How does this work in actual life?

Requiring women to call men women “is justified to avoid harassment” of men who call themselves women. The harassment of women who are just women, and who just are women, comes in a very distant second to the harassment of men who say they are women.

This is a judge telling women we have to call men women if the men claim they are women. Not should, not could if we want to be especially kind, but have to.

It feels very churchy, very 16th century churchy, very swear the oath or we light the fires.

It seems Trump is not in a good mood.

Deeply aggrieved by the proceedings and mindful of how they will stain his legacy, Trump spent the 24 hours before the vote on the phone with top officials and Republican lawmakers, according to multiple people familiar with his calls, expressing outrage at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and looking ahead to what his trial in the Senate will look like.

As he watched conservative pundits on television bolster his views, Trump called for religious intervention.

“Send god to help!”

“This shoild never happen to another President again,” he wrote, the misspelling of “should” hardly masking his outrage. “Say a prayer!”

Ok. “Dear god, please let Trump be impeached and convicted, and then arrested the minute he leaves office.”

Impeachment has consumed much of Trump’s days and nights this month, between dictating an irate letter to Pelosi, phoning his associates to vent into the wee hours and plotting his defense in a Senate trial.

He has been ranting about impeachment in phone calls with Republican members of Congress over the last several days and nights, according to multiple GOP sources.

I hope he’s calling them at 3 a.m. All of them.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement the President would be “working all day” but “could catch some of the proceedings between meetings.”

Ten minutes later, he was decrying “SUCH ATROCIOUS LIES BY THE RADICAL LEFT, DO NOTHING DEMOCRATS” on Twitter, his message written in capital letters.

But he’s totally working all day. Work work workity work.

Last week, Trump and his aides — including speechwriter Stephen Miller — began drafting the scathing letter to Pelosi that was delivered on Tuesday, according to officials familiar with the matter, keeping the plan and text closely held within the West Wing until its public release.

Some White House officials who were not involved in the letter’s preparation said they were surprised when they saw the six-page document, which was indignant in tone and cited the Salem Witch Trials as a precedent to his situation.

Happy HOLIDAYS Donnie.

Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger issued a fine statement:

“As a former federal agent and CIA officer, I have spent my professional career in search of facts and evidence—the facts and evidence necessary to uphold the rule of law and protect our national security. Today, I am driven by facts and evidence to protect the integrity of our democracy.

“This week, the House of Representatives will vote on two articles of impeachment. In advance of casting my vote, I have read the articles and studied the evidence—including the majority and minority reports, deposition transcripts, and public testimony.

“The facts are not in dispute; witnesses, including those called by both parties, affirm these facts. The President has abused his power by soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election and leveraging U.S. security assistance dollars paid for by taxpayers and appropriated by both parties in Congress to compel a close ally—at war and dependent on our aid—to malign his political rival. When these actions became known, the President endeavored to hide the truth, and he obstructed Congress’ constitutional duty to investigate by withholding documents, evidence, and fact witnesses.

“The President’s actions violate his oath of office, endanger our national security, and betray the public trust. Because of the oath I swore to support and defend the Constitution, I will be voting in favor of both articles of impeachment. This vote is about more than one man’s abuse of power; it is about the power of the presidency and whether we, as citizens, can expect that our elected officials, and most powerfully, our President, will fulfill their obligation to uphold the Constitution. The framers foresaw the risks to our republic that could come with a President willing to put self-interest before national interest, and they gave Congress the sole power of impeachment as a remedy.

“It is with a heavy heart, a solemn devotion to our Constitution, and a deep belief in our country that I believe we must pursue this remedy. The world, and our children, are watching as the foundation of the world’s longest-standing democracy is tested. Through this trying time, nothing is more important than fulfilling our obligation to defend the Constitution and protect our republic.”

I think the former federal agent and CIA officer bit helps. She knows from facts and evidence.

Tragically, the Republicans in the Senate appear to be wholly indifferent to the facts and evidence, but it’s still good to have people who aren’t.

Reading The Letter again. Much of it is reworked by the grownups in an attempt to disguise quite how infantile and incapable Trumpbaby is, but he pops up like a jack in the box despite them. Like here:

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. 

