Stonewall UK has a disappoint.

Have the courts missed a vital opportunity to send a positive message that recognises all parents for who they are? (There’s also the separate question that asks whether it’s the job of courts to send a positive message or not.) Would it “send a positive message” to let a mother legally call herself a father and thus make her child the first in human history to be gestated and birthed by its father? Would it really send a positive message to tell a child it never had a mother?

Even if you think the answer is yes, what about the next part? What about the recognising people for who they are bit? Surely the demand here is for recognising people for who they are not. Literally speaking Freddy McConnell is a woman. Physically Freddy McConnell is a woman. That’s who Freddy McConnell is. What Stonewall is really talking about is endorsing people’s fantasies about themselves, which is radically different from recognising who they are.

Something puzzling here.

I see that tweet so I find Z Nicolazzo PhD so I find Z Nicolazzo’s page at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Z Nicolazzo is an Assistant Professor of Trans* Studies in Education at the Center for the Study of Higher Education and a member of the Trans* Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona.  She earned her Ph.D. in Student Affairs in Higher Education at Miami University (OH), and formerly worked in various functional areas in student affairs, including residence life, sexual violence prevention programming, and student activities.

What is Trans Studies? (Or Trans* Studies if you insist.) How does one be a professor of it? How is it an academic discipline? What are we even talking about here?

I wouldn’t bother, I wouldn’t have looked beyond the Twitter account, were it not for the fact that the doc expresses the all too familiar hostile contempt for women, dressed up as cutting edge progressivism because it’s expressed by a Trans* person.

Ah yes those pesky white women, says the white man. Buncha Karens, aren’t they.

Professor Nicolazzi includes a photo on his page.

It’s the earrings, you see, along with the lipstick. Those make it totally right-on for him to express his contempt for women right out in the open.

Maya Forstater tells us:

The Crown Prosecution Service has withdrawn an anti-bullying guidance pack for schools developed with Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence, after a 14-year-old girl brought a legal action. The pack, which has been withdrawn for review, encouraged schools to tell girls to ignore their discomfort and not object to males entering single sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms.

I can’t think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong, can you? Similarly with bears. If you’re out hiking in the woods and you see a bear, you should approach it to make friends. Similarly with fires. If you see a house on fire you should hasten to go inside the house to enjoy the spectacle.

One of its teaching exercises features a video scenario where an adult male presenting in a feminine style enters the women’s toilets. Two young women at the sinks whisper their discomfort: “What’s he doing in here? This is the Ladies”. The next time the person uses the Gents’ where two middle-aged men shout abuse and bang on the door.

Ah yes – so, because men are abusive to the man in a skirt, girls should shut up when he decides to use their toilets instead of the men’s. That’s totally fair. The fact that he could be abusive to them is of no importance whatever.

The guidance says:

“Ask the students what happened in the clip. Thinking about how the girl in the clip was treated, can the class understand why she might have felt hesitant about going into the toilets?”

But there was no “girl,” there was an adult man. However he dresses, he doesn’t get to use the girls’ toilets. (Why is an adult using students’ toilets in the first place? That itself is not the usual arrangement.)

As the legal letter to the CPS points out it is not safe for girls to learn that they should consider an adult male using a facility intended for their bodily privacy as a ‘girl’.

Nor is it safe for them to learn that they have some kind of obligation to put themselves in danger to protect a man in a dress. I’m not saying men in dresses should be put in danger, but I damn well am saying they shouldn’t use girls as shields.

Speaking of disordered personalities and trans activism – see Freddy McConnell.

A transgender man who gave birth to a child has lost his latest legal bid to be registered on the birth certificate as the father rather than the mother.

Aka a woman who trashed her body so that she could look a little bit like a man wants to make sure her child will be legally deprived of a mother.

Freddy McConnell appealed against a decision made by a High Court judge that a person who carries and gives birth to a baby is legally a mother.

Legally and factually and physically. That’s what “mother” means – the parent who gestates the baby inside her body. No mother no baby; that’s the reality.

Andrew Spearman, from Laytons law firm, said the decision had not recognised Mr McConnell’s legal gender “and, importantly, the role he takes in his son’s life as his father”.

What about the role he takes in his son’s life as his bathtub, or his teddy bear, or his beans on toast? McConnell isn’t his father, and babies don’t understand role playing. McConnell should put the kid first and ego last.

In Lansing today:

Hundreds of people protested outside the Michigan Capitol building in Lansing on Thursday, with some pushing inside while the Legislature was debating an extension of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s state of emergency in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Protesters held signs, waved American flags and even carried firearms, while some chanted “Let us in!” and “This is the people’s house, you cannot lock us out.” Others tried to get onto the House floor but were blocked by state police and sergeants-at-arms, according to NBC affiliate WDIV of Detroit.

