After this night in the forest

Nov 3rd, 2019 4:51 pm | By

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.



Don’t cross the equality and diversity guidelines

Nov 3rd, 2019 4:05 pm | By

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.



As the fire’s rage

Nov 3rd, 2019 2:47 pm | By

Speaking of Only in Trump’s White House…what other president, even the shittiest of them, ever decided the best thing to do when a state was suffering a disaster would be to shout abuse at its governor, in public? I don’t know of any. But for Trump it’s just another Sunday.

The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must “clean” his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers…….Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states…But our teams are working well together in………putting these massive, and many, fires out. Great firefighters! Also, open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the North. Don’t pour it out into the Pacific Ocean. Should be done immediately. California desperately needs water, and you can have it now!

Image result for trump boy mowing lawn meme california



Only in Trump’s White House

Nov 3rd, 2019 2:29 pm | By

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.

via Yahoo News

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.



To define someone else’s identity

Nov 3rd, 2019 11:12 am | By

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.



Step right up

Nov 3rd, 2019 10:15 am | By

Amy Hamm tweets:

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

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Retroactive policy trap

Nov 3rd, 2019 9:57 am | By

You may recall that Jonathan Best is being punished by the University of Huddersfield for violating orthodoxy on trans issues. He tweets today:

News on the Uni of Huddersfield disciplinary case against me: my appeal against the warning given to me by the Dean has been allowed and I now proceed to a full, disciplinary hearing on November 15th. These are the allegations the university brings against me, and which I refute:

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That third item made me sit up and take (extra) notice. Breach of the Trans Equality Policy? What is the Trans Equality Policy? What special kind of equality is there that applies to trans people and not others? So I went looking for it, and found it. The odd thing is, though, it’s dated this past September and October…so they’re accusing Best of breaching something that didn’t exist when he is supposed to have breached it. They appear to have written a new policy for the very purpose of accusing Best of breaching it before it was written.

Trans Equality Policy Statement [pdf]:

1. The University of Huddersfield is committed to removing any form of unlawful
discrimination against people on the grounds of their gender identity or gender
expression. Where this policy refers to ‘trans people’, it has in mind a broad range of
people whose gender identity may not be expressed in ways that are typically
associated with their assigned sex at birth. This includes those who have non-binary,
agender or gender-fluid identities.

But unlawful discrimination against people on other grounds is ok? No. So what’s the point of specifying the grounds? Besides attempting to justify punishing Jonathan Best with a retroactive rule? Unlawful discrimination is unlawful.

2 and 3 are about valuing diversity and respect and no harassment. Then it gets more specific.

The University undertakes the following:
• Students will not be denied access to courses, progression to other courses, or fair
and equal treatment while on courses because of their gender identity or because
they propose to or have transitioned.
• Employees will not be excluded from employment or promotion or redeployment
opportunities because of their gender identity.
• Requests to change name and gender on records will be handled promptly and
employees and students will be made aware of any implications of the changes.
• The University will respect the confidentiality of all trans employees and students’
identities and will not reveal information relating to their trans status without the
prior agreement of the individual.

So apparently they’re saying that as far as they’re concerned students and employees can change sex instantly and on request, with no questions asked, and that students will be made aware of any implications of the changes while at the same time the whole thing is kept confidential. So that’s confusing.

Then we get to the bit they apparently wrote specifically to justify their bullying of Jonathan Best:

Transphobic abuse, harassment or bullying (name-calling/derogatory jokes,
unacceptable or unwanted behaviour, intrusive questions etc.) will not be tolerated
and will be dealt with under the appropriate procedure,
https://staff.hud.ac.uk/media/universityofhuddersfield/content/files/hr/policies/staffha
ndbook/Dignity-At-Work-Procedure.pdf

Nice “etc.” there – what do you bet it will turn out to cover whatever they need it to cover in order to justify their bullying of Jonathan Best. What do you bet it will turn out to cover any kind of skepticism about “gender identity” at all. I guess it doesn’t matter what you bet because nobody will take the bet – the reality is too obvious.

Page 3 has all the dates. September and October.

Updating to add: Best replies to my questions:

Versions of these policies were in existence prior to the complaint against me. The clauses I’m accused of breaking have been made clear to me.

Ok. I remain very suspicious of this late re-write, and especially of that “etc.”



Somehow

Nov 3rd, 2019 9:10 am | By

Adding another from Jolyon Maugham, a more trivial one but it itches my mind.

Your argument contends that trans men and women are somehow pretending to be men and women. And don’t also deserve protection. I don’t accept those contentions.

