Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph – the Telegraph, please note, not the Guardian, even though she’s a Guardian columnist. The Guardian must have refused to publish it.

I am well aware that Twitter is not the real world. But then nor is the Labour Party. Out of all the issues that might be bothering the leadership contenders – anti-Semitism, a reconnection with lost voters, a plausible response to Boris Johnson – instead, a bizarre set of pledges has been issued on trans rights.

Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey have signed it. It suggests the expulsion of “transphobic” members from the party and says that organisations such as Woman’s Place and the LGB Alliance, which are concerned to keep same sex spaces for women, are hate groups that have to be fought.

In other words Labour has said a big “fuck off” to women.

But this is not actually about trans folk at all. It is about a denial that women need safe spaces, whether that’s in prison or refuges.

That and more. It’s about a denial that women are oppressed or marginalized, it’s about barely disguised hatred of women, it’s about expecting women to give way to everyone else, it’s about hostility and contempt and venom that doesn’t have to be hidden any more.

Feminism and gay rights didn’t happen via Momentum. Some of us are aware that competing sets of rights may clash and we need to talk. I merely note that this discussion is always about trans women and not trans men.

Why is that? And who is the enemy of trans people? Who rapes and kills them? Feminists? Or men? The last time I saw threatening male behaviour was outside the Woman’s Place meeting at Labour conference.

Enough of us have had enough of being told what a woman’s place in the Labour Party is. We will go elsewhere. We already have.

And we won’t be handing out sandwiches.

Walter Shaub thinks Trump’s strong-arming of New York is not getting nearly enough attention.

Or (or and) it could be that in the firehose of bad shit that Trump sends out every day it becomes very difficult to spot the top maximum utmost worst things.

Trump does think he is in effect a king. Someone surely must have told him that in fact the powers of a president are not those of a king, but he equally surely must have paid no attention.

And Barr is his enabler.

Barr was once seen as a potential check on Trump’s overt desire to take command of the justice department, deploying its investigators and prosecutors at his whim and his will. But this week, critics warn, the attorney general has been revealed as an eager accomplice in eroding norms meant to insulate the criminal justice system from political interference, threatening the bedrock principle of equality before the law.

I’m not sure who once saw Barr as a potential check on Trump’s overt desire to take command of the justice department; the way I remember it there were some faint hopes that he might be more principled than Sessions (let alone Whitaker), but also plenty of pessimism.

“We fought a revolution against kingly prerogative,” said [Paul] Rosenzweig. “At its most extreme, Trump’s actions post-impeachment in the last week reflect his belief that he really has, as he said, an absolute right to intervene anywhere in the executive branch. And there’s a word for that.

“People with absolute rights are kings.”

And presidents don’t bounce around shouting that they have an absolute right to do X…unless they’re Trump. He’s a first that way; he’s the first to be that unselfconsciously authoritarian and that reckless about saying so, and he’s the first to be historically and institutionally illiterate enough to think it’s true.

“Bill Barr has turned the job of attorney general and the political appointee layer at the top of the justice department on its head,” said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton.

“In past administrations of both political parties, the function of the political appointees at the justice department has been to insulate the rest of the department from political pressure. And Bill Barr instead has become the conduit for that political pressure.”

All for…what? An end to abortion rights? A permanent Republican stranglehold on elections? Lower taxes for billionaires? Copper mines in all the national parks?

Barr has not been untouched by the turbulence of the last week. Reported threats of additional resignations drove him on Thursday to grant a TV interview in which he complained that Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job” and vowed: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

A Trump spokesperson said the president’s feelings were not hurt. Barr was said to have warned the White House of what he was going to say.

And nobody believed a word of it.

The interview was met with outrage and eye-rolls among critics who saw a wide divergence between what Barr said and everything else he has been doing.

“I think Bill Barr is shrewd, deliberate, smart, calculating, careful, and full of it,” tweeted the former US attorney Preet Bharara.

