On the one hand “anyone with a cervix,” on the other hand drop your pants. Insult in ALL the ways.

Why not “Spread’em, honey”?

Libby Purves isn’t taking Stonewall’s instructions.

The lobbying charity Stonewall has advised that the M-word is not “inclusive” and should not be used by the bodies it advises and lists on its “Workplace Equality Index”.

…

It’s been going on for a while, the pious new word-world that cannot content itself with mangling a plural pronoun into singlehood but calls biological females “menstruators” and coins the insulting word “chestfeeding”. That was a Brighton maternity department, as keen as any Victorian divine to avoid the wicked word “breast” . It spoke of distress at the way “biological essentialism” was polluting the “mainstream birth narrative”. Makes one feel quite guilty at the reckless and rather messy essentialism of having given birth twice oneself, through the usual channels so unfairly denied to both natal males and transwomen.

The usual channels – that’s very good.

Stonewall, 32 years after its bold, simple-hearted and principled fight against Mrs Thatcher’s opportunist “Section 28” of the Local Government Act, needs to see these limits and learn humility. As some of its very founders, such as Matthew Parris, have said, it didn’t need to get “tangled up in the trans issue” at all, let alone twist ordinary tolerance to intolerant extremes. Yet now, with a bitter irony it cannot see, Stonewall eerily echoes the bullying attitude of Section 28 itself.

The parallel is striking. Section 28, remember, was basically a denial of emotional and personal reality, with local authorities forbidden to “promote the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”…

Yet now Stonewall, pivoting into power like the pigs in Animal Farm, displays a Thatcherite self-confidence and considers itself the only arbiter of what is compassionate and correct: now at the extreme asking officialdom to replace the ancient and honourable word “Mother” with a laborious “parent-who-gave-birth”. As if the visceral reality of biological motherhood, painful and arduous and frightening and tender and fraught with animal instinct, is unmentionable or “pretended”.

Not to mention – and it suddenly strikes me that it doesn’t get mentioned all that much – as if that particular bond just doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter enough to be mentioned.

The sad joke is, without mothers, there would be no humans at all. Zero. (I’m leaving other species out because they cheerfully ignore Stonewall’s rules.) Stonewall and the other language policers are like a cartoon character erasing herself.

That Times piece by Michael Powell on the ACLU, part 2.

Less than two months after that terrible day in Charlottesville, Claire Gastanaga, then the executive director of the A.C.L.U. chapter in Virginia, drove to the College of William & Mary to talk about free speech. One of her board members had resigned after Charlottesville, tweeting, “When a free speech claim is the only thing standing in the way of Nazis killing people, maybe don’t take the case.”

Ms. Gastanaga planned to argue that by defending the rights of the objectionable, the A.C.L.U. preserved the rights of all.

Does it though? Is that how it worked in Charlottesville?

She walked onstage and dozens of students who proclaimed themselves allied with Black Lives Matter approached with signs.

“Good, I like this,” Ms. Gastanaga said. “This illustrates very well ——”

Those were the last of her words that could be heard.

She walked onstage and dozens of students who proclaimed themselves allied with Black Lives Matter approached with signs.

And they stayed there, and after half an hour she gave up and left.

The debate inside the A.C.L.U. proved scarcely less charged. “People were rubbed raw,” said Mr. Parker, who directed its racial justice project and took part in these impassioned discussions. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A decade earlier, Mr. Parker, who is Black, debated before taking a job at the A.C.L.U. He had worried about representing white fascists of the sort who paraded about in Charlottesville. “I have a predisposition to be less concerned about the rights of people who would like to see me dead, and that did complicate my decision.”

This is what I’m saying. It’s not just offense, it’s wanting to see you dead, and working toward that goal.

I think it’s a cop-out to keep putting it in terms of offense.

The ACLU has changed.

At a celebratory lunch in 2017 Daniel Goldberger, one of its star lawyers, found the speeches disconcerting.

A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U. and that Black people experienced offensive speech far more viscerally than white allies. In the hallway outside, an A.C.L.U. official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.

Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged.

I find reporting and commentary on this issue frustrating, because it always (at least so it seems) evades the real issue. The issue isn’t really “offensive” speech and it isn’t really what views we find “repugnant.” It would be nice if it were, because it would make the conflict so much easier. It’s not just about bad feelings, it’s about people getting killed…or disenfranchised or deprived of rights or confined to ghettos and so on.

“I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”

But what is principle? Is free speech obviously more a principle than preventing racist violence (for example)?

