Peter Tatchell orders women to let men into spaces reserved for us.

Excluding trans women from women’s spaces because of physical or sexual violence by a tiny unrepresentative minority is like banning all Muslims because of terrorist acts by a handful of extremists. SO WRONG!

So then not allowing men into women’s spaces because of violence by a minority is also like “banning all Muslims because of terrorist acts by a handful of extremists”? So then women don’t have a right to women-only spaces at all, ever, no matter what? Do women have to give birth in public then? Do we all have to do everything in public and leave all our doors and windows open?

In other words Peter didn’t bother to think about what he was saying, he just saw an opportunity to tell women what to do, and he seized it.

Not everyone said yes sir, whatever you say sir. A lot of people pointed out that it’s not his place to tell us we have to include men in spaces reserved for us.

He did a followup post explaining that he’s right.

As a follow up to my post on Wednesday about trans rights, which generated a staggering 1,400+ comments: I am not telling women what to do. I am merely expressing my point of view, in the same way that I accept that straight people have a right to comment on LGBT+ issues. Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. Moreover, I’m simply echoing the many feminists & women’s organisations that have been trans-inclusive for many years – with the support of staff and women service users, and without any problems. They endorse trans rights and inclusion. Are all these feminists and women’s organisations also misogynists?

He is telling women what to do though, and condescending to us as well.

I reject the trope of trans women as predators. Although I share the concerns of those who are worried about women’s safety, I don’t agree that a blanket ban on trans women is right or the answer. Men who want to harm women don’t need to pose as trans women to do harm.

In addition, many acts of women-on-women violence are committed by women who are not trans, so demonising trans women and focusing on them as a huge threat is disproportionate and not evidence based.

If there are trans women who have a history of violent or sexual assaults on women, and have not demonstrably reformed, I agree they should not have access to women’s spaces. Indeed, many women’s organisations already vet women & trans women to exclude anyone perceived to be a threat or not a genuine trans woman.

I recognise that there are many deeply held differences on this issue but believe they can be reconciled in a way that supports both women’s and trans rights. All women, trans or not, are victims of misogyny. And trans women suffer particularly high rates of male hate crime, domestic violence and sexual assault. This common oppression by men must surely give all women, including trans women, an interest in working together to fight misogyny in all its forms. I have supported every women’s rights struggle, including trans women’s rights, for over 50 years and will continue to do so, even if we disagree on the trans issue. Solidarity with all women worldwide fighting for respect, dignity, rights and freedom x

But trans women aren’t women, they’re men who “feel like” women or some such woolly nonsense. They’re not women, and they have a striking tendency to hate us. We don’t want to invite them to our party, and we don’t have to. Women are concerned with stuff that affects women; trans women are a massive change of subject. We don’t want to talk about their subject, and we don’t have to. Men as a group have a strong tendency to hog the microphone; we don’t want to share the microphone with them, and we don’t have to.

Be more inclusive by never mentioning mothers or fathers.

Schools and sporting groups in Victoria will be told to  avoid terms like “mum”, “dad”, “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” as part of a push to curb the dropout and suicide rates of LGBTQI+ young people.

Here’s a surprising fact: lesbians and gay men can have mothers and fathers. I don’t think lesbians and gay men object to the words “mother” and “father.” (I don’t know why schools are talking about “mum” and “dad” instead of “mother” and “father”; mum and dad are personal names, which schools shouldn’t be using for anyone, because it’s intrusive and weird. “Mum” and “dad” are not nouns, they’re family nicknames.)

The North Western Melbourne Primary Health Network has set up the #SpeakingUpSpeaksVolumes campaign which will bring in unisex bathrooms, non-gendered playing teams and rainbow flags in a bid to be more inclusive.

But that’s not more inclusive, it’s vastly less inclusive. It excludes girls from school. Girls aren’t going to want to go to a school where they have to share the toilets with boys. And the sports thing, as we know to the point of tedium, excludes girls from sports.

Oh well, just girls.

