In actual evil…

For more than nine months, María, 23, has been waiting in an immigration detention center in Arizona hoping to reunite with the six-year-old niece she raised as a daughter. When the two asked for asylum at the border last March because they feared for their lives in Guatemala, border officials detained María in the Eloy detention center and sent the girl to foster care in New York, 2400 miles away.

The Guardian first reported on the ongoing separation of this family in October. As the story spread, lawmakers and more than 200 clergy asked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to grant María parole so she can leave detention and reunite with the girl. A woman in New York volunteered to house them both while María awaits a decision on her appeal for asylum.

But earlier this month ICE said No.

Parole was once the norm for arriving asylum seekers, but in recent years approvals have become increasingly rare. On a standardized form, Ice officers indicated María failed to prove she was “not a flight risk” or that her “continued detention was not in the public interest”.

That would be such an easy thing to prove, from inside a detention center, having fled for your life.

Six years ago, a gang in rural Guatemala murdered María’s last living relatives except her niece, who was a baby. María raised the child and is the only mother the girl has known. They fled toward the United States last Christmas after the gang murdered María’s partner and tried to shoot her.

So now we’re torturing both of them some more. I wish I could throw a bucket of piss in Trump’s face.

Now why would we ever think even for a second that there’s any misogyny involved…

That’s just a small sample; it seems to go on forever.

Andrew Sullivan wonders what the point was.

I read with some interest Peggy Orenstein’s long essay on what’s wrong with boys. An in-depth study of a hundred boys, analyzing their problems and issues, seeing what makes them tick, seeing how the culture has changed them: It’s a fascinating topic. I kept reading and reading in the hope of discovering the point. I’ve now reread it and still can’t figure it out.

Orenstein reports the following facts drawn from her meticulous research: Boys brag to each other about whom they’ve had sex with and compete for girls, they boast about how they screw around on girls, they tend to admire jocks and athletes and mock those less active in sports, they try not to cry in public. They admire “Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day).” Teenage boys may react to the notion that they should become vegans by saying something like, “Being vegans would make us pussies.”

More earth-shattering revelations: Boys find it hard to talk about their feelings, especially with their fathers. They tend to talk about these things with women — girlfriends, sisters, mothers. Many are jealous. One immediately broke off an affair with a girl when he was told she was cheating. In the locker room, male teens can be really gross: “It was all about sex,” one sensitive teen boy complained. “We definitely say fuck a lot; fuckin’ can go anywhere in a sentence. And we call each other pussies, bitches. We never say the N-word, though. That’s going too far.” These boys also saw socializing as instrumental: “The whole goal of going to a party is to hook up with girls and then tell your guys about it.”

Sullivan’s reaction is “You don’t say.” Boys are like that, boys have always been like that, tell us something we don’t know.

This, Orenstein implies, is some kind of crisis. But it’s only a crisis if you find the very idea of male culture as it has always existed somehow problematic.

Yes, there are downsides to this kind of maleness. There’s a reason men tend to die younger than women.

I can think of some other downsides that Sullivan doesn’t mention, like misogyny, rape, the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, domination, aggression…that kind of thing. Sullivan, weirdly, talks about everything but that. He seems to get so close to it but he never arrives.

What if so much of what she abhors — admiration of strength, envy of others’ ability to have sex with women, aggression, nonverbal forms of interaction, stoicism, risk-taking, mutual mockery, bawdiness — is intrinsic to being male?…[Y]ou’re left with the sinking feeling that the essay is really simply a lament: that men are men, that they are different, that their world can be alien to women, and that their rituals and discourse and company are somehow inherently problematic in a way that women’s simply could not be.

Not “somehow inherently problematic.” It’s not mysterious. Male rivalry and aggression all too often centers on domination and ownership of women, and that’s not great for women. It did its work on Sullivan himself, apparently: he can’t even see the problem.

Going to girly-school:

Trans woman Nicole Thornbur goes to specialist studios to learn how to become more feminine.

