He has got to be kidding.

Or rather they have got to be kidding, since they wrote it and simply put his label on it. But still – he and they have got to be kidding.

Trump issued a ProclaMation flattering Thomas Becket and Religious Freedom and the right of religious bosses to tell the monarch to fuck off. Yes because Trump is so keen on being told to fuck off.

Today is the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket on December 29, 1170. Thomas Becket was a statesman, a scholar, a chancellor, a priest, an archbishop, and a lion of religious liberty.

By “religious liberty” Trump means the liberty to agree with him and do what he says to do.

Before the Magna Carta was drafted, before the right to free exercise of religion was enshrined as America’s first freedom in our glorious Constitution, Thomas gave his life so that, as he said, “the Church will attain liberty and peace.”

Right because Trump is so good at paying attention to the Constitution.

When the crown attempted to encroach upon the affairs of the house of God through the Constitutions of Clarendon, Thomas refused to sign the offending document. When the furious King Henry II threatened to hold him in contempt of royal authority and questioned why this “poor and humble” priest would dare defy him, Archbishop Becket responded “God is the supreme ruler, above Kings” and “we ought to obey God rather than men.”

Unless the men are Donald Trump.

As Americans, we were first united by our belief that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” and that defending liberty is more important than life itself. If we are to continue to be the land of the free, no government official, no governor, no bureaucrat, no judge, and no legislator must be allowed to decree what is orthodox in matters of religion or to require religious believers to violate their consciences.

Unless their consciences tell them to criticize Donald Trump or win elections that Donald Trump wants to win.

On this day, we celebrate and revere Thomas Becket’s courageous stand for religious liberty and we reaffirm our call to end religious persecution worldwide. In my historic address to the United Nations last year, I made clear that America stands with believers in every country who ask only for the freedom to live according to the faith that is within their own hearts. I also stated that global bureaucrats have absolutely no business attacking the sovereignty of nations that wish to protect innocent life, reflecting the belief held by the United States and many other countries that every child — born and unborn — is a sacred gift from God.

Unless it’s the child of asylum seekers from Central America.

To honor Thomas Becket’s memory, the crimes against people of faith must stop, prisoners of conscience must be released, laws restricting freedom of religion and belief must be repealed, and the vulnerable, the defenseless, and the oppressed must be protected.

The what? What was that again?

the vulnerable, the defenseless, and the oppressed must be protected.

According to Donald Trump???

Come on.

A society without religion cannot prosper. A nation without faith cannot endure — because justice, goodness, and peace cannot prevail without the grace of God.

So that’s an official insult to all atheists, handed down by the government. So much for religious freedom.

Oh no, people questioning someone’s identity again. People are what they say they are! Unless they’re TERFs who object to being called TERFs of course; that’s completely different.

Last week, a Twitter sleuth sketched out how Hilaria Baldwin, the influencer wife of actor (and sometime SNL star) Alec Baldwin, has perpetrated “a decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.”

Or rather, pretends to be a Spanish person. Impersonating one means a specific one, as opposed to a generic one. She was going for the generic.

The user, who goes by the handle @lenibriscoe, shared a number of damning videos of “Hilaria,” from a Good Morning America appearance where she employed a Spanish accent to a Today show stop in which she supposedly could not remember the English word for “cucumber.”

Further posts showed Hilaria’s mother discussing growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and numerous articles pointed to how she had spent virtually her entire career practicing medicine in Massachusetts, where she’d served as “an associate physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School” until she “retired from both positions in 2012,” according to MassLive. (In a video interview she said she moved to Mallorca, Spain, in 2011, the same year Hilaria began dating Alec.)

And yet…

Hilaria Baldwin’s CAA speaker page claims that she was born in Mallorca, Spain, as does her IMDb bio and Wikipedia page. She said on a podcast earlier this year: “I moved here [to America] when I was 19 to go to NYU from… my family lives in Spain, they live in Mallorca,” adding, “I knew no pop culture.” She has graced the cover of Hola! magazine, a Spanish-language publication based out of Madrid, where she was identified as a Spanish person in both the interview and its press release. Alec Baldwin has repeatedly referred to her as “Spanish” online. And she’s made a number of appearances in Latina magazine, which she’s enthusiastically promoted (Spain is not a part of Latin America, by the way), and has referred to Spain as her “home.”

