More fawning coverage of “Laurel” Hubbard’s successful cheating:

Weightlifting has been at the centre of the debate over the fairness of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, and Hubbard’s presence in Tokyo is set to attract huge media attention as well as criticism from fellow lifters and coaches.

Her gold medal wins at the 2019 Pacific Games in Samoa, where she topped the podium ahead of Samoa’s Commonwealth Games champion Feagaiga Stowers, triggered outrage in the island nation.

Australia’s weightlifting federation sought to block Hubbard from competing at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast but organisers rejected the move.

In other words organisers said a big “fuck you” to women in weightlifting.

Stark raving mad.

A 25-year-old from Huddersfield has implored people to help them become comfortable in their own skin by donating money for life-changing gender reassignment surgery.

Pan Hollingworth, who was born in Leeds and moved to the West Yorkshire town in 2010, came out as non-binary 10 years ago after previously identifying as genderqueer.

They realised during childhood there was a “disconnection” with either gender as they did not conform to being male or female. After researching online, they then found a term which they could relate to.

“I was online quite a lot as a 16-year-old and I just came across this phrase,” Pan said. “I came out as genderqueer first as I knew I wasn’t a girl but also that I wasn’t a boy.

So then what surgery is required? If you’re neither then what surgery can you possibly “need” in order to match your chosen Gender Idenniny?

Maybe the idea is just to chop off everything that protrudes, and seal up everything that opens? So a non-binary assigned male gets his bits chopped off and a non-binary assigned female gets her bits sewn up (much as in FGM) and her tits chopped off? The aim is the doll under the clothes look? That smooth immaculate band of plastic between the legs?

Assessments with clinicians cost up to £300 each time, with surgery costs set to be as much as £9,000. To help with the costs, Pan is asking people for help in their fight to raise enough money for “top surgery” which will entail a double mastectomy or chest reconstruction surgery.

So Pan can’t get the annoying tits chopped off on the NHS?

“It would be unbelievable if people could help and it would mean the absolute world,” Pan said.

“It is so important and there are tons of people that are creating GoFundMe pages and I’m just one of them.

“It’s massively important for people to get the health care they need, especially with the NHS underfunded and understaffed.”

Well yes, it is important for people to get the health care they need, but cutting off healthy breasts because the breasts-haver claims to be “non-binary” is not actually health care.

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre – the one that just made a trans woman its CEO – offers no women-only services.

We respect the courage and strength it takes to speak out about your experience whether it has been a recent assault or it happened a long time ago. When you contact us we will offer you a face-to-face support session. You can use this time in any way you choose, and we can talk through what support we offer. 

Our specialist trauma-informed support services are open to women, all members of the trans community, non-binary people and young people aged 12 – 18 who have experienced any form of sexual violence at any time in their lives, by abusers of any gender. This includes rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation.

So, open to women and some men – which is unfortunate for women raped by men, which will be nearly all raped women.

We will listen, believe and support young people (aged 12 -18) and women and all members of the trans community of any age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity (and non-binary people), religious and cultural background.

But they won’t listen to, believe, and support women who need women-only services.

Women only spaces

We offer women only spaces (which are inclusive of trans women) in our centre on Tuesdays 4pm – 7pm, Wednesdays 12.30pm – 4pm and Fridays 9am – 12.30pm. The rest of the week we offer appointments to people of all genders.

No women only spaces at all then. Zero.

I wonder if Edinburgh has an actual rape crisis center or two.

The new Jesus and Mo –

“You’re either non-binary or you’re not”

No room for radical feminists in the feminist movement. Interesting. I wonder what they think feminism is, exactly.

(I don’t really wonder. I don’t think they think much at all, I think they just parrot the slogans they’re told to parrot.)

Supporting the rights of trans people really isn’t essential to protecting all women. It’s beside the point. The rights of trans people appear to be 1. the right to force everyone to agree that you are the sex you aren’t and 2. the right to punish and ostracize and vilify anyone who declines to do that. Those “rights” are inimical to women’s rights, and respecting them is certainly not essential to feminism. Rather the opposite.

