Sky News did a chat with cycling champion and famed trans woman Rachel McKinnon.

RM: 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 of that I’m a man, and so there’s this stereotype that men are always stronger than women, and so if you think of trans women as men, then you think there’s an unfair advantage.

No. We don’t “think of trans women as men” – that’s just what they are. It’s McKinnon who does the thinking of people as what they’re not; those of us who reject the bullshit just know men when we see them. We don’t “think of” McKinnon as a man, we just know he is one, and we don’t “think of” it as fair for him to race on the women’s team in order to scoop all the top prizes. We don’t “think” there’s an unfair advantage, we just know it. (Here’s a hint: how many medals did McKinnon win before he started racing on the women’s team?)

The interviewer presses him.

Interviewer: Do you accept that there may still be an advantage?

RM: Is it possible? Yes. However, the range of body sizes and strength levels within a sport – you can be successful with massively different body compositions, even within my sport.

Then why wasn’t McKinnon successful when he raced on the men’s team? It is just pure coincidence that he’s grabbing all the medals now that he’s moved over?

[rude noise] Of course it’s not. He did it calculatedly, and he’s bullshitting everyone in sight, laughing to himself at all the fools who are buying it.

Journalist goes to meet subject of interview, starts write-up with hipster description of meet and greet, so that we can get our attitude straight at the outset. Lila Shapiro meets Andrea Long Chu:

On an early fall afternoon at a dry-pot restaurant in the East Village, the critic Andrea Long Chu is talking about herself, which is, by her account, one of her favorite things to do.

I guess we’re meant to take that as irony? Or charming self-deprecating frankness? Or, ideally, some of each, so that we’ll fall all the more in love with Chu? I don’t know, but it doesn’t work on me. I’ve become profoundly resistant to people who love nothing more than talking about themselves. There are few things I hate more. If talking about herself really is one of her favorite things to do then I recommend not interviewing her, not meeting up with her in any kind of restaurant in the East Village (or the West Village or the Upper West Side or even the Bronx), not having anything to do with her. Seek out the people who are interested in other things instead.

But hey: of course Chu is a narcissist. I should have known.

A little less than a year ago, in a New York Times op-ed about her plans to undergo surgery to “get a vagina,” Chu made a provocative claim that angered some trans advocates: She did not expect the painful, expensive procedure to make her happy. Still, Chu insisted, she had the right to get it whether it cured her dysphoria or not.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a “right” to “get” a vagina (or a penis either).

Nearly a year after the surgery, she says she’s feeling more miserable than she’d expected. “It’s perversely vindicating,” she adds with a wry smile. Dressed in a jumpsuit patterned with blue-and-white flowers, she brushes a curtain of curls away from her face with a flip of her wrist, revealing a tattoo of a geometric vulva on the underside of her forearm. “It’s very dangerous to get what you want.”

This is the sort of statement — darkly funny, intensely personal, daringly poised between profundity and trolling — that has made Chu one of the most exciting critics working today.

Oh stop. Glib paradoxes of that kind don’t make anyone an exciting anything. They’re easy to make and they’re not particularly interesting, let alone exciting. Why are people so gullible about this kind of dreck?

In her first book, Females, out later this month, she posits a new theory about gender and sexuality, starting with the contention that “everyone is female.” (“I get criticized for projecting a lot,” she says dryly.) In Chu’s usage, female is a “universal existential condition,” defined by submitting to someone else’s desires. For example, even if you conceive of yourself as an alpha male who likes to top in bed, the desire to dominate is ultimately its own form of submission. “A top,” says Chu, “is just a bottom folded into another shape.” So why does she insist on calling a universal condition “female”? “Because everyone already does,” she writes. Women are the “select delegates” of this state of being.

Blah blah blah. It’s the same old shit with a new (but cheap and ugly) ribbon on. It’s Molly Bloom but more reactionary. It’s yet another guy explaining women to women. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

#bedbugsummit is trending.

“Bring the leaders of the free world to Doral, he said. What could go wrong, he said,” tweeted songwriter Holly Figueroa O’Reilly, founder of Blue Wave Crowdsource, which supports Democratic candidates.

