Victoria Smith points out how dull, banal, simple, obvious the whole issue of female subordination is. Where’s the fun in that? No room for clever layers of irony or jargon-riddled homilies.

“Men keep threatening to kill — and in fact killing — women and girls” is just not very interesting or complex. On the contrary, it all sounds terribly basic. Aren’t there more fascinating debates to be had about language and symbols and whether in fact — hear me out on this, it’s counter-intuitive hence super-clever — female people are in fact complicit or even to blame for their own deaths, what with them weaponising their pain by performing being murdered within the cisheteronormative capitalist economy? Makes you think, doesn’t it? Whereas a plain, boring feminism that says “no, I don’t think you threatening to kill me with a machete offers us all a unique opportunity to explore why I am in fact The Man” doesn’t make you think at all. It sounds so painfully obvious it’s hard not to suspect there’s something you must have missed.

The machete reference, in case you’ve forgotten, is to one of Akwaeke Emezi’s tweets in her tantrum at Chimimanda Adichie.

This unfortunate boring obviousness of women’s subordinate status is an entry point for “You’re both giving me a headache,” which Victoria calls “opportunistic both sides-ism.”

It tells us we are too clever, too humble, too conscious of nuance, to fall for anything so simplistic as a straightforward victim-perpetrator narrative. On the contrary, it makes a virtue of our bystanding. Those women who are begging you to intervene? They lack your heightened sensitivity, your intellectual discernement, your ability to see shades of grey in a fist to the face.

…

The practical, rational desire not to intervene, because it is risky and upsetting, because it aligns one with the messy, disruptive victim, creates a need to see complexity where there is none. If you can position yourself as morally and intellectually superior to those basic types who still “take sides” (how childish!), then you have not only saved yourself the work of serious political engagement, but you can kid yourself that your conscience is clear. And — added bonus — it’s because you’re cleverer and kinder than everyone else!

And you have the best accessories, too.

No, please, do go on; I love being patronized.

Hazarika belittles feminist women and pats herself on the back for being so brave and determined. Two for one: you get both sides of the Both Sides award.

The Fawcett Society is continuing the “who can possibly know what to think in such a complicated disagreement??” approach. If they’re going to go that route in spite of everything, why are they even the Fawcett Society? Why aren’t they the Everybody Society? Being a feminist society is taking a position, it’s not throwing up one’s hands and saying “You’re both wrong and you should both apologize and start over.” Feminism isn’t about splitting the difference.

Ah yes “mediation.” Let’s force “mediation” between the aggressor and the target; let’s split the difference between the bully and the victim; let’s say “you’re both wrong” instead of paying attention to the reality; let’s say “good people on both sides” and see what happens.

The Law Society? Really?

Under HR and people management:

Using pronouns in the workplace

I think you’re supposed to learn that in the very early grades, or even earlier, as you learn to speak the local language. I don’t think it’s something adults need a refresher on.

Judging by name or appearance is not always an accurate method for determining a person’s pronouns.

Yes it is. Being able to tell who is which is another very early skill.

We frequently, and likely subconsciously, interpret or ‘read’ a person’s gender based on their outward appearance and expression, and ‘assign’ a pronoun.

However, our inference as to that person’s gender identity may not be correct.

Getting it wrong is extremely rare. This isn’t something adults don’t know how to do, or need instruction in.

Everyone deserves to have their chosen name and pronouns respected in the workplace.

No, everyone doesn’t. The workplace is the workplace. It’s a place for getting stuff done. It’s not a place for massaging the egos of special flowers who have special pronouns. The childish hobby of “choosing” a new name and a luxury pronoun is not something anyone “deserves to have respected.” On the contrary, such foolery deserves contempt.

Although you may feel it personally unnecessary to do so, and it may even make you feel a little uncomfortable at first, sharing your pronouns helps raise awareness and acceptance of different, including non-binary, gender identities.

