The title is perfect:

How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me?

How indeed? But we mustn’t point out that the whole idea of “defining” one’s “gender” is entirely about who is watching the Precious Self.

By Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

Mx. Marzano-Lesnevich writes extensively on transgender issues and is working on a memoir about nonbinary identities.

In other words Mx. Marzano-Lesnevich has nothing in her his their head other than this fiction of trans and non-binary idennninies.

When the lockdown started he she they thought it would be a nice rest from taking the idenniny out on parade.

Alone in my apartment, I imagined that all my difficulties in being seen and recognized as transgender-nonbinary would evaporate. No one would gender me except myself; my pronouns would be right there in the text box on my Zoom screen.

So I was surprised by how much my gender instead seemed to almost evaporate. No longer on the alert for how to signal a restaurant’s waitstaff that neither “he” nor “she” applied to me, or for whether colleagues and neighbors would use the right language — devoid of anyone to signal my gender to — I felt, suddenly, amorphous and undefined.

Lordy. They she he don’t seem to realize how much she he they is revealing.

What if – just spitballing here – what if this whole gender thing is all about signalling one’s magic gender to other people? What if it’s just a novel way to demand extra attention? What if there’s really no more to it than that? What if Mx’s artless confessions are spilling the beans on the pathetic truth?

Where did my own gender reside, then, if not in sending signals of difference? My friends and I had long joked, “Gender is a social construct!” every time one of us needed shoring up after a messy encounter with the expectations of the gender-conforming heterosexual world. But without that world, we now added a rueful punchline: “Too bad there’s no more ‘social’!”

No more social and no more Mean Mommy and Daddy in the shape of the gender-conforming heterosexual world (which of course includes all those evil radical feminists, who are not “gender-conforming” at all but don’t let that slow you down). With no Cis Enemy what is even the point of being gnc?

With the gender binary all but gone, what did it mean to be nonbinary? How do I define my gender when I — accustomed to how visible my gender usually makes me — am no longer being watched?

I know this one. You grow up, that’s what. You realize that nobody actually cares, because people are interested in other things, things that aren’t you. You realize you’re not that special. You realize that thinking of yourself as that special is kind of adolescent and embarrassing, so you stop doing it.

Of course that’s not the lesson Mx Mx learned.

As an apology to all the people who (quite reasonably) are not entirely fond of posts based on random tweets from random people, a completely random tweet from someone I don’t know that is its own justification.

The governor of Florida is a “my sacred right to do whatever I want regardless of the harm to others” jackass.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Friday announced an executive order banning “vaccine passports” in the state, which like the rest of the US continues to suffer under the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Suffer” as in die a horrible gasping death or have friends or family die such a death or be an intensive care nurse or doctor and watch patients die gasping. That kind of suffer. It’s absolute hell.

Companies around the world are working to develop such “passports”, secure records of vaccination against Covid-19 that might be used to help society and businesses return to full operation by managing entry to buildings or events. New York state has launched its own version.

The tin hat crowd is running around squawking about the secret police and our sacred liberties are gone and yadda yadda. Apparently they get to draw from the goods of society but can’t be expected to give anything back, even something so obviously reasonable as trying not to spread the virus.

But the Florida governor’s order claimed “requiring so-called Covid-19 vaccine passports for taking part in everyday life – such as attending a sporting event, patronizing a restaurant or going to a movie theater – would create two classes of citizens”.

That’s so fucking stupid. No it wouldn’t. It would temporarily create two categories of citizens, for pressing public health reasons. The end.

Vaccine passports have become the latest flashpoint in increasingly politicized battles over coronavirus policy. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a controversial far-right Georgia Republican, has said vaccine passports are Joe Biden’s “mark of the beast”, the Hill reported. She has also introduced a bill to ban such passports and fire Dr Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser.

But what justifies this? What’s the thinking? In what way is public health “political”? Even right-wingers don’t want to die gasping for breath in an ICU surrounded by exhausted traumatized nurses and doctors. What on earth is the point of making a political issue of precautionary measures? I’ll never understand it.

