A rabid opponent of federal land management has been put in charge of…federal land management. Of course he has.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday signed an order making Wyoming native William Perry Pendley acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau’s holdings are sweeping, with nearly one out of every 10 acres nationally, and 30% of minerals, under its dominion, mostly across the U.S. West.

Pendley, a former midlevel Interior appointee in the Reagan administration, for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands. He has written books accusing federal authorities and environmental advocates of “tyranny” and “waging war on the West.” He argued in a 2016 National Review article that the “Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”

In other words he’s a fanatical “everything should be private property” crank, and he’s now acting head of the BLM. That’s cute. It’s kind of like making a Mafia boss head of the FBI, or a tobacco CEO head of the FDA.

In tweets this summer, Pendley welcomed Trump administration moves to open more federal land to mining and oil and gas development and other private business use, and he has called the oil and gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, “an energy, economic, AND environmental miracle!”

Conservation groups called the Pendley appointment an alarming choice, while Western ranchers called it a welcome move that shows the Trump administration is serious about opening public lands to all uses, including mining and ranching.

So that’s not really “all uses.” If you open public lands to mining and ranching then they’re no longer open to hiking and camping. If you open public lands to profit-making resource extraction then they’re no longer open to public enjoyment, and they’re also no longer open to the birds and reptiles and other animals that were living on them.

The Trump people have already moved BLM headquarters from DC to Colorado and spread employees all over the Western states, in what looks like a prelude to zeroing out the agency altogether.

An analysis of six new BLM proposed management plans by the Pew Charitable Trust, which calls itself a nonpartisan research center, for parts of six Western states found they significantly reduce protections that have been in place for decades and open up new land for mining and oil and gas. They include Alaskan lands known as nesting habitat for peregrine falcons and Montana rivers homes to the westslope cutthroat trout.

That’s ok, they can all just move to Canada.

A reminder to consider the likely impacts:

The “unregulated roll-out” of gender self-identification in Scotland has taken place with weak or non-existent scrutiny which could be putting women and girls at risk, according to new research.

University of Edinburgh academics Dr Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn argue that decision-making on sex and gender identity issues has been directed towards the interests of a specific group, “without due regard” for the wider population.

Published on Monday in the university’s journal Scottish Affairs, the study claims that policy makers have been over-influenced by those lobbying for the rights of trans people to the “detriment” of women and girls.

Why is that? Why has it been so quick and easy? I don’t suppose I’ll ever really understand it.

Within the last two years, proposals by the Scottish and UK Governments to reform the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) to allow people to change their legal sex based only on making a legally-registered self-declaration have sparked an intense debate on how sex and gender identity should be defined in law and policy.

Equalities Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville announced last month that the government’s plans for reforming the 2004 Act – which would make it easier for transgender people to get legal recognition of their “lived gender” – would be delayed and consultation reopened.

The report’s authors state: “It is clear that here, and elsewhere, public authorities have repeatedly failed to assess properly the impact on other groups who have specific protections under the Equality Act 2010, as the Act requires, and that little thought has been given to the possibility that such policies might be open to abuse by individuals with malign intent, irrespective of gender identity.

Which amounts to believing in magic, when you think about it. Normally public authorities are well aware of the existence of individuals with malign intent, but here somehow that awareness simply left the building. “Yes, darlings, any man who wants to can simply declare himself a woman and be legally recognized as such, because what could possibly go wrong?” It seems so obvious what could go wrong, and yet…

“On one analysis, the analysis simply reflects that women remain, as a class, less powerful than men.

“From another perspective, it is a story about policy capture that demonstrates how a small number of influential actors appear to have secured a monopoly on how sex and gender identity are understood within Scottish policy-making.”

And most of those influential actors are men, so the two analyses or perspectives are connected.

Originally a comment by latsot at Miscellany Room 3.

Have we done this one yet? So many of these things turn up in my labyrinthine feeds that I sometimes have trouble keeping track.

[Answer: no, we haven’t. I saw it last week and made a couple of attempts to read it but found it way too long for purpose as well as excruciatingly annoying so I turned my back on it.]

Anyway, as the URL suggests, the title is Dear Philosophers, You Can Trust the Feminist Consensus: Gender-Critical Radical Feminism is Bogus

It seems to be all over the place and since today I reached peak procrastination, I finally started to read it.

It’s written by a philosopher to philosophers. We know that because he inserts “dear philosophers” into every other paragraph. It’s also an excellent reason to ask “what is it with all these philosophers” and a house-bankrupting fallacy bingo card.

