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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump wants to beat up electric cars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen Joyce on the awkward retreat from gender ideology:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly.

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

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

Victoria Smith on trans activism versus anti-rape activism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let alone bullying them for rejecting the offer.

Another purge.

Updating to add:

Classic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portlandia.

Always proud to celebrate a cheater.

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

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

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

The content is asinine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting it in bold doesn’t make it true.

What is a TERF? they ask on our behalf.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Alabama v unions:

On May 13, Gov. Kay Ivey announced to a meeting of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce that she had signed SB231. The new law punishes businesses that choose to voluntarily recognize unions by forbidding them from receiving any grants, loans, or tax credits from state and local governments.

Must not accept unions voluntarily. Must resist, kicking and screaming, until the bitter end. Those with more money and power must always be on top.

In her speech, Ivey also made it clear that she views the United Auto Workers as an outside intruder threatening one of Alabama’s “crown jewels” — the auto industry.

“Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, they’re not Detroit,” she said, referring to the ongoing union election at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa County.

Meaning they’re not pro-union, not pro-worker, not [whisper] where all the N-words went the minute they could get away.

Mercedes employee Jeremy Kimbrell has repeatedly said that the ongoing unionization drive is led by Mercedes employees, an assertion which has been supported by recent coverage of the campaign. In an interview with labor journalist Alex Press, he joked that “Mercedes is our best organizer,” not any out-of-state UAW staff members.

Oh those pesky out-of-state organizers. They’re probably all Jews ya know.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Bren Riley, the president of the Alabama chapter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, said: “It’s funny to me that Governor Ivey and the sponsors of this bill try to paint unions as the outsider.”

Riley pointed out how the “cookie-cutter” bill was promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national conservative organization that is based in Virginia. Almost identical bills were passed in both Georgia and Tennessee before Ivey signed SB235.

Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama…what do they all have in common, I wonder. Could it possibly be a history of not paying workers anything at all?

H/t Sackbut

The Independent is pruriently concerned about why an actor continues to play a character created by that notorious monster JK Rowling.

Tom Burke has shared his feelings about starring in Strike, the hit BBC adaptation of the detective novels written by JK Rowling. The 42-year-old actor has portrayed the one-legged private eye, Cormoran Strike, since 2017 and is returning to the role for its sixth season, which began shooting in February.

Speaking in an interview with The Independent, Burke discussed his thoughts on being linked to one of the most polarising figures of the day, Rowling, who has been met with a strong backlash in recent years over her outspoken stance on trans women.

HINT HINT. Been met with a strong backlash, get it? GET IT??? We’re saying she’s a moral monster so how dare you act in a series based on her novels?? SPEAK UP OR WE’LL LABEL YOU A TWANZFOBE.

Rowling, who first faced a backlash from several key cast members when she shared controversial remarks about the trans community in 2020, has seen her relationship with stars deteriorate amid increasingly toxic debate.

The community. The community, I tell you! She’s not a community! How dare she say something about the community when she’s not a community?!!

And in conclusion:

Elsewhere in the interview, Burke talked about his new film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, his roles in the movies Mank and The Souvenir, and being the non-stereotypical leading man.

Blah blah blah but we obviously don’t care about all that, the important thing is why hasn’t he declared war on Rowling yet?

Do scabs identify as scabs?

The United Auto Workers on Friday accused Mercedes of interfering in a union election at two Alabama factories by intimidating and coercing workers into voting no.

A week after Mercedes workers voted against joining the union, the labor group filed an objection with the National Labor Relations Board seeking a new vote. The union accused the company of engaging in a “relentless antiunion campaign marked with unlawful discipline, unlawful captive audience meetings, and a general goal of coercing and intimidating employees.”

As companies tend to do when they can get away with it.

The company’s spokespeople of course said it was nothing but helpful and polite.

Employees at Mercedes battery and assembly plants near Tuscaloosa voted 56% against the union. The result handed the union a setback in its efforts to unionize workers at auto plants in the Deep South. The defeat in Alabama came a month after the UAW scored a breakthrough victory at Volkswagen’s 4,300-worker assembly factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The Deep South has been ferociously anti-union since forever.

The union filing said that four pro-union employees were fired, and the company allowed anti-union employees to “solicit support during work hours but forbade pro-union employees from soliciting support during work hours.” The company also required workers to attend anti-union captive-audience meetings and displayed anti-union propaganda while prohibiting the distribution of union materials and paraphernalia in non-work areas, according to the objection.

The union said the company, or its representatives, polled workers about union support, suggested voting in the union would be futile, targeted union supporters with drug tests and “engaged in conduct which deliberately sought to exacerbate racial feelings by irrelevant and inflammatory appeals to racial prejudice.”

