Aw, trouble in paradise.

Tracie Harris, Jen Peeples & Clare Wuellner got on YouTube to discuss the right-ward slide of the Atheist Community of Austin, and their experiences with the transphobic takeover of that organization.

You may have noticed that FtB hosts The Atheist Experience, the blog for the call-in show of the ACA. Although I’m sure the blog isn’t a major contributor to their popularity — it’s primarily driven by YouTube traffic — it does get a good number of comments each week.

We’re currently discussing dropping the blog from our network in our backchannel, because it has drifted into incompatibility with our mission statement, which I’ll remind you is:

Freethoughtblogs is an open platform for freethought writers. We are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism…

Mmhmm. They are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism, and if you drift into incompatibility with their mission statement you’re banished.

Our network of blogs is designed to encourage independent thinking and individual autonomy…

Their network of blogs is designed to encourage independent thinking and individual autonomy. and if you dispute the dogma on Trans Idenniny you need to gtfo.

The discussion went the way everyone knew it would.

I’ve emailed the president of ACA, the vice president, and the board, and have received no response. We’ve discussed the matter on the FtB backchannel, and the comments there so far have been unanimous: the ACA is now incompatible with the mission of Freethoughtblogs. Therefore, and regretfully, I have disabled comments on the AXP blog and demoted all of their administrators. Nothing is irreversible yet, but I can’t imagine what kind of defense they could put up that would reverse our decision.

The great and powerful Oz has spoken.

There are many things we will not tolerate on any of the blogs here: racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are all grounds for ejection from the network. The ACA is guilty of the last.

What about trans people expressing misogyny? Who wins in that conflict of non-tolerateds?

You know the answer. She was asking for it.

H/t Holms

At Inside Higher Ed today:

How should the discipline of philosophy respond to current discussions of sex and gender identity?

Recent conversations among academic philosophers have given traction to proposals to censure or silence colleagues who advocate certain positions in these discussions, such as skepticism about the concept of gender identity or opposition to replacing biological sex with gender identity in institutional policy making. Those who support such sanctioning have appealed to various considerations, among them the contention that these positions call into question the identities of trans people, thereby making our discipline less open and welcoming to all.

We, all scholars in philosophy at universities in Europe, North America and Australia, oppose such sanctioning. The proposed measures, such as censuring philosophers who defend these controversial positions or preventing those positions from being advanced at professional conferences and in scholarly journals, violate the fundamental academic commitment to free inquiry. Moreover, the consequent narrowing of discussion would set a dangerous precedent, threatening the ability of philosophers to engage with the issues of the day.

And trans ideology very much is one of the issues of the day, because it’s a new ideology and one that is ratcheting itself upward into ever more wild assertions, so we all need to be free to talk back and ask questions.

Accordingly:

• We affirm the right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse, and we welcome them enthusiastically as fellow participants in the profession of philosophy.

I have to say, that’s putting it more strongly than I would if I were a participant in the profession of philosophy. I would withhold the “enthusiastically” part. Here’s why: I think trans ideology, by its very nature (the ever-ratcheting extreme assertions), attracts narcissists and bullies. The more cultish and irrational it gets, the more attractive it is to narcs and bullies and the less attractive it is to reasonable people.

• We affirm the right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse, and we welcome them enthusiastically as fellow participants in the profession of philosophy.
• We reject calls for censuring or deplatforming any of our colleagues on the basis of their philosophical arguments about sex and gender identity, or their social and political advocacy for sex-based rights.
• We condemn the too frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric, including accusations of hatred or transphobia, directed at these philosophers in response to their arguments and advocacy.
• We urge that the philosophical discussion of sex, gender and related social and political issues be carried out in a collegial and mutually respectful manner, reflecting the full range of interests at stake and presuming the good faith of all parties.

Cordelia Fine is one of the signers.

Is it hypnosis? Terror? Room 101? Hostage taking?

The Vancouver Dyke March assures us it is “centering” trans people. Cool. Next up: anti-racism march to center white people. Poor People’s March to center billionaires. Union march to center scabs. Atheist march to center Westboro Baptists.

In a bid to stamp out trans-misogyny and transphobia, the Vancouver Dyke March is centring the voices of trans people at this year’s march, which takes place Aug. 3, in East Vancouver.

Actual dykes can just stfu, right?

