Brave and stunning Charlotte Clymer, who as Charles Clymer was notorious for being a domineering “I’m a good guy!” male feminist who liked to talk over women, has a piece in USA Today explaining to JK Rowling how unsafe and vulnerable trans women are…in all-too-typical oblivion of or indifference to the ways women are unsafe and vulnerable.

The rights and dignity of transgender people are constantly under attack, not only legally but physically, as we see with continuing violence against trans people, and culturally, as evidenced by the controversy J.K. Rowling stirred up last week.

You know who else is constantly under attack physically? Women. The statistics say so. Culturally we’re under attack from misogynists and pussy-grabbers and guys like Charlotte Clymer.

Her transphobic remarks attempted to deny the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus affirming trans people and peddled dangerous and hurtful myths about our community.

There is no such overwhelming consensus, and what consensus there is is all of about ten years old. We’re not talking about gravity here.

He then says it’s hard to believe Rowling knows any trans people, because HEY WE’RE IN DANGER. He gives examples.

I haven’t been to the gym since I came out. Most cisgender women would be completely fine with a trans woman using the showers after a workout, but do I want to risk ticking off some random transphobe? No. Do I want to risk having someone take photos of me without my consent? No.

See what I mean? What if some of those pesky “cisgender women” are not completely fine with having Charlotte, recently Charles, Clymer getting naked next to them? He doesn’t even pause to think about it that way – because of course he doesn’t. It’s not for him to take our needs into account, it’s for us to take his. New boss just like the old boss.

If I’m out in another city, either for business or pleasure, I watch how much I eat and drink. I don’t want to be in a position where I’ll need to use a public restroom and feel uncertain whether it’s safe.

Women who might feel unsafe when he comes in? Again, pffffff, who cares.

I have a membership to a women-only workspace. It’s quite trans-inclusive and make a point of being affirming. I’m still not going to use its shower facility. Too risky. Some random transphobe makes a fuss, and it becomes a whole thing. Not worth it.

He has a membership to a women-only workspace, which he feels perfectly happy to render not-women-only by his presence, and then he whines about a potential “transphobe” by which he means a woman who wants a women-only workspace to be actually for women, not women plus men who say they feel like women.

There is not a week that has gone by since I came out that I wasn’t street harassed in some way. It’s just something I don’t even talk about anymore. I expect it and move on with my day. Put my headphones in and walk, so I can avoid hearing it.

Again – has he ever spoken to a woman in his life? If so has he listened?

That’s enough. I’m too sick of this oblivious egotistical BUT MY NEEDS crap to read any more of it. But it’s why we won’t just roll over.

Matt Gaetz is such a worthless piece of crap.

Bolton’s book is lighting up the Twitternet.

This one got my attention:

He what?

David Choi at Business Insider:

President Donald Trump approved of a concentration camp for Uighur Muslims in China during a private meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to former national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming memoir, “In The Room Where It Happened.”

In a private meeting during the 2019 G-20 meeting in Japan, Trump and Xi were only accompanied by their interpreters, according to Bolton’s book, parts of which were published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Xi “explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang,” Bolton claimed, based on the interpreter’s account. The interpreter reportedly added that “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Of course he did. He likes to single out Muslims for persecution and insult and banishment himself, and he likes to cozy up to people who like to do things like that. He would have loved Hitler, and I say that in all seriousness. An empty head and a complete lack of moral compass is all it takes to love Hitler.

The Chinese Communist Party has long been criticized for its construction of large concentration camps in Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims are believed to be detained under the guise of a counter-terrorism campaign. Inside the roughly 465 camps in Xinjiang and surrounding region, roughly 2-3 million Uighur Muslims are under surveillance and are subject to mandatory “reeducation” training. Some survivors have reported being beaten, subjected to medical experiments, and even being forced to watch gang rapes.

Exactly the right thing to do though.

Josh Dawsey at the Post has been reading Bolton’s book.

He tried the same move on China as he tried on Ukraine.

During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi complained to Trump about China critics in the United States. But Bolton writes in a book scheduled to be released next week that “Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats.

“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes. “He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”…

The episode described by Bolton in his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” bears striking similarities to the actions that resulted in Trump’s impeachment after he sought to pressure the Ukrainian president to help dig up dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden in exchange for military assistance.

So we can assume he’s done it to everyone, because he’s far too stupid to figure out that different heads of state have different interests, and just assumes they will all do what he asks if he bullies or pleads hard enough.

