Trump and co are openly moving to steal the election. This is a violation of several laws.

The head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union alleged Tuesday that mail sorting machines are “being removed” from Post Offices in her state due to new policies imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump whose operational changes have resulted in dramatic mail slowdowns across the nation.

Mail sorting machines are being removed. What will that do? Sabotage voting by mail, of course.

Asked by NPR‘s Noel King whether she has felt the impact of DeJoy’s changes, Iowa Postal Workers Union President Kimberly Karol—a 30-year Postal Service veteran—answered in the affirmative, saying “mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we’re seeing equipment being removed.”

Karol went on to specify that “equipment that we use to process mail for delivery”—including sorting machines—is being removed from Postal Service facilities in Iowa as DeJoy rushes ahead with policies that, according to critics, are sabotaging the Postal Service’s day-to-day operations less than 90 days before an election that could hinge on mail-in ballots.

Observers reacted with alarm to Karol’s comments, viewing them as further confirmation that DeJoy is deliberately attempting to damage the Postal Service with the goal of helping Trump win reelection in November.

Ya think? What else would removal of sorting machines be?

Karol’s remarks come as members of Congress and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans are demanding DeJoy’s immediate resignation or removal in the wake of his displacement of nearly two dozen top Postal Service officials late last week—a major leadership overhaul that critics dubbed a “Friday Night Massacre.”

According to internal Postal Service memos obtained by Reuters, DeJoy—a former logistics executive with tens of millions invested in USPS competitors—was aware his operational changes would lead to mail delays. As Reuters reported:

The reorganization, introduced in July, has resulted in thousands of delayed letters in southern Maine, as delivery drivers follow a new directive to leave on time, even if the mail has not been loaded.

Delays have also been reported in at least 18 other states, according to media reports.

“One aspect of these changes that may be difficult for employees is that—temporarily—we may see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor or docks,” says one memo, dated July 10. The plan hopes to eliminate 64 million working hours nationally to reduce personnel costs, according to another memo.

And to steal the election and to destroy the Postal Service so that the for-profit outfits can make more profit.

In a statement over the weekend, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) warned that Dejoy’s “nefarious collective efforts will suppress millions of mail-in ballots and threaten the voting rights of millions of Americans, setting the stage for breach of our Constitution.”

“It is imperative that we remove him from his post,” said DeFazio, “and immediately replace him with an experienced leader who is committed to sustaining a critical service for all Americans.”

Do it.

Stonewall wants us to know that oh yes it definitely does support the swift and easy prescription of puberty blockers.

Sterility and arrested brain development, rock on!

Trump is telling us right out in the open that he’s carefully kneecapping our ability to vote by mail, i.e. rigging the election so that he can keep destroying everything while piling up more money for himself.

Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network on Thursday morning, Trump appeared to confirm that he opposes Democrats’ proposed funding for mail-in balloting and the U.S. Postal Service in order to make it more difficult to expand voting by mail.

“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

And he doesn’t want “them” to have it because “they” will vote his sorry ass back to Queens.

Trump also alluded to this idea at a news conference on Wednesday evening, noting that Democrats are now asking for $3.5 billion for universal mail-in voting and an additional $25 billion for the Postal Service.

“They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Trump said. “Are they going to do it even if they don’t have the money?”

He added: “But therefore they don’t have it. They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in votes.”

And: “Therefore, they can’t do the universal mail-in vote. It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”

He does love to repeat himself.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last year suggested that Democrats’ proposal to make Election Day a federal holiday — something that would logically increase turnout — was “a power grab that’s smelling more and more like exactly what it is.”

“A power grab,” meaning grabbing the power of getting elected via full voting rights. Republicans want to make it difficult to vote – so what does that tell you? Who is really “grabbing” power here? Isn’t it more of a “grab” to suppress the vote among people who would vote you out?

So of course we get this:

Thanks What a Maroon for alerting us to that.

“So what?!” says Tucker Carlson in fake fox anger.

Margaret Sullivan in the Post:

Not only did Carlson mispronounce it, but when a guest went out of his way to politely correct him, Carlson had one of his trademark fits of pique.

The exchange went like this:

“Tucker, can I just say one thing?” said Richard Goodstein, an adviser to Democratic campaigns.

Carlson: “Of course.”

Goodstein: “Because this will serve you and your fellow hosts on Fox. Her name is pronounced ‘comma’ — like the punctuation mark — ‘la.’ Comma-la.”

He went on: “Seriously, I’ve heard every sort of bastardization of her —,” and then Carlson broke in: “Okay, so what?”

