Narcissist meets masochist, hilarity ensues.

I posted the other day about an open letter that purports to be “from the Irish LGBTQ+ community” and against “transphobia.” There’s more to say about it.

Let us say unequivocally that the statements of newly launched organisations that seek to defend biology or fight gender identity and expression do not represent the wider LGBTI+ community nor feminists in Ireland. More importantly, they are not organisations at all, they have no governance, no accountability, and are simply Twitter accounts. Further, they are not supported by the wider Irish community.

On the one hand there are newly launched organizations that say things, on the other hand the newly launched organizations are not organizations at all, but just Twitter accounts. But you just said…

In addressing these accounts it is simple enough to refute them by stating they are not radical, they are not inclusive, and they are not feminists. They are simply misinformed and transphobic. The vitriol and disinformation these accounts and people share does not represent the beliefs of the legitimate organisations and signers of this letter, and together we repudiate their beliefs, and call for an end in giving airtime to their despicable brand of harassment. In Ireland we exist as a strong coalition of intersectional solidarity. As LGBTI+ and feminist organisations we stand together, we march together, we advocate together. We will not allow transphobia to grow and our history of work together will only continue to propel us to a more equal future for all marginalised people.

Apparently the open letter is calling for these unspecified Twitter accounts to be…erm…deprived of air time. Meaning what? Not invited to talk on tv or radio or podcasts? Suffocated? Either way, since they’re not named or otherwise specified…it’s hard to know what action is being sought.

But then it gets a little clearer.

We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation for those that share bigoted beliefs, that are aligned with far right ideologies and seek nothing but harm and division. These fringe internet accounts stand against affirmative medical care of transgender people, and they stand against the right to self-identification of transgender people in this country. In summation they stand against trans, women’s and gay rights by aligning themselves with far right tropes and stances. They have attacked LGBT+ education in school, attacked anti-bullying campaigns, and attack access to medical services. They stand to remove equality, and cause a legacy of damaging discrimination.

They want media and politicians to stop providing legitimate representation? What can that mean? That this enemy population should be made stateless? It’s an extraordinary demand.

And the things they say after that are just lies – nasty, destructive, reckless lies.

And Amnesty Ireland and Amnesty International signed that open letter.

Amnesty Ireland has a pinned tweet endorsing that nasty dishonest abusive letter.

Institutional capture.

Downright embarrassing.

Whoops, what happened?

Remember when feminists had that kind of power? No, neither do I; we never have. We’ve never had the clout to extract sobbing apologies and bunches of tulips from men who…promoted a webinar.

We blew it.

Perhaps no hospital in the United States was better prepared for a pandemic than the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. The people on staff had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Barack Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases. There’s a reason many of the Americans who were airlifted from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February were sent to UNMC.

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

They’re full, and cases are still surging. It’s that simple. Hospitals are filling up and it’s only going to get worse. It’s going to get nightmare.

During the spring, most of UNMC’s COVID-19 patients were either elderly people from nursing homes or workers in meatpacking plants and factories. But with the third national surge, “all the trends have gone out the window,” Sarah Swistak, a staff nurse, told me. “From the 90-year-old with every comorbidity listed to the 30-year-old who is the picture of perfect health, they’re all requiring oxygen because they’re so short of breath.”

This lack of pattern is a pattern in itself, and suggests that there’s no single explanation for the current surge. Nebraska reopened too early, “when we didn’t have enough control, and in the absence of a mask mandate,” Cawcutt says. Pandemic fatigue set in. Weddings that were postponed from the spring took place in the fall. Customers packed into indoor spaces, like bars and restaurants, where the virus most easily finds new hosts. Colleges resumed in-person classes. UNMC is struggling not because of any one super-spreading event, but because of the cumulative toll of millions of bad decisions.

When the hospital first faced the pandemic in the spring, “I was buoyed by the realization that everyone in America was doing their part to slow down the spread,”  Johnson says. “Now I know friends of mine are going about their normal lives, having parties and dinners, and playing sports indoors. It’s very difficult to do this work when we know so many people are not doing their part.” The drive home from the packed hospital takes him past rows of packed restaurants, sporting venues, and parking lots.

