Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Putting ideology before science.

I think when it comes to medical or other technical subjects, we’re all forced to take shortcuts and rely on some heuristics. It’s just not possible to become an expert in gender medicine, climate science, evolutionary biology, and virology and infectious disease, to name just a handful of science-related controversies. So we look at things like what side do most of the credentialed experts take, how good are the best arguments made by their critics, what are the economic incentives and biases of the disputants, who seems to be arguing in good faith, etc.

And a lot of the time, this works quite well. You don’t have to look very hard at evolution/creation arguments before you notice that creationists tend to offer an argument on Tuesday that is shown to be an outright lie that even they don’t bother to defend, only to make that same bogus argument on Thursday to a different audience. And that they’re almost invariably arguing in support of a religious agenda, even when they try to hide it (“no, we’re cdesign proponentists!”) Etc.

And yeah, one of the criteria you might look at is who seems to be the “good guys.” Which can absolutely go wrong.

On gender medicine, you have a significant number of credentialed experts who insist that the science is settled, and they just want to help people live their lives, and a nontrivial amount of the opposition comes from religious right types who seem motivated by disgust and hatred rather than good faith intellectual disagreement. Sure, if you take a not-very-deep dive into the details, it becomes apparent that there’s a lot more going on, but very few people do that.

Texas wants women to die of pregnancy complications.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday rejected a challenge to the state’s strict abortion ban — a response to a lawsuit filed last year by a group of women who had serious pregnancy complications.

The ruling was unanimous. All of the nine justices are Republicans.

Five women brought the lawsuit in March 2023, saying they were denied abortions even when issues arose during pregnancy that endangered their lives. The case grew to include 20 women and two doctors.

That’s what happened to Savita Halappanavar, and what happens to women in Catholic-run hospitals in the US. Texas wants all pregnant women in Texas to run that risk. Texas wants all pregnant women to die rather than survive by terminating the pregnancy.

Zurawski v. Texas was the first legal challenge to the state’s bans that focused specifically on women with complicated pregnancies.

One of the lead plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, has said she nearly died in August 2022 when doctors delayed giving her a medically necessary abortion after she had catastrophic complications while 18 weeks pregnant. After her health deteriorated, her doctors eventually performed an abortion. She said she later went into sepsis and spent three days in the intensive care unit.

The Texas legislature wants more of that.

Convicted felon Trump gave a news conference packed with the usual lies.

Mr. Trump, in a rambling and misleading 33-minute speech, derided the trial as “rigged” and attacked the judge in his first public comments since a Manhattan jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign. He also made numerous misleading statements about the case and what took place at the trial.

“Misleading statements”=lies.

Mr. Trump said he would appeal. Long before that appeal is heard, he will be enmeshed in the gears of the criminal justice system. A pre-sentence report, made by probation officers, will make recommendations based on the defendant’s criminal record — Mr. Trump had none before this case — as well as his personal history and the crime itself.

That’s very interesting, because his personal history is packed full of fraud and lies. Voters can (and sadly do) ignore that, but probation officers not so much.

Trump claims, implausibly, that he never thought of Michael Cohen as a fixer. He says he thought of him purely as a lawyer. In reality, Trump assigned Cohen to do many jobs that had nothing to do with lawyering, such as threatening contractors and trying to rig an online CNBC poll to make Trump seem more popular than he really was.

So Threatening Contractors isn’t Law 101? Who knew?

Trump is now talking about Michael Cohen, who was the prosecution’s star witness against him. He says Cohen was an “effective” lawyer who turned out to be a “sleazebag.” This is ultimately part of the prosecutors’ case against Trump: he was trying to blame Cohen for everything, but Cohen was who Trump himself chose to defend him for a decade.

It’s hilarious that Trump calls anyone a sleazebag. Trump is the sleaziest sleazebag who ever sleazed. Everything he touches or mentions or looks at turns into sleaze. He’s the mildew of sleaze.

Where Trump looked both dismayed and upset in his brief remarks yesterday, he is back to familiar form, essentially lecturing the news media, and the public, at length about his views on the case, the trial, the judge and prosecutors.

In terms of daily life as opposed to larger matters, that’s one of the worst things about him – how much he talks at us and lectures us on his views in his horrible grating voice using his short stupid words to say brutal stupid things. It’s as if a bratty 8-year-old child got to yammer at us all day every day.