The real Barr, critics say, has a 12-month track record as a spearhead for Trump’s attack on justice, beginning with public lies about the report of special counsel Robert Mueller and running through his intervention in the case of Roger Stone.

In short he’s a hack and a very bad man.

More on Fair Cop:

Harry Miller was visited by Humberside Police at work in January last year after a complaint about his tweets.

He was told he had not committed a crime, but it would be recorded as a non-crime “hate incident”.

He hadn’t committed a crime, yet the plods “visited” him at work. No crime, but punishment anyway.

The court found the force’s actions were a “disproportionate interference” with his right to freedom of expression.

…

Mr Justice Julian Knowles said the effect of police turning up at Mr Miller’s place of work “because of his political opinions must not be underestimated”.

He added: “To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom.

“In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

Funny to edge toward it on behalf of men who say they are women.

Janice Turner writes that Lisa Nandy brands herself as Labour’s truth teller:

Rational, grounded, fearless of factions, the only leadership candidate prepared to tackle the self-delusion and disconnect which lost four elections, she’d won many prospective votes, including mine. Until Tuesday, when Nandy signed up to a witch-hunt of thousands of (mainly female) party members, including me.

It’s that “expel the transphobic bigots” pledge, which Turner calls astonishingly totalitarian.

It not only demands signatories “accept there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights” but says anyone who disagrees is a bigot. It names Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance as “hate groups” whose supporters are transphobic and must therefore be expelled.

News flash: not wanting to surrender our rights to men who say they are women doesn’t make women “transphobic.”

I mention Nandy because although every leadership candidate except Sir Keir Starmer has now signed this pledge, she has doubled down. There are no spaces at all, she said on Radio 4’s Today programme, where male-bodied people should be excluded.

Maybe it’s not that gender critical women are transphobic but that gender not-critical women are transphilic? They certainly do put the claimed needs and firm demands of trans women ahead of ours. Women just have to put up with male bodies in formerly women’s private spaces whether we want to or not? Isn’t that a tad rapey? Or does transphilia excuse all?

Nandy is not the first politician who, sucked into the gender vortex, loses all reason. This week Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle confounded biologists by saying that “sex is not binary”. During the election Lib Dem Dr Sarah Wollaston denied that a baby’s biological sex is observed at birth; potential Lib Dem leader Layla Moran believes women can differentiate male predators from self-identified trans women by looking into their souls.

And the window for that is where, exactly?

How have LGBT issues, in particular gender self-ID, become such a moral test of politicians in progressive parties? Sociologists speak of how organisations can be overwhelmed by “purity spirals”. This is when a group grades its members by a single value, which has no upper limit or agreed interpretation. Those who seek power must demonstrate their purity in ever more abstruse ways: those judged “impure” are denounced and destroyed.

That makes sense. The single value and the no upper limit is exactly what we encounter day in and day out.

Working on the 2019 Labour manifesto, Lachlan Stuart observed that LGBT activists were not “driven by a motivation to improve the quality of life for trans people” such as increased mental and physical health provision, only “to erode or erase the political rights of female people.” Their alarming central goal was to open up all female single-sex spaces to anyone who identified as a woman.

How will voters, who have hitherto been unaware of this arcane debate, feel about a Labour Party fully committed to ending historic safeguards? To a party which believes any male person should be allowed to legally change sex without qualification or checks, leaving women and girls vulnerable yet unable to object? Will Labour leaders pull out of the purity spiral and heed the fears of thousands of women members? Or will they, as that nice Lisa Nandy demands, simply chuck them out?

Get out of the purity spiral while you still can.

Trump will be blowing another gasket in 10, 9, 8, 7…

Reuters:

The U.S. Justice Department is closing its criminal investigation into whether former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to investigators about his communications with the media without bringing any charges against him, his attorneys announced in a statement on Friday.

In a letter his lawyers also released from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., prosecutors said that “based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”

Trump can always console himself by remembering he put McCabe through two years of hell and took away his pension.

