And then of course the replies. Always the replies.

Amatonormativity!

Hey, I don’t like peanut butter cookies, do I get a week?

They’re really doing this? It’s not a joke? I saw a mention of it earlier today but thought it was a joke. I guess it’s not a joke?

Really?

Tips? Support? Ally? Community?

They’re not joking?

Come on…

The Beeb gave the job of “analysis” on that Brighton NHS gendoo newtwoo wangwidge article to, of all people, Ben Hunte, their “LGBT correspondent” who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about women.

The hospital is currently receiving a huge amount of backlash following several misleading news reports and lots of misinformation on social media.

On Twitter, some have called the changes “misogynistic” or “an erasure of women”, and many have labelled them “ridiculous”.

Good start. Scare-quotes on misogyny; that’s Ben Hunte for you.

However, while some reports have stated that Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is entirely replacing any language related to womanhood, this is not the case.

We know, it’s women and blah blah blah, but we still object to that, because it is in fact women and only women. We get to object to being redefined as well as being erased.

One trans man told me he is “disappointed” that language meant to include him is so divisive, as “adding others should not subtract”.

Poor Ben Hunte, he couldn’t persuade more than one trans man to tell him that?

What are they putting in the drinking water in Brighton?

An NHS trust is to use “gender inclusive language” for its maternity services, including terms such as “chestfeeding” and “birthing parent”.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust is thought to be first in the UK to adopt the language in its internal communications and meetings.

Let’s hope it’s also the last, and that it changes its mind.

The trust said it recognised “challenges” gender identity can have on pregnancy, birth and feeding.

It recognized what? You mean it recognized the challenges “gender identity” can present for pregnant women and mothers?

Let’s assume that’s what they mean. So what’s the point? That women who have delusions of being men find it painful or disconcerting to experience pregnancy and giving birth and nursing a baby, and that therefore there is a need to change the language used by everyone so that women will be erased even from that whole creating human beings thing that is why women are so policed. A very small number of women with socially-fostered delusions, and bam, it’s time to pretend anyone of any sex can push out a baby.

Don’t worry, women, we’ll still mention you, but we’ll also pretend that people other than women can push out babies.

A document on the trust’s website lists new terms such as “breast/chestfeeding”, “mothers and birthing parents” and “father or second biological parent”.

And all of Brighton joins hands and dances together.

Ominous headline:

Scottish misogyny law must protect all women, says Helena Kennedy

On the one hand, duh, obviously it must. But this being now, of course on the other hand are we using “all women” to mean “including men”? We are, aren’t we. It wouldn’t be a news story otherwise.

There should be no limits of the types of women protected from hate crime says Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, as she begins her consideration of whether Scotland requires a standalone offence to tackle misogynist abuse.

Of course that’s right…unless by “types of women” you mean “especially men who call themselves women.” A man isn’t a type of woman. There are many types of rabbit, but a dog isn’t a type of rabbit. There are many types of tree, but a daffodil isn’t a tree.

Kennedy is immediately clear on how she would define the scope of specific protection she is charged with: “This is about hatred. Trans women, gay women, journalists, parliamentarians, all women get a whole lot of horrible stuff slung at them – disproportionately – and I’m not narrowing down those who receive it.”

Cute, but no. Trans women are men, and it’s not “narrowing down” the category “women” to say men are not women.

Describing it as an ambitious project to protect women, Kennedy and her six-person panel – “hand-picked by me” – have a year to resolve whether the creation of a standalone offence or adding sex to the list of other protected characteristics, such as race and religion, would better tackle misogynist abuse.

Why isn’t sex already a protected characteristic? I’ve never understood that.

The Scottish government’s own hate crime bill has attracted a huge amount of controversy and, while it was always the intention to examine this standalone option, the timing is far from ideal. As it stands, the bill that is passing through Holyrood criminalises, among other things, the stirring up of hatred against cross-dressing people, thereby protecting men who dress as women, but not the stirring up of hatred against women, while the decision on protections for women won’t be made until Kennedy’s working group reports back in 12 months’ time.

That’s how we know we’re women: we’re always an afterthought.

From Woman’s Place UK:

“Women saying no to males is ‘vileness & cruelty’, so says the man.

In Spain,an effigy of a woman who opposes men self ID’ing into our spaces was hung from a tree.

The attacks only come one side of this debate. It’s not coming from women, it’s coming from men who hate us saying no.”