But those identities are a fiction. HR departments should not be telling employees that they have to adopt a stupid new language that’s tedious to learn and worthless when you do learn it. The People of Gender need to grow up.

Sarah Phillimore is scathing about the cowardice and malice of Ayesha Hazarika.

[T]here was only strange and timorous silence from the Fawcett Society following [Maya] Forstater’s victory, until it was finally broken by an article in the Evening Standard on Wednesday.

Hazarika calls for “more moderate voices” to overcome the toxicity of the current debate, and an end to “cruelty and polarisation”:

As with so much right now, extremist, unforgiving, rigid voices on both sides dominate the online war in a fight to the death of who can scream and shame the loudest. And all it does is alienate people in the middle who want to find a solution which is humane, modern and common sense. But more moderate voices who could find the common ground here and find useful solutions are too scared to join in and who could blame them?

It is not merely the crude and unfair caricature of the current position which reveals the bad faith of this author. This is emphatically not about “both sides”. It is not trans women who are facing criminal trials or secret police recording their political speech; nor is it trans women who are being no-platformed by universities in breach of their statutory obligations to protect freedom of speech. It is also not trans women who are being sacked from their jobs for talking about issues of sex and gender.

And it is also not trans women who are the subordinated sex. It is not trans women who are assaulted on the street, murdered in their kitchens, sold into sex slavery, kept out of school, stoned to death on suspicion of talking to a man.

I am sorry that Hazarika finds herself so threatened by legitimate criticism that she needs a mental health professional on speed dial. Perhaps she might like to spare a thought for the thousands of women every day who face much worse and who do not have this privilege.

Define your terms. No discussion can take place unless we can agree what we are talking about. I suspect Millicent Fawcett had no difficulty defining a “woman” — they were the ones denied the vote. What does the Society that bears her name and operates under her banner of “courage calls to courage” now think a woman is? And what rights will it fight for her to have?

The right to chat about shoes and scarves with men who claim to be women?

I can’t recall any great campaigns that were won by squeaking mice, but if the Fawcett Society thinks timidity is the way to win women’s equality, fine. Do as you wish. But please don’t expect to go publicly unchallenged when you suggest that this represents the limits of what a woman can aspire to be, or to criticise her for defending her legal rights with vigour and robust language, in the face of continued threats of physical and sexual violence. If you really find argument and discussion so traumatic then that is your weakness to address, not our responsibility to fix with our “kindness”.

There is no “middle ground” here. Either women have rights, or they do not. Either they are allowed to speak about their rights, or they are not. If you seek to persuade us that “being kind” is more important than “having rights”, then you will need to do better than this. And change the name of your society. You have offered sufficient insult to the legacy of Millicent Fawcett.

Also…Maya has offered to have a conversation with Hazarika, and Hazarika has simply ignored her.

Nothing. Lots of lovey thank yous to people who flattered her, but no response to Maya, whose position she did not describe accurately.

She’s annoying.

More It Must Not Be Allowed, this time from LSE staff in solidarity with Open University staff and students.

We, the LSE Department of Gender Studies, write this letter in solidarity with the scholars, researchers, members of staff, and students at the Open University who are facing an unwelcoming and antagonistic environment because of the newly created Gender Critical Research Network. We support and wholly endorse the Open Letter from OU Staff and Postgraduate Research Students, written in response to the launch of the Network. Reiterating the demands of our colleagues at the Open University, we ask that the Open University urgently rescind its support for this network, and that it actively re-commit to supporting trans rights and the field of Gender Studies.  

The Gender Critical Research Network is an explicitly anti-intellectual attack on Gender Studies, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and inclusive, intersectional feminist politics. Proponents of the “gender critical” perspective, including the Members and Affiliated Members of the Network, are adamantly and openly opposed to recognising trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights. Their efforts to undermine trans rights are particularly concerning now, at a time when trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people in the UK and elsewhere are already experiencing such immense restrictions on their social, medical, interpersonal, and political livelihoods.