Wellllll maybe she meant it’s her spiritual home.

It appears that Hilaria’s real name is Hillary Hayward-Thomas, according to her old MySpace page and those who claim to be her old classmates. She attended the private Cambridge School of Weston, in Massachusetts, and in her senior yearbook is listed as “Hillary Hayward-Thomas.”

So, is there anything tacky about this at all? Does it qualify as appropriation? Is it comparable to Rachel Dolezal, or is it just someone who is smitten with a foreign country where she has spent a lot of time and likes to pretend to have deep roots in that country when she doesn’t? And if we’re all free to define ourselves in whatever terms we like, then why is this even a story?

Now about this word “influencer”…

Graham Linehan asks the age-old question: Is Eddie Izzard a lesbian?

Alright, everyone, let’s get out there and start asking our favourite celebrities the following question: “Is Eddie Izzard a lesbian?”.

Ask everyone you can think of, from intellectuals like Jameela Jamil and Frankie Boyle all the way across to such LGBT giants as Michael Cashman and Linda Riley. Let’s get people on the record as saying that Eddie Izzard is a lesbian.

Because, by now I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that, yes, this is literally what is being proposed. It is why lesbians have been lying down in front of Pride Marches and such. It’s why Maya Forstater lost her job. It’s why there are branches of the LGB Alliance opening all over the world, despite the fact that it’s not easy being a branch of the LGB Alliance, with the BBC, for example, unable to make up its mind whether they’re a hate group or not, in part because they never seem to find the time to speak to them.

…

It’s currently de rigeur among Twitter’s blue checkmark set to call the LGB Alliance a hate group. Their crime? They don’t believe that Eddie Izzard—and the many other crossdressing men like him currently claiming trans status— are the same sex as they are.

“Is Eddie Izzard a lesbian?” Ask them the question. Let’s see if they can go that far. Let’s see if they dare go on the record saying such a disgraceful, homophobic thing. Let’s see how long they will play along with a sick joke by Eddie that erases the reality of women, and lesbians in particular, in the most careless, reckless, selfish manner.

Eddie, with respect, you’re not a lesbian. That’s homophobic and sexist and I’m sure you don’t want to be homophobic or sexist, no matter how many people are currently telling you that you’re stunning and brave, such as the famously ethical and rigorous Pink News.

If he were an actual lesbian no one would pay the slightest attention to him.

More than 13 years later and it’s still pissing us off.

As it should.

So she got a job writing comedy.

A tedious conversation:

Hahahaha right the law is magic and changes men into women when they say the magic words.

This “movement” has been hell on people’s thinking skills.

The really scary thing is the abject apology Jessica Cluess felt compelled to give.

Well, I tell you what, if she does learn more about “Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts” she won’t be impressed. She probably knew that when she said it. She was either appeasing the bullies or mocking them, or perhaps both at once.

Having just read a bit of Ms. Germán’s important work I can report that it has no value. She’s not literate enough to do that kind of work; she’s not sufficiently interested in literature to do it. She’s the wrong person for the job.

The reality is there are already teachers reading against the grain, encouraging students to think critically about what they’re reading, and the like. I have no idea how general that kind of teaching is, but I know it’s not completely absent, because scholars of education have been writing about it for decades.

The Lorena Germán – Jess Cluess contretemps has nudged my curiosity, so I looked for more.

Way back last July:

Oy. You mean, like Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton? For example?

Fast forward to today and she’s being bullied in the usual fashion.

So how about this DisruptTexts crew of educators?

Here’s Lorena Germán on how (and why) to disrupt Shakespeare.