Genevive Gluck at Glinner’s site on the core reversal:

In 2018, Me Too campaigner Rose McGowan was at a Barnes and Noble bookshop in New York promoting her memoir Brave, which details the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. During a question and answer session, as Rose was discussing her grief and recovery, a trans-identified male heckled her from the crowd, saying, “We get raped more often. We go through domestic violence more often. Trans women are in men’s prisons, and what have you done for them?”

The viral video depicts a trans-identifying male with hair dyed pink, wearing a pale pink hoodie, standing among a crowd of seated patrons — who observe stoically — yelling, “This is genocide! This is the AIDs crisis all over again! This is white cis feminism!” an outburst prompted by an interview with RuPaul in 2017 wherein McGowan said that trans-identified males experience life differently from women. The heckler is peacefully removed while chanting, “White cis feminism!” in an apparent attempt to rouse the audience.

The audience wasn’t roused. Several women laughed.

After the removal of the heckler, urged on by supportive cheers, McGowan rises and shouts, “I do not subscribe to your language!” and proceeds to condemn the use of demeaning labels.

There was support from the audience, but clips from the event edited that out.

In particular, the US Women’s March organization denounced her within the day. Women’s March stated that “denying trans women’s identities is never okay,” in a tweet that also linked to trans activist Katelyn Burns’ interview with the agitator, a trans-identified male named Andi Dier. Dier claimed that those who identify as trans women are more oppressed than women, saying “When someone pulls down her pants and sees a v-gina, she won’t be murdered for it. That is not something she fears. That’s why she’s cis.”

Except of course when she is murdered for it, which is a great deal too often. Maybe Andi Dier fears violence if he tries to convince a man that he’s a woman who wants to have sex with him, but that’s a separate and quite specialized issue. It’s irrelevant to violence against women, and it’s in no way the fault of women. Why doesn’t Andi Dier run around interrupting men’s q and a sessions? Why does he target women?

Gluck did some research on Dier and found him to have some…permissive views on sex with minors. She notes that people get punished for mentioning such things.

In December 2020, while researching the influence of pornography on gender ideology, I noticed that Dier had reappeared on Reddit and Twitter, advertising homemade ’sissy’ pornography. Over the course of the past few months, Dier has been active in several subreddits, including both the r/rapefantasies and r/rape forums; the former focuses on rape-themed pornography, and the latter is a support group for victims. Even as Dier advertised in one forum by saying, “trans lesbian rapemeat needs to be f*cked straight,” he was simultaneously commenting in a support group for rape survivors. 

In other words, I take it, he’s using a support group for rape victims as fodder for rape-themed pornography. Nice guy.

To consider Andi Dier an outlier is to ignore a disturbing trend involving the normalization of dangerous sexual paraphilias and the degree to which institutions have been more concerned with protecting their public image than with defending women and children from male violence. Indeed, women are being banned from social media platforms for calling attention to male sexual abuse as well as for questioning the increasing trend of forced inclusion of male-bodied people in women’s spaces.

Whaaaaat could possibly go wrong.

H/t YNnB

The magic is gone.

Several Republican leaders on Sunday expressed concern at incendiary comments made by former President Donald Trump during a speech Saturday night at a Republican National Committee donor retreat.

Incendiary comments were fine as long as he was squatting in the White House, but now that he’s the official loser, they’re discovering an uncomfortable level of heat.

The former president went off-script in a roughly 50-minute keynote speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, ripping into Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, even calling him a “dumb son of a bitch.” Trump also took aim at former Vice President Mike Pence — saying he was “disappointed” in him for not fighting the certification of the election results in January — as well as Anthony Fauci, who Trump said was “full of crap.”

New Trump just like the old Trump. They lay down with this guy, they can’t complain about the syphilis now.

Trumpcine instead of vaccine. Dang, that’s really really clever. They should totally do that.

Ruth Smeeth, CEO of Index on Censorship, complains of polarization…a complaint I always find rather dull and beside the point. “X is for torture and Y is against it; oh no the polarization!” It seems especially beside the point for an organization whose title and purpose is to oppose censorship. It’s not literal censorship to say stop being so polar, but it is a form of pressure to say different things in a different way.