The grownups would not have said No Pressure. The grownups know that we don’t use capital letters for emphasis in formal writing.

You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016.

The great Election of 2016? What was so great about it? Given the whole Russian interference problem, and the discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral college vote problem, and the Comey’s last minute intervention problem, and the vote suppression in the wake of Shelby problem? Oh yes, of course: Trump calls it that because he won. Narcissism guides the hand that holds the sharpie.

House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country’s best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports)—who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen.

The grownups lost that round. Grownups wouldn’t make such a ludicrously exaggerated absolutist claim, nor would they say “dirtiest cops” in a formal letter to Congress.

A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared…

Lost that round, too – to the ranting and raving “president.”

As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president.

Another eruption. The grownups wouldn’t say “As you know very well,” nor would they say “the totally appropriate conversation.” It’s not appropriate to rant and rave about a totally appropriate conversation.

Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me.  His shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.

All Trump, that bit, except a grownup must have done “as though it were.”

You are the ones interfering in America’s elections.  You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy.  You are the ones Obstructing Justice.  You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.

No YOU are! No grownups on that one.

O what an ignoble mind is here o’erthrown.

They are BOYS’ socks, dammit. They are masculine socks. They are woven from the finest grass-fed testosterone. They are in BOY COLORS.

They are in STRONG COLORS. Not a pastel among them. Those are MANLY colors. Girls can’t wear colors like that, they can’t carry the weight.

Besides, they have dinosaurs on them. Duh. Girls can’t wear dinosaur socks! What rock do you live under? Girls can wear flower socks, birdy socks, baby bunny socks – not dinosaur socks. Only boys can wear dinosaur socks, because boys can stand up to dinosaurs but girls get squashed by them.

Girls’ socks:

Boys’ socks:

I hope we’ve got all that clear now.

Trump has sent an idiotic “letter” to Speaker Pelosi, to underline how stupid and uncomprehending he really is.

Over six pages, on White House letterhead, the president piles adjectives like cords of wood, fires rhetorical fusillades in all directions and invokes the judgement of the American people, the nation’s founding fathers and history itself.

As if we hadn’t been judging him all along. He’s given us bales of evidence, and we’ve made our judgement: he’s a disaster in almost every category one can think of. (Possible exceptions: he’s probably not a literal pollutant; he hasn’t so far burned down the White House.)

Here are five choice lines from a president whose capacity for the extraordinary and unprecedented is ever-expanding.

“You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!”

Heh, yes, that’s a good one. Here is this very ugly word, and you have cheapened it! He forgot what he was saying four words in, and apparently nobody around him feels safe enough to fix it.

“Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the president’, when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in the negative sense.”

And my rattle. You broke my rattle!!!

“You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offence – it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for lawful exercise of legislative power.”

Obviously someone else wrote that bit, but it’s still bullshit. It’s in no sense national “policy” to try to bribe and extort vulnerable allies to do the president personal favors related to the next election. Nope. That is not anyone’s policy, it’s just straight-up Mafia behavior but from the seat of government.

“I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record. One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another president again.”

He wants to put his thoughts on an indelible record. What thoughts? He doesn’t have any thoughts. He has reactions, rages, eruptions – thoughts don’t come into it.

Of course he does.

The Trump administration has said it does not consider the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 to be a genocide, contradicting a unanimous vote by the US Senate.

That is, Trump has, and his pathetic slaves are echoing him.

The historic vote last week incensed Turkey, which has always denied that the killings amounted to a genocide.

Turkey’s foreign ministry on Friday summoned the US ambassador to express its anger over the vote, accusing the US of “politicising history”.

Because saying it was a genocide is political while saying it wasn’t is totally not political.

There is general agreement that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert and elsewhere in 1915-16. They were killed or died from starvation or disease.

Hmmm I think I detect a possible additional reason Trump says it wasn’t genocide, additional to his perverse desire to suck up to Erdoğan. Something to do with not wanting brutal deportations under life-threatening conditions to be called by harsh names.

Mr Trump gave a warm welcome to Mr Erdogan in Washington DC last month, despite a recent invasion by Turkey of north-east Syria that targeted the Kurds – formerly US allies in the region. The invasion infuriated many US politicians and military officials and led to calls on the president to impose sanctions on Turkey.