Well, “make history” is one way to put it. The Guardian gushes:

Trans weightlifter Laurel Hubbard set to make history at Tokyo Olympics

Laurel Hubbard is a man, and what he’s set to do at the Tokyo Olympics is steal a medal from a woman. The Guardian doesn’t admit that.

History and controversy is expected to be made at the Tokyo Olympics this summer after the transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard was effectively guaranteed a place in the women’s super heavyweight category.

Why controversy? Because he’s a man, so it’s cheating. Blatant, shameless, piggy cheating.

It means Hubbard, who won silver at the 2017 world championships and was sixth after a severe injury in 2019, is almost certain to become the first transgender athlete to compete at an Olympics. And while she will be the oldest weightlifter at the Games, she will also have a genuine chance of a medal given her qualifying lifts rank her fourth out of the 14 qualifiers in the 87kg-plus super heavyweight category for Tokyo.

But saying “she” every time you mention him doesn’t make Hubbard a woman. He’s not a woman.

However, her selection will sharply divide opinion between those who see it as an enormous step forward for trans athletes and others who insist she benefits from an unfair advantage.

Ah yes, they “see it” but we insist. Of course we do; we’re Karens.

Under IOC guidelines, issued in November 2015, athletes who transition from male to female can compete in the women’s category without requiring surgery to remove their testes provided their total testosterone level in serum is kept below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months – a rule followed by the IWF.

However, a number of scientific papers have recently shown people who have undergone male puberty retain significant advantages in power and strength even after taking medication to suppress their testosterone levels. Hubbard lived as a male for 35 years, and did not compete in international weightlifting. But since transitioning in 2012 she has won several elite titles.

At least they admit the significant advantages…finally. That should have been at the top, not buried many paragraphs down.

But having admitted it they then rush on as if nothing were amiss. Prepare for Hubbard’s cheat to pay off.

Last July Stonewall posted some advice on “how you can better support non-binary people.”

Is this a reciprocal type thing? Is there advice to non-binary people on how they can better support binary people?

And what is it to “support” people anyway? When it’s parents of minors, for instance, it means paying their expenses. When it’s non-binary people…?

So let’s see what Stonewall tells us.

There are many ways to be inclusive of everyone, regardless of their gender identity. Our language and the way we speak is often embedded with hidden gendered cues.

So to support non-binary people we should get rid of all those embedded hidden gendered cues, yes? Only, then, won’t trans people wonder what happened to our support of them? If we can’t say “she” any more how can we Validate the Idenniny of our trans laydee friends?

Once we start to notice them, we can move towards using language that’s inclusive for all. Here are 10 tips you can start using right away!

1. Introduce yourself with your name and pronoun. Stating your pronouns reminds people that it might not always be immediately obvious what pronoun someone uses

My pronoun is “I” – and so is everyone else’s. I don’t see where that gets anyone.

3. Instead of addressing groups of people with binary language such as ‘ladies and gentlemen’, try more inclusive alternatives such as ‘folks’, ‘pals’ or ‘everyone’

But see this is what’s worrying: won’t trans women resent this disappearance of “ladies”?

4. Use words that define the relationship instead of the relationship and gender. For example, use ‘parents’, ‘partner’, ‘children’ or ‘siblings’

But what if we’re talking about our brother or sister? We have to call them “my sibling” instead? Also see the part about trans women not wanting to see the lady words disappear.

5. Not everyone is comfortable with gendered titles such as ‘Ms’ or ‘Mr’. Titles are not always necessary, but if they must be used it’s good to provide alternative ones such as ‘Mx’ (pronounced mix or mux)

Not everyone is comfortable being called Mux, either.

6. Use the singular ‘their’ instead of ‘his/her’ in letters and other forms of writing, i.e. ‘when a colleague finishes their work’ as opposed to ‘when a colleague finishes his/her work’

Why would we say his/her? We would say her or else we would say his, because we would know who the colleague is. Are we supposed to say “their” even though we know it’s her or his? Can we refuse?

