explanation” of what can’t possibly make any sense.

Preserving the dogma:

Oh come ON Beeb – “reluctant” is the LAST thing he is. If he were reluctant he wouldn’t be doing this sadistic unfair thing.

And it’s not “history” he’s making, either.

The ridiculous story, by Joshua Surtees:

“I’m not here to change the world,” said Laurel Hubbard in 2017, the year she first competed as a female weightlifter.

The year he first competed “as a female” as if that were something people can just do, the same way they can just comb their hair or eat a sandwich.

“I just want to be me and do what I do,” she told a reporter in her native New Zealand, after returning home with two silver medals from the World Championships.

Of course he said that, what else would he say? “I just want to compete against women so that I can be sure of winning”?

Two years later, her victory in the +87kg category at the Pacific Games in Samoa provoked accusations of unfairness – due to the fact she had lived as a man for the first three decades of her life before transitioning in 2012, coming out as a transgender woman aged 33, then resuming her sports career.

Rubbing the incorrect insulting pronouns in our faces. And yes of course that’s why his theft of two medals provoked accusations of unfairness: it was unfair. We’ve all seen the famous podium photo.

On Monday she will become the first openly transgender athlete to compete in a different gender category to that which they were born at an Olympic Games.

On Monday he will openly compete as a woman in the hope of winning medals he would otherwise have zero chance at.

Now 43, she will become the third oldest lifter in Olympic history. The New Zealand Olympic Committee’s Ashley Abbott called her a “really important role model” who “opens a conversation about inclusivity”.

“If you see someone like you achieving on the world stage, it’s a really wonderful opportunity to see that there is a pathway,” said Abbott.

What if you’re Samoan or Tongan and you see someone like you lose the chance to achieve on the world stage because an entitled rich white guy has stolen your place? That’s an opportunity to see that there was a pathway but entitled rich white guy has stolen it, yeah?

Though changing the world may not be top of her agenda, Hubbard’s selection as the first trans athlete in an individual sport goes a long way towards changing centuries of sporting tradition.

For the worse.

On Friday, the IOC released another statement on her behalf which read: “I see the Olympic Games as a global celebration of our hopes, ideals and values and I would like to thank the IOC for its commitment to making sport inclusive and accessible.”

Bullshit. He’s thanking the IOC for making sport exclusive and inaccessible for women. How fucking dare the BBC ignore this obvious fact.

Abbott said Hubbard was “keeping a low profile” and told reporters on Friday she would be shielded from “anything negative in the social media space”.

“We all need to remember that there’s a person behind all these technical questions,” said Abbott.

A male person, who is cheating women out of their medals and chances to compete. Not all that technical really.

At the same briefing, Richard Budgett – the medical and scientific director of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – said: “Laurel Hubbard is a woman and is competing under the rules of her federation.

“We have to pay tribute to her courage and tenacity in qualifying for the Games.”

We have to no such thing. It takes zero courage to steal opportunities and rewards from women.

It’s Satanic Panic all over again.

Last paragraph of the statement:

CAAPS supports eliminating the use of ROGD and similar concepts for clinical and diagnostic application given the lack of empirical support for its existence and its likelihood of contributing to harm and mental health burden. CAAPS also encourages further research that leads to evidence-based clinical guidelines for gender-affirming care that support child and adolescent gender identity development.

CAAPS does not encourage further research that leads to evidence-based clinical guidelines for watch and wait care that support child and adolescent body-acceptance.

At this rate, 5 or 10 years down the road, will psychology organizations be supporting “species-affirming” care that helps children and adolescents look like horses, cheetahs, giraffes, swans? I don’t suppose many children and adolescents will be identifying as hippos or rats or wart hogs.

It’s always so funny when a man “jokes” about hitting a woman with a hammer. It’s even funnier when both parties are members of Congress.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joked about casual violence against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a glitzy fundraising dinner in Tennessee on Saturday night, according to several reporters who were at the event.

During a speech to around 1,400 GOP donors, McCarthy reportedly spoke optimistically about the Republicans’ chances for retaking the majority in the House following the 2022 midterm elections.

McCarthy went on to say that, should the GOP manage to flip the House in 2022 and if he were to become the speaker, he would find it difficult to resist hitting Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel, The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer said on Twitter.

“It will be hard not to hit her with it but I will bang it down,” McCarthy joked, according to Scherer.

They don’t want us to forget that he was “joking,” do they.

But of course it isn’t a joke. It especially isn’t a joke when it’s a man talking about hitting a woman. It especially isn’t a joke when the man’s political party tried to overthrow the government a few months ago. It especially isn’t a joke when several colleagues of the man appear to have helped the attempted overthrow of the government, and when all but two of his colleagues are resisting all attempts to do anything about the attempted overthrow.

None of it is a joke.

WHERE ARE THE GROWNUPS???

The American Medical Association says core information should be left off birth certificates because…[ ]

Sex should be removed as a legal designation on the public part of birth certificates, the American Medical Association (AMA) said Monday.

Requiring it can lead to discrimination and unnecessary burden on individuals whose current gender identity does not align with their designation at birth, namely when they register for school or sports, adopt, get married, or request personal records.