“”This is an effigy of Carmen Calvo, Spain’s vice-president & Secretary of Equality at the socialist PSOE party. A Constitutional Law professor, she voiced legal concerns about “gender identity” policies…”

Raquel Rosario Sanchez

The boot on the neck, always.

Pliny’s latest:

Where that “being offensive is a crime” billboard came from:

So apparently they parked outside an Asda with their police state billboard, and had rewarding chats positive discussion with the shoppers – the essential shoppers. I suppose by “essential shoppers” they mean people who were at the shop for essential goods only, not anything frivolous – like having a chat about the illegality of being offensive.

Mostly just women, probably, essential shopping at Asda to pick up the beans on toast, the tea, the chip butties, the Weetabix. That’s good, because women are the people who don’t matter when it comes to being offensive, and the people who need to be punished when anyone says a man is not a woman. Women need the police showing up at their essential shopping, so that they the women can be told how to behave, and the police can feel they’ve made the world less offensive for The Trans Community.

This one had me holding my breath for a bit as I read. A council took funding away from a domestic violence shelter to give it to one “that caters for the needs of people with all the protected characteristics.” Sorry, wimz, you don’t have enough protected characteristics, bye!

Brighton and Hove City Council has defended the decision that cost a Brighton domestic violence charity a £5 million contract.

Senior councillors shared their shock when the situation was raised at a budget meeting.

And they promised to look into the decision that will lead to RISE being replaced by Victim Support and the social housing provider Stonewater.

RISE has run refuge and helpline services in Brighton and Hove for the past 26 years.

But now women escaping domestic violence will just have to live on the pier.

Today (Friday 19 February) councillors were told in a briefing that the bids to run the domestic violence and abuse support services were evaluated by officials from Brighton and Hove City Council as well as representatives of Sussex Police and the Office of the Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner.

The briefing said: “The specification for the recommissioning of the services in Brighton and Hove and East Sussex was informed by a comprehensive series of engagement events with multiple community and third sector stakeholders, including RISE and other incumbent providers, between January and October 2019.

“The engagement identified the need for a broader focus on inclusive service provision that caters for the needs of people with all the protected characteristics.

Because women just don’t matter enough on their own, you see. Some of them deserve the violence, and all of them could deserve the violence, so let’s stop funding them and instead fund more glamorous “protected characteristics.”

“Equalities impact assessments (EIAs) were carried out for the redesign of all services and identified the need for a broader focus on inclusive service provision that caters for the needs of people with all the protected characteristics.

“A commissioned report found that currently contracted domestic abuse services are viewed as much more accessible to women and that current onsite provision is women-only.

“The EIAs highlighted the need for more support for both heterosexual and gay male survivors and also highlighted the specific barriers to service experienced by the trans community, with trans survey respondents noting that the type of support they wanted was not available.

“The tender specification for community services was therefore intentionally non-gendered and inclusive to all survivors of domestic and sexual violence and abuse.”

But we were careful to take away the funding from the original group, that serves mostly women, because women don’t get to have funding mostly for women. Women don’t count. Please try to get that through your heads…in fact come over here, you need a slap.

Domestic abuse survivors put together a website and started a petition which has been signed by more than 20,000 people in just six days.

Gotta go, I have a petition to sign.

Speaking of the police…

There’s a lot to notice about that. First there’s the fact that women are excluded from the list, I guess because women are never the target of hatred or violence. Then there’s the muddle of starting with a set of people and then instantly switching to a list of categories. Then there’s the fact that pimps are sex workers so what kind of “crime against” pimps do Merseyside Police have in mind? Then there’s belief – what is a “crime against” belief?

The other side isn’t great either. “BEING OFFENSIVE IS AN OFFENCE.” Really? All “being offensive” is a police matter? Have they thought this through?

I don’t know. The cops have never cared this much about women or immigrants or poor people or workers or brown people…they’ve never gone parading around town towing billboards saying “touch not mine anointed.” It’s only pimps and men who claim to be women who really get their zeal for policing going, I guess.

When the police are in on the scam…

Ah yes the “habit” of thinking there are two genders and we know which is which. It’s just a silly frivolous thoughtless habit, like dropping your coat on the floor or whistling.

Hooray that we’re so enlightened now we’ve broken the habit, and are in a position to teach children “the right concepts” – that you’re a girl if you feel like a girl and if you don’t feel like a girl you’re a boy or nonbinary or one of leventy seven other flavors of GenDer.