9. Make sure that your workplace, school and college policies and documents use inclusive language, i.e. using ‘they’ instead of ‘he/she’ and avoiding sentences that imply two genders. Where specifically talking about gender identity, make sure it is inclusive of non-binary gender identities and not just trans men and trans women

In other words make everyone at your workplace, school, and college hate you. I don’t think so. I’m refusing whether you say I can or not.

Another item from the annals of “kink” –

A man was today found guilty over the death of his partner after a bondage game went wrong at a North Wales holiday resort.

That is, a man killed a woman during sex.

Warren Martin Coulton, 52, tied-up Claire Wright, 38, during a drug and drink fuelled session at a luxury lodge.

However, he fell asleep while she was still restrained and she suffocated to death.

Coulton found her dead when he woke up but fled the scene.

During his seven day trial, the court heard Coulton had put a sock in her mouth and may have taped it up.

In other words he killed her.

Ms Wright’s body was found in a bed by staff at the Herons Lake Retreat near Caerwys in Flintshire on July 16, 2018.

So that’s a cleaner traumatized. Very nice.

Prosecutor Caroline Rees QC said the couple brought what Coulton called “toys” – including ties, red tape, white tape and gloves – along to the resort for bondage sessions.

She said Coulton, who was 12 years older, was the “dominant” partner.

Duh. He’s the man. A pornsick reckless man who killed a woman for the sake of “kink.”

We’re told not to “kink-shame” but I say shame that crap into oblivion.

Trump is hopping with fury at Facebook and Liz Cheney.

Donald Trump has just released a new statement, but the former president focuses his ire on congresswoman Liz Cheney, not the Facebook oversight board.

“Warmonger Liz Cheney, who has virtually no support left in the Great State of Wyoming, continues to unknowingly and foolishly say that there was no Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election when in fact, the evidence, including no Legislative approvals as demanded by the U.S. Constitution, shows the exact opposite,” Trump said.

He’s still illiterate as well as a liar. “Unknowingly” is not the right word there. Most of the words are wrong or in the wrong place or lies or all three. He still “writes” like a half-asleep child.

Trump went on to say, “Had Mike Pence referred the information on six states (only need two) back to State Legislatures, and had gutless and clueless MINORITY Leader Mitch McConnell (he blew two seats in Georgia that should have never been lost) fought to expose all of the corruption that was presented at the time, with more found since, we would have had a far different Presidential result, and our Country would not be turning into a socialist nightmare! Never give up!”

The illiteracy of it. Those chaotic parentheses, interrupting himself like hiccups, instead of organizing the sentence to incorporate the interjections – so illiterate. The vulgar railing and abuse.

The nightmare was you, Charlie. We’re so happy you’re gone. Go play golf.

Sure but they got away with it anyway.

Judge says Barr “misled” aka lied about the Mueller investigation.

A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.

That’s a terrible opening sentence/paragraph. The Times should worry less about wiping out the Oxford comma and more about a too-long one-sentence opening paragraph with too much context-free information lumped all together with no punctuation. I know the idea is overview first then details but the overview in this case sucks.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.

You don’t say. Barr and other cronies lied to Congress about the Mueller investigation; we know. Too bad they got away with it, and then looked the other way while Trump triggered an almost-successful coup, and got away with that.

The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.

The “private advice” crap is such crap. None of this was or could be “private” because it was all to do with Trump in his government job. (I get that it may be legit in legal terms, I’m just saying it shouldn’t be.)

She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.

“The attorney general’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.

What they could see with sickening clarity was an attempt to hide the ball.

The ruling came in a lawsuit by a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asking that the Justice Department be ordered to turn over a range of documents related to how top law enforcement officials cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.

A range of documents related to how the foxes guarded the henhouse.

Heeheehee Trump has a blog. I bet mine is better.

His retro webpage, billed “From the Desk of Donald J Trump”, appears at DonaldJTrump.com/desk and features a small photo of the 45th president writing in a book on his desk.

Which is funny because he barely knows how to write.

Twitter announced it had banned Trump permanently after the US Capitol attack for breaking its “glorification of violence” rules.