We knew that suggesting educators disrupt Shakespeare would be a challenge for many. We were pleased to see the openness to the idea and the willingness to engage. But then again, it could be because we’re “preaching to the choir” and we acknowledge that educators hesitant to challenging thinking around the use of Shakespeare in our schools chose not to engage. The chat surfaced some valid points and great thoughts around the reasons for replacing and/or critically interrogating Shakespeare. Here are some of our thoughts around Shakespeare and his pedestal:

We believe in offering students a wide variety of literature and access to playwrights other than Shakespeare. That is valuable, restorative, and productive.

No kidding. Do any schools say Shakespeare and only Shakespeare should be on offer? University students who major in English literature will take one or more Shakespeare course(s), but primary and secondary schools mostly don’t specialize that way.

We believe that Shakespeare, like any other playwright, no more and no less, has literary merit. He is not “universal” in a way that other authors are not. He is not more “timeless” than anyone else.

Nope. Wrong. Wrong in the “no more” part. He does have more “literary merit” than most. You’d have to read him and/or see him on stage/film to see how and why though. It’s not a myth; he really is as good as he’s cracked up to be. This is all the more interesting because he came from such an unremarkable background. He wasn’t an earl or even a knight, he wasn’t rich, he didn’t go to Cambridge or Oxford, he started out as a player (an actor), who had to go on the road when plays were banned in London because of the plague (sound familiar?), which was considered very raffish and low-class indeed.

We believe he was a man of his time and that his plays harbor problematic depictions and characterizations.

That “harbor” is sly – as if he were hiding a fugitive Nazi in his basement. Anyway – Othello? Shylock? They’re not as straightforwardly “problematic” as you’d expect from a 16th century country boy. And then there’s the women question, on which he is startlingly original and different from his rivals.

Overall, we continue to affirm that there is an over-saturation of Shakespeare in our schools and that many teachers continue to unnecessarily place him on a pedestal as a paragon of what all language should be. Though we enjoy reading some of the plots in his plays and acknowledge the depth and complexity within many of his plot arcs and characters, we also find that educators are often taught to see Shakespearean plays as near perfection, his characters as “archetypes”, and to persist in oj indoctrinating students into a false notion of the primacy (and superiority) of the English language.

Oh we enjoy some of his plots; how generous. That passage is illiterate and stupid, and this group should not be allowed anywhere near any curriculum decisions.

We do not see these same problematic approaches in other plays where whiteness and the male voice are not centered…So, let us be honest, the conversation really isn’t about universality, nor and this isn’t about being equipped to identify all possible cultural references. This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization.

I’m not persuaded. You know why? Her words are not up to the job. Language is a vital tool for persuasion, in fact it’s pretty much impossible to persuade without it, unless you consider a fist under the nose “persuasion.” Exposure to rich, complicated language just might be a path to important fields of learning and work.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

Now just a god damn minute. The reason Shakespeare shouldn’t be dumped into the bin labeled “Evil Hate-monger From the Past” and forgotten is nothing to do with “academic excellence.” Fun fact: he wasn’t considered an elite taste in his own day, but rather one of those vulgar players, who wrote some of their vulgar plays himself. Gabriel Harvey pointed out as a matter of surprise that he appealed to both classes, but Ben Jonson considered him much too pop and too little erudite…until he sat down to read the First Folio in preparation for writing an introductory poem. The reason Shakespeare shouldn’t be dumped is because many of his plays are simply brilliant. Ignoring him would be like going to the Grand Canyon and carefully staying in the car the whole time, looking in the opposite direction.

Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”

Mmyes, good point. Everything written before 1950 is evil shit. Definitely.

Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.”

An online horde descended, accused Ms. Cluess of racism and “violence,” and demanded that Penguin Random House cancel her contract. The publisher hasn’t complied, perhaps because Ms. Cluess tweeted a ritual self-denunciation: “I take full responsibility for my unprovoked anger toward Lorena Germán. . . . I am committed to learning more about Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts. . . . I will strive to do better.” That didn’t stop Ms. Cluess’s literary agent, Brooks Sherman, from denouncing her “racist and unacceptable” opinions and terminating their professional relationship.