Dannielle Livengood, secretary treasurer of the Dyke March said the group invited WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre to be grand marshals of the march, because it admires how the centre has evolved to include trans, non-binary and gender diverse people in its sexual assault support services.

Aw yeah, evolving is so admirable. Shall we all evolve to include Trump in our anti-Trump campaigns?

Last year, a group of about 30 people showed up to “antagonize” trans people, Livengood said.

“The biggest problem of having these TERFs, or Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists … is that their tactics are often very subtle,” she said.

“To the uninitiated observer (their signs) can be very innocent, often with things like ‘Stop lesbian erasure,’ or two Venus symbols, and these seem like really legitimate things that most people would overlook, but often are weaponized against, particularly, trans women.”

How shocking. So let’s by all means erase lesbians and ban double Venus symbols, for the sake of men who claim to be women. Let’s center men who claim to be women in everything, and most especially in dyke marches.

People who are anti-trans don’t see trans women as women, said Livengood, who hesitated to explain what the protestors might have meant with their slogans for fear of giving them another platform.

That is, for fear of revealing the fact that what the protesters meant with their slogans was simply to point out the truth: that men are not women, and that women need and have a right to organize as women.

“Unfortunately, these people see biological and genetic sex traits as immutable and unchangeable, so they see trans women as taking over women’s spaces, or erasing lesbians, however the Dyke March proudly asserts that trans women are women and everyone who identifies as trans has a valid identity.”

The Dyke March also proudly asserts that bears are peaches and hammers are the Mississippi and climate change is Fake News. Whee!

Last month the Australian Associated Press reported:

Trans, gender diverse and intersex Victorians will no longer need to have gender reassignment surgery in order to change the sex on their birth certificate, under proposed new laws.

The state Labor government will on Tuesday introduce a bill to parliament which, if passed, will allow applicants to self-nominate the sex listed on their birth registration as male, female or any other gender diverse or non-binary descriptor of their own choice.

I wonder how the “any other gender diverse or non-binary descriptor of their own choice” is evaluated. It’s their own choice but it has to be gender diverse or non-binary – so is there a master list of approved terms somewhere? Or can they just say it’s gender diverse or non-binary and that will be good enough?

Simona Castricum is happy but cautious:

As a transgender Victorian, our community have been here before: in 2016 a bill to reform legislation around gender identity on birth certificates was introduced by Labor but denied by the Liberal National Coalition.

“As a transgender Victorian, our community have been here before” – I do wish people would pick one subject (as opposed to object) and stick to it. That part of the sentence should read “As part of the Victorian transgender community, I have been here before” or “We in the Victorian transgender community have been here before” or some other similar variation, but it should not start with I and then lurch to our community while using the same verb for both. Does the Guardian not have editors?

Anyway.

If this new bill is passed, the proposed legislation presents a major leap forward in life chances for gender diverse Victorians…Changing the legislation presents a critical step in ensuring the life chances of trans and gender diverse people are realised to their full potential.

Why? How? Because all women will change their birth certificates to male and thus stop facing discrimination at every turn?

While trans and gender diverse people in the eastern mainland states wait for the democratic process to recognise their basic human right to self-identify, they are subjected to discrimination through existing birth certificates that indicate incorrect sex or gender. At the core of systemic transphobia is administrative violence. “The categorisation of people works as a key method on control,” writes Dean Spade in his 2015 book Normal Life, meaning sex or gender indicators on our birth certificates adversely affect basic rights to education, employment, social security, health insurance, public amenity, international travel and incarceration.

Basic rights to incarceration? But more to the point, their basic human right to self-identify? There is no such basic human right. That’s not a thing. I can’t identify as Donald Trump and transfer all his ill-gotten money to myself. Donald Trump can’t identify as a Nobel Prize winner and get respect and admiration. Ivanka Trump can’t identify as a head of state and get other heads of state to listen to her babble at the G20. That’s not how any of this works.

As the American writer and activist Julia Serano said in her 2013 book Excluded: “To shatter the glass ceiling, we must first learn to move beyond biology and give ourselves permission to become anything we want to be.”

We can give ourselves permission all we like, but that doesn’t mean we actually can become anything we want to be. Words are not magic, life is not a fairy tale, reality is not playdoh for us to shape any way we like. That’s not how any of this works.

