Back in August I did a couple of posts about cricket player Maxine Blythin. I missed the news a month later:

🏆 | What a season she’s had!

Your 2019 Kent Women Player of the Year is…. Maxine Blythin!

What a season indeed! Taking a woman’s place on the team and then taking an award from a woman.

One poignant reply a few minutes ago:

I teach at a girls’ school in Kent. We’ve had speakers in from Kent cricket to encourage the girls to view cricket as a sport for them. I guess that was all just a lie.

Oh not at all, girls can still play, they just have to be prepared for boys to be on the team too. I suppose if enough boys decide to cheat that way then girls can’t still play, but…I don’t know, maybe they can stand on the sidelines and cheer the boys on?

Garrett Epps points out:

Trump has, one way or another, changed our national life irrevocably. When one side of a political struggle has shown itself willing to commit crimes, collaborate with foreign powers, destroy institutions, and lie brazenly about facts readily ascertainable to anyone, should the other side—can the other side—then pretend these things did not happen?

Some Democratic leaders are proclaiming that we can go back to the world before Trump—and before Brett Kavanaugh and Mitch McConnell, before Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani, before an invasion of a secure facility at the Capitol, before babies were torn from their mothers and caged, before racist rhetoric from the White House and massacres at a synagogue and an El Paso Walmart—to a world of political cooperation, respect for norms, and nonpolitical courts.

How?

Assume new national leadership in 2021. What leader worth voting for would negotiate with Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy and believe either will keep his word; what sane president would turn over sensitive documents to Republican-led committees; what Democratic president would simply accept that the federal courts are now the property of the opposition, and submit issues of national policy to them, in the confidence of receiving a fair shake? After this night in the forest, can I, or any sane person, ever believe in these people and institutions again?

No. I think he’s right that we’ve gone down a road we can’t go back up.

Sorry to cite the Daily Mail, but you know how it is – sometimes the quality papers are looking fixedly in the other direction.

A birth coach has been ‘ostracised’ by her professional organisation after transgender activists branded as offensive a Facebook post in which she said that only women can have babies.

Lynsey McCarthy-Calvert, 45, was forced to stand down as spokesperson for Doula UK and has since resigned altogether from the national organisation for birth coaches. Her exit comes after transgender rights activists triggered an investigation in which Doula UK concluded her message breached its equality and diversity guidelines.

What equality and diversity guidelines are those then? Ones that say men can have babies? Is there a big market for birth coaches who think men can have babies? Wouldn’t prospective clients be worried the doula might get confused on the big day and start coaching Daddy?

‘I am angry and sad,’ she said last night. ‘I was effectively ostracised for saying I am a woman and so are my clients.

‘I have been very disappointed by Doula UK’s response. The leadership are paralysed by not wanting to upset transgender rights activists. They have fallen over themselves to acquiesce to their demands.’

Their demands to treat women as oppressive privileged class enemies, and to remove all mention of them from public life.

The Doula UK row started after Cancer Research UK dropped the word ‘women’ from its smear test campaign, instead saying screening was ‘relevant for everyone aged 25-64 with a cervix’.

In response, Mrs McCarthy-Calvert posted a photograph on Facebook of a negligee-clad woman somersaulting underwater, with the wording: ‘I am not a “cervix owner” I am not a “menstruator” I am not a “feeling”. I am not defined by wearing a dress and lipstick. I am a woman: an adult human female.’

Beneath it she wrote: ‘Women birth all the people, make up half the population, but less than a third of the seats in the House of Commons are occupied by us.’

She claimed women were accused of transphobia more than men, arguing men were not ‘subjected to cries of bigotry and transphobia when they say they don’t want to have sex with a woman with a penis’. Most trans-women have not had their male genitalia removed.

…

Days later, around 20 trans activists wrote a letter of complaint claiming Mrs McCarthy-Calvert had ‘clearly’ breeched Doula UK policies stating that members ‘shouldn’t post anything that our colleagues, clients and affiliates would find offensive’.

They alleged that the post contained several ‘trans exclusionary comments’ including the description of a woman as an ‘adult human female’.

Doula UK immediately withdrew Mrs McCarthy-Calvert as spokesperson and, after a four-month investigation, its board of directors concluded in March the post ‘does breach Doula UK’s guidelines’.

Last night, Doula UK denied it had ‘acquiesced’ to activists or that Mrs McCarthy-Calvert had been ‘in some way driven out of the organisation’.

A spokesperson added: ‘We are proud to say that we seek to listen to the lived experience of marginalised groups and make changes – including changes to the language we use – if we believe it is necessary to make the Doula UK community more welcoming and supportive.’