It’s that “somehow” that’s so annoying. Come on. The “somehow” is that trans people claim to be the opposite sex. That’s what “trans” means in this context. (There are other contexts. Transcontinental, transnational, translate, transfer.) Trans people explain themselves as “identifying as” the other sex. It has become socially mandatory to treat those claims and explanations as true and self-evident and rude-to-dispute, but that doesn’t translate to “we no longer even understand what is meant by ‘trans’ or how anyone could possibly think trans women are in any sense men.”

And how are we defining “pretending,” anyway? I don’t think all trans people are consciously deliberately perpetrating a hoax while laughing up their sleeves, but I also don’t think “identifying as” is identical to being in all uses of the word.

The current ideology is that trans people are both trans and the sex they transed into. That doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but then that’s the beauty of ideology: it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense.

There can be a mix of pretending and sincerity, but whatever it is, the reality stays the same: people can’t literally change sex, so there’s nothing puzzling or opaque about saying that trans dogma is a gift to men who have reasons to pretend to be women…such as men in prison for example. Maugham’s pretending to be confused by the idea that some trans people could be pretending to be the other sex is flippant and annoying.



Not his problem

Nov 3rd, 2019 8:33 am | By

Jolyon Maugham QC, who will never find himself in the situation of a woman locked up with a predatory man who claims to be a woman, weighs in with his QC opinion on the subject.

There’s a need for great care when arguing for the need to protect ‘safe spaces’. To contend ‘X, member of group, is a criminal and so you should fear all in that group’ is to adopt a trope favoured by bigots down the ages. 1/3

He was commenting on a tweet by Jean Hatchet:

Yes. This has happened and the rapist was called *Karen* White. Now returned to male prison. If we raise this we are called transphobic. But we will raise it. Stand with feminist women against these attacks on your rights. Go to a @Womans_Place_UK meeting. Find out. Push back.

Maugham continues:

The Equality Act (and the very provision Jean cites) talks of “proportionate” measures to achieve “legitimate” aims. This languages recognises the need carefully to balance conflicting rights and dignities. Trans men and women, like cis men and women are entitled to respect. 2/3

How real is the risk? What is necessary to safeguard against it? How might these safeguards be operated to protect the rights and dignities of all? These questions are more likely to generate policy responses that achieve that balance than broad assertion. 3/3

It’s not a risk he will ever face, and that could be why he finds it so easy to dismiss, minimize, shrug off.



Her assailant had also moved there and would be sharing accommodation

Nov 3rd, 2019 8:12 am | By

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.



At the Pan Pacific Vancouver

Nov 2nd, 2019 5:56 pm | By

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.

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An hour later, as promised:

#GIDYVR #NOTcancelled

Image

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

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Not canceled! Baby included!



Being canceled

Nov 2nd, 2019 5:20 pm | By

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.



Guest post: Everything has completely shifted

Nov 2nd, 2019 4:57 pm | By

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.



The very definition of adult public discourse

Nov 2nd, 2019 11:49 am | By

Rex Murphy is scathing on the campaign to silence Meghan Murphy:

[T]he Toronto Public Library (the well-known free-speech-mongering fascist hive) was the scene of great turbulence when Meghan Murphy (feminist scholar, writer) rented a room in one of its divisions to give a talk on gender identity and its various legal and other implications.

Now people living in less enlightened cities than Toronto might think that a civilized, qualified woman — feminist, too — speaking on the subject of women, in the quiet dignity of a public library, to people (many of them women) who wished to hear her, was the very definition of adult public discourse, an illustration of a healthy civic climate, and a very fine addition to the intellectual state of democracy.

Further, and this is a key point, the very consideration that the public library system of a city was obligingly renting a room for discussion and debate was proof, if any were needed, that TPL was living up to the great traditions of libraries since they came into the world, of providing a haven for intellect, exchange and debate.

A haven for TERFs you mean.

Immediately, the cry went up from always alert trans-activists that the library system was hosting “hate speech,” that it was a place where “bigotry” had found a home, that as a publicly funded institution it had no “right” to supply a “space” for “transphobia.” To judge from the volume and intensity of the outcry, one would believe that should this Megan Murphy give her 40-minute talk to a hundred people who wanted to hear it, Toronto was on a slide to become the Rome of Mussolini, liberal culture would expire, and it would scarcely be safe to go out at night.

As for the embattled Meghan Murphy, the most tireless label plastered on her — in news reports, sour columns and in the howling street — was that she was a “self-described,” “self-designated” feminist. That she couldn’t therefore be a “real” feminist. The careless mouths making that charge were standing in a thunderstorm of irony and not noticing they were getting drowned in the downpour.