The other thing about Alice Roberts’s dead people tweet [sorry Harald!] is that she’s right that the dead don’t come back to life, but then…why does she believe (or say she believes) that men do become women? Many are asking.

Ahhh yes, thank you for mentioning it. No beliefs should be beyond scrutiny and criticism! Including beliefs about whether or not men are women if they say so. And yet the belief that they are is pushed on all of us, often very hard, with insults and menaces and ostracism and terminated careers. What about that, Professor Roberts?

Ahhhh unscientific beliefs is it…like the belief that men are women if they say they “identify as” women. Imagine if your children said they identified as tigers and owls, not at age 4 but at age 15 or 20. Wouldn’t you see that as an unscientific belief?

Quite right, and skirts and high heels don’t make women.

Can you think of another damaging myth we push onto children, Professor Roberts? Because I can.

Is the impulse (or habit or need) to set people straight about things a necessarily religious one? I don’t think so, I think it’s a lot broader than that, although religion is certainly one area of life where people are encouraged to do it even unto the end of days.

I get what he means, and accept the mockery, but still – I think it’s a broader impulse than he’s implying, and also a more useful one. If you know how to get a fire going better than the people in the next hut over, you’re doing them a favor if you show them your skills.

But, of course, evangelism doesn’t come with a false positives detection kit. The impulse can be to bring people out of darkness into the light of your personal or shared delusion, and that’s not necessarily a benefit.

Or maybe I’m just constructing a rationalization for why I like to argue about nearly everything.

Trans woman Grace Lavery interviews trans advocate Jolyon Maugham:

Maugham: I was making the point in the summer of 2020, repeatedly, that the lawyer that Keira Bell had retained was using was someone with links to the religious right.  He himself has said so.  And you can look at the cases he has brought.  They’re attacks on abortion rights.  They’re attacks on gay rights. And he has associations with organizations that have attacked assisted dying.  And he appears on the sort of tv channels of organizations who are religious conservatives, let me put it that way.  So I didn’t think he would deny that he comes from that background.  His name is Paul Conrathe. It’s certainly abundantly clear that he does.  The barristers, I don’t have any reason to suggest that they come from that standpoint. And the judge who is believed to have written that judgement—a judge called Natalie Lieven—doesn’t come from that background.  She is simultaneously a hero amongst the Good Law Project’s overwhelmingly female staff team for the work that she’s done as a judge protecting the right to an abortion.  And now, a sort of fallen hero for what we all regard as the work that she’s done to roll back trans rights, to empower transphobia and transphobes in domestic public discourse.  She comes from a very particular place, and I don’t know whether this is mirrored around the world, but in England there is a very, very dominant…strand of feminism.  Not dominant numerically but dominant because it’s a feminism of privilege that is deeply opposed to trans rights.  And that demographic is the demographic that she fits perfectly in.  I’m not saying she’s a transphobe.  I’m just saying that she is in that demographic.

A feminism of privilege is it. What kind of privilege? And what of Jolyon Maugham? What about his privilege?

More basically, of course, there’s the usual obligatory lie that it’s “transphobia” to continue to understand that people can’t change sex.

Anyone reading your newsletter will know that J.K. Rowling complained bitterly of the abuse that she received on social media––and I think she’s entitled––right indeed––to complain about that.  But much of it wasn’t genuine abuse.  It came not from member of the trans community but from accounts that were set up, I believe, to discredit the trans community. And what I was particularly angry with J.K. Rowling about, somebody who I’ve spoken to privately in the past and previously had a good relationship with was that I thought that she weaponized in a rather mischievous way the abuse that she received.

So typical of women, isn’t it. We weaponize rape, we weaponize sexism in the workplace, we weaponize misogynist abuse – there’s just no end to it. We’re so mischievous.

What’s not to like?

But also watch the huge man in the tank top, and how unashamed he is to go right up to the much smaller woman and tower over her while being an angry opponent. It’s threatening as hell and he thinks he’s fine doing it because hey trans rights.