Of course, the reality is this has always been part of our political discourse. There is a healthy tradition of challenge in our public space. But…my concern is it is no longer on the fringes of our national conversations, it now dominates and the damage that it is doing is untold.

Says the CEO of the anti-censorship organization.

In the last week, we have seen academics compared to the KKK, a trans writer attacked for being long-listed for a literary prize for women, and a new narrative on intersectional veganism which attacks other vegans for not considering the role of white supremacy in their eating habits.

I added an Oxford comma there, because it’s badly needed for clarity. I hate the taboo on the Oxford comma. There needs to be a pause after her second example, so that we can separate it out in order to say what shite it is.

Torrey Peters was not “attacked for being long-listed for a literary prize for women.” The people who put Torrey Peters on the list were criticized and disputed for putting him there. We are allowed to do that, no matter how “polarizing” the CEO of Index on Censorship thinks it is.

Because of the list, there has been criticism of Peters’s writing, especially of the sissy porn “forced feminization is soooo erotic” trope, but again we are allowed to do that. Maybe it is “polarizing,” but whose fault is that? What are we supposed to do about woman-hating porn and woman-displacing trans-identified men? Just shut up? Very politely say sirs we do kind of wish you wouldn’t appropriate everything that’s ours?

I am not saying that people don’t have the right to these views – of course they do. Index on Censorship exists to ensure everyone’s rights to free expression. But that doesn’t mean that our words and deeds don’t have impact or consequence.

We witnessed in America only this year where this form of populist politics can lead to, at the extreme end – the storming of the Capitol. This week we’ve riots on the streets of Northern Ireland, again. Anti-Chinese hate crime has spiked post-Covid. In Belarus, Hungary and Poland we witness daily the appalling impact of the combination of this political polarisation and authoritarian-leaning governments. Words have consequence.

And she’s comparing gender-critical feminist women to that.

Wait, who is it that is polarizing again?

Young Americans for Freedom made the mistake of sneering at the observation that racism is built into many US highways, thus giving a lot of people the opportunity to educate onlookers about the well-documented fact that racism is built into many US highways. Own goal.

No, they’re right, it’s not parody, and it’s true.

That thing about roads designed not to allow buses? That’s closely tied to voter suppression, too. The suppressionist bills that limit voting places are helped along by extra difficulty getting from Point A to Point B for people with little money and no car. If you have to go a long distance to vote and there is no bus route near you – bam, there’s your obstacle to voting.

LA public radio station KCRW in June 2020:

While Los Angeles does not feature statues of slave traders or Confederate generals, there are less obvious monuments to structural racism. Just turn to freeways.

When construction of the Interstate Highway System began in the 1950s, white-dominated municipalities nationwide often routed freeways through communities of color or as a divider between Black and white neighborhoods.

The 10 freeway is a prime example. It split the affluent northern parts of the LA basin from some of the economically struggling Black areas of South LA. This affected thriving Black communities, including the Pico neighborhood in Santa Monica and the Sugar Hill area in West Adams. 

Planners didn’t generally say “put them in the black neighborhoods,” at least not in public, they framed it as urban renewal, slum clearance, a brighter tomorrow.

He’s still alive, but it was a near thing.

A second lieutenant in the US army is suing two Virginia police officers over a traffic stop last December in which the officers drew their guns, pointed them at him and used a slang term to suggest he was facing execution before pepper-spraying him and knocking him to the ground.

Body camera footage shows Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, dressed in uniform and with his hands held in the air outside the driver’s window as he tells the armed officers he is “honestly afraid to get out” of his SUV.

But they must have had a good reason for the traffic stop, right?

No.

Daniel Crocker, a Windsor police officer, radioed that he was attempting to stop a vehicle with no rear license plate and tinted windows. He said the driver was “eluding police” and he considered it a “high-risk traffic stop”, according to a report included in the court filing.

He wasn’t eluding police, he was heading for a place with lights, so that they couldn’t shoot him in the dark.