Facebook also banned him, with its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, saying “the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great”.

But Facebook’s independent oversight board is expected to announce on Wednesday whether it is overturning the suspension.

In the meantime Trump, exiled at his private Mar-a-Lago residence and club in Palm Beach after leaving office in defeat and disgrace, has been sending press releases to journalists.

They are often in a style reminiscent of his tweets, with capital letters, exclamation marks and misspellings. But they no longer drive the day’s agenda or cable news chyrons as his presidential missives once did.

Isn’t it peaceful?

Big news – another open letter saying eeek transphobia eeek. Great, because there haven’t been enough of those yet.

A group of individuals from across the books industry has written an open letter to The Bookseller which has warned “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry”, arguing that what is needed is “quiet statements of acceptance from companies and organisations within our industry”. 

But how are these individuals defining “transphobia”? It tends to mean just not agreeing with the magical dualist claims of trans ideology.

The three-page letter, entitled ‘The Paradox of Tolerance’, is signed anonymously from a number of trade figures, including publishers, writers, illustrators and booksellers. It is published below this article. The Bookseller has been passed some details of signatories but has been unable to independently verify these for reasons of confidentiality.

Then how does The Bookseller know the signatories are trade figures, including publishers, writers, illustrators and booksellers? How does it know they’re not just claiming to be those things? Maybe they’re trans trade figures, including trans publishers, trans writers, trans illustrators and trans booksellers.

Why, really, is The Bookseller publishing an anonymous letter at all?

The letter reads: “The hardest thing to say here is that the deepest damage is being done unwittingly, by those who don’t understand, or who want to try and take no side.  It is easy to express abhorrence of discrimination in literature, but we all need to express it in our own day to day lives too.” It calls on organisations to make specific statements of acceptance and discusses previous forms of discrimination in regards to “homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, people of colour, Muslims, suffragettes, even left-handed people in our past”. 

Not women though. Women have never faced discrimination. Women are just Karens.

This is an edited version of the letter passed to The Bookseller:

‘The Paradox of Tolerance’

Somebody, sooner or later, must speak up. So here we stand together, a group of writers, illustrators, booksellers and publishers, to make a start and say what others dare not say or can’t quite articulate. At this moment what needs to be expressed most urgently is the distinction between a petty anxiety and the horror that rises when you become aware that you are witnessing a persecution. 

Transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry. Our industry excuses it, says that to view transgender individuals as having less than full human rights is OK and an opinion as valid as others. Our industry is still very comfortable about giving this form of prejudice a powerful platform. 

Nonsense. That’s just an outright lie. Who has ever said that to view transgender individuals as having less than full human rights is OK?

It kind of gives away the fact that they have no case, doesn’t it, when they tell a whopper like that. It’s not a human right to pretend to be something you’re not, and it’s especially not a human right to try to force other people to agree that you’re something you’re not.

There are a few individuals who are openly using language about the transgender and non-binary community that isolates that community and pushes them away from being fully accepted as part of society.

What language?

Again, they fail to say. If they had something they would tell us about it, so I conclude that they don’t.

 If your opinion makes you blind to the shunning and demonising of a young community who are trans or non-binary, then we’d like to invite you to reconsider the extent to which you have understood the implications of voicing your opinion or allowing discrimination and persecution to go unchallenged.

They should see the shunning and demonising that feminist women have been getting lately.

Far from being the ‘cancel culture’, some have labelled it, it is the opposite: the whole point of calling out prejudiced views is to ensure that as many people as possible are welcomed and included.

Welcomed and included in what? Women don’t have to welcome and include men in all settings and circumstances; women are allowed to have some women-only organizations and spaces.

Those of us who have studied history can see perhaps more clearly than many that the language and accusations against the trans community are *exactly* those that have been used against: homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, people of colour, Muslims, suffragettes, even left-handed people in our past.

No they aren’t.

The language is very revealing: people will say that it upsets the natural order of things; there’s an implication of something monstrous; they’ll say that these people are dangerous; these people look different; they aren’t proper people somehow, not what they should be; it is just a phase, it is an illness.