During a meeting in Washington last month, Mr Trump said he was a “big fan” of Mr Erdogan, ignoring widespread criticism over the Turkish president’s poor human rights record.

Bad. Bad human rights record. Not “poor,” bad. Don’t euphemize.

I’m not seeing the source of the puzzlement.

In other words, some women are not having children. And?

Having children is like almost everything else (the exceptions being things like breathing, drinking, eating): some people like it and some don’t; some people want to and some don’t. Isn’t that fairly easy to understand?

Until extremely recently this fact (if I’m right that it’s a fact) was largely concealed by the immense pressure there was on women to marry combined with the near-total absence of birth control. Most women had children because most women married (whether they wanted to or not) and marriage brought procreation with it, whatever either parent or both parents wanted.

But why is it tragic? Why can’t it just be how some people decided to live?

Also it seems a little odd to ignore the looming climate change issue.

It was all a mistake about the proletariat and the means of production and all that. It turns out it’s trans people who are the true proletariat and cis people who live off their exploited labor.

Transition is work. Transition is the labour that continually gives birth to gender, that produces liveably gendered lives under intolerable conditions. And the workplace of gender, like any workplace, cannot be borne except through self-abnegation, exhaustion, lies, glimpses of satisfaction strung out along the working week, alienation, and endless work.

I’m not clear on where we go to buy the gender that they produce with the labour of transition, but I’m deeply sympathetic about the endless work. (Most of that work is shouting at women on Twitter, I guess?)

We teach ourselves techniques of dress from online tutorials and whispered conversations. We write dissertation-length posts on support forums detailing self-medication hormone regimes. We order multiple binders and gaffs from exploitative internet retailers and submit the return labels before anyone notices. We labour for hours before the mirror to bring to the inclusive workplace a gender which can be named, respected, spoken with pronouns, paraded in front of diversity working groups.

Hm. I thought there already was a gender or two in the workplace. Is the idea that trans genders were needed for the sake of keeping diversity working groups occupied? But isn’t that a tiny bit…circular?

We teach doctors our medical pathways and pretend to be attentive when they repeat our knowledge back to us. We tweet messages in support of the liberal recognition schemes cooked up by our middle-managers to ensure our compliant participation in the workplace, the household, the nuclear family. We perform reason and tolerance, we absorb the hate and shame of our antagonists, we are the dump for all the sexual anxiety and gender horror of a society sickened by its own creations. We are sex workers. (Decrim now!) We make your entertainment, your food, your computers, your care packages, your websites, your education system, your knowledge, your play, your city.

Really? As such? That is, trans people alone make our entertainment, our food, our computers, our care packages, our websites, our education system, our knowledge, our play, our city?

Interesting if true, because I thought it was trans people as part of the larger body known as people, as opposed to trans people only. If the point is that it’s trans people as part of the larger body known as people, then…ok? And? What new thing have we learned here?

Marked by capitalism as those with too much gender and too little, we work a second shift, a third shift, a fourth, to acquire the resources necessary to produce our genders, to produce genders survivable under capitalism, at least for another year. And further, as those whom capitalism has produced through its cisheteropatriarchal division of sex classes and gendered labour, whom capitalism has spat out as the uncosted externality of gender, we labour to produce the very gender on which capitalism depends. You live in our work.

So…there’s an invisible army of trans people laboring (underground is it?) to produce gender, which the rest of us simply put on and wear unthinkingly, heedless of the millions of tormented peasants toiling away at their…lathes? Drills? Coal faces?…to produce that which we wear in all our arrogance and cissitude.

Our care work is unpaid. Our medical expertise is unpaid. Our gender production is unpaid. Our advocacy is unpaid. Our training is unpaid. Our support work is unpaid. Our teaching is unpaid. Our writing is unpaid.

Well…lots of things are unpaid. Lots of activities are unpaid, because lots of activities are not transactional in the first place, and because some potentially payable activities aren’t performed well enough to be paid. I would put the “medical expertise” of random trans activists in the latter category.

Everywhere there are trans people, there are people communally producing transitions. In trans communities, we teach each other the skills of dress, voice, deportment, body modification and self-imagining which are essential to liveable trans lives.

