Yes of course these issues should be discussed – but obviously not by you, because you’re much too informed and concerned about them.

Thank god he’s not at all prejudiced against anyone himself.

Never enough.

Always jam tomorrow.

Julie comments on the sudden stab in the back:

It’s disgusting.

16 hours ago:

Two hours later:

Bam, that’s Julie Bindel thrown under the bus to make way for a man who identifies as a woman.

Imagine a bookstore doing this to, say, Isabel Wilkerson or Ta-Nehisi Coates to make way for a white person who identifies as black.

It wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen, and the white person would be excoriated and chastised.

Why is it ok to do it to feminist women?

Her book is like that, too. A review from LSE:

In Me, Not You, Alison Phipps builds on Black feminist scholarship to investigate how mainstream feminist movements against sexual violence express a ‘political whiteness’ that can reinforce marginalisation and oppression and limits the capacity to collectively achieve structural change and dismantle violent systems. This short and accessible book challenges us to think deeply about how the politics of woundedness, outrage and carcerality are embedded within the feminist movement and our own organising, writes Lili Schwoerer, and serves as another encouragement to explore and engage with alternative imaginaries.

So what should we have then, feminist movements for sexual violence?

Also, if we’re talking about marginalization and oppression, and claiming that feminist movements against sexual violence can reinforce them, I can bring up an interesting fact, which is that sexual violence can reinforce marginalization and oppression too. A lot. Really: a lot. Sexual violence in the workplace is a good way to force women to leave it. Being forced out of a job by sexual violence is very marginalizing and oppressive. What about that? Has Alison Phipps given that any thought? Is it not hip enough for her? Is it not the cool kids enough? Raped women aren’t very good at rapping, is that it?

This short, accessibly written book pivots around the #MeToo movement, which, according to Phipps, provided a powerful opportunity to highlight the widespread nature of sexual violence, while also replicating and exposing some of the longstanding violences of mainstream feminism. The feminism that Phipps critiques here is Anglo-American, public feminism: the kind of feminism which is most hegemonic, and most visible, in corporations, NGOS and institutions, including universities. The book’s six short chapters draw together historical and conceptual analysis with empirical observations on the ways in which the tendencies to co-opt the work of women of colour and to centre white woundedness shape these kinds of feminist organising, and the political landscape more generally.

She really means this shit, doesn’t she. She means it so much it seems to be her only idea.

Shahdin Farsai wrote an opinion piece for Canadian Lawyer Magazine in October, titled British Columbia’s practice directions on preferred gender pronouns in court are problematic. Yesterday the magazine removed the article.

The article is archived.

On December 16, 2020, both the BC Supreme and Provincial courts issued practice directions to lawyers that require parties and/or lawyers to state their preferred gender pronouns at the beginning of all court proceedings, which are “to be used” by all participants appearing before the courts including judges.

My antennas naturally went up as a lawyer. I see these practice directions as problematic for three central reasons. They are potentially compelled speech in court, a breach of privacy rights, and damage the perception of judicial impartiality.

… Outside of court, we have legislation to protect gender identity or expression in the BC Human Rights Code, but inside court all parties are protected by absolute privilege or immunity. This doctrine shields the legal process from itself becoming the source of further litigation. No one can dictate the words spoken or written by court participants including judges during judicial proceedings. The doctrine is essential to the administration of justice because it permits parties to give evidence in whatever words they choose and lawyers to protect and present their client´s case unfettered.

We saw this play out when the judge compelled Maria Maclachlan to refer to the man who assaulted her with female pronouns, which obviously impeded her ability to give evidence in her own words, and indeed to tell the truth about what happened.

The doctrine of absolute immunity goes hand in hand with lawyers’ professional duty to zealously protect their client’s rights. Advocates must not be under any obligation to refer to another party by their preferred pronouns, especially if doing so would go against the legal position and the instructions that they receive from their clients. This point was made in a recent case before the BC Supreme Court. The court heard the case of a mother attempting to prevent her 17-year-old daughter from having surgery to remove her breasts. The daughter wanted to transition to the male gender, and provincial authorities supported her wish. The mother still regarded her daughter as a female. The question of her gender transition was the very issue before the court. Yet when the mother and her counsel referred to the daughter as “her”, the judge challenged the mother´s right to do so. According to the transcript, the judge said, “there has been a request that counsel refer to [the youth] as he or him … are you refusing to do that?”

The woman who gave birth to the girl was being compelled to refer to her as he and him.

But as I mentioned the piece was removed. Conversation ensued.

No skin off his…nose, is it.

