Andrew Sullivan catches it and then drops it.

Lots of people are telling him that it can’t be the right thing to do if it isn’t fair, which I agree with but think misses his point. He’s not so dim as to be unaware of the paradox in his claim. There can be necessities that are nevertheless unfair to someone.

But having said that, I still find it annoying that he says it may be the right thing to do, because…come on. A guy’s desire to compete against women because he thinks of himself as a woman (assuming he’s not pretending) doesn’t make it the right thing to do. It’s just his desire, that’s all, so why should it trump someone else’s desire when it’s not fair? His life doesn’t depend on it, his health doesn’t depend on it, his basic needs don’t depend on it. He just wants to. That’s not enough to override the “it’s not fair” part.

The whole point of trans activism could be summed up as converting desires to needs in this way, and that’s why it churns out such unconvincing rhetoric.

It was Sex Week at Ohio State University last month! We missed it!

It was under the umbrella of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Department.

What is that about? Why are women and sexuality lumped together? Do men have nothing to do with sexuality? It’s hard not to conclude that the lumping together is because women are the consumer good, rather than because men have nothing to do with sexuality. It’s like this, see: when people (i.e. men) think about women they think about sex, so the two go together as an academic department. What non-people (i.e. women) think about when they think about men is of no interest or importance. Disciplines are organized according to what men think about, and women are just the raw material.

Anyway. Sexuality week is guaranteed to be fun and sex-positive.

Student Advocates for Sexual Health Awareness (SASHA) is hosting The Ohio State University’s annual Sex Week! Sex Week is dedicated to creating a judgement-free, inclusive, relatable space for the OSU community to explore sexual health. The week will include presentations and discussions on various topics including sex education, abortion stigma, pleasure, sex work, and more!

With no judgement! Of any kind! Always desirable in an academic setting.

Monday, February 15th

• “Kiss me Thru The Phone: Cybersex during COVID-19” (2:00pm – 3:00pm)
• “Beyond the Gender Binary with Alok” (5:00pm – 6:00pm)
• “The Policy on Our Bodies: A Panel on Current Legislation” (6:00pm – 7:00pm

Tuesday, February 16th

• “They Work Hard for the Money: Sex Work with Dr. Teela Sanders” (3:00pm – 4:00pm)

Who do? Pimps? Pimps don’t work hard for the money.

Friday, February 19th

• “Smashing the Stigma on Sex” (11:00am – 12:00pm)
• “Not Your High School Sex Ed” (2:00pm – 3:00pm)
• “Plan B(ingo)” (6:00pm – 7:00pm)
• “Kink 101” (7:30pm – 8:30pm)

Send your daughter to Ohio State to learn how to love being strangled during sex!

SASHA is a student organization that advocates educating the student body about sexual health in all its forms. Realistic sexual health is interdisciplinary and includes healthy relationships, methods of protection, and STI awareness, gender equality, and body acceptance.

Co-sponsored by The Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Feminism? What’s that got to do with anything?

Cage fight.

There’s an ambiguity in there, which Dawkins corrects with the first two words of his second sentence. “Science” refers to the human discipline and also to the realities it uncovers. Gorski assumes Dawkins is talking about the first, but that requires him to ignore the “Science’s truths” bit. Perhaps because…

So is transgender science the socially constructed kind or the “scientific facts” kind?

Dawkins did clear it up, while (characteristically) claiming it was OBVIOUS what he meant (it wasn’t – see above about the ambiguity).

The struggle continues.

Wut?

Well I certainly hope they decided to stop calling it OBGYN, given what the GYN stands for. Filthy business, filthy. (I actually once knew someone who considered “gynecologist” a dirty word. This panic-loathing around all things female comes from somewhere.)

So…

The old version starts with “This 4-week clerkship emphasizes health care for women…”; the second replaces that with “This 4-week clerkship emphasizes sexual and reproductive care…”

The word “women” is gone. Sabina Spigner is “stoked” to have gotten the word “women” removed from a course description for OBGYN students. Stoked.

Bully plans to go all the way from Florida to Alaska, without Air Force One at his disposal, in order to bully a woman he doesn’t like.

Trump is making official his plans to target Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, vowing to travel to Alaska to campaign against her ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

Campaign against her meaning what? Running for the senate? Or just throwing his weight around.