Another officer, Joe Gutierrez, was driving by when he heard Crocker’s call, saw him attempting to stop the SUV and decided to join the stop. Gutierrez acknowledged that Nazario’s decision to drive to a lighted area happens to him “a lot, and 80% of the time, it’s a minority”, Arthur said, quoting the officer.

Gee I wonder why.

The lawsuit says that by the time the two officers reached Nazario’s SUV, the license plate was visible in the rear.

In other words they had no reason to stop him.

Nazario drove to a gas station where, according to the lawsuit, the officers drew their guns and pointed them at Nazario. The officers attempted to pull Nazario out of his vehicle while he continued to keep his hands in the air. Gutierrez pepper-sprayed Nazario multiple times.

“I don’t even want to reach for my seatbelt, can you please … My hands are out, can you please – look, this is really messed up,” Nazario stammered, his eyes shut.

The officers shouted conflicting orders, telling him to put his hands out the window while telling him to open the door and get out, the lawsuit says. At one point, Gutierrez told Nazario he was “fixin’ to ride the lightning”, a reference to the electric chair and a line from The Green Mile, a film about a Black man facing execution.

Nazario got out of the vehicle and asked for a supervisor. Gutierrez responded with “knee-strikes”, knocking him to the ground, the lawsuit says. The two officers struck Nazario multiple times, then handcuffed and interrogated him. The stop was captured on Nazario’s cellphone and cameras worn by Crocker and Gutierrez, according to the lawsuit.

All this when they had no reason to stop him in the first place.

The video is stomach-turning.

At A Blog of One’s Own:

On 11 March, Legal Feminist (a collective of feminist lawyers, of which I am a member: tweeting from @legalfeminist and blogging at legalfeminst.org.uk) tweeted this:

That’s from a pre-prize novella Peters wrote called The Masker.

The Masker isn’t a one-off: there’s a genre. It’s called “sissy porn,” and “forced feminisation” is a popular trope among aficionados^[2]. It is a manifestation of a phenomenon known as autogynephilia: a tendency in some heterosexual males to be aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women^[3].

With “as women” meaning things like getting aroused by “forced feminisation.” Has it all, doesn’t it – not only stealing what we are, but also treating what we are as all about masochistic joy in violent subordination. Gee, I can’t imagine why we would object to any of this, can you?

In this novella, Peters explicitly eroticises violence against women. The fictional narrator is a masochist for whom dressing as a woman and being treated as female is the ultimate sexually arousing debasement; and for whom “treated as female” means “violently abused.” The single most chilling line in this extract, to my mind, is “meek as an abused woman.” The narrator is luxuriating in his own fearful, humiliated capitulation.

Would Torrey Peters luxuriate in being told to fuck all the way off and not come back? Because I’d be more than happy to oblige.

That being so, it is scarcely necessary to spell out what nerve was hit by our tweet about Peters’ longlisting for a women’s literary prize. Women are being told that transwomen are in every sense women; that we should unquestioningly welcome them into women-only spaces, spaces where we are undressed or in other ways vulnerable or wishing for privacy from males. We are told that if we have any doubts about the safety of extending that welcome, or if it makes us feel uncomfortable, that is because we are bigots.

And here’s this guy writing about how sexy it is to be punched in the face and getting nominated for a women’s prize for writing.

[T]here is – in The Masker and similar material – clear evidence that some proportion of male-bodied people who choose to dress as women are individuals for whom the idea of themselves as women – doing women’s things, in women’s spaces – is not merely convenient and comfortable, or even affirming and validating, but positively erotic. And that some proportion of that category regard femaleness as inherently debased and humiliating, and find the thought of violence against women arousing.

We’re entitled to find that an alarming and enraging prospect: we’re entitled to take strong exception to being co-opted as involuntary bit-part players in someone else’s kink. We’re entitled, too, to fear that some of those for whom the thought of inhabiting the role of an abused woman is erotic may also be aroused by swapping places and abusing an actual woman. The violently abusive language directed against prominent women who speak against gender ideology does nothing to reassure us.

As for me, not only does it do nothing to reassure me, it pisses me off and disgusts me and makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with people.

