Catherine Bennett isn’t in the mood to be told to calm down.

Less than a day separated the arrest of a serving Metropolitan police officer on suspicion of Sarah Everard’s murder from the first suggestions that women calm down and put it in perspective…

A professor of criminology, Marian FitzGerald, thought it important to tell other women – twice – on the BBC, not to get “hysterical”. She was being interviewed by a senior man in an organisation which has evidently shared her reservations about women’s fallibility – were they worthy, even, of being paid the same as men? – and it duly went unchallenged.

The message, that women’s difficulties with the status quo can be just as troublesome as male offending behaviour, was seemingly reinforced by the BBC’s favourite troll, the ubiquitous ex-judge Jonathan Sumption. “Most profound cultural problems like this are not easily amenable to government action or legislation,” he claimed, on Any Questions? “It’s going to be a gradual process, I’m sorry but we’ve got to be realistic about this.” It was only to be expected: Sumption had previously levelled at female lawyers the same imputation of naivety. “It takes time. You’ve got to be patient.” Via such insights do the retired male beneficiaries of overwhelmingly unequal professions recommend themselves to Radio 4 producers.

Yes but you know how it is – women are just so annoying with our shrill demands and strident claims and hysterical reactions.

Just last week an off-duty police officer, Oliver Banfield, remained at liberty after his conviction for attacking a lone woman at night. He stays in his post. Shortly before, Javed Miah, who sexually assaulted a woman at night, running away when she used the SOS function on her phone, avoided jail because he was the “sole earner”. In February a chef who admitted kissing and touching a resisting colleague somehow convinced a magistrate that it was his Turkish culture. Men with an interest in terrorising vulnerable women may have been further reassured by the suspended sentence handed, at Kingston crown court last year, to an Uber driver who harassed and exposed himself for 20 minutes to a woman in his cab, where she was avoiding unsafe streets. Not that the recent five-year sentence for a man who murdered his wife, pleading lockdown distress, left much room for doubt about values still prevailing in parts of what is claimed – by men – to be an infinitely more enlightened system. Alleged equalities progress did not, for instance, prevent a professional tribunal deciding, in the case of a barrister turned upskirter, that it is possible to be both a member of the bar and a registered sex offender.

Yes but what is all that compared to an angry woman’s voice?

Sweet.

Updating to add James Dreyfus’s parody.

Fair Play for Women explains to the bosses what Stonewall really is:

Dear leaders of public sector organisations,

You think you are doing the right thing, appointing so-called LGBT representatives and inviting Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence and the like to write policy for you. It’s time to open your eyes. Your own people are doing the work of transactivists and you’ll be the one left carrying the can.

Because the problem is L and G and B are nowhere and it’s all about the T.

Stonewall is considered wrongly an expert rather than a lobby group with its own priorities and objectives

It’s an easy mistake to make. You need a transgender policy so you task your transgender equality manager to write one and they go to the transgender groups for expert advice. Job done.

Here’s England Rugby proudly stating how its transgender inclusion policy was developed in partnership with Stonewall – as if that’s some kind of quality assurance mark. It’s not. You’ve been hoodwinked by a rather clever lobby group into believing it’s ok to expose yourself to the risk of women getting their necks snapped in a scrum with a male opponent.

Not to mention exposing women to that risk.

No, see, this is one reason I won’t just close my eyes and “be kind.”

No. “Birth sex” and “actual sex” are not opposite, they’re the same thing, which can most easily be named with simply “sex.” Your sex is your sex is your sex. You can’t change it, any more than you can change your species. Some things you can change, some you can’t. Deal with it.

It’s not “ideology” to refuse to pretend that sex is optional and switchable. What’s ideology is to make up a whole new pretend-science in which sex is as optional and switchable as what shirt you put on.

It’s pretty rich for the bossy bratty ideologues of the trans religion to accuse the rest of us as “enforcing” anything – we don’t enforce the fact that sex is not optional, it’s just reality that does that.