Enough already. “Gender identity” isn’t a thing. We are what we are. We don’t have species identity or time identity or geographic identity or any other kind of identity that contradicts the dull facts. Think of yourself as magical all you like, but quit trying to make the real world agree with your fantasies. We’re not interested. There are too many of us, we can’t keep track of everyone’s many Imported Luxury Identities. Birth certificates aren’t there for purposes of self-actualization or pretend-validation.

“Assigning sex using binary variables in the public portion of the birth certificate fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity,” Underwood said, and can be used to discriminate.

There is no such “medical spectrum.” Fantasy isn’t medical.

Really, where are the grownups?

How these things go. Remember yesterday the Head of Diversity and Incloooosion at Harvard something Twitter-denounced an academic for “transphobic and harmful remarks”? Like so?

All very public, with names and specifics, yeah?

But it turns out Laura Simone Lewis is the injured party here. She’s a grad student, you see, and the woman she pointed out for punishment on Twitter is not.

Wait wait wait wait wait. Lewis named and shamed Hooven on Twitter, not the other way around. It’s Lewis – the shy and fragile grad student – who announced on Twitter that she’s “appalled and frustrated” by Hooven’s “transphobic and harmful” remarks. Then Hooven responded.

Then she said let’s meet offline and Lewis enthusiastically agreed. But now Heather Dingwall wants to “make it crystal clear” that somehow Hooven is bullying Lewis.

Trans bullshit seems to inspire people to argue dishonestly.

The Attorney-General of Missouri. That’s right, not some random goon on Twitter, not that twitchy guy on the bus, not even a Fox News Personality, but the top law person in Missouri.

I see that claim from the other wackaloons – it’s not about the virus, it’s about control!!

Really. Why? To what end? How do you know? Why now? Why not two years ago? What would convince you you’re wrong? Why do you think the CDC and state/national officials should let the virus cut a swathe through the population and then turn around and cut another until we’re all gone?

What kind of control is it to get people to put masks on? Where’s the profit? What’s the next step to get the cunning plan to pay off? Ok you have 300 million people or so in masks; now what?

Is the idea that it’s training us all to obey mindlessly?

But that’s stupid. Putting masks on doesn’t mean our next step will be to obey a command to arrest all the Republicans or set fire to all the banks or kill all the Jews. It doesn’t mean anything except that we want to avoid spreading a lethal disease.

I know; it doesn’t matter; the already crazy will believe the crazy no matter how stupid it is. I still need to point out the crazy.

More on the sentencing of Grant Karte:

Grant Karte threatened the 55-year-old [Joanna Cherry] with sexual violence in a series of messages on Twitter after she was sacked from the party’s front bench in February.

In one, the 30-year-old promised to ‘f**k you like you f****d Scotland,’ also leaving contact details behind.

In other words he promised to rape her. Promising to fuck a woman you’re bullying=promising to rape her.

He admitted sending the threats back in March, but sentencing waited while he got a psych evaluation.

Karte sent the five messages on the day Ms Cherry, 55, was “sacked” from the SNP’s front bench by the party leadership on February 1.

The first read: “You don’t know me or what I’m capable of. Tell me something.” An email address and phone number was also left.

A second message added: “Or I will be your worst enemy.”

Another read: “I read between the lines.”

The fifth said: “You have 24 hours or I will f*** you like you f****d Scotland.”

We’re left to wonder what was in the fourth message.

The SNP (or Sturgeon) is hammering the message home by appointing a “complaints officer” (have some scare quotes) who has a history of…you know the rest.

The Herald has the details:

THE SNP has come under fire after posts emerged from their newly-appointed complaints officer accusing their own party MP of “transphobia” and “bullying”.

Ricky Taylor posted online on Friday evening to say he was “delighted” to be joining the SNP’s headquarters at the end of August as the party’s new complaints officer.

He added: “It’s not going to be the easiest job but I’m definitely up for the challenge of making sure the party is a welcoming and safe place for all”.

By which of course he doesn’t mean people he considers “transphobic.” (It’s scare quotes day.)

Brilliant, the new complaints officer is a punk kid who told an adult woman to grow up and adopt his ridiculous beliefs about Magic Gender.

In other words it’s a big “fuck you” to Joanna Cherry and women in general.

Rape threats? From a fellow party member? Sorry, not our department.

Joanna Cherry has condemned the “SNP hierarchy” for deserting her after she was bombarded with rape threats by a party member for her stance on gender reforms and trans rights.

There are too many scare quotes in this article. The SNP exists and it has a hierarchy so I don’t see any real reason for the “” other than leaning on one side of the scale.

At Edinburgh sheriff court Grant Karte, 30, was ordered not to contact Cherry for five years and sentenced to a community payback order under which he will be supervised for 15 months.

Cherry, 55, a QC and the MP for Edinburgh South West, said that she was “very disappointed” not to receive “the same support as other women who have suffered abuse”, describing how Karte had sent “a number of menacing and obscene private messages, including threats of sexual violence”.

We know what it’s about of course. Those other women weren’t Evil Terfs. It seems Evil Terfs deserve rape threats.

Karte sent his abusive messages on the evening of February 1 this year, the day [Cherry] was removed from the SNP front bench team at Westminster.

…

Karte, who is said to have been an SNP member at the time of the threats, admitted offences under the Communications Act 2003. He has previously admitted sending Twitter messages that were “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”, repeatedly threatening Cherry.

So many lefty men cannot believe their luck at having a “progressive” excuse to bully and threaten women.