But if trans women are women, why does any trans woman need to learn how to become “more feminine”?

Or, more precisely…if trans women are women because they have an internal feeling that they are women, an internal feeling that is absolutely reliable and truth-determining and ungainsayable, an internal feeling that it is evil and criminal to question or doubt, then what possible need can there be to “learn how to be more feminine”? Trans women are women, so whatever they are is feminine enough, because they are women being it.

From that point of view it all seems superfluous. From the point of view that men are men no matter what their internal feelings may be, it seems both ludicrous and obnoxious. We’re not women because we’ve been trained to mince and lisp and look coy, we’re women because that’s the physical reality.

The thing is…that’s what the putative “internal feeling” that you are a woman in fact is: it’s the years of being told it and of dealing with expectations that follow from it, including expectations about how to dress and walk and talk, and what jobs to get and how much education to get and whether or not we get to walk around in the world.

That’s what it is and that’s all it is. Men who want to lisp and act coy should go right ahead, knock themselves out, but they shouldn’t be on women’s soccer teams or in women’s changing rooms.

Uh oh. Is Nike a TERF?

A transgender former Nike contractor is seeking $1.1 million in damages from the sporting goods giant for allegedly allowing gender identity-based harassment. 

According to a civil lawsuit filed this week, Nike and Mainz Brady Group, a staffing firm that hired workers for Nike, discriminated against computer engineer Jazz Lyles, who identifies as transmasculine and prefers the pronouns they/them/their. The complaint was filed with Multnomah Circuit Court in Oregon. 

What does “transmasculine” mean? How is it different from trans male? Is a trans man “transmasculine”? Is that just another way of saying Jazz Lyles identifies as male? Or is it different? Does they merely prefer the pronouns they/them/their, or does they require them? It sounds as if they requires them, seeing as how they is suing.

During Lyles’ tenure at Nike — from May 2017 to September 2018 — the engineer was repeatedly “misgendered” by coworkers, the complaint said. While Lyles notified management about the issue multiple times, the companies allegedly failed to implement any policies, procedures and trainings around the use of gender pronouns in the workplace.

Could it be that the coworkers just forgot? It’s actually not all that easy to remember to override your perceptions every single time you refer to Special Person X, and people at work tend to have other things to think of, more pressing things that are closely related to their paychecks. It’s also not absolutely clear that Nike or any other company should be wasting training time on telling employees to memorize counter-intuitive pronouns for a growing list of special employees.

“When someone refuses to acknowledge a person’s gender identity or insists on referring to them by a gender to which they do not identify (called misgendering), this causes real and significant harm,” read the complaint.

Ah. It’s interesting that you say that, because no it doesn’t. It doesn’t cause real or significant harm. Having a special bespoke pronoun is just a stupid narcissistic demand on others, and their failure to comply causes no harm at all – it might even do some good, by instructing the pronoun-haver in what all adults should have a healthy awareness of: the fact that Them is not more special than other people, and Them can’t put extra burdens on other people as a way of forcing them to pay increased attention to Special Them.

“Employers like Nike have a responsibility to present a safe workplace and ensure that employees respect their coworkers’ gender pronouns,” Shenoa Payne, the plaintiff’s attorney, told CBS News. 

No, they don’t. Safe workplace, yes, of course, but ensure that employees respect their coworkers’ gender pronouns, no – not what Payne means by “gender pronouns,” which is pronouns that don’t match the sex of the pronoun-haver and thus require extra attention for people to remember to use. If employees are calling a guy “her” because they think he’s too girly, that’s harassment, but forgetting to call him “them” is just forgetting.

According to Payne, the misgendering lawsuit against Nike is unique, though it is not the first time the company faced a lawsuit focusing on gender. Last year, four women filed a federal lawsuit against Nike, alleging it violated state and federal equal-pay laws and fostered a work environment that allowed sexual harassment.

And Lyles decided They wanted some of that for Themself.

So they admit it. Only in private, but there they admit it.