Even TIME is promoting the big lie.

Saying You Support Trans Rights Isn’t Enough. Here’s How to Prove It

Enough for what? Enough for whom? Why do I have to “prove it”?

The author is someone named Emme Lund. I have no idea if “Emme” is a name for female people or male people or “non-binary” people. Lund doesn’t bother to tell us before telling a story about a childhood friend.

Growing up, my best friend wore extensions in his hair, blue braids swinging down to his hips. He wore short leather skirts and platform boots. He bought me a fishnet top when I was 14 (a long-sleeved shirt I hid for years from my religious family). We used to walk home from the mall together and recite entire TOOL albums. He taught me it was O.K. to disrupt gender norms.

Then, a few years ago, we got in an argument on Facebook. I explained to him the harmful concept of gender essentialism, the belief that gender is determined at birth and cannot be changed, and he told me he believed that a trans woman would always be a man in his eyes. I wasn’t out then, but anger boiled inside me. I deleted his comments and blocked him.

As one does. “Omigod my childhood friend sees men as men. The anger, it boils!”

When you are trans, you never know who to trust. Our gender identity can be hidden for years, even from ourselves but especially from others.

That “even from ourselves” is telling. If it’s hidden even from you yourself, maybe it was never there in the first place. Maybe it’s the “finding” it that’s delusional, not the failure to see it. Maybe there is no “it”, and you just are what you are, like all of us.

I’m not sharing anything new, but it’s important that everyone understand why it is so hard for trans people to trust even the most well-meaning cisgender allies.

Maybe that’s not what’s important. Maybe what it’s important for everyone to understand is that people’s sex is what it is, and that what varies is the set of cultural beliefs about how women and men dress and talk and walk and behave.

After I came out to my wider family and friends, I received a lot of supportive messages, but people also asked why I had not come out sooner, offended by the idea that I could not trust them with a secret so big. I make it a point not to hang out with bigots, but I still wasn’t sure who would be able to love and support me and fully embrace my identity.

You know, that isn’t something that is just due you (or anyone) no matter what. We’re allowed to have reasons for being friends with people, and to stop being friends with X if X changes radically in some way that matters to us. If a friend “comes out as” a frothing reactionary rage-monger who sees masks as yellow stars and Fauci as unspeakably evil, then that’s going to change things. Some reasons are better than others, but nobody owes anybody permanent loyalty no matter what. Nobody has to “fully embrace” anyone’s identity.

We are in the midst of a giant backlash with politicians looking to strip away the rights of trans people.

No we’re not. Nobody wants to take away trans people’s rights. There is no “right” for men to join women in the women’s toilets or the rugby team.

It may seem like I’m asking a lot. I am. But I need my cisgender friends and family to take on this fight as well. Don’t ask the trans people in your life if they trust you. Assume they don’t. Instead show us that you can be trusted, that you will fight alongside us, and that you believe that trans people deserve to be loved and respected. You care about trans lives? Good, go prove it.

Trusted to what? Agree that you’re a woman when you’re not? Fight alongside you to what? Force other people to agree that you’re a woman when you’re not?

No. Sorry, but no.

Uh oh, the monstrous regiment of women.

In Michigan, women hold power. Not everyone seems comfortable with that.

The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party called three top statewide elected officials “witches” in a speech last week. He said he wanted to “soften up” the women — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson —  so when he had GOP candidates to run against them, they’re “ready for the burning at the stake.”

Well at least he didn’t call them cunts. Progress?

Weeks earlier, the state’s Senate majority leader said of Whitmer that the party had “spanked her hard on the budget, spanked her hard on appointments.”

In December, another state senator said Whitmer was “neutering” lawmakers. He had described two women colleagues’ words as “shrill outrage” months earlier.

Anxiety much?

“Misogyny does happen, subtly and blatantly,” said Democratic state Sen. Erika Geiss, one of the women described by a male lawmaker as having “shrill outrage” when she made a statement on the Senate floor last May about partisanship. “It is problematic, and it has been problematic for years.”