Ultimately legislating for trans and gender diverse people to self-identify breeds self-esteem: a good start at best. Our gender – at birth or throughout life – is not for others to decide.

Assuming by “gender” he means “sex” it’s not for anyone to decide, it’s just a given. It just is what it is.

It was a big party. They had a lot of fun.

The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president’s rally in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd.

His voters and supporters were having fun. The “Send her back” chant directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values.

What values? The values of racist contempt, white triumphalism, belligerent patriotism, paranoid nationalism, generalized anger.

To watch raucous crowds of (mostly) white Americans unite in frenzied hatred of a black woman — to watch them cast her as a cancer on the body politic and a threat to a racialized social order — is to see the worst of our past play out in modern form.

A few decades back it would have been a lynching. Those too used to be exuberant festivals of hatred.

Ah. I typed that before I scrolled to the next paragraph.

To be clear, the Trump rally was not a lynch mob. But watching the interplay between leader and crowd, my mind immediately went to the mass spectacles of the lynching era.

Quite. They really did have a party atmosphere of the same kind as Trump’s foul “rallies.” People used to send postcards of lynchings. Jamelle Bouie goes on to describe one such lynching.

It is important to take history on its own terms. We shouldn’t conflate the past with the present, but we should also be aware of ideas and experiences that persist through time. A political rally centered on the denunciation of a prominent black person demands reference to our history of communal, celebratory racism.

Trump has no understanding of that, and wouldn’t care if he did. You could tell him that his rally had set off a mob that very night and that they had burned down several houses with people in them, and it wouldn’t slow him down for a second.

Nell Painter in the Guardian:

In the 1970s, I thought changes in US laws and customs had put cries of “get out” and “go home” to rest. I thought the legislation of the 1960s on immigration, civil rights and access to the vote had put all that behind us, in law, at least, if not totally in practice. I thought the United States had turned a corner, had moved away from “this is a white man’s country” and relegated “go back to where you came from” to schoolyard taunts.

I didn’t quite think that, but I thought the changes and legislation had made the more overt behavior more shameful and thus less practiced in public.

Trump has made us admit that the “white man’s country” past – the past of publicly uttered white supremacy that Trump channels, the unabashed bigotry and xenophobia, the long, long past of race hate in the American south, but also in the west and the north—flourishes among us. His followers chant “send her back” and he preens in their enthusiasm.

He’s done that, and he and his allies and fans are also busily educating a new generation straight into racism, noisy shameless unabashed public racism. This isn’t going to fade away once Trump is gone.

It wouldn’t matter, except that he’s a Labour Councillor.

https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152497636110458881

https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152556948149166081

But what is “one’s identity”? The first definition via Google is “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.” The first in the Concise Oxford is “the quality or condition of being a specified person or thing.” (The Concise Oxford is 1672 large closely-printed pages, so it’s not all that concise.) In other words the first definition is factual. So…trans women are trans women, but that doesn’t mean they are women, and in fact they’re not women, they’re men who “identify” (in a different and rather nebulous sense) as women.

So what are we talking about when we talk about being respectful of one’s identity? Well in Councillor Doyle’s case we’re talking about respecting a fictional identity, and an ever-growing number of people are getting tired of being told to do that. It’s a fiction that men can be women; it’s a fiction that “identifying” as a woman means you are one; it’s a fiction that “identifying” as a woman makes you one. Actual, literal women are under no obligation to believe men’s claims that they are women because they “identify” as such. We would also quite like people to stop calling us “terfs” for saying something so mild.

https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152559741303971840

Excluding it from what?

Not believing people’s far-fetched claims about themselves isn’t excluding them, nor is it depriving them of rights.

https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152563800253575169

Well I can say I’m a lifelong advocate for LGB rights, but that doesn’t mean I get to tell LGB people to accept straight people who “identify as” lesbian or gay as in fact lesbian or gay. It’s not my call.

https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152647446461390851

Sigh. He has no problem sharing his space with women who “identify as” men. Fine; good for him; it’s still not the same as forcing women to share their spaces with men who “identify as” women. Trans  men are not a threat to men; trans women can be a threat to women.

Councillors should be better informed on such issues.

In honor of the 50th anniversary…

(The anniversary bit is the last few seconds.)

Two days ago:

Six years ago:

The ruling that lifted the publication ban in the Yaniv hearing is available for our reading pleasure. It presents the reasons for lifting the ban.