Straight out of the Deep South Anti-union Playbook.

A spokeswoman for the National Labor Relations Board confirmed an objection had been filed. Kayla Blado, a spokeswoman for the NLRB, said the regional director will review the objections and could order a hearing. If it is determined that the employer’s conduct affected the election, a new election could be ordered, she said.

Fingers crossed.

Stupid and malicious in one delightful package.

A couple of hours later:

Pointing out that some women’s rights benefit men is not the same as saying those rights are bad or not worth having or extremely unfeminist.

It’s such a basic distinction. Can he really be this stupid? Is it an act? Is he a double agent?

Sigh.

No it isn’t. Legally it is, yes, but in this case it’s because the law is deeply fucked up. For a woman facing a naked man in her changing room it is not “a different situation.”

Male host at 3:15: “Someone who is self-certified as being a woman, you say that person cannot go into a women’s prison, is that what you said?”

Jardine, eyes turned up to the ceiling in irritation: “I said, someone who has transitioned, who has a certificate -“

Male host: “What does that mean?” Jardine: “Can you let me finish please?” Male host yields. Jardine continues: “Someone who has transitioned, who is, who is a woman legally, has been um certified as a woman not by me but by those who are certifying can go into a women’s prison -“

Female host tries to ask what that means and there’s a torrent of talking over each other again.

Anyway, tragically, we know what that means. It means what it appears to mean. As long as the People Who Are Certifying have done their Certifying, then a man gets to pretend to be a woman and thrust himself into places that are reserved for women as much as he likes and the women can’t do a god damn thing about it. The fact that it’s ludicrous to claim that “certifying” can transform men into women is beside the point, aka shut up, bitches.

Heads men win, tails women lose.

NHS chiefs are facing landmark legal action after 26 female hospital nurses protested about being forced to share a women’s changing room with a transgender colleague who is biologically male.

The women complained that the transgender nurse – who has not had gender reassignment surgery – had taken a ‘keen interest’ in female staff when they were getting undressed. They say they have found the situation ‘intimidating and upsetting’.

In a formal complaint, the nurses say they were stunned after the ‘sexually active’ trans nurse admitted to trying for a baby with a female partner and [that he] had stopped taking female hormones. But a human resources manager at the hospital trust allegedly said that the female nurses need to ‘be more inclusive’, ‘broaden their mindset’ and ‘be educated and attend training’.

The female nurses have to be so much more inclusive that they’re perfectly happy to have a gruesome piggy entitled man openly watch them take their clothes off. They have to broaden their mindset to the point that they don’t mind having this sadistic dude in their changing room.

Six of the nurses are taking legal action at an employment tribunal against the NHS trust in the North East for alleged sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in what is thought to be the first case of its kind. One of the nurses told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We don’t feel safe because we strip down to our underwear and [the individual] doesn’t just stay by his locker. ‘He walks around the changing room in his boxer shorts.’

…

In March, 26 nurses wrote to management saying that the transgender nurse ‘has made no secret’ of the fact that ‘he has stopped taking female hormones and is trying to inseminate his female partner’. They added: ‘We do not consider it appropriate to have a sexually active biological male sharing our changing facilities.’

They did not receive a written response but say there was an ‘impromptu meeting’ at which an HR manager told the ward manager the female nurses ‘need to compromise’. The HR manager told them to ‘be more inclusive’, ‘broaden their mindset’ and ‘be educated and attend training’, according to a second complaint letter sent by the nurses in April.

They have to smile, shut up, spread their legs, and let him do whatever he wants.

The Libbatarians don’t love him.

Donald Trump, the former US president, has suffered the rare humiliation of getting booed and heckled during a raucous speech to the Libertarian National Convention.

Trump’s rocky ride at a Washington hotel on Saturday night, including cries of “Bullshit!” and “Fuck you!”, underlined the challenge that the Republican presidential nominee faces to broaden his appeal both left and right on the political spectrum.

The clips are fun to watch. He doesn’t enjoy being booed and yelled at.

“The fact is we should not be fighting each other,” Trump pleaded. “If Joe Biden gets back in, there will be no more liberty for anyone in our country. Combine with us in a partnership – we’re asking that of the libertarians. We must work together. Combine with us. You have to combine with us.” The appeal went down like a lead balloon as delegates booed, jeered and shouted insults. It was a stunning rebuke for a man who has become accustomed to cult-like rallies where his every word is cheered to the echo.

It’s good to see him humiliated just for once.