One of Donald Trump’s top re-election advisers told influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states, according to an audio recording of a private event. The adviser said later that his remarks referred to frequent and false accusations that Republicans employ such tactics.

But the report emerged just days after news that a conservative group is forcing Wisconsin to purge upwards of 230,000 people from state voter rolls more than a year earlier than planned, a move that would disproportionately affect Democrats before the 2020 election

…

Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s re-election campaign, made the remarks about voter suppression on November 21 as part of a wide-ranging discussion about strategies in the 2020 campaign, including more aggressive use of monitoring of polling places on election day in November 2020.

The more aggressive the better, because that will discourage more of the kind of people they want to discourage.

“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark said at the event. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are.

…

Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

Republican officials publicly signaled plans to step up their Election Day monitoring after a judge in 2018 lifted a consent decree in place since 1982 that barred the Republican National Committee from voter verification and other “ballot security” efforts. Critics have argued the tactics amount to voter intimidation.

Parties should not be doing any voter monitoring.

“We’ve all seen the tweets about voter fraud, blah, blah, blah,” Clark said. “Every time we’re in with him, he asks what are we doing about voter fraud? What are we doing about voter fraud?’ The point is he’s committed to this, he believes in it and he will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s successful.”

Clark said Trump’s campaign plans to focus on rural areas around mid-size cities like Eau Claire and Green Bay, areas he says where Democrats “cheat.” He did not explain what he meant by cheating and did not provide any examples.

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Wisconsin.

The dirty game continues.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on That turning of the tide has been slow.

To me the most memorable and useful concept from 1984 was Doublethink (I believe the closest You get to a synonym in Oldspeak is “compartmetalization”):

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word DOUBLETHINK it is necessary to exercise DOUBLETHINK. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of DOUBLETHINK one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

Gender ideology seems to be all about Doublethink (covered up by the wordmagic of Genderspeak):

• On the one hand we’re obliged to accept that being a “woman” is all about thoughts and feelings and has nothing what so ever to do with physical traits. On the other hand we’re also supposed to accept that trans “women” automatically belong in all the same groups and spaces as the people with innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers, many (most? all?) of whom might not think or feel the required ways (and hence qualify as “women” in the Genderspeak sense) at all.

• On the one hand gender ideologues themselves are the ones who insist that there are distinct, identifiable “male” and “female” ways of thinking and feeling, thus establishing a “gender binary” that applies to pretty much anyone other than themselves (hence their special snowflake-status). Yet those who think this makes everyone non-binary, thus basically negating that the “gender binary” is even a thing, are the ones accused of reinforcing it.

• On the same note gender ideologues themselves are the ones who insist some perfectly real and vitally important* difference in ways of thinking and feeling makes certain people “female” to the very core of their being, regardless of any physical traits, thus justifying dividing people into separate groups requiring separate vocabularies, separate dress-codes, separate toilets, separate sporting events etc. Yet those who don’t think being “female” says anything about You other than the most superficial, irrelevant and unimportant physical traits are the ones accused of “gender essentialism”.

• Etc. etc.

* So important, in fact, that being called by the wrong word or placed in the wrong box is comparable to actual violence and even murder.

For some reason this stupid banality from Laurie Penny, similar or identical to millions of others, has gotten on my nerves.

It’s banal, we’ve seen it a billion times, but all the same, it’s infuriating – because it’s so stupid. It’s not “basic good manners” at all, it’s a new and clunky and sometimes totalitarian bit of etiquette, which if pushed to the extreme becomes impossible to comply with.

No, actually, if “someone” tells you they would prefer to be called Napoleon or Hitler or Julia Child or Amy Klobuchar no it isn’t basic good manners to respect that. It’s the opposite of basic: it’s baroque and twisted and fanciful. It’s the other way around: people demanding to be called Something Special are making rude entitled onerous demands.