Torrey Peters has come to prominence by being the first transwoman to be longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In other words, Peters is a biological male who is now in the running to win a prize that was conceived – and presumably endowed – on the basis that it would be ring-fenced for women.

What made the difference was the sickeningly misogynist nature of some at least of Peters’ writing.

A transwoman who has previously published misogynist and abusive pornography which treats femaleness as inherently degrading has been shortlisted for a prestigious prize for women’s fiction, and that fact has been triumphantly reported in the national press.

Exactly so.

This, to my mind, is blatant power play. Women have been abused, bullied, no-platformed, hounded out of their jobs, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted for putting forward civilised measured arguments against self-identification, and for explaining patiently and politely why biological sex sometimes matters, and even for writing accurately on the relevant law. Most of the mainstream feminist organisations and too many prominent individual women have capitulated and are obediently trashing women’s protections and reciting the mantra “trans women are women.”

This outrage – and others like it – feels like part of a victory parade: the more flagrant the outrage that we can be terrorised into ignoring, the more complete – meek as abused women – our capitulation.

And so we persist.

They just will not report on this subject honestly.

A protest against trans health-care scheduled this weekend in downtown Vancouver has reignited a debate pitting the protection of vulnerable youth against the right to free speech.

It’s not a “protest against trans health-care.” Nobody is campaigning to prevent trans people from getting health care. The issue is not health care at all, it’s health-compromising body modifications to match the sex one is not. It’s also not a matter of trying to block the protection of vulnerable youth. Nobody is demanding the free speech right to keep vulnerable youth from being protected.

Vancouver social justice lawyer Adrienne Smith fears the April 10 event will include transphobic rhetoric that contributes to real-world harm, and believes police and city officials have the legal tools necessary to shut the protest down.

What about the real-world harm to women and girls that transphiliac rhetoric contributes to?

“It’s definitely a breach of public order to say hateful things that are likely to inflame others,” Smith said. “There’s no middle ground with hateful comments.”

There’s also no universal agreement on what “hateful” means in this context, to put it mildly. I consider “trans women are women!!” far more “hateful” than “trans women are men.”

Promotional material says the event is to “stop child-medical transition.” In other words, to protest transgender kids accessing gender-affirming health care, which can include puberty blockers and connecting them with trans-inclusive health care providers.

“Gender-affirming” health care isn’t health care at all. It cures no disease, it prevents no disease, it heals no wounds. Being female or male isn’t a disease or an injury.

Gender identity expression is also protected under both the B.C. and Canadian human rights codes, and a recent court ruling chastised a parent for improperly trying to interfere with a teen’s gender transition, which had been approved by a team of medical professionals.

That’s because Canada has frankly gone nuts on this subject.

Andy Lewis on confusion between ontology and epistemology of sex

Much confusion appears to exist in popular discussion about the nature of sex. This has political importance at the moment, most visibly in recognition of people with trans identities in law and society. Confusions abound around conflations of the terms sex and gender, but, most fundamentally, about what a sex is, and what it means for an organism, animal or human, to have a sex. What is a sexed body? How can we tell what sex an organism is? Clear responses to these questions are so often lacking. And without that, policy, law and social arrangements are likely to be incoherent and unjust.

Much of that lack of clarity is deliberate, with the goal of convincing everyone that sex is how you identify as opposed to what you are.

I do not believe for one moment we can help improve the lives of people with gender dysphoria and trans identities if we rob all the relevant words that might objective describe those experiences of any stable and coherent meaning. And even more so, and despite [Sarah] Hearne’s wish to help women, we cannot help women if we cannot say what the word “woman” means. So intent is this article in denying the link between being a woman and being female, that an extraordinary statement is made,

But we should also bear in mind that women aren’t discriminated against because they have vaginas, or breasts, or even because they have babies. Having babies makes it easier to discriminate against us, but the pay gap still exists for childfree women. It goes back to gender – the “socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities” that have led women to be less valued than men in society.

Just what is it then that creates injustice and discrimination for women? To what are these “socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities” applied to if it is not being female and the sex that bears children? No suggestion is made.