With his familiar mocking laugh, Carlson demanded to know what difference it made if he pronounced it KAM-a-la, with the first syllable like “camera.” Or Ka-MILL-a. Or, properly, Comma-la.

The difference it makes is it’s just basic. Get people’s names right. Oh and while we’re at it, get the adjectival form right too – it’s not “Democrat party” and “Democrat senator,” the adjective is Democratic. British news media please note.

In Carlson’s case, he used his guest’s correction to begin one of his typical rants. Making a fuss over her name, he argued, only proves how Democrats don’t want Harris challenged in any way at any time.

You don’t “challenge” political figures by getting their names wrong. You do it by making substantive criticisms of their actions and/or policies – not their looks, not their clothes, not their accessories: their actions and/or policies. You can do that and pronounce their names correctly both at once.

Of course Trump is calling Kamala Harris the N word.

President Trump has called magazines, pharmaceutical advertisements and questions “nasty.” He has called rumors, numbers and one unnamed TV columnist who gave “The Apprentice” a bad review “nasty.” He has called men “nasty,” and he has called women “nasty.”

So of course he wasted no time in using it on a woman who is more intelligent and impressive than he is.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the president described Harris’s questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as “extraordinarily nasty” — “nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing.” He also said she was “the meanest” and “the most horrible” in pressing Kavanaugh. And Trump said her debate stage attacks against Biden during the Democratic primaries were “very, very nasty.”

Which, as I’ve mentioned before, is just absurd coming from the most foul-mouthed abusive insulting vulgar piece of shit who’s ever polluted the Oval Office by breathing in it.

Calling a woman nasty, say many experts and women in politics, is another way to deliberately dismiss and demean female politicians.

“It really has become coded language for a woman, and it tries to put her in a place that is unacceptable to society,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women across the country. “Our society allows for poor behavior by men but has little acceptance for anything but perfection by women, and so a term like ‘nasty’ really is just coded language, at least for a certain piece of the population.”

It’s also belittling though. It sounds feeble; mean but feeble. Especially in Trump’s Queens accent. (That’s me being nassssty.)

Aparna Thomas, a professor of politics and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Cornell College in Iowa, said the descriptor is “dismissive” and signifies that “women are not to be taken seriously.” She said it was significant that “nasty” was the inaugural attack Trump hurled at Harris once she became Biden’s running mate.

“That’s the first thing that comes to the president’s mind, is that she’s to be dismissed and that she’s a nasty woman,” Thomas said. “We’re now back to 2016, where we have a vice-presidential candidate who is female and is still being judged by a different set of standards set by men.”

We never left it.

Jonathan Chait wrote a thing in New York magazine last month, about anti-racism training and some eccentric ideas some such trainers (or entrepreneurs) have embraced. In Googling for more I saw that National Review and Don Junior were also interested, so keep that in mind – but even National Review and Don Junior aren’t wrong about everything. (Nearly everything, in Junior’s case, but not quite everything.)

The star of anti-racism training is Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame. What Chait focuses on is the whiteness studies part.

The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation. The museum’s page summarizes what it calls “white culture” in this astonishing graphic:

What’s the problem? The problem is ascribing things like “emphasis on scientific method” to whiteness ffs! Bam, with one blow of their fist they declare black people uninterested in science. That will work out well! I guess Katherine Johnson was just mistakenly trying to be “white” with all that math skill she had? Neil Tyson should have played basketball instead?

And by the way this dreck was created by white people, for…anti-racism training. What would pro-racism training look like?

Also the graphic is full of baby talk. In the second item on the list, Family Structure, it says “father, mother, 2.3 children is the ideal social unit.” It is? White people think 2.3 children is the ideal? What do they do with the .3 of a child?

It’s confused, it’s dopy, it’s talking about different things at different times, it’s a grab bag, it’s silly. The section labeled “history” – what is that even supposed to mean? History as taught in school, history as scholarship, history as museum gift shops, what? And it’s not true.

But the worst part is including various instrumental virtues and treating them as part of whiteness when what they are part of is what it takes to get shit done. Oh no, planning for the future! Paying attention to time! How hideously pale, everyone must do the opposite!

Chait comments:

“White” values include things like “objective, rational thinking”; “cause and effect relationships”; “hard work is the key to success”; “plan for the future”; and “delayed gratification.” The source for this chart is another, less-artistic chart written by Judith Katz in 1990. Katz has a doctorate in education and moved into the corporate consulting world in 1985, where, according to her résumé, she has “led many transformational change initiatives.” It is not clear what in Katz’s field of study allowed her to establish such sweeping conclusions about the innate culture of white people versus other groups.

