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

Maybe the same reason the BBC did.

Along with the non-stop bullying of women.

Oh have they now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before and after:

Mermaids had better start looking for lawyers.

From The Australian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too busy reporting on the evil doings of TERFs.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Furthermore gender critical feminists just don’t get it.

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

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

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

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

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

Sums it all up if you ask me.

Trump can barely get the words out.

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that’ll be enough.

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

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

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

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

Like for instance renting women.

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

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

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

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

Their rented woman’s body.

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

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

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

Reading the intro part 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading the intro part one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doesn’t it.

No.

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

Talk about institutional capture…

Table of contents.

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

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

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

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

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

And more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People have lost their damn minds.

Sir has his wars mixed up (also the 1918 flu was in 1918, not 1917).

LGBT+ Labour has put out a stupid bullying “statement” on Labour MP Rosie Duffield who had the unmitigated temerity to say that it’s only women who have a cervix.

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community, and the trans people, and trans individuals, and all trans people, and trans groups, and trans collectives, and each and every trans person, and all the trans people, and every single trans person, and have we said it enough ways yet?

But solidarity never with women. Fuck women; women are the enemy. Karens.

It is with great sadness that we have decided to put out this Statement on Rosie Duffield.

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community.

LGBT+ Labour would like to express our deep disappointment in the actions of Rosie Duffield. We believe that her previous tweets and lack of apology is absolutely unacceptable.

Rosie Duffield’s initial comments which sparked concern claimed, “only women have a cervix”. This statement is very troubling as it ignores both trans men and numerous non-binary people’s existence. Many Labour activists, especially from the trans community, raised their anxieties over this exclusionary language and were met with hostility. With already rising levels of hatred towards the trans community, the bare minimum to expect from Labour MPs is full solidarity and support.

Furthermore, Rosie Duffield then shared a Spectator article that referred to the “trangender thought police” and described the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights as “authoritarian… petulant youngsters”. It is clear that this has contributed towards a situation where our party has become a space where trans and non-binary members do not feel as safe and protected as they should.

The cause for trans rights should be integral to the Labour Party, as the party of equality in our country. Trans rights are human rights, and are workers’ rights, and LGBT+ Labour will always defend our members.

We have spent the past few days reaching out to Rosie Duffield and her office to attempt to initiate steps towards an apology and reparations. Since we have approached Rosie Duffield, she has continued to like and share tweets from people known by the trans community as hostile to their rights. Unfortunately we have not reached a conclusion that our committee sees as an adequate response for her repeated actions.

We are deeply disappointed, and know that in order to regain trust in our party from the trans community, we must now publicly call on the leadership of the party to take measurable action on this situation. We will be writing to Keir Starmer on behalf of our members to ask for a response.

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community.

These people are such sniveling sniffing creeping pointing whining demanding poking prodding oily creeps I wouldn’t want anything to do with a party that has them in it. If this is Putin’s work he’s a genius.

Originally a comment by iknklast on In middle-of-nowhere Arizona.

Omar, as someone who is a higher education faculty member, I feel the answer to the question of what is the product is of utmost importance. As you said, many see the diploma/graduate as the product. It is not. You said the experience. I think that is important, giving the student experiences that no other setting offers; they may or may not enhance their future career, but they add richness to life.

But the most important product of education is…education. Learning how to think. Learning some facts so you can think about things. Learning how to learn. Learning how to work with others

The product is education; the diploma/degree/certificate is just a certificate of authenticity, verifying that said student learned (or was able to fake learning well enough to fool the faculty, all too easy with some faculty) what the paper says the learned.

Because we get this wrong – the product misidentified – we make huge mistakes in how we approach education. We approach it toward a goal of success, but we identify success as the paper, not as what lies behind the paper. A student who does not complete the degree, but learns tons, is more use than one that completes the degree but learns nothing. (Trump comes to mind for the last; Dubya, too.)

Many of the studies I see on “effective” education seem to interpret success as ‘student is happy’, because few of them that I have seen have actually shown any improvement in learning with the new methods. Those that do, the effect size is so small, and they get significance by generating a larger n, it isn’t worth throwing out things that are working as well and remaking the entire system around a nebulous maybe.

Try telling administrators that. Their eyes gleam at significance, and they never notice small effect. They get to start new projects, hire new administrators, and torture educators, so they will jump on board the newest, latest bandwagon. A year later, that will be declared “ancient” methods and they will move on to the latest shiny squirrel.

People outside the US are surprised that we’re doing such a staggeringly bad job of preventing the virus from exploding.

With confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hitting 5 million Sunday, by far the highest of any country, the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.

We’ve always been crap on the social justice, equality, fairness side, but we were good on the techy side. Now? We’re Major Kong riding the nuke down, waving his hat and hollerin’.