More from the Barr is dirty files:

The New York Times is reporting that attorney general Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to “scrutinize the criminal case” against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.

The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.

“Highly unusual” as in “unprecedented in living memory,” according to prosecutors Rachel Maddow talked to yesterday. This is not what the Justice Department is supposed to do. The fact that it’s doing it in a case that Trump has loudly and frequently bellowed about makes it all the more grotesque.

I don’t think Bloomberg should be running, let alone elected, but he is in a good position to give Trump what he dishes out.

Trump knows that’s true and he hates it.

Yasssssss.

Police officers unlawfully interfered with a man’s right to freedom of expression by turning up at his place of work to speak to him about allegedly “transphobic” tweets, the high court has ruled.

Harry Miller, a former police officer who founded the campaign group Fair Cop, said the actions of Humberside police had a “substantial chilling effect” on his right to free speech.

Miller, 54 and from Lincolnshire, claims an officer told him he had not committed a crime, but that his tweeting was being recorded as a “hate incident”.

At this point in the story I always pause to think about the torrents of abuse that have been poured over women on Twitter, with neither the police nor Twitter giving the tiniest fuck about any of it.

The College of Policing’s guidance defines a transgender hate incident as “any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender”.

In a ruling on Friday, the high court in London found the actions of Humberside police were a “disproportionate interference” with Miller’s right to freedom of expression.

But he said the College of Police guidance was fine. So…I guess everything is a hate incident if someone says so, but that’s not necessarily a good enough reason to show up at people’s jobs and wreck their lives.

The judge said: “The claimants’ tweets were lawful and there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet.

“I find the combination of the police visiting the claimant’s place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the claimant’s right to freedom of expression because of their potential chilling effect.”

In his judgment, Knowles stated: “I conclude that the police left the claimant with the clear belief that he was being warned by them to desist from posting further tweets on transgender matters even if they did not directly warn him in terms.

“In other words, I conclude that the police’s actions led him, reasonably, to believe that he was being warned not to exercise his right to freedom of expression about transgender issues on pain of potential criminal prosecution.”

Kate Scottow, on the other hand, lost her case.

Today’s judgement was a hard sight to bear: a 39-year-old mother of two children, one of whom is autistic, listened as the judge at St Albans Magistrates’ Court found her guilty, under the Communications Act (2003), of using a public communications network to “cause annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety”.

Again, I pause to think of the torrents of abuse that have been poured over women on Twitter, with neither the police nor Twitter giving the tiniest fuck about any of it. Real abuse, sustained abuse, deliberate calculated repeated over weeks and months abuse – which is apparently just what women have to expect if they talk in public.

The verdict means Kate Scottow is unlikely to be able to fulfil her ambition of becoming a forensic psychologist, after completing her master’s degree in the subject last year.

Her crime? To send some offensive tweets to a trans woman called Stephanie Hayden. These included describing Hayden as a “pig in a wig” and referring to Hayden as “he” or “him”. 

Note that the president of the United States does worse than that almost every day.

Yes, that’s right, frame it as “first for transgender athlete!!” as opposed to “man hopes to qualify for women’s Olympics.” Make it sound like an exciting innovation as opposed to a man cheating a woman out of a place at the Olympics.

On Dec. 8, 2019, 28-year-old Megan Youngren became one of 63 women at the California International Marathon to officially qualify for the 2020 U.S. Olympic marathon trials, the race that will determine the team for Tokyo. Her 40th-place finish in 2:43:52 came as both a relief and a reward, after four months of intense training. But it also marked another significant moment: With her qualification, Youngren is set to make history on Feb. 29 as the first openly transgender athlete to compete at the U.S. Olympic marathon trials.

In other words Youngren is a man.

