DOCTOR Veronica Ivy Rachel McKinnon is being peak philosopher again.
Peak philosopher Ivy McKinnon is framing a disagreement about the ontology of the category “woman” as hate speech which must be reported to “the appropriate authorities” and flagged up to Michael Robinson’s sponsors, clearly in the hope that they will all drop Robinson instantly and with public opprobrium.
Meryl Streep made an important point in this 2012 interview on Fresh Air:
GROSS: You gave a terrific commencement address at Barnard in 2010. And one of things you talked about was that the hardest thing in the world is to persuade a straight, male audience to identify with a woman character. It’s easier for women because we were brought up identifying with male characters in literature. It’s hard for straight boys to identify with Juliet or Wendy in “Peter Pan,” whereas girls identify with Romeo and with Peter Pan. What led you to that conclusion?
STREEP: What let me to that was I have never – I mean, I watch movies. And I don’t care who is the protagonist, I feel what that guy is feeling. You know, if it’s Tom Cruise leaping over a building – I want to make it, you know? And I’m going to – yes, I made it. And yeah, so I get that. And I’ve grown up, well, partly because there weren’t great girls’ literature – Nancy Drew, maybe – but there weren’t things.
So there was Huck Finn and “Spin And Marty.” The boys characters were interesting, and you’ve – you lived through them when you’re watching it. You know, you don’t – you’re not aware of it, but you’re following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. But it became obvious to me that men don’t live through the female characters.
GROSS: Do you think that women have that kind of double consciousness and men, like, boys…
STREEP: I think it has to do with…
GROSS: …Don’t make that leap?
STREEP: Well, it has to do with very deep things, you know, because it might be that imagining yourself as a girl is a diminishment. But it is something that when I made “The Devil Wears Prada,” it was the first time in my life, 30 years of making movies, that a man came up and said, I know how you felt. I know how you felt. I have a job like that. People don’t understand.
GROSS: It’s the first time?
STREEP: First time. First time. And they say lots of things. I think they – this is what I was trying to say in that speech. It’s very hard point to make because I guess it’s hard to wrap your head around it. But for men, the most – usually the favorite character that I’ve ever played is Linda in “The Deer Hunter.”
Without question, of the heterosexual men that I’ve spoken to over the years, that’s usually – they say, you know, my favorite thing you’ve ever done was Linda or Sophie. And they were a particular kind of very feminine, recessive kind of personality. They – so they fell in love with her, but they didn’t feel the story through her body. And it took to “The Devil Wears Prada” to play someone tough, who had to make hard decisions, who was running an organization, and sometimes that takes making tough decisions for a certain kind of man to empathize. That’s the word – empathize. Feel the story through her. And that’s the first time anybody has ever said that they felt that way.
Can confirm. Growing up I identified with a thousand male characters – and a thousand female ones too.
The smug piece on CeCé Telfer was written by Dawn Ennis, who is
But of course.
So it’s an Outsports award, and Dawn (formerly Don) Ennis is the editor in chief of Outsports, and Dawn Ennis is trans, so a trans woman gives a woman’s award to a trans woman. Bros before hos am I right?
The Outsports Female Athlete of the Year is
you know this one already
The LGBTQ sports world was blessed in 2019 with an abundance of choices for Female Athlete of the Year. Readers nominated several women, among them:
– USWNT icon Megan Rapinoe, who made an indelible mark during the Women’s World Cup.
But who cares about her, she’s just a boring commonplace woman. They’re a dime a dozen, yawn. Outsports can do better than that.
But in terms of making an indelible mark on sports history, CeCé Telfer of Franklin Pierce University sprinted to the top of the list with her groundbreaking victory at the May 2019 NCAA Division II National Championships. Telfer beat her closest competitor by a second and a half, winning the 400m hurdles at Javelina Stadium on the campus of Texas A&M University in Kingsville, Texas.
Groundbreaking!
As far as we know, she is the first track and field NCAA champion who is an out transgender woman.
Meaning, she’s a person with a male body who won by competing against women. That’s not something to celebrate or give an award because of which.
That achievement brought her fame as well as made her a target of detractors and opponents of transgender inclusion in sports, including Donald Trump, Jr.
Those critics focus on her victory and ignore the fact that she competed within NCAA rules and placed fifth in the 100m that same day.
Apparently it’s simply beyond the realm of possibility, even of imagining, that the NCAA rules could have this wrong.
“I try to lead by example,” Telfer told Outsports. “The one quote that has been with me my whole life is; ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ And I want to be that change, a step forward in making the world a more inclusive and safe place. It’s all starts with me.”