For as long as women have had any power, would be my guess.

Ron Weiser, the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, apologized Saturday for his “witches”  remarks made late last month. 

Soraya Chemaly, the author of the 2018 book “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,” said Weiser was using gender stereotypes ”to depict women with power as unnatural, as irrational.”

Chemaly drew a line from the man captured in a photo with his feet on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Capitol insurrection to what’s happened to Whitmer.

“The thought that a woman can have this power over men is really hard for many people. It’s particularly hard for conservative men,” she said.

Naturally enough, since many of them don’t even believe in the principle, let alone the practice.

Originally a comment by Arcadia on Rated inadequate.

I get why it’s hard to suddenly come up with a large number of trained specialists to deal with a condition growing patient numbers by over 1000%, not to mention that apparently there is no specific training to deal with this, but more experimental guesswork and common or accepted practice.

What I don’t get is the implication that features in all these articles that, if the distressed child can’t get the appointment with the so-called specialists, that nothing else can or should be done.

If I needed a hip replacement, and couldn’t get an available surgeon, I think I’m better off waiting, even in pain, rather than turning to a dentist to either attempt the surgery or prescribe medication to help me.

But attempting to ease the distress of confused children is not an exclusive specialist skill that only gender clinicians have. It’s what counsellors, child psychologists and psychiatrists and support groups do. Heck, it’s what teachers, social workers and parents do.

Telling a child that their body won’t limit their presentation choices, mannerisms, career options or hobbies. That it is impossible to be born in the wrong body – their body is perfect and functioning exactly as it should. That lots of people hate their bodies for lots of reasons but that hatred can be overcome. That puberty is not only normal and natural, it is essential for growing children into adults. That “being who you are” is what you’re already doing – having surgery and artificial hormones would be the opposite. Ground them in reality with what cannot change, and that is biological sex. Tell them they can rely on that. Tell them they can also rely on the support and love of their family.

So get those kids some counsellors and advise their families and schools on how to be actually supportive, and that means affirming that yes, I can see you feel bad, but you will be okay. Not “affirming” that the child can become the opposite sex (or no sex) if they want.

Boys just wanna have fun.

A Morrison government adviser has been sacked after pixelated images of unnamed Coalition advisers allegedly performing lewd sex acts on the desks of female MPs were broadcast on Monday night, deepening the political crisis surrounding workplace culture at Parliament House.

The federal government was hit on Monday by new allegations broadcast by the Ten Network of male Coalition staffers engaging in vulgar and unprofessional conduct as the ABC prepared to air a new episode of Four Corners where a security guard provided a firsthand account of what she witnessed on the night Brittany Higgins was allegedly raped in the office of then-defence industry minister Linda Reynolds in early 2019.

…

The report referenced images that were alleged to be of staffers masturbating on female MPs desks, with the whistleblower declaring there was “a culture of men who think they can do whatever they want”.

Labor’s shadow women’s minister, Tanya Plibersek, described the allegations as “extraordinary” and “revolting”.

Yes who wants that on her desk? A calendar, a jug of flowers, a postcard from Lake Como, yes, male colleagues’ Bodily Fluids, no.

CNN tells us:

Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican being investigated by the Justice Department over sex trafficking allegations, made a name for himself when he arrived on Capitol Hill as a conservative firebrand on TV and staunch defender of then-President Donald Trump. Behind the scenes, Gaetz gained a reputation in Congress over his relationships with women and bragging about his sexual escapades to his colleagues, multiple sources told CNN.

You know, like any other frat boy.

Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor. The sources, including two people directly shown the material, said Gaetz displayed the images of women on his phone and talked about having sex with them. One of the videos showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source.

I can hear him now. “Look at these whores I did.”

Federal investigators are examining whether Gaetz engaged in a relationship with a woman that began when she was 17 years old and whether his involvement with other young women broke federal sex trafficking and prostitution laws, two people briefed on the matter said.