What is meant by “trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights”? If by “gender” they mean clothes and haircuts, then no gender critical people oppose such claims. If they mean “sex” then of course we do, just as people of color object if white people pretend to be people of color. That’s the usefulness of “gender” in this conflict: it’s never clear exactly what they’re claiming.

As numerous scholars and activists have documented, those espousing gender critical perspectives routinely make transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly, that have profoundly negative effects on social and political life. Their unfounded viewpoints are inimical to intersectional feminisms and scholarly debate, and they contribute to the ongoing “anti-gender” attacks on the field. In refusing the concept of gender, and in framing “sex” as immutable, binary, and essentialist, the gender critical perspective runs counter to decades of scholarship from across the social sciences, humanities, and medical fields, and it relies on and invests in racist, colonial understandings of sex/gender.  

Nah, what’s racist is claiming that it’s only white people who know who is which sex.

They end with a list of demands.

Empowerment! Yet another institution for female people has found a new way to erase female people. Progress!

The alma mater of a long list of distinguished women, from Rosalind Franklin and Dame Kate Bingham to Emily Mortimer and Rachel Weisz, is to rename the role of head girl because it is too “binary”.

In other words a girls’ school finds the word “girl” too “binary.” So will it become a persons’ school now? If so it will wait a long long long time for Eton and Harrow to do the same.

The head girl of St Paul’s Girls’ School, one of the country’s leading private schools, will be known as head of school after calls from pupils to make the role more inclusive.

Inclusive of what? They’re at a girls’ school. I suppose they could make it more inclusive by turning it into a factory, but then it wouldn’t be a school any more.

A better way to make such schools more inclusive is to offer more and more full-ride scholarships.

The school confirmed that the change would take effect from the next academic year, prompting outrage from some staff who claimed that it sent a “damaging message that girls now have to be ashamed to be seen as girls”.

Oops! Those members of staff are even now on the train to re-education camp.

“Why do the girls have to change their name?” a source said. “They should be teaching young women to be proud of their sex, not ashamed of it. It’s very contradictory. How can you be a single-sex school that exists to empower girls to do well and at the same time support girls to identify out of being a girl?”

Easy question. You can’t.

About seven out of 778 pupils at the school identify as non-binary, requesting that the school refer to them as they or them. “It’s a damaging message for the majority in order to protect the minority” Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of the campaign group Transgender Trend, said. She claimed that the push for inclusivity had gone so far that “only male people can be girls or women without fear of offending anyone, apparently.”

Also the school had a gender training session in April.

The webinar — Beyond the Binary: Understanding How to Be Inclusive for All Gender Identities — was hosted in April by Helen Semple, the deputy head, in her capacity as founder of the Schools Inclusion Alliance, a group that aims to “put inclusion at the heart of every school”. It featured as guest speaker Emma Cusdin, founder of Global Butterflies, who spoke about her own transition from male to female. “The LGBTQI world is an amazing rainbow of positivity and labels. We love labels. We love terminology, we love flags, we love parties,” Cusdin told staff.

“Young people are finding amazing ways to self-identify. At the last count, we stopped counting at 150 gender identities that people are self-identifying. We did a little quiz in terms of what are the 150. I know about 30, in terms of what the definitions are. Don’t be afraid to ask, ‘That’s a new term to me. What does it mean to you?’ ”

Of course “young people are finding amazing ways to self-identify” – they’re self-obsessed. Adolescence does that to a person. But obsessing over one’s personality and idenniny and special specialness is not a reason for the world at large to change its understanding of sex every ten minutes.

According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, 3,115 students in Britain identified as neither male nor female in 2019-2020, compared with 185 in 2013-2014.

But it’s not a fad. Not at all. No no.

They always frame it deceptively.