But what Telfer did doesn’t make the world more inclusive, let alone more safe. It makes women also-rans in their own sports, and in sports like rugby it puts them in danger too. Neither inclusive nor safe.
Originally a comment by Claire on Researchers found.
I can’t access the paper because it’s behind a paywall and I’m not at work. The appendix has the methods and detailed description of how they collected the data and that’s all I really care about. I always read the methods first. If I think the methods are garbage then the paper is garbage and I can devote my valuable time to something else.
PNAS is a good journal and I’m a little shocked that the paper was published. Statistically, this paper is flawed in many ways. Firstly, none of the methods adjusted for confounders. Confounders are elements that you have not accounted for in a study that may be coincidentally correlated with the trait of interest.
Here, they report that an overwhelming majority of parents identified as “liberal”. This is a problem in a study like this. I’m sure you can all see it already, parental attitudes to the trans movement are highly correlated with their overall political stances. Conservative parents are much more likely to disapprove of any expression of difference in gender presentation and sexual orientation, even at a young age. So you have already introduced selection bias right from the beginning. It’s right there in the data, you can see it.
Next confounder: locations of recruitment. This is a problem in all studies, including the sort of work I do. But I adjust for it! Cities are more liberal than rural areas as well as being more populous (easier to recruit in big cities vs small communities) and San Francisco is very different to Oklahoma City, politically speaking.
There are others, but I think I’ve made my point.
The methods themselves are terrible for these kinds of problems. Tests like t-tests, chi-sqs and even the more complex tests like ANOVA are not capable of adjusting for confounders (ANCOVA would work, but they didn’t use it).
There are other problems with the statistics too; some of the tests are inappropriate because of the “small cell” problem, they can’t report odds ratios or betas because they didn’t do the right tests. But I don’t want to get into the weeds here.
Finally, they don’t seem to have the faintest idea of how hypothesis testing works. They state their null hypothesis (H0) and their alternate hypothesis (HA) as two separate hypotheses (1a and 1b and so on). This indicates a lack of understanding of what they are doing. They list several hypothese in this paper (not counting the whole weird H0/HA presentation) and this hurts them.
Statistical power is the probability you will correctly reject the null hypothesis, i.e. the alternate hypothesis really is true. But every time you add another test, you have to adjust for it, which reduces the power. Here they claim good power but do not present their power calculations.
I’ve only outlined a few of the most pressing issues with it; there are more but I don’t want to bore you all. This is almost certainly a terrible paper, based on the methods description. I tried to be as open and unbiased as I could, reading it as if I were a reviewer of a paper in my own field. If I had reviewed this paper, I would have been very concerned about the standard of statistical expertise in this study and probably written to the editor to ask it be improved before I was even willing to do the review.
This explains a lot – trans activism gets massive government funding while feminist resistance to the parts of trans activism that harm women gets…can you guess?…zero funding.
It’s called “policy laundering” according to Mary Harrington. Useful term.
In its most blatant form, policy laundering looks like government departments using taxpayer money to pay lobbyists to influence government…
…
Let us consider an example: the Scottish Trans Alliance. This is a project funded by the Scottish Government Equality Unit and delivered by the Equality Network, which is largely funded by the Scottish government as well as by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (funded by UK government).
The project delivers research, advisory, and training, including to government-funded bodies, who in turn repeat the ideas received via reports, training and consultancy back toward policymakers. Thus, a nested series of public sector grants has enabled government to conjure into existence a body that shapes public sector policy. Meanwhile, the pronouncements and statistics produced by this arms-length government body are treated by the (government funded) BBC as though emanating from independent civil society voices.
See what I mean? Explains a lot. I’ve been wondering for a very long time how all this incoherent bullshit got such a purchase on the minds of politicians, and this seems to answer that question.
The whole cycle amounts to a process of laundering, by semi-independent bodies, a series of policies the government already wanted to adopt so they look as though they come spontaneously from the society upon which they will in due course be visited.
Mind you, that introduces the question all over again. Why did the government already want to adopt trans policies?
The result looks like a thriving voice for civil society in the national debate. But in reality it is more like the government having a conversation with itself, via a series of proxies. Meanwhile, that part of civil society without insider status sits scratching its head trying to work out which form to fill in to get a seat at the table.
Under those circumstances, you might expect differences to emerge between the official conversation and what people actually think and feel on the ground. Taking our example of transgender activism: in 2018 then-Equalities Minister Maria Millar launched a consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act. The proposed changes would effectively have turned legal recognition as the opposite sex from a bureaucratic years-long procedure involving medical testimony into a simple matter of form-filling.