The request for electoral assistance from Xi is just one of many instances described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favors or approval from authoritarian leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the U.S. president and attempt to manipulate him, Bolton writes, often through simplistic appeals to his various obsessions.

Yeah no shit. It’s not as if he doesn’t advertise how stupid he is.

Bolton recounts numerous private conversations Trump had with other leaders that revealed the limits of his knowledge. He recalls Trump asking Kelly if the nation of Finland is part of Russia. In a meeting with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018, a British official referred to the UK as a “nuclear power,” and Trump interjects: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” Bolton adds that he could tell the question about Britain, which has long maintained a nuclear arsenal, “was not intended as a joke.”

If only that were surprising. It’s not surprising in the least. He’s made it entirely clear that he knows nothing. This is a man who insists on referring to one of his [shudder] predecessors as “Honest Abe.”

Daniel Dale had some time so he made a list (non-exhaustive) of Trump’s lies about Obama.

Trump has long been fixated on his predecessor. Since May 1, as his presidential campaign against former Vice President Joe Biden has heated up, Trump has made at least 12 separate false claims about Obama and his record in office.

Trump added a new one Tuesday in a speech about police reform, declaring that Obama and Biden “never even tried” to fix problems in policing. That’s not even close to true.

It’s true of Trump. It’s not true of Obama.

Trump touted his own efforts to address policing problems, then said, “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period. The reason they didn’t try is because they had no idea how to do it.”

Who has fewer ideas of any kind: Obama, or Trump? Who thinks less? Who knows less? Who reads less? Who talks to experts and critics and a wide range of people less?

Obama’s Department of Justice initiated “pattern-or-practice” investigations into troubled police departments and secured court-enforceable consent decrees or other agreements in which cities including Baltimore, Cleveland, Portland and Miami formally agreed to make changes.

Ok but besides that.

In 2014, after the unrest that followed the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama launched the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which in 2015 put forward dozens of recommendations for improvement. The administration provided grants to some departments that were implementing the recommendations.

Ok but…oh never mind.

Trump claimed: “I did Criminal Justice Reform, something Obama & Biden didn’t even try to do – & couldn’t do even if they did try.”

Facts First: The Obama administration did try to get a criminal justice reform bill passed; a bipartisan bill failed in the Senate during the 2016 presidential election, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided not to bring it up for a vote.

Ok but that’s Obama’s fault!

Trump said Obama did nothing about HIV/AIDS; in fact his administration spent billions on it.

That’s three; there are nine more.

Fallon Fox achieving peak woke:

It’s not as if they’re not trying to persuade Trump not to kill them.

On 16 April, the White House issued guidelines for the nation’s slow reemergence from lockdown. But the next day, rather than promote his own administration’s advice, Donald Trump tweeted demands to immediately “LIBERATE MICHIGAN”, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA”. At every step of the crisis, say public health experts, the president has undermined the government’s efforts.

Now, local officials are begging Trump to cancel his planned rally in Tulsa this weekend amid a surge of coronavirus cases in Oklahoma, one of six US states to report record numbers of infections in recent days.

No, he’s not going to do that, but he is going to shout insensitive bullshit at Ahmaud Arbery’s mother on Twitter. Will that do?

So, this should go well.

New cases of the novel coronavirus in Oklahoma’s Tulsa County have nearly doubled in recent weeks, according to the latest data from the Tulsa Health Department. The county is home to the city of Tulsa, where President Donald Trump is scheduled to hold his next rally on June 19.

What do rallies feature? Huge crowds! All mashed together so that everyone can see how huge the crowd is!

Tulsa County reported a total of 263 new cases from June 5 to 11, a jump from 149 new cases reported from May 29 to June 4, a rise of over 76 percent.

The county’s seven-day rolling average of daily cases has been on a sharp increasing trend from June 1 to 11, the Tulsa Health Department reports.

But that’s okay. No doubt it will plummet in the next three days, as a courtesy to Trump.

Trump’s upcoming rally will be his first since the start of the outbreak. Large scale political rallies were paused in March due to the threat of spreading infection among large crowds.

But now that the threat is worse…he’s doing a rally. Thanks, Mister Sir.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said in a statement to Newsweek that his office was in the process of confirming the details regarding Trump’s next rally. “Tulsans have managed one of the first successful reopenings in the nation,” Bynum said, “so we can only guess that may be the reason President Trump selected Tulsa as a rally site.”

How is he defining “successful” exactly?

Trump told reporters on Wednesday: “They’ve done a great job with COVID, as you know, in the state of Oklahoma.”