Some were carrying guns.

Michigan United for Liberty organized the protest, dubbed the American Patriot Rally, to call for the reopening of businesses.

Men with guns. Big angry-looking white men with guns.

Remember Tamir Rice? 12 years old? Playing with a toy gun in a park? A cop shot him dead. Tamir wasn’t white though. You gotta be white to get away with the threatening legislators with guns thing.

A war hero:

President Donald Trump on Thursday seized upon new developments in the Michael Flynn case to reinvigorate his pet conspiracy theories about Obama-era law enforcement and intelligence community officials conspiring to bring him down.

What about the Central Park 5? It’s ok to do it to them?

Should Trump pay any price for his role in what happened to the Central Park 5? Unlike Flynn, they really didn’t do it.

At issue are newly released documents detailing how top FBI officials handled a key January 24, 2017, interview with Flynn, who at the time had just started his brief, ill-fated tenure as Trump’s national security adviser.

FBI leadership was already aware at that time that Flynn had phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period. In those calls, Flynn advised Kislyak not to respond to new sanctions the Obama administration placed on Russia for interfering (on Trump’s behalf) in the just-completed presidential election. Intercepts of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak raised concerns within the bureau that Flynn had violated the Logan Act, a law that prohibits unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.

The newly unsealed documents, which were released by Flynn’s lawyer on Wednesday and are the first fruits of Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the Flynn investigation, indicate that FBI officials debated how to question Flynn about his contacts with Russia and whether their aim was to get him to admit any wrongdoing.

In one handwritten note that Trump and his backers in Congress and on Fox News are trumpeting as a bombshell, Bill Priestap, then the FBI’s head of counterintelligence, wrote, “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired? If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ & have them decide. Or, if he initially lies, then we present him [redacted] & he admits it, document for DOJ, & let them decide how to address it.”

Trump and Don Junior and Devin Nunes say this reveals DIRTY COPS.

What’s on Trump’s mind today:

Trump is shitting in his own nest again.

Trump said on Thursday his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was tormented by “dirty cops” as part of the probe into whether Russia helped Trump win the White House in 2016.

The president’s comments in the Oval Office, latest in a string of remarks about Flynn, may suggest that the retired general could be in line for a presidential pardon.

That is, Trump’s barfing out this sinister bullshit in the midst of a pandemic is probably a sign that he’s planning to pardon his dirty general.

Internal FBI documents turned over by the Justice Department on Wednesday showed FBI officials debated whether and when to warn Flynn that he could face criminal charges as they prepared for a January 2017 interview with him in the Russia probe.

They decided not to warn him that lying to them could mean criminal charges, and he lied to them, and the criminal charges happened.

Does that make him innocent?

Silence the pesky women.

Make sure to prevent those women from talking.

Ahhhhh no.

Yellow undershirt sets up the question for her and Pence says “That’s a great question and I’m glad you asked me.” Yes of course she is: she gets the opportunity to tell a lie about why her arrogant pig of a husband breathed all over everyone he approached at the Mayo Clinic.

And no, it was not after he left the Mayo Clinic that he found out about their mandatory mask policy.

Look, it’s about hierarchy. Pence is the vice-dictator and the Mayo Clinic is just some medical-type place thingy that Pence was doing the great favor of visiting. It’s Pence who gets to tell the Mayo Clinic what to do, not the other way around. Respect authority!

That’s low.

The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party is encouraging people planning to protest stay-at-home orders imposed amid the coronavirus pandemic to dress like health care workers.

Now why would they do that? Oh yes, of course: to fool onlookers and reporters into thinking health care workers also think we should get out there and infect each other.

Recently, several health care workers around the country have worn their scrubs and medical gear to counterprotest against people calling for states to reopen against the urgings of medical experts.

So the thing to do if you’re a reopener is dress up in pretend scrubs; fakeout!

Ward’s comments come a few days after she questioned the authenticity of a small group of health care workers in Colorado who counterprotested against people calling for the state to reopen.

“EVEN IF these ‘spontaneously’ appearing ppl at protests against govt overreach (sporting the same outfits, postures, & facial expressions) ARE involved in healthcare – when they appeared at rallies, they were actors playing parts #Propaganda #FakeOutrage,” Ward tweeted last week.

I took a brief look at her Twitter and it’s quite the spectacle.

