I can’t understand this at all. It seems as batshit crazy as trans ideology.

Supreme Court justices in Trump case lean toward some level of immunity

But Trump is the living breathing knockdown argument for why immunity is a really really bad idea.

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices signaled sympathy on Thursday to the argument that presidents have some immunity against criminal charges for certain actions taken in office as it heard arguments over Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for trying to undo his 2020 election loss.

He claims immunity for trying to steal the election. It’s an absurdity.

D. John Sauer, the lawyer arguing for Trump, painted a dire picture of the presidency without immunity.

“Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it. For 234 years of American history, no president was ever prosecuted for his official acts,” Sauer told the justices.

Trying to steal an election is not an official act.

Where would they be without the silly platitudes and the deceptive wording? At a complete loss, that’s where.

Scottish Greens shout

We must ensure that young people are supported and that their lived experience is at the heart of trans healthcare, says the Scottish Greens health spokesperson, Gillian Mackay MSP.

Why? Why must we or they or anyone make sure that anyone’s “lived experience” is at the heart of her/his/their healthcare? Healthcare isn’t a “lifestyle” choice, it’s a technology to prevent and cure illness and injury.

In a question to the Minister for Public Health, Jenni Minto, Ms Mackay said: “Many young people will be concerned about the effect of last week’s decision to pause the prescription of hormones on their healthcare journey, and our solidarity should be with them. We need to work as quickly as possible to ensure that the concerns of the clinicians are resolved so that they can provide this care with confidence.”

Slow the fuck down, Ms Mackay. What do you mean by “their healthcare journey”? It’s not healthcare to try to change people’s sex, it’s harmful quackery. You don’t need to work quickly to shove the clinicians into continuing to help young people ruin their own bodies. The “concerns of the clinicians” are a reason to stop doing that, not to find ways to keep on doing it.

“Scottish Trans have suggested that we should consider setting up our own research study. Can the Minister outline what steps the Government is taking to resolve the current situation, and how we can ensure that lived experience is at the heart of any action going forward?”

Can the Minister help us figure out how to continue to ruin young people’s lives in defiance of medical knowledge?

Ms Mackay added: “The last few weeks have been really hard for a lot of LGBTQ+ people, and trans people in particular. They are seeing their rights being treated like a political football.”

No they’re not. There’s no such thing as a “right” to force medical professionals to pretend to change one’s sex just as there’s no such thing as a right to force medical professionals to pretend to change one’s species. Medical professionals can’t perform the impossible and there is no “right” to force them to pretend or try.

Ok here’s “Olly” of “Pop n Olly” –

I don’t like it – the minute plus 8 seconds I managed to watch – but then I’m primed not to like it. But then I’m primed not to like it for reasons, and some of the reasons are right there. He’s too fucking perky. I didn’t like excess perky when I was five, let alone older than that.

But more to the point, there’s a creepy mismatch between the perky bubbly twinkly presentation, meant for toddlers who don’t know many words yet, and the subject matter. If you’re going to do a tv series explaining “gender” and “identity” and “romantic love” and “sexual orientation” and “privilege” and “discrimination” and more to children then you need a much less dorky, cutesie, bubbly-twinkly persona to do it with. Olly seems to be talking to three-year-olds, and does it really make sense to teach three-year-olds about “identity” and “privilege” and “discrimination”?

No, it doesn’t, so why are they doing it? I suppose it’s the usual depressing reason. Get them young, teach them the doctrines, close the door behind them. Grooming, in short – grooming at least for “trans activism” and sharing the dogma of Our Lord Jesus Transalpine.

Somehow con schools into using your cringy manic way too friendly videos to indoctrinate children into the Mandated Beliefs, and make money doing it.

Send the asteroid.

Without the verbal tricks and cheats and concealments it would crash and burn in seconds.

Like that. In the first tweet it’s “sex” but in the second one it’s “legal sex” – meaning, of course, fake sex, pretend sex, not sex, unreal sex. But the switch is not mentioned, it just happens, as if inevitably. It’s smoke and mirrors, aka lies, and it shows what a cheat the whole thing is.