To a degree, Johnson sympathizes. “I don’t think people in Omaha thought we could ever have something that resembles New York,” he told me. “To be honest, in the spring, I would have thought it extremely unlikely.” But he adds that the Midwest has taken entirely the wrong lesson from the Northeast’s ordeal. Instead of learning that the pandemic is controllable, and that physical distancing works, people instead internalized “a mistaken belief that every curve that goes up must come down,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that if we don’t change anything about how we’re conducting ourselves, the curve can go up and up.”

And there are too many people in charge who are not helping.

Speaking on Tuesday afternoon, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts once again refused to issue a statewide mask mandate. He promised to tighten restrictions once a quarter of the state’s beds are filled with COVID-19 patients, but even then, some restaurants will still offer indoor dining; gyms and churches will remain open; and groups of 10 people will still be able to gather in enclosed spaces. Ricketts urged Nebraskans to avoid close contact, confined areas, and crowds, but his policies nullify his pleas. “People have the mistaken belief that if the government allows them to do something, it is safe to do,” Johnson said.

That’s that bargaining with the virus thing again. Boris Johnson said it’s ok to visit family during this five days, so that means it really is ok. Johnson must have reached an agreement with the virus, and the same for Ricketts.

This is a problem.

Jane Clare Jones is also infuriated by the interruption.

Shut up about women, we have to talk about trans women whenever anyone tries to talk about women. It’s imperative.

Olivia Colman, Jameela Jamil and Paloma Faith have signed an open letter condemning “hostility and violence” against trans women, joining a chorus of voices to do so on International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and Girls.

Right, because we can’t talk about women and girls any more, it’s not allowed, if we try we will be interrupted and told to talk about trans women instead. Shut up about women and instead talk about men who say they feel like women in their heads.

The letter, which pledges solidarity with trans women, who experience significantly higher levels of violence, was also signed by Labour MPs Nadia Whittome and Zarah Sultana.

But they don’t. They don’t experience significantly higher levels of violence. They experience lower levels of violence.

Two in five trans people (41 per cent) have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last 12 months, Stonewall’s 2018 Trans Report found.

But “incident” covers a lot of territory…including failure to agree that men are women if they say they are. Also Stonewall is not known for its honesty on this subject.

The open letter says: “We are feminists and we write, on international day for the elimination of violence against women and girls, to express our solidarity with trans women, particularly trans women of colour, who experience violence and hostility so frequently it is almost a way of life.

“Trans women are more likely to be murdered, more likely to be victims of violent attacks in their own homes, and more likely to be homeless, again increasing the risk of violence, than their cis sisters.” 

Not true, and in any case, it’s a change of subject. Women have not suddenly become a privileged invincible set of people, let alone the sex with all the power, so we need to be able to talk about women without being constantly interrupted by shouts of “TRANS WOMEN.” Glosswitch says it sharply, as always.

Theocracy tightens its grip and gives a giant boost to COVID-19.

In a 5-4 ruling, the US Supreme Court sided with religious organizations in a dispute over Covid-19 restrictions put in place by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo limiting the number of people attending religious services.

The case is the latest pitting religious groups against city and state officials seeking to stop the spread of Covid-19, and it highlights the impact of Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court. The decision comes as coronavirus cases surge across the country.

This could be a very wise move if we lived in a world where viruses do what a god tells them to do. We don’t live in that world, though; viruses do what viruses do, and going to church or temple or mosque just helps them spread.

The ruling, released just before midnight on Thanksgiving eve, contains several separate opinions and some unusually critical language.

In the main, unsigned opinion, the majority ruled in favor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America that argued that the restrictions violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment because the regulations treated the houses of worship more harshly than comparable secular facilities.

What comparable secular facilities are there? In what secular facilities do people sit close together and stand close together to sing or pray or both? Sport facilities are a big one, but aren’t they closed for that very reason?

“Members of this Court are not public health experts, and we should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area,” the court said. “But even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.”