In a statement to POLITICO on Saturday, Trump said: “I will not be endorsing, under any circumstances, the failed candidate from the great State of Alaska, Lisa Murkowski. She represents her state badly and her country even worse. I do not know where other people will be next year, but I know where I will be — in Alaska campaigning against a disloyal and very bad Senator.”

Spoken like a petulant illiterate, as always.

But if he’s going to be in Alaska all next year that’s fine. He’ll hate it.

Trump says images of him belong to HIM. Get your dirty mitts off them.

Donald Trump has told the Republican National Committee and other party bodies to stop using his name and likeness in fundraising efforts, it was reported on Saturday.

“President Trump remains committed to the Republican party and electing America First conservatives,” Politico quoted an unnamed adviser to the former president as saying about the legal cease-and-desist notice, “but that doesn’t give anyone – friend or foe – permission to use his likeness without explicit approval.”

Wrong! Anybody can use images of him without his permission unless he has copyright.

Spiteful little fucker isn’t he.

Relief bill passed.

Joe Biden hailed “one more giant step forward on delivering on that promise that help is on the way”, after Democrats took a critical step towards a first major legislative victory since assuming control of Congress and the White House, with a party-line vote in the Senate to approve a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill.

One senator was able to see to it that unemployed people would be kept poorer.

The marathon “vote-a-rama” session that preceded the final Senate vote featured the longest recorded vote in Senate history, just shy of 12 hours, on Friday, as Democrats scrambled to strike a deal with Manchin, a moderate who mounted a last-minute push to scale back unemployment benefits.

Bowing to Manchin, the resulting compromise will keep benefits at $300 a week instead of $400, as proposed by Biden and approved by the House. However, the benefits will be extended until October rather than August, and Democrats added a provision to provide up to $10,200 in tax relief for unemployed Americans.

Let them eat stones.

Early on Friday, the Senate rejected a proposal by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to include a $15-an-hour minimum wage increase, a top liberal priority and a key plank of Biden’s economic agenda.

Despite widespread public support for raising the federal minimum wage, Democrats remain divided over the measure. On Friday, eight joined all Republicans in blocking the amendment, which would have required 60 votes to pass.

If people can’t live on $7.50 an hour well they should have thought of that before they got born.

That very first sentence is pretty astounding. What does it even mean to say “I am contacting you within my role as head of trans inclusion at Stonewall”? What does some “role” at some political organization have to do with sending peremptory bossy complaints about what one woman says on Twitter to her employer?

Has there ever been any organization that could do that on behalf of women?

Perhaps it’s just a racket, plain and simple.

Allison Bailey today made public the complaint that Stonewall sent to her chambers.

Uh oh. A foot wrongly placed.

Who doesn’t know that sexual attraction is based on chemical reactions as opposed to weird irrelevant shit like bodies and faces and genitals and chest-ornaments? Nobody pays any attention to bodies and faces and genitals and chest-ornaments. What a warped medieval idea.

Repent!

It’s very cis to think clarifications have to be related to what they’re supposed to clarify.

Hoping desperately that saying it would be all that’s required.

And trying to make people choose or learn it would be conversion therapy, so…kinda makes ya think, don’t it.

NPR should be better than this.

“Detransition narratives” they say – but I bet they don’t talk about “transition narratives.” I bet their internal editor would tell them “that’s transphobic!!!” before they even finished typing it. Detransition is a fairy tale, but transition is glorious and healthy and never fails to make everything perfect.

In short, NPR has decided that trying to “change sex” is a good and wise thing to do, and that being skeptical of that view is evil and forbidden. Why? Why has NPR decided that?

Also note the “weaponized against trans people” bit. It’s not “weaponized against arm-having people” to say that amputating your arms for no reason would not be a good idea. It’s not “weaponizing” against anyone to point out that humans can’t change sex, and that trying to change the obvious physical markers of sex is probably futile and quite likely to cause problems.

Also detransition doesn’t “belong to” anyone, and the people who have experience of it aren’t trans any more, so why should they be shoved aside by people who think detransition is a “weapon”?

There is so much dishonest manipulative language in this movement that it should be obvious to onlookers that it’s not the broad sunlit path to happiness it’s cracked up to be.

We don’t seem to be very good at learning, in the US. The fact that the number of new cases has fallen from a peak is not the same as PANDEMIC IS OVER EVERYONE JUMP INTO THE POOL AGAIN.