Plot twist in that story Monday about the commenter at The Freethinker who said I’m a Trump supporter. The first twist was haha it turned out she was joking (Susan Montgomery is her handle) and second twist was oh oops she wasn’t joking. The fact that the column she was commenting on, the column I wrote, is intensely hostile to Trump is irrelevant because:

Wut? That’s not my cartoon, the cartoon isn’t about me, how does that cartoon explain that my hostility to Trump is actually support of Trump?

Here’s how:

I think it’s a fair summation of Benson’s attitudes over the years as she’s sought to replace Camille Paglia as the Alt-Right’s Feminist organ-grinder monkey.

Do you have evidence to the contrary or are you sticking with the “NUH-UHH! You’re the real fascist!” that alleged freethinkers are justly famous for?

Evidence to the contrary? Well there’s the column she’s commenting on – and the fact that I said so. If I were a Trump supporter I would be supporting Trump, not writing columns about how chaotic his thinking is. And is there any evidence for her claim? Which I think is a good bit more outlandish than the claim that I am not a Trump supporter (given the several million not friendly to Trump posts I’ve bored you all with). No, there isn’t.

With exquisite politeness, she replied:

And, with your sterling reputation of honesty and integrity, why would I doubt your word?

On a completely unrelated matter, have you decided whether to advocate voting for the Green Party or for sitting out the upcoming election? After all, you’d never support Trump…

One of those “Do I know you??” moments. Why the fuck is this person being so grossly insulting when I’ve never heard of her before?

So I hied me to Google and found that she comments at Pharyngula, and that she has a blog, and that she’s a trans woman.

I asked him why he was calling me a liar.

Because I’m honest.

Anyway, I’m sure you have another Heritage Foundation do to get to, so I’ll let you get on with “not supporting Trump”.

EDIT: And I just had the worst incidence of l’esprit d’escalier by not saying “I’m a freethinker”. Ah, the road not taken…

So he’s an angry guy who likes to think of himself as a woman and really likes to let his misogyny loose on women who don’t believe men turn into women by saying so. And I remain what I say I am: not a Trump supporter, not part of the Heritage Foundation, not Alt-Right, not a Camille Paglia wannabe.

Jared Kushner thinks he’s a colleague of Anthony Fauci’s and fully qualified to tell us when it’s safe to stop social distancing.

Jared Kushner took a bullish stance on the coronavirus during a Fox News appearance on Wednesday morning.

The White House senior adviser and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law said the goal was to have much of the US “back to normal” by June and for the nation to be “really rocking again” by July.

He described the country as being “on the other side of the medical aspect of this,” despite cases mounting in rural states.

“The federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story,” Kushner said on “Fox & Friends.”

He’s a predatory landlord who married Trump’s daughter; he knows nothing about pandemics or contagion or medicine.

“I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again,” Kushner added.

Of course that’s what the hope is. The hope is that the whole thing stops right this second. That has nothing to do with the reality.

“Somebody asked me why [testing] took so long,” Kushner said. “I actually said, you should look at how did we do this so quickly.

“The eternal-lockdown crowd can make jokes on late-night television, but the reality is that the data is on our side.”

Oh yes the eternal-lockdown crowd – we’re doing this because we want to, we’re doing it to spite Trump, we’re doing it for no reason except making jokes on late-night tv.

Go home, fake-Harvard boy.

So the plan is to starve those pesky workers into going back.

As states begin to reopen their economies after weeks of stay-at-home orders, some are warning employees that they will lose unemployment benefits if they refuse to return to their jobs, according to The Hill — even if they fear contracting the coronavirus.

In Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds (R) said failing to return to work would be considered a “voluntary quit,” which would terminate an employee’s benefits.

Starve and be evicted and die or get the virus and die – your choice!

“If you’re an employer and you offer to bring your employee back to work and they decide not to, that’s a voluntary quit,” Reynolds said Friday. “Therefore, they would not be eligible for the unemployment money.”

Even during a pandemic. Even as new clusters keep being found. Even as testing remains drastically inadequate.

A similar situation is playing out in Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott announced that businesses can reopen on Friday.

Cisco Gamez, a Texas Workforce Commission spokesman, told the Texas Tribune that employees who choose not to return to work will become ineligible for unemployment benefits.

They call it “choose” to make it sound free and voluntary and defiant, as opposed to a safety measure forced by the worst pandemic in the past century.

News via Sahara Reporters:

President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, Mubarak Bala, has started receiving death threats for ‘insulting Prophet Muhammad’ on Facebook, SaharaReporters has gathered.

Bala was arrested by men of the Nigerian Police in Kaduna for blasphemy.

His arrest followed a petition by a group of lawyers to the Kano State Police Commissioner to prosecute him for the act. 