The court said that even though Cuomo had lifted some restrictions, the houses of worship “remain under a constant threat” because the restrictions could always be reinstated.

Lower courts had sided with Cuomo.

It was 5-4, remember. This is our future – religious fanatics in charge.

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, said that the regulations were designed to “fight the rapidly spreading — and, in many cases, fatal — COVID-19 virus,” and that they allowed the governor to identity hot spots where the virus had spiked. Breyer noted the grisly statistics concerning the virus that has infected more than 12 million Americans and is currently surging. “The Constitution principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,” Breyer wrote.

But the hell with all that, instead let’s turn it all over to a non-existent god.

Speaking of Ash Sarkar…PBS here is running a BBC series called The Rise of the Nazis, which I watched a bit of last week. It includes historians explaining things, including Richard Evans, so I settled in expecting good things…and then suddenly there was Ash Sarkar, giving her thoughts on the rise of the Nazis. Ash Sarkar??? I thought. Alongside real historians?? Wtf??? What she said was of course vapid and of no interest. I turned the tv off.

Later I consulted Google to see if anyone else had noticed, and anyone else had. There seems to have been a slight uproar. One article is titled Ash Sarkar is not an expert on Nazism. And the BBC should not treat her as one. My thoughts exactly.

So, here’s a question. You are making a three-part documentary series about the rise of the Nazis. You have lined up a terrific cast of German and British historians, including Richard J. Evans and RJ Overy. You have shot some first-rate drama sequences in Lithuania and commissioned some fine graphics. The narrative is a bit GCSE. Nothing very original or exciting and lots of big gaps. But you have found a couple of very interesting human interest stories, about two lawyers who stood up against the Nazis.

So, what induces you, and the BBC Commissioning Editor, to pretend that Ash Sarkar, one of the interviewees, is some kind of “expert” about Nazism?

What followed her appearance last night was entirely predictable. There was a tsunami of protest on social media. Not just because Sarkar doesn’t know anything worth knowing about Nazism or German Communism. Her contribution to last night’s episode consisted of a handful of ten or fifteen-second soundbites which managed to be both unilluminating and annoying. She described the leader of the KPD as “definitely a charismatic guy” and “red as Hell”. The scale of the Nazi attack on the KPD, she said, was “insane”. Not one soundbite was longer than fifteen seconds. This was not BBC2. This was history as a banal mix of BBC3 and Radio 1. 

But it’s ok, the BBC had an explanation.

“As well as featuring interviews with some of the world’s leading experts on pre-war Germany, this series asks recognised contemporary figures from different professional fields, amongst them historians and journalists, to examine in detail the motives and experiences of individual historical figures from this period. Ash Sarkar is one of a number of current public figures who feature, alongside representatives from military and legal backgrounds.”

But it would make more sense to grab someone at random off the Tube platform.

So, apparently, Sarkar was chosen because she’s a “contemporary figure” or a “current public figure”. This is completely vacuous. And what makes Sarkar, a Left-wing self-publicist, “a contemporary figure”? The BBC, in a moment of panic that they are not watched by enough young people, have started filling up many of their current affairs programmes with Left-wing activists in their 20s. And that makes her a “contemporary figure”, who can be interviewed in a BBC2 historical documentary programme alongside Professor Sir Richard Evans, author of almost thirty history books, including a 2000-page trilogy on the history of Nazism. No one at the BBC has come up with a remotely plausible argument for her inclusion.  

That was exactly my reaction. Richard Evans is the real deal, and Ash Sarkar is…irrelevant.

This one spells it out – no you cannot have a single day to yourselves to talk about violence against women, yes you do have to include men who say they are women in your protests of violence against women.

Ash Sarkar shouldn’t be proud of that letter, she should be ashamed of it.

That Suzanne Moore essay:

It is March 2020. For several months now I have been trying to write something — anything — about the so-called “trans debate” in my Guardian column. But if I ever slip a line in about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out. It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: “It didn’t really add to the argument”, or it is a “distraction” from the argument.

I wouldn’t like to have editors like that. I like having editors who let me decide what my argument is, since I’m the one writing the column after all.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Well ok but besides winning the Orwell Prize what makes you think you’re any good at writing political columns?