So it’s welcoming and supportive to tell male people they can gestate babies? And to punish a woman for saying it’s women who gestate babies?

It’s upside-down world.

So the Trump people threw a Halloween party for staff and their kids.

A Halloween party on Oct. 25 at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building featured candy, paper airplanes and — concerning for some attendees — a station where children were encouraged to help “Build the Wall” with their own personalized bricks.

Photos of the children’s mural with the paper wall were provided to Yahoo News.

The party, which took place inside the office building used by White House staff, included the families of executive-branch employees and VIP guests inside and outside government.

…

The “Build the Wall” mural was on the first floor, outside the speechwriter’s office and next to the office of digital strategy and featured red paper bricks, each bearing the name of a child.

Aww, cute.

Build the wall to keep out the filthy foreigners, plus also, America First. Isn’t that a healthy message for children? “Always be selfish, kids! You first! Push to the head of the line, grab all the chocolates, punch anyone who objects, knock down anyone who gets in your way. MAGA!”

Earlier in the week offices inside the EEOB had been instructed to put together kid-friendly displays for trick-or-treaters. The displays were supposed to be interactive and inspiring, and all were supposed to address the party’s theme: “When I grow up I want to be…”

You know, they could have done that. Even Trump people can imagine inspiring futures for kids, I would think. Astronauts, doctors, rocket scientists, dancers, teachers, chefs, musicians – lots of things other than adding bricks to a wall built to keep brown people out.

Those who worked in and around the EEOB said the border wall display is far different from what was done in prior years. “We never did anything like this in the Obama administration,” said Nate Snyder, who previously served in the Department of Homeland Security as a counterterrorism official. “We hung up skeletons and ghosts.”

However, a person who works with the Trump administration said people were making too much out of a children’s display. “Everyone loses their minds over everything, and nothing can be funny anymore,” the person said.

One, the wall is not funny. Two, any conceivable Wall Jokes would be nauseatingly inappropriate for children.

Erika Andiola, the chief advocacy officer for the immigration rights organization RAICES, said the wall, which has become a symbol for Trump’s immigration agenda, including the child separation policy, was inappropriate for a kids’ party.

“I don’t think they understand the amount of pain that people are going through at the border for them to make a joke out of it,” Andiola said of the Trump administration. “We still are dealing with children in cages even if people are not calling it that, so it’s not a joke.”

Oh, it’s not that they don’t understand. It’s that they like it.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy organization, also described the wall as “an offensive metaphor” to feature at a children’s party. “It screams to white grievance voters that ‘real Americans’ should fear, exclude and dehumanize brown people,” Sharry said. “Only in Trump’s White House would a holiday event centered on kids, costumes and candy become a propaganda opportunity for his racism and xenophobia.”

Snyder, the former Obama counterterrorism official, said that by politicizing the walls of the EEOB, Trump’s staff showed a “lack of respect for where they are and what they represent.”

“This building is historical beacon of freedom that once housed the military, and now you have a fake construction-paper wall with ‘America First’ signs on it,” Snyder lamented.

“For me as a person who worked in and outside of the White House and walked these halls countless numbers of times,” he said, “it seems like a desecration of the building.”

It’s what we stand for now.

Do we believe in magic? Jolyon Maugham QC again:

To construct an argument around that because a man raped a women in a women’s prison it follows that trans women as a class pose a risk to women in prison is plain and simple bigotry of a type applied to eg black men, gay men, rape victims, jews etc etc

A reply:

No it’s not – TW are male – we want to exclude males from female only spaces like prisons. Unless it’s bigoted to have any female only spaces, any female only anything.

Jolyon QC:

That’s what, sadly, so many of these replies come to. That you have the right to define someone else’s identity and treat them accordingly. I find it really sad that so many whose self-conception is of protecting minorities and disadvantage find themselves arguing as you do.

When and why and how did clever people like QCs become so convinced that “identity” is such a magical category that everyone is required to take everyone’s word for her/his “identity” no matter what the identity, what the circumstances, what the details?

There is no such magic. You’d think lawyers of all people would know that, since they must have to deal with lying and liars and lies all the time. There is no magic that requires us to treat other people’s claimed “identities” as sacrosanct and forbidden to question.

Women are not “defining” a man’s identity by recognizing him as a man. They’re just heeding the evidence of their senses and their years of experience. There is no moral rule that says women have to take a man’s word for it that he’s a woman. People are working hard to invent such a rule and make it binding on everyone, but we still have room to resist.