Which is absurd. Why do male animals of many species fight each other for access to ovulating females? It’s not because of “gender.” Why do dominant male animals of many species monopolize ovulating females and attack them if they stray? Not because of “gender.”

It is difficult to think of a greater conceptual and ideological muddle than this that exists amongst educated people. The Skeptic magazine as the “home of critical thinking” has obviously absolved itself of the need for thought here, or indeed the need for consistency. Not a few days before, the magazine published another article which apparently appeared to know full well why women are subject to discrimination based on their sex, and that fact they have vaginas, when they wrote an article entitled “Virginity testing is as unscientific as it is sexist, but will banning these tests prove effective?”

Virginity testing can be described as barbaric, monstrous, revolting, (insert your own virtue signalling qualifier here). It denies women autonomy over their bodies, reinforces gender inequality and outright devalues their humanity. But virginity testing is a symptom of the underlying root cause, which is the violation of human rights and the oppression of women.

But what’s the underlying root cause of that? Eggs. It’s all about the eggs.

We can be sure that no virginity testing is applied to anyone with a penis. One of these articles is horribly wrong. Or worse, the second is horrifically “transphobic”. But in this world of the denial of sex, consistency is not required. Pointing out incoherence and inconsistency is the only crime.

Maybe we should skip the shirts and posters with the definition of “woman” and just make it “eggs.”

McKinnon did his CNN bit. He’s highly excited.

CNN calls him Associate Professor of Philosophy at College of Charleston, which is misleading since he’s “quit” [or been told to quit or be fired, or just plain been fired] and will be gone as of May 15 and has been on sabbatical and then medical leave all this year.

His fans are gloating at his…erm…whatever this is.

Anyway. Point is, things have to be arranged to suit McKinnon. That’s all you need to understand about trans women in sport.

There you go. If transgender people had their own sports then McKinnon would literally have no one to race against, and we can’t have that, so all of women’s sport has to be wide open to takeover by men who say they are women. Mind you he doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t have people to race against, he just asserts it, as if it were a rule of sport that people who win literally have no one to compete against. He’s equating being the best in the field with being the only in the field, but that’s just silly. Literally.

Oh look, a provocation from Dawkins that doesn’t make me roll my eyes.

Been discussing for several years now. Progress slow.

It’s outrageous that children are being taught that in school, by the people delegated to educate them. Talk about violating human rights.

Originally a comment by latsot on The most extreme elements.

A compromise is supposed to be a mutual acceptance of terms. A deal. It’s expected that each party give something up to achieve a result beneficial to everyone. The phrase a “compromise on the rights of women” implies that it’s only women – as usual – who are expected to give anything up and what they’re expected to give up is – as usual – their rights.

This is not a compromise as the word is generally understood. Sullivan uses it to make disagreement seem unreasonable and himself the sole arbiter of reason.

That much is obvious. What’s not, apparently, is that negotiation isn’t really about making compromises, it’s about creating options. If there’s something one side won’t budge on, then chances are you – the negotiator – are thinking about the problem in the wrong way. Think about it differently and you might find that new options drop out for free.

That’s what’s happening in this whole argument and why compromise isn’t possible. While putative negotiators like Sullivan are (presumably) looking for a solution that respects the wants of trans people while preserving the rights of women and homosexuals, the most vocal TAs want something completely different: the domination of women. No compromise can be made because the destruction of women’s rights is what – for a variety of reasons – they want. The goalposts will shift alongside any and every compromise. We know this.

Wiser heads than Sullivan’s have been saying for decades that to negotiate our way through this mess we need to scrap gender altogether. Free options! Anyone can live and present however they like without taking away anyone’s rights! And anyone who disagrees can rightly be called a bigot! Everyone wins (except the bigots, and even they aren’t actually losing anything!)

This is negotiation: persuading societies to be more accepting of the non-conforming – something we’d all benefit from – and giving the non-conforming the option to dress and act how they like, with the usual caveats. We shouldn’t even be talking about how rights need to be compromised when that’s not only absolutely unacceptable as should be perfectly obvious to everyone but entirely unnecessary even given the wildly fluctuating demands of TAs.