The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.” The English Department chairman of Lawrence Public Schools, Richard Gorham, didn’t respond to emails.

What about keeping the Odyssey in your curriculum and including the “we wouldn’t do that now” stuff in the discussion? It does of course have a lot of such stuff, because it’s about war and warriors and the domestic life of warriors, many centuries before the Geneva Convention and the UDHR and feminism. It features slaves, and war crimes, and mass murder. It’s a harsh world. But it’s worth reading.

Small backwater towns are not all Frank Capra and social capital. They can be all MAGA and fuck wearing masks, instead.

Ten years ago, Dr. Kristina Darnauer and her husband, Jeff, moved to tiny Sterling, Kan., to raise their kids steeped in small-town values.

“The values of hard work, the value of community, taking care of your neighbor, that’s what small towns shout from the rooftops, this is what we’re good at. We are salt of the earth people who care about each other,” Darnauer says. “And here I am saying, then wear a mask because that protects your precious neighbor.”

But Darnauer’s medical advice and moral admonition were met with contempt from some of her friends, neighbors and patients. People who had routinely buttonholed her for quick medical advice at church and kids’ ballgames were suddenly treating her as the enemy and regarding her professional opinion as suspect and offensive.

Because somehow medical science and reliance on evidence and listening to expert advice became a matter of politics instead of a matter of the right tools for the job. It makes about as much sense as deciding that calling a plumber when a pipe breaks is something liberals do, while conservatives prefer to let it fix itself.

That wedge is splitting off health care workers from communities that desperately need them.

More than a quarter of all the public health administrators in Kansas quit, retired or got fired this year, according to Vicki Collie-Akers, an associate professor of population health at the University of Kansas. Some of them got death threats. Some had to hire armed guards.

“These are leaders in their community,” Collie-Akers says. “And they are leaving broken.” Collie-Akers notes these professionals also leaving at a terrible time. The pandemic is still raging. Vaccines still need to get from cities to small towns and into people’s arms; public health officers are as important as ever.

Also it’s going to be hard to replace the people who are leaving, because the situation remains what it is.

The Gender Studies professor strikes again.

Hur hur. So funny. Lesbians are not endangered! Yes, there are a lot fewer of them in the rising generation but that’s because they’re glorious inspiring trans men instead! Which is obviously so much better! So let’s laugh ourselves sick at the very idea that fewer lesbians means fewer lesbians.

This is a Labour MP.

But that’s not true. Everyone isn’t free to define herself in whatever terms she deems fit. I’m not free to define myself as Charlotte Nichols MP, for instance. Many many kinds of defining oneself as something or someone one is not are criminal fraud, while others are reckless endangerment, and others are rape, and we could go on this way. We’re not free to tell lies about ourselves if anything hangs on those lies. If it’s just play or fantasy or a game, sure, but that’s not what Nichols is talking about, nor is it what the LGB Alliance is talking about.

Would Nichols say the same thing if it were a white guy identifying as Keith Vaz? I don’t think so.

Presumably that’s not what she meant, but then what did she mean? What is this supposed truism that we can all identify any way we like? I wonder if they will ever start to notice that they’ve created their own reductio ad absurdum.

The conversation seemed to start well.

But it didn’t go on well.

…”you drawing the lines of who gets to be one” – well if there are no such lines then what are we even talking about? What even is a lesbian?

This is laughably basic but apparently not everyone gets it – the reality is we can’t talk about anything if we don’t have common meanings for the words we use to talk about things. One broad hint at this state of affairs is that we can’t go prancing all over the globe striking up conversations with everyone we encounter, because the world contains many different languages, and it takes time and effort to learn new ones.

The word “lesbian” has a meaning. Lesbians are women attracted to women. That’s it, that’s the meaning. It’s not an issue of who gets to be one, it’s an issue of who is one, who can be one. It’s not a country club that the members can hand out guest passes to, it’s a word with a specific narrow meaning. Some words have broad meanings, like “beautiful” for instance. There’s room for argument there, and people do argue over what is or isn’t beautiful. Are the Sainte Chapelle and the Chrysler building both beautiful or do you have to pick one? That kind of broad meaning. But “lesbian” isn’t like that. It isn’t evaluative, it’s just factual. Men can’t be lesbians, because that’s not what the word means.