Ohhhh, that’s what the labour is. Not toiling underground at a workbench but telling each other how to Talk Like a Gurl. What’s the going rate for that? $500 an hour?

There’s miles and miles more of it. There’s a list of Acknowledgements at the end, one paragraph of which especially caught my attention:

I learned the term “sur-thrivance” from a group exhibition by Indigenous artists, Two-Spirit Sur-Thrivance and the Art of Interrupting Narratives, at the gallery Never Apart in unceded Kahnawake Mohawk Territory on the island of Tiohtiake.

Mmhmm. Always appropriate something from someone indigenous; that’ll fetch’em or I don’t know Arkansas.

I did an errand this afternoon and then did some urban exploring after – not real exploring, but walking around places I don’t get to every day, so close enough. I walked along the canal in Fremont then under the beautiful Fremont Bridge.

A minute after I crossed under it the bell rang that means it’s about to go up, so I stopped to watch because it’s always fun to watch a bridge go up from below, especially a deep blue one with orange trim. Then I got to watch the Rachel Carson chug through.

Then I walked on a hundred yards or so to under the Aurora Bridge to look up at the engineering marvel.

Exploring is good, even (or perhaps especially) on a grey winter afternoon.

Take his wisdom to heart.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Another scourge of White Feminism.

I definitely understand the “not wanting to start from zero” argument, because I face it so much myself in discussing global warming. I really don’t want to have to present the basics of the evidence over and over to people who have made up their mind. But I have to. The problem is, that takes time from actually doing what needs to be done, so it feels like we never progress.

I feel the same way about women’s issues. Even in groups of women, I sometimes have to start from zero to say, yes, there are women out there who do not make what their male counterparts make, who have few freedoms accorded them, etc etc etc. Can we please get on with the important issues of fixing things? The answer to that is no, because you always have to start at zero and by the time you get your interlocutor up to speed, assuming you ever do, the day is over. The next day, you have to start at zero again.

If there were ever a thing doing solid work for the oppressors, it’s ignorance. They count on it. Keep us busy starting at zero, and what little time is left we put out brush fires, etc. Nothing major will get accomplished, the world keeps spinning with the same rhythms as always, and the white male Christian component of the population remains largely in charge.

Perhaps what we need are designated “zeroists” who are in charge of starting at zero, while everyone else can pitch in and get the work done. These “zeroists” are who we refer questions to, and they will be trained and expert in starting at zero, and the constant nagging person who doesn’t know much and doesn’t accept that they don’t know much will no longer get so much in everyone else’s way.

So Rudy the Gee has artlessly admitted – to The New Yorker, so not at all conspicuously or anything – that yes he needed to get Marie Yovanovitch out of the way of his cunning plan.

Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney to President Trump, has admitted that he saw former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as an obstacle in his plan to find dirt on his client’s potential rival—former Vice President Joe Biden—in advance of the 2020 election, he said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani is reported to have said, telling the magazine that he compiled a dossier on the former VP and his son Hunter and Yovanovitch herself. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”

Oh well then. That makes it all okay.

There’s a certain piquant humor in seeing former New York mayor confessing his guilt in…The New Yorker.

Double back-flip with walnuts:

The chief executive of Hallmark Cards has apologised for its decision to withdraw television advertisements featuring same-sex couples.

The company’s cable network pulled the ads for wedding registry and planning site Zola under pressure from the conservative group One Million Moms.

The decision drew criticism on social media and calls for a boycott.

Hallmark said it would reinstate the adverts and attempt to re-establish its partnership with Zola.

Ok well next time just skip the part about doing what conservative groups tell you to do, especially ones that call themselves “moms” instead of “mothers” as if we were all six. No but seriously, just ignore people who whine about same-sex marriage. We’re past that.

The original decision to withdraw the adverts drew criticism from a number of high-profile gay figures, including Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

…

Saturday Night Live performed a skit which mocked Hallmark’s decision, concluding with the line: “This is Emily Cringle for Hallmark, reminding you to stay straight out there.”

Nobody wants to be a skit on SNL, not even Hallmark.

The original decision to withdraw the advert was prompted by complaints from a conservative activist group.