There again. Of course trans people have human rights, and nobody says they don’t. The issue is that there is no such thing as a right to force everyone to agree you are the sex you are not. Trans people have the human rights that humans have; they don’t have special luxury rights that cancel other people’s genuine human rights.

But who decides what is forwards and what is backwards?

Finn Mackay thinks Finn Mackay does, but I dispute Mackay’s map.

In school. In SCHOOL.

IN SCHOOL.

A whistle blower steps up:

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor. 

Jamie Reed worked for several years at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teenagers and young adults who were HIV positive.

Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 

Makes it a bit tricky to label her a “transphobe” I should think.

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 

Does off the charts social contagion count as abundant evidence? As it turns out, no.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

So she is blowing the whistle.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t). 

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

Ok hang on. How could they know that? How could they possibly tell? When the putative condition itself is entirely in the mind? There are no physical symptoms of being trans, so how can doctors possibly be confident that thinking you are the other sex is not social and mental rather than physical?

Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 

Well the center didn’t specify reliable studies, it just said “the studies we have.” So that’s ok then!

Reed and a colleague had concerns about a boy who didn’t really grasp what the off-label medication was going to do to him.

Bicalutamide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, and one of its side effects is that it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts. The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminizing agent for boys. As with most cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects, and this patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.

They should have sued.

Read on.

Oppositional defiance disorder:

Prosecutor Chris Conroy captured the quintessential Donald Trump in a single sentence at the ex-president’s hush money trial on Tuesday.

“He knows what he’s not allowed to do, and he does it anyway.”

Conroy was referring to Trump’s incessant testing of a gag order protecting witnesses, court staff and the jury. But there’s rarely been a better description of the presumptive GOP nominee’s entire approach to business and politics – or the way he’s promised to behave if voters send him back to the White House.

Business, politics, and everything else. He considers himself special, and entitled to defy whatever he feels like defying. Nobody gets to disobey him, but he gets to disobey everyone.

Only six days into the trial, Trump is doing what he always does, pushing the rules and conventions of the law and accepted behavior to service his own narrative of victimization he’s placed at the core of his 2024 campaign.

It gives his life meaning.

CNN’s John Miller reported Tuesday that the Secret Service, court officers and the New York City Department of Corrections have quietly consulted on what to do if Trump ends up being jailed for contempt of court. That remedy remains a distant one for now, but any eventual step in that direction cannot be ruled out since no judge can allow a defendant to mock his authority in what is in essence a show of contempt for the rule of law.

And for everyone else – everyone who isn’t Trump. We peasants have to obey the rules; Trump alone is entitled to defy them.

It’s almost inconceivable that any other criminal defendant would get away with lacerating the judge and his court in the way that Trump has done on his Truth Social network, in interviews and in his remarks to cameras outside the court.

Which raises the annoying possibility that he’s enjoying being in the dock.

One lawyer’s view:

Trump is busy testing them even as we speak.

Now there’s a trial within the trial. The trial has been paused while the judge and the lawyers discuss what to do about Trump’s nonstop violations of the gag order.

Trump was warned he could face sanctions if he violated the order, “and here we are”, the prosecutor says.

They are now going over each of the social media posts where Trump allegedly broke the order, including one he reposted from Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’ former lawyer, who is now serving time in prison for extortion, tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement.

…

Some of the most striking moments so far have occurred when prosecutors have recited Trump’s own words back at him as he sits here in court.

Just now, lawyer Christopher Conroy recited the remarks Trump made outside the courtroom yesterday about Michael Cohen.

Trump is playing an extended game of fuck around and find out.

“He knows about the order, he knows what he’s not allowed to do, but he does it anyway,” prosecutor Christopher Conroy tells the court. Conroy argues the proximity of the posts to the events of trial, and the subjects discussed in them, make it clear what they are about. Conroy says he can’t see any “straight-faced argument” that these posts don’t relate to the trial. He also alleges the disregard for the order is “intentional”.

And a reminder for our readers, the burden of proof is on the District Attorney’s office to prove that Trump wilfully flaunted [flouted] the gag order covering the trial. That’s what Conroy is trying to prove right now.