Darren Johnson on the Green party’s refusal to heed the Cass Report:

Labour’s Wes Streeting admitted that he had got things wrong in the past and called the review a “watershed moment” for the NHS. Even in Scotland, the previously gung-ho SNP belatedly welcomed the findings and it is hoped that changes will be made to provision there. 

But sadly, that wake-up call does not appear to have been heard by the Greens. In the Scottish Parliament Green MSPs now stand completely isolated on the Cass findings. Their co-leader, Patrick Harvie, was reluctant to even accept the report as a valid scientific document. 

In London, Zoë Garbett, the Green mayoral candidate last month (who now sits as a London Assembly Member after her predecessor resigned her seat just days after getting elected) joined Harvie in attempting to undermine the findings.

Which, as Johnson goes on to emphasize, is quite a reckless thing to do when the issue is the future health of children and Zoë Garbett probably knows less about it than Dr Cass.

This casual dismissal of such a landmark report was absolutely gut-wrenching for me. I had twice stood as the Green Party’s candidate for mayor of London and spent 16 years representing the Greens as a London assembly member. Throughout that time, children’s health featured high on my list of priorities, whether it was pushing for tough measures on air pollution or fighting for better homes for families living in overcrowded conditions. How dare leading Greens be so dismissive of a well-researched, scientific review tackling a shameful medical scandal. 

My guess is that they dare because they don’t think of it as a medical issue but as a justicey one. They see it as not technical but political, and thus wide open to attack and dismissal on political as opposed to medical grounds.

I reacted with fury. “Vote Green if you want to completely ignore medical evidence and see more children pumped full of harmful drugs.” I wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in response to that awful, glib video from Garbett. 

He knew it was risky, and he took the risk.

I am beyond despair that the political party I’ve been a member of for decades, that has always said “trust the science” when it comes to climate change or air and river pollution, is apparently putting ideology before science when it comes to pushing untested medical treatments for children. 

Trust the science; no not like that.

Holy shit that was fast.

The jury is reciting the verdict. Up to 20 guilty at this moment.

Next moment: guilty on all 34.

Updating to add some er commentary.

Update: It’s fun to see each one recited.

Yet another field of battle: literary festivals.

Last week, in the days leading up to the Hay Literary Festival – the UK’s most prestigious literary event which, each May since 1987, has brought together high-profile speakers from across the world – a crisis was unfolding. 

Those scheduled to appear had received an email from an organisation called Fossil Free Books, urging them to protest against the festival over its sponsorship deal with the Edinburgh-based investment firm Baillie Gifford. The email asked them to denounce Baillie Gifford – which invests two per cent of its portfolio in the petrochemical industry and which, FFB argue, also profits from “Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide” – or read aloud a poem by a Palestinian author, or withdraw from Hay entirely. 

Speakers were also encouraged to sign a letter of protest, while a second email gave details of several pro-Palestinian demonstrations scheduled to take place at the festival, with details on how speakers could support them. Various publicists and publishers found the tone of this email “quite threatening”. There was unease about safety concerns, and that authors would find themselves caught up in the protests. 

Well look at it from the point of view of the activists. How much trouble is it to send a bullying email to lots of people compared to actually doing something useful?

Speaking at Hay on Thursday on the subject of control being exerted over the arts, the novelist Howard Jacobson said: “The idea that anybody can come along and say ‘you can’t read this and you can’t read that’… is a desecration. It’s a desecration of books, it’s a desecration of the idea of literature”. He also described feeling “sorry for the people who organise this festival, because they have been subjected to the most cruel and objectionable pressure.”

And frankly it just seems too meta to make any difference to climate change. There are too many steps. It looks more like performing Doing Something as opposed to actually doing something.

Toby Mundy, who runs the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, previously known as the Samuel Johnson Prize – the £50,000 prize is run entirely independently from Baillie Gifford, who merely provide “a substantial sum” to finance it – says: “I was dismayed and disappointed that [Hay] chose to make this decision. Baillie Gifford play an indispensable role in the cultural life of this country. They fund public spaces in the form of book prizes and literary festivals where issues can be debated openly, without seeking to control in any way what happens in those spaces.”

…

“People with very strong views feel they have the right to impose them on other people. It puts institutions like Hay in a very difficult position,” says the novelist Joan Smith, who last appeared at Hay in 2019. “It’s authoritarian. It worries me that individual authors will find themselves under pressure to sign their statement for fear that, if they don’t, people will think they are a climate-change denier. Yet it’s very hard to see how the call to cut ties with Baillie Gifford will have the slightest influence on climate change. The Middle East in particular is far too complex a situation to be solved by these sorts of single-issue campaigns.” 

