Trust Ash Sarkar for that. Woman’s Hour talks to a couple of women and Sarkar intervenes to tell it to talk to different people instead. Self-hating woman rebukes Woman’s Hour for not being as self-hating as she is.

Right, because we never hear from “trans and nonbinary” people, apart from all the fucking time. It’s mandatory to interrupt women who are talking about how something affects women to say shut up about women when are you going to talk about “trans and nonbinary” people instead? Women don’t matter, women are old news, women are Mommy and we hate Mommy, women are privilege, women are Karen, women cause all the problems, women are the worst, shut up about women shut up shut up SHUT UP.

Some warped legal reasoning here from a University of Alabama law guy:

Laws that prohibit physicians from providing treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy to minors are bad public policy. Their advocates claim that these are efforts to protect kids, who they argue may later change their mind, from medical treatments they characterize as irreversible. But these arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny: The laws—such as the one Arkansas just passed and those that more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, are actively considering—will certainly harm transgender children, denying them medical care that they need and causing them psychological pain. That should be reason enough to oppose these laws.

Wait a second though. It’s hotly disputed whether puberty blockers and cross-hormone “therapy” are “treatments” at all. What’s the disease they’re treating? There is no disease, there’s an idée fixe about being the “wrong” gender and wanting to “change sex” to correct the mistake. It’s a delusion, and it’s not at all clear that it’s in the patient’s best interest to treat the idée fixe as real and needing “treatment” in the form of fiddling with the genitals and breasts and hormones.

The most obvious, and compelling, constitutional objection to Arkansas’s Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act and laws like it arises from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. That guarantee means, among other things, that a state government may not target one group of residents for discriminatory treatment arising from animus, dislike, or irrational fear.

Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has consistently rejected moral disapproval of a particular group of individuals as a constitutionally legitimate basis for imposing targeted legal burdens on the group. Thus, when Congress attempted to, in the Court’s assessment, “prevent so-called ‘hippies’ and ‘hippie communes’ from participating in the food stamp program,” the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the ban for otherwise eligible “hippies.”

But this isn’t that. The laws are meant to benefit the putative trans teenagers over the long haul, because most adolescents who say they are trans desist as they get older.

It may also be true that some legislators find trans dogma irritating, but the rest of us out here in the big world are watching in horror as activists breezily dismiss all concerns about for instance what about this teenager’s future sex life and reproductive life? Is it really a good idea to destroy both forever just because the teenager claims to be this thing called “trans”? Isn’t it possible that the legislators – even Republican ones – are right to see that as a problem? Isn’t it possible that legislators who take the other view are being appallingly reckless with other people’s futures?

In clear contradiction of this constitutional rule, Arkansas’s SAFE Act singles out one group in need of medical care—transgender children—and makes the provision of that care within the state unlawful.

But it isn’t medical care. It isn’t medical care. It isn’t. Cutting off healthy breasts and penises isn’t medical care.

How do they not see this?

Trans identifying Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir is shocked shocked that anyone thinks people have a right to say that men are not women.

Last week a court in the UK heard an appeal from a tax researcher called Maya Forstater who lost an employment tribunal in 2019 – she was sacked after tweeting that transgender women can’t change their biological sex.

…

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) saw reason to intervene. In my view it is bizarre that they found it important to speak up for someone who clearly holds hostile views towards a vulnerable minority. 

It’s not “hostile” to say that men are not women. It’s also not a mere “view” that men are not women. It’s a fantasy, and a silly one at that, that people can become the other sex. People can’t become tables or goats or jumbo jets, and it’s not hostile to say that. People can’t become wizards or ghosts or time-travelers, and it’s not hostile to say that.

And I’m becoming less and less able to believe that trans people are really a “vulnerable minority.” I think it’s more that they’re an entitled demanding aggressive minority.

The EHRC assert that they protect people from discrimination, even if their beliefs might be controversial or offensive — but do say this does not include extreme beliefs such as ‘a belief in racial superiority’. 

I honestly find it quite shocking that the EHRC would intervene and suggest that ‘gender critical’ views should be protected beliefs that aren’t extreme — because ‘gender critical’ beliefs are in my mind the exact definition of extreme views. As the judge said in the original tribunal, they ‘are not worthy of respect in a democratic society.‘

Yes but the judge was wrong, and rather horribly wrong at that. It’s not “extreme” to think and say that men are not women – it’s central to the meaning of the word “men” that it excludes women, and vice versa. Humans are female and male, and the one is not the other.

Like that. Many species have female and male, and humans are one such species.

