Another non-first first!

A trans woman has been nominated for the Women’s prize for fiction for the first time, with Torrey Peters making the longlist for the £30,000 award for her acclaimed debut Detransition, Baby.

Oh do shut up.

The whole point of having a Women’s prize for fiction is to get around the problem that women get overlooked so easily. “Trans women” are men; men should not be candidates for prizes designated for women.

Peters’ longlisting comes after organisers clarified in 2020 that it was open to any “cis woman, a transgender woman or anyone who is legally defined as a woman or of the female sex”. “It’s a prize for women, and trans women are women, so …” said chair of judges and author Bernardine Evaristo.

But trans women are not women, so…

Akwaeke Emezi, the non-binary transgender author who was nominated for the Women’s prize in 2019, has previously said they would not allow their future books to be entered because organisers had asked for information on their sex as defined “by law”. On Wednesday, organisers said they asked publishers to confirm eligibility “when submitting and confirming again at longlist stage”.

Well then we can’t have women’s anything. If we’re not allowed to confirm that women are women then men will take advantage.

Peters is up against former winner Ali Smith, chosen this time for the last in her quartet of seasonal novels, Summer; and comedian turned novelist Dawn French, picked for her “warm, compassionate, funny” look at motherhood, Because of You.

I certainly hope Smith or French wins.

Dang. If ever there’s an issue you’d think would be immune to the Trans Policing & Shunning it would be the Irish church’s persecution of women and children…but nope.

ExCUSE me??? Feminist women “are not welcome” to talk about the Mother and Baby Homes issue? Then who the fuck is? Priests? Popes? Men who play at being women?

Here’s a news flash: men, no matter how intensely they play at being women, remain immune to the kinds of harm done to Irish women and children by the Catholic church. Men don’t get pregnant. It’s that simple. Women have always been treated as permanently under suspicion and probably criminal because women get pregnant. It’s that simple. Men don’t suffer from that disability, and women do, and that’s all there is to it. Men who “identify as” women have nothing to do with this issue, and therefore it’s piling insult on insult to tell feminist women to gtfo of campaigning against the evils the church committed.

Just stop. Get off the train at the next station. Leave it all behind.

Updating to add:

Imagine if white people had done this when George Floyd was murdered.

But he’s not a woman.

But they’re not women so it’s not misogyny.

Who gets to say that X is lying? Who gets to say that X is lying on a widely-seen tv news-chat show? Who gets to say that X is lying without troubling to offer any evidence?

Anybody who works for Fox News, is one answer, but Fox News isn’t alone in allowing and indeed inviting a lot of claims of the “X is lying” type.

Piers Morgan has made a name for himself with that kind of thing.

Meghan Markle formally complained to UK broadcaster ITV after Piers Morgan lashed out at her and accused her of lying about her mental health on “Good Morning Britain,” according to a report.

What jumps out at you about that? What jumps out at me is how unlikely it is that Piers Morgan has any real way to know the truth about Meghan Markle’s mental health. Does she send him a report? Do any or all doctors or therapists she talks to send him a report? Do any of them send such a report to the news media? No, no, no, and no. So where does he get the confidence to say she’s lying about it?

Amid the backlash, the famed host sensationally quit the show Tuesday, just hours after storming off the set when his co-star Alex Beresford called him out for continuing to “trash” Markle following the couple’s stunning sit-down with Oprah Winfrey.

You could see it as punching up – the British royals do suck up an enormous amount of cash to keep the whole absurd pantomime going, at a time when the other remaining European monarchs ride bicycles to work. There is a hell of a lot of hierarchical flummery and “protocol” that could just go away today with no harm done. But in plenty of other ways you can see it as punching down – she’s a woman, she’s mixed race, she’s middle class, she’s a Yank. In a passel of Windsors she’s very much Not One of Us. Morgan didn’t trash her on behalf of the working class, he trashed her on behalf of Rigidly Unchanging Monarchism.

And he had no way of knowing that she was lying.

Morgan had expressed doubts on the show after Markle opened up to Winfrey about having suicidal thoughts, including claims that she was told that seeking help would not look good for a member of the royal family.