What I’m saying. It’s drama rather than really doing something. I suppose there’s an argument that all such actions are about raising awareness and thus worth doing, but there’s also an argument that they’re just performances.

Baillie Gifford argues that the accusations levied against its investments are misleading. They point out that its two per cent investment in the petrochemical industry is far below the industry average, which is five to 11 per cent. Mundy, who as a member of the Baillie Gifford Prize board regularly carries out due-diligence checks, suggests that Baillie Gifford also “invest much more than that in companies working in clean energy”. 

Ok but on the other hand punishing Baillie Gifford is easier than working in clean energy.

Snappy headline:

Scottish Greens drop candidate who called JK Rowling a ‘cow’

A SCOTTISH Greens election candidate has been deselected by the party after calling JK Rowling a “torn-faced cow”.

Sophie Molly has been blocked from standing as the party’s candidate in Gordon and Buchan at the upcoming General Election after a Scottish Green Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday night. Green members in Molly’s area had complained about her social media conduct and accused her of bringing the party into disrepute.

So now he’s tweeted that he’s ditched the Greens and joined the SNP. Frying pan/fire springs to mind.

She added: “They will afford me the respect and dignity that a proud trans woman like me deserves. I will no longer be voting Scottish Greens.”

Why does a “proud trans woman” like him deserve respect and dignity, particularly? Why is proud transitude especially respect-worthy?

For people who pause to think about it for more than two seconds, it’s rather the opposite. Thinking you’re the other sex is a delusion, at best. (At worst it’s a cynical fraud.) Why does being delusional deserve exceptional respect and dignity? Mentally ill people of course deserve basic rights and respect like everyone else, but Molly Sophie Molly is claiming he deserves enhanced respect & dignity because he’s proudly trans. I beg to differ.

Is it “sexist” for a woman to object when a man who pretends to be a woman wins a best actress award?

The first transgender woman to be awarded the best actress prize at the Cannes film festival filed a legal complaint on Wednesday over a “sexist insult” from a far-right politician after her win. Karla Sofía Gascón and co-stars jointly received the accolade on Saturday for their performances in French auteur Jacques Audiard’s Mexico-set narco musical Emilia Perez. In the film, the 52-year-old Spanish actor – who lived as a man until she was 46 – plays a Mexican drug trafficker both before and after gender reassignment surgery.

He didn’t “live as a man” until he was 46. He simply was a man, and he still is.

After her win, French far-right politician Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, posted on X: “So a man has won best actress. Progress for the left means the erasure of women and mothers.”

I’m sorry she’s the granddaughter of Le Pen, but she’s still right. Men stealing women’s awards is men stealing women’s awards, and yes it is erasure.

Gascón, through her lawyer, told AFP: “We need to stop such comments.” Her lawyer Etienne Deshoulières said she had filed a legal complaint for “sexist insult on the basis of gender identity”.

If a kid puts on a bear suit and a parent reminds the kid “You’re not actually a bear” does the kid have grounds to sue?

H/t Sackbut

Last week:

Action on the floor of the House of Representatives paused for more than an hour Wednesday after Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., listed off the criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.

“We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we’re being prevented from even acknowledging it,” McGovern said during debate on the House floor, suggesting that House Republicans had prohibited any honest discussion of Trump’s trials. “A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending a hush money payment to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law.”

House Republicans quickly pushed back against McGovern’s words, with the back-and-forth leading to a lengthy delay as House staff members figured out how to proceed. His remarks were eventually ruled out of order.

Any port in a storm, eh?

The situation started when McGovern, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, referred to the Republican members of Congress who have attended Trump’s hush money trial in New York. “Maybe they want to distract from the fact that their candidate for president has been indicted more times than he’s been elected,” he said.

Rep. Jerry Carl, R-Ala., who was in the chair presiding over debate, reminded McGovern to “refrain from engaging in personalities” toward the presumed presidential nominees.

It’s not just “personalities” though is it. What’s wrong with Trump goes way beyond “personalities.”

[McGovern] then asked why a Republican member last week could call the Trump trial a “sham” on the House floor and not face the same admonishment by the chair. During a floor speech May 15, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, repeatedly referred to the “sham trial against the former president in New York,” which he said “relies on an unreliable witness being presided over by a biased judge.” 

But that’s completely different because.

Well whaddya know.

Starmer is currently on a mission to oust the few remaining leftwing Labour MPs from the party ahead of the snap election. On Monday, Labour sources leaked to the Times that Diane Abbott would not be permitted to stand as Labour’s candidate in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, despite having had the whip restored.