I get the ACLU’s point, I think, but I also think there’s a real tension, much realer than mere repugnance or offense.

[T]he organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.

Its national and state staff members debate, often hotly, whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police.

Those debates mirror those of the larger culture, where a belief in the centrality of free speech to American democracy contends with ever more forceful progressive arguments that hate speech is a form of psychological and even physical violence. These conflicts are unsettling to many of the crusading lawyers who helped build the A.C.L.U.

I don’t argue that speech is physical violence, but I do say that some speech can lead to physical violence. Look at January 6 for one glaring example. Look at Charlottesville for another.

A tragedy also haunts the A.C.L.U.’s wrenching debates over free speech.

In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core.

The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown. 

And that turned out well.

This is what I’m saying. The far right groups in Charlottesville (and in DC on January 6) weren’t just offensive and repugnant, they were murderous. People got beaten up, and some got killed. I think the ACLU’S intervention was an intervention too many.

Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”

There it is again – even the people arguing for balance are weakening their own case by making it about “giving offense.” Offense is survivable; insurrectionist violence is not.

A.C.L.U. leaders asserted that nothing substantive had changed. “We should recognize the cost to our allies but we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant,” Mr. Cole said in an interview with The New York Times.

Never mind repugnant; will the views get people killed? At least tell the truth about what you’re defending. (I think the tension is real. I don’t 100% agree with the ACLU but I don’t oppose it either. I’m conflicted.)

When Brett M. Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, the A.C.L.U. surprised longtime supporters by entering the fray, broadcasting a commercial that strongly suggested the judge was guilty of sexual assault. When a book argued that the increase in the number of teenage girls identifying as transgender was a “craze” caused by social contagion, a transgender A.C.L.U. lawyer sent a tweet that startled traditional backers, who remembered its many fights against book censorship and banning: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

That of course is Chase Strangio.

Mr. Romero insisted he oversaw no retreat from the fight for free speech and points to key cases to underscore that. In recent years the A.C.L.U. argued that the attempt by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to deny the National Rifle Association access to financial services infringed on freedom of speech; defended motorists’ right to put the Confederate flag on specialty license plates; and criticized Facebook and Twitter for banning Mr. Trump.

“I recall a conversation with a Planned Parenthood leader after we defended the right of protesters to stand outside clinics,” Mr. Romero said. “She was annoyed and told me, ‘When you lie down with wolves, you wake up with fleas.’ I replied, ‘If I have fleas, I wash them off in the morning.’”

Yeah that’s cute but meanwhile women are being intimidated and bullied by those “protesters.” I think the ACLU is dead wrong on this one.

The money that flooded into the A.C.L.U. after Mr. Trump’s election allowed Mr. Romero to flex the organization’s progressive muscles and greatly increase the size of its staff. Many of the new employees, however, were not nearly as supportive of the A.C.L.U.’s traditional civil liberties work. They worked inside their policy silos, focused on issues like immigration, transgender rights and racial justice.

Not women’s rights though. I guess those are so last century. Women are Karens who deserve to be intimidated outside Planned Parenthood clinics.

[I]n interviews, several younger lawyers suggested a toll taken. Their generational cohort, they said, placed less value on free speech, making it uncomfortable for them to express views internally that diverged from progressive orthodoxy.

I bet I know what kind of views.

The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s. After Skokie, a leader of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild complained of its “poisonous evenhandedness.”

It’s a tension.

H/t Screechy Monkey

Sing it!

When guest talks go bad:

A psychiatrist said in a lecture at Yale University’s School of Medicine that she had fantasies of shooting white people, prompting the university to later restrict online access to her expletive-filled talk, which it said was “antithetical to the values of the school.”

The talk, titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” had been presented by the School of Medicine’s Child Study Center as part of Grand Rounds, a weekly forum for faculty and staff members and others affiliated with Yale to learn about various aspects of mental health.

The title doesn’t sound entirely reasonable or well judged.

“This is the cost of talking to white people at all — the cost of your own life, as they suck you dry,” Dr. Khilanani said in the lecture, which drew widespread attention after Bari Weiss, a former writer and editor for the opinion department of The New York Times, posted an audio recording of it on Substack on Friday. “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil.”

Any good peaches out there? Grapefruits? Cherries?

“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a [fucking] favor,” she said, adding an expletive.

I like the exquisite politeness of that “relatively.” Not completely guiltless, you understand, just relatively.

Later in the lecture, Dr. Khilanani, who said she is of Indian descent, described the futility of trying to talk directly to white people about race, calling it a “waste of our breath.”