Also: she is white. It’s almost as if it’s a cunning plan by actual racists.

The African-American History Museum took the page down after all this hostile attention. Good move.

Meanwhile we mustn’t lose sight of the filthy corruption of “senior adviser” Ivanka Trump. (Her brothers are just as filthy but they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House, they don’t insert themselves into conversations among heads of state at international meetings, they don’t take Daddy’s place at the table at international meetings, they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House.)

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, earned at least $36 million in income outside their White House roles in 2019, according to financial disclosure forms released on Friday. 

The income, first reported by The Washington Post, is from the businesses, properties, and other assets owned by the couple.

“Conflicts of interest?” [giggle, simper] “What are those?”

According to the Post, the amount is about $7 million higher than their earnings in 2018, and the real amount may be as high as $157 million, as the Office for Government Ethics does not require officials to submit exact but only approximate income figures. 

…

Ivanka Trump closed her fashion business in 2018, a year after after taking a role in the White House. The business had been subjected to a boycott campaign when she initially refused to close it despite working in a government role. She continues to own a stake in her father’s business, the Trump Organization, and has a wide range of other assets.

According to the disclosure forms filed to the Office of Government Ethics, she received $4 million in income from the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC.   

The one that foreign officials and others seeking favors from Trump lavish money on. Massive throbbing conflict of interest.

Kushner decided earlier this year not to divest of stocks in a real estate tech start-up, Cadre, he co-founded, despite being advised by government ethics lawyers to do so, government ethics nonprofit CREW reported in July. 

The company has received $90 million in investment from foreign sources, according to The Guardian. 

“That’s unethical, Junior.”

“MmmmmmI don’t care, gonna keep it anyway.”

Filthy filthy filthy.

Donnie Disaster has added a quack to his pandemic team. Donnie D introduced him yesterday at the “press briefing.”

The man Trump was pointing to was Dr. Scott Atlas, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who frequently appears on Fox News and has advised Republicans in the past. And crucially, unlike the government’s medical experts who have advised Trump until now, has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to Trump’s — including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as “hysteria” and pushing for the resumption of college sports.

Just what we need – even more murderous denialism about the pandemic.

“He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus,” Trump said. “And he has many great ideas. And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.”

“And and and he thinks I’m a really good boy and and he said I could have ice cream and and and you’re not the boss of me shut up bang bang I have to go potty now.”

Although Monday was Trump’s first public introduction of Atlas, multiple sources with knowledge of the relationship told CNN that Atlas has been informally advising Trump for weeks. Trump first noticed Atlas on Fox News, where he asserted it doesn’t matter “how many cases” there are in the US, wrongly claimed those under 18 years old have “essentially no risk of dying,” implied teachers who are at high risk for contracting Covid-19 should “know how to protect themselves,” baselessly claimed “children almost never transmit the disease” and without evidence blamed a rise in cases in southern states on protests and border crossings.

A reckless hack, in other words. Fabulous. Trump has almost 3 months left to kill us all; do you think he can manage it? (He has another almost 3 after that but I think lame-duck killing is a little more difficult.)

Mermaids? Mermaids who? I think you must have the wrong number.

Maybe the same reason the BBC did.

Along with the non-stop bullying of women.

Oh have they now.

The BBC has quietly dropped four LGBT+ charities from an information page for transgender people seeking support.

The LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, The Gender Trust, and The Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) are all registered British charities that provide vital support and advice for trans, non-binary and gender-questioning people.

“Support” in the form of eager encouragement of delusional thinking.

As recently as June 29, they were all listed on a page on the BBC website called “Information and Support: Gender Identity”.

Pages such as this are often linked to under BBC articles or videos covering topics people may need further support or information about, including gender identity, sexual or mental health, and addiction issues.

But signposting to the four charities on the transgender support page has been stripped away with no explanation, leaving behind no information for those seeking help.

Innnnteresting. The truth is emerging so the BBC is carefully backing away?

Mermaids, a charity that supports trans and gender-questioning children and their families, said it was concerned to learn that the BBC had removed trans charities from its trans help page, and called for an immediate explanation.

Yes WHY is the BBC no longer sending people to “charities” that encourage mutilation and/or life on puberty blockers?

Before and after:

Mermaids had better start looking for lawyers.