“Who did you go to?” Morgan said Monday on “Good Morning Britain.” “What did they say to you? I’m sorry, I don’t believe a word she said, Meghan Markle. I wouldn’t believe it if she read me a weather report.”

There is a real matter of journalistic ethics here. It’s a big no-no to announce that people are lying in the absence of rock-solid evidence. Saying you don’t believe her isn’t quite announcing that she’s lying, but it’s close, especially with the added “I wouldn’t believe it if she read me a weather report.” That may be why Ofcom is looking into it.

Susanna Reid has told viewers of the first edition of Good Morning Britain after the departure of Piers Morgan that they “disagreed on many things”, including his remarks on the Duchess of Sussex, and described him as an “outspoken, challenging, opinionated, disruptive broadcaster”.

…

Morgan walked off set on Tuesday after a disagreement with the weather presenter Alex Beresford and was to face an Ofcom investigation after 41,000 complaints over his remarks, including one sent on Meghan’s behalf. In a tweet, sent while the programme was on air on Wednesday morning, Morgan appeared to confirm that his refusal to retract his comments lay behind his exit.

He wrote: “On Monday, I said I didn’t believe Meghan Markle in her Oprah interview. I’ve had time to reflect on this opinion, and I still don’t. If you did, OK. Freedom of speech is a hill I’m happy to die on.” He said he was “off to spend more time with my opinions” and appended a Winston Churchill quote about free speech.

Freedom of speech, fine, but news outlets don’t have to employ people who fling around accusations of dishonesty.

Cotton ceiling again.

First one. Yes a few minutes ago I said I wanted to hook up because I thought you were a lesbian.

Second one. But you are one.

Third one. It’s not being a not-decent human being to want to know the sex of the person who wants to have sex with you. Other way around, actually – the not-decent thing is to keep what sex you are a secret.

Fourth one. No, creep, you’re the jerk – you’re the one trying to trick or bully a lesbian into having sex with you when she doesn’t want to.

Graham did this:

He also posted the text.

Almost four years ago I saw that feminists were being bullied, harassed and silenced for standing up for their rights and their children’s rights. I decided to use my platform on Twitter to bring attention to what seemed to be an all-out assault on women, on their words, their dignity and their safety. Also, I saw that vulnerable children were being fast-tracked onto a medical pathway that carried severe long-term implications. My position is very simple. I believe everyone should be allowed to talk about these issues. In fact, I believe it is a moral imperative that we do so. 

I am talking about such matters as… the scandals at the Tavistock, the confusing and misleading advice that Stonewall has been providing to institutions all over the UK regarding the nature of the equalities act, the issue of men in women’s sports, in women’s prisons, their rape crisis centres, the destruction of basic safeguarding principles that has led to all this, and the silencing and abuse of feminists, doctors, teachers, academics and writers–anyone, in fact–who questions the fashionable American orthodoxy of gender identity ideology.  

Is it American? Probably, yes. I apologize.

Around three years ago, I was among the initial signatories of a letter to Stonewall asking them to help lower the toxicity of the conversation around sex and gender and acknowledge the plurality of views on the subject. The letter was composed by Jonny Best, a gay man and longtime LGBT activist, and the majority of these initial signatories were either gay, lesbian or trans.

We wanted to see an end to women receiving death and rape threats for standing up for their sex-based rights. To that end, we asked Stonewall to commit to fostering an atmosphere of respectful debate, rather than demonising as transphobic those who wished to discuss or dissent from Stonewall’s current policies. Stonewall flatly refused this appeal within the day, and continued to dishonestly frame women standing up for their rights as an attack on trans rights. The petition has since been signed by over 11,000 people, many of them gay men and women in despair at what is being done in their name. 

“Stop trashing women in public? Oh hell no!”

This silencing of women was the main reason I entered this fight. I knew the subject of gender was fraught but I’m political by nature and I couldn’t remain quiet in the face of such vicious misogyny. I presumed that when others saw what was happening that they too would speak up and we would be able to force the debate our opponents were so desperate to avoid. 

I now realise that I was up against a much bigger beast than I thought. These platforms shape the debate and declare you untouchable when you refuse to play by their rules. The upshot is that many people presume that I am a bigot. These people also presume the same of JK Rowling and many other left-leaning, liberal and progressive women.