Oh and also? Trans women shouldn’t be using women’s services, because trans women are not women.

Some people lie for Jesus, other people lie for boys can be girls.

No, that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s not “punishing” boys to say they can’t play on the girls’ teams, any more than it’s “punishing” boys to say they can’t punch girls in the face. They still have the outlets and joys available to their peers – including playing mixed-sex sports when that’s available.

The father on the Chris Hayes segment must have been raving, because no one is talking about not letting trans children live.

Liar.

A long thread by Steve Moses on joining the Green Party in 2009, and feeling confident that the Greens were on the right side of issues involving women and “the gay community” and that he could focus on issues he knew more about…until…

Aaaaaand…he can’t do it.

Rebecca Solnit on the habit of blaming women for “tempting” men:

The alleged murderer of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, reportedly said that he was trying to “eliminate temptation”. It’s as if he thought others were responsible for his inner life, as though the horrific act of taking others’ lives rather than learning some form of self-control was appropriate. This aspect of a crime that was also horrifically racist reflects a culture in which men and the society at large blame women for men’s behavior and the things men do to women.

See, it’s superficial to think men are responsible for the things they do to women. You have to dig below the surface to discover that it’s women who lure men into rape or punching or murder.

Sometimes men are written out of the story altogether. Since the pandemic began there have been torrents of stories about how women’s careers have been crushed or they have left their jobs altogether because they’re doing the lioness’s share of domestic labor , especially child-rearing, in heterosexual households. In February of this year, NPR opened a story with the assertion that this work has “landed on the shoulders of women” as if that workload had fallen from the sky rather than been shoved there by spouses. I have yet to see an article about a man’s career that’s flourishing because he’s dumped on his wife, or focusing on how he’s shirking the work.

Well, NPR – they don’t want to be seen as feminists, do they. That would be ick.

Behind all this is a storytelling problem. The familiar narratives about murder, rape, domestic violence, harassment, unwanted pregnancy, poverty in single-female-parent households, and a host of other phenomena portray these things as somehow happening to women and write men out of the story altogether, absolve them of responsibility – or turn them into “she made him do it” narratives. Thus have we treated a lot of things that men do to women or men and women do together as women’s problems that women need to solve, either by being amazing and heroic and enduring beyond all reason, or by fixing men, or by magically choosing impossible lives beyond the reach of harm and inequality. Not only the housework and the childcare, but what men do becomes women’s work.

I suppose some of that – maybe most of it – is inevitable, in the sense that reporters can report on A Situation a lot more easily and safely than Who Did What to Whom.

Down the page she suddenly forgets what she’s talking about and lurches into saying “people” instead of “women.” I picture an invisible activist creeping up behind her and shouting “TERF!!”

When it comes to abortion, unwanted pregnancies are routinely portrayed as something irresponsible women got themselves into and that conservatives in the US and many other countries want to punish them for trying to get out of. (You get the impression from anti-abortion narratives that these women are both the Whore of Babylon when it comes to sexual activity and the Virgin Mary when it comes to conception.) Though people who want to be pregnant may get pregnant on their own, with a sperm bank or donor, unwanted pregnancies are pretty much 100% the result of sex involving someone who, to put it simply, put his sperm where it was likely to meet an egg in a uterus. Two people were involved, but too often only one will be recognized if the pregnancy ends in abortion.

Whoopsie! In one paragraph, too. She starts with women getting all the blame for pregnancy, then she swerves to people who want to be pregnant and two people being involved in a pregnancy. She literally ditches her own argument in the middle of a paragraph.

After that she sticks to the muddle.

Katha Pollitt noted in her 2015 book on abortion that 16% of women have experienced “reproductive coercion” in which a male partner uses threats or violence to override their reproductive choice…

And of course anti-abortion laws with rape exemptions require pregnant people to prove they were raped…

It’s astonishing. She kicks the legs out from under her own argument in the middle of the piece in which she makes it.

Proud of what?