More “include trans women in EVERYTHING” from Nora Imlau:

Damn that’s a huge claim. Even if you think trans women should be “included” in the definition most of the time you can still think there’s no need to “include” them in discussion of bluntly physical matters like pregnancy and childbirth and genital mutilation.

It’s so officious, this interrupting of women to shout “INCLUDE MEN WHO CALL THEMSELVES WOMEN” any time anyone has the temerity to talk about women. Who made Nora Imlau, or anyone else, the boss of what women get to talk about when we talk about women?

That just reads like parody, but the rest of her lecturing doesn’t, so I think she means that one literally. Who says it’s “correct” though? Who is the official in charge of all this? How does Imlau know what the official has ruled about how we’re required to talk about women and men who pretend to be women? How can the rest of us take that official to court?

Why? Why is it important to say that?

I can tell you why it’s important not to say that. It’s important because people “with a vulva” have historically been subordinated by people “with a penis,” and if we suddenly can’t call the first set “women” and the second set “men” then we can’t get rid of that subordination. If we’re forced to pretend that some men are women and some women are men, there can’t be any feminism any more.

Norm Allen on the Black Church:

Henry Louis Gates’ two-part, 4-hour documentary on the Black Church was featured on PBS February 16–17, 2021. It focused on the Black Church’s role in combating racism. While it is clear that churches (or rather, church people) have always had some positive aspects, the bottom line is that theistic churches have at their center the belief in a perfect God.

So the question that instantly comes to my mind – as it did every time I saw a teaser for Gates’s doc on PBS – is why this perfect God allowed slavery, or any kind of race-based hierarchy, or any kind of hierarchy period.

For all of the talk of the role of the Black Church in the struggle for civil rights, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I never attended a single church in which modern slavery or racism was even mentioned, let alone discussed in sermons…I have conducted no scholarly research to confirm or dismiss my personal observation. However, I have spoken with many other African Americans that attended church back then, and all of them have agreed with my observation. There are many Black scholars who have said that most Black churches either were not involved with the civil rights movement, or actually distrusted it. I suspect that this is true.

From what I’ve read a lot of Black churches looked very askance at King and the SCLC at first (and had no time for SNCC at all). That may have been more to do with fear and the realities of life in the south than with moral or religious “principles,” but it does hint that it wasn’t all a story of rights and freedom and rising up.

[M]ost Black churches have promoted the idea that only Christians can make it into Heaven. Obviously, religion evolves before our very eyes, and many, if not most, Black Christians have abandoned this bigoted religious belief. However, many still embrace it, and it is a part of history. A good historian should examine the belief and see how it has influenced people for better or worse.

Similarly, Black churches defend a belief in Hell and demons. The great 19th Century freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll once stated that “all the meanness of which the human heart is capable is summed up in that one word: Hell.” The belief in Hell and demons has led to botched “exorcisms,” false accusations against and ostracization of alleged sinners, literal witch hunts and much worse.

And it also leads to starkly binary views of people – saved or not saved, good or evil, one of us or cast out. None of that leads to a good place.

Finally, the documentary focused on the idea that without the Black Church, there would have been no real fight against slavery and racism. This is a case to be argued and not assumed. In any case, if not for White Christianity and the racism and slave system that it created, there would have been no need for the Black Church. As Gore Vidal noted, Christianity is a great religion for solving the problems that it creates.

It’s what con artists do – dump something on your carpet and then make a big show of cleaning it up with this miraculous device only $99.99 if you buy now.

I can’t vouch for the truth of this, couldn’t find anything else about it, but just in case it is true…

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Just like.

What a vast amount of time and attention and energy people are squandering on this absurd caricature of social justice, when they could be doing something useful.

The fact that women are forced to respond to this bullshit when they could be directing their efforts towards other necessary projects instead of having to fight rearguard actions to protect rights they thought they’d won already. Just like firefighters, whose job is already difficult and dangerous enough without the added distraction of false alarms and arson.

Or, to put it in a cruder way, TRAs are pissed off at campaigns against genital mutilation because that’s how you get trans people.