H/t GW

Voting rights are being attacked again. Ari Berman at Mother Jones:

Georgia Republicans have already introduced an avalanche of new laws that would radically limit voting options in the state. On Monday—the first day of Black History Month—Republicans in the state Senate introduced nine bills to restrict access to the ballot, including eliminating automatic voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, and mail ballot drop boxes, as well as prohibiting third-party groups from sending mail ballot applications, and banning people who move to Georgia after the general election from voting in runoff elections. Many of the bills were sponsored by Republicans who backed Texas’ unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Supreme Court to throw out election results from Georgia and other states carried by Biden. These bills come on the heels of another bill that would require voters to submit physical copies of photo identification twice to vote by mail, once when they request a mail-in ballot and again when they return it.

We’ve been through all this. It’s voter suppression, and it’s wrong. The Voting Rights Act made it illegal, but then the Supreme Court said “never mind” in 2013.

“I will not let them end this [legislative] session without changing some of these laws,” Alice O’Lenick, the GOP chair of the board of elections in Gwinnett County in suburban Atlanta, which Biden carried by 18 points, said last month. “They don’t have to change all of them, but they’ve got to change the major parts of them so that we at least have a shot at winning.”

A shot at winning by suppressing the vote, that is. That’s not a shot “we” are supposed to have.

And to make it harder for Democrats to get elected.

See also

But white tears when it’s Phipps telling us about them are a whole different story, it seems.

So…when she doesn’t feel safe she retreats, and that’s not white tears. Imagine how trans people feel! Don’t imagine how women feel, except me, but do imagine how trans people feel.

There are lots of flattering and sympathetic replies, and she doesn’t reject any of them as being too sympathetic and flattering to white tears.

Jane Clare Jones expresses the disgust at Alison Phipps’s sneers better.

That. Why is it now the done thing for a feminist academic to sneer at women who report sexual trauma? WHY?

From the new Glinner update week in the war on women –

THE TELEGRAPH: The psychotherapist blocked from researching detransition is taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

James Caspian is a psychotherapist who has specialised in counselling trans people for over 10 years. He has worked with numerous de-transitioners and had planned to conduct an academic study into this massively under-researched area. However, Bath Spa University rejected Caspian’s MA proposal. He was told, “Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university.” 

And the university is too fragile to cope with “attacks on social media”? So much too fragile that it vetoes research on something one would think is of considerable importance to the well-being of quite a few people?

Caspian is now taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights. He told The Telegraph why he is pursuing this issue:

“Too much is at stake for academic freedom and for hundreds, if not thousands, of young people who are saying that they are being harmed and often silenced by a rigid view that has become a kind of transgender ideology and permits no discussion.

My preliminary research had revealed a growing controversial schism in transgender politics and inpatient experiences which greatly concerned me and confirmed the need for this research. Some of the people I spoke to said they were too traumatised to speak about their experiences, which proved it was even more important to research the issue, not less.

Bath Spa University should feel embarrassed.

We get to read Alison Phipps’s “don’t hit me, hit those other white women” paper.

The actual title, lest we forget, is “White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism.” It’s a white woman sneering at white women, specifically for talking thinking campaigning as feminists.

Speaking out can attract political dividends: in earlier work (Phipps, 2016, 2020) I have theorised experience, especially of the traumatic kind, as a form of investment capital in what Ahmed (2012 [2004]: 45) calls the ‘affective economies’ of testimonial culture. Trauma can be disclosed or ventriloquised to generate further capital in the form of feeling, creating political gain.

…

Most of the key figures in the viral iteration of #MeToo were Western, white and middle or upper-class (Tambe, 2018), reflecting the makeup of mainstream feminism and especially its media iterations…

In her 1995 book States of Injury, Wendy Brown argued that progressive movements tended to coalesce around ‘wounded identities’ that demanded recognition and protection, whether from hate speech, harassment or violence…

As I have argued elsewhere (Phipps, 2019), the ‘wounded attachments’ Brown attributed to feminism are likely to be those of middle-class whiteness, given the domination of both first and second waves of mainstream feminism by bourgeois white women (such as myself). 

Such as herself, but she’s damn well going to sneer anyway, because that’s where the action is – piling up the reasons to hate Karen.

By ‘mainstream feminism’, I largely mean Anglo-American public feminism. This includes media feminism (and some forms of social media feminism), institutional feminism, corporate feminism and policy feminism. This is not a cohesive and unified movement, but it has clear directions and effects. Building on HoSang (2010), I call the modus operandi of this feminism ‘political whiteness’. This goes beyond the implicitly or explicitly ‘whites first’ orientation of most politics dominated by white people: it has a complex affective landscape involving attachments to the self (often the wounded self) and to power (often in the form of the state). These attachments produce a number of dynamics: narcissism, alertness to threat (which in white women’s case is often sexualised), and an accompanying need for control.

How dare women be alert to threat? How dare women feel a need to control threats?