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

What she says is literally true, I think. Trying to write something you don’t want to write and don’t believe deadens your prose. Readers know dead writing when they see it, at least readers with the sense to read people like Moore do.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

Because too many people have oatmeal where their brains should be.

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

And since the orthodoxy is deeply stupid…a lot of deeply stupid people got together to whine at her.

To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” This person went on to say that I felt insecure “because a new generation of younger leftists have caught the public mood”. 

And you know what Jolyon says – the younger generation is always right.

So there we have it. Here comes the “new generation”: the new Left, same as the old Left. Full of misogyny, utter pricks and those with the emotional intelligence of whelks. Misogyny in the name of socialism. Again.

Not so much socialism as Ideninny.

Eventually, I was allowed by a great editor to write about how gender critical women wanted to assert their basic rights. A professor of working-class history at Oxford, Selina Todd, was disinvited from an event. I noted, referring to this incident, that it is women again, never men, who were losing jobs, incomes and public platforms if they spoke up. Many of them were emailing me: not on one side or another, but generally worried. I wrote that I believed biological sex to be real and that it’s not transphobic to understand basic science. To my mind the column was fairly mild.

We all think that.

It was published. The next thing I know there are loads of people on social media thanking me for saying what needed to be said. And then another lot: the “die in a ditch terf” lot, amazingly telling me to die in a ditch. Again.

…

The censorship continues and I cannot abide it. Every day another woman loses her job and a witch-burning occurs on Twitter. My fear is not about trans people but an ideology that means the erasure of women — not just the word, but of our ability to name and describe our experience. We are now cervix-havers, birthing parents, people who menstruate. On Amnesty’s latest posters to support the women’s strike in Poland, the literal translation from Polish for the thousands of women who were protesting the awful tightening of abortion laws was: “I stand with people in Poland”. Which people? Women forced to give birth on a plastic sheet to a dead baby with foetal defects? Say it.

Nor do I buy the idea that all of this is a purely generational issue. In part it is, sure, but it can at times be an issue of unfettered misogyny and a failure to understand that many women’s rights are fairly recent and always contested.

…

All this is then just a little story about being given a warning to shut up. And refusing to. I have had a lifetime of such warnings. Class will out. This is just something I wanted to tell you about a woman saying no. And the ways we say no.

No in thunder.

Trump pardoned Flynn.

House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler issued a statement:

“This pardon is undeserved, unprincipled, and one more stain on President Trump’s rapidly diminishing legacy.

“Michael Flynn was fired from the White house for lying to senior officials.  He pleaded guilty—twice—to lying to federal investigators about his communications with a foreign adversary. Flynn’s agreement to cooperate with the government in exchange for those guilty pleas seemed light to some, given reports that Flynn and his son had engaged in far more disturbing criminal activity. 

“It is important to talk about why the President pardoned Flynn.  President Trump dangled this pardon to encourage Flynn to backtrack on his pledge to cooperate with federal investigators—cooperation that might have exposed the President’s own wrongdoing.  And it worked.  Flynn broke his deal, recanted his plea, received the backing of the Attorney General over the objections of career prosecutors, and now has secured a pardon from the President of the United States. 

“This pardon is part of a pattern.  We saw it before, in the Roger Stone case—where President Trump granted clemency to protect an individual who might have implicated the President in criminal misconduct.  We may see it again before President Trump finally leaves office.  These actions are an abuse of power and fundamentally undermine the rule of law.

“The President’s enablers have constructed an elaborate narrative in which Trump and Flynn are victims and the Constitution is subject to the whims of the President.  Americans soundly rejected this nonsense when they voted out President Trump.  President-Elect Biden will soon take office and restore a measure of honor to the Office of the President.  Between now and then, we must be vigilant to additional abuses of power, even as we look with hope to days to come.”

Another woman-hating creep who works for Pink News.

But what is this “relentless targeting”? The opening of Moore’s article:

It is March 2020. For several months now I have been trying to write something — anything — about the so-called “trans debate” in my Guardian column. But if I ever slip a line in about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out. It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: “It didn’t really add to the argument”, or it is a “distraction” from the argument.