It is still something of a surprise, even after all these years, that it’s the non-conforming who are proving the most resistant to persuasion. It’s not that I don’t know why, but it will still surprise me as long as I’m still capable of that emotion.

This kind of crap.

No you’re not, because I for one did say it and you didn’t and you can’t, because you don’t know where I am and because it’s hardly worth it to travel from wherever you are and because there’s no such thing as “period diarrhea” and because if there were you wouldn’t be keeping it in a tub now would you.

Anyway. This. This is why the whole idea is so fucked up. The belief that women can’t function in the world because [gasp] they have periods is one of the pretexts for subordinating and confining us for however many years it’s been. To see fetishizing fantasizing men claiming they’re menstruating and that as a result they’re alternately crying and raging is such a fucking insult, in so many dimensions. It’s as if rich white people liked to put on overalls and straw hats and claim to be picking cotton, while moaning about how their hands are bleeding. It’s also as if rich white people kept tweeting that they were made to sit in the back of the bus and turned away from the polling place because of their skin color.

“Woman” isn’t a costume or a game for men to play and trans women DON’T MENSTRUATE.

It takes my breath away sometimes to see with what relaxed confidence some men will tell women to compromise on our rights. Andrew Sullivan is one such man.

If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy. 

It’s so extreme of us to refuse offers of a compromise on the rights of women. It’s so extreme of us to think and argue that we get to have rights just like anyone else. It’s so extreme of us to grasp that it is of the essence of rights that they don’t admit of compromise. It’s so extreme of us to understand that our rights aren’t something Andrew Sullivan gets to whittle down, not even a “smidgen.”

However when he gets to the actual suggestions they turn out to be not compromises at all.

Defend the rights of both women and trans women. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is no conflict. In the few where there are, compromise. Women who have been abused by men and need a space free from any inkling of maleness and penises deserve such a space. Some shelters can include both trans women and women, but some shelters solely for women should absolutely have a right to exist.

Provided there are enough women-only shelters, I doubt that any of us crazy extreme feminists object to the existence of shelters for women and trans women (although we probably think they will in practice be just for trans women).

In prison, when we are dealing with criminals, trans women need to be housed separately to minimize the horrible abuse and rape many currently endure at the hands of men; but by the same token, women should not have to be imprisoned alongside trans women, for the same reason. We’re not talking about regular trans people here; we’re talking about criminals, some sex offenders. Separate facilities for trans people is the sanest and least dangerous option.

That’s not a compromise, that’s what we say. By all means separate trans women from men, just don’t dump them on women.

So that’s Andrew Sullivan for you. Call us extreme and then argue for what we argue for. Jerk.

This is very bad news: Amazon succeeded in blocking the union.

Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.

That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.

The union said it would challenge the results.

It accused Amazon of interfering with the right of employees to vote in a “free and fair election”, including by lying to staff about the implications of the vote in mandatory staff meetings and pushing the postal service to install a mailbox on company grounds in an effort to monitor the vote.

“Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to gaslight its own employees,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which organised the effort.

We live in corporate America. Amazon is one of the biggest regions in corporate America.

If successful, the union drive would have meant that Amazon, the second largest employer in the US, would have had to negotiate a contract with union officials on issues such as work rules and pay.

And now they don’t. Work rules will continue to suck.

Rebecca Givan, professor of labour studies at Rutgers University, said she was not surprised by Amazon won the battle, given the outsize power employers have to fight union efforts under current US law.

“Employers have a huge advantage in these situations,” she said. “They have almost unlimited money and almost unlimited access to the workers to bombard them with messages of anxiety and uncertainty and we see the result of that here.”

Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, a global federation of unions, said Amazon’s conduct during the campaign showed that US labour law was “broken”.

But we can all bask in the reflected light of Jeff Bezos’s billions, yeah?

“Rachel” McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy is working his final weeks at the College of Charleston and still finding time to abuse a student on Twitter. It’s almost as if he’s just not a very nice man.