There’s even a special word for us.

Social media has created a through the looking glass world which is robbing everyone of their ability to think. My final statement on Twitter, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was simply “Men are not women.” A world where statements like “Men are not women” is hate speech is a world on the brink of chaos. Feminists are just the canary in the coalmine in this upside-down world where public discourse depends on the whims of a small group of men in Silicon Valley. Gender identity ideology began in American Universities, is uncritically disseminated by the popular media, but social media companies and their users are the enforcers.

Oh, American universities – Judith Butler and so on. Fair point. I reiterate my apology.

The reason you have not heard the things that I have heard is that the discourse is being shaped by trans rights activists. In place of reasoned arguments and democratic discussion, we have mantras like “No debate” and “Transwomen are women”, we have policies passing by stealth, we have bogus statistics about trans murder epidemics and we have the unconscionable weaponising of suicide for political ends.

The discourse is broken. Women’s rights are being stripped away, our children are not safe, and we are not allowed to talk about it. 

That plus we are being ordered, with menaces, to believe what we can’t believe, to believe an obvious lie, indeed an absurdity. We are being bullied and shouted at and called names for the sake of a ludicrous fantasy-based denial of reality. We are being pressured to stop knowing what we know and instead know what we can’t possibly know because it isn’t true. That becomes all the more insulting and outrageous when the thing we’re being told to stop knowing is that men are not women.

The ACLU ordered us to pretend that men are women on Facebook too.

Policing womanhood hurts ALL of us.

Funny how it’s just womanhood. Funny how they don’t order men to pretend that men are women or that women are men – funny how they leave men alone on this subject.

It’s weirdly sly and passive-aggressive to call it a “reminder” to tell us a lie. “I am here to remind you that frogs are gorillas.”

Sounds like “Jessica” Yaniv without the “trans” aspect.

An Ottawa charity focused on the well-being of Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ youth is in disarray after staff quit and speakers pulled out of a recent conference because they believe the group’s leader has multiple aliases and a history of taking her enemies to court.

That description is oddly vague. What does it mean for a charity to be “focused on the well-being” of anyone? I wonder if there’s any connection between the vagueness of the description and the alleged multiplicity of its leader’s aliases.

Maxine Adwella is known as the head of the National Collaboration for Youth Mental Health (NCYMH), which, according to its website, has spent nearly 20 years advocating for racially and culturally specific mental health services for young people.

That’s more specific, but not a lot clearer. Racially specific mental health services? Sounds kind of…racist.

However, a recent court judgment concluded that a woman named Maxine Adwella is actually an alias used by Althea Reyes, a woman with a criminal past who was declared a vexatious litigant in 2017 for repeatedly launching civil proceedings to “harass her foes,” as the judge put it.

A CBC News investigation of Reyes reveals a remarkable backstory that’s led young staff and volunteers to walk away from NCYMH. Some allege they’ve been subjected to smear campaigns and threatened with legal action for speaking out against the charity and its leader.

So much for anybody’s well-being.

Judge rules for reality.

Part of the census guidance for England and Wales accompanying the question on a person’s sex should be withdrawn, a High Court judge has warned.

Campaign group Fair Play for Women argued the guidance unlawfully allowed “self-identification” as another sex.

The guidance says people could use the sex listed on their passport – which can be changed without a legal process.

Well of course the sex itself can’t be changed – the word you put on your passport can be changed. Changing a word on your passport isn’t magic; it can’t change your sex or age or species or planet of residence.

Taking place in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on 21 March, the census aims to provide a snapshot of the population of the country which can then be used to make decisions about services – and which this year will be used to understand the impact of the pandemic.

…

For the first time, it will include a question about gender identity as well as the one about a person’s legally registered sex. The decision had been welcomed by some trans people as a “step in the right direction”.

The right direction how? Should the census include questions about hairstyle, shoes, favorite books, preferred morning stimulant, travel plans, attitude to the monarchy?

Speaking before the hearing, Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play For Women, said: “If we don’t have good data on sex we can’t monitor inequalities due to sex, and if we can’t measure it, we can’t make good policies to remedy it.”

Which is exactly what some people would like to see happen.