I won’t go into the fallacies here in any detail, they are far too tedious. But I feel compelled to convey the general dishonesty and I will paste the guy’s mission in writing the article. What’s that lesson we’re all supposed to learn about hubris, again?

First he has a droning preamble about how people might think gender critical people have a point and that we should be able to discuss this stuff in an adult fashion, all the time clumsily telling any of us foolish enough to believe that that we’re naive and wrong. He says he, too, once thought as common swine but lo he had an epiphany and now he’s superwoke. While he was reticent in the past about telling feminists how to feminism because he’s a man, now his post-epiphany status as a member of the wokinati means that he’s practically obliged to do it. He’s doing those misguided women a service, after all.

Then he picks three points we’ve all been talking about (it really doesn’t matter which ones) and says:

I’m going to try to show not just that these are wrong, but that they are baseless, rooted in some combination of conceptual confusion and factual error, and hold together as an ideology only because of the organising power of anxiety, confusion, or hostility to trans people.

Oh rilly? Anyone else here get the feeling that he’s going to completely misrepresent arguments and just say they’re wrong, possibly throwing out a few fallacy bombs in his shambling wake like a fugitive dropping scent bombs to confuse pursuing dogs?

Well spotted, but it’s hardly like we need a spidey-sense at this stage, is it?

Part 1: Do Trans People Reinforce Gender Stereotypes? (No)

Well, if the answer’s no, there’s no need to read further, obviously. But if you did you’d see that he picks an illustration of a point (gleefully from the gendercritical subreddit and claiming that means he – superwoke as is he – is incapable of bias)…. and then of course completely misrepresents it and staples strawmen (transstrawmen?) all over it.

He misrepresents the point of the image and then uses baited language to misrepresent the point of this part of the debate because he wouldn’t be sufficiently insufferable otherwise. The image is this one:

The idea that people transition in order to better fit gender stereotypes is, as best I can tell, just false.

And with that brilliant stroke of logic, that whole argument is bogus now and for all time and we shouldn’t even talk about it. Even though he is talking about it. Shut up, he’s superwoke and allowed and you are neither.

In case you’re worried about spoilers, don’t. He has pages and pages to say on the matter. I’m not an expert on fallacies, really, but he’s setting the bastards off like fireworks. He finishes – I can barely type this – with an appeal to his “dear philosophers” to use the tools of philosophy when discussing this issue, which – he insists – they are not allowed to do because he says so, citing “reasons”.

Part 2: Are People Being Pressured to Transition? (No)

He quotes a comedian (Robert Webb) saying that he was gender non-conforming as a child and that it would be wrong to tell children that because they were non-conforming they must be trans.

Philosopher-dude leaps on this using what seems to be his favourite word: “all”. He turns every argument everyone has ever made into absurdity by quoting a fairly reasonable and innocuous statement like that then saying “well, it’s just not true that all children are being told that!!!!!”

Nobody – not even Robert Webb – ever said anything of the sort. People – including Robert Webb – have said that it might be a bad idea and that’s pretty much it.

Part 3: Does Admitting Trans Women Make Women’s Spaces Less Safe? (No)

He understands the issue here, no doubt about it. He makes it very clear that he knows what the gender critical argument is. But…

Well first he says that “the most respectable” gender critical philosophers aren’t claiming that – his favourite word again – “all” trans women are predators, implying that anyone at all is saying they are.

And there are plenty of people out there making that crude and obviously transphobic argument!

Citation? Nope. He invents some scenarios about how sex segregation might work in bathrooms without ever seeming to understand that…. this already happens. It happens all the time. It has happened throughout all living memory without much difficulty. And to compound matters, he also invents a scenario in which women demand to see people’s ID before they are allowed to use the facilities and if the accused non-women refuse, they are assaulted by their accusers.

This is so transparently bullshit that it looks like satire, which is the very signature of this fallacious crap.

I’m too exhausted to talk about the conclusions and there are dozens of delicious fallacies you can hunt out for yourselves.

This is the standard of argument we get and everyone still rolls over. As Josh said recently, the trans movement has done zero work for this. The LGB and feminist movements did all that work and that’s where we live now. Arse.

Oh good grief. I thought I was going to leave the subject for today but then I saw this piece at Inside Higher Ed, fatuously titled Taking Trans Lives Seriously. Because what, there are all these people making a big joke of trans lives? Are we supposed to take trans lives more seriously than any other kinds of lives? (Of course; stupid question.)