Selina Soule was of course not suing to ban trans women from sport, she was suing to keep males from competing in women’s sport.

But also, this is a man in his late 30s, a professor, holding a first year student up to ridicule on Twitter, and lying about her in the process.

I guess Rhys McKinnon wants bullying a teenage girl on Twitter to be his legacy at 39. Yikes.

Yes definitely the fact that he never taught her himself personally in person in the flesh makes it fine for him to abuse her on Twitter. Totally fine. He has no kind of privilege or advantage over her whatsoever – not his job, not his sex, not his 20 more years, not his notoriety, not those massive shoulders, nothing.

Also, eat shit.

Apparently CNN thinks he’s just the guy they want to have a nice chat with.

Mm. Progressive.

More on “Jessica Marie” Hann from March 2019:

Desert Hot Springs, California. Jason Michael Hann was convicted of senselessly murdering his infant daughter and son, and abandoning their bodies in storage units. At the time of his arrest, he was found to be subjecting a third infant, his son, to life-threatening harm. Now on death row, the 45-year-old serial baby killer says he identifies as a woman, and is demanding that the state of California approve him for gender-affirming surgery to supplement the bras, makeup and hair-styling tools he is permitted to use.

In 1999, Mr Hann was living in Vermont with Krissy Lynn Werntz, the mother of his children, when he beat their infant son, two-month-old Jason, to death. Two years later, he killed the couple’s daughter, ten-month-old Montana, with a blow to the head while the family was residing in California.

The murders were discovered in 2002, a year after the murder of his daughter. Mr Hann had quit paying rent on a storage trailer in Arkansas in which he had stashed Montana’s small body. When the contents of the unit were auctioned off, the auction winner discovered the child’s remains, which were wrapped in plastic and duct tape and enclosed in a Tupperware-like storage container.

I guess that’s what you do when you kill your baby? A two month old baby doesn’t take up much space, so a plastic refrigerator box will be just fine. It’s a good idea to keep paying the storage fee though.

When law enforcement went to arrest the couple, who were now living in a motel in Portland, Maine, they discovered that Mr Hann and Ms Werntz had a one-month-old son who was already showing serious signs of abuse, including a dozen broken ribs, retinal hemorrhaging, bleeding under the skin and internal injuries.

A day after the couple’s arrest, authorities discovered Jason’s plastic-wrapped body in a storage unit in Lake Havasu, Arizona.

Whatever. Anyway, he’s a laydee now, so he gets to make a laydee do his strip searches. You can’t expect him to let a man do it can you?!

Man approves of man being nominated for women’s prize.

Easy for him. He’s a man, so he doesn’t get overlooked and forgotten and tucked away on the pink fluffy shelf the way women do.

He’s apologizing to himself in case any of the ugliness on Twitter has been directed at him. How sweet.

Oh yes, that’s so funny, women and little girls are so funny for being afraid of male strangers getting all kinky and ironic in their toilets and pageants.

Yeah, god damn it, open up the cruise industry again, because how could that possibly be at all risky in the midst of a pandemic?

The state of Florida is suing the Biden administration to reopen the cruise industry “immediately” and allow cruises to “resume safely,” Florida’s governor and attorney general announced Thursday.

“Safely” how? A cruise ship is a small place where thousands of people are packed together like tuna in a can.

“We don’t believe the federal government has the right to mothball a major industry for over a year based on very little evidence and very little data. And I think we have a good chance for success,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference at the Port of Miami.

What do we mean by “major industry” here? It’s certainly not major in the sense of crucial for life. It’s not comparable to agriculture and shipping of food and other necessities and health care and housing. It’s “major” in the sense that a lot of money flies around, and in the sense that the ships are hulking monstrosities that do environmental damage all over the planet, but other than that – I don’t see it.

DeSantis said that tens of thousands of Floridians depend on the “viability of the cruise industry for their livelihoods, for their jobs, their ability to feed their families.”

Just barely. Most of the jobs are shit jobs, featuring very hard work for very mediocre pay.