Twitter users began using the hashtag Thursday after White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney announced that the G7 summit would take place at Trump’s Doral resort because it was “far and away the best physical facility for this meeting.”

Except for the bedbugs. And the heat. And the humidity. And the overall who wants to be stuck at a crap Trump resort near Miami airport. And the fact that there are many better physical facilities. Other than that, it’s definitely the best.

The front page of the Baltimore Sun today:

On the one hand you have the political or philosophical concept of freedom of speech, and on the other hand you have the commercial interest of various people who make lots of money by selling tv shows and magazines and tabloids, and/or the advertising they purvey. If we want to think about the political or philosophical concept of freedom of speech, we’re well advised to consult Tocqueville or Mill or Orwell rather than Murdoch or O’Reilly or…Zuckerberg.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is not impressed by Zuckerberg’s credentials to instruct the masses on free speech.

For his entire adult life, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been able to make up in hubris what he lacks in education. He continued that trend on Thursday while addressing students at Georgetown University in Washington DC, in what was billed as a major manifesto on “free speech”.

“I am here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” Zuckerberg said, as if anyone beyond the growing collection of authoritarian dictators seriously argues against it.

And as if Facebook didn’t have a conspicuous habit of suspending or banning women who express skepticism about the ability of men to become women by simply declaring it to be so.

Zuckerberg’s unsophisticated thoughts on free speech generated a manifesto that can only be called incoherent. Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s content regulations have been incoherent in design and in practice.

Imagine how insulting it must have been for hundreds of the brightest young minds in America, many of whom have considered deeply the history of American constitutional law and the ways it influences democracy, to sit politely and listen to billionaire who seems to have barely cracked a book on the subject and can’t seem to form a clear line of argument.

He’s a billionaire. Why would he bother cracking a book?

The speech was so weak and poorly structured that it could not have served as worse evidence in an argument for the value of speech itself. The event would have been much more valuable to Zuckerberg and his audience if the Georgetown public policy students had lectured him about the history and value of free speech. They, after all, know things and are trained to think and write clearly.

Zuckerberg made a thing that sold well. That’s not the same as knowledge or ability to think and write clearly.

For being such a key player in the young 21st century, Zuckerberg embraces an outdated, 19th-century view of speech. For him there is actually something like a marketplace of ideas through which the best ideas prevail once we encounter evidence and argument. The problem is, Facebook undermines any attempt to sustain such a practice.

We largely solved the challenge of the 19th century. By 2019 we have managed to offer most people in the world a platform for expression and a tool for constant, affordable human communication. In much of the world, speech remains beyond the reach of state control. That’s all fine, except it creates a new problem we have yet to confront.

The problem of the 21st century is cacophony. Too many people are yelling at the same time. Attentions fracture. Passions erupt. Facts crumble. It’s increasingly hard to deliberate deeply about complex crucial issues with an informed public. We have access to more knowledge yet we can’t think and talk like adults about serious things.

Is Trump the inevitable result of that state of affairs?

So Mulvaney says yeah there was a quid pro quo, deal with it, ya big bunch of anti-corruption wimps.

Or almost that.

A senior White House official has admitted military aid to Ukraine was withheld partly to pressure Kyiv to investigate allegations on the Democrats and the 2016 election.

Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said President Donald Trump had mentioned Democratic “corruption”.

But Mr Trump was also concerned about wider corruption in Ukraine, he said.

Yeah like socialist corruption and Mexican corruption and…uh…Muslim corruption. Stuff like that.

Briefing reporters on Thursday, Mr Mulvaney gave a lengthy answer to a question about Ukraine, saying the president had told him Ukraine was a “corrupt place” and that Mr Trump didn’t want to spend aid and “have them use it to line their own pockets”.

This is Trump talking – Trump accusing other people of corruption and lining their own pockets. Trump.

Mr Mulvaney also said that the president “did not like” the fact that European countries weren’t providing much military aid to Ukraine.