The initial proposal was developed in consultation with government funded LGBT charities, but included little input from women. Opposition to the GRA reforms first gained traction on the parenting messageboard Mumsnet and over 2018 morphed into the campaigning organisation Fair Play For Women (government funding: nil) and swelled the ranks of Transgender Trend (government funding: nil).
These groups, aided by a coalition of social conservatives, radical feminists, transsexuals, ordinary concerned women and the occasional man, challenged the GRA reform campaign led by Stonewall (2018 UK government grant funding: £233,000, Scottish government funding £90,000, earnings from delivering paid-for training courses to the public sector: higher still).
They’ve got a lock on the money.
It explains a lot. It’s depressing as fuck.
Via Kathleen Stock:
There’s a study, you see. A study. Be impressed.
Transgender children may start to identify with toys and clothes typical of their gender identity from a very young age, a recent study suggests.
Children identify with their clothes? I think not.
They mean, of course, something like “identify with the role that is purported to belong to this sex as opposed to that,” but hey, that would make everyone stop reading.
And their confidence in their gender identity is generally as strong as that of cisgender children, whose identity matches their sex assigned at birth, researchers found.
Except that doesn’t mean anything. What shirt you wear is not organically connected to what sex you are in the way that fatuous sentence implies. It’s back to front. Toys and clothes are just things, and it’s a matter of social rules – stupid social rules, mostly – that says girls play with this and boys play with that. Liking the “wrong” or “other” toy doesn’t make a kid The Other Sex.
The Reuters/NBC article never says what discipline the study is in. I had to Google the lead author to find out. The study was at the University of Washington (a few miles from where I’m sitting):
The study, published Nov. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed more than 300 transgender children from across the United States, as well as nearly 200 of their cisgender siblings and about 300 unrelated cisgender children as a control group. It is the first study to report on all of the participants in the TransYouth Project, launched in 2013 by UW professor of psychology Kristina Olson.
The transgender children in this study, all of whom enrolled between the ages of 3 and 12, had socially — but not medically — transitioned when they participated: They had changed their pronouns and often their first names, as well as dress and play in ways associated with a gender other than their sex at birth.
So what are we talking about here? Apparently about children who prefer the toys and clothes associated with The Other Sex…but does that really make them a magical thing called Transgender, or does it just make them kids who have their own preferences in clothes and toys?
In other words why are we interpreting preferences of that kind as a profound and meaningful difference as opposed to just part of the variety of people in general? It’s as if we’d decided pears are for boys and apples are for girls so anybody who likes pears more than apples is a boy.
Humans being dumb. Oh oh girls and boys must wear and play with radically different things; we must enforce these rules with all the advertising and discipline we can; if a child despite all the advertising and discipline fails to conform to even one of these rules, that must mean the child is In The Wrong Body.
“Trans kids are showing strong identities and preferences that are different from their assigned sex,” said lead author Selin Gülgöz, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the UW and will start a new position this winter as an assistant professor at Fordham University. “There is almost no difference between these trans- and cisgender kids of the same gender identity — both in how, and the extent to which, they identify with their gender or express that gender.”
And that’s innate! It’s biological! They were born with it! It’s nothing to do with social rules, and simply choosing different social rules, no no, it’s an overpowering biological imperative which overrules what’s actually between the legs.
Hey, it’s a Study, what more do you need to know.
One of these is not like the other, one of these doesn’t belong.
Can YOU see it?
The RSPCA is looking into claims made by a prominent lawyer that he killed a fox with a baseball bat.
Jolyon Maugham posted on Twitter on Thursday morning: “Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?”
The animal welfare charity tweeted that the claim was “distressing”.
Which is so sad because he meant it to be funny. Jokes are such a personal thing.
Government guidelines state you can use cage traps and snares to catch foxes and you must “humanely kill any fox you catch while it’s in the trap or snare”.
Humanely doesn’t mean “with a baseball bat.”
Jolyon Maugham QC’s fox-smashing exploit has garnered him considerable attention, and not the good kind. Maybe being a preening sadist isn’t such a great marketing ploy after all?
So I smashed it with a club.
“Charlotte” Clymer, who gained fame as a patronizing male “feminist” under the name Charles Clymer, has a piece in the Washington Post telling JK Rowling what to do.
Woven throughout the narrative is an insistence on love and community and integrity and inclusion, which is why it has broken my heart in recent years to see Rowling’s inexplicable replacement of justice-minded imagination with a bigotry-driven rejection of science and reality.
So Team Trans gets to claim both imagination and science & reality, while taking them away from Rowling?
In her tweet, Rowling effectively dismissed [the judge’s ruling in Maya Forstater’s suit], suggesting that Forstater was being fired for “stating that sex is real,” a common transphobic assertion that has been dismissed by medical experts and other scientists.