It is not permissible to debate in some academic parlor game the lives of people who are oppressed and murdered, writes Mark Lance.

“Some academic parlor game” says a professor of philosophy at Georgetown. Anyway people aren’t “debating the lives” of trans people in the way he wants us to think: debating whether they deserve to live or not. That’s a cheap, manipulative move which ought to be beneath a philosopher.

In 1702, the New England Puritan Cotton Mather produced a theological/philosophical reflection on the nature of the American continent and its inhabitants. He asserted that the heathen savages that Europeans had met here were probably put here by the devil, likely lacked souls, were more akin to beasts than humans and absolutely must be at least converted, and if not, removed (i.e. killed).

Oh, good opening – he’s going to say that’s what gender critical philosophers are doing, i.e. saying trans people should be killed. Nothing hyperbolic or unfair about that.

[A]t the dawn of the 18th century, as a mass influx of Europeans are launching one of the largest campaigns of ethnic cleansing and genocide in human history, these remarks are violence. They are an endorsement of genocide and played a very real role in facilitating it.

Recently, a small but highly visible group of scholars has taken to arguing against the growing acceptance of the gender self-identifications of trans people — insisting that trans women are really men, trans men really women, trans lesbians really heterosexual men and so forth — and often explicitly presenting these arguments as support for legal efforts to restrict trans folks’ access to public spaces.

Sure enough, that’s what he’s saying. Gender critical feminists are like Cotton Mather, and are endorsing and playing a role in facilitating genocide against trans people. Don’t be shy, professor. He’s not a trendy young woke philosopher, either, but a grown adult. Also, that bullshit about “support for legal efforts to restrict trans folks’* access to public spaces” – that sounds as if gc feminists want a blanket rule expelling trans people in general from public spaces in general. That’s incredibly dishonest. The issue is whether women are required to “include” trans women in all spaces reserved for women, and women do have a right to have opinions on that without being accused of facilitating genocide or advocating apartheid.

*”folks” yet again – it’s always “folks” – it’s a tell.

I do not suggest that the current situation around TE“RF” philosophers is as grim as the genocide of Native Americans.

He says, having just done exactly that.

Obviously, there are differences of quantity, and some of content, between what happened to Native Americans in the 1700s and what’s occurring in academe today.

What?? There are some differences of content? But it’s still pretty close to what happened to Native Americans in the 18th century? That’s just deranged (and defamatory).

But when trans folks are systematically reviled, mocked and disempowered; when they are disproportionately harassed by police, arrested and brutalized — both on the street and in custody — and when there are active campaigns or existing laws in many countries to deny them basic human rights, one cannot merely have a polite discussion about the nature of gender and sex. To produce arguments, in this context — that trans women are not women, or trans lesbians are not lesbians — is not just a view we can easily reject as confused and offensive. It is complicity with systemic violence and active encouragement of oppression.

So we have to just shut up, and wax J Yaniv’s balls, and nod approvingly when Morgane Oger gets funding taken away from Vancouver Rape Relief, and applaud when boys win girls’ races. Yes sir yes sir, anything you say sir, it’s not your rights being taken away but you’re the boss so yes sir, yes sir.

And to write pompous open letters about efforts to combat such complicity without mentioning any of the relevant context, to write as if this is simply an abstract question of academic freedom, to pretend that the cisgendered deniers of trans rights are the real victims because others criticize them is not nearly far enough from our hypothetical reaction to Cotton Mather.

But we’re not “deniers of trans rights.” We don’t want to take any rights away from trans people. We also don’t want trans people to take away our rights, and the reality is that a few trans women have made some major dents in our rights.

It is difficult for me to see how highly educated, highly intelligent people can fail to see these obvious points. Perhaps they do, or perhaps something more complicated or more sinister is going on. I don’t know, or really care, what is behind it. But everyone who cares about the current victims of social and institutional bigotry needs to denounce it.

It is not permissible to debate the lives of people who are oppressed and murdered. Those who treat this like an intellectual game should not be engaged with. They should be told to [unprintable here] — just as I hope we would respond to Cotton Mather. Every time.

I find that breathtaking.

Chase Strangio is a staffer at the ACLU:

Chase Strangio is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project and a nationally recognized expert on transgender rights.

Strangio is also a trans man.