From The Australian:

Australia’s psychiatrists have been urged to be very cautious about giving official backing to gender clinic treatments for under-18s after an international scandal over false claims of mental health benefits for transgender surgery.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists should be “extremely careful” before endorsing so-called “gender affirming” hormonal treatment and surgery for minors, according to Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists whose members look after patients in the private and public sector.

In other words don’t cut crucial bits off people or give them dangerous hormones, or both, unless you’re very sure it will be beneficial. (Shorter: first, do no harm.) You’d think that would be self-evident, but it hasn’t been.

The country’s biggest gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne has asked for more public money to start double mastectomies on girls under 17 who identify as male, with director Michelle Telfer claiming in July 2019 that “chest reconstructive surgery” improves mental health.

Chest reconstructive surgery probably does improve mental health where it’s needed, but the issue here is cutting healthy breasts off.

This month, the prestigious Journal of American Psychiatry had to publish an extraordinary correction to an October 2019 US-Swedish paper hailed as a global breakthrough in a field where even gender affirming clinicians admit the evidence is short-term and low-quality.

The peer-reviewed paper was the first to use official Swedish data, which is unusually comprehensive, to claim that surgery such as mastectomy or genital reconstruction reduced the need for mental health treatment by 8 per cent a year over the ensuing decade.

“No longer can we say that we lack high-quality evidence of the benefits of providing gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them,” said study co-author John Pachankis, who directs the LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative at Yale University.

Newsweek touted the finding and claimed that scientists said “such (surgical) interventions must be as easy as possible to access.” Yeah deffo, girls should be able to walk in off the street and get their breasts lopped off just by asking. What could go wrong?

On August 1, the American journal published a correction, an editorial and letters from a dozen psychiatrists, clinicians and researchers in four countries identifying multiple flaws in the 2019 paper, with the conclusion that the data showed no improvement in mental health after surgery or hormonal treatment.

Oops. Sorry, everyone who had bits cut off in the intervening ten months.

“It has great international significance,” said Paul McHugh, one of America’s most distinguished practitioners, former chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and co-author of one of the letters run by the journal.

He said the correction would make gender affirming advocates “a lot more cautious” when making scientific claims because “they’ll know people are watching”.

“Peer review is not going to God, it’s going to the common thought of the day, which in psychiatry is usually good, but every 10-15 years it gets lost in some misadventure,” Professor McHugh told The Australian.

He predicted the excesses of gender affirming treatment — like the 1990s “enthusiasm” over repressed memory and multiple personality — would be reined in by the courts, not by the psychiatric profession.

That 1990s enthusiasm is what this cult always reminds me of. It’s just as enthusiastic, in fact more so, and it’s even more wacko.

Media outlets which reported the 2019 study’s result have yet to cover the journal’s correction.

Too busy reporting on the evil doings of TERFs.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

The Kamala Harris news has given me a second wind so I’ll go back to TERF wars an intro for a bit.

The next theme, after the “cis women and white fragility” bullshit, is “what do they mean it’s an ideology??”

The language of ‘gender ideology’ originates in anti-feminist and anti-trans discourses among right-wing Christians, with the Catholic Church acting as a major nucleating agent (Careaga-Pérez, 2016; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). In the last decade the concept has been increasingly adopted by far-right organisations and politicians in numerous American, European and African states. They position gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’, as represented by multinational corporations and international bodies such as the United Nations…

Here they’re mashing together lesbian and gay rights with trans activism, and calling it “gender egalitarianism” – but that’s not what it is. It wouldn’t be “racial egalitarianism” for white people to insist they “identify as” black and then bully the crap out of any black people who didn’t agree. That would be an insult, and nothing to do with egalitarianism. Same with the “gender is realer than sex” move.

Yet, what is actually meant by ‘gender ideology’ (along with anti-feminist uses of terms such as ‘genderism’ and ‘gender theory’) has not been clearly defined: as Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff (2018, p. 799) argue, ‘these terms have become empty signifiers, flexible synonyms for demoralization, abortion, non-normative sexuality, and sex confusion’.

Now they’re mixing it up with feminism. No, “gender ideology” or “trans ideology” is nothing to do with abortion, it’s to do with men insisting, with menaces, that they can become women just by saying so, and that women have to embrace them as such or be punished to the fullest extent of the bully’s energy.

Ultimately, the growing social acceptance of trans and non-binary people has challenged immutable, biologically derived conceptualisations of both ‘femaleness’ and ‘womanhood’.

No it hasn’t. It’s feminism that does that. Trans ideology is undoing the work of feminism, not continuing it.

About that word “TERF” – it’s a tool of the powerless.