The ex-president claimed that much of his record was libertarian, citing examples such as tax cuts, slashing bureaucratic red tape, cancelling and defunding federal diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. He promised to appoint Libertarians to a taskforce to “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who has been unjustly persecuted” by Joe Biden’s administration.

Trump said: “As everyone knows, it will be my great honour to pardon the peaceful January 6 protesters or, as I often call them, the hostages. They’re hostages. There has never been a group of people treated so harshly or unfairly in our country’s history. This abuse will be rectified and it will be rectified very quickly.”

Yeah right. Enslaved people were treated like royalty in comparison. Indigenous people were pampered in comparison. Women were treated as equals from the outset.

Hadley Freeman lets rip:

On Wednesday, at a US Senate judiciary hearing, [Ted] Cruz questioned Judge Sarah Netburn, whom President Biden has nominated to the US District Court. Netburn has a long record of dealing with complex cases but Cruz focused on one in particular: her recommendation in 2022 that the serial rapist William McClain be transferred to a women’s prison.

In 2015, when McClain was 51, after he was released from jail for raping two children and before being reincarcerated for sharing violent child pornography, he chose to identify as a woman. And off he went to a women’s prison, with Netburn’s blessing. When the Bureau of Prisons suggested this could be traumatising and dangerous to the female prisoners, the judge dismissed that concern as “overblown”.

I have to wonder exactly why that concern was “overblown.”

“The other women in that prison … do they have the right not to have a 6ft 2in man who is a repeat, serial rapist put in as their cellmate?” thundered Cruz.

“I considered the facts presented to me and I reached a decision based on the law,” replied Netburn in a “computer says no” monotone. Given she referred to the convicted rapist as “she” during the hearing, her grasp on facts is perhaps a little shaky. 

How a female judge can do this to female prisoners and still sleep at night is beyond me.

Biden also expanded Title IX — the civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools — to include gender identity, after the Trump administration had restricted it to referring to biological sex. Yet his team have been tentative about how this would work with school sports, and as a result, there are endless clips online of American boys with long hair body-slamming girls in basketball games and stealing gold medals in girls’ running races.

And smirking while they do it.

Gender ideologues try to dismiss feminists — who argue there are major biological differences between men and women — by describing them as “right-wing”. It is true most politicians on the right tend to understand the existence of biological sex. They also probably accept the existence of gravity. That so many on the left would — still! — rather jettison women’s rights than state the well-established obvious reflects badly only on them, and it has left a lot of women politically homeless, stuck between anti-abortion homophobes on one side and biology-denying, rapist-pandering cultists on the other.

Utterly and completely homeless.

Yet again.

Ya uh huh.

Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman and the clues are there in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, according to US author Jodi Picoult.

…

She believes there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare did not write the works – most damningly, she says, a man who did not secure education for his daughters could not possibly have written “proto-feminist” characters.

Secure education for his daughters how? Send them to Oxford?

Moreover, Picoult says Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that he was not the real author.

On the contrary, they knew that he was. Ben Jonson had always felt rivalrous toward him, and scornful of his lack of erudition or classical education…until he read the Folio and realized how wrong he’d been.

“I think that, back then, people in theatre knew that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for a lot of different types of authors. I think they expected it to be a joke that everyone would get. And we’ve all lost the punchline over 400 years,” she told an audience at the Hay Festival as she launched the novel, By Any Other Name.

Huh. Well I think he was really the child of Cleopatra and J. Edgar Hoover, and we’ve all laughed that off over 400 years.

English people are resistant to the theory, she added. “Shakespeare has gone beyond being a playwright – sometimes I think he’s a religion. And if you talk to people who are religious and you push hard enough, eventually the answer is, ‘Because that’s what it is!’ There is this blind faith in Shakespeare.”

There’s a reason for the status of Shakespeare. What is that reason? It’s because he was good at what he did. Really really extraordinarily good. Unusually good. Better than even very clever people routinely are. He was out of the ordinary that way. People noticed. It’s not blind faith; the evidence is right there for anyone to see.

“When he died, he was not buried in Westminster Abbey, although a lot of playwrights you don’t even know were buried in Westminster Abbey. And when he died, no other playwrights of the time seemed to mourn him publicly or talk about his legacy.

Wrong. As I said: Ben Jonson.

Also, we wouldn’t know about the mourning or the talk, because it wasn’t recorded. Very few things were recorded. It’s not clever sleuthing to decide that people weren’t saying X when we have so few records of people saying anything. There were no obits in the Times or the Guardian, no discussions on the BBC, no 500 page biographies in every Waterstones, but that doesn’t mean nobody talked about his legacy. They just didn’t tell us about it, because they didn’t have the technology or the habits that go with the technology.