“We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero to accept responsibility,” she said. “It ain’t going to happen. They have five holes in their brain.”

So Yale made the video of her talk available only to the people who were eligible to attend it.

Dr. Khilanani posted several videos on TikTok addressing what she called Yale’s “suppression of my talk on race.” In her email, she called on Yale to release the video, and she said in a phone interview that Yale should not have been surprised because “they knew the topic, they knew the title, they knew the speaker.”

That is a point. Why did they invite her in the first place?

Is this just more cancel culture? No, because of the fantasies about shooting people. If a GC feminist did a talk ranting about fantasies of shooting people I wouldn’t defend her.

How can we ever match their eloquence?

On the one hand Trump is more absurd than ever, on the other hand he’s more dangerous than ever.

Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States, commutes to New York City from his New Jersey golf club to work out of his office in Trump Tower at least once a week, slipping in and out of Manhattan without attracting much attention.

The place isn’t as he left it. Many of his longtime employees are gone. So are most of the family members who once worked there with him and some of the fixtures of the place, like his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen, who have since turned on him. Mr. Trump works there, mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.

What kind of “work” does he do there? Composing “statements” like the one saying Mark Zuckerberg requested not to be invited to dinner?

Still blocked from Twitter and Facebook, he has struggled to find a way to influence news coverage since leaving office and promote the fabrication that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Giving a slurred speech while wearing questionable trousers is part of His Struggle.

He has pressed conservative commentators and writers to echo his claims that the election was rigged. His focus has intensified in recent weeks, coinciding with the empaneling of a special grand jury by Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, into his businesses.

A grand jury does tend to concentrate the mind, to borrow Samuel Johnson’s phrase.

Last week, he shut down his blog after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

He is small and irrelevant. Dangerous, but still small and irrelevant.

He has been so eager for an audience that he is even billed as a speaker who will appear live, via Jumbotron, at a rally in New Richmond, Wis., where the other headliners are Diamond and Silk, the MAGA movement social media stars, and Dinesh D’Souza, who received a presidential pardon from Mr. Trump for a felony conviction of making illegal campaign contributions.

Celebrity Jumbotron!

“If you’re a one-term president, you usually go quietly into the night,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “He sees himself as leading the revolution, and he’s doing it from the back of a golf cart.”

The golf cart revolution will be televised.

Trump issued a solemn Statement. Short, but solemn.

Cool. Zuckerberg requested no more dinners, and Trump is complying. Whatever.

It is however quite rude and dismissive to refer to anyone as “his wife” and nothing else. Most women are not as empty and useless as Melania Trump, or indeed Donald Trump.

Tell me more about the residential accommodation one.

That’s so interesting, because by giving a trans woman the option of being in a single sex flat that is an all women flat, they remove that option from the women in the flat. He gets his preferred option and they lose theirs.

Why is that fair, again? I just can’t seem to grasp it.

It’s been sorted and Marion has what she needs for now.

What a glorious progressive movement, am I right?

Excellent post by Lily Maynard on The Curious Case of Marion Millar.

It’s all good; I’ll just whet your appetite with her take on Joss Prior:

Joss’s attack on women is a triple whammy, the epitome of bigotry – attacking women for their age, their politcs (entirely speculative) and their perceived intellectual capacity.

I imagine Joss’s idea of a feminist protest would have been a parade of 20-year-old bikini girls sporting full make-up and perfectly coiffed hair, chanting ‘transwomen are women!’

While explaining astrophysics to the people in the bleachers.

Prior- no spring chicken himself- is also disparaging about the number of women in the photo. I’m told that others were present who were not photographed, but bloody hell –   just yesterday someone was threatening to shoot gender critical women with a ‘gun’! It’s pretty damn brave that these women dare show their faces at all! And with just six day’s notice, on a week day, when most women are either at work or have kids to ferry to and from school. In the middle of a pandemic. And where, exactly? Central Edingburgh? No: Coatbridge. A town in the lowlands of Scotland, about nine miles outside Glasgow. I’ll just hop on my bike…

…

For Women Scotland tell me, “It was just some friends and supporters outside the police station, so not really a protest as such.”

My favourite response was an… ahem… old photo of Prior in formal dress with the caption ‘bored, middle-aged dullard’?

If that seems harsh, bear in mind that Prior was not above doctoring a picture created by The Famous Artist Birdy Rose to make it look as if she had drawn Millar giving a Nazi salute.

It’s difficult to be harsh enough to Joss Prior.