What is the axle on which trans-identity turns? … Give me a minute here … I’ve got to check … Oh, yes. It’s self-identification. Self-description. Per exemplum, Ms. Yaniv, late of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, and now bearing its fines, “self-identified” as a woman. That same self-identification gave Yaniv the “standing” to harass more than a dozen immigrant women.

Surely Meghan Murphy has a little more ground than self-identified Jessica Yaniv to assert the less troublous category of “feminist.” Feminist is — hold on — not even a biological state. Feminism doesn’t ask other people to wax its particles. It is an intellectual orientation.

In other words it’s a category it does make sense to “identify” as or with or into. It can still be debatable, we can still say it makes no sense to call yourself socialist or conservative if your views don’t align with your chosen designation, but it’s not pure childish make-believe.

But our brave trans-activists want to claim their “right” to nullify Murphy’s actual work, education and experience as a feminist because — by their angry tally — she just says she’s a feminist. I suggest that using “self-described” or “self-identified” as a term of scorn and rebuke is not the ideal tactic for a movement built on self-identification and self-description.

A world where Rachel McKinnon is a woman because he says so but Meghan Murphy is not a feminist even though she says she is and countless feminists agree with her is confusing at best.



A little harder to violate a particular norm of behavior

Nov 2nd, 2019 10:56 am | By

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.



Only emphasising the need

Nov 2nd, 2019 9:43 am | By

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



The argument is not a strong one

Nov 2nd, 2019 9:29 am | By

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.



In quite robust terms

Nov 1st, 2019 6:05 pm | By

If Benjamin Wittes says “Yeesh” it’s worth paying attention. He said it about the Independent’s reporting on the Trump people’s attack on their own intelligence services.

…overshadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election.

This has now been designated a criminal investigation with power of subpoena and the possibility of prison sentences for those who have been allegedly involved in criminal actions, although exactly what these criminal actions entail remains unclear.

That’s because they haven’t made it up yet. They’re working on it.

The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers.

Trump and Barr have also been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBICIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.

And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.

In order to protect the most shamefully evil president we’ve ever had.



Don’t squawk, ya dirty rat

Nov 1st, 2019 5:34 pm | By

It’s ok to commit high crimes and misdemeanors as long as you keep it secret.

The senior White House lawyer who placed a record of President Donald Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president in a top-secret system also instructed at least one official who heard the call not to tell anyone about it, according to testimony heard by House impeachment investigators this week.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated Army officer who served as the National Security Council’s director for Ukraine, told lawmakers that he went to the lawyer, John Eisenberg, to register his concerns about the call, in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, according to a person in the room for Vindman’s deposition on Tuesday.

Eisenberg recorded Vindman’s complaints in notes on a yellow legal pad, then conferred with his deputy Michael Ellis about how to handle the conversation because it was clearly “sensitive,” Vindman testified. The lawyers then decided to move the record of the call into the NSC’s top-secret codeword system—a server normally used to store highly classified material that only a small group of officials can access.

That’s the senior White House lawyer right there – deciding that the thing to do with a record of the president strong-arming a vulnerable ally to find dirt on a political rival is to hide it. The thing to do about the crime is to join in it by covering it up.

Vindman did not consider the move itself as evidence of a cover-up, according to a person familiar with his testimony. But he said he became disturbed when, a few days later, Eisenberg instructed him not to tell anyone about the call—especially because it was Vindman’s job to coordinate the interagency process with regard to Ukraine policy.

Eisenberg’s decision to move the call record to the codeword system following his conversation with Vindman was first reported by The Washington Post. But Eisenberg’s subsequent request that Vindman not disclose the content of the call to anyone has not been previously reported.

The NSC and Eisenberg ignored Politico’s requests for comment.

Eisenberg’s purported request that Vindman keep the call a secret raises questions about whether the lawyers’ intent was to bury the conversation altogether. It also undermines Trump’s insistence that the call was “perfect.”

Just a tad.



In addition to male puberty

Nov 1st, 2019 5:10 pm | By

Madeleine Kearns at the National Review can see it, but the wokies can’t. Strange times.

Rachel McKinnon — the so-called defending “world champion” of women’s track cycling — is a man. I’ll repeat that so my meaning cannot be misconstrued. He is a man.

Maybe my kind-hearted reader is offended by this blunt phrasing. Why am I calling McKinnon a man — when, perhaps for complicated reasons, he would rather be called a woman? Why don’t I compromise and call him a “trans woman,” as others do? Or be polite and address him by “she/her” pronouns, like everyone else in the media?