No they don’t. Especially not in the book industry they don’t. There are probably many people who say things like that around the dinner table, but this isn’t an open letter to people around dinner tables, it’s a letter to people in the book industry. They don’t talk like that string of nonsense.

If you re-read many of the speeches and comments from the those who seek to tell us that speaking about transgender people this way is a valid opinion, and in your mind replace the word transgender with ‘Jews’ or ‘Refugees’ or ‘Gay Men’, you’ll see how unpleasantly familiar it becomes.  

Funny how their examples never include women. I wonder why that might be.

In the case of transgender people there is even talk of segregating them from others in public spaces.

No there isn’t. There are women insisting that we have a right to segregated spaces for our own safety, which means that women who identify as trans can come in but men can’t. Nobody is saying trans people as such should be “segregated from others in public spaces.”

There are surprisingly many more paragraphs, but given the crudity of the ones I’ve slogged through already I think I won’t be reading them.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on So, Dan.

How on earth do they get from one to the other?

Leap of faith.

Call me paranoid, but I think there’s more to it than that. They look like two serarate, but connected moves.

Opening girls’ sports to boys who claim to be girls will only result in a tiny number of trans girls joining teams anyway so it’s not a problem”

First, minimize the the imposition. Make the problem look small; make the reaction to it look extreme and unreasonable. “It’s only a few, what’s the harm? You’re over-reacting!” And this is setting aside the fact that however “few” boys are admitted to teams, at least that number of girls will be cheated out of playing on that team at all, and any girls from other schools who lose to teams with boys on them are also being cheated out of victories and awards. TAs have to clothe their own demands in the language of “fairness” and “justice” to hide the injustice to which girls will be subjected. They claim priority in their manufactured hierarchy of injustice. “Look, we’re fighting cis privilege!” This is on top of the absolute necessity to completely disguise the fact that what is being demanded is boys playing on girls’s teams, which would be a much harder sell to call “just” or “fair.”

“Not letting the boys join girls’ teams will result in all the girls having their genitals checked to ensure they are not boys”

Part of this may be an unjustified confidence in the ability of boys to pass as girls. This ability diminishes considerable after puberty. Long, multicoloured hair, lipstick, and head tilting can only get so far against the primal, finely-tuned evolutionary skill of being able to tell males from females.

I believe that this idea of “genital inspections” is a threat. It’s being presented in such a way that it portrays the poor TIMs as being subjected to this inhumane treatment, but I think that TAs are actually going to demand that girls be subjected to genital inspections. If they don’t get their way in blocking these bills, I fully expect TAs to make exactly this demand. I also think this is letting a bit of projection slip. They think their opponents are plotting to do this because it’s what they themselves are planning to demand. It’s a scare tactic designed to make girls and their parents back down in their fight to protect the rights and health of girls and women.

The simple presentation of a birth certificate would completely circumvent the need (and threat) of genital inspections, assuming that they have not been changed. As humans cannot change sex, this should not be legally possible, but we’ve seen how there is pressure to enable records to be tampered with in this way. It’s distorting history, and a demand that we play along. Welcome to Minitrue.

On IMDB, there is no longer an entry for Ellen Page, and all her past performances are now credited to “Elliot Page,” even though there was no such person as Elliot Page at the time those movies were made. Would any romantic scenes filmed with Page’s male co-stars now be considered “gay” love scenes? Only if you’re willing to deny reality and have compliantly retconned your own memory. Wherever Page is now in the continuing evolution (or disintigration) of her personality and “identity,” she was not then where she is now, and to pretend otherwise is, to put it plainly, a lie. The first five returns on Google in entering a search for “ellen page academy awards” are for “Elliot.” The oscars.org website has yet to be sanitized, and Ellen’s 2008 win for Juno is still in her original name. I’m not sure if this is the result of an actual commitment to historical integrity, or simply because nobody has gotten around to “fixing” it.