Four men described as leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group have been charged in the US Capitol riot, as an indictment ordered unsealed on Friday presents fresh evidence of how federal officials believe members planned and carried out a coordinated attack to stop Congress certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

…

The latest indictment suggests the Proud Boys deployed a much larger contingent in Washington, with more than 60 users “participating in” an encrypted messaging channel for group members created a day before.

The Proud Boys abandoned an earlier channel and created the new Boots on the Ground channel after police arrested the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, in Washington. Tarrio was arrested on 4 January and charged with vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December. He was ordered to stay out of the District of Columbia.

Proud boys putting boots on the ground in order to vandalize black churches. Don’t they sound nice.

Proud Boys members, who describe themselves as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”, have engaged in street fights with antifascist activists at rallies and protests. Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys in 2016, sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling it as a hate group.

So we’ve got male dominance, western chauvinism, “political incorrectness,” street fighting, and…legal action against being called a hate group. If you call yourself all those things and boast of doing all those things, aren’t you just outright saying you’re a hate group? Street fights aren’t a sign of affection, are they?

There is some useful bluntness in this thread:

I think “and it never will” is over-confident…but at the same time I also don’t see how the ideology ever could map onto how most people experience reality. Trans women aren’t ever going to gestate and push out babies, so…

I gotta say I love that one. Your ideas are shit and you only have three anyway.

Fox News is Team Putin.

This week, asked by ABC News if he considered Vladimir Putin a “killer,” President Biden responded in the affirmative. Putin responded by challenging Biden to a debate this weekend. At this point, Donald Trump’s allies immediately weighed in on Putin’s side.

Putin “is openly mocking the president of the United States for his own amusement,” Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed last night, “and frankly, I find it, as an American citizen, humiliating.”

Junior got in on the act.

Yeah right Biden is the empty suit.

What’s more significant is the context of Putin’s taunt. Biden’s response was a reference to Trump’s repeated refusal to acknowledge that Putin murders his political opposition in a way American presidents don’t. In 2015, he batted away Joe Scarborough’s accusation against Putin by responding, “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing too, Joe.” In 2017, when Bill O’Reilly tried the same argument, he shot back, “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?”

As Jonathan Chait points out, funny how Putin never challenged Trump to a debate. It’s not because Putin thought he would lose…

You…what?

“This image” of 24 female bums “has become a symbol of female empowerment”??? In what universe? What on earth do women’s buttocks have to do with empowerment?

What “positive message” does this drive? The only message I see is “Look look women butts doncha wanna get some of that???”

Gah we cannot win, can we. On the one hand “thongs are hawt!!” and on the other hand “this hairy six foot man with the beer gut is actually a woman and you have to be inclusive to him I mean her.” Between the two feminism has no room to breathe.

Updating to add:

NPR’s manipulative language was to introduce a conversation with a pediatrician.

Often missing from the culture-war aspect of the debate is a focus on the type of questions that Dr. Eric Vilain has spent much of his career researching. Vilain, a pediatrician and geneticist who studies sex differences in athletes, says there are no good faith reasons to limit transgender women’s participation in sports, especially at the high school level. Vilain has advised both the International Olympic Committee and the NCAA, and says these laws generally aren’t based in scientific evidence, but rather “target women who have either a different biology or … simply look different.”

Easy for him to say. It’s not his rights that are being rapidly carved away by men who say they are women.

Supporters of these bills say they are meant to eliminate any competitive advantage that transgender athletes may have. So I’d like to ask you if there is data on this and what does it show?

We know that men have, on average, an advantage in performance in athletics of about 10% to 12% over women, which the sports authorities have attributed to differences in levels of a male hormone called testosterone. But the question is whether there is in real life, during actual competitions, an advantage of performance linked to this male hormone and whether trans athletes are systematically winning all competitions. The answer to this latter question, are trans athletes winning everything, is simple — that’s not the case.

Oh yay, it’s simple. It’s not credible, but it’s simple.