Well, no, Jethro, we don’t know they’ve done a great job.

News from the Boogaloo:

Facebook on Tuesday removed almost 900 accounts associated with the far-right Proud Boys and American Guard, including those belonging to Proud Boys supporters who marched into a protest zone in Seattle Monday and confronted anti-racist demonstrators.

…

Facebook had previously banned the groups for promoting hate, but individual members continued to post images with weapons and urge others to attend protests that followed the Minneapolis killing of George Floyd in police custody.

Facebook is under heightened scrutiny as provocateurs use it to coordinate and recruit. It has also acted to make it harder to find groups in the so-called Boogaloo movement.

Now about those Russian accounts…

Oh, man, this is the kind of thing that makes me totally furious. Well there are lots of those, but still – this especially. Another man in pearls steals women’s history.

Transgender Woman Will Lead Gender Studies Program At Rutgers

Next up:

White Man Will Lead Critical Race Theory Program At Rutgers

Just kidding, they would never do that. Never never never. They would eat broken glass before they would do that. But women? Oh that’s completely different…because, you see, women are karens, so they have privilege over men in pearl necklaces.

Rutgers University: Catherine Fitzpatrick may be the first openly transgender woman in the U.S. to lead a women’s and gender studies program

That is, “Catherine” Fitzpatrick may be the first openly male person in the U.S. to lead a women’s and gender studies program, but we bet he won’t be the last!

An English literature professor at the university since 2014, Fitzpatrick believes she may be the first openly transgender woman in the country to lead a Women’s and Gender Studies program.

And has no qualms about it. Fitzpatrick has no qualms about taking a job that should have gone to a woman, because we have all now been instructed that trans women are more oppressed than women, and thus get to grab everything that used to belong to women, including even the subject “women” and the discipline women’s studies. Women are second best and frankly should just…well, you know, stay home and bake pies.

There are openly transgender scholars who lead other programs and departments at the university level, according to Yale professor Susan Stryker, one of the country’s foremost scholars on gender issues. But when Fitzpatrick was asked to take the helm of a program dedicated to the study of women and gender – an appointment Stryker also thinks is a first for a transgender woman – it felt like the ultimate validation of her true self.

And that, of course, is infinitely more important than the validation of the fact that women matter too, just as men matter. Sorry laydeez that’s old hat, we don’t believe that any more. Trans women matter, but you, not so much. I like cherry pie the best.

“I think I can now announce that I have accepted the position of director of Women’s Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Relatedly, we can finally answer the age-old question, ‘how do I know when my transition is over?'” she wrote in a tweet this fall.

That’s what matters – his transition. Not women, not the movement to free women from the rules and limits imposed on them from time immemorial, no, just the transition of a man to a pretend-woman.

Though she was showered with congratulatory tweets from followers, Fitzpatrick’s happy moment also drew out trolls questioning her appointment. And she knows she will be hounded by some feminist groups that reject the role of trans women in the feminist movement once her story is shared on social media.

Yes how dare women think that feminism is for women just as BLM is for black people. How dare women think they get to say men are not women however much they like to fantasize that they are. How dare they say anything at all, really.

“I think this is precisely the thing that certain feminists feel is a betrayal. The argument tends to recycle itself because there are always new transwomen coming out,” she said. “They come for people without any provocation, but if you avoid engaging them online, they get bored and go away.”

So he gets that we “feel” it’s a betrayal, but he also doesn’t care, and feels entitled to ignore us until we go away.

However, Fitzpatrick is quick to point out that while a trans lady running a Women’s and Gender Studies program is “cool,” it has not escaped her that she is another white professor in a position of power at one of the most diverse universities in the nation. She said she is committed to using her new role to represent marginalized communities – especially those in Newark.

Wow. That rubs it in even more. Taking a woman’s job is “cool” but oh oh oh he’s a white professor, oh oh oh where are some marginalized communities he can represent? Maybe some of those bitches could draw up a list for him during breaks from pie-baking?

“I don’t want to think about trans-only issues,” she said. “I want courses that talk about a much broader bases of things, courses that focus on race, disability, the struggle for sex worker’s rights and Mad Pride (mental health) movements.”

Every fucking god damn thing except the struggle for women’s rights. Because it’s become so “cool” to hand those over to men.

Look at this absolute shit.

Two people are murdered, and this shit uses them to pretend their murders are the fault of feminist women.

In other words men who want a fuck discover that the person they want to fuck doesn’t have female genitalia so they fly into a male rage…………

…………..and the real responsibility for that is not that of the men who do it but of the feminist women who say that only women are women.