The whole foundation of being ‘gender critical’ is to be vehemently against the right of trans people to participate equally in society as their gender, whether that is socially or legally. The ideology centres first and foremost on the exclusion of trans people and renunciation of everything they are.

No it isn’t. He certainly does tell a lot of lies, doesn’t he. Maybe it’s because he’s so vulnerable and minor? “Vehemence” has nothing to do with anything, and the point of the gender critical position is to say no to men who try to take prizes and institutions and jobs and facilities that are reserved for women. We have a right to refuse to share those. Men don’t have a right to force us to share them.

At the heart of ‘gender critical’ views is the repeated claim that ‘sex cannot be changed’ – which certainly isn’t being stated as a neutral or objective observation or fact by them. It is said to be deliberately offensive and disrespectful to trans people.

No, that’s back to front. We say it because it’s true. The fact that some trans people fly into a rage when we say it is not our fault, and it’s certainly not a reason for us to stop saying it. Our stuff is our stuff, which it’s taken us thousands of years to get, and no we don’t have to share it. Sharing it would be a betrayal of all the women who helped us get it.

Alan Sokal points out (not for the first time) a certain insouciance about the difference between facts and fantasies.

For millennia—since at least ancient Greece—philosophers have debated what constitutes knowledge and how one can legitimately acquire it. But when philosophers returned from their seminars back into the real world, even the most ardent anti-realists generally adopted the common-sense view that there do exist objective facts—situations in the external world that are independent of our beliefs—and that, sometimes at least, we can obtain reasonably reliable knowledge of those objective facts, through evidence and reasoning.

But, starting about 40 years ago, a small coterie of social-constructivist sociologists of science began to break this consensus, with radical claims like:

-The validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence.

-The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge.

-For the relativist (such as ourselves) there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such.

These ideas were in turn picked up by postmodernist scholars—mostly in departments of literature, it must be said, not philosophy—and from there percolated into the rest of society. There, they became part of the mother’s milk—the unexamined conventional wisdom—of some sectors of the “woke” left. “There is no objective, neutral reality,” writes Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling White Fragility.

What goes around, comes around. Now everyone—Trumpists included—can have their own “alternative facts.”

Which, he emphasizes, isn’t to say that Trumpists are students of postmodernism or that postmodernists are to blame for Trumpism, but:

When all is said and done, postmodernist academics and their activist followers are not to blame for any of the evils of today’s right wing. What postmodernist relativism has wrought is, rather, something more insidious: by devaluing the concept of objective truth, it has undermined our own ability to combat objective untruths—to develop herd immunity to a pandemic of viral disinformation, as one writer eloquently put it.

Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I honestly don’t know how to put it back in.

He doesn’t mention the ideology of fungible sex/gender, which is why I just did. Same genie, same bottle, same difficulty putting it back.

Antisemitic and antifemale, too.

A police investigation has been launched after a video was circulated on social media showing antisemitic chants being shouted from a convoy of cars in north London.

Finchley Road, to be exact.

Politicians condemned the footage, which was posted on Twitter and showed the cars travelling through the St John’s Wood area of north London on Sunday afternoon. The cars were covered in Palestinian flags with a speaker blasting out antisemitic slurs and threats against Jews.

Threats against Jews and “their daughters” – which is a telltale way of putting it.

The Metropolitan police said of the incident in Finchley Road:. “We are aware of a video appearing to show antisemitic language being shouted from a convoy of cars in the St John’s Wood area this afternoon. “Officers are carrying out urgent enquiries to identify those responsible. This sort of behaviour will not be tolerated.”

This isn’t cancel culture or no-platforming. Screaming “rape their daughters” is incitement.

The housing and communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, said the video was “deeply disturbing”. He added: “Vile, criminal hatred like this must not be tolerated.”

In a statement, Jenrick continued: “Whatever your view of the conflict in Israel and Gaza, there is no justification for inciting anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim hatred. The incidents of antisemitism we have seen in recent days have been shameful.

Yes but focus. It isn’t the hatred itself, which the law can’t really touch; it’s the driving through a heavily Jewish neighborhood screaming “Fuck the Jews, rape their daughters.” It would be equally shameful and unjustifiable to drive through Tower Hamlets screaming “Fuck the Muslims, rape their daughters.”

Fair Play for Women on the fad for putting a few men in women’s prisons:

In July 2019 a specialist unit was opened on the Downview women’s prison estate to house high-risk transgender prisoners. We obtained the Equality Impact assessment through a Freedom of Information Request. The document is now available to view here: Equality Analysis Document E Wing Version 16.0 for publication.