I suppose one could make an argument that Trump is genuinely too stupid and too self-enclosed to understand that the gag order is real and applies to him and can be enforced. One could probably make an argument that he genuinely believes that he alone is allowed to ignore things like gag orders.

Trump’s defence lawyer, Todd Blanche is now arguing his case to the judge. He claims Trump is fully aware of the gag order, and did not violate it because he was not attacking witnesses in relation to the trial specifically, just in general.

Blanche adds that Trump was simply responding to attacks from the witnesses, including Cohen. “He’s allowed to respond to political attacks, your honour,” Blanche says.

Hmm. Nah. Not convincing. I’d go with “He’s too stupid to get it, your honour.”

Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s lawyers, is becoming increasingly aggravated [irritated].

His argument with Justice Merchan over Trump’s social media activity continues. At one point, Merchan asks him if he is claiming that when Trump made the social media posts in question, the former president did not believe he was violating the gag order. Blanche stands before the judge in silence for several seconds before moving onto something else.

Say yes! Say that’s exactly it: he did not believe it, because that really is how stupid he is.

Not that it would work, but it would be fun to see.

A tiny flicker of hope?

The Labour shadow justice secretary has said she agrees with JK Rowling that “biological sex is real and is immutable”. Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary, expressed support for women who express gender critical views, saying that they should not be “stigmatised” for saying them.

The Labour shadow justice secretary – not the Eating People’s Faces shadow justice secretary.

It comes after Wes Streeting earlier this month admitted that he had been wrong to say that “trans women are women” in the wake of the Cass review into NHS gender care.

If trans women are women then what does the “trans” in “trans women” mean? It’s double dipping, that’s what it is. They don’t get to be women twice. They have to pick one. Trans women or women; not both.

Ms Mahmood added: “I think that actually in this era of social media, that’s been a real challenge for people to hold onto what we would consider are normal legal norms. 

“That which is allowed within the law you shouldn’t be stigmatised for, or prevented from saying, and you certainly shouldn’t feel that you might lose your job for holding perfectly legal views.”

Legal and accurate and obvious.

The public humiliation of Trump got under way this morning. It may be the only consolation we ever get.

The prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, presented to the jury that Trump’s “catch-and-kill” scheme with the National Enquirer was entirely geared towards helping the Trump 2016 campaign.

Colangelo contended there were three parts to the alleged conspiracy: that the National Enquirer would run positive coverage, the National Enquirer would attack political opponents and that the National Enquirer would act as the eyes and ears for the campaign to detect and suppress negative stories.

Journalism at its finest.

During much of Colangelo’s opening statement, Trump appeared uncomfortable in his seat with his brow furrowed while the unsavory details of the alleged affair with Daniels and his boasts about grabbing women’s genitals in the infamous Access Hollywood tape were read out to the jury.

“With his brow furrowed” is a nice way of putting it. A more realistic way would be “scowling like a child.” He always scowls like a child, and very stupid it makes him look.

But part of the Access Hollywood tape that was read out verbatim – when Trump remarked he could grab women “by the pussy” – caused Trump to frown deeper and fidget in his seat.

Well, I hope he’s suffering agonies of embarrassment and shame. It’s long overdue.

The Daily Mail three days ago:

A transgender runner who outraged many by entering last year’s London Marathon as a woman has revealed she won’t list herself in the female category when she runs the race again on Sunday. 

Glenique Frank, 55, sparked controversy last year after she competed in the female category of the colossal race in the English capital last April, with Olympian Mara Yamauchi claiming it was ‘wrong and unfair’. 

“Glenique.”

[T]he charity runner from Daventry is again preparing to take on the gruelling 26.2-mile race on April 21, albeit in a different category than last year. 

She is expected to compete as a non-binary athlete instead, a category that was introduced by marathon organisers last year, making this the second race in which it has been offered as an option for runners. 

Although Frank does not believe she is non-binary and would have preferred to have entered into the women’s category again, she is keen to ‘keep the peace’ and not ’cause trouble’. 

Frank is right that he’s not “non-binary” – because no one is and it doesn’t mean anything. On the other hand he has zero right to “enter the women’s category again” and he’s a bad person for thinking he should be able to and for bragging about “keeping the peace” and “not causing trouble.”