This same demand for compliance with, and acquiescence to dishonesty, is at the core of the push for so-called trans “rights,” including the demand for boys and men to play on girls’s and women’s teams. Reworded truthfully, it’s clear that this effort cannot survive the use of clear, plain language, so distortion, obfuscation, and emotional blackmail are the only tools it has. It may be hidden behind a facade of glitter and rainbows, but looking closely, what we see is the same old male entitlement, as prepared to resort to threats, intimidation, and violence, as it always has been.

A woman wonders, very tentatively, if there’s anything at all sexist about the ever-escalating trend (aka pressure) for women to spend much of their time and money repairing putative flaws in their faces breasts genitals buttocks legs arms hands feet nails teeth hair.

It’s nothing shocking now for women of my age (30) and younger to seek out anti-ageing procedures. To feel troubled by this puts you in strange territory.

I feel sometimes there is a feedback loop in feminism. Issues first raised by second-wave feminism – and perhaps broached too prescriptively – were later reconsidered under the idea that feminism should allow women to do what they want. Take body hair removal. Quite rightly, feminists over the years have highlighted shaving and waxing as an area of inequality, a thing women generally have to bother with if they don’t wish to face ridicule or worse. Later this idea was readdressed, with some third-wave feminists arguing that if shaving feels good to an individual woman, then it shouldn’t be seen as oppressive – it could, for her, be an act of empowerment.

In other words to throw out feminism altogether. “Third wave” feminism isn’t feminism at all, it’s just the same old shit with the label “choice” added. Shaving doesn’t “feel good” to an individual woman out of nowhere, it “feels good” because she’s aware of the social expectations and the punishments for not meeting them. Doing what those expectations dictate is not “empowerment.” Hairless legs and crotches do not equal power.

I have no moral high ground here: the only reason I don’t commit to all those ways of rendering yourself standardly attractive to society is that I’m too lazy or too cheap, not because I’m above doing it. I have no admonishment whatsoever for individual women who get to feel a bit happier about their appearances, and I don’t believe it is morally wrong to get cosmetic procedures. At the same time, I think we are foolish to accept the mainstreaming of cosmetic intervention without querying what it will do to us. 

That “at the same time” is doing a lot of work.

Forget it. Forget trying to appease the choosy-choice pseudo-feminists. You can’t do it anyway, so don’t bother to try.

I also feel this way about the uncritical discussion of rough sex and BDSM practices.

You mean men strangling women? That “rough sex”? The kind that too often ends up with a dead woman and a live man who says oops and goes on his way rejoicing?

I’ve seen young women whose politics I share disavow contemporary feminism altogether, because all they see in the movement are self-interested white women who exclude trans people, sex workers or other demographics that don’t include them. 

That’s not what you’re seeing though. Feminist women don’t “exclude trans people”; we refuse to “include” men in the category “women,” because that category is for women (and so not men). Feminism is for and about women, not men who say they are women. And feminism doesn’t exclude women exploited by the sex trade, it excludes pimps. And this feminism – the real feminism – is not exclusively white, either.

Frank Bruni at the Times says Tucker Carlson is trying to be the new Trump – i.e. the new guy who says stupid shit to rile people up. Grab some popcorn, kids, it’s another episode of Who’s the Biggest Troll?

Case in point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.

“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse.”

So what we should do, no doubt, is deny him the attention he’s obviously seeking, but then again it’s not as if that will make him go away any sooner.

Like Trump, he has decided that virality is its own reward. And he’s being amply rewarded, as exemplified in this very column. I’d prefer to ignore him, but I face the same irreconcilable considerations that all the others who aren’t ignoring him do.

To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host — ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow — and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.

Quite so.

The amount of real estate that Carlson occupies in political newsletters that I subscribe to seems to have grown in proportion to the amount that Trump has lost. (That’s my own replacement theory.) And it proves that we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.

Is it that we need villains of that kind? Or is it that villains of that kind are very bad and so they motivate us to say how they are bad. I don’t feel much of a need for smug conceited cruel people, but when they’re wielding their smug conceited cruelty like a battering ram then I feel a need to talk about it.

#CreepyTucker is trending on the Twitterbox, and this is why.