Listen, he makes the laws, nobody gets to investigate him for breaking them.

A few Republican colleagues are defending him, but most are keeping shtum. Brave heroes.

Gaetz was one of the most vocal backers of Trump’s lie after the 2020 election that the election was stolen from him. After 10 Republicans voted to impeach Trump in January, Gaetz personally took up the task of trying to oust the House’s GOP conference chair Liz Cheney, the highest-ranking Republican to support impeachment, traveling to Wyoming to hold a rally against Cheney in her home state.

Almost as if he’s a criminal scumbag all the way down.

Last year

Gaetz led a band of House Republicans who barged into a closed-door House impeachment inquiry interview, occupying the House Intelligence Committee spaces for several hours in a publicity stunt to protest the investigation that would lead to Trump’s first impeachment.

Hur hur. He probably inspired the people who tried to seize the Capitol and slaughter Democratic legislators on January 6.

Ex-Muslims of North America has a horror story:

In November 2020, a teenage Muslim boy opened fire on a family of Ahmadis, a religious minority in Pakistan who consider themselves Muslims but are not considered such by the government. Tahir Ahmad Mahmood was killed, and his father and two uncles suffered injuries. The teenage culprit was restrained and apprehended by police, whom he told his motive: the Ahmadis “were insulting Islam” and possessed unacceptable “religious differences.”

And “unacceptable” apparently means “deserving of death.”

Speaking of teenagers and puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones…the Tavistock is in a bit of a pickle.

In January, England’s only NHS gender clinic for children and young people was rated “inadequate” by the country’s health watchdog – the lowest rating, meaning it is performing badly.

The findings make for sobering reading with inspectors raising “significant concerns” about the way the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) works.

Nearly 5,000 children are waiting – sometimes for up to two years – for an appointment, and the management team has been disbanded following the inspection. 

Well at least the children who are waiting aren’t getting blockers or hormones, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing? Maybe the longer you wait to get into the Tavistock the better off you are?

Now BBC News has had exclusive sight of an external report written in 2015 which recommended GIDS take drastic action. It argued the service was “facing a crisis of capacity” to deal with an ever-increasing demand and strikingly it should “take the courageous and realistic action of capping the numbers of referrals immediately”.

Why is demand ever-increasing? Could it possibly be because the whole idea of changing sex is a new and constantly accelerating fashion?

It could, instead, be that gender dysphoria is a real thing, and that it wasn’t seen as such until recently because of insufficient knowledge or attention or research or all those.

Or it could be both. It could be that lots of people find puberty alien and disconcerting, and that some adjust to it over time while some don’t. On the other hand if kids uncomfortable with puberty are all encouraged to think they’re “in the wrong body” and that they’re stunning and brave and should probably transition, then a lot of kids who would have adjusted over time will instead make a mess of their bodies and brains because of a fashion. That’s not a good outcome.

Oh oops really? That’s embarrassing.

The evidence for using puberty blocking drugs to treat young people struggling with their gender identity is “very low”, an official review has found.

Uh oh. So all those kids we’ve put on puberty blockers have messed up their brain development and bone density and whatnot to no purpose? Oops. Our bad!

The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said existing studies of the drugs were small and “subject to bias and confounding”.

…

The NICE evidence review looked at what impact puberty blockers had on gender dysphoria, mental health – such as depression, anger and anxiety – and quality of life.

NICE, which provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care, said: “The quality of evidence for these outcomes was assessed as very low certainty.”

Ok fine so it turns out the puberty blockers were not treatment, they were an experiment. It’s fine to do experiments with tweaking the sexual development of teenagers by telling them the experiments are a treatment! Fine and ethical and very progressive.

NICE also reviewed the evidence base for gender-affirming hormones – sometimes known as cross-sex hormones. These can be given to young people with gender dysphoria from age 16 in the NHS.

Oestrogen may be given to people who are registered or assigned male at birth, and testosterone to females, to start the development of the physical sex characteristics of the gender with which they identify. The aim is to improve mental health, quality of life and body image.