The fight over the rights of transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s athletics has spilled over to more than a dozen states as lawmakers in Idaho, Montana, West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and most recently Florida have passed legislation since the beginning of 2020 to ban them from the field.

There are no such “rights.” Imagine saying “the fight over the rights of adult athletes to compete in children’s athletics has spilled over” blah blah – nobody would say that because the absurdity would be too obvious, but for some reason it’s not obvious when it comes to men trampling women.

Chase Strangio, a transgender man who serves as the ACLU’s Deputy Director for Transgender Justice, pushed back against the notion critics of transgender athletes have pushed, that they have an unfair physical advantage over girls and women. “The idea of trans dominance is completely overblown. It’s a myth,” he said.

It’s not a “notion” that men have an unfair advantage over women, it’s reality. We’re not “critics of transgender athletes,” we’re outraged at the obvious unfairness of letting males compete invade women’s sports. The issue isn’t “trans dominance,” it’s male dominance. They just will not report this honestly.

“At the Olympic level…the most elite level of sporting competition, trans women and girls have been eligible to compete,” said Strangio. “Laurel [Hubbard] will be the first trans woman to ever qualify. Her current statistics do not even put her in medal contention.”

Hubbard stole a medal from a Samoan woman at the Pacific Games. He should not be competing in the women’s events.

“Perceived” by whom, you damn fools?

Janice Turner on the Royal Academy’s venomous censorship of a woman artist starts with the fact that Jess DeWahls sent her an embroidery of her mother’s hands six months ago.

A photo I’d posted on Twitter of my first care home visit in many months had moved her to sew. She didn’t want payment, just for me to have it. Now this touching work sits by my desk.

De Wahls is no cosy cross-stitcher: she deploys her needle for political, especially feminist purpose. She embroiders fallopian tubes giving the finger, had a show called Big Swinging Ovaries, ran a vagina sewing workshop at Tate Modern. She’s funny, outspoken, has bright red hair and lavish tattoos. As all artists should be, she’s freethinking and bold.

Well! The Royal Academy can’t be expected to put up with that sort of thing.

She also has a sideline in embroidered flower patches, dahlias and pansies you iron onto T-shirts or jeans. Liberty stocks them, and the Royal Academy shop had just reordered when this week its head of commercial emailed to say she’d received eight complaints that De Wahls was transphobic. She wrote back. Silence. The RA Instagram account, with 500,000 followers, then posted: “Thank you to all those for bringing an item in the RA shop by an artist expressing transphobic views to our attention.” They would no longer sell De Wahls’s flowers.

Imagine if eight feminists complained to the RA about an item in the RA shop by an artist expressing misogynist views. What do you suppose would happen? My educated guess is Absolutely Nothing. Misogynist views are entirely normal; “transphobic” views are a dire emergency.

[S]o a few years ago, when gender theory took off among Soho Theatre colleagues, “and they’d disinvite a friend from a party because she believed that only women have vaginas”, De Wahls was bemused. “I said, ‘Are you serious?’” They were. When she asked questions, they insisted trans women were biological women, just like her. This denial of science, of tangible reality, this insistence that 2+2=5, troubled her.

After immense thought, sleepless nights and with much trepidation, in 2019 she posted a 5,000-word blog. “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex,” she wrote. “However, I cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to which they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such.”

It doesn’t take much clairvoyance to guess what happened next.

She was driven from her Soho Theatre salon. A gay friend whose hair she’d cut for ten years tweeted: “Never trust a bitch who does vagina art.” A colleague trawled her Facebook page, ordering lifelong friends to disavow her. All her offers to meet and talk were blanked.

Meanwhile the Instagram “embroidery community” set about destroying her livelihood. Petitions were launched, an exhibition in Australia was cancelled and every collaboration with a charity or company sabotaged. When she donated a work for raffle to raise money for period products in India, a male embroiderer hoped he’d win so he could burn it. One prominent stitcher of cheery flowers and “be kind” homilies has ranted non-stop about the injustice of it being De Wahls’s work that the snobbish RA chose when it finally allowed embroidery into “its hallowed halls”. Rather than her own, maybe?