Why don’t the lawyers and the police and everyone else trust their god to deal with the matter? Why do they think they have to do it instead?

One of Bala’s friends, who spoke with SaharaReporters on Wednesday, said a popular Muslim cleric and a policeman both in Kano have both vowed to kill him if found. 

Why? Why not let the god deal with it?

Findings by SaharaReporters revealed that Bala, who is an atheist, is already being moved to Kano where he could be executed if found guilty under Sharia law. 

It seems very unreasonable to apply religious laws to people who explicitly don’t subscribe to the religion.

Reacting to the issue, rights lawyer, Inibehe Effiong, said that Bala could not be subjected to Sharia law because he doesn’t subscribe to it.

He said, “It is only Moslems that are subject to Sharia law and that is the constitution because Sharia law is an Islamic law that governs lifestyle of Moslems who subscribe to Islam and followers of Prophet Muhammed. 

“I, as a Christian, have no business with Sharia law, I don’t believe in it, so there is no way I can be subjected to it.

“I have an ideological objection to blasphemy laws because more often than not, those laws mirror the civilisation of a society. 

“As much as people are encouraged to be responsible in their speech, I do not believe that in this age and time that people should be thrown in jail for allegedly insulting a god or a supreme being.”

Especially given the fact that if the god exists the god can simply do the punishing or rebuking or enlightening itself.

This has been happening:

A British academic whose new book is about why women are blamed for crimes committed against them has been subjected to thousands of coordinated attacks from alt-right trolls over the last week, culminating in her personal computer being hacked.

Dr Jessica Taylor, a senior lecturer in forensic and criminal psychology, is due to publish her exploration of victim blaming, Why Women are Blamed for Everything, on 27 April. Looking into what causes society to blame women who have been abused, raped, trafficked, assaulted or harassed by men, the book has drawn increasing publicity, including an appearance on Woman’s Hour.

I listened to that conversation on Woman’s Hour; it was very good. She talked about the just world fallacy: thinking “if I do everything right it won’t happen to me” so if it happens to someone else you decide she must have done something not-right. I recognize the tic in myself: hearing of bad thing, wanting to avoid bad thing, making note not to do ___ that person bad thing happened to did. It’s unconscious, it’s knee-jerk, and I absolutely do it.

But since 17 April, Taylor has been targeted by what she describes as a “group of organised trolls” who align themselves with the “alt-right”, men’s rights activists, incel (involuntary celibates) and Mgtow (men going their own way) movements, who have posted thousands of messages on her public Facebook page, including rape and death threats. On 21 April, Taylor contacted police when the screen on her laptop was remotely accessed. The investigation is ongoing.

But today brings a bit of pleasanter news.

That should boost sales just a tad.

#PenceIsAnIdiot is trending.

Exactly. It’s wildly insulting to put them at risk so that they can gaze upon his holy countenance.

More on Pence’s insulting and potentially murderous refusal to wear the mandatory face mask on his publicity stop at the Mayo Clinic:

Vice President Pence responded to criticisms that he defied Mayo Clinic policy by not wearing a mask during his visit Tuesday to the campus, saying he complied with federal guidelines and felt it was his duty to speak to workers at the facility unencumbered by a facial covering.

He said he complied with federal guidelines – but if you’re entering a medical institution which mandates a face mask, you put on the fucking face mask, you don’t say “Wull I’m following the federal rules so you and your staff and your patients just have to suck it up. Literally.”

And how can it be his “duty” to speak to workers at the Mayo Clinic, who are all wearing masks, without a mask, which will put them at risk from him while he is less at risk from them because they are all wearing the masks? What kind of “duty” is that? If he wanted to speak to the workers at the Mayo Clinic his very first duty was to do as he was told, and to wear a mask.

“And since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health care personnel, and look them in the eye and say ‘thank you.’ ”

But, not to belabor the obvious, he could look them in the eye while wearing a mask. The mask covers the mouth and nose, not the eyes. He wanted them to look him in the mouth, even though he knew that they were more keen to avoid contagion from his mouth and nose than they were to look him in the mouth.

The princess apologizes for wearing that weird pink plush bunny suit to a press briefing today…

Just kidding: actually she brags about it.

Also…you know…people are dying, and other people are out of work, struggling, desperate, terrified…why are they standing up there beaming as if they were opening a House of Love and Babies and Puppies? Why is Ivanka there at all and why is she wearing pink baby clothes? Why are Ivanka and Don smirking and grinning at “entrepreneurs” while millions of people are out of work and scared, and many are dying? Wtf is this for?