Public health experts encouraged Americans to continue social distancing and wearing masks at a potentially critical inflection point in the pandemic – one in which highly effective vaccines could provide relief, but fervor [eagerness] to reopen public life could unintentionally spread new Covid-19 variants.

The warnings come the same week Texas and Mississippi flung open the doors to normal social life in their states.

No doors should be flung open yet. Not even close.

Coronavirus cases have declined across much of the United States since mid-January, a point when the peak of the third wave saw upwards of 4,000 Covid-19 deaths a day. However, cases remain “extremely high” according to data watchers, and could plateau at a point equivalent to the peak of summer 2020.

See, the peak was very high, so cases can decline and still be too high.

On Wednesday, following a crippling winter ice storm Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, ended all pandemic restrictions and opened the state “100%”. The Republican governor of Mississippi soon followed suit, and lifted mask mandates on all activities except schools and large arenas.

…

The moves prompted immediate outcry. Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, called lifting pandemic restrictions a “systemwide state leadership failure”, while Joe Biden called the decision “Neanderthal thinking”.

Pause for explosions of wrath over “Neanderthal.” The Neanderthal Pride Association could not be reached for comment.

Bolsonaro to the people of Brazil: suck it up!

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has triggered a wave of revulsion by telling citizens to stop “whining” about a coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 260,000 people.

The far-right populist made the inflammatory declaration on Thursday, as Brazil’s already dire Covid situation deteriorated and its average daily death toll rose above that of the United States.

“Stop all this fussing and whining. How long are you going to keep on crying?” Bolsonaro asked supporters in the midwestern state of Goiás, where nearly 9,000 people have died.

What’s there to fuss and whine about after all? Hospitals overrun, nurses and doctors stretched beyond the limit, people suffering – who cares?

The composer Zeca Baleiro tweeted: “A president who says ‘stop whining and fussing’ at the most critical, painful and heart-rending moment the Brazilian people have faced since the start of the pandemic isn’t just a bungling politician, a bad man or a moron. He’s an incurable sociopath.”

There are people who compete with each other on Twitter to see who can say the most psychopathic things about the pandemic.

Getting closer.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Thursday that it has arrested Federico Klein, one of former President Donald Trump’s appointees to the U.S. Department of State, for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Klein, 42, was picked up by federal agents in Virginia, according to a spokesperson for the FBI’s field office in Washington, D.C. Court documents obtained by ABC News show Klein has been charged with assaulting federal law enforcement personnel during the deadly riot earlier this year.

Gee I thought Trump and his people were big fans of law enforcement.

Charging documents filed Tuesday in federal district court in Washington, D.C., accuse Klein of taking part in one of the day’s most violent interactions between authorities and the mob seeking entrance at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol building. Investigators said law enforcement body-worn cameras purportedly captured Klein as he “violently shoved a riot shield that apparently had been taken from an officer, towards the officers trying to stop the mob from gaining access to the building.”

Investigators said Klein allegedly “pushed the riot shield in between the doors to the Capitol, preventing officers from closing the doors,” according to the court documents.

Investigators said other videos posted on social media purportedly show Klein “inciting the mob and trying to break through the police line in the Lower West Terrace tunnel and into the Capitol building.” In one instance, as a crowd of rioters assaulted and struggled with authorities, investigators said Klein was purportedly captured on video repeatedly “calling back to the crowd behind him, ‘We need fresh people, we need fresh people,'” according to the court documents.

But if you believe Trump is the god-emperor that’s not a crime, it’s a patriotic and devout act.

On Jan. 20, the FBI posted a bulletin showing individuals who it said had made unlawful entry into the Capitol building and assaulted law enforcement personnel on Jan. 6. The list included Klein, who was given the moniker “136-AFO.” The FBI then received a tip from an individual who identified 136-AFO as Klein. The tipster told the FBI that Klein was their neighbor and “had exhibited extreme behavior to include displaying inflammatory rhetoric on their vehicle about President Biden, Vice President Harris, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the ‘ANTIFA’ movement,” according to the court documents.

Investigators determined that Klein had been an employee of the U.S. Department of State until resigning his position on Jan. 19, the day before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Klein also possessed a top-secret security clearance, according to the court documents.

So he wasn’t just a file clerk.