“Those were the driving factors,” he said. “Did he also mention to me in past the corruption related to the DNC [Democratic National Convention] server? Absolutely. No question about that.

“But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money.”

Ok then, thanks for being so candid.

When reporters put to him that he had described a “quid pro quo”, Mr Mulvaney replied: “We do that all the time with foreign policy,

“There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy. That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. And foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration,” he said.

He also said that the move had been made in connection with “an ongoing investigation by our Department of Justice”.

But a senior Justice Department official told CBS News: “If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation with any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us.”

A person familiar with the reaction inside the department said officials were “utterly confused” and “angry” at Mr Mulvaney for saying the aid was withheld in connection to an investigation, CBS reports.

Well they’re just a bunch of whiners.

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Not angels.

As many of you know, I spent some time in Turkey about 30 years ago. In total I was there for about a year, including a summer in Istanbul and about ten months in Ankara. While I was in Ankara, I also had the opportunity to travel around the country, and visited pretty much every region. I met a lot of wonderful people there and had a fantastic time, and have many cherished memories. Of course spending a year in the country three decades ago doesn’t give me any real insight into what is going on now, but the recent actions of the government have brought back some memories.

If you’re in Turkey, it’s hard to avoid Kurds, though you may not realize it. In Istanbul there was the shoeshine boy who wanted to clean my sneakers; impressed with his persistence, I finally agreed to him cleaning one of my shoes. In Ankara, I had several Kurdish students, though even admitting that was an act of trust on their part. One of them took me around one weekend to show off the apartment he had just bought (that was still under construction), and then brought me to the office of his uncle, a prosperous dentist in the center of the city. While we were there, his uncle took out some cassettes he had hidden away and played them for us. The music was fairly typical Turkish pop from the time, but the songs were in Kurdish, a language that was officially unrecognized and effectively prohibited. Again, this was an enormous amount of trust on their part.

In the summer we had about five weeks of vacation, so I took a long, slow tour around the country. Toward the tail end of the tour, I found myself in Diyarbakır, in the south, wandering around with some time to kill before my next bus. A kid of around 17 approached me offering to take me to a carpet shop. This was a fairly common occurrence in Turkey at the time, and with nothing better to do I agreed, though I made clear I wasn’t interested in buying anything. He took me to the shop, where the served me tea while a man roughly my age (mid-twenties at the time) launched into his spiel about how the carpets were woven while another man in his thirties or forties looked on. Eventually the older man left, and the tone of the younger man changed. He abandoned the spiel, explained that the older man was his math teacher and a Turk, and then explained that he was a Kurd, and denounced Turkey as a fascist state. Yet another act of trust.

I don’t have any grand conclusions to draw from these relatively random encounters, but I’m sickened by what the Turkish government is doing now in Syria, and by our role in it, and I want to believe that the people I knew thirty years ago would be sickened too.

From Gordon Sondland’s prepared statement to the impeachment inquiry:

On May 23, 2019, three days after the Zelensky inauguration, we in the U.S. delegation debriefed President Trump and key aides at the White House. We emphasized the strategic importance of Ukraine and the strengthening relationship with President Zelensky, a reformer who received a strong mandate from the Ukrainian people to fight corruption and pursue greater economic prosperity. We asked the White House to arrange a working phone call from President Trump and a working Oval Office visit. However, President Trump was skeptical that Ukraine was serious about reforms and anti-corruption, and he directed those of us present at the meeting to talk to Mr. Giuliani, his personal attorney, about his concerns. It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the President’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani. It is my understanding that Energy Secretary Perry and Special Envoy Volker took the lead on reaching out to Mr. Giuliani, as the President had directed.

And that right there is stark raving mad. Why should they talk to Trump’s personal anything about a foreign policy matter? What business does Trump have “directing” them to do so? None in both cases.

Indeed, Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker, and I were disappointed by our May 23, 2019 White House debriefing. We strongly believed that a call and White House meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky was important and that these should be scheduled promptly and without any pre-conditions. We were also disappointed by the President’s direction that we involve Mr. Giuliani. Our view was that the men and women of the State Department, not the President’s personal lawyer, should take responsibility for all aspects of U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine.