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn’t have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units.

… “We Italians always saw America as a model,” said Massimo Franco, a columnist with daily Corriere della Sera. “But with this virus we’ve discovered a country that is very fragile, with bad infrastructure and a public health system that is nonexistent.”

Yup! That’s how we roll!

Trump’s frequent complaints about Dr. Anthony Fauci have regularly made headlines in Europe, where the U.S. infectious-disease expert is a respected figure. Italy’s leading COVID-19 hospital offered Fauci a job if Trump fired him.

It’s a good thing Trump can’t fire him, or we can be confident he would have.

This is what Rebecca Solnit ignored in her perky reference to the last night of the last lesbian bar in San Francisco and what a lot of “trans men” were present:

Today I grabbed a latte at my local Starbucks. There’s no drive-thru there, and I found myself darting into the premises with a feeling of dread. The young lesbian on testosterone was at the counter again. Two other servers are also transing lesbians. I’ve seen them before.

I can tell they would have been young butch lesbians in any other era. I can tell because I was a young butch lesbian in this hating world once. The only difference between them and me is time – I was just one of the lucky ones to not be around at the time of the transcult.

…

The horror of knowing they are lesbians who think they are men due to the current contagion of transactivism makes it hard to be there. I look around as I leave and three of their transing lesbian friends are sitting at a booth.

…

Every butch lesbian who is critical about this horrific trans. movement—a movement that would push young lesbians into believing they are male and amputating their healthy breasts and taking cross-hormones—every butch knows what they are seeing. It’s like looking into a mirror and recalling all of the angst, hatred, parental and peer rejection all over again.

It’s a horrific experience to sit in a room full of my sisters and know this. It’s like being one of the last butch survivors in a complete eradication. I can’t think of any other way to state the horror I feel at progressives actually thinking that the surgical violation of these young lesbians is somehow a brave and courageous thing.

They are telling these girls that they are not okay being who they are and wearing what they want to wear. These are girls like I once was. They sometimes have short hair, and that way of carrying themselves that is strong and independent. They don’t care about boys and when they were kids, they played with trucks and things other girls don’t really like. They liked collecting rocks and they didn’t giggle around the boys like the other girls did. They were never like the other girls.

And now they’re being told they’re men.

They call it ‘gender non-conforming.’ That’s a fancy word for butch lesbian. What is happening is that tomboys are pushed to transition and the trans. net captures all the future butches. This is not mere speculation. Physicians who work in gender clinics are saying that homosexuality is the first ‘step’ to transing. This is gruesome.

…

Our lesbian spaces are already dead. Our bookstores, our dances. Everything we built is dead and taken over by the trans nightmare. I was there when we had it all. Don’t think I don’t have at least a modicum of hope that this madness will end. Because I do. But that’s not today.

That’s what Solnit left out.

H/t Papito

Rebecca Solnit ffs. I’d expect better from her.

She grew up in San Francisco. It was “in its heyday the loudest, proudest queer town around.” It was all about kindness and liberation.

As I’ve watched transphobia explode in the American right and the British whatever, I’ve thought over my own experience. San Francisco has been for a century or so a sanctuary city for dissident, rebel and queer people, so I suspect I have lived my whole adult life in a place with more trans people per capita than almost anyplace else. Transphobes are always warning us that if trans people live in peace and legal recognition and even have rights, there will be terrible consequences, but I assume that we here have long realized, at least to some extent, that dreaded future, and we’re all fine.

No, that’s not what gender critical people say. That’s the usual stupid caricature of what we say, which should be beneath Rebecca Solnit. We’re not saying trans people should not live in peace or have rights, obviously. And we’re not “all fine.” Female athletes who have lost medals, spots on a team, scholarships because a trans woman or girl took them are not “all fine,” they have been harmed, their rights have been violated, they have not been allowed to live in peace.

Despite this, people – many of whom are supposed to be feminists – keep coming up with lurid “what ifs”. My response to them is: trans women do not pose a threat to cis-gender women, and feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy, which means, sorry, you can’t be a feminist if you’re not for everyone’s human rights, notably other women’s rights.

In other words her response to us is just an assertion, and it’s an assertion that is not true. She doesn’t get to announce that “trans women do not pose a threat to cis-gender women” as if it were an obvious and universal truth just like that. Some trans women do pose a threat to women; some have already been violent toward women. Solnit can’t know that all trans women without exception are and always will be no threat to women, so it’s fatuous and also rude to announce it in that confident way. Solnit can’t even know that all trans women really are trans women as opposed to men consciously faking it in order to be housed in the women’s prison or compete against women in sport or be given a position such as Women’s Officer.

Saying all this and more is not a matter of being opposed to “everyone’s human rights,” it’s a matter of rejecting lies and fantasies and attempts to bully us into accepting lies and fantasies.

Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You.

Then don’t call us “cis.” You’ll have seen that she did call us “cis-gender” in that second quoted passage. And would she say that about Rachel Dolezal? Would she say that about white people who claimed to be black or brown? Suppose Eric Trump had a sudden conversion, and told the world he’s discovered he’s a Cherokee in his soul, no matter what he looks like on the outside – would Solnit tell us we don’t get to “define” him? Would she tell people who really are Cherokee that they don’t get to “define” him?

As a young woman dealing with endless street harassment and menace from straight men, I used to breathe a sigh of relief when I got to the Castro District, because that was the only place I was confident I would be safe. Reflecting back on these four decades, I figure I must have spent a ton of time around trans people in bars and clubs and street parties and protests (and yeah, public restrooms) without really noticing, which is maybe the point. OK, in 2015, at the last night at the Lexington Club, San Francisco’s last lesbian bar, I did gradually realize that the many nice young men in the crowd were trans men.

Uh…yes? And? She missed it, didn’t she. Why was there a last night for San Francisco’s last lesbian bar? In 2015? Why is she apparently cheering that fact? Does she actually think it’s an improvement that lesbians have disappeared into “trans men”?

It’s an embarrassing performance altogether.

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed:

Like many academic debates, one currently rocking the music theory world is esoteric. But the controversy — about the legacy of the late Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker — has grown legs because it involves accusations of anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and, now, censorship.

…

Late last year, when conferences still happened in person, [Philip] Ewell delivered a plenary address at the society’s annual conference. Ewell, who is Black, argued that Schenker’s known white supremacist views informed his hierarchical approach to music theory. The talk, in which Ewell referred to Schenker as “an ardent racist and German nationalist,” was part of a much longer, since-published paper on the “white racial frame” in music theory.

Ewell argued that music theory will only diversify through “deframing and reframing” that “structural and institutionalized” framework that Schenker helped build. He also pushed for a more diverse music theory curriculum. The talk was generally well received: Ewell enjoyed a standing ovation.

Soon after the talk, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, housed at North Texas, put out a call for papers responding to Ewell’s plenary. Music theory is a traditionally white, male-dominated field and Ewell’s comments — underneath the applause — apparently ruffled feathers.

Some of the articles were favorable, others were critical or outright hostile.

One by Timothy Jackson, distinguished university research professor of theory at North Texas and a co-editor of Studies, was arguably the most critical of all: in it, Jackson seemed to accuse Ewell of anti-Semitism. Ewell in his talk did not discuss Schenker’s Jewishness. But Schenker’s wife was killed by Nazis and he likely would have ended up in their clutches if he’d lived past 1935.

… Beginning a series of sweeping statements about Black values, culture and families, Jackson said Ewell “is uninterested in bringing Blacks up to ‘standard’ so they can compete. On the contrary, he is claiming that those very standards are in themselves racist.” African Americans “have the right to embrace their own culture as precious — i.e. rap music, hip hop, etc. — and study and teach it in universities,” he added, “so that the products of the ‘defective,’ ‘racist’ White culture — i.e. classical music — be shunted aside.”

…

Finding the symposium disturbing, a group of music graduate students at North Texas petitioned their dean to publicly condemn the issue and investigate its editorial process, due to the apparent “horrendous lack of peer review, publication of an anonymous response and clear lack of academic rigor.”

Going forward, the students also asked the dean and the greater university to dissolve the journal and discipline and potentially remove faculty members who used the journal “to promote racism.”

Another one of these, in short.

H/t Sackbut

One for the “that’s just embarrassing” file:

White House aides reached out to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem last year about the process of adding additional presidents to Mount Rushmore, the New York Times reported.

Meaning, Trump hacks asked South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem if she would please add Donald Trump’s face to the four faces carved into that slab of rock to make the world’s tackiest whatever-that-is.

According to a person familiar who spoke with the Times, Noem then greeted Trump when he arrived in the state for his July Fourth celebrations at the monument with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included his face.

Noem has noted before Trump’s “dream” to have his face on Mount Rushmore, the Coolidge-era sculpture that features the 60-foot-tall faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

It’s ugly, it’s tacky, it’s silly, it’s inappropriate, it’s yet another theft from Native Americans, and did I mention it’s ugly? It’s so ludicrous that Trump bothers to think about it, let alone thinking he’s MonuMental.

According to a 2018 interview with Noem, the two struck up a conversation about the sculpture in the Oval Office during their first meeting, where she initially thought he was joking. “I started laughing,” she said. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.”

Because he’s that stupid and that vain. Yes. There is no limit to his stupidity and vanity.

Donnie’s never going to be on a monument. Donnie will be lucky to avoid prison (and I hope he doesn’t avoid it).