I think there’s more to it than that. I think that TAs cannot allow women to have anything for themselves. Third space bathroom provisions are not good enough. It’s access to female toilets or nothing. Rape and abuse shelters launched and run by and for women are expected to include TIMs. Again, no third space option is deemed acceptable. Why do the hard work of actually building up resources and institutions when you can force your way into those created by people whose identity you are now appropriating? Agreeing to a space for trans needs means admitting that TIMs are not actually women, and even though they are not, “forcing” them to admit this reality is apparently a non-starter. TIMs are to be “centered” in anything intended for women, or the righteous wrath of the woke is unleashed. Even LGB is not allowed to organize without the “T,” as such exclusion is “transphobic.” TIMs act as if they posess some sort of “All Access” pass that entitles them to glom onto whatever organization or entity that suits their fancy, demanding not only admittance, but redirection of the group’s mission to prioritize their needs above anyone elses’s, even at the expense ot that organization’s original base and target demographic (Hello Stonewall!). Resistance is Transphobic Violence.TIMs are not to be excluded by anyone from anything.

Ironically, it’s gender critical feminists in the UK, fighting the changes to the definition of “sex” being introduced to the Census, who are pointing out that the way this is being done will result in a loss of vitally important information that would be useful to the trans community. By making it impossible to tell how many trans people there are, it is impossible to track how they are faring when it comes to discrimination, employment, medical care, housing, etc. The pressure group that has succesfully orchestrated this back-room change in how the sex question is being asked, either did not think this through, or thought that being able to tick a box on the census offers is just too big a hit of “validation” and “affirmation” for AGPs to resist. Again, “inclusion” above all. This scorched earth policy of insisting on the primacy of validation, confirmation, and forcing others to share in their fantasy results in the rejection of genuine solutions that would actually benefit the health, safety, and well-being of trans people.

But…

But.

But why should a woman who campaigns against female genital mutilation have to “include” men who identify as women? However they identify, they can’t possibly experience FGM, so why should Hibo Wardere include them in her work? Her work is not personally relevant to them (even if they do have enough concern for others to care about the issue, which all too many trans women seem not to have), so what would be the point? Even if you buy into the whole trans women are women fantasy, they still don’t experience FGM, so can they really not just leave this one alone? Can their “allies” like Nora Imlau here leave this one alone?

And how can everyone “accept that trans women are women just like cis women” when in the case of FGM that is simply obviously false? Even if you buy into the whole woman’s brain in a man’s body fantasy, trans women are still not just like “cis” women in the sense of having the same kind of genitalia.

What a vast amount of time and attention and energy people are squandering on this absurd caricature of social justice, when they could be doing something useful.

Billy Bragg, defender of the downtrodden.

How dare women take a stance? Their taking a stance proves that they are powerful and not downtrodden in any way. Bitches.

How dare women make statements that contradict the stances of their employers?! Obviously employers get to dictate what their workers can say, and if the workers disobey, obviously they should be fired or have their contracts canceled! That’s the progressive view and always has been!

Why?

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has said flags in the state will fly at half-staff for Rush Limbaugh, the hard-right talk radio host who died this week aged 70.

Is that a thing? Lowering flags for random entertainers?

DeSantis, a controversial governor known to some as a “mini-Trump” and widely thought to have presidential ambitions, called Limbaugh a friend.

What’s that got to do with anything? Do governors usually get to lower flags for their friends? I thought flag-lowering was meant to be an exceptional thing with some connection to public service.

Appearing with James Golden, longtime producer to the leading “shock jock”, the governor told reporters: “When there’s things of this magnitude, once the date of interment for Rush is announced, we’re going to be lowering the flags to half staff.”

What magnitude? He was a rude angry right-wing hack. A talented hack, maybe, but still a hack.

Golden called him “a second-generation founding father”.

“The seeds that he planted,” he said, “are going to sprout in America and continue to grow for generations and generations to come, and America will be great again, not just because of Rush, [but] because of men like – and women – but men like this governor.”

What seeds are those? The seeds of loud angry hostility to and contempt for anyone who isn’t a loud angry hostile white guy?

DeSantis has previously ordered flags to be at half-staff to honour law enforcement officers killed on duty, members of the US navy killed in a mass shooting in Pensacola and the liberal supreme court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others.

Those all seem appropriate. A venomous talk radio star, not so much.

While he has a minute.

It’s not a “handout” though to get electricity and water that you pay for. Public utilities aren’t “handouts,” they’re what it says on the tin. Water, sewer systems, garbage removal, recycling, electricity – we pay for them.

I also wonder how he thinks people are supposed to “think outside the box” to “supply water” on their own. Outside the box is likely to kill you, especially when you can’t boil anything because the power is out.

Word is he has decided to stop being mayor of Colorado City, Texas.