Amy Hamm tweets:

So @MorganeOgerBC wants women to drown in the ocean and this trans activist outside #GIDYVR wants to behead women.

The Sunday Times reports:

A female prisoner who was allegedly sexually assaulted in jail by a male-bodied transgender inmate has launched a High Court action for a judicial review of government policy.

She says the transgender woman, who is serving a sentence for rape of a female, groped her breasts in the prison toilets. Shortly after the assault, the victim was moved to a different prison only to find her assailant had also moved there and would be sharing accommodation.

She is challenging the lawfulness of the government decision to place trans-women prisoners convicted of sexual and violent offences against women in women’s prisons without, it is claimed, adequately protecting female prisoners.

…

The claim says the government’s national policy, implemented from October 31, states that “transgender women prisoners with gender recognition certificates must be treated in the same way as biological women for all purposes”. It rules they must be placed in the women’s estate unless there are exceptional circumstances.

So, again, when rights claims compete, men win – which, ironically, underlines the fact that trans women are men. The “right” of men to have their fantasies of being women taken seriously even by the state, even in its role as enforcer of the laws, trumps women’s right to be safe from men especially in captivity. Women in prison can’t just quit, leave, move, transfer if they don’t want to live in close quarters with men; they’re in prison. Men win, women lose, again.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play for Women, a group that has campaigned to highlight the risks to women, said: “We very much welcome this application to the court to grant a judicial review.”

Well done Nic.

From The Postmillenial late yesterday:

Word spread quickly on social media this evening that Simon Fraser University has backed out of its decision to host the event entitled “#GIDYVR: How Media Bias Shapes the Gender Identity Debate” on November 2nd.

In addition to Vancouver feminist Meghan Murphy, the event was slated to feature Quillette Canadian editor Jonathan Kay and The Post Millennial contributor Anna Slatz, and was co-organized by Mark Collard, an SFU professor of anthropology, Amy Eileen Hamm, Holly Stamer, and GIDYVR. Free speech activist Lindsay Shepherd was set to moderate.

Amy tweeted four hours ago:

We are not cancelled. New venue will be announced in an hour.

An hour later, as promised:

#GIDYVR #NOTcancelled

If all went as planned they started 22 minutes ago.

Collard, who had originally sponsored the event and assisted in booking the venue at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus, decided to withdraw his support for the event after speaking to senior director of campus public safety, Tim Marron. Marron explained that there was a high risk of violence as a result of the event.

“The senior admin had been very firm about respecting my academic freedom in terms of supporting the event,” Collard told The Post Millennial. “Tim explained what happened yesterday in a meeting between the SFU LGBT student group called Out On Campus and an outside group called Coalition Against Trans Antagonism (CATA). CATA was attempting to persuade Out On Campus to use direct action, discussing tactics such as pulling fire alarms and engaging in property damage. The ball was left in my court, and because of the safety concerns, I could not in good conscience allow this to proceed.”

There is apparently a report on the potential risks drafted by SFU security but Collard has not seen it yet—it remains with senior administration.

Threats of violence don’t do much to polish the reputation of trans activists.

Updating to add: Amy just tweeted:

Here we go! #GIDYVR #NOTcancelled

Not canceled! Baby included!

Katie Herzog writes for the Seattle weekly The Stranger. One day she wrote an article about trans people who halt or reverse transitions. You’ll never guess what happened next.

Two days later she started getting hate mail.

“It is, by far, the most-read thing I’ve ever written,” Ms. Herzog said. It also made her “wildly reviled.” Seattle residents burned stacks of The Stranger and posted stickers calling Ms. Herzog a transphobe.

Ms. Herzog lost “dozens” of friends over the article, she said. She soon felt unwelcome at lesbian bars. She began to hesitate to give strangers her name. She felt like a “pariah” in her hometown, she said, and eventually moved out of Seattle to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

Her main social contacts now are her live-in girlfriend and a small group of older female friends. “I’m not invited to brunch anymore,” Ms. Herzog said.

Been there, got the T shirt. (Except the brunch thing. I do not know this “brunch” of which you speak.)

The term for people who have been thrust out of social or professional circles in this way — either online or in the real world or sometimes both — is “canceled.”

This week, even Barack Obama spoke about online denunciation, personal purity and being “politically woke,” saying, “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”

Purity is not enough, and it’s not always even desirable. Purity can be racial or sexual or ethnic or national or religious, and none of those brands of purity-policing lead to good places.