Good old ACLU. On International Women’s Day, here they are to bully us for saying that we are women and men are not. On International Women’s Day, they think it’s the best possible day to tell us to shut up about men trying to usurp the word “woman” and the ontological status “woman.” On International Women’s Day they shout at us for continuing to think that women are women and that fantasies and let’s pretend games don’t change that.

On International Women’s Day here’s your reminder; you know, the one you didn’t ask for and don’t want, the one we decided to shove in your faces because we can, the one that insults you and belittles you and pretends your sex is a matter of choice and self-declaration. That International Women’s Day.

And no one gets to tell us what it means to be a woman, but the ACLU does get to tell us, women, what we are required to think about who is a woman, and that we are not allowed to say that men are not women.

If their claims had some merit this endless bullying repetition of stupid “Because I said so” might eventually persuade, but since what they’re endlessly bullyingly repeating is utter childish bullshit, all it does is make us more furious every time they do it. Here’s your reminder that grapefruits are locomotives, and no one gets to tell us what it means to be a grapefruit or a locomotive.

Here’s your reminder that the ACLU has gone both stupid and bossy.

Georgia is still busy suppressing that pesky black vote.

Georgia’s state House passed a bill this week that includes several measures that restrict voting access, including a ban on automatic voter registration, a limit on Sunday early voting days and ballot drop boxes, and a number of restrictions and ID requirements for absentee voting. The bills come after former President Donald Trump made baseless claims of a rigged 2020 election, saying there had been widespread voter fraud in Georgia.

It also comes after the terrible Supreme Court ruling in Shelby.

In a 5-4 vote, the court struck down a formula at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that required certain states and localities with a history of discrimination against minority voters to get changes cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this decision. The power of the Voting Rights Act was in the design that the supreme court gutted – discriminatory voting policies could be blocked before they harmed voters. The law placed the burden of proof on government officials to prove why the changes they were seeking were not discriminatory. Now, voters who are discriminated against now bear the burden of proving they are disenfranchised.

Back to CNN:

[Cliff] Albright [co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter] said the proposals directly target the methods used to mobilize Black voters. He said limiting Sunday early voting, for example, is a direct attack on “Souls to the Polls”– which is a get-out-the-vote campaign led by Black churches. A CNN analysis found that Black voters made up 34.6% of the voters who cast early ballots on the three weekend voting days that could be eliminated under the proposal from Georgia lawmakers.

The bill also prohibits free food and drinks from being served to people standing in line to vote. Volunteers often served pizza and chips to voters who stood in line for several hours at predominately Black precincts in the Atlanta area.

“Clearly, the attack is based on when it is and how it is that they know Black voters are being mobilized to turn out,” Albright said. “They know that they can’t win elections if we actually expand access to voting or even if we just maintain it.”

And the Supreme Court made it all possible.

Happy International Genders Day.

President Biden marked International Women’s Day on Monday by signing two executive orders geared toward promoting gender equity, both in the United States and around the world.

In a statement, Biden said: “In our nation, as in all nations, women have fought for justice, shattered barriers, built and sustained economies, carried communities through times of crisis, and served with dignity and resolve. Too often, they have done so while being denied the freedom, full participation, and equal opportunity all women are due.”

With you so far.

The first executive order establishes a Gender Policy Council within the White House, reformulating an office from the Obama administration that was later disbanded by the Trump administration, and giving it more clout.

“Reformulating” it how?

Under former President Barack Obama, the office was called the White House Council on Women and Girls. The name change to the Gender Policy Council is intentional, according to Council co-chair Jennifer Klein, who has worked on women’s issues going back to the Clinton administration.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

So by the same token shouldn’t Black Lives Matter be renamed Race Lives Matter? Or would that sound too much like All Lives Matter?

“We are very inclusive in our definition of gender,” Klein said in a White House briefing Monday. “We intend to address all sorts of discrimination and fight for equal rights for people, whether that’s LGBTQ+ people, women, girls, men.”

So there you have it: that is literally all lives matter. Discrimination against women will now be folded into discrimination against people, and “feminism” will become an obsolete word.

The Council’s staff will include a special assistant to the president to focus specifically on “policies to advance equity for Black, indigenous and Latina women and girls of color,” Klein said, in recognition of the historical and disproportionate barriers those groups face.