But also…every single item in her extended sneer applies double or triple to those geniuses of non-white non-bourgeois feminism, [drum roll] trans women. Trans women are immune to Phipps’s sneers because they and they alone are True Victims who have Every Right to be alert to threats and flaunt their wounded identities and demand recognition and protection. The trans bit cancels the white bit, you see.

More later.

Someone is watching.

I don’t want to brush off or belittle concerns about racism, but at the same time…I’ve seen too many self-righteous Letters of Outrage lately not to recognize this as another example. “Our community is outraged and in pain”? I doubt it. I bet their community was in a fever of righteous exhilaration.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe McNeil really did fling around racist insults with cheerful abandon…but I doubt it. Jesse Singal doubts it.

David Aaronovitch doubts it.

There’s a fad in my neighborhood, and for all I know in all neighborhoods, to festoon one’s front garden with yard signs carrying little homilies and love notes. I hate this fad. “Our community is outraged and in pain” is kind of those homilies and love notes turned inside out.

I’m not kidding about the love notes, either. One reads “YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE.” It’s so stupid, because it’s a yard sign – total strangers are going to be reading it. What’s the point of displaying such a meaningless slogan? And others like it? There are ones that say “DON’T GIVE UP” – but sometimes giving up is just fine, and in any case it’s our decision, not that of random neighbors we don’t know.

So one the one hand YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE, whoever you are, and on the other hand, our community is outraged and in pain and we are going to get your ass fired. Don’t give up though.

This is one way we know trans women are not women.

That’s not “activism.” It’s not struggle, it’s not consciousness raising, it’s not social justice. It’s just an image of an angry man brandishing a bat studded with nails, by way of telling us we are under orders to agree with him that he is a woman, and that refusal will be met with murderous violence.

I don’t want to be any kind of ally with men who threaten to smash women to death for failing to agree that the threatening men are women.

We’re stuck in a tight circle here. That nail-studded bat simply underlines and entrenches the impossibility of 1. seeing the bat guy as a woman and 2. agreeing to pretend the guy is a woman. The threat is supposed to make us surrender but all it does is make us say: “See? This is just same old male violence and domination, so hell no.”

A second thing. That “not up for debate” trope is supposed to suggest the obvious justice of the claim and the irrationality of failing to agree with the claim. But how can it? How can we be expected to agree that men claiming to be women is just obviously both true and progressive? It’s not that kind of claim. The “activists” want to pretend it is, but it isn’t.

It’s not a human right to force people to agree that you’re a woman when you’re obviously a man. It just isn’t. Knowing the difference is a very basic bit of animal knowledge, and forcing us to pretend otherwise is not a right.

Oh ffs.

Trump lawyer wants to suspend the trial during his “sabbath” because it’s “mandatory” for him.

David Schoen, 62, has written to senior figures of both main parties in the US Senate asking for an agreement that the trial [be] postponed from 5.24pm on Friday until Sunday so that he can observe the Sabbath. In the letter, reported by the New York Times, the lawyer apologises for any inconvenience, adding that “the practices and prohibitions are mandatory for me … so I have no choice.”

Blah blah blah. Mandatory according to whom? A particular version of the imagined sky daddy. He might as well say it’s mandatory for him to take two days off to say prayers to Elmer Fudd.

The request presents managers of the trial with a scheduling dilemma. To complete the trial by sundown on Friday would require breakneck speed that could appear unseemly; to delay it until Sunday might push the proceedings into the following week that had been earmarked as a Senate holiday.

Never mind that, imagined sky daddy makes the rules.

Interesting. Liz Cheney is thinking about criminal investigation of Trump.

In extraordinary remarks on Fox News Sunday, Cheney made specific reference to the “massive criminal investigation” on the Capitol insurrection that is now sweeping the country. She said that the probe would cover “every aspect” of the events of 6 January and look at “everyone who was involved”.

But she reserved her most pointed words for Trump. “People will want to know what the president was doing,” she said. “They will want to know whether the tweet that he sent out calling Vice-President Mike Pence a coward while the attack was underway was a premeditated attempt to provoke violence.”

The impeachment trial in the Senate starts Tuesday.

Last week she survived an attempt by fellow House Republicans to remove her from her leadership position in protest at her support of Trump’s impeachment. On Saturday, the Republican party in her home state of Wyoming voted to censure her, calling for her immediate resignation.

Cheney said Sunday she would not step down. “The oath I took to the constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment – it does not bend to partisanship or political pressure, and I will stand by that.”

If the Republicans only knew it, she’s doing them a favor.

Ahead of the historic proceedings, prominent Democrats took to the Sunday political shows and spoke with passion about why Trump deserved to be convicted for his role in allegedly inciting the 6 January assault. Ayanna Pressley, a congresswoman from Massachusetts, called on senators to “honor their oath and hold Trump accountable and bar him from ever holding office again”.