Strangio makes a melodramatic claim:

We die because we are told we can’t live. We die because people oppose the premise of our existence. We die because you want us to. Call me dramatic. Mock me. Threaten me but I am going to fight for my people to live. NO matter what you do.

Obligingly, I did call that claim melodramatic. That’s because it is. Trans people don’t flop over and die because people tell them things, and they are not told they “can’t live.” This is just a variation on the “you’re denying our existence” nonsense that we hear constantly, and it’s just as fatuous. Saying people can’t magically turn themselves into something they’re not by saying some words is not saying the people who attempt it don’t exist. Being wrong about oneself is not the same thing as not existing, or for that matter as sudden death.

Nobody “opposes the premise of their existence.” That’s more word-magic. What I for one oppose is not their private ideas about themselves but their bullying efforts to force everyone else to agree with them. That’s it. That’s all it is. We just are not obliged to endorse other people’s fantasies. We’re not obliged to, and being bullied for refusing is itself an injustice.

Chase Strangio of course is all for the “right” of boys to identify as girls and then compete against girls in sport and snap up all the prizes. What about those girls? What about the premise of their existence? Why is Strangio so indifferent to them?

More demands for more more more gender reform:

More than 100 LGBT organisations and celebrities are urging the government to reform UK gender identity laws, the BBC has learned.

But what if “gender identity” doesn’t actually mean anything?

But, in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, LGBT groups said the UK was “lagging behind” other countries “in terms of legal equality for trans and non-binary people”.

Is it? How? In what way do trans and non-binary people not have legal equality? What does “legal equality” in that sentence mean?

Ashleigh Talbot, a transgender woman, says the current process to get legal recognition is too negative.

“It’s an extremely bureaucratic process,” said Ms Talbot.

…

Ms Talbot added that for any other community to be required to prove something to a panel in order to be granted full rights would be an “absolute outrage”.

But that’s nonsense. Talbot is using “full rights” to mean something it doesn’t mean. People don’t have “full rights” to get government recognition for whatever “identity” they choose – helicopter, grapefruit, shark, Vesuvius, the War of the Spanish Succession. Talbot already has the same “full rights” everyone else has.

She continued: “I know people who have had their application turned down because of a perceived fault with the evidence – they were so humiliated.

“The stress and the emotional toll that it takes on members of the community, simply to have legal recognition, is all extremely damaging.”

In other words Talbot deployed the usual emotional blackmail. Talbot talks like an abuser – “Give me what I want or I’ll burn the house down with us in it.”

The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) sets out the legal process by which a person can change their gender.

It was last updated in 2004, and was the first piece of legislation that officially recognised transgender people but, since then, the way people identify has come a long way.

That is, since then the list of demands and threats has ballooned grotesquely.

The BBC does allow one dissenting voice through.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play For Women – which campaigns for the sex-based rights of women and girls – said GRA reform would mean any male could change their birth certificate to say they were born female.

“Women have a lawful right to exclude males from female-only spaces when it’s necessary for privacy, safety and fairness,” she said.

It would make women’s existing legal rights “unworkable”, she added, and that advancing rights for one group “at the expense of another vulnerable group” is wrong.

But now let’s hear from the More Special Than That community.

Jamie Windust, an LGBT and non-binary activist who does not identify as a man or woman, says things need to change.

“Non-binary people like myself are not even given the option to change our gender identity through the GRA,” they said.

“This is not only invalidating, but having your own government not allow you to just exist is really painful.”

Except of course that the government is not “not allowing you to exist.” Windust is allowed to exist, and judging by the fact that the government quotes Them, Windust does in fact exist. It’s not “invalidating” for the government to reject an invented category for birth certificates.

Stupidest possible reaction to Karen’s tweet about a woman murdered by a “sex toy” which is to say a spiked wheel shoved up her vagina:

A woman has been killed.

But the take here is that “Kink shaming is bullshit.”

That’s Grade ‘A’ bullshit if you ask me. pic.twitter.com/yJUln3q1Jv

— Dr Karen Ingala Smith (@K_IngalaSmith) July 29, 2019

Strangling women is “breath play” and shoving spiked wheels up women’s vagina’s is “sensation play.”

What is wrong with people?

Open Labour is a group or organization or faction or ______ that aims to make the Labour Party more wonderful. Or something. What they stand for:

We represent Labour’s open Left: a practical, open-minded and tolerant type of democratic socialism. Our ideas and campaigns are based on a simple strategy: creating broad and diverse alliances behind policies which transform society.