One Million Moms is an online project of the American Family Association, which is a long-time opponent of gay rights.

One Million Moms said it had personally spoken to Bill Abbott, who’s the chief executive of Hallmark’s parent company Crown Family Networks.

Moms and Bill and Crown Family – it’s all so cozy.

I guess those million “moms” are feeling pretty spanky and go to your roomy today.

Another one of those “being a man who identifies as a woman is such an excellent screen for misogyny” types:

That’s longstanding Pharyngula commenter abbeycadabra, who joined the populous but thin roster at Freethought Blogs a few days ago. That photo on the blog is captioned:

Abbey St. Brendan is five or six kinds of artist, maybe one kind of successful at it, a long-time FtB reader and grizzled veteran of the deadly TERF wars.

The opening of Cadabra’s hello world post:

Hi folks! I reckon most of you who might look at this post at least have seen my handle around, probably complaining bitterly at someone who is being a dicknostril, especially about trans issues. The plan here is to show off mostly the not so angry sides of my personality – which I would like to think is most of it, but hey, who knows.

I’m grateful to the existing Beloved Ruling Class here on FtB for accepting my application. I’ve been here for a long time – I’ve read Natalie Reed, Zinnia Jones, Crommunist, and Ed Brayton here; I’ve seen the dark moments when a bloggers were expelled for racism or plagiarism; I was here for Ophelia Benson’s grand final flounce and the sad passing of Caine – and have a lot of respect for the bloggers here. I’m honored they’re willing to take a chance on including me among them.

I’m so proud to loom that large in someone’s resumé.

See also a footnote on an essay on how kindness is compatible with being venomous to people you see as evil:

* In Holms’s case I’m really not sure what he expected to accomplish by doing this to directly pick a fight with a blog owner (not for the first time); perhaps he imagines himself a martyred crusader for White Feminism.

Ahhhhhhhh yes, White Feminism. Pasty white dude in lacy top is accusing people of White Feminism. Pasty white dude has found the only way to include himself among The Marginalized and women among The Oppressors.

H/t Holms for the source.

Apparently this Louis Staples guy went on shit-tweeting about Helen Lewis for hours after his first barrage, and then – uh oh – must have had a tap on the shoulder from a higher up at the Independent (where he is a columnist).

Do we believe he’s sincere? No.

He plans to reflect on “this.” How much reflection does it take? How much does it take to grasp the complicated and subtle point that you don’t spend six hours shit-tweeting lies about people, and that a man doing that to a woman is not a great look?

Want to know why the trans “movement” got so popular so fast? This is why. It gives men who fancy themselves progressive cover to vomit misogyny all over women while keeping their woke credentials.

That whole piece about Casablanca by Meredith Hindley is interesting.

With few Americans knowing Casablanca was a city in French Morocco — let alone how to find it on a map — the studio banked on audiences’ love of wartime intrigue, along with the star power of Bogart and castmates Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, to sell the film.

But on November 8, reports began to trickle in that the Americans and British had launched Operation TORCH with the goal of seizing Algeria and French Morocco from Vichy France. The assault was a new phase in the war against Nazi Germany, one designed to help the Soviets, who fought a bloody battle against the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Over the next few days, headlines and radio reports buzzed about the fighting in and around Casablanca, as the U.S. Navy battled the French fleet and 33,000 American soldiers stormed Moroccan beaches under the command of Major General George S. Patton, Jr.

Warner Brothers could hardly believe its luck — it had a movie in the can about a city that had just become the site of a major Allied victory. The studio couldn’t buy that kind of publicity. Rather than premiering the film in 1943, Warner Brothers hastily arranged a screening in New York on November 26, 1942, two weeks after the French surrendered Casablanca to the Americans.

…

If audience members didn’t become verklempt watching Victor lead the patrons of Rick’s Café Américain in a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise,” they received another opportunity when the lights came up. Before the premiere, members of the Free French had marched down Fifth Avenue, and at the end of the movie, they assembled on stage and belted out the revolutionary anthem in front of a flag emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. “The occasion took the tone of a patriotic rally rather than the premiere of a timely motion picture,” noted the Hollywood Reporter. Sentiments about Vichy France ran deep — even in New York.

Or especially in New York.