Certainly, TERF (like ‘cis’) is often used in angry commentaries online by both cis and trans feminists, either as an accusation (e.g. ‘you’re a TERF’) or an insult (e.g. ‘fuck off TERF’). Yet, it is important to understand and account for the power dynamic at play here. In examples such as those above, members of a marginalised group and their allies seek to identify, and express anger or frustration at, a harmful ideology that is promoted primarily by and in the interests of those who are systemically privileged as cis…

Definitely. Men who say they are women are the tragic marginalised group, persecuted by the domineering all-powerful women, as has been true since the beginning of time. Also “TERF” is not a slur, because TERFs choose to be TERFs.

This does not, however, mean that ‘TERF’ actually functions as a slur. Christopher Davis and Elin McCready (2020), for example, have argued that while the acronym can be used to denigrate a particular group, this group is defined by chosen ideology rather than an intrinsic property (in contrast to trans people for instance, or women). It is this denigration of a group defined by an intrinsic property that is necessary to constitute a slur. Moreover, in the case of ‘TERF’ the act of denigration does not function to subordinate within some structure of power relations (in contrast to acts such as misgendering, and sexist slurs such as ‘bitch’).

These three goons are sociologists, don’t forget. Marvelous what a grasp they have of power relations, isn’t it.

Furthermore gender critical feminists just don’t get it.

As noted above, ‘gender critical’ feminists’ arguments often run against (and ignore) decades of feminist theorising on the ontological and epistemic status of ‘womanhood’ and ‘femaleness’ (see also Hines, 2019). Gender scholars (e.g. Butler, 1990; Laqueur, 1990; Snorton, 2017; Warren, 2017) have shown how biological conceptualisations of sex are mediated by wider gendered as well as colonial and racialised norms that direct the social positions ascribed to different women and men, including one’s ability to claim a position as a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ in the first place. Western colonial narratives have not only constituted colonised racialised subjects as less than human, but also framed ‘womanhood’ and ‘manhood’ (defined in terms of white, European heteronorms) as characteristic of human culture, which colonised subjects were seen as unable to replicate due to their ‘primitive’ status. They thus remained female and male, at best, but were not granted the status of women and men (McClintock, 2013).

Therefore, Caitlyn Jenner really is a woman so shut up.

Then they explain away the issue of men taking over women’s sport to their own satisfaction.

 Sport regulators have a long history of anti-feminist stances and excluding women, including via implicitly ascribing inferiority to (all) women’s bodies for over a century (Erikainen, 2020). This exclusion has, however, disproportionately impacted racialised women from the Global South, in many ways because of the enduring discourses in the West that pre-position racialised (and especially Black) women and their bodies as unfeminine, failing to manifest normative ‘womanhood’ of the Western, white and middle-class form (Erikainen, 2020). Despite this, an alliance has emerged between powerful sport governing bodies and some ‘gender critical’ women’s rights advocates. The effect is that new iterations of older, gendered as well as racialised boundaries between ‘biological’ femaleness and ‘social’ womanhood are being drawn. Yet, it is women’s rights advocates such as Coleman herself who erase a deeply significant reality that has long been recognised in feminist (and especially Black feminist) politics: there is no single shared experience of female embodiment or ‘womanhood’ (Combahee River Collective, 1983; Koyama, this collection) – and neither chromosomes nor hormones ‘determine’ sex (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).

So it’s fine for a white man to steal a wrestling medal from a Samoan woman.

Sums it all up if you ask me.

Trump can barely get the words out.

He also says Harris was “very disrespectful” to Biden. Trump says that. Trump is the rudest person on the planet, and he says that. Also…

Good news I think, Biden’s choice. He’s such a lousy choice himself, he needs an exciting companion on the ticket. I know people have qualms about some of Harris’s work as a prosecutor, but I think she’ll rock it anyway.

Once a rival for the top job, the California senator of Indian-Jamaican heritage had long been considered the front-runner for the number two slot.

The former California attorney general has been urging police reform amid nationwide anti-racism protests.

…

Mr Biden had faced mounting calls to pick a black woman as his running mate in recent months as the nation was convulsed by social unrest over racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans, a key voting bloc to the Democratic Party.

What a good thing there were several highly qualified black women with relevant experience to choose from.

I’m chuffed. It’s nice to have a bit of good news for a change.

Now that I’ve calmed down a little I’ll tackle another chunk of Terfwarsanintro.