It’s funny, in a way, the obligatory “allegedly” – necessary because the trial is pending but still funny in a way, since we’ve all seen the video where he quite frankly and unabashedly incites the assault. When we can watch him doing it on a loop it ain’t no mere allegation.

About that tweet –

In the tweet, which has now been removed from Twitter as part of Trump’s suspension from the platform, he criticised the then vice-president for failing to block counting of the electoral college results of the presidential election that Trump lost.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” Trump posted.

The tweet was posted about 10 minutes after it was reported that Pence had been ushered off the floor of the Senate following the violent breach of the Capitol by Trump supporters and white supremacists. During the attack, members of the mob could be heard chanting “hang Mike Pence”.

This is a puzzler. I’m seeing people laughing at a column by Virginia Heffernan for its clueless entitled snobbery crossed with self-righteous “liberalism,” which sounded odd to me because when I first encountered her writing she was a libertarian with some modest leanings in a more leftish direction. Also, she was sharp, and the writing in this piece is very dim – so the piece must be a parody, right? Surely? Poe’s law?

Let’s see…

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?

Surely that’s parody-naïve not real naïve …isn’t it?

These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.

Yeeeaaah I don’t think this can be real Heffernan talking in her own voice.

On the other hand if it is parody I’m not sure what her point is.

The Green Party is losing women:

Dozens of activists have quit the Green Party in protest at the election of a transgender campaigner as head of its women’s group.

That is, at the election of a trans woman as head of its women’s group. Quite a few women think that positions of that kind should be for women rather than trans women. We think that because women are still far from being equally represented in top jobs, let alone over-represented, so to make a man who identifies as a woman (which is not the same as just plain being one) the head of a party’s women’s group is insulting to women.

The exodus, involving at least 40 women, follows the appointment in December of Kathryn Bristow, who was born a man but now identifies as a transwoman.

If you’re born male you’re a man, however you identify. Identifying as something doesn’t change physical reality.

[H]er critics claim Ms Bristow’s new role means women are losing representation within the party.

Because it does. Obviously.

Some even fear that its focus on trans issues could overshadow its traditional campaigning against environmental catastrophe.

“Even”? It’s not a huge leap.

A source suggested Ms Bristow’s appointment has added to internal strife that erupted five years ago when the party referred to women as ‘non-males’, adding: ‘Many women in the Green Party have had enough of being told what to think. 

‘We’ve fought hard for over a century to have a seat at the political table. Trans people face their own challenges and need spokespeople, but so do women.’

In emails from departing supporters seen by The Mail on Sunday, furious female activists among the 52,000-strong membership criticise the party’s stance on women’s rights.

…

The party’s grassroots have been further outraged by an email sent to LGBTQ+ members urging them not to include motions for discussion on items such as ‘women’s sex-based rights’ which were labelled as ‘non-inclusive’. 

Yes, and discussion on black people’s rights is non-inclusive, discussion on lesbian and gay rights is non-inclusive, discussion on workers’ rights is non-inclusive, discussion on immigrants’ rights is non-inclusive. Any kind of specificity is non-inclusive. The fact remains that there are particular sets of people who are deprived of rights because they are in one (or more) of those sets, not because of generic human-ness. Workers don’t have to be inclusive of bosses and women don’t have to be inclusive of men.

Ms Bristow rejects the claims. She tweeted: ‘My rights as a trans person don’t conflict with anyone else’s, as that’s not how human rights work. Fighting for trans liberation is part of everyone’s liberation, because we all must be free for any of us to be.’

Of course that’s how human rights work. If it were otherwise we wouldn’t need human rights at all. If nobody ever exploited or dominated or oppressed anyone else, human rights wouldn’t even be a concept. We need the concept because the more powerful do all that to the less powerful. All our human rights conflict with people’s rights to exploit and harm us. That is how human rights work.

Last night, a Green Party spokesman said: ‘We are unequivocal in our support for trans rights.

‘We recognise that transwomen are women, transmen are men and non-binary identities exist and are valid.’

They “recognise” a falsehood, and their doing so conflicts with women’s rights.

The misogynist hyperbole is out of hand.

One small good thing:

Activists in Indonesia on Thursday lauded the government’s decision to ban public schools from making religious attire mandatory, a move that followed national outrage over non-Muslim students being forced to wear a hijab.

Muslim students shouldn’t be forced to wear it either, of course, not even by their parents.

The special autonomous province of Aceh, which enforces sharia law, is exempt from the decree, Education Minister Nadiem Makarim said.

So stay out of Aceh.

Andreas Harsono, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said schools in more than 20 provinces still make religious attire mandatory in their dress code, so the decree was a positive step.

“Many public schools require girls and female teachers to wear the hijab that too often prompt bullying, intimidation, social pressures, and in some cases, forced resignation,” he said.

It’s a badge of inferiority, whatever else it is.