It’s transphobic to say sex is real? So sex is not real? What is it then? And medical experts and other scientists agree that sex is not real?
I naively held out hope that Rowling was probably confused about transgender identities and simply needed someone to clue her into the reality of our lives, helping her cut through the disinformation pushed by bigots. I have seen people with impeccable progressive credentials somehow be unaware of basic facts about the trans community; was it not possible that the most beloved children’s author of my generation, someone who consistently seemed to operate from a place of empathy, simply needed better friends who could help allay her lack of knowledge?
But it isn’t a matter of disinformation and lack of awareness of basic facts and lack of knowledge. It’s a matter of having a different understanding of information and facts and knowledge, different from the jargon-spouting fanatics like Clymer.
I couldn’t concede that a writer famous for creating space for marginalized people in an imaginative world (even if it was often retroactive, as when she belatedly announced that Dumbledore was gay after finishing the series) could ignore the universal consensus of medical experts and other scientists, from the World Health Organization to the American Medical Association to the Royal Society of Medicine, validating and affirming trans people in our authenticity.
Like that. That’s what I mean. It’s just jargon. “Validating and affirming trans people in our authenticity” – that’s not medical expertise or science, it’s just political jargon.
I was left realizing that transgender people embody the magical world of Harry Potter better than almost anyone.
Indeed! The magical, fictional world of Harry Potter. That’s rather our point.
Odd thing to brag about.
A great many people have pointed out that the RSPCA has a 24-hour hotline for exactly this purpose. The RSPCA have pointed out that what Maugham claims to have done is not lawful.
In case you’ve forgotten, that was Maugham’s tweeted advice to women who pointed out the potential for male people to harass or abuse women in “inclusive” changing rooms.
In further news of holiday cheer, Walmart doesn’t pay overtime for those very same holidays.
Walmart is one of several big-box retailers who are open on Thanksgiving Day and will start its Black Friday sale at 6pm.
Walmart is also one of the few big companies that does not offer employees increased hourly wages for working shifts on a holiday. At Target and Amazon, workers are paid time and a half for each hour worked.
“Walmart doesn’t offer holiday pay. They have a discount you have to work certain days to receive and one discount only lasts two days,” said a Walmart worker in Idaho who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. They are re scheduled to work full-time shifts on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday this year.
Walmart sent ever such a nice note to explain exactly how many minutes you have to use the discount and exactly what you can’t buy with it, although the “etc” at the end could mean…well, everything else, so not so much exact as a trap. What nice trillionaires they must be.
God almighty. These people.
Republican of Arizona.
I thought a nice stocking present would be a sampling of the thoughts of several prominent “mental health experts” on Trump’s Letter to Pelosi, via Salon.
Dr. Bandy Lee:
This letter is a very obvious demonstration of Donald Trump’s severe mental compromise. His assertions should alarm not only those who believe that a president of the United States and a commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military should be mentally sound, but also those who are concerned about the potential implications of such a compromised individual bringing out pathological elements in his supporters and in society in general. I have been following and interpreting Donald Trump’s tweets as a public service, since merely reading them “gaslights” you and reforms your thoughts in unhealthy ways.
Dan P. McAdams:
Venomous and vitriolic, obsessively focused on the self and nothing else, this letter is what we have come to know as vintage Trump…
…[T] he letter is like the vitriolic, grievance-filled tweets he sends out every day, full of falsehoods, hyperbole and hate. As an extended expression of who Trump really is, the letter shows you how his mind works and what his raw experience is like.
For over 50 years, Donald Trump has lived this way. Trump has fought every day of his adult life as if he were being impeached by his enemies. And there have always been countless enemies, because his antagonism brings them out of the woodwork.
So he’s trapped in a spiral. He’s self-centered and hostile and mean, so he repels people, which makes him ever more hostile and mean. (He started out at max self-centered, so no increase is possible there). All the gold plating in the world can’t make that a happy life.
Dr. David Reiss:
Whoever actually wrote the letter, it accurately reflects Trump’s immaturity that has been obvious in public as long as he has been a public figure: insisting that his needs be met in a child-like manner; having very poor problem-solving ability; having an inability to take responsibility for anything and projecting his own negative attributes onto others; an inability to look at consequences of his statements or actions. Basically, acting as a frustrated or emotionally hurt toddler would react, looking for a parent to protect him and “make the bad people go away.”
Dr. Lance Dodes:
Mr. Trump’s letter shows his incapacity to recognize other people as separate from him or having worth.