Mara Yamauchi asks a question:

Maximum self-determination at last:

The German Parliament, or Bundestag, passed one of the world’s most far-reaching sex self-determination policies on April 12, despite protests from women’s rights campaigners. The Self-Determination Act (SBGG) establishes ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth.

Entschuldigen sie Deutschland but that’s not self-determination. That’s the opposite of self-determination. Parents changing the sex marker on a newborn’s documents is parental determination, not self determination. Verstehen sie?

No, actually, it’s just that Genevieve Gluck Reduxx worded it confusingly. What she meant was that the law lets parents change their children’s sex marker retroactively, starting at age 5.

But arguably the most troubling aspect of the law relates to a portion of the bill which permits parents to alter the recorded sex of children [ ] beginning from birth. From the age of five years old, it allows for name and sex changes if there is “mutual consent” between the child and their parents.

The word “retroactively” is so useful for this kind of thing. Insert it between “children” and “beginning” in that first sentence and we know where we are.

Where we are is a very stupid place, where parents of children age 5 can alter their children’s records to say the children are and always have been the sex they are not.

If parents choose to do so, they may alter the identifying information of their children from birth. The SBGG stipulates that the consent of a child is necessary from the age of five, and, “from the age of 14, minors can do it themselves, but require the consent of their guardians.”

However, should parents refuse to provide legal permission, “a family court would decide based on the best interests of the child,” thus allowing the state to overrule the wishes of parents or legal guardians.

Never mind that, the dudes are happy.

During the hearing on the SBGG, two trans-identified male politicians were present to advocate for and support the bill’s passage.

Tessa Ganserer and Nyke Slawik were elected to Germany’s Bundestag in September 2021 as representatives for the Green Party, taking positions that were reserved for female political representation.

They’re male and they occupy positions that were reserved for women.

There’s a situation at Columbia:

Columbia University is facing a full-blown crisis heading into Passover as a rabbi linked to the Ivy League school urged Jewish students to stay home and tense confrontations on campus sparked condemnation from the White House and New York officials.

The atmosphere is so charged that Columbia officials announced students can attend classes and even possibly take exams virtually starting Monday – the first day of Passover, a major Jewish holiday set to begin in the evening.

Tensions at Columbia, and many universities, have been high ever since the October 7 terror attack on Israel by Hamas. However, the situation at Columbia escalated in recent days after university officials testified before Congress last week about antisemitism on campus and pro-Palestinian protests on and near campus surged.

The latest crisis has opened Columbia President Minouche Shafik up to new attacks from her critics, with Republican US Rep. Elise Stefanik demanding she step down immediately because school leadership has “clearly lost control of its campus.”

Shafik was president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023 and is a member of the House of Lords. She’s originally from Egypt; I can’t tell from the headlines whether she’s Muslim or ex-Muslim or secular or for that matter Jewish. It shouldn’t matter, of course, but on this subject, also of course, it does.

At any rate, anti-Semitic bullying and worse is an issue at Columbia right now.

“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN on Sunday. The statement did not include examples of those incidents.

President Joe Biden similarly said Sunday, “Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.”

In response, organizers of the protest — Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine — said in a statement, “We have been peaceful,” and distanced themselves from non-student protestors who have gathered outside the campus, calling them “inflammatory individuals who do not represent us.”

And yet they choose to turn up outside the campus. Why might that be do you suppose?

In a statement, New York Mayor Eric Adams said the city’s police department has an “increased presence of officers” in the area around Columbia’s campus “to protect students and all New Yorkers on nearby public streets.”

The Democratic mayor said he was “horrified and disgusted with the antisemitism being spewed at and around the Columbia University campus.”

…

The rabbi sent the message [quoted in the lede] after videos circulated showing a man outside the university saying, “Never forget the seventh of October,” and “that will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times!”

A video taken on the university’s campus Saturday night also shows a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanting, “Fuck Israel. Israel is a bitch,” while waving the Palestinian flag.