In 2013, Youngren started running to lose weight and boost her health after transitioning, and now she primarily races on trails and runs up and down mountains for fun. Youngren says that running helped alleviate any lingering symptoms from a case of shingles. By 2014, she was running consistently, but with little structure to her training. An Alaska native, Youngren ran her first marathon at the 2017 Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks in 4:48, on a course with an unforgiving 3,285 feet of elevation gain and loss. Despite the difficulty and cramping, she credits that race as the one that got her hooked on the 26.2-mile distance. …

“I thought that if I worked incredibly hard and took some huge risks that I could run a 2:45,” Youngren says. “People will try to put it down by saying, ‘That’s too easy because you’re trans.’ But what about the 500 other women who will qualify? There’s probably someone with the exact same story. I trained hard. I got lucky. I dodged injuries. I raced a lot, and it worked out for me. That’s the story for a lot of other people, too.”

Not because he’s trans; because he’s male. And it’s not that it’s too easy, it’s that it’s an unfair advantage.

Interesting. I saw the tweet, and found it exceedingly disgusting, but didn’t quite make the connection. Good thing other people did.

Barr has been putting on a show of indignation.

Attorney General Bill Barr told ABC News on Thursday that President Donald Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case” but should stop tweeting about the Justice Department because his tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

I can all but hear them planning it. “Pretend you’re pissed off about my tweets.” “Hahahaha sir you’re a genius.”

Barr ignited a firestorm this week after top Justice Department officials intervened in the sentencing of Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser to the president who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

In a stunning reversal, the Justice Department overruled a recommendation by its own prosecution team that Stone spend seven to nine years in jail and told a judge that such a punishment – which was in line with sentencing guidelines – “would not be appropriate.”

The reality is that it’s Barr’s interference that was and is inappropriate. But hey, blame the tweets.

In the interview with ABC News, Barr fiercely defended his actions and said it had nothing to do with the president. He said he was supportive of Stone’s convictions but thought the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years was excessive.

And yet…

The filing notes that this recommendation is “consistent with the applicable advisory Guidelines.”

Maybe “excessive” in this case means “excessive for a friend of Donald Trump’s”?

Back to Barr:

Barr said Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet put him in a bad position. He insists he had already discussed with staff that the sentencing recommendation was too long.

Barr insists a lot of things. Barr is not credible.

When asked directly if he had a problem with the president’s tweets, Barr responded, “Yes. Well, I have a problem with some of, some of the tweets. As I said at my confirmation hearing, I think the essential role of the attorney general is to keep law enforcement, the criminal process sacrosanct to make sure there is no political interference in it. And I have done that and I will continue to do that,” adding, “And I’m happy to say that, in fact the president has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.”

He doesn’t need to, does he. And as for making sure there is no political interference with law enforcement – do not insult our intelligence that way.

Barr also told ABC News he was “a little surprised” that the prosecution team withdrew from the case and said he hadn’t spoken to the team. He said it was “preposterous” to suggest that he “intervened” in the case as much as he acted to resolve a dispute within the department on a sentencing recommendation.

By intervening. We know.

When asked if he expects the president to react to his criticism of the tweets, Barr said: “I hope he will react.”

“And respect it?” ABC’s Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Barr said.

So how did that work out?

About two hours after the interview aired, the White House issued a statement.

“The President wasn’t bothered by the comments at all and he has the right, just like any American citizen, to publicly offer his opinions. President Trump uses social media very effectively to fight for the American people against injustices in our country, including the fake news. The President has full faith and confidence in Attorney General Barr to do his job and uphold the law,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.

So Barr must be “disappointed.”

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Define “civil liberty“.

It all comes down to the initial claim that trans people actually are the sex they feel they are. Yet too often rebuttals are dismissed with the insistence that these academic, intellectual debates ignore the suffering and needs of real, live people.

Yet we are told that we must prioritise the suffering and needs of some few, real live trans identified males over the suffering and needs of all real, live women and girls. We are told that there is no actual conflict since, because “transwomen are women”, they are all in fact the same group, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot who desrves to be no-platformed or sacked. This is why the definition of “woman” is so vital. To what group of people are you referring when you use the word “woman?” How is that group defined, by feelings or biology? Being able to convince bystanders and others that this is a conflict within feminism rather than a conflict between “feminisms” (or more acurately, between feminism and something that identifies as feminism), allows TRAs to paint GC feminists as evil TERFs and avoids the much needed discussion of the very real conflicts they are so desperate to deny exist and at the same time paper over.