This is happening:

Welcome to Sex Matters:

A launch message from Rebecca Bull, Naomi Cunningham, Maya Forstater and Emma Hilton.

The Era of “No Debate” is over

In the last 12 months, the UK government has dropped plans to change the law in England and Wales to enable people to change their legal sex status through self-declaration. The Department for Education has told schools to stop saying children can be ‘born in the wrong body’. The Crown Prosecution Service has withdrawn guidance for schools equating dissent to “hate.” In Scotland the Forensic Medical Services Bill was amended to clarify that rape victims should be allowed to request the sex not the “gender” of the medical professional examining them. And the High Court has ordered doctors to take a much more cautious approach to treating children with gender dysphoria.

Step by step.

Should we be furious about Dr. Seuss, or elated, or neither?

On Tuesday, the publishing imprint Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would cease publishing six books by Dr. Seuss that include offensive images. In the statement, which was published on the author’s birthday, the publisher said it reached its decision after working with a panel of experts, including educators, in the service of its mission “of supporting all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.”

The six shelved books are all comparatively obscure works in the Seuss canon: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. Beloved classics like The Cat in the Hat and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! remain untouched. But the decision, which caused enormous uproar across the right-wing infosphere, is part of a larger debate raging across the children’s literature community.

The thing is, though, books go out of print all the time. Were people thinking all books, once published, stay in print forever? If so, get out your hankies: they don’t. Most books don’t stay in print long.

That includes relatively unpopular books by authors whose more popular books are still in print. It happens.

For decades, the works of Dr. Seuss (real name Theodor Seuss Geisel) have been considered both iconic childhood classics and bastions of liberalism. They are lauded for their celebration of all that makes us different, and Seuss books like Horton Hears a Who and The Sneetches appear frequently in anti-racism curricula for children.

But in recent years, the Dr. Seuss brand name has lost some of its shine. Read Across America Day, an annual day of programming designed by the National Education Association to get kids excited to read, is traditionally held on or around March 2, Geisel’s birthday. It usually features a lot of Cat in the Hat paraphernalia and other beloved Seuss branding. But when the NEA’s contract with Dr. Seuss Enterprises ran out in 2018, it chose not to renew the terms, leading to a lot less Dr. Seuss merch getting distributed to different schools. And this year, the NEA has pivoted away from Dr. Seuss entirely. Instead, it’s using Read Across America Day to spotlight children’s books by authors of color.

That’s not the end of the world. Variety is good. Give other books a turn. That’s fine.

And now Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to cease publishing six of Dr. Seuss’s books, all of which include racist caricatures.

Notably, in If I Ran the Zoo, the narrator declares his intention to put a “chieftain” (illustrated as a man in a turban) on display in the zoo; a pair of African characters are portrayed as monkeys; and a group of Asian characters, described as “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell” carry a caged animal on their heads. The other books contain similar Orientalist caricatures.

Well, you know, there’s not really any pressing reason a publisher has to keep publishing those books. Publishers stop publishing particular books all the time, that’s just how publishing works. If the reason is not just “not all that popular any more” but also “also racist” then so be it.

Times change. Racist caricatures used to be normal, and that wasn’t a good thing. Lots of things used to be normal that shouldn’t have been.

Hm. Sounds like one of those political practical joke type things.

Mansfield today is waking up to the stunning news that their headline-hunting MP, Ben Bradley, has been appointed to the Women and Equalities Committee in the House of Commons.

Who is he? Well…

He has repeatedly whined that white men do not get enough of a break and called for a ‘Minister for Men’.

He has either avoided or voted against legislation promoting equality and human rights, including abortion and same-sex marriage.

…

He’s cool with police brutality and has encouraged officers to ‘splat the chavs’ with water cannons.

He pushed back against Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign, supporting the idea that vouchers given out in his constituency go straight to crack dens and brothels.

So, basically, not a fan of women or equalities.

Heh.

If trans women are women then what does “trans” mean?

“Trans” isn’t a word like tall or young or clever or Irish or working or famous. It’s not purely descriptive, purely an add-on that doesn’t change what the noun means. “Trans” does change what the noun means…it changes it to mean “not literally” but we’re supposed to pretend it doesn’t.