Women and girls? But she just said it was for men too.

By establishing the council, Biden said, his administration shows its commitment “to ensure that every domestic and foreign policy we pursue rests on a foundation of dignity and equity for women.”

For women? Or for people of gender? Or for women plus LGBTQ+ people plus men?

By establishing the council, Biden said, his administration shows its commitment “to ensure that every domestic and foreign policy we pursue rests on a foundation of dignity and equity for women.”

They seem to be confused.

In observance of International Women’s Day…

Julie Bindel tells us:

At the Green party spring conference this weekend, a motion which sought to introduce a party policy on women’s sex-based rights was defeated. A whopping 289 delegates (out of 521) voted to not include biological females in the party’s list of oppressed groups.

All the motion aimed to do was simply add a paragraph to the Green party’s ‘Our Rights and Responsibilities Policy’. The motion reads:

‘This is to include the protected characteristic of sex as currently our Record of Policy statements supports the other eight characteristics (age, disability, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, race, maternity, religion/belief, marriage/civil partnership) but not that of sex discrimination – aimed primarily at women…’

The motion was opposed because, in essence, it is considered ‘transphobic’ to recognise that women are targeted by male oppression precisely because of their female sex.

Why is that considered “transphobic”? Because men who say they are women want it all – they want to be hugged and cuddled and tied up in wool because they are oppressed as women and they want to keep women out of all that because it should all belong to them and they want to bully and threaten women and they want a whole other consignment of hugs and cuddles because they are oppressed as trans women. Everything is for them, nothing is for women. Women are either cuddlers of men or death-deserving terfs and Karens; there is nothing in between.

The Green party leader Sian Berry, who has declared that she wishes London to be the most ‘trans inclusive’ city in the world, seemed to see this as a victory. In a series of tweets following the vote, Berry stated: ‘Motion E01 was defeated. My party voted for inclusive women’s rights and someone is having a big old cry. Thank you Greens!’ Berry signed off with, ‘Vote for inclusion and kindness!’

So can trans black people, i.e. white people who say they are black, take over all the anti-racism groups and kick black people out of them? Or is it only women we get to do this to.

The Green party leadership has long capitulated to the trans Taliban. Take Caroline Lucas, the former Greens leader. Prior to 2016 Lucas steadfastly supported the feminist campaign to criminalise paying for sex as a way to deter men from creating the demand for prostitution. She told me back in 2008 that she wanted to see an end to the sex trade because she understood it to be exploitative of women and a barrier to equality. But in 2016, having been told off by trans activist Paris Lees (who is of the view that feminists that campaign to end prostitution are posh, white prudes) Lucas did an about turn, offered to meet up with Lees, and has since supported the campaign to decriminalise pimps, brothel owners and punters.

Paris Lees, of course, is not a woman. It’s not obvious why his telling off would convince a feminist woman that prostitution is a boon for women.

The yelling went on and on, along with throwing things.

Andrew Sullivan has form.

It’s not “pointless” to call male athletes who are displacing female athletes in female competitions “male,” because that’s what they are and because it gives them an advantage over females that everyone used to know was in fact an advantage. It’s not some random thing to call them, it’s the whole issue, and it’s certainly not pointless, it is exactly the point.

And it’s not “offensive” unless you buy into the whole silly narrative about being “in the wrong body” or having “a woman’s soul in a man’s body” or having “known she was a girl since she picked up a doll at age two weeks.” It’s the silly narrative that’s offensive, not the refusal to echo it.

And there’s nothing “accurate” about “trans female.” Male people are not any kind of female, so the only “accurate” word to put in front of “female” would be “not.”

And it’s not the women who are being bullied and shunned who are being “callous and hurtful.” It’s the male people who rob them of athletic prizes and the people who cheer on this unfair dishonest trick who are being callous and hurtful.

And saying male people are male people is not a slur, much less a “hurtful slur.” We might better ask why everyone rushes to be so melodramatically concerned about the hurt feelings of males who are hell-bent on invading women’s spaces and sports and scholarships and everything else they can grab.

Women are people too, Mr. Sullivan.

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.