Also in Trump’s speech on race-not speech on race, the loudest dog whistle ever:

Our heritage of Jim Crow laws and the blocking of Reconstruction and “vagrancy” laws that sent thousands of black men to prisons that contracted them out to…you’ll never guess…cotton plantations. And race riots and lynching. That heritage.

Or maybe that wasn’t his “speech on race” (which god knows nobody wants to hear), maybe it was his “ban on chokeholds except when the cops really want to use it” speech. It can be hard to be sure with him.

Trump has taken the podium in the Rose Garden, and he said he had just privately met with several families who lost loved ones to police brutality. “All Americans mourn by your side,” Trump said to the families, who were not present for the Rose Garden event. “Your loved ones will not have died in vain.”

What, because he’s now signed an order saying no chokeholds except when you really want to? That makes all those deaths not in vain?

And what a disgusting thing to say anyway, especially to people who aren’t there. If he really thought his order would be a consolation to them, they should have been in the front row, or on the podium; instead they weren’t present at all.

No, it’s just one of those reflexive verbal formulas that he uses so much because he doesn’t know how to think.

Trump blamed police brutality on a small number of police officers, even though criminal justice activists have argued police brutality is a reflection of systemic racism.

“They’re very tiny,” Trump said of the officers responsible for police brutality. “I use the word tiny. It’s a very small percentage. But nobody wants to get rid of them more than the really good and great police officers.”

Is it a very small percentage? I don’t think he knows that, and I strongly doubt that it’s true.

Trump has now signed the executive order on police reform, surrounded by law enforcement officials who were invited to the Rose Garden event.

The visual struck some as odd, considering the president had privately met with families who lost loved ones to police brutality moments before the event and the order comes after nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd.

Yeah not really “odd.” No that’s not the right word.

Trump has apparently given his “speech on race.” Many are confused.

I guess this is the part where he actually talked about it, sort of.

…as we strive to deliver safe [here he stops reading and ad libs] byootifull elegant [returns to reading] justice (and liberty) for all.

What the everloving fuck is elegant justice? What’s he talking about? Why does he think he needs to add interior decoration adjective to the word “justice”? And I suspect he also added that “and liberty,” because it doesn’t make sense there. I suspect “the Pledge of Allegiance” has trained him to think “libertyandjustice” is all one word.

Then he calls a bunch of law enforcement people to come up and stand next to him.

The racial justice aspect is………………………..not obvious.

For some reason Laurie Penny thought we needed to hear the formulas from her too, in case we hadn’t already heard them enough times from enough other fools and cowards.

What happened to sisterhood?

Good question. What happened to yours?

Last week, beloved children’s author J.K. Rowling became the world’s most famous transphobe.

Second sentence, and already in the ditch. Calling her a “transphobe” assumes what needs to be argued, aka poisons the well. Who says she’s a “transphobe”? On what basis do they say it? Is it true? Is it true even in the terms of people who go along with most of the dogma?

After the Harry Potter writer spent days defending transphobia on Twitter and in her blog, writing that she was “worried about the new trans activism,” millions of distraught fans and confused bystanders were left wondering what the hell was going on.

That’s more frankly just a lie. If I were Rowling I’d be considering sending in that lawyer again. Rowling did not “defend transphobia.”

But Rowling’s public spasm of self-delusion isn’t unusual.

Oh we’re the ones with the self-delusion, are we – we who don’t believe men magically become women by saying “I am a woman” – we’re delusional.That’s persuasive.

Britain is the epicenter of a strange, savage, and specific cultural backlash against trans rights. That backlash is doing real harm to people whose lives should not be up for debate.

What does that mean? If she means “whose right to live should not be up for debate” then of course they shouldn’t, but then no one is arguing that they should, so why say it? If she means “whose claims about their identity which contradicts their physical reality should not be up for debate” then that’s just absurd. It’s a useful trick, putting it ambiguously like that, because it makes people shy of disputing it.

I’d do the rest but…it’s long, and LP is not an interesting writer.

Rowling is back, composing tweet after tweet after tweet to make a child artist’s day week year. Bonus: some of the child art is gorgeous.

I want that one on a wall.

Ermergerd. There’s such a thing as “hydrofeminism.” Who knew??

Well not a “thing” so much, but a word, with at least one person using it as a word and saying words about it.

The mind reels. Mermaids? Transmermaids? Bints in ponds? Synchronized swimmers?

Hydrowhatnow?