“Trans” means not really or pretend or make-believe or fake. We’re supposed to pretend it names a spooky magical process by which some men (but far more than we used to think, lots and lots and lots more) are actually women underneath the alien shell of maleitude, but the reality is that the shell of maleitude aka the male body is what makes a man a man. We are our bodies and our bodies are us. I can’t have the body of a blue whale and neither can anyone else. I can call myself a trans whale all I like, but doing so doesn’t magically transform me into a blue whale in everything but mere physical reality.

Point missed.

Calls have been growing in India for the chief justice of the Supreme Court to resign “without a moment’s delay” after his recent remarks in two cases of alleged rape.

What remarks?

Justice Bobde, who was heading a three-judge bench, asked a 23-year-old man accused of raping a girl whether he would marry her.

“If you want to marry (her) we can help you. If not, you lose your job and go to jail,” he said.

His comments shocked many, especially considering the horrific accusations the girl – who was 16 at the time of the alleged rapes in 2014-15 – had made against the man, a distant relative.

According to the letter, he “is accused of stalking, tying up, gagging, repeatedly raping a minor school-going girl, and threatening to douse her in petrol and set her alight, to hurl acid at her, and to have her brother killed”.

It added that “the rape came to light when the minor school-going victim attempted suicide”.

This is where patriarchy gets things so very wrong. From the patriarchal point of view, what the rapist has done is to use and spoil and make dirty the female piece of property. If he marries her that won’t matter any more. She will be married and thus under firm control, and her dirt will get on no one but the man who made her dirty, so that’s fair.

But from the human point of view, what the rapist has done is to terrorize and torture her. Marriage to him would be nothing but more torture and terror, but the judge is apparently blithely unaware of or indifferent to that fact. He thinks of her as a filthy leaking vagina walking around dirtying up Pakistan, while she thinks of herself as a human who doesn’t want to be used like a rag.

Her family was fine with it though. It’s not clear whether she was fine with it too or simply had no option.

The girl’s family also alleged that they had agreed not to go to the police because they were promised by the accused’s mother that once the girl became an adult, they would marry the two.

In a country where victims are often blamed for rape, and sexual assault carries lifelong stigma, her family agreed to the arrangement.

But after the accused backtracked from his promise and married someone else, the survivor went to the police.

…

Gatherings of village elders in rural communities steeped in patriarchy are known to offer such a compromise formula to broker peace between families, and over the years, there have been several instances of the judiciary trying to play matchmaker between the victim and the accused.

“Village elders” of course are all male, and patriarchy treats women as fucktoys/babymachines.

It’s SO unfair.

Actually it’s another two months. April is between March and May and it’s only March 4 now so…two.

The Daily Beast:

The self-described white nationalist who stormed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and posed for gleeful photos during the Capitol riot doesn’t believe he should be in jail—and he’s had a temper tantrum in court to make his opinion known.

“They’re dragging this out. They’re letting everyone else out,” Richard “Bigo” Barnett yelled during his Thursday court hearing, insisting that “it’s not fair” that he is still in jail while a slew of his fellow rioters have been released pending trial.

Well, different people did different things. Different people pose different levels of flight risk. Judges have discretion. Also if we’re going to talk about “fair,” it’s not all that fair to smash your way into the Capitol and into Nancy Pelosi’s offices and then to vandalize those offices and steal some of the contents.

Barnett’s outburst was futile. After a five-minute recess, his lawyers told the judge they intended to file a new bail motion. The judge said he would rule on whether to release Barnett after that is filed, then abruptly ending the hearing. His next court date is May 4.

…

Prosecutors allege that during the Jan. 6 siege that forced lawmakers to hide for hours, Barnett was photographed carrying a stun gun and walking into Pelosi’s office. He posed for photographs sitting in Pelosi’s office with his feet propped on a desk, according to a criminal complaint.

Prosecutors allege that plus we’ve all seen the photographs.

Another photo shows Barnett, who previously described himself as a white nationalist who was prepared for a violent death, holding an envelope addressed to Pelosi. Once outside the Capitol, he appeared to brag about his behavior, all while still holding the personalized envelope he stole from Pelosi’s office.

“I did not steal it. I bled on it because they were macing me and I couldn’t fucking see so I figured I am in her office. I got blood on her office. I put a quarter on her desk even though she ain’t fucking worth it,” Barnett told one news outlet, according to the complaint. “And I left her a note on her desk that says, ‘Nancy, Bigo was here, you bitch.’”

And now he’s there.