…

‘E-wing’ was the solution to a problem of where to accommodate high-risk male prisoners who have acquired a GRC and so need to be treated as “female for all purposes”. Some of these prisoners are dangerous sex offenders who under normal circumstance would be considered too high-risk to mix with women. But the MOJ decided that their GRC meant they had to be treated differently from the trans prisoners without a GRC.

In other words the MOJ decided that their GRC mattered more than the safety of female prisoners. That’s a deeply weird thing to decide.

An operational need to find a long-term solution that appropriately balances the rights of men who say they are women and the rights and safety of the female prisoners. Just look at that. Women have to compromise on their rights and safety because a small subset of men says it Identifies As women. Real women have to give up their rights and safety because some men are pretending to be women.

They might as well just give up altogether. They might as well just say women have to “appropriately balance” their rights with the rights of violent abusive men at home and at work and on the street and everywhere else because the violent abusive men say so.

It is then confirmed on page 5 that the MOJ considers trans prisoners are “required to be located in the women’s estate because they hold a GRC”. No acknowledgement of the single-sex exemptions that enable males to be excluded from female-only spaces, even if they do have a GRC.

“Given the need to advance equality and eliminate discrimination” – against men who say they are women, that is. Plain ordinary boring actual women, the ones who just are women, don’t matter. There’s no need to advance their equality or eliminate discrimination against them. They have been moved to the class “Karens” for ease of forgetting. The only women who matter now are the male ones.

Parody? Must be? But apparently not.

As if anybody wants to ask this fool about anything.

(The underlying message, on the other hand, is the usual absurdity. “Don’t interpret my genitals as determining my sex. I have Magic Gender so I’m Special, and you have to genuflect.”)

Trump is chewing the wallpaper.

mole at the counter is hilarious.

OUT OF DATE BUFFET CAR SAUSAGE ROLL FILMS hahahahahahaha

The AP isn’t altogether happy about the bombing that demolished an office block almost on their heads.

An Israeli airstrike destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets on Saturday. All AP employees and freelancers evacuated the building safely.

Al Jazeera was another tenant.

AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt has released the following statement:

We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza. They have long known the location of our bureau and knew journalists were there. We received a warning that the building would be hit.

We are seeking information from the Israeli government and are engaged with the U.S. State Department to try to learn more.

This is an incredibly disturbing development. We narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life. A dozen AP journalists and freelancers were inside the building and thankfully we were able to evacuate them in time.

The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.

The upper floors were residential, so that’s a lot of people with nowhere to go – if they all got out.

Don’t you know there’s a war on?!

No, wait, not a war, a closing of pubs. Same thing though! All must do their duty.

Pubs and bars will be allowed to serve customers indoors from Monday (17th May) after a long third lockdown which has seen many pubs struggle to survive.

According to the latest estimates some 2,500 pubs have already shut during lockdown, with many others facing an uphill battle to recoup losses as the economy opens up.

Campaigners have produced a ‘Your Local Pub Needs You’ poster urging revellers to get their hands in their pockets to save the UK’s 40,000 boozers.

In other words, pour more alcohol down your throats, it’s a public good!

They are calling on Brits to sup 124 pints to give the industry the £25.66 billion cash boost it needs to get back to pre-pandemic income levels.

It highlights the scale of the plight facing Britain’s bars following lockdown.

A poster released to support the campaign states: “The average pub will need each customer to spend an additional £382 this year to combat the impact that Covid has had on the sector.

“Thank you for doing your bit!’’

Yes thank you for growing potatoes joining the Home Guard saving paper drinking gallons of beer!

This is moronic. Alcohol isn’t a necessity of life, and in fact it can be quite unhealthy for the consumer and for the consumer’s dependents. There are more pressing needs than the need to save all the pubs by swallowing oceans of beer.

Student being investigated for stating basic facts.

A law student who said that women have vaginas and are not as physically strong as men is being investigated by her university.

Investigated why? For doing what? What is there to investigate?

Disciplinary action is being taken against Lisa Keogh, 29, over “offensive” and “discriminatory” comments that she made during lectures at Abertay University, Dundee.

The mature student was reported by younger classmates after she said women were born with female genitals and that “the difference in physical strength of men versus women is a fact”. The complaints have prompted a formal investigation into her conduct.

Why? Why have the complaints prompted a formal investigation? Where the fuck are the grownups?

Keogh, a final-year student, fears that any sanction could end her dream of becoming a human rights lawyer. Her case is being backed by Joanna Cherry QC, the SNP MP for Edinburgh South West and deputy chairwoman of the Lords and Commons joint committee on human rights, who described the situation as farcical.

Who is more likely to do a good job of being a human rights lawyer, a woman who knows that women have vaginas and are not as physically strong as men or people who think those two statements are reportable and punishable offenses?