Which is not so much a “view” as just obvious reality. How should an administration deal with other countries? By going out and collecting some random people to do the work, or by continuing to rely on the people trained and qualified and security-cleared to do the work? The president’s personal lawyer should no more take over that work than the president’s dentist should.

Sondland and Volker and Perry decided obeying the order to rope in Rudy was preferable to ditching the meeting, so they went ahead.

But I did not understand, until much later, that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign.

It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect…from a normal president.

Trump’s hair will be on fire all day today.

I feel somewhat shattered at the loss of Elijah Cummings. Dan Rodricks in his hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun:

“We are better than this.”

Elijah Cummings said that over and over again, urging his fellow Americans and his fellow Baltimoreans to believe it — and to be it.

The U.S. congressman from Maryland, who died early Thursday morning at 68, was a long-time warrior for justice, truly a great man. He spoke truth to power even as a member of the power class. And the Democrat was not above pleading, with rival Republicans or constituents, for what he knew was right.

He chose politics and public life because he wanted a better country, a better city. Immersed in the complex problems of both, he kept his eyes on the prize all through his career. As a member of Congress, with oversight of government operations at a range of levels, Cummings was in the role of examiner, and what he examined was usually bad — from incompetence by bureaucrats to price gouging by corporations to the abuses of power of the executive branch. And so his words were often aspirational, uttered while mired in mud, yet pointing us toward a mountaintop.

He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he did not want.

He did not want the children of migrants separated from their parents at the border. “We are better than this,” he said.

He wanted the president to be civil, courageous, kind and honest. He wanted the president to abide by the Constitution.

“We are better than this. We really are,” Cummings said in February, after Michael Cohen described his sordid undertakings as the president’s one-time lawyer. “As a country, we are so much better than this.”

But wait, there’s more! James Kirkup introduces us to Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke of Cheshire Police.

DCC Cooke has rather a big job in Cheshire, where there were more than 30,000 violent crimes in the year to August 2019 and the monthly rate of violent crime is up by more than 50 per cent in the last year. 

Fortunately, however,  DCC Cooke has still managed to find time to make a video marking International Pronouns Day.

Marking what??!

No, I know what; I had heard of it; it’s just that it’s so idiotic, and so idiotic-squared that anyone is paying attention to it, let alone making police videos about it.

If you’re not familiar with that occasion, the DCC is here to explain that pronouns are very important and we should always take care to use the pronouns – he/she/they/ze/whatever – that other people want us to use for them. This is especially important to “people who identify as transgender and gender non-conforming,”  DCC Cooke says.

That it, it’s especially important to people delusional enough to think they can change sex and narcissistic enough to think they can force the entire world to pretend their delusion is true. A somewhat niche market, I’d have thought.

The DCC tweets:

Today marks #pronounsday – seeking to make sharing, educating and respecting personal pronouns commonplace. @pronounsday

How is this any of the police’s business?

“It is so important to understand the pronouns that somebody wishes to be used for them,” the uniformed DCC tells us in her video, filmed in front of a Cheshire Constabulary background – just in case we were in any doubt about whether this is an official police communication.

“Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing. It also can be used as a form of abuse for them, and that just isn’t right,” DCC Cooke says.

But, again, what does this have to do with the police? Why are the police trying to micromanage people’s language in such fine detail that they’re issuing instructions on what pronouns to use? None of it makes any sense.

More pathetic Qusilings who don’t even know they’re Quislings.

Women’s Book History:

Good morning! Just a reminder that our page celebrates things related to book history for all of the following:

– cis women
– trans women
– cis men
– trans men
– nonbinary folks

and everyone else in between! We usually post about women, but that’s because that’s our jam. We do, and always have, included trans women in our category of “women’s book history” and this stance is not up for debate. If this bothers you, we encourage you to keep scrolling. Anyone who posts harassing messages about trans women will have those comments deleted and then they will be banned from the page.