Obama is “some creepy old guy.”

A cheerful prospect.

The New York Times did an offensively bad and one-sided job of Explaining the moves to prevent boys from competing against girls in school sports. To put it more bluntly, they argued for allowing boys to compete against girls as if it were just obviously fine and not at all unfair.

I’m quoting from the transcript. It’s worth listening to some, to hear how emphasis is used to tip the scales even more.

Just four months into 2021, Republican state lawmakers across the country have already proposed more bills restricting the lives of transgender youth than in any previous year. Today, Sabrina Tavernise spoke with our colleague, Dan Levin, about what’s behind these bills and the impact they could have on the children and families that they target.

This is a transcript of a podcast, which is why they start every single exchange with “so” – which a producer or someone should teach them to stop doing.

Sabrina Tavernise: So, Dan, can you start by telling us what are these bills we’ve been seeing around the country?

Dan Levin: So, the big national picture is, since January, in often Republican-controlled legislatures in over 30 states, lawmakers have introduced more than 80 bills that focus on the rights of transgender youth. And these bills kind of fall into two main baskets. The first focus is on trans youth in sports. And the other big basket of bills is around transgender medical care.

Sabrina Tavernise: So, Dan, let’s start with the first basket. Tell me about the sports bills.

Dan Levin: So these bills have been introduced in states from Texas to Florida to West Virginia, Kansas, and Missouri. And the major focus of these transgender sports bills is that they aim to prevent transgender athletes, and really, in most of these cases, transgender women and girls from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity.

Sabrina Tavernise: So let me make sure I understand this. This would bar a girl who was called male at birth from playing on a female soccer team.

No, it would bar a boy who calls himself a girl from playing on a female soccer team. The magic story we’re being told about Trans Girls is just that: a magic story. It’s not true. Justice and fairness don’t require adult journalists to pretend it is true.

Dan Levin: Exactly. These bills would ban transgender girls on a high school soccer team or a middle school soccer team or in a college team from playing on women’s teams.

That is, boys.

Dan Levin: The main argument of proponents of these bills is that they’re all about ensuring fair competition in sports.

They play a clip of a legislator saying it’s not fair to girls.

Dan Levin: They say that women and girls might be physically outmatched by transgender women and girls.

Might??

Sabrina Tavernise: Dan, is there any truth to the argument that trans women have certain advantages in sports? Tell me about that.

Dan Levin: So this is a highly debated question. And there isn’t enough research done on transgender athletes to say definitively. But what we do know is that the American Academy of Pediatrics has stated that kids should play on sports teams that match their gender identity. And sports associations like the N.C.A.A. and the International Olympic Committee already have policies in place to really ensure that athletics can be inclusive of transgender women, while also ensuring fair competition.

No they don’t. They have policies to do with testosterone, which is only part of the advantage males have. Less or more testosterone won’t do anything about the bigger bones and muscles, the greater lung capacity, and the other hard-wired physical advantages.

Many school athletics associations are saying this is not really an issue. And they have come out against these bills, saying they are based on stereotypes and are actually not really needed. And trans advocates also say that these bills are incredibly invasive in that many of them would allow anyone to contest a student athlete’s gender. And that student would then be required to undergo, say, a genital exam, other kind of testing that would just be incredibly stigmatizing and invasive.

ST: Wow. How often does this question of transgender athletes playing on sports teams even come up, Dan? Are there a lot of schools encountering this?

DL: There really aren’t. Transgender youth make up less than 2 percent of the population, according to recent estimates. And trans athletes are even fewer. Last month, the Associated Press reached out to sponsors of these anti-trans sports bills in more than 20 states. And many of these sponsors could not cite a single instance in their state or their region where the participation of transgender athletes has caused problems.

Oh well that’s ok then. It will happen to only a few girls, at first, so that’s fine. Who cares anyway, when they’re only girls. The really important people are boys who say they’re girls.

Bastards.

About Australia’s travel ban from India…

Scott Morrison has continued his “don’t worry about the India travel ban” media tour this morning on Nine’s Today show, where he was asked about former test cricket opener Michael Slater’s comments that the prime minister has “blood on his hands”.