The university’s definition of misconduct includes “using offensive language” or “discriminating against gender reassignment”. Punishment can be as harsh as expulsion.

What is “discriminating against gender reassignment”? What can that mean?

Keogh, a mother of two, fears for her future. “I don’t come from a legal background and have worked incredibly hard to get to where I am,” she said.

Yes but being a cis woman cancels all that out.

Cleanup on aisle 7:

The Biden administration on Friday revoked a Trump-era restriction on migrants who enter the country without health coverage and rolled back six executive orders intended to stoke anger over street protests and attacks on Confederate monuments in 2020.

The actions, while hardly unexpected, represented a broad repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump, and his practice of using executive orders to advance his political agenda.

To advance his political and spiteful agenda. He’s got to be the most spiteful human being on the planet.

The restriction on migrants was blocked by a judge soon after Trump issued it.

The others rolled back on Friday were a grab-bag of Trump pronouncements and initiatives that now seem like a time capsule of his tempestuous, news-cycle-driven presidency, including a proposed sculpture garden to honor the “great figures of America’s history,” first proposed on July 3, 2020, at a rally at Mt. Rushmore. It was never funded.

A week earlier, Mr. Trump had also signed an executive order to protect federal monuments against the attacks of protesters, at a time when statues of rebel generals and racist politicians were being defaced by protesters and removed by local governments.

The order, written with the partisan bombast of a Trump campaign speech, blasted “rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists” and called upon federal law enforcement agencies to punish anyone caught defacing public property to the fullest extent of the law.

His “you kids get offa my lawn” order is null and void.

See the reporter get it wrong in the very first paragraph (and thus also the headline).

Neuroscience Professor Removed From APA Discussion After Saying There Are Only Two Genders

Wrong. He said two sexes.

A neuroscience professor was ousted from the American Psychological Association’s (APA) email discussion group by vote after suggesting that there are only two genders as well as past concerns over his posts, the College Fix reported Friday.

Wrong. He said two sexes.

Psychology and neuroscience professor John Staddon at Duke University was removed from the APA’s Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology (SBNCP) Division 6 listserv and was notified via email by the group’s presidential trio who said use of the forum was a “privilege,” in the statements republished by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) on April 30.

The NAS is a conservative organization, but they’re a good watchdog on this stuff.

“It is sad that an audience of supposed scientists is unable to take any dissenting view, such as the suggestion that there really are only two sexes,” Staddon said in reply to the notification of his removal from the division’s group before allowing NAS to publish the email exchange. “Incredible! I don’t mind having one less distraction, but I think you should really be concerned at Div 6’s unwillingness to tolerate divergent views.”

His post that “tipped the scale,” according to Staddon, was titled “Hmm… Binary view of sex false? What is the evidence? Is there a Z chromosome?” Staddon told Newsweek he created the post on April 15.

“Science, real science, can and should be isolated from politics. Science has values, to be sure—curiosity, honesty, openness to debate, adherence to empirical facts, and so on—but they are not, and should not be, political,” he wrote to Newsweek. “Most of my comments have been devoted to that fact. I might add that a sense of humor would help.”

Science should be isolated especially from politics of the “men are women if they say they are” type. That’s not so much politics as childish fantasy-enforcement.

One tiny ray of light:

Women must have the right to question transgender identity without being abused, stigmatised or risking losing their job, the new head of Britain’s equalities watchdog has warned.

In her first interview since taking office, the incoming chairwoman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission said it was “entirely reasonable” for people to challenge the biological status of women who were born as men.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine added it was a “freedom of belief” the commission was determined to protect.

“Someone can believe that people who self identify as a different sex are not the different sex that they self identify,” she said. “A lot of people would find this an entirely reasonable belief.”

And a lot of people would find the opposing belief, that people who self identify as a different sex are the different sex that they self identify, not a reasonable belief at all, but rather a childish absurdity.

Falkner said she was concerned that current levels of abuse were making it difficult for people to exercise their fundamental rights — protected by the EHRC — such as freedom of speech and belief.

“There is too much self censorship going on — certainly in terms of gender critical theory,” she said. “And what happens to women who raise that does seem to be an effect on them of abuse and stigmatisation.

“We ought to be able to have a debate about it, even when we disagree with them, without them feeling so isolated.”

Abuse and stigmatisation and ostracism and punishment and demotion and job loss.

The Times (the London one) reports:

Academics at Edinburgh University claim they are teaching in a climate of fear with some lecturers allegedly “hunted down” because of their failure to comply with the “unchallengeable orthodoxy” of gender identity theory.