How bizarre that the art world, the crucible for shocking and subversive ideas, balks at the mere fact of biological sex. As I write, the RA’s tremulous head of commercial just told De Wahls “everyone is still thinking”.

Well think harder and better.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops trying to rule us all again:

The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft a statement on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a political push by conservative bishops to deny President Biden communion because of his support of abortion rights.

They’re bishops. They’re not senators or representatives or part of the executive branch, they’re bishops – clergy of one particular religious sect. They’re not the boss of us. They’re not the boss of Biden either.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an assembly of the country’s 433 active and retired bishops, can issue guideline statements, but it does not have the authority to decide who can or cannot receive the sacrament of communion. That power is reserved for the local bishop, who has autonomy in his diocese, or the Pope.

But it’s theater. Look at us, we’re god’s janitors.

Hmm.

Last weekend in East Dulwich:

Three more women were violently attacked in East Dulwich over the weekend after police failed to respond to a 999 call from a woman who was strangled in the street in front of her child.

As the News reported earlier today, a woman was left waiting for a response car that never arrived last Friday night after calling 999 four times. 

She said she had been approached and strangled by a stranger in front of her ten-year-old son shortly before 9pm. 

She reported that the unknown man had attacked her out of the blue on Wood Vale and tried to smash her head against a wall while her distraught child ran to try and find help. 

…

Over the weekend reports have circulated that three other women were targeted in exactly the same location, including a knife attack. 

The victim’s injuries were, fortunately, not life-threatening but there is no update on the seriousness of her condition.  Two other women were also threatened with knives in the same three day period. 

Today (June 15) a 53-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm with intent and remains in custody while enquiries continue. 

Police say they believe she is the only suspect, and had initially been mistaken for a man. 

Mistaken for a man? I think not. I think the police mean this violent man says he’s a laydee and they’re pretending he’s telling the truth while insulting the basic intelligence of the women who reported his attacks, as well as confusing everyone in the area about what the threat was and may be again. At this rate the police might just give him a new dress and tell him to go in peace.

But the victims all say it was a man who attacked them.

Stonewall wants to launder all the brains.

Teachers should drop the terms boys and girls in favour of “learners”, and mix up the sexes in PE classes, Stonewall has told schools.

The controversial LGBT charity is urging teachers to ditch all gendered language and gendered uniforms and suggests that children should compete against the opposite sex in sport.

Great idea! That way boys will always win! (Just don’t call them boys. Small price to pay.)

There are awards for schools that follow the most slavishly.

Those wishing to win are directed to a guide which tells them that “it is unnecessary to say ‘boys and girls’ when referring to learners of all genders, you could instead say ‘learners'”. 

They are told that they should check their policies and remove any “unnecessarily gendered language. Instead of using ‘he’/‘she’, you could use ‘they'”. 

On the one hand gender is the most important thing on earth, on the other hand gender doesn’t exist. Also it’s very useful for school children to learn that there is no distinction between female people and male people.

Tanya Carter, a spokesman for the parents and teachers campaign group Safe Schools Alliance UK, said “It is shocking that cash-strapped schools are paying for misinformation from Stonewall that undermines basic safeguarding.”

She said that sport should be “separated by sex for reasons of safety and fairness”, particularly in light of a recent Ofsted report that found sexual harassment was prevalent in schools.

Yes but it’s only girls it’s unsafe and unfair to, so that doesn’t matter.

The New Yorker on anti-anti-anti-racism. I think. I lose count after a while. It centers on a guy called Christopher Rufo.

… an employee of the city of Seattle documented an anti-bias training session and sent the evidence to a journalist named Christopher F. Rufo, who read it and recognized a political opportunity.