The Glinner Update leads with one of those Women of the Year items.

Monday 21st December – Even A List Of Women Isn’t Just For Women

THE TIMES: The paper’s 50 Women of the Year list was published.

It included three males.

Imagine a 50 BAME or Black People of the Year that included three white people.

The first was Valentina Sampaio, a transgender model from Brazil who has posed for Victoria Secret and featured in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.

The second was High Court judge, Victoria McCloud, who transitioned in the late 1990s. In 2010 McCloud was hailed as only the second ever woman to become Queen’s Bench Master. Though, of course, he wasn’t.

Smile when you steal a women’s only the second ever.

The third trans-identified male on the list was Raquel Willis, a black trans rights activist and writer from the US. Willis is the Director of Communications for the Ms. Foundation, an organisation intended to amplify the voices of women and girls.

Amplify the voices of women and girls and a few men.

South Oxfordshire is catching up.

A local authority will ensure all its buildings have a gender neutral toilet in a bid to help transgender people.

Will it also ensure that all its buildings have women’s toilets? Or is it going to create its “gender neutral” toilets by converting the women’s. Probably.

The council’s constitution, policies, forms and internal and external communications will also be gender-neutral.

Eh? What does that mean? What if a policy is about women? How can they make all forms “gender-neutral”? If they do that how, for instance, can they tell whether or not they’re failing to hire or promote women?

The motion also stated the council, which covers Henley, Didcot, Wallingford and Thame, respects that “trans men are men, trans women are women, and that non-binary genders are just as valid”.

But the first is false, the second is false, and the third is meaningless.

This crap is embarrassing.

Big news!

He’s proud to be the first man to be elected co-chair of Green Party Women.

Never mind, he has that winsome head-tilt, so what does it matter that he’s taking a woman’s position away from a woman.

Actual women can just go jump off a bridge, right?

Yeah, all women, dammit, including the ones who are men! About flipping time!

Don’t do that.

It’s not “people,” it’s not randomly assorted “people” who somehow found themselves pregnant, it’s not a wide-open set of people that we have no word for. It’s women. It’s the sex that has always been viewed as and treated as both inferior to and subordinate to men. If you can’t call them “women” then you lose sight of that systematic subordination, and the contempt and loathing that goes with it. It’s ethnic minority women that Harvard Med is talking about here. It knows that but…

From The Telegraph:

Lesbians are facing “extinction” because of the “disproportionate” focus on transgenderism in schools, a controversial campaign group for gay rights has claimed.

The LGB Alliance, which has been branded a “trans hate group” by Pink News and other vocal critics, was set up in October 2019 amid concerns that Stonewall, the UK’s leading gay rights charity, had become too fixated on gender identity.

Its founders, Kate Harris and Bev Jackson, claim to have been “cancelled” for questioning gender identity theory and airing their concerns about the erosion of women’s rights in the face of the transgender movement.

Their detractors claim their refusal to include the ‘T’ in their LGB Alliance is transphobic…

But why should that be seen as transphobic? Why can’t there be a group that’s about lesbian, gay and bisexual people? Being trans is not the same thing; even if you think it’s closely related, you can’t think it’s just plain the same thing, so why does it have to be included every time anyone talks about lesbian and gay issues?

On Wednesday, Ofcom chief Melanie Dawes said it would be “entirely inappropriate” for the BBC to approach groups like the LGB Alliance to “balance” debates around trans issues after SNP MP John Nicolson, a homosexual, described them as “transphobic”.

Ok, I say Melanie Dawes and John Nicolson are transphobic; does that mean they have to be ignored and shunned too?

“If you do not accept that everyone has a gender identity then you are automatically labelled transphobic which means you can no longer discuss women’s lives and what’s happening to lesbians,” said Ms Jackson. “We are increasingly discovering that lesbians are no longer welcome in the LGBTQ+ world, which is astonishing.”