H/t Sackbut

Susan Dalgety in The Scotsman:

Why have I spent the last 24 hours sharing despairing texts with some of Scotland’s most successful women, each as bewildered as I am? Women who have won awards for their work, women who have spent their entire adult lives overcoming prejudice, women who are the social, economic, and political equal of any man. Warrior queens every one of them. And now scared to speak out.

I could point to a Coatbridge police station, where on Thursday, Marion Millar, a 50-year-old feminist, was charged with malicious communications after posting allegedly “homophobic and transphobic” tweets, but the story doesn’t start there.

I could direct you to Johann Lamont’s powerful parliamentary speech where she argued successfully for the survivors of rape and sexual assault to have the right to choose the sex, not the gender, of the person who examines them after an attack. But the story didn’t start there either.

See also Joan Mcalpine.

Women who argue that biology is real and that our sex is the basis of inequality are dismissed as bigots. Women who marched alongside their gay brothers and sisters in the campaign for equality are accused, by some of the people they marched with, of causing a moral panic by asserting their sex-based rights.

Women have lost income, been shunned by their professional peers and pilloried for standing up for their sex-based rights. And one woman now awaits trial in Glasgow Sheriff Court on July 20.

It is now, she concludes, time to fight back.

Marion Millar put up a GoFundMe about 3 hours ago – the donations flooded in – so of course GoFundMe took it down.

Glinner sums up:

I hate that Marion Millar is going through hell at the moment, but I’m delighted she’s about to draw attention to the tactics used by trans rights activists, the ideologically captured police who empower and enable them, and the silicon valley companies that hold women down while this theft of their rights and resources is underway.

When she finally does get it going, share it everywhere. Use it to peak friends and family. Let’s get the light flooding in on this dangerous cult that has done so much in the darkness. The accelerating demise of Stonewall and the imminent demise of Mermaids were both only possible because women like Marion fought like tigers against what amounts to an ideological coup, and a fraud comitted by Stonewall that took in the whole country.

Self-ID has been held back in Spain and Germany, and feminist groups inspired by the UK movement are popping up everywhere. The ripples from this case will be felt all over the world, so Marion, don’t lose heart. This is a dying movement, certainly in the UK, and you’re about to deliver the final blow.

Location changed to PayPal.

Updating to add: hold off on donating for now because evil people are setting up fake accounts and running off with the cash.

Again with this crap.

Valentina Petrillo could this year become the first openly transgender woman to compete at the Paralympics. For the visually impaired Italian, selection for the national squad would be a dream come true – but she says she understands why other athletes may have doubts and questions about racing against her.

“I’m happy as a woman and running as a woman is all I want. I couldn’t ask for more,” says Valentina Petrillo.

“I’ve got a fire inside me, that pushes me. An emotional strength. Obviously, my body’s not what it was at 20 when I was at my peak, but my happiness pushes me to go further, to go beyond my limits.”

But what Petrillo wants and Petrillo’s happiness isn’t the only issue.

The BBC does eventually get to the part about women who say it isn’t fair, but the part about Petrillo’s happiness and womanyness is what comes first.

I feel a need to learn something about these here Yogyakarta principles we hear so much about.

So I’m reading.

In 2006, in response to well-documented patterns of abuse, a distinguished group of international human rights experts met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia to outline a set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. The result was the Yogyakarta Principles: a universal guide to human rights which affirm binding international legal standards with which all States must comply. They promise a different future where all people born free and equal in dignity and rights can fulfil that precious birthright.

Two words there I don’t understand – “binding” and “must.” On what basis do the people who drew up the principles have the authority to make them binding and to say that all States must comply?

Wikipedia gives some background:

The website promoting the Principles notes that concerns have been voiced about a trend of people’s human rights being violated because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. While the United Nations human rights instruments detail obligations to ensure that people are protected from discrimination and stereotypes,^[4] which includes people’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity, implementation of these rights has been fragmented and inconsistent internationally. The Principles aim to provide a consistent understanding about application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity.^[5]

Those two things don’t go together though. They shouldn’t be formulaically paired that way as if they’re the same and have the same kinds of impacts on other people, because they’re not and they don’t.

The Yogyakarta Principles were developed at a meeting of the International Commission of Jurists, the International Service for Human Rights and human rights experts from around the world at Gadjah Mada University on Java from 6 to 9 November 2006. The seminar clarified the nature, scope and implementation of states’ human rights obligations under existing human rights treaties and law, in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity.

Again – not the same. Should not be treated as a pair.