TRAs are currently in an advantageous tactical position given the rapid and widespread institutional capture in government and media they have been able to engineer or take advantage of, but the fact they have to fight material reality itself means that whatever tactical positions they hold now, they will always have to fight to keep them. Reality isn’t going to change, and it’s not going anywhere.

Well that’s a mess.

Another day another letter.

I haven’t been able to find the letter in non-image form so I’ll just have to proceed with this one. The very first sentence is odd – colleagues at the University of Kent have recently been informed that the university “has chosen to uphold the invitation to Selina Todd” – as if there were something shady about inviting someone to speak and then not withdrawing the invitation. As if the university were supposed to withdraw invitations to external academics upon request. As if the university deserved rebuke for “choosing to uphold” such an invitation. Funny kind of academics these are.

Todd is a “self-proclaimed” [nonsense – that’s a loaded way of putting it] gc feminist “who has been widely criticised” [by people like us] “for her arguments against trans people’s – particularly trans women’s [i.e. men’s] right to self-identify.”

Yes, and? There is no such thing as a “right to self-identify.” Suppose you come to my door right now and “self-identify” as a friend of mine and invited to lunch. Do I have to “validate” your identity and give you lunch? I do not. Suppose I go to your children’s school and “self-identify” as a physics teacher; does the school have to let me teach classes? It does not. There is no such right.

Blah blah blah. Third paragraph – “The power dynamics” of letting Selina Todd (a historian of working class women) speak puts trans and non-binary people in the position “of having to defend their right to exist.” No it doesn’t. Why? Because no gender critical feminist is saying such people should not exist, or anything like it. Because no gender critical feminist is a threat to anyone’s existence. Because it’s not about existence. This constant framing of gender critical feminists as genocidal is both ludicrous and intensely insulting.

Then they quote Sara Ahmed saying “some at the table are, in effect or intent, arguing for the elimination of others at the table.”

The elimination – in other words the genocide. Again.

Todd’s views, they say, in a powerful surge of reasoning, “refuse to acknowledge that trans women ARE women, and that trans women’s rights ARE women’s rights.” Oh well ok then, if you put it in all caps there is nothing left to say.

Then they say it doesn’t matter that she wasn’t invited to talk about trans issues, she’s infected all the same. These are academics, remember.

Then they say there is precedent, because look, the University of East Anglia postponed a seminar with Kathleen Stock. Good argument: hit this person, because we hit that other person before. (Also, last I heard, the UEA didn’t postpone that seminar, nor did it cancel it or object when Kathleen refused to agree to a different format at their request.)

What a gang of craps these “academics” must be.

The ACLU’s Staff Attorney on their National LGBT & HIV Project:

They’re not “cis” girls. Chase Strangio doesn’t get to other them from their own sex like that. They’re just girls. They didn’t choose it, they were born it, as we all were. That doesn’t make them a subcategory of their sex.

But even more dishonest is that “because their trans peers are able to participate fully in school life.” Strangio lies like that constantly, and it’s infuriating, especially coming from the ACLU. That is not why the girls are suing, and Strangio knows it. They are suing to prevent boys from competing on the girls’ team and thus depriving girls of medals and scholarships. Those boys don’t have to compete on the girls’ team to participate fully in school life. They could compete on the boys’ team (since they are boys). They wouldn’t come in first, but there is no “right” to come in first, especially by cheating.

How would those two boys – Yearwood and Miller – like it if all the boys in the school joined them on the girls’ team? Not much, because they would lose again.

It’s a sanctimonious and kind-of-racist lie to say this is about “urging the state to police young Black women.” Yearwood and Miller are not young Black women, because they are not women.

Chase Strangio is despicable.