Amidst intense backlash, including from Tony Blair’s former director of communications and Starmer’s own party racism inspector, Starmer appeared to backtrack, denying to the BBC that Abbott had been barred from standing for Labour.

Whatever. Good news that Russell-Moyle is hobbled.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Looking for a face-saving way to recant.

Amongst them is Keir Starmer. In 2021 the Labour leader said backbencher Rosie Duffield was wrong to say that only women have a cervix; post-Cass he admits that “biologically, she of course is right”.

Sounds like a grudging admission preceding a “but” that’s supposed to mean that deep down he was actually correct.

An awful lot of people who spent years insisting not just that gender-confused kids should be chemically castrated with puberty blockers and speedily prescribed cross-sex hormones, but also that women can have penises and all the other trans articles of faith, are now looking for a face-saving way to recant.

I’m all for the continued embarrassment of the loudmouths and bandwagoneers who cynically chose to use gender bullshit to polish their progressive credentials. But I’d also like to see some accountability for those who pushed and implemented government policy that hurt women in service to gender ideology. I want to know who said “yes” to putting men in women’s prisons and rape crisis centers, and single sex, women’s hospital wards. I want to know who said yes to the lobbyists’ demands, eagerly implementing them with little or no public input, oversight, or scrutiny. There was (and is) no excuse for the thoughtless, reflexive promotion, adoption, and enforcement of these measures, particularly when women foresaw their consequences, and screamed bloody murder to try to stop them. I want these people identified, and called to answer for their destructive actions. It won’t happen of course, but it should.

Let’s break the taboo! No not that one! The other one!

Trump wants to beat up electric cars.

He has long claimed electric cars will “kill” America’s auto industry. He has called them an “assassination” of jobs. He has declared that the Biden administration “ordered a hit job on Michigan manufacturing” by encouraging the sales of electric cars.

And on Saturday, after ticking off a litany of false claims about electric vehicles, he spoke about slapping a “100 percent tariff” on cars manufactured in Mexico but imported into the United States. “And you’re not going to be able to sell those cars,” he said. “If I get elected. Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country, that’s going to be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”

It’s a metaphor, of course, but metaphor choice can be very instructive. It’s not without interest that he likes using violent metaphors. (I think I probably do too, but then I’m not running for president.)

Jennifer Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” noted that in his weekend speech, Mr. Trump jumped from complaining about the failure of the United Auto Workers to endorse him to making claims about the auto manufacturing industry leaving the United States for Mexico to the blood bath comment and then back to car sales.

“Because his speech was so disjointed it makes it difficult to know if he was threatening the U.A.W. workers, the U.S. auto manufacturers, or the nation as a whole,” Ms. Mercieca said. But, she added, “In a sense, it doesn’t matter because Trump was threatening all at once.”

Ms. Mercieca, who teaches communications at Texas A&M University, called Mr. Trump’s rhetoric a strategy of “ad baculum,” which is using threats of force or intimidation to coerce behavior.

It’s the crudest form of rhetoric there is, so of course Trump likes it. He’s the Platonic essence of crudity.

Helen Joyce on the awkward retreat from gender ideology:

An awful lot of people who spent years insisting not just that gender-confused kids should be chemically castrated with puberty blockers and speedily prescribed cross-sex hormones, but also that women can have penises and all the other trans articles of faith, are now looking for a face-saving way to recant.

Which is tragic for them, because there isn’t one. Their faces are stuck with what they did and said for so long.

Amongst them is Keir Starmer. In 2021 the Labour leader said backbencher Rosie Duffield was wrong to say that only women have a cervix; post-Cass he admits that “biologically, she of course is right”. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, who used to say “trans women are women, get over it”, now says the next Labour government will “work to implement the expert recommendations of the Cass review”.

Why did two clever men ever believe that men could become women? Or that little children could discern their innate gender identities before they could tie their shoelaces?

Believe or claim to believe. I for one always struggle with the difficulty of believing they really actually believed it as opposed to just saying it. It is difficult to believe.

Streeting, like so many gay men, was presumably misled by some gay campaign groups’ adoption of trans ideology despite its incompatibility with gay people’s rights. As for Sir Keir, he’s a lawyer, and lawyers are prone to believing that laws can overwrite reality.

Ahaha I never thought of that. It helps explain the witless belief that having a “gender certificate”=you really are the other sex. It’s like saying if you have a certificate that says you’re a tiger then you’re a tiger…but maybe to lawyers that’s just truth.