As he always does, he accuses others of precisely what he has done, in precisely the same language. When confronted with violating the Constitution he says his accusers are violating the Constitution. When others point out that he undermines democracy, he says they undermine democracy. Through these very simpleminded projections he deletes others’ selfhood and replaces who they are with what is unacceptable in himself.
They’re all saying the same thing – he can’t see other people as real, he can perceive only his own self.
Dr. Justin Frank:
When I first read Donald Trump’s six-page letter to Speaker Pelosi, I marveled at the ease with which he shared what goes on in his mind openly, and without reservation. His letter is the quintessential example of how professional victims actually think. They turn the prosecutor into the persecutor.
…
Trump is a con artist who succeeds by tricking his marks into not seeing the con. But the biggest mark — bigger than the GOP and his base — is himself. He believes the lies he tells, the delinquent traits he disavows. It’s what psychoanalysts call delusional projection.
We civilians call it projectile delusion.
Rudy Giuliani talked to a reporter for New York magazine the other day.
As we sped uptown, he spoke in monologue about the scandal he co-created, weaving one made-up talking point into another and another. He said former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom he calls Santa Maria Yovanovitch, is “controlled” by George Soros. “He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents.” I told him he sounded crazy, but he insisted he wasn’t.
The sarcasm is interesting. She did her job, and she answered questions before Congress, therefore Giuliani mocks her. She’s not a criminal or a traitor, so let’s sneer at her as a saint.
“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” he said. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.”
But “Jew” doesn’t mean just “someone who goes to synagogue.” If it did there would have been fewer Jews killed in the genocide.
In the grand tradition of Soros conspiracy theorists, Giuliani believes the media is doing the billionaire’s bidding by printing lies about him, yet he often bungles his own attempts to discredit the media’s reporting. While attempting to argue that, despite what has been written, “I have no business interests in Ukraine,” he told me about his business interests in Ukraine.
“I’ve done two business deals in Ukraine. I’ve sought four or five others,” he said. Since he’s been representing the president, he said, he has been approached with two opportunities in Ukraine, both of which he turned down to avoid accusations of impropriety.
“The one that I really wanted to do,” Giuliani said, was a lawsuit on behalf of the Ukrainian government against a large financial institution he claims laundered $7 billion for Viktor Yanukovych, the former president. “It would’ve had nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with Burisma, nothing to do with Biden,” he said. He then explained that the reason why he “really wanted” to take on the case was to learn about Ukrainian money laundering, “so I could figure out they utilize the same money-laundering system for Hunter Biden.”
That’s especially interesting because he’s a lawyer, a lawyer and a former prosecutor. You’d think a prosecutor would be well alert to the importance of keeping his stories consistent.
And then there’s the Southern District of New York, the biggest betrayal of all. That was supposed to be his world, full of his guys; he ran the office for most of the ’80s. It was unrecognizable now. “If they’re investigating me, they’re assholes. They’re absolutely assholes if they’re investigating me,” he said.
…
“If they are, they’re idiots,” he went on. “Then they really are a Trump-deranged bunch of silly New York liberals.”
Again…for the millionth time…I don’t get this. It’s not about being liberal, it’s about Trump’s many crimes and brutalities. It’s not just “liberals” who object to crimes and brutalities. Apparently I have more respect for conservatives than Trumpy conservatives do.
Stephen Miller pushed to embed agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a refugee agency in a bid to target the parents of unaccompanied migrant children for deportation, a new report has revealed.
Pro tip: that’s not what refugee agencies are for.
The Washington Post reported that according to six current and former Trump administration officials, the White House sought to plant ICE agents at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which cares for migrant children who cross the border without a parent as part of the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Program.
Stephen Miller is another Mengele, minus the medical skills.
According to the Post, Miller has long claimed that the ORR is being exploited by parents who hire smugglers to bring their children into the U.S. illegally. Three officials familiar with Miller’s plan said it was part of his wider effort to dismantle the barriers between ICE and the refugee program.
Yes, and let’s place a lot of cops in food banks, and disguise FBI agents as caretakers in public housing, and replace public school teachers with prison guards.
Happy Festivus from Pettson and Findus, via Sven Nordqvist.
Best known for his series about the old farmer Pettson and his talented cat Findus, Sven Otto Rickard Nordqvist originally wanted to be an illustrator but was rejected by several art schools. Instead he studied architecture at Lund Institute of Technology, and worked for a time there as a lecturer in architecture. At the same time he continued to look for work as an illustrator working on advertisements, posters and picture books. In 1983 he won first prize in a children’s book competition and since then has worked exclusively as an author and illustrator of children’s books.
H/t Jeffrey