Alice Dreger, a former Northwestern University professor, estimated she has counseled “about 100” people through their experiences being canceled. In doing so, she has become part of an “informal peer network” that includes two pugnacious writer-personalities: Christina Hoff Sommers, who rose to prominence defending Gamergate and coining “victim feminism,” and Meghan Murphy, who opposed adding gender identity to Canada’s human rights act.

Ms. Herzog had interviewed Ms. Dreger for her piece on trans people. “I told her, ‘You’re going to get slaughtered for this.’ She just laughed,” Ms. Dreger said. “Six months later, she gave me a call.”

“Katie thought what we all thought: The truth will save me. That’s what Galileo thought, too, and he died under house arrest. The same thing has happened to us.”

Did I think that? No, I don’t think so. I apparently did think I would be allowed to express some careful, reasoned reservations though. Ha! Nope.

Ms. Dreger’s chief concern is ensuring that the canceled person has access to mental health care, she said. The experience of public scorn is psychologically damaging.

“There’s an effect to being constantly told, in public, that you’re wrong and evil,” said Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex in England.

Ms. Stock has also received strong criticism for her writings on trans people. (She describes herself as “gender critical.”) She said she is “anathema” in certain philosophy factions.
She has also corresponded with Ms. Herzog and Jesse Singal, another journalist who has been scorned for his writing on trans people, and has developed genuine friendships with like-minded academics. “Some of us have even been on holiday together,” Ms. Stock said.

Brunch, holiday – these people speak a dialect I’m not familiar with.

Mr. Singal and Ms. Murphy may be case studies for people who don’t believe “cancel culture” is real, or effective. Twitter-based outrage hasn’t had a lasting, adverse effect on their careers or social lives. It has become a central part of their online personas.

For Ms. Murphy, getting canceled has brought her into contact with people she once considered her “political enemies.”

She was banned from Twitter for “targeted misgendering” and then sued Twitter over the decision. (She lost the suit but said she is currently in the appeal process.) While she thought it would hurt her writing career, she said the opposite occurred. “People tried to cancel me, and I was un-cancelable,” Ms. Murphy said. “It backfired, and I gained a bigger profile.”

And lots of invitations to brunch, I bet.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The very definition of adult public discourse.

It’s quite true that we should avoid relying on “us vs. them” mentality too much, and I suppose it’s healthy to reach across the left/right divide every now and then. I’m probably giving myself way too much credit here, but I believe I’ve always been the type to at least try to give the right’s ideas the benefit of the doubt — I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand simply because they come from the bad guys. I’m trying to find an old Jon Stewart joke from the early 2000s I used to be fond of, that went something along the lines that you could make the left turn against any idea by simply getting Joe Lieberman to endorse it. I’ve always been aware that there’s a lot of that kind of tribal in-group thinking on the left, and I’ve always tried to put myself above it and ground my political stances on reason rather than tribal identity. (Or at least, that’s what I’ve flattered myself into believing.)

But in practice it rarely mattered whether one’s leftist beliefs came from merely identifying as a leftist or from reasoning one’s way into them, because the two were almost always in alignment, at least as I saw it. There were enough reason-minded people at the helm of leftist thought to keep the herd on course. No matter how hard I looked, I almost never found instances where the right’s position seemed more reasonable than the left’s. There were some examples where the left was wrong, though, and I kept them in mind as important lessons the left should learn from: their betrayal of Salman Rushdie; their knee-jerk attitudes about religious rights; Noam Chomsky’s genocide denialism in Bosnia and Cambodia; etc.

But things feel different now. Everything has completely shifted. The leftist herd is now led by emotional soundbites spread through social media, and it’s drifted far from the course towards reason. The right recognizes this and are seizing on the opportunity to position themselves as the shepherds of reason, and some young people are getting behind them. And it makes me sick to my stomach with fear, because mingling in among the right-wing herd are a lot of dangerous, harmful ideas that could quite literally destroy the planet.

I’m not sure I understand Benjamin Wittes’s argument in this post on the collapse of Trump’s defenses last week.

Hamilton’s point was that guilt or innocence might be not be dispositive in impeachment trials. It was not that guilt or innocence doesn’t matter in the face of political power. There’s a temptation to conflate these two points. If the president’s defense has crumbled but that fact will not trigger his removal, does it even matter? In fact, the crumbling of the president’s defense matters a great deal—even if the wall ultimately holds, even if a large segment of the public refuses to engage that reality and even if a large cadre of elected officials chooses to keep escalating the noise instead of either accepting Trump’s guilt or mounting a substantive defense of his actions.