…

Ms Harris said: “We are both convinced, had we been growing up now, that we would have transitioned.”

Referring to her childhood as a tomboy, she added: “If I was in school today, I would be taken to one side and helped to come to terms with the fact that I was gender non-conforming. And how special would I feel? What child would turn down additional attention?”

Citing scientific studies which have found elevated rates of autism in transgender people, she said: “This is what drives us. We were recently talking to a teacher in a SEN [special educational needs] school who said there were 24 trans kids, one non binary, but no gays and lesbians.

“Is lesbianism going to become extinct? Yes. It’s deeply uncool. At school, in university, it is so uncommon, it is the bottom of the heap. Becoming trans is now considered the brave option.”

Well hey lesbians got maybe two weeks of being the brave option, so that’s enough, right?

Following accusations of being associated with “neo Nazis”, Ms Jackson said: “We have no connection whatsoever with any far right organisation, any religious right organisation”.

That came after its Just Giving and Go Fund Me pages were taken down following complaints by the SNP’s Mr Nicolson, who described the LGB Alliance as “a hate group which encourages the trolling of trans people and those who champion their rights”.

The MP for Ochil and South Perthshire is now campaigning for the organisation to be denied the charitable status it applied for in February.

He told the Telegraph The LGB Alliance had launched a “sinister campaign of abuse” against him, with supporters branding him a “paedophile” a “rape enabler” and a “misogynist” online after he questioned their motives.

But the Telegraph just got through saying he called them transphobic. He didn’t just innocently “question their motives,” he called them toxic names, names that get people systematically shunned and punished.

“No one is shutting it down,” he said. “It’s incredibly mouthy and loud and obstreperous and perfectly entitled to make the arguments it likes. What I object to is its demonising of trans people.

“I call the LGB Alliance sinister because it is. It’s milking the gullible for cash by claiming it is championing gay rights. Under no circumstances should they get charitable status. The Charity Commission should take one look at its abusive tweets.”

He seems like quite a bully.

I just had to ruin the rest of your day (or night if you’re 8 time zones east).

Number 9473381 in the series “Why we really really need to call racist white women ‘Karens’.”

There was no direct connection between the “Central Park Karen” incident in New York City and the police killing of 46-year-old George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, beyond the coincidence of timing.

But let’s plant the idea anyway.

The specter of Karen persisted as Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest spread around the country following Floyd’s murder and reckonings with racism began to roil institutions, toppling careers as well as statues. More than just an amusing meme, Karen allowed for a new kind of discourse about racism to gain credence in the US.

Actually it’s a very old kind of discourse: the misogynist kind.

“We as a culture have adopted this stance that white women are more virtuous and not complicit in upholding racism in particular,” said Apryl Williams, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. “They just sort of go along with it, but they’re not conscious actors. The Karen meme says, no, they are conscious actors. These are deliberate actions. They are complicit. And I think that’s why it strikes a nerve with people.”

But the Karen meme also says women are bitches. That too is why it strikes a nerve with some people.

… Amy Cooper took on the mantle of an American archetype: the white woman who weaponizes her vulnerability to exact violence upon a Black man. In history, she is Carolyn Bryant, the adult white woman whose complaint about a 14-year-old Emmett Till led to his torture and murder at the hands of racist white adults. In literature, she is Scarlett O’Hara sending her husband out to join a KKK lynching party or Mayella Ewell testifying under oath that a Black man who had helped her had raped her. In 2020, she is simply Karen.

The Carolyn Bryant example gets cited a lot, but the interesting thing about that is that she didn’t torture and murder Emmett Till. Scarlett O’Hara and Mayella Ewell are of course characters in novels, so they can hardly provide evidence of real life actions by real women.

Of course there are racist white women, and of course some of them do racist things, but we can say that without this invidious “Becky/Karen/Goldilocks” thing. There are angry sexist violent black men, too, but we can talk about that without giving them a contemptuous nickname. These “memes” which are actually just contemptuous nicknames don’t make anything better.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on How things actually are in the world.