In a sense we probably don’t get to tell anyone else “how to identify,” whatever that even means, but anyone else also doesn’t get to tell us what special names or pronouns to call her him them. Basic good manners is not making extraneous demands of random people.

Jane Clare Jones’s analysis of Judge Tayler’s ruling is mammoth (in a good way!) so I’ll take small bites.

Judge Tayler’s operating ontology surfaces in his refusal to recognise that for women to adequately express their political critique of trans activist demands it is necessary to point to sex and sometimes, even, to the sex of specific individuals – a refusal which effectively corresponds to an easy dismissal of the political stakes for women, and a blunt lack of respect for our specific political interests. The half-explicit denial of sex is also central to Tayler’s refusal of Maya’s claim that the GRA creates a legal fiction, a refusal that makes sense only on the basis of denying that there is any difference between legal and ontological sex.

This is the exact distinction I made in that comment thread on Freethought blogs, that caused all the wheels to come flying off. I said “political” as opposed to “legal” but the distinction is the same: legal or social or political on the one hand and ontological on the other. Will I agree to pretend that trans women are women versus will I agree that trans women literally are women in every sense. The distinction is crucial and if we’re not even allowed to make it then we’re in bedlam. Tayler takes us into bedlam.

By suggesting that there is only the man-made structure of ‘legal sex,’ Tayler is effectively asserting the priority of the ideal/cultural over material/biological reality. Here, legal sex (like it’s conceptual twin ‘gender identity’) trumps/erases biological sex, and the judgement itself turns out to be a perfect performance of the core of the ideology we were seeking to show we had a lawful right to resist.

And one of the ironies is…if there weren’t so much ferocious insistence on that, the social fiction would probably be a lot easier.

While women’s political interests or specific feelings are entirely ignored, Tayler judges trans people’s distress of such significance that it’s taken to easily trump both material reality (which he’s more or less handwaved anyway) and women’s concerns (which he never even bothered to consider) to such a degree, that, like the movement whose logic it so closely resembles, the judgement then lapses into ontological totalitarianism.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

From the other direction…

It is though. Being female, aka having a female body, is what makes her a woman. It’s what follows from that that is a choice, and that should be a free choice.

But that’s there anyway. We deal with it via rights, justice, arguments, regulations, organization. We don’t deal with it by saying “Look, some women have male bodies, therefore you can’t say women aren’t as strong as men!”

No. It’s not “policing women’s bodies” to say that men are not women, because the bodies in question are not women’s bodies. It’s not “policing women’s bodies” to say that people with penises don’t get to take over feminism by announcing that they are women.

And it’s tortured reasoning to say that you can’t struggle for equality and liberation if you “allow women to be solely defined by biology” when the whole point of feminism is that having female biology doesn’t make people inferior or subordinate.

It’s fair to say that biology doesn’t exhaust the meaning of “woman” but it’s absurd to say that biology is not relevant to the meaning of “woman.” Biology may not be sufficient but it damn well is necessary.

Soraya is pretty obviously right about this.

Do we think a woman whose job experience for being president consisted of being a small town mayor would get any traction?

Don’t make me laugh.

Hmmm.

Ardent ally just cannot understand it.

She made it about her? Really? I missed that – I didn’t think it was about her at all, but rather about reality.

Let’s see it again.

No, I was right – it’s not about her at all. It’s about this subject a lot of us have been talking about – are women women, or is it actually men who are women. It’s not about her; she doesn’t even use the first-person pronoun except in the hashtag.

I guess by “made it about her” Comerford means she said it while famous. Ok but then does he object when “Caitlyn” Jenner says things? Does he object when Jenner appears on the cover of Vanity Fair in a bathing suit age 66? I bet he doesn’t.

And then this business of “a great ruling for trans people” – what about the women whose rights are being taken away? Why does that part not give him any pause?

And then, “the abject cruelty” – it’s not cruelty to say that men are not women. It just isn’t.

It’s nice that the discussion is so reasonable, so nuanced, so careful and thoughtful and temperate.

That person has 90 thousand followers.