Over and over they said it. I watched the clip. Isn’t it fascinating the way the worst most degrading insult is “woman” and the worst threat is rape? Isn’t it fascinating the way fights among men deploy hatred of women as a weapon?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on There’s no shame, no apology.

I have a sickening feeling that one reason the medical interference has been seen as okie doke is because so many people were doing it at the same time. There’s a “community” being built, and when there’s a “community,” well at least you won’t be lonely with your ruined body, you’ll be able to find other people in the same boat. Once that stops being the case, the interference stops looking quite so progressive. What does this mean? That much of the fervid proselytizing for medical interference has been recruitment – so that people who have already trashed their bodies will have a pool of potential fellow-miserables. A circle of horror.

That’s the flawed premise at the heart of the Cass review: you can’t really tell how well gender medicine “works” if you don’t even try to address the mechanism through which it supposedly operates. It’s not enough to just look at mental health outcomes over the short and medium term. (And the Cass report wasn’t even able to do that, because the culprit clinicians banded together to withhold the follow-up data, which is where we’d expect to find the really incriminating evidence.) There’s no clear hypothesis to test!

I know that the subject of FGM is very sensitive to some because it’s so awful. But there’s an apt comparison here. The practice is, per UNICEF (via Wikipedia):

usually initiated and carried out by women, who see it as a source of honour, and who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion.

Is this not also a circle of horror? Compare that sentiment to this one about “gender medicine,” quoted in the Guardian, and cited here at B&W last week:

I would much rather my child was growing up in a way in which [she] wasn’t sticking out like a sore thumb and potentially going to end up dead.

With the benefit of an outside perspective we can see very clearly that there’s no direct medical necessity to remove parts of women & girls’ clitorises and labia, and that whatever supposed mental health benefits this practice confers to such victims — I will never call them “patients” or “subjects” or any other word besides victims, no matter how “medicalized” these atrocities are presented to be — it’s entirely dependent on the cultural/social landscape: the domain of social hierarchies and taboos and superstitions and rituals, and the foul effluvium of woman-hatred that enshrouds the senses of those within it.

Now, imagine there was a report that analyzed the efficacy of female genital mutilation strictly in terms of short-to-medium term self-reported mental health outcomes without ever addressing the question of why the practice had begun in the first place. Outrageous! To be clear, I’m not trying to say that the Cass report is outrageous — far from it; I think it’s a powerful and necessary report, which is already proving to be greatly beneficial to the struggle to put this scandal behind us. But it’s a sign of how outrageous our current social climate is, how mired in the bog we are, that such a report can’t be allowed to step all the way back to show us the true horror of the big picture.

No human female is born with an innate medical condition in which she is doomed to suffer unless otherwise healthy parts of her genitals are sliced off of her body. This is self-evident.

Likewise, no human of either sex is born with an innate medical condition in which they will suffer from such dire psychological distress they might die of suicide unless their otherwise healthy breasts and reproductive organs are removed, their puberty suppressed, a host of other cosmetic medical treatments are given, and all of society is compelled to band together and suppress all evidence of the sex of these poor innocents. Again, this is self-evident.

The gender mess is ultimately a battle on cultural grounds, and as much as systematic reviews of mental health outcomes are one piece of evidence we can use to put an end to it, they will never be the smoking gun, because the guilty party is the cultural climate that fosters mental distress in vulnerable people who don’t medicalize their bodies, and which (at least temporarily) showers those who do go under the scalpel with praise and social rewards.

The supposedly “positive” mental health outcomes of victims of gender medicine are as dubious and precarious as the supposedly “positive” outcomes of the victims of FGM: if the circle of horror ever stops, the fog that dulls the senses will lift and the pain will be acute.

Here’s a report about FGM in the Guardian from last month:

Reports have also emerged recently of resurgences in the central Kenya region of Murang’a, where women over 30 are opting to undergo the cut as a ‘return to culture’.

See again how clearly the Guardian is able to report on these “procedures” as a cultural phenomenon instead of medical treatment — and a tragic and terrible one — because Kenya is way over there.

If only they could see clearly enough to report that the resurgence of sex stereotypes, in large part due to the rise of social media, is why so many women — and men, too — are choosing to undergo their own version of “the cut” right here in the Guardian readership’s own backyard, in Europe and North America.