By positioning (cis, white) ‘females’ as a category uniquely vulnerable to the threat of ‘male’ violence (and especially ‘biological’ male sexual violence), trans-exclusionary arguments around toilet access – including those advanced by self-proclaimed feminist groups – lend support to the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men).

These discourses have racist undertones, as the implicit whiteness of the women who are the subject of protection means that racialised and especially Black women and non-binary people are more likely to be considered dangerously masculine (Patel, 2017).

It would be funny if it weren’t so infuriating, the sleight of hand of it. They arbitrarily slap down this “(white)” card and then use it for yet more arbitrary “implicit” bullshit – they build assumption on assumption on assumption, none of it backed up by anything more than parentheses or the word “implicit.” It’s such obvious bullshit. “The implicit whiteness of the women” – but who says the whiteness is implicit?? Or explicit or relevant at all? And by the way what color are you?

Moreover, discourses that position trans women and non-binary people as a ‘threat’ to cis women elude how (white) cis women’s ability to claim a position of vulnerability in this context is, itself, a reflection of the power that (white) cis women have over trans women (as well as racialised subjects of all genders).

Karen, I tell you. Karen Karen Karen. No other argument is needed.

Women don’t have power over men. Women don’t rape men, women don’t assault men in the street, women don’t kill men and then get away with it because they call it “rough sex.” Women as a class don’t have power over men as a class. Women as a class therefore don’t have power over trans women as a class (if trans women even are a class).

One’s ability to be recognised or awarded a position as ‘vulnerable’ is conditioned by whiteness and gender normativity.

Yes it’s such a privilege to be (and thus “awarded a position as”) vulnerable. The stats on violence against women make our favorite bedtime reading.

I think that’ll be enough.

David Kaufman in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago:

Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.

By “create a family” he doesn’t mean adoption or step-parenthood, he means gestation. But of course the ability to gestate is determined by biology and by sex (not gender). It’s not something men can do. One can “envision a future” in which that’s not the case all one likes, but as of now that’s how it is. People burble about “uterus transplants” but it’s not that simple, to put it mildly.

“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers L.G.B.T.s face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”

Like for instance renting women.

Mr. Poole-Dayan and others believe infertility should not be defined as a physical condition but a social one. They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making.

Rather, their specific life circumstances, like being a man with a same-sex partner, have rendered them unable to conceive or carry a child to term without medical intervention. A category of “social infertility” would provide those biologically unable to form families with the legal and medical mechanisms to do so.

Er, no. Men are unable to conceive or carry a child to term no matter what. It’s not only if they have a same-sex partner, it’s no matter what partner they have – men don’t do the conceiving and carrying part. They can’t. This valuable talent and arduous labor is something only women can do, which is, ironically, probably the foundational reason for male dominance. “I need her to do this thing for me so I gotta control her or else.”

Fertility equality activists are asking, at a minimum, for insurance companies to cover reproductive procedures like sperm retrieval, egg donation and embryo creation for all prospective parents, including gay couples who use surrogates. Ideally, activists would also like to see insurance cover embryo transfers and surrogacy fees. This would include gay men who would transfer benefits directly to their surrogate.

Their rented woman’s body.

“But what about gay men?” Captain Aguilera said. “Why aren’t we on equal footing? The whole process made me feel like giving up my dream of becoming a parent.”

Gay men aren’t on equal footing because they are men – men don’t have the bodies that gestate babies.

Women are not machines to rent for baby-making purposes.

Reading the intro part 2.

 Organisations resisting self-determination discursively position it as ‘dangerous’, arguing that it enables ‘men’ (a category frequently presumed to encompass trans women and non-binary people assigned male at birth) unfettered access to women-only spaces. Trans people and allies often describe proponents of this approach as ‘TERFs’ because they tend to support trans women’s/girls’ exclusion from spaces such as women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, shelters and feminist groups.

That’s because trans women and girls are not literally women and girls, they are men and boys who have adopted the label “trans.” The label is just a label. It’s just a word. It’s not magic. I could say I’m a trans house or giraffe or oak tree, and I wouldn’t literally be any of those things. Feminist women want to “exclude” male people from women’s shelters and rape crisis centers because they are male people, whatever label they apply to themselves. This isn’t such an eccentric view that it requires a pejorative name.

Proponents of anti-trans ‘bathroom bills’ argued that they were required to protect the safety of cis⁴ women, who could supposedly become victims of harm committed by trans women and non-binary people, who, in turn, were (implicitly or explicitly) positioned as ‘men’ who ‘identify as’ women.