Shannon @ #20:

Let’s tackle these in reverse order.

3) Multi-gender social orders do not entail what you think they do. Whether we examine the Navajo or the Indian “genders”, what we find is not a system of biological classification, but instead a patriarchal hierarchy of normative worth stinking with misogyny and homophobia. The function of these systems is to exalt the masculine and crush the feminine. In those systems where the additional gender or genders are categories of male people, those genders are for males whose masculinity is perceived as deficient or corrupt in some way. Masculine deficiency can be such things as physical weakness, small genitals, or pacifism. Masculine corruption could be interest in dolls, an effeminate manner, or homosexuality. The “third gender” hijra is not a category of liberation; it is a way for a patriarchal society to protect their honor from the shame of having to admit the existence in their families of gay boys and gentle boys. It’s a way for a father to deny that one of his sons is a failure, because it is preferable to mark a son as a hijra than as a filthy faggot.

This analysis has far more explanatory power than the epistemologically relativist notion that these multi-gender cultures had/have some special insight that the rest of the world failed to grasp. It explains why homosexuality is illegal in Iran while the nation performs the second most transsexual surgeries in the world. It explains why women who resist bear the brunt of the venom from activists. It explains why so much of the justification for knowledge claims about “gender identity” derives from gendered—i.e., sexed—stereotypes regarding acceptable behavior and interests. It explains everything.

2) Complex question hiding false assumption: sex is not defined by genitalia, nor is it defined by brains. Sex is defined by the reproductive functions involved in sexual reproduction. There are two such functions, represented by two types of gamete. A creature’s sex refers to which of those gametes its body is configured to produce. Because such configuration is temporally unstable, we also include in each category (A) those whose bodies are no longer so configured (e.g., due to age, hysterectomy, etc.) and (B) those whose bodies are not yet so configured but eventually will be (e.g., due to youth). We also include (C) those who at any point fit into (B); e.g., a boy castrated at five. Group (C) naturally gives rise to including those whose sexual development goes awry, and so we also include (D) those with DSDs.

The concept is neither uncommon nor controversial. The overwhelming majority of temporally unstable categories behave in the same manner. My hair is black, and I remain black-haired even if I shave my head. Humans are bipedal, and so I remain even if my leg be amputated.

If your brain were removed from your body and placed in a vat where your consciousness survived, we would have to stretch our language in order to describe the situation. Natural language develops to describe situations that speakers encounter. No one has ever encountered the brain-in-a-vat scenario in reality, so we don’t have a way to comfortably describe it. This lack forces us to default to analogy. By analogy, if all that remains of your body is your brain, then you have had your legs amputated, and you are still a bipedal creature. By analogy, if all that remains of your body is your brain, then you have had your gonads removed, and you are still either male or female.

1) A word’s dictionary definition is often—nay, usually—not its complete or technical definition. Dictionaries provide definitions that capture general usage. Crucially, definitions of words for things in the world tend to be satisficing. That is, they are true of the things described. For example, Merriam-Webster provides this as sense 8 for its definition of C: “a structured language for creating computer programs that is designed to be compact and efficient”. This is certainly true of the programming language C. It is a structured language for creating computer programs, and it was designed to be compact and efficient. However, there are many structured languages for creating computer programs that were designed to be compact and efficient. These other languages are not C.

Similarly, “a group of organisms that share a genetic heritage, are able to interbreed, and to create offspring that are also fertile” is true of species, but there are also groups that fit this description that do not qualify as species; e.g., the set of all tigers and lions. Further, by this definition, any infertile organism cannot be a member of a species, because an infertile organism cannot create offspring.

Does this mean this is a bad definition? No! It is a good definition for its purpose: general, non-technical distillation of a complex concept.

What it does mean is that we are dishonest if, knowing how dictionary definitions function, we conclude from their imprecision anything about the things they describe. The plurality programming languages relative to the dictionary definition of C does not entail that computer science categories are fungible or mysterious. Neither does the “messiness” of biology relative to the dictionary definition of species entail that biological categories are fungible or mysterious.