I’ve been an employee of the city of Seattle and I’ve attended one or two of their training sessions of that type and I have to say I found them stupid. Not too lefty but too stupid. In a way they weren’t lefty enough – they were more like self-help sessions.

When Rufo received the anti-bias documents from the city of Seattle, he knew how to spot political kindling. These days, “I’m a brawler,” Rufo told me cheerfully.

Through foia requests, Rufo turned up slideshows and curricula for the Seattle anti-racism seminars. Under the auspices of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, employees across many departments were being divided up by race for implicit-bias training. (“Welcome: Internalized Racial Superiority for White People,” read one introductory slide, over an image of the Seattle skyline.) “What do we do in white people space?” read a second slide. One bullet point suggested that the attendees would be “working through emotions that often come up for white people like sadness, shame, paralysis, confusion, denial.” Another bullet point emphasized “retraining,” learning new “ways of seeing that are hidden from us in white supremacy.” A different slide listed supposed expressions of internalized white supremacy, including perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism.

This is what I mean. It’s just stupid. It’s not left-wing, it’s therapy. The issue isn’t what every individual has in her soul, it’s how the system works. You can’t fix the system by retraining the nearest individuals.

Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.

Which is unfortunate because they both suck.

Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present.

As it does! So the point is the laws and societal rules, not the innermost thoughts of every single individual, you get a retraining and you get a retraining and you get a retraining.

As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.”

So it’s far more urgent to tackle the structured disadvantages than it is to have touchy-feely training sessions. Far far far more urgent.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Mission creep creeps again.

YNnB? #20

Exactly, it’s roughly analogous to saying “I am entitled to get for free what you have to pay for”.

If they had better arguments, they would use them.

Indeed, and as you have correctly pointed out several times already, if they had any real examples of feminists stirring up “hate” against trans people, denying their “rights”, advocating “violence” etc. they would use it for everything it was worth. It should be a huge red flag to anyone when an ideological pressure group keeps making such outrageous accusations without providing any specifics apart from the words that they themselves put into the mouths of their opponents (like the corrupt cops often portrayed in gangster movies who plant drugs or weapons on an innocent person just to give themselves an excuse to have him/her arrested).

Funnily, when I got into feminism in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti Harassment Policy Wars, the women who were targeted by MRAs (including Ophelia) never had any problem with providing endless concrete examples of obvious hatespeech, bullying, and threats. Not that any more examples were needed. One of my most vivid memories from that time was watching Caroline Criado-Perez’ mentionings on twitter fill up with the ugliest cyberbullying I had ever seen, including the obligatory rape and death threats, faster than the twitter feed could load them. I would click “refresh”, and by the time the tweets were finished loading there were 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at a time, everyday for months or even years.

When my twitter feed started filling up with horror stories about the diabolical TERFs (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs going after CCP), it was a very different story indeed. No direct quotes, or screencaps, or retweets of the alleged “TERF’s” actual words, only the TA’s own account of what her words supposedly implied as seen through the distorting lens of a Million unquestioned assumptions and ideological dogma, and only at the other end of a long train of impossibly sloppy inferences, extrapolations, mindreading etc.. In fact the only actual examples of hateful and violent rhetoric seemed to come from their own side. It wasn’t long before I realized that the diabolical “TERFs” they were talking about included at least half of the feminists I was following. That’s when I realized that this was a pseudo social rights movement with more in common with “incels” than feminists or anti-racists.

It didn’t have to be that way. There could have been a legitimate movement for people genuinely suffering from gender sex dysphoria, indeed there should have been, but that’s not the trans rights movement we have now. Feminists didn’t cause me to think this, TAs did. If this were about fighting real transphobia, then at least to an excellent first approximation 0% of their time and effort would be spent fighting feminists while 100% would be spent fighting toxic masculinity. Instead as good as 100% of their time and effort is spent fighting feminists, and rather than fighting toxic masculinity, they are actively engaging in it.