The review found the evidence of clinical effectiveness and safety of gender-affirming hormones was also of “very low” quality. “Any potential benefits of gender-affirming hormones must be weighed against the largely unknown long-term safety profile of these treatments in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria,” NICE said.

First do no harm.

I missed these back in early March.

24 days later Gloria Steinem boasts of signing the open letter that says we all have to “support” men who say they are women, and accuses feminists who say no of co-opting “the feminist label.”

GLAAD presents an open letter supporting “trans women and girls” – i.e. men and boys who claim to be women and girls.

In observance of Women’s History Month and Transgender Day of Visibility, we write this letter as feminist leaders in advocacy, business, entertainment, media, politics, and social justice who stand as, with, and for transgender and nonbinary people.

What does Women’s History Month have to do with trans anything? Women’s History Month is about women, not trans people. Women are allowed to have things that are for women, and we’re not required to add a shout-out to trans women to all the things that are for women. I for one am deeply fed up with having the subject changed every time a feminist woman mentions a feminist issue. Trans activism is not feminism, and in many ways it is in intense opposition to feminism. All this rushing to interrupt women talking about women to shout “trans women!!” is one of those ways.

We acknowledge with clarity and strength that transgender women are women and that transgender girls are girls.

You can’t “acknowledge” it, because it isn’t true. You might as well say that you acknowledge with clarity and strength that transspecies tigers are house cats. (The strength might come in handy if a transspecies tiger decides to eat you, but it probably wouldn’t.)

And we believe that honoring the diversity of women’s experiences is a strength, not a detriment to the feminist cause. All of us deserve the same access, freedoms, and opportunities. We deserve equal access to education, employment, healthcare, housing, recreation, and public accommodations.

Being a man isn’t part of the diversity of women’s experiences. There’s diversity and then there’s just plain not the same. We do deserve equal access to all those things, but in some cases that requires separation of the sexes and sometimes it requires designating the things as specifically for women, aka affirmative action. Campaigns to improve women’s access to education, employment, healthcare, housing, recreation, and public accommodations are not helped by including some men as women; on the contrary, they are hindered.

And we must respect each person’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.

No we mustn’t, not always. There is no imperative to “respect” young children’s “right” to mutilate themselves. There is no imperative to “respect” anyone’s absolute right to self-determination, because there is a great long list of items people can’t just declare themselves and then act accordingly. My right to self-determination doesn’t stretch to my declaring myself the owner of your house. With that as an example, it’s trivially easy to think of others.

It is time for the long history of assaults (legislative, physical, social, and verbal) against trans women and girls to end. For far too long, lawmakers have worked to strip trans women of their civil liberties—in 2021, once again, we’ve seen a wave of bigoted governmental policies and legislation. Many of these laws target the rights of girls to play school sports or criminalize doctors for treating trans youth and their families.

Now they’re just lying. None of these laws target the rights of girls to play school sports; the issue is boys who want to play on the girls’ teams or to compete against girls, thus gaining an unfair advantage over the girls.

The rest of it is too damn stupid to bother with.

Oh no oh no it’s totalitarianism in our very own HomeLand.

Top Republican leaders have increasingly spoken out against the prospect of vaccine passports. The passports would serve as proof of COVID-19 immunization. Some venues and companies might require such passports before allowing people to crowd into their indoor spaces.

President Joe Biden‘s administration has provided guidance on vaccine passports for private sector businesses. However, Biden has said that there will not be a federally mandated, universal vaccine credential nor a federal database for storing citizens’ vaccination information.

Nevertheless, top Republicans have begun to vocally oppose the passports as evidence of government overreach and inequality amid the ongoing pandemic.

It’s not “overreach” to try to slow and stop a lethal pandemic. A government that doesn’t bother to do that isn’t doing its most basic job. This isn’t Little House on the Prairie, we can’t do everything ourselves, and we also can’t run around infecting other people just because we don’t want to get vaccinated.