…

The decision to make attempting to return to Australia within 14 days of being in India a criminal offence punishable with up 5 years in prison and fines as high as $60,000 has been roundly criticised. Morrison has been going to great lengths to water down this rhetoric this morning.

The likelihood of any sanction, anything like that is extremely remote.

If the law is on the books the law is on the books. It’s not much comfort to claim that the likelihood of enforcement is extremely remote. If that’s the case why is the law the law?

Maybe it won’t be for long.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says Australians must have the right to come home, appearing on ABC News Breakfast to criticise the government’s India travel ban.

Well, look, it must be a fundamental right for every Australian citizen to be able to come home. The… song “I Still Call Australia Home” sounds ironic now, doesn’t it? It has a bitter taste to it.

That is the first thing – Australians must have the right to come home. The Commonwealth has the obligation to make it safe for them to do so.

The thing is, it’s not a universal rule.

Scott Morrison has been asked why Australia didn’t ban travellers from the US or UK despite similar rates of infection during their respective spikes, and if the characterisation of the Indian policy as “racist” is fair.

Morrison’s tactic when asked this is to talk about China, which by the most generous of characterisations is only vaguely related to the issue.

Ok how about Thailand? Sri Lanka? Kenya? Are we getting warmer?

But it’s not dehumanizing.

But it’s not dehumanizing. Women are human. Saying a woman is a woman isn’t dehumanizing her. You can call it rude or unkind if you like, but it’s not even slightly dehumanizing. Women and men are both human.

He’s 38 years old. I do find that slightly shocking. People should be reasonably adult by that age.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic sought out some vax-refuseniks to explain their thinking.

The people I spoke with were all under 50. A few of them self-identified as Republican, and none of them claimed the modern Democratic Party as their political home. Most said they weren’t against all vaccines; they were just a “no” on this vaccine. They were COVID-19 no-vaxxers, not overall anti-vaxxers.

Many people I spoke with said they trusted their immune system to protect them. “Nobody ever looks at it from the perspective of a guy who’s like me,” Bradley Baca, a 39-year-old truck driver in Colorado, told me. “As an essential worker, my life was never going to change in the pandemic, and I knew I was going to get COVID no matter what. Now I think I’ve got the antibodies, so why would I take a risk on the vaccine?”

Because thinking you’ve got the antibodies doesn’t sound like much of a magic protection? Because COVID is a bigger risk than the vaccine?

Many people said they had read up on the risk of COVID-19 to people under 50 and felt that the pandemic didn’t pose a particularly grave threat. “The chances of me dying from a car accident are higher than my dying of COVID,” said Michael Searle, a 36-year-old who owns a consulting firm in Austin, Texas. “But it’s not like I don’t get in my car.”

But there is no vaccine for a car crash. If there were, wouldn’t it make sense to get it?

And many others said that perceived liberal overreach had pushed them to the right. “Before March 2020, I was a solid progressive Democrat,” Jenin Younes, a 37-year-old attorney, said. “I am so disturbed by the Democrats’ failure to recognize the importance of civil liberties. I’ll vote for anyone who takes a strong stand for civil liberties and doesn’t permit the erosion of our fundamental rights that we are seeing now.” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, also told me he didn’t vote much before the pandemic, but the perception of liberal overreach had a strong politicizing effect. “When COVID hit, I saw rights being taken away. So in 2020, I voted for the first time in my life, and I voted all the way Republican down the ballot.”

Civil liberties are important, but you can’t exercise them if you’re dead, and they’re not so important that they override our duties to other people.

But the no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more, they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give them straight answers on anything virus-related.

The no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living). This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites‪.

The thing about one’s own mind is that it’s just one mind. Epidemiology is the work of many minds, part of whose job it is to check each other’s work. Do I trust my own mind on epidemiology more than I trust a whole institution of epidemiologists on epidemiology? The question answers itself. Institutions can get things wrong despite all the checking, of course, but so can individual minds.