I doubt that many readers of National Review have that particular brand of kind-heartedness – the kind that humors identity bullshit. Capitalism bullshit, market bullshit, antifeminist bullshit, yes, but identity bullshit, no. Not their thing. Once in awhile that makes them right.

This is precisely the well-meant, tragically naïve logic that has enabled a structure of lies and tyranny to be erected around us, a structure that most cannot opt out of without incurring an enormous social cost. It is a structure in which cheating and viciousness are rewarded while civility and truth-telling are punished. Rachel McKinnon is the perfect example of how this structure works and operates, as well as why we should resist it.

He is. He is more so than for instance Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv, because he has a respectable job as an academic, and is much better at righteous rhetoric than Yaniv is. He doesn’t come across as flaky the way Yaniv does; instead he comes across as a determined malevolent conscious cheat and bully.

For context: McKinnon lived unambiguously as a man (called “Rhys”) until the age of 29. In addition to male puberty, he has had a full experience of modern academia where he developed a particular enthusiasm for the philosophy of lies (literally) and for “gender studies.” Graduating first from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, he completed a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on assertions, “Why You Don’t Need to Know What You’re Talking About” (the literal subtitle).

And later a book.  Of course he did.

While serving as an associate professor at the College of Charleston, S.C., McKinnon decided to get into sport cycling. (Fair.) He won the 200-meter sprint record for women in the 35–39 range in 2018, and then the UCI Masters World Track Cycling Championship in the Women’s Sprint. (Not fair.)

This month, he defended his title. From the news last week: “Rachel McKinnon successfully defended her track World Championship title in Manchester,” per Cycling Weekly;  “Prominent trans rights campaigner McKinnon has defended her right to compete,” per the BBC; “[McKinnon] found herself defending her title against a critic — the president’s son,” per CBS News; “McKinnon keeps dominating women’s cycling. And she keeps creating controversy all the way,” per the New York Post.

McKinnon keeps dominating women’s cycling because of that whole not being a woman thing.

Because McKinnon being a man is directly relevant to the argument that he should not compete against women, in calling him something other than a man, we obfuscate that argument — and all for the sake of a very recently invented set of blasphemy norms (e.g. “misgendering” and “deadnaming”) that don’t apply to us non-believers.

That’s a good way of putting it. They’re blasphemy norms in a religion we don’t adhere to or admire so leave us out of them.

Second, by pretending that McKinnon is not a man — but rather a vulnerable woman — we have forsworn all expectations of accountability and decency. The most egregious example of this, and the precise moment I decided to stop lending McKinnon special courtesies, was when he lauded the terminal illness of a young woman, Magdalen Berns, whom I held (and still hold) in great esteem.

Berns believed strongly that men cannot be women. As she lay on her deathbed in Scotland, at the age of 36, surrounded by her loved ones, McKinnon tweeted that he was “happy” when bad people died, that this feeling is “justified,” that Berns is a “trash human,” and further advised his followers “don’t be the sort of person who people you’ve harmed are happy you’re dying of brain cancer.”

That’s McKinnon. He should write a book on how it’s possible to be seen as progressive while calling women names day in and day out on Twitter.

So, can you compromise or appease a tyrant? You can certainly try. In a surprisingly balanced interview with Sky News — in which the interviewer explained that the science shows that even after taking testosterone suppressants, men retain indisputable physiological advantages that are especially pronounced in a sport like track — McKinnon explained why he thinks skeptics like me, who consider the science of sex, are wrong:

I’m legally and medically female. But the people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male. They use the language that I am a man . . . If you think of trans women as men then you think there’s an unfair advantage.

Of course, nobody is questioning McKinnon’s existence — for how could the continually aggressive presence of such an unpleasant man be denied? What is being disputed is his belief that he is a woman and his sense of entitlement to compete against actual women. But for those who might be more sympathetic, or for those who don’t know quite how much of a thug he is, he makes the classic cartoon-villain mistake: overreach. Those who are not with him entirely, he explains, must be entirely against him:

[Sport] is central to society. So, if you want to say, “I believe you’re a woman for all of society except this massive central part of sport” then that’s not fair. So, fairness is the inclusion of trans women.

As it happens, I do not have an ideological commitment to gender terminology or pronouns one way or another. For struggling, respectful souls, I’m happy to lend special courtesies (in fact, I frequently do). But for cheats and liars, for bullies and tyrants, for those who seek to use my words to propagate deceit and injustice? Oh, just drop it, sir — I’ll never call you “ma’am.”

How about this guy?