The scorn in “supposedly” is interesting. Do the authors genuinely think that trans women can’t possibly ever do harm to women in private closed spaces? If so I have to wonder how they line that up with the known facts.

Yet, this notion of toilet ‘safety’ is part of a wider protectionist politics around (cis) women’s bodies that function to protect idealised notions of white female vulnerability (Patel, 2017; see also Koyama, this collection).

White? What’s “white” doing there? Nothing; it’s just another rock to throw.

The cultural positioning of trans women as dangerous to cis women relies on gendered conceptualisations of (cis, implicitly white) women as necessarily fragile in relation to (cis) men, who in turn are conceptualised as having superior physical (and sexual) prowess.

Oh implicitly white – of course. Implicitly according to whom? Well, the person who typed the word, and what more do you want?! This is top professional academic sociology right here so have some respect. Karens, white fragility, implicitly white, cis, boop boop beep beep.

Also, by the way, kindly just throw overboard everything we’ve ever known about male strength compared to female strength and the connection to sexual violence – that is all ancient cis history now…except when we’re talking about Jeffrey Epstein, at which point the clock reverses for as long as it takes.

By positioning (cis, white) ‘females’ as a category uniquely vulnerable to the threat of ‘male’ violence (and especially ‘biological’ male sexual violence), trans-exclusionary arguments around toilet access – including those advanced by self-proclaimed feminist groups – lend support to the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men).

Just look at that shit. The parenthetical (white)s proliferate like fleas on a sweaty dog. This, my friends, this is appropriation – theft of anti-racism for the purpose of throwing shit at feminist women who won’t obey the orders to call men “women.”

It’s pissed me off enough that I’m pausing it for now.

Reading the intro part one.

Intense debates over trans issues, feminism, anti-trans ideologies, and the very language employed by various agents in these debates are not just terminological disputes or about how sex and gender should be conceptualised. They are also debates about information, and how people relate to it in a time of information overload; they are debates about truth, and how people relate to truth in a ‘post-truth era’. The trans/feminist conflicts we refer to as the ‘TERF wars’ reflect the current conditions of our time in which public discourse is dominated by political polarisation, deepened by the proliferation of misinformation and distrust in ‘experts’ whose knowledge may not speak to individuals’ cultural common sense. These are contemporary phenomena with deep historical roots, which must be interrogated to make sense of the current landscape.

Analyses of trans-exclusionary rhetoric provide an important contribution to sociology. This is not only because they offer an insight into the production of ideologically ossified, anti-evidential politics (including within academic environments), but also because of what can be learned about power relations. Questions of whose voices are heard, who is found to be convincing, what is considered a ‘reasonable concern’ and by who, and how these discourses impact marginalised groups are key elements of sociological enquiry.

So we can see how this is going to go. We already knew, thanks to the title of the intro for a start, but this makes it all that much clearer. It’s the Bad feminists – the TERFS as they so technically put it – who use rhetoric, which we the Good feminists will analyse from our position of goodness and correctitude. We the Good feminists of course don’t use rhetoric, we use that other stuff, that is not rhetoric. The TERFS are ideologically ossified and anti-evidence, while we are ideologically organic and pro-evidence (like, for instance, what people tell us about their souls). Bad feminists by the way are not marginalised. They have all the power and privilege. Make a note of it.

They say there’s a backlash, and give a quick history of it.

To understand the nature of the backlash, two important points are worth unpacking regarding what, exactly, is being opposed and espoused by groups like WPUK and FPFW. The first concerns how sex and gender are being operationalised: a central concept mobilised by these organisations is ‘women’s sex-based rights’, and this concept is used in ways that emphasise the distinction of sex (as ‘biological’ or material reality) from gender (as social role or ideology).

In other words the physical body as opposed to the thoughts in the head.

There are in fact reasons for not losing sight of the fact that male bodies exist, and are different from female bodies, and have ways of harming female bodies no matter what the thoughts in the head are. A huge man in a dress remains a huge man, and huge men can be dangerous to women. We’re expected to pretend that’s not true if the huge man says he’s a woman, but see above – there are reasons for not pretending in that way.

Organisations opposed to gender self-determination have argued not only that there is a clear distinction between sex and gender, but also that UK laws such as the GRA and the Equality Act 2010 should be interpreted in such a way that trans women are understood as ‘male’, trans men as ‘female’, and non-binary people as implicitly delusional (Fair Play for Women, 2017). That is to say, the view of these organisations is that while ‘gender’ may be subject to change, ‘sex’ is immutable. Notably, this position ignores decades of feminist scholarship which argue that gender and sex are discursively co-constituted…

Ahhhhhhhh discursively co-constituted – well that changes everything, doesn’t it.