The collapse matters—even if it does not prove dispositive politically—because persuasion matters and thus persuasiveness matters. The last line of defense against a lawless, oathless president is the electoral process, and clarifying Trump’s conduct before the electorate is thus crucial to voters’ ability to make informed decisions. The process of evaluation itself also plays an important role here. The definition in the minds of members of Congress of what is unacceptable helps to articulate and reinforce norms of behavior. In a period in which we are fighting to defend norms, that articulation and reinforcement is a critical exercise.

I follow so far. (I’m not sure how true it is in the age of Fox News and social media flooded with lies, but I follow.)

It’s a little harder to violate a particular norm of behavior once you have publicly voted to impeach someone for it—not impossible, to be sure, but harder. Conversely, argue that conduct is acceptable or tolerable in a president, and it becomes a little easier to do it yourself. It is a notable fact that Democrats have not, by and large, argued for Trump’s impeachment based on his conduct—very likely criminal—in the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal matters. Having argued during Bill Clinton’s tenure that crimes undertaken to cover up mere sexual misconduct are not impeachable, Democrats are staying away from that one.

We can hope that something of the opposite effect is happening here: If the only consequence of going through this process is to make it a little harder for some Democratic president in the future to emulate Trump’s ongoing abuses of foreign policy and law enforcement in the service of political ends—because essentially all Democrats will have labeled the conduct as impeachment-worthy—that alone will be worth the process the country is going through now.

Eh? But Democrats don’t have a record of doing this kind of thing. I have a very hard time seeing Trump’s successful evasion of impeachment as worth it because it will discourage a future Democrat from doing what Trump did. That seems like saying it’s ok if Harvey Weinstein gets away with it because at least the process will discourage women from raping men.

Good one.

It’s so strange when men think they will stop us from being feminists by telling us our rights don’t matter. Don’t you see you are only emphasising the need? It’s like thinking you can stamp out socialism with the message that poor people should know their place.

Hannah McGill

Now Republicans are shifting to the “Ok what he did wasn’t great but that doesn’t make it impeachable” defense. Apart from the squalor of that, there’s also the inconvenient fact that it’s not true.

The argument, according to constitutional experts and historians of impeachment, is not a strong one. In fact, Trump’s conduct, according to analysts interviewed by the Guardian, hews more closely than any previous conduct by any other president to what scholars conceive as a concrete example of impeachable behavior.

What, you mean strong-arming a vulnerable ally to smear a political rival in exchange for aid? That’s impeachable? Whaddya know.

Frank O Bowman III, author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump and a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, said that Trump’s having extorted actions with no legitimate US national purpose from a foreign country that is “literally at risk of losing its political and territorial independence” without US support was impeachable.

“It’s plainly an abuse of power, and it’s plainly impeachable,” Bowman said.

“I think these are quite clearly, precisely the type of high crimes and misdemeanors that the founders not only feared but actually discussed at the constitutional convention,” said Jeffrey A Engel, co-author of Impeachment: An American History and director of the center for presidential history at Southern Methodist University.

“The high crime is the trade – give me dirt on Joe Biden and his son, and I’ll give you in return military aid and help with your economy – I think that is certainly impeachable,” said Corey Brettschneider, author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents and a professor of constitutional law at Brown University.

See, if he weren’t the president, he wouldn’t be able to bully another president to help him kneecap a personal political rival. Using the presidency for such a personal-interest act of bullying – yes that looks like an abuse of power to me.

In an Oval Office interview on Thursday, Trump compared his conduct favorably with the last two presidents to face impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

“Everybody knows I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Washington Examiner. “Bill Clinton did things wrong; Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won’t go back to [Andrew] Johnson because that was a little before my time. But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong.”

Everybody knows no such thing, and it’s not true.

Trump’s analysis of his own behavior does not stand up to scrutiny, scholars said.

“Obviously the degree of severity is almost immeasurably different,” said Bowman. “With respect to Clinton, yes you had a violation of law, in the sense of his having committed perjury, but he committed perjury in order to conceal a private, consensual sexual affair. Now that’s discreditable, it’s also criminal – he got disbarred as a result of doing it.

“But in terms of the interests of the nation, not even remotely comparable.

“In this case, Trump is literally holding the independence of another country hostage to his own political interests. Not only is that contemptible, and in many ways more contemptible than what Nixon did, but I think it’s also true, and we’ve heard a lot of testimony about this over the past couple of weeks, that what he was doing is endangering an American policy objective, the whole framework of containment of Russian expansionism, the bedrock of our policy in eastern Europe for the last 70 years.

“It’s far worse, in that regard, I think, than what Nixon did.”

Of course, Russia sees it as a matter of containing US-NATO expansionism, but that’s another bag of cats.