We are realistic about public opinion, but we believe that Labour’s democratic left must seek to lead it. This will only happen if our party is vibrant and democratic – if it can include a wide variety of views and groups without intolerance or bigotry keeping members away.

So I guess the rest of Labour is impractical, closed-minded, and intolerant? And they don’t aim to create broad and diverse alliances behind policies which transform society?

I don’t know. It all seems quite vague to me, but I’d never heard of them before. I heard of them just now because they issued a statement on Twitter. It’s not on their website, just on Twitter – I don’t know if that makes it more official or less or if there is no difference.

Sadly, we need to clarify our position around transphobia. Our National Committee have decided unanimously to issue the below statement. pic.twitter.com/c4yAmBREnc

— Open Labour (@OpenLabour) July 29, 2019

The reason it caught my attention, along with the fastidiously prurient denunciation of “one of our committee members,” is the unmarked oddity of the first sentence.

At Open Labour we seek to stand in solidarity with LGBTQ+ people, and with trans people in particular in the struggle for respect and equal rights.

The unmarked oddity is “and with trans people in particular.” Why with trans people in particular? Seriously, why? That’s constantly implied and occasionally spelled out like that but it’s never (that I see) explained. Why are we endlessly told, implicitly or explicitly, that trans people are due particular, extra, emphatic, special solidarity?

If we understood that we would have a better grip on why it’s seen as acceptable and even admirable to single out women for threats and abuse if we fail in this duty to give particular solidarity. We would have a better grip on what they think they mean and why they think it, so then we might be able to make a dent in this idiotic claim.

Of course there is nothing at all in the statement itself that would help with that. It’s pathetic how this whole branch of activism relies on empty slogans endlessly repeated and just utterly fails to ground any of it in comprehensible reasons.

Great. Trump is replacing the Director of National Intelligence (Dan Coats) with a party hack.

President Donald Trump’s just-announced nominee to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence had already drawn national attention earlier this week, when he delivered an aggressive diatribe against former special counsel Robert Mueller.

…

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, called Ratcliffe’s questioning of Mueller “demagogic” and said the White House selected him for intelligence director because he “exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump.”

“It’s clear that Rep. Ratcliffe was selected because he exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump with his demagogic questioning of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” Schumer said in a press release Sunday. “If Senate Republicans elevate such a partisan player to a position that requires intelligence expertise and non-partisanship, it would be a big mistake.”

They’ll do it.

This is not a good argument.

Imagine for a moment how this allegation would read (and what the reaction would be) if the word "trans" was replaced with the name of any other minority group within our society: https://t.co/F2Dicb7zKC

— Stop Funding Hate (@StopFundingHate) July 28, 2019

It’s not a good argument because, first, any minority group? But that could be rapists, or psychopaths, or serial killers, or greedy landlords who don’t make repairs (hello Jared Kushner!), or members of the KKK. Being part of a minority group doesn’t automatically make people right about everything. And second because the trans lobby is in fact a special case, so swapping in for instance “feminist lobby pressure” wouldn’t do the work Stop Funding Hate wants it to do. The trans lobby does in fact apply fierce pressure to everyone it can reach to accept and echo and flatter the dogma about what it is to be trans.

I’ll quote again a bit from that Guardian piece that I quoted from yesterday:

Evans said that since his resignation he had become concerned that the debate around transitioning had been shut down by a vocal minority. “The mind that is free to think or ask difficult questions is treated as a real threat; TV producers and journalists continually report that while people are willing to speak in confidence to them about their reservations about treatment in these areas, they shy away from being named, for fear of being accused of being bigoted and transphobic and sometimes either disciplined or even sacked for speaking their mind.”

Emphasis added. We know that’s not a foolish or empty fear; we know it happens. We just saw it happen to another blog at Freethought Blogs earlier in the week. We saw it happen to the Vancouver Public Library, told it can’t be part of Pride because it allowed Meghan Murphy to give a talk in its building. We know it happens. The allegation is not a false one.

Guest post by Josh Slocum

Lesbians and gays had to ask, beg, plead, protest, and keep it all up for decades just to get:

• The right not to be fired for being gay
• The right not to be evicted for being gay
• The right to participate in the same tax incentive system that straight married people had

That’s all. That’s all we asked for. Nothing that took from, or imposed on, anyone else.

Trans comes along and is required to do exactly zero work. All they have to do is be a straight man in a wig and scream that they’re oppressed, and instantly laws are changed to make women’s space their legal property.

This is fucking obscene.