Shock-horror she tried to talk about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, but the Guardian wouldn’t let her.

(I have to say, I was shocked by the subbing out and the patronizing explanations. It’s her damn column, she gets to make her argument the way she wants to.)

So Ryan John Butcher is in a towering rage at Suzanne Moore because she wanted to talk about the significance of female experience. So much for solidarity eh? Intersection of Me and Me, and don’t you forget it, laydeez.

She didn’t lie, she didn’t bully anyone. The 338 colleagues who signed that open letter trashing her on the other hand…

CBS has details:

One day after Pennsylvania certified its election results, formalizing President-elect Joe Biden’s win over President Trump in the state’s presidential race, Mr. Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani is attending a public hearing in Gettysburg on election “issues” and alleged “irregularities.” President Trump, unable to attend in person, phoned in his false claims that he won swing states like Pennsylvania and the entire election. 

Mr. Trump stated his goal in no uncertain terms: “We have to turn the election over,” the president said as he called into the meeting on speakerphone. The outgoing president claimed that what happened was not the United States of America, insisting without evidence there are “many, many cases” of fraud. 

“This election was rigged and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen for our country. And this election has to be turned around, because we won Pennsylvania by a lot and we won all these swing states by a lot,” the president said inaccurately and without stating proof. 

All of the president’s false and unfounded statements will not be repeated in this article.

That’s bad syntax, because the meaning is ambiguous. It should be either “Not all of the president’s false and unfounded statements will be repeated” or “This article will not repeat all of the president’s false and unfounded statements.” Anyway, the point is, CBS has reported only some of his lies, and we should understand that there were more. Trump is copious that way.

Mr. Trump was previously expected to join Giuliani at the hearing at 12:30 p.m. ET but the trip was canceled. The change in plans came after Boris Epshteyn, an adviser to the Trump campaign, revealed he tested positive for COVID-19. Epshteyn attended a press conference at the Republican National Committee last week alongside Giuliani, and participated in a radio interview with the former mayor Sunday.

Thus demonstrating that the whole thing is a communist anarchist BLM plot!

But seriously. The virus doesn’t agree to step back for five days, and I find the bargaining language people use about this decidedly odd. They seem to think that if they promise it’s just five days and they promise not to infect each other on purpose then the virus will do its part and all will be well. Like:

One of my daughters lives with her boyfriend in London, and the other lives in a flat share. The three-household rule means I can see them both. It’s a rubber-stamp, and it means that in your conscience you can know you’re doing the right thing, and abiding by what the government deems acceptable.

But none of that makes any difference to anything. It doesn’t become safe because “the government” says it is. There is no rubber stamp. The conscience isn’t relevant, and you really can’t know you’re doing the right thing until two weeks later.

A different person:

It seems a sensible compromise to allow some level of mixing at an important time of year for lots of people. I think there was a risk that the government would just say you could do anything, and mix as many households as you like, and that would certainly be really bad.

But there is no compromise. There is no sit-down with the virus where you agree to social distance most of the time and the virus agrees you can have five days off. It doesn’t work like that.

The way it works is, the virus understands that people really really want to get together with family over Christmas so it will declare a cease-fire for five days. The virus is strict, but fair.

Ministers are facing calls to publish scientific advice on the relaxing of Covid-19 rules over Christmas amid warnings that a single infectious guest could infect a third of those at a household gathering.

Under rules revealed by the prime minister on Tuesday, up to three households can form a “bubble” for five days over Christmas. It prompted a raft of scientists to speak out, warning that mixing will inevitably lead to an increase in infections come the new year, leading to deaths. Some said the government should have put greater emphasis on the dangers and potential control measures.

No but see it’s a “bubble,” which is the signal the virus agreed to respect.

Now experts have called for the government to release advice given by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

…

Dr Julian Tang, clinical virologist at the University of Leicester, said: “I do not think Sage will have evidence to show that enhanced mixing is going to be beneficial in terms of stopping the virus from spreading, if anything it will increase the virus spread … The reason that the government and Sage are … giving this amnesty of five days is more of a psychosocial, emotional side of what Christmas means to people.”