And lastly, I would say that every sport requires different talents and anatomies for success. So I think we should focus on celebrating this diversity, rather than focusing on relative notions of fairness. 

Aw yes, what a beautiful thought. Let’s celebrate the diversity of men destroying women’s sports, because what could be more inspirational and diverse than that? It fair makes my eyes well up with tears of joy!

The endless struggle to pretend we don’t know what we know. It must be exhausting.

Throughout the country, roughly 35 bills have been introduced by state legislators that would limit or prohibit transgender women from competing in women’s athletics, according to the LGBTQ rights group Freedom for All Americans. That’s up from only two in 2019.

Yes of course it’s “up,” because more boys and men are doing this.

The latest action in this push came last week, when Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed into law the “Mississippi Fairness Act.” The law prohibits schools from allowing transgender female students to compete in female sports and cites “inherent differences between men and women” as one of the reasons to block these athletes from competition.

The quotation marks can be just ordinary quotation marks, to convey “this is the exact wording in the bill”…but they can also be scare quotes, to convey “can you believe the absurdity of thinking there are inherent physical differences between men and women?”. Choosing that particular bit of wording to put in quotation marks can’t help but suggest skepticism or mockery.

The often heated debates around these bills have centered on whether transgender women and girls have an unfair advantage over cisgender women — a term used for those who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth.

A term used by dogmatists to make strange the routine humdrum knowledge that men are not women and women are not men.

Proponents say the legislation is needed in order to maintain fairness in women’s athletics by reducing what they believe is an inherent competitive edge of trans athletes who identify as female. Critics call that a false argument and say the proposals are being used as a way to discriminate against transgender Americans.

But how can it be a false argument, NPR? Could you explain that bit? Could you possibly let us in on the secret of how it can be possible that men don’t have an inherent competitive edge?

Also, the issue isn’t “transgender Americans,” it’s boys and men who cheat girls and women in athletic competitions.

But we mustn’t ever spell that out.

About that Violence Against Women Act…

The House approved with bipartisan support a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a popular 1994 law that protects and provides resources for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence. The measure passed 244-172.

So the 172 are for violence against women? Good heavens no, it’s just that they love guns more than they hate violence against women.

The most contentious issue in the House-passed bill is a provision that expands the criminal threshold to bar an individual from buying a gun to include misdemeanor convictions of domestic abuse or stalking. It would also close the so-called boyfriend loophole to expand the definition of who is affected by existing gun prohibitions to include dating partners. “This legislation makes it clear that Democrats consider gun ownership a second-class right,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va.

And that remark makes it clear that Republicans consider gun ownership a right that trumps women’s right to continue existing.

But then the Democrats throw it all away.

The House-passed bill would also strengthen existing protections for transgender women to access women’s shelters and serve in prisons that match their gender identity.

That is, the bill would “strengthen existing protections” for men to invade women’s shelters, thus making them no longer women’s shelters, and to be locked up in women’s prisons, thus making them unsafe for women.

All lives matter! Not just women’s! Shut up about women! Shut up shut up shut UP.

Of course there’s also the question of what it means to build bridges across people, but whatever. The point is: ALL LIVES MATTER.

Tatchell squares the circle.

Listen up, ladies, says Peter Tatchell – you need safety from male violence but that doesn’t mean we can’t force you to be “inclusive” of men in your safety from male violence. We want you to be safe! All of you! Including the male ones! So in order to be safe from male violence you have to be “inclusive” of men by pretending they are in fact women. All lives matter!

We have always been at war with…Singal.

The short inglorious career of…

Sinister.

Is all this happening in the basement of a pizza shop in DC?

I find that Planned Parenthood Ottawa has blocked me on Twitter, no doubt via one of those Lists (since I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with them). It seems bizarre for an organization of that type to block people – what if they block people who need their services? There are other routes but still, it seems…disobliging.

Anyway. Their focus is odd.

Tut. Those fogies in Illinois said “women.” How clueless can you get?!