Funny how many people fell for this when they have no trouble understanding the concept of a “legal fiction” when the government declares Rwanda safe.

Exactly.

The hope now is that many of the cowards who remained professionally deaf and blind to the downsides of pretending sex can change, join the rush for the exit. The self-proclaimed sceptics who used to be so scathing about homoeopathy but swallowed the ludicrous claim that it was possible to be “born in the wrong body”. The New Atheists who genuflected to a godless neo-religion. The civil servants supposed to uphold impartiality in public life, who put their pronouns in their email signatures.

Yessssssss!! We all know all too well about those self-proclaimed skeptics and New Atheists. I hope their faces are a deep uncomfortable red.

Victoria Smith on trans activism versus anti-rape activism:

Roz Adams, a former ERCC caseworker, won her tribunal against the organisation for unfair dismissal, having been accused of transphobia for wanting to reassure clients about the sex of a colleague. The judgement was damning in its description of the “deeply flawed” way in which Wadhwa conducted the internal investigation. Nonetheless, at the time of writing, he remains in post. This is inexcusable. 

Even now, there will be some who characterise the situation as one of balancing competing rights (so difficult!) or well-meaning activists going a little too far (so easy to do!). I would argue that it is far worse than that. While claiming to stand for the marginalised,  Wadhwa has used his position to display an extraordinary level of callousness towards female victims of sexual violence. Traumatised women have been smeared as racists; they have been told to “rethink [their] relationship with prejudice”; they have been lectured on their “privilege”. This behaviour is too consistent to be accidental.

Calling it callousness is actually generous. It is callous but it’s also sadistic. Wadhwa isn’t just indifferent to women; he hates them.

This is a feature, not a bug, of modern-day trans activism. Trans-identified males such as Wadhwa and Morgane Oger, who waged war on Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter, are committed to controlling sexual violence support services in ways which allow their perceptions to dominate at all times…What Wadhwa, Oger and others — such as those opposing a current campaign for just one single-sex service in Brighton — are trying to do is control the feminist analysis of sex, power and female trauma. It would be bad enough if their sole concern was validation, but it is not. This is about shaping the political narrative of rape itself. 

Look at it from their point of view. If you’re a man who somehow convinces people that he’s a woman trapped in a male body, you’d be a fool to waste the opportunity. “People think I’m a woman! What a golden opportunity to make it ok to rape women!!”

Anyone can be a victim of rape (though most victims are female, and under English law all perpetrators are male). I don’t doubt that some trans-identified males have been victims themselves, and as such require support and care. Shared victimhood is not, however, the same as a shared understanding of the politics of sexual violence.

It wouldn’t be, would it. The politics of sexual violence are different depending on what sex you are.

Trans activism is incompatible with feminism in general, but it is especially incompatible with anti-rape activism. In the aftermath of trauma, we need to be reminded who we are and that we matter. To be a woman is not to exist to be objectified, redefined, placed in question. It is simply to be a female human, whole, complete. Traumatised women need help to remember that. Anyone who finds such a thing offensive might well need help themselves, but of a different kind. What they should never be doing is presuming to offer it to others.

Let alone bullying them for rejecting the offer.

Another purge.

Updating to add:

Classic.

Absolutely classic. It’s called Women’s Open Talk, it promises a judgement free support group for the women of Holmfirth – when it shuts down women’s talk, it judges the women for talking, it kicks the women out instead of supporting them. It talks a good game and then cancels every single promise it made.

They need to re-do the whole thing. It’s not women’s, it’s not open, it’s not judgement free, it’s not a support group, it’s not for women of Holmfirth or anywhere else.

Oh no oh no a movie actor said things that don’t comport with gender ideology. How will we cope?

A cinema in Massachusetts has apologised to the audience at a special screening of Jaws and a Q&A with its star, Richard Dreyfuss, who reportedly made a number of sexist and transphobic comments.

I have a feeling the sexist comments would have flown way under the radar if it hadn’t been for the “transphobic” ones. We all know that men who claim to be women are persecuted a BILLION times more than any sniveling bitches are.

No transcript of the event has been released, but social media posts suggest that he called Streisand a “genius” but that he didn’t listen to her as she was “a woman, and woman shouldn’t have that power”.

Call me crazy but I think I detect a little self-mockery and more than a little provocation along with the sexism there. I think it’s performative sexism, which, yes, is tiresome, but it’s not all that tiresome. I suspect it wouldn’t have drawn the slightest attention in the absence of the vastly more important “transphobic” comments.