But the virus gets that, it understands, so it’s agreed to step back for those five days. It’s all arranged.

Can women have anything for ourselves now? Even just one day out of the 365 to call for an end to violence against us? Just ONE??

No, of course we fucking can’t.

Rewire is doing the same thing all over again today.

Hur hur. Throw food at them. We are very adults. Hur hur Aunt Karen, she’s such a bitch. Aren’t we good feminists?

“Ask any pregnant person,” because we don’t talk about women any more unless it’s to say throw turkeys at them.

They’re entirely right about Catholic hospitals, by the way, which is why this is so infuriating – they’re burying their own work with all this childish “throw food at women who don’t agree that man can be women” nonsense.

News flash: women get pregnant and men do not. Only women have bodies that can get pregnant; men have the other kind of bodies, the ones that can’t get pregnant. There’s no such thing as a “gender spectrum” that changes the facts. Women can wear flannel shirts and engineering boots and drive a big truck, men can wear dresses and high heels and drive a big SUV; none of that changes which sex gets pregnant and which sex doesn’t.

The Post has updates:

Pennsylvania and Nevada, two key battleground states, certified President-elect Joe Biden’s wins Tuesday, even as President Trump continued to fight results in court and insisted that he will “never concede.”

So he will never not be a childishly sore loser. Ok Spanky.

Trump’s “legal team” is shouting that there will be hearings, hearings I tell you, but Arizona says nope we don’t have any hearings scheduled.

The campaign said Arizona would hold a hearing on Nov. 30, but spokesmen for the Arizona GOP caucuses confirmed that neither the House speaker nor the Senate president had authorized any such hearing.

Who you gonna believe, them or…never mind.

But the lawyer who says we should throw turkeys at the Aunt Karens who fail to agree that men are women if they say they are can stop fretting: soon Aunt Karen’s failure to agree will be a crime, at least it will if she doesn’t keep her damn karen mouth shut.

Activists who promote the view that a trans woman is not a woman will be breaking the law if a court rules their campaign was intended to stir up hatred, the justice secretary has confirmed.

Humza Yousaf said it would not be a crime to express the opinion that sex is immutable unless it was accompanied by behaviour that was intended to stir up hatred, which could include aggressive campaigning.

And aggressive campaigning could include…what? Saying so on Facebook and Twitter maybe? Saying so in blog posts or opinion pieces? Saying so at dinner tables?

It’s just Scotland for now, but it could spread.

Some people love it:

Becky Kaufmann says she has been the target of hate crime in the past. She works as a policy officer for the Scottish Trans Alliance, one of several organisations that back the bill.

“All laws are authoritarian, by definition,” she said.

“Laws that tell you what you have to do are constraining your behaviour. In a civil, decent society we have laws that truly recognise what is abusive and offensive behaviour and we don’t criminalise what is not.

She added: “Unfortunately, in this day and age, we have behaviour that climbs above that threshold, and when the behaviour climbs above that threshold, and any reasonable observer could look it and say ‘that’s not on’, then that should be criminalised.”

Ah yes, that clears things up beautifully. If any reasonable observer could look it and say “that’s not on” then there’s your case, open and shut, no room for doubt.

It’s not just a Twitter thread, it’s also an article at Rewire News.

At Rewire News Group, we hope you’re able to safely enjoy the holiday away from toxic relatives, but we also know that might not be possible. Toxic relatives come in many forms: the Trump supporter, the devil’s advocate, the COVID-19 denier.

There’s also the TERF: the trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Let’s back up. Let’s think about this unargued assertion that Trump supporters and devil’s advocates and COVID-19 deniers are “toxic.” Let’s think about it and decide that it’s self-righteous adolescent garbage, and that it is, ironically, dehumanizing in just the way much of Trump’s rhetoric is. The views of the listed groups may or may not be toxic, figuratively speaking, but that doesn’t make the people who hold the views toxic. Calling people “toxic” is itself very trumpish.