Contributors from Edinburgh to a new internet forum have complained of bullying and repeated personal attacks on social media if they are open about their opinions while others fear students are being indoctrinated “with fixed mindsets on gender identity”.

No surprise there.

Scores of academics, many claiming to be from the Russell Group of leading universities, shared their anonymised experiences on GC Academia. One part-time lecturer at Edinburgh said a sense of intellectual freedom had been supplanted by a culture of fear.

The lecturer wrote: “It is as though academic colleagues believe there are some trans/trans ally students who are monstrous toddlers, ready to throw a strop if they should hear anything that invalidates their ‘true self’ and report the offending tutor. The effect is that the extreme version of gender identity theory has to be taught as though it’s an unchallengeable orthodoxy.”

In other words it’s Pharyngula writ large, Twitter but more expensive.

One critic of the university wrote scathingly of the “authoritarian bullies of the Staff Pride Network,” adding: “The postmodern thought and language police are very active in my subject area.”

They added: “Their latest is an instruction to check our course materials for ‘cis-normative’ [a gender identity which matches their biological sex] assumptions and monitor ourselves, our students and each other for ‘micro-invalidations’.”

This was a reference to guidance published by the university to help staff recognise and counteract “microaggressions against trans and/or nonbinary people”.

It urges staff to refrain from using phrases such as “all women hate their periods” and “all people think about being the opposite gender sometimes”.

But what if you think it’s likely that all people do think about being the opposite gender sometimes? And you think it’s relevant and of interest? Do the people of gender get to declare a monopoly on the word “gender” now? Why would that be?

Ah there it is, the whole point – force other people to pay attention to precious One, and force them to do extra things and make extra efforts, all for precious One.

London North Eastern Railway (LNER) has said its conductors will be warned to not use the greeting “ladies and gentlemen” following a complaint from a non-binary passenger.

LNER said train managers should not use the phrase to avoid offending passengers who might identify as neither male nor female.

Passengers might identify as a potato, too, but that doesn’t mean they are one. Nobody is neither male nor female. They can ask their friends to call them non-binary if they like, but the world at large has better things to do.

It comes after a complaint from a passenger on social media, the Telegraph reports.

In a Twitter post directed to LNER, the passenger wrote: “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls…” As a non-binary person this announcement doesn’t actually apply to me, so I won’t listen.”

I’ve seen some tweets about this over the past couple of days and in fact the complainer isn’t a passenger but an employee. The complaint wasn’t spontaneous but a plan.

LNER replied to the complainant, agreeing that train managers “should not be using language like this”.

Because they should be keeping the needy narcissists in mind at all times yeah?

LNER is the latest company to ditch the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” in favour of more inclusive language.

More “inclusive” because a phrase that includes all adults isn’t “inclusive” enough. “Ladies, gentlemen, and fantasists”?

The phrase was discarded from announcements on the Tube in 2017, in a bid to make them gender-neutral.

Bosses at Transport for London told staff to use terms such as “good morning everyone” to ensure all passengers feel welcome.

LGBTQ+ campaigners have fought for gender-neutral language, explaining that phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen” exclude people who do not identify as male or female.

But “not identifying as male or female” is meaningless. Humans just are one or the other, including the small minority that’s intersex. People can decide they don’t identify as mammals, too, but that doesn’t make them reptiles. Thoughts in the head are just thoughts in the head, and most of them are of no interest to anyone except the owner of the head.

How the trick works.

“The more typically male propensity to defy illegitimate authority” – how sweetly self-flattering that is, and how indifferent to the realities.

Males in the abstract represent illegitimate authority. Males are the beneficiaries of that stupid mistake that goes “the bigger and stronger get to rule.” Decent males not in the abstract of course don’t endorse that social law, but I doubt that any of us can escape its influence entirely.

That stupid mistake pervades all of life and has for all of history, yet a man still flatters himself that his war against masking is thanks to a more typically male propensity to defy illegitimate authority as opposed to a more typically angry-conservative propensity to see public health measures as “illegitimate authority.”

Women have plenty of propensity to defy illegitimate authority, only in our case it may be the guy at the dinner table or the work meeting. We have plenty of propensity but we also know that many men are quick to resort to violence. Men don’t have that particular brake on their propensities, which probably frees them up to put their defiance on display, no matter how stupid and anti-social it is.

It’s almost as if Marjorie Taylor Greene shouldn’t be there at all.

Congress needs a good bartender/bouncer.

Good. Well done Rep. Swalwell.

MTG should be expelled from the House. The move to do exactly that failed, but try again. She should be out of there. She’s another Preston Brooks just waiting to happen.