Abigail Shrier has a couple of thoughts on the subject.

Ok, Karen with eyeroll and facepalm is very science.

The feud widens.

The certain prominent skeptic is Michael Shermer.

Harriet Hall’s review is in the Skeptic reading room.

To be honest I can kind of see why they might have wanted some tweaking even if they agreed with the content. Hall doesn’t always make it clear whether she’s summarizing the book or offering her own generalizations. I don’t usually read SBM (not for any particular reason, I just don’t) so I don’t know if they have a house style, but it they do and it’s somewhat formal, I could understand their wanting a more Officially Sciencey note. I like the review myself, but I can see some non-invidious non-stupid non-orthodoxy-enforcing reasons why they might want changes.

But, the reality is, we know Gorski doesn’t like the content (I don’t know about others at SBM), so it’s hard to give him the benefit of the doubt on the whole “Well I gave it my best shot but I’m just going to go ahead and retract it now soz” thing.

Meanwhile, Shermer is wrong if he thinks the trans dogma is any kind of far-left progressive ideology. It’s extremely conservative and regressive, unfortunately.

David Gorski’s statement on why he retracted Harriet Hall’s review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage:

After careful review, the editors of SBM decided to retract this book review. Because we allow trusted authors to publish without prior review for the sake of efficiency and timeliness, occasionally corrections need to be made post-publication. In this case we felt there were too many issues with the treatment of the relevant science, and leaving the article up would not be appropriate given the standards of SBM.

Already there are false accusations that this move was motivated by pressure from readers. This is not the case. SBM had and never will cave to outside pressure. We have endured a great extent of such pressure, including the threat of lawsuits and actual litigation.

It didn’t occur to me it was pressure from readers, because I already knew Gorski is all-in for the trans ideology.

Further, any attempts at portraying this retraction as censorship are also false. This has nothing to do with silencing opinions or perspectives, but rather is entirely a matter of quality control. SBM is first and foremost about high quality scientific evidence and reasoning to inform medical issues, and we felt the article in question was below the minimal acceptable standard for SBM.

He can say that; we don’t have to believe it.

Suzanne Moore on the RA shop v Jess DeWahls:

Her work is desirable and sold in the shop of a prestigious museum. Yet her thoughts which she sometimes blogs about, these terrible thoughts mean that now this work must be banned from the museum’s gift shop because it “conflicts” with the values of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” that the institution stands for.

You know, I would have thought that the values the institution stands for are values that relate to art. It’s not a social work institution or a political institution, it’s an artistic institution. There are basic, background values that we generally assume public institutions adhere to, like not barring The Wrong Kind of People, but they’re basic and background, not up front and in your face.

And then, of course, whether they’re in your face or in a small closet two floors below ground level, it’s a funny kind of equality and diversity and inclusion that banishes a woman artist because she thinks men are men.

I am , of course talking about the completely ludicrous decision by the shop of the Royal Academy to no longer stock the work of Jess De Wahls because she “cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born.” She thinks that being female is not simply a feeling.

…

Maya Forstater won her case last week but clearly the Royal Academy does not understand the Equality Act. Nor do they mind hanging paintings on the wall by a man who bought girls from their mothers and gave them syphilis  –  Paul Gauguin – or selling his prints in their gift shop. Diverse? Inclusive? Equal?  Eric Gill who sexually abused his daughters was an associate of the Royal Academy. Indeed the place is full of art made by those with views that certainly do not embody the mantra of values that every institution now intones .

It would be nice if we could get someone from the Royal Academy shop to explain the thinking here. Why Gaugin & Gill fine but DeWahls banished?

What the Royal Academy has achieved here is not even the appearance of goodness but the appearance of stupidity. Does any of this – the banning of textiles – help a single trans person? 

Stupidity but also unabashed bullying of a woman, all too similar to the bullying of Rowling and Forstater and Murphy and Millar and Suzanne herself.