The author of this venomous article and the venomous tweets is Caroline Reilly.

Caroline Reilly is a legal fellow with Rewire News Group. She is a writer and a reproductive justice advocate. She holds a JD from Boston College Law school. 

You’d think she’d be adult enough to eschew the flippant “throw a turkey at the woman” pseudo-jokes, but apparently not.

Back to her “throw a turkey” article:

TERFs are transphobes who wrongly believe transgender women are not women, and they think feminists shouldn’t include trans women in their advocacy. But the reality is that trans women are women, and you cannot separate feminism from advocacy for trans rights. Feminism that does not include trans people is just bigotry dressed up to look like something else.

No, the reality is that trans women are men who say they are women, men who identify as women, men who explain that they “feel like” women, men who claim that they have a woman’s brain in a male body. None of that changes the physical reality that they are men. That’s what “trans woman” means – a man who identifies as a woman.

So it’s not truthful or fair or reasonable to say that “TERFs are transphobes who wrongly believe transgender women are not women,” because they believe that rightly, not wrongly.

Sometimes TERFyness is loud and obnoxious in its bigotry, tweeting away about how trans women are dangerous and letting them privately pee in a stall next to a cis women is akin to letting Ted Bundy into a women’s locker room—truly unhinged stuff. You’ll often find TERFs on Twitter yelling about young people’s genitals or some other completely invasive and inappropriate thing that would have them banished from Earth if it was about young cis people.

Speaking of loud and obnoxious, and truly unhinged stuff – that’s not a very careful or fair description.

Sometimes, though, TERFs are a little more insidious in their approach, as they scaremonger about women’s rights and children’s safety—cloaking obviously bigoted viewpoints in false concerns about the welfare of women and children.

And why are the concerns false? What makes the viewpoints so obviously bigoted? Why is it insidious to talk about women’s rights? The lawyer doesn’t explain or elaborate, she just asserts.

But make no mistake. A TERF is a TERF is a TERF—whether they’re transparent about their motives and bigotry, or whether they’re stoking fears about violence and discrimination to make their overt hatred for trans people seem well intentioned. It is not.

Again – it’s just assertion. There’s not a trace of argument anywhere to be seen. All this is in aid of advocating violence against female relatives who have a political view the lawyer dislikes.

And then she gets to the remedies.

Throw the turkey at them. If you do not have the upper-body strength to throw the turkey, you can opt for something slightly easier to lift like a handful of mashed potatoes or some stuffing. A pie also works, and offers an added comedic effect.

If you do not want to turn your Thanksgiving dinner into a food fight, you can consider a more passive (or passive agressive) approach. Ignoring them works; so does repeating everything they say back to them in a mocking tone. Think: What would your most annoying little cousin do?

You need not feel obligated to entertain a bigot with reasoned debate, but if you want to, it helps to have some talking points handy. Like—the gender binary isn’t real. And violent men can actually just walk into women’s bathrooms whenever they want, irrespective of whether we allow trans women to pee in peace there. You can also talk about how gender-affirming care is necessary and lifesaving treatment, and trans people should be entitled to it the same way you’re entitled to your colonoscopy, Aunt Karen. And you can explain to your relatives that whether or not someone has medically transitioned, and regardless of how they look, their gender is still valid.

Aunt Karen. Cue Jolyon Maugham telling us how much wiser the younger generation is than all those millions of evil feminist Aunt Karens.

If you’ve got a TERF in your holiday midst, you have a couple options. You can engage; you can ignore; or you can, as we’ve stated, launch assorted foods across the table until they retreat. What you do not have to do is make yourself feel unsafe or uncomfortable in order to entertain their bigotry. You also bear no obligation to sit quietly and politely as someone spews hatred simply because it’s the holidays and you’re supposed to get along like family—whatever that means.

It’s funny because right under that (the end of the article) is the box with the explanation of why we should support Rewire News:

We’re glad you’re here! Our work is written for readers like you—folks who care about reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice, and understand how critical independent media is to a democratic society.

Ah yes reproductive rights and justice…except for TERFs and Karens.