Doesn’t it.

No.

That’s the whole point. No. No, it doesn’t.

Talk about institutional capture…

Table of contents.

“Sex wars and (trans) gender panics” by Sally Hines.

“Whose feminism is it anyway? The unspoken racism of the trans inclusion debate” – I bet we can guess which side of the “debate” is riddled with unspoken racism.

“Feminism will be trans-inclusive or it will not be: Why do two cis-hetero woman educators support trans feminism?”

“Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ’embodiment fantasies’ model” – by Julia Serano.

“A critical commentary on ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria'”

And more.

Excuse me, I gotta read “TERF wars: An introduction,” which is open access.

A publisher – in fact Hachette, which publishes JK Rowling – asked the trans-cult group Mermaids to check an article for thought crime. The Times reports:

JK Rowling’s publisher invited the transgender activist group Mermaids to review an article in a magazine for A-level law students, which summarised a High Court test case on freedom of expression.

To review an article! Mermaids! Why??!!

The case made headlines in February when the judge likened police to the Gestapo or the Stasi for the way they responded to Harry Miller, 55, a businessman accused of sending transphobic tweets on social media.

Humberside police visited Miller’s place of work and told him his tweets would be recorded as a “non-crime hate incident”. They included a poem about transgender people and one saying: “I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me.”

Not a police matter, we thought at the time and still think. Not even close to being a police matter. Also, about all those actual threats that are tweeted at women day in and day out? That the police cheerfully ignore from one decade to the next?

Management at Hodder Education, part of Hachette UK, referred the article on the ruling to Mermaids, asking it to suggest “examples we can use to counteract the tone and opinions in the piece” and to suggest changes to “anything you feel is untrue, unfair and/or offensive”.

…

In response to the invitation to suggest changes, the head of legal and policy at Mermaids sent four closely typed pages, including a comment that the article “doesn’t come over as balanced”.

Even before this, Hodder had heavily edited the court report, removing two-thirds of the original, explaining: “We also have to be very careful how we present certain views.”

Publishers and cops have never carried on like this about women or immigrants or the working class – why are the rules so different for trans people?

The author, Ian Yule, protested to the publisher that he had not introduced personal opinions in the article, which was intended to update A-level pupils and their teachers on the court ruling.

“This article contained little or no commentary by me, and no comments whatsoever on the issue of transgenderism,” he said. “My article did not express my own thoughts or beliefs but was a straightforward and accurate report of a High Court judgment.”

He added: “If the judgment of a respected High Court judge is likely to upset such students and their teachers, they have no business studying or teaching this subject.”

In its justification for the intervention, a Hodder editor told him: “The claimant’s [Harry Miller’s] views and the judge’s [Mr Justice Julian Knowles’s] comments about transgender issues would be offensive to most of our readers and our staff.”

Why? Why are people’s offensOmeters set to go off so easily on this subject and this subject alone? Why? Why? Why?

The publisher’s behaviour so angered Yule that he resigned as chairman of the editorial board of A-Level Law Review. He wrote to colleagues: “In the process of ‘reviewing’ my article [Mermaids] effectively destroyed it.”

And what business Mermaids had reviewing it in the first place is unfathomable.

 James Benefield, a senior executive at Hodder, had sent Yule the Mermaids review and told him: “Mermaids have requested quite a few changes here. It is important we do follow all of the attached advice — not only is it from a trans-specialist organisation, it is also from the company lawyer who felt they were best placed to review the piece.”

What exactly is a “trans-specialist organisation”? Mermaids is a fanatical activist organization, one that energetically encourages people to get mutilated to match their fantasies about being the other gender. It’s ludicrous to treat them as some sort of experts who need to vet articles on court rulings.

He stated that it was “an issue of balance rather than of censorship or freedom of speech” and made a mysterious reference to “various occurrences in other things we’ve published”.

Balance? Balance? So we can’t just have X’s take and Y’s take and leave it at that, we have to make them “balanced” so that they say the same thing?

Hodder said: “In editorial disputes, it is good practice to go to an external body for a second opinion. We approached a couple of organisations for this. [Yule] chose not to engage with the Mermaids review or, for the most part, our edits. We work with many different organisations and individuals to review content, including authors, academics, charities and special interest groups.”

What was the dispute? Was there a dispute before management at Hodder decided to let the wackos at Mermaids “review” an article about a court ruling in case Mermaids thought it was icky?

People have lost their damn minds.