Originally a comment by Sastra on But I want to, he said.

@Sonderval #10:

Very insightful, and clearly expressed. This misapplied attitude of “look below the surface, it’s almost always more complicated than it appears to the simple-minded” is I think one of the main motivators for an atheist/skeptic/humanist embrace of gender ideology. It’s a sort of forced-teaming with the theory of evolution to go with the forced teaming with homosexuality and gay rights. The combination leads to a very comfortable, smug certainty that they can’t possibly be wrong. A science-oriented person ought to be just as wary of that.

YNNB #8 is undoubtedly correct about the different motivations. I’ll add in the natural human tendency to think small and personal. Say you have a friend or relative who is trans (or have emotionally bonded with a famous or fictional character you feel you know.) You see no harm in letting this particular person, Pat, be considered to be the gender they believe themselves to be. You even try very hard to see them as they see themselves.

Now — every single time you hear or read about problems with either the application of gender ideology or the claims of gender ideology itself, you plug in your Good Friend Pat. Should Pat be allowed to run? To use the restroom? To change a birth certificate? Forget the statistics, forget the specifics of a case or situation, forget the big picture or the women inconvenienced or worse. Answer as if it’s Pat, just Pat, and you’re accountable to Pat …harmless, friendly Pat who simply wants to be themselves. The side to be on will always be that which places you next to your friend. The pat answer is always Pat.

“I’ve seen far too many criticisms of it so far to be able to say that.”

Derp.

Of course he has: because he sought them out, and because his mates and allies are all firmly trapped in the ideology.

Originally a comment by Sonderval on But I want to, he said.

What do they see that I don’t see???

They “see” the same thing we all see. But they do know that if you are smart you look deeper than the obvious, and that looking only at the surface is what stupid and bigoted people do.

Smart people (having read Kant) know that “I think therefore I am” is not as convincing as it looks on first sight.

Smart people know that species, despite looking clearly distinct, actually evolve.

Smart people know that space and time are not what they seem.

Smart and non-bigoted people know that despite looking different, members of all races are just human.

So this allows one simple conclusion: reality is always deeper and more complicated than we think. Therefore if you are smart, you should never accept a simple thing at face value. The fact that trans women are usually obviously male just confirms how deep and well-reasoned believing trans ideology actually is. To prove this, you can point to people having DSD or at clownfish etc.

It is exactly the fact that it looks so absurd that makes it attractive to at least some intellectual people and this is probably also part of the reason why so many so-called sceptics fall for it: they have (correctly) become wary of things looking simple and of believing that things are what they look like and so they conclude (incorrectly) that things are never simple and that it is always wrong to believe it could be. So telling them “but this is obvious” only shows how shallow and bigoted you are.

In a sense it is extrapolating the lessons of science to a “credo quia absurdum”.

CBS is less dishonest than NBC, which is damning with faint praise indeed. They do manage not to say the assault was an assault, not an “altercation.”

A 13-year-old is facing charges after a student at one Montgomery County middle school was assaulted at lunch with what students describe as a Stanley cup. Upper Gwynedd Township police said the teen will be charged as a juvenile with aggravated assault and other charges.

Less deceptive, but still pretending nobody involved has a sex.

Superintendent Todd Bauer started the meeting with a statement about the attack, which took place at lunchtime Wednesday afternoon. He said a seventh-grade student was assaulted by another student in an alarming attack. As a result, that student was taken to the hospital with serious injuries, and the school was put on lockdown for eight minutes.

“That” student. Which “that” student? All this deception plays hell with reporters’ writing skills. More to the point, it matters that the victim is a girl and the perp is a boy. Physicality is relevant here.

The superintendent sent everyone a letter.

As a school district, we aspire to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for our students and staff. A student sustained serious injuries as a result of another student’s actions. I have been in contact with this student’s family and will continue to work with them throughout the recovery process. The family has requested and deserves privacy as the student recovers.

Which student is “this” student? Has the family requested “privacy” about which sex their child is? And about which sex the other student is?

Pathetic.