“It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society,” DeSantis added.

No it really isn’t. If you’re spreading a lethal virus then that’s what you’re doing, and that’s actually what’s unacceptable.

Similarly, Republican Ohio state Representatives Al Cutrona and Mike Loychik have said they will co-sponsor legislation to prohibit entities from requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccination before allowing people to access an area or establishment.

Why? We don’t have a right to “access” every area or establishment we feel like “accessing.” Some are off limits; some have conditions of entry. If those conditions are unreasonable – if they bar people on grounds of race for instance – there are laws against that. Avoiding lethal infection is not unreasonable.

Matt Gaetz says they were just good friends.

The Florida politician, a close ally of Donald Trump, claimed during the Tuesday night interview that he was the victim of an extortion plot by a former justice department official, and questioned the motivation behind Tuesday’s original reporting by the New York Times.

Gee, yes, what motivation could a newspaper have for reporting such a thing?

Gaetz, 38, claimed his lawyers had been informed that he was the subject of an FBI inquiry “regarding sexual conduct with women” and that the official was attempting to extort $25m from his family “in exchange for a commitment that he could make this investigation go away”.

Uh huh. Sure.

According to the New York Times, Gaetz was under investigation by the justice department to determine whether he violated federal sex trafficking laws and had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, and whether he paid her to travel with him.

The investigation was launched in the final months of the Trump administration under attorney general William Barr, the newspaper said, and was part of a broader investigation into a Republican party official and political ally in Florida, Joel Greenberg, indicted last summer on charges of sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, including at least one underage girl.

So it’s all kind of Jeffrey Epstein without Jeffrey Epstein. Was Andy Windsor there too?

Adding to the intrigue was a story reported by Axios earlier on Tuesday, just hours before the Times published its allegations, that Gaetz told associates he was considering resigning his seat in Congress to take a job with the rightwing media outlet Newsmax.

Totally normal thing to do.

Joan Smith points out that it’s a bit much to tell girls in school to be sure to report rape when in reality reporting rape tends to be a dead end, with a lot of misery on the way to the dead end. “Be sure to report rape, even though it’s futile and will also bring a world of bullying down on your head.”

Suddenly everyone is talking about a “rape culture” in schools. Not for the first time, it has to be said, but influential MPs, headteachers and senior police officers are urging anyone who has been attacked to report their experiences. “Every victim who comes forward will be believed, will be listened to and dealt with sensitively,” according to Simon Bailey, the national police lead for child protection. Really?

“Really?” is exactly what I was saying as I read that. No, of course not really. It is not true that every victim who comes forward will be believed. The truth is pretty much the opposite – every victim will be doubted.

Official figures tell the story: on average, about 1,060 women report a rape to the police in England and Wales each week. Only 40 of those rapes will lead to a prosecution, and about 27 will end in a conviction. More than 1,000 men a week are getting away with rape, in other words, and that’s only the cases known to the police. Many more go unreported, never featuring in the statistics.

Far more than do get reported, I think. Women know how this plays out, so mostly they don’t report it, because futile plus miserable. Thanks anyway but no.

When public figures urge girls to report rape, they should be honest about the fact that they are directing victims into a completely broken system; rape has all but been decriminalised, encouraging a culture of impunity among perpetrators. Hardly any rapists end up in prison, so what do they have to fear?

Especially when they get to shame and humiliate the accuser on the way to not going to prison?

There are now more than 8,000 posts on the Everyone’s Invited website, but it does not seem likely that they will change this atmosphere of corrosive distrust towards victims. Bailey’s statement that girls who come forward will be believed is hard to square with pronouncements from the country’s most senior police officer, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, who in 2018 reversed her force’s policy of believing individuals who report rape.

…

We live in a society where half the population faces an ever-present threat of sexual harassment and assault at school, at work and in our own homes. But the criminal justice system is so intent on protecting the interests of men and boys accused of rape, it no longer does its basic job of providing justice for victims.

Keep wearing those shorts under the school uniforms, girls.