Here you go:

Among those who are cognisant of our watery links to the wider world we find the small Copenhagen publishing house and curatorial platform Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. The five curators behind the laboratory see water as ‘transnational, trans-species and trans-corporeal’.

The laboratory has just published a Danish translation of Astrida Neimani’s text “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water” while also launching the exhibition project Hydra, which will unfold over the course of the spring at the edge of the water at Snekkersten north of Copenhagen. The group members themselves describe the project as an ‘exploration of watery worldings, trans-corporeal trauma and oceanic healing’.

Let’s learn more:

The meeting focuses on writings by Astrida Neimanis on Hydrofeminism. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Hydrofeminism develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it.

Where does the feminism come in?

Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Hydrofeminism brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the post-human critical moment. Neimanis writes: “Watershed pollution, a theory of embodiment, amniotic becomings, disaster, environmental colonialism, how to write, global capital, nutrition, philosophy, birth, rain, animal ethics, evolutionary biology, death, storytelling, bottled water, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, drowning, poetry. These are all feminist questions and they are mostly inextricable from one another.”

How to write, global capitalism, storytelling, multinational pharmaceutical corporations – WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO DO WITH WATER? Apart from the obvious “well you can’t have any of them without water because humans can’t live without water” – which is surely a little too broad and obvious to be meaningful.

I can list things too. Potatoes, shoes, Calvinism, ballet, hair, the stock market, fleas, the Daily Mail, smallpox, Denali, tamanduas. DO YOU SEE HOW CONNECTED IT ALL IS?

This is hilarious.

Yes that’s Ted Cruz, THE Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz, saying “Betcha can’t beat this other guy ya big sissy!”

It’s always been my understanding that when you’re taunting someone for being weak & scrawny & feeble you’re supposed to say “I could beat you up,” not “This other guy could beat you up.”

The second just doesn’t have the same oomph, somehow.

They’re just lying to Oklahoma to trick everyone into going.

During a White House roundtable meeting called “Fighting for America’s Seniors” on Monday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence blatantly lied to reporters about the trajectory of COVID-19 cases in Oklahoma, where President Trump is scheduled to hold a large campaign rally on Saturday.

“In a very real sense, they’ve flattened the curve,” Pence claimed of that state. “And today their hospital capacity is abundant, the number of cases in Oklahoma has declined precipitously and we feel very confident going forward with the rally this coming weekend.”

In fact, Oklahoma reported 225 new cases of COVID-19 this past Saturday, its highest one-day total since the pandemic began. On Sunday, Tulsa County reported 89 new cases, the largest single-day increase since the state had its first case on March 6th.

So what’s the very real sense in which they’ve flattened the curve? Is “very real sense” a synonym for “lie”?

That…doesn’t look flat.

Trump is determined to hide what he’s doing with all that money.

The Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to block oversight of its coronavirus-related rescue programs are raising new alarms with government watchdogs and lawmakers from both parties amid concerns about the anonymity of companies receiving unprecedented levels of taxpayer funds.

Government watchdogs warned members of Congress last week that previously unknown Trump administration legal decisions could substantially block their ability to oversee more than $1 trillion in spending related to the coronavirus pandemic.

A TRILLION.

In a letter to four congressional committee chairs Thursday, two officials in charge of a new government watchdog entity revealed that the Trump administration had issued legal rulings curtailing independent oversight of Cares Act funding.

How does the Trump administration get to issue unilateral “legal rulings”? They’re not the Supreme Court. Can Trump issue a “legal ruling” that everyone in the country has to give him all their money and possessions?

The letter surfaced amid growing bipartisan outrage over the administration’s decision not to disclose how it is spending hundreds of billions in aid for businesses.

It’s pissing off even the Republicans, so it must be really bad.

According to the previously undisclosed letter, Treasury Department attorneys concluded that the administration is not required to provide the watchdogs with information about the beneficiaries of programs created by the Cares Act’s “Division A.” That section includes some of the most controversial and expensive programs in the coronavirus response efforts, including the administration’s massive bailout for small businesses and nearly $500 billion in loans for corporations.

Run along now watchdogs, go play with your chew toys.

Mnuchin surprised many lawmakers last week when he announced he would not allow the names of Paycheck Protection Program recipients to become public after the Trump administration had said for months that the data would eventually be disclosed.

I’m thinking “surprised” is probably not the most exact word for the lawmakers’ reaction.

Basically Trump and his enforcers think Congress gave them a trillion dollars to play with and that they don’t have to tell anyone a damn thing about what they’re doing with it. That would be a pretty strange way of conducting government.