Deadline reports that he also said “you shouldn’t be listening to some 10-year-old who says they want to be a boy instead of a girl”. The Boston Globe reports that he continued by saying that allowing such young people to transition “was bad parenting and that someday those kids might change their minds.”

That’s the real issue, isn’t it. The women bit is just throat-clearing, and an alibi. The real issue is Our Trans Siblings.

However, a video from the end of the event indicates that many audience members did remain and were highly appreciative of the actor, who cautioned against a decline in critical thinking to considerable applause.

Shut up shut up shut UP. Those audience members don’t matter. It’s only the ones who stomped out crying and bleeding who matter.

On 27 May, the venue issued a statement, saying they were “aware of, and share serious concerns, following the recent event with Richard Dreyfuss”.

They continued: “The views expressed by Mr Dreyfuss do not reflect the values of inclusivity and respect that we uphold as an organisation. We deeply regret the distress that this has caused to many of our patrons.”

Stop doing this. Nobody ever do this any more. Stop endorsing and agreeing with and pampering and inflating their ridiculous tantrums.

“We regret that an event that was meant to be a conversation to celebrate an iconic movie instead became a platform for political views,” it continued. “We take full responsibility for the oversight in not anticipating the direction of the conversation and for the discomfort it caused to many patrons.”

The statement concluded: “We are in active dialogue with our patrons about their experience and are committed to learning from this event how to better enact our mission of entertaining, educating and inspiring our community.”

They might as well be Trotskyists writing a mash note to Stalin after months of torture, not grown-ass adults who run a move theater. The sulking and screeching of the Outraged Moviegoers is a trivial matter and does not merit all this shoe-licking.

The Guardian includes a phot of Dreyfuss from Jaws, but I prefer that other, earlier role.

Portlandia.

Always proud to celebrate a cheater.

I happened on this piece from the National Women’s Law Center last June. I don’t think I saw it or shared it at the time (a word search turns up too many items to check). Apologies if this is a revisit.

Happy Pride, the title tells us. Don’t Be a TERF, it adds.

Women’s Law Center, putting men in dresses ahead of women.

The content is asinine.

It feels like every day there’s a new attack on trans people—whether it’s a ban on medical care for trans youth or legislation making drag shows illegal. 

What do drag shows have to do with trans people? Trans isn’t drag. Haven’t they been told?

Anti-trans rhetoric is currently taking center stage in the news and online, and unfortunately, some of these transphobic talking points are being repeated by well-meaning but misinformed people.  

Many people have been exposed to—or even use—this harmful ideology disguised as feminism without even knowing it. Whether you know what a TERF is or not, you should know that they’re using every trick in their book to get you on their side. 

That is truly sinister, ugly stuff. Protocols of the Elders of Zion level sinister and ugly. You’d think we were plotting genocide.

To save you from that fate, we’re breaking down how we got to this moment and why you can’t support women and be a TERF at the same time. 

Putting it in bold doesn’t make it true.

What is a TERF? they ask on our behalf.

The technical definition of a TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Most TERFs came to their ideology via second-wave feminism that radicalized into the lie that trans people are a threat to women.  

That’s a staggeringly impoverished definition, especially from a group of lawyers. What is meant by “trans-exclusionary”? People who don’t know what “terf” means aren’t going to know what these fools mean by “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” What ideology? What is second-wave feminism? What do you mean “radicalized”? And finally the idiotic over-simplification of the final sentence.

Some language to look out for: TERFs often self-identify as “gender critical” or as an “adult human female.” They believe in “sex-based rights,” “LGB rights,” and “protecting women and girls;” they call trans people “trans rights activists,” “the trans lobby,” “the trans debate,” and call trans women “TIMs” (Trans Identified Males).  

Ooooh I’ll look out for that. Wait. Why will I look out for it? What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with identifying as “gender critical” or as an “adult human female”? What’s wrong with believing in “sex-based rights,” “LGB rights,” and “protecting women and girls”? Doesn’t the Women’s Law Center believe in those things? If not why not?

It doesn’t get any more intelligent as it goes on. It’s mind-bendingly sub-literate, clunky, barren of thought, bossy, insulting, and dishonest. It makes Chase Strangio look reasonable in comparison.

The authors are Lark Lewis, Senior Manager of Creative and Digital Strategies, and Jordan Reynolds, Manager of Creative and Digital Strategies, Social Media. They must have a combined mental age of 15.