The YP website explains each principle. On the page for principle 3 we get:

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. Persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities shall enjoy legal capacity in all aspects of life. Each person’s self-defined sexual orientation and gender identity is integral to their personality and is one of the most basic aspects of self-determination, dignity and freedom.

Yet again – not the same thing, should not be treated as a pair. It’s not even clear that “gender identity” is as solid a concept as sexual orientation is, let alone sex.

No one shall be forced to undergo medical procedures, including sex reassignment surgery, sterilisation or hormonal therapy, as a requirement for legal recognition of their gender identity.

Boom – there you have a “principle” that has turned out to be massively destructive of women’s rights. It’s too bad they didn’t manage to think about that back in 2006.

No status, such as marriage or parenthood, may be invoked as such to prevent the legal recognition of a person’s gender identity.

In other words children and spouses have no interests in this question.

No one shall be subjected to pressure to conceal, suppress or deny their sexual orientation or gender identity.

How are we defining “pressure”? Because if we define it broadly enough that means women are not allowed to say that men are not women. Again: more thought needed here.

States shall:

… b)     Take all necessary legislative, administrative and other measures to fully respect and legally recognise each person’s self-defined gender identity;

Seriously?

It’s bonkers.

Naomi Wolf pushed the vax conspiracy theorizing too far.

Ofsted is out.

Stonewall raised “concern” with Ofsted that inspectors do not always discuss trans issues with primary school children, The Telegraph can reveal.

Ahhhhhhhh now that’s damning. Stonewall was complaining to Ofsted that inspectors weren’t pushing primary schools to groom children.

The LGBT charity questioned an exemption in the school watchdog’s guidance allowing inspectors to avoid asking children as young as five about topics such as gender transitioning if a headteacher “reasonably believes” it is sensitive for pupils.

In an email to Ofsted, released under freedom of information laws, Stonewall said: “We are concerned that exempting inspectors from speaking to pupils about certain protected characteristics could undermine their ability to effectively assess a primary school’s compliance with the Equality Act 2010.”

In other words schools have to indoctrinate small children into the trans ideology or they won’t be doing their duty by “certain protected characteristics” and Stonewall will have to punish. What power-drunk shits these creeps are.

In the email to Ofsted, seen by The Telegraph, Stonewall’s director of education and youth wrote: “We know that some students who are bullied (for whatever reason) do not disclose this to teachers, so it is difficult to envisage how inspectors could make assessments on whether homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying is prevalent in schools, without being able to speak to pupils about all protected characteristics.”

Yes that will definitely solve the problem. “Johhny, do you bully any classmates because you’re biphobic? Do you bully any classmates because you’re homophobic? Do you bully any classmates because you’re transphobic? Jenny, does Johnny bully you because you’re bi? Does he bully you because you’re a lesbian? Does he bully you because you’re trans?” Makes you wish you could be a kid again.

Meanwhile, more public bodies have quit Stonewall’s diversity scheme. They include the Post Office, NHS Highland, Swim England, three police forces and several councils.

Police Scotland should quite Stonewall’s diversity scheme. Yesterday.

When Channel 4 goes…

Channel 4 has become the latest organisation to pull out of the diversity scheme run by the charity Stonewall.

In US-speak “scheme” is mostly a pejorative. That’s less true in the UK but I still smirk at calling Stonewall’s (cough) campaign a “scheme.”

The broadcaster, which has been praised for its programmes highlighting LGBTQ issues, said it was withdrawing from the “diversity champions” scheme.

…

Yesterday Moon Beever, a law firm, severed its ties with the charity. The Equality and Human Rights Commission and the employment dispute service Acas have withdrawn for “cost reasons”, and the DVLA and the housing department have also pulled out.

…

Frances Coulson, senior partner at Moon Beever, told the legal blog RollOnFriday: “After some disquiet about recent actions of Stonewall we have decided to exit the Stonewall Diversity Programme.”

“Some disquiet” – there’s that suave understatement again.

One more exit:

A law firm has ended its membership of a diversity scheme run by Stonewall citing concerns over its recent actions, saying it can no longer support the LGBTQ+ charity.

Moon Beever, based in Gray’s Inn and specialising in insolvency work, was one of 77 firms signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme.

But Frances Coulson, the firm’s Senior Partner, told RollOnFriday that Moon Beever had relinquished its membership.

“After some disquiet about recent actions of Stonewall we have decided to exit the Stonewall Diversity Programme”, she said. 

“This in no way detracts from our commitment to diversity and equality, but in common with the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Government Departments we no longer feel that we can support Stonewall”, said Coulson.