In the Original Decision, I reviewed Ms. Yaniv’s privacy interests and found that they  were complex. I identified factors weighing both for and against a publication ban. Ultimately, I decided to err on the side of protecting Ms. Yaniv’s privacy because, once that is lost, it could  not be regained. The primary factor which tipped the balance in favour of this outcome was Ms.  Yaniv’s assertion that she faced threats and harassment which would escalate if she was  exposed as the complainant in these proceedings: para. 48. I expressly found, however, that if  new facts came to light which affected my balancing, I may lift the order.

Mr. Cameron has presented new facts which, in my view, change the balancing of
interests in this case such that a publication ban is no longer warranted. In particular, I have
learned that Ms. Yaniv is using her own Twitter account to tweet about these complaints and
other very similar circumstances.

Boom tish. Not very bright, is he. “No publication allowed! For my safety! But I get to publish!”

By her own admission, a number of Ms. Yaniv’s tweets within the last month are about
her waxing complaints. While she says that her mother wrote some of them, I do not find that
changes the analysis. The tweets were issued from her Twitter account, using her full and real
name, next to a picture of her. It is fair to attribute them to her, for the purpose of assessing
the extent to which she has any interest in maintaining privacy over these complaints.

The extent to which he has any interest in maintaining privacy, actually. I know the Tribunal Member (Devyn Cousineau) isn’t going to call Yaniv he, but it’s worth reminding ourselves, because every time we say “she” we make Yaniv seem more vulnerable than he in fact is. Yaniv is not vulnerable the way women are, and he is hell-bent on making other women vulnerable to him. He is a bad bad dude.

One wrong undone:

A man who was sacked by the supermarket chain Asda for sharing a video clip of the comedian Billy Connolly mocking religion on social media has been reinstated.

Brian Leach was dismissed last month after a colleague complained that a sketch he shared, in which Connolly said “religion is over” and called suicide bombers “wankers”, was anti-Islamic.

He shared the sketch on Facebook, I think in a friends-only post. He didn’t slap it up in the break room at work, so I fail to see how it’s any of his colleague’s business at all, let alone their employer’s.

The National Secular Society has been in touch with Mr Leach throughout an internal appeals process and has now learned that he has been given his job back.

NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said the decision was “a victory for common sense”.

“We welcome Asda’s decision to reinstate Brian Leach, although this case raises broader concerns about the extent to which employers can legitimately restrict their employees’ freedom of expression on social media.”

It certainly does.

H/t Helen Dale

Brendan O’Neill adds his take on the Yaniv Frolics:

A born male who identifies as female, and whose male genitalia is still intact, is suing female-only waxers on the basis that their refusal to wax his bollocks – sorry, her bollocks – is an act of discrimination. Yes, this person believes that because he identifies as female he should therefore have access to every female service, including the most intimate female services. Any female beautician who refuses to tend to his testicles is being ‘transphobic’, apparently, because they are denying his womanhood. Even though he has a penis. And testicles. And is a man. That’s hate speech, I know.

It’s parody-leftism, it’s made for people like O’Neill, and it’s a huge mistake.

Yaniv claims that the women’s refusal to give him a Brazilian – that is, to handle his penis and testicles and to remove his pubic hair, activities these women did not want to carry out – is discrimination. Yaniv says that self-identifying as a woman is sufficient to be treated as a woman and to get access to services typically reserved for women. In the words of the National Post, the HRC hearings revolve around the question, ‘Should a business be allowed to deny service on the basis of gender identity?’ Or perhaps, ‘Should a woman be forced by law to touch a penis she doesn’t want to touch?’ – that’s a franker, more honest way of putting it, though it’s obvious why people don’t put it like that, given it would expose the fundamental misogyny at play in this demented case.

Usually our Brendan isn’t all that good at spotting misogyny or giving a shit when he does. The Yaniv Movement is a gift to people like him.

There is a temptation to view Yaniv as simply an eccentric trans activist. But in truth this case is entirely in keeping with the cult of gender self-identification where one can now become a woman simply by declaring it.

Yes it is. I hate it when our Brendan’s right, but he is. Yaniv is clearly an abusive creepy asshole in every way, but he’s also exploiting the existing ideology. He didn’t make it up; it was sitting there waiting for him.

A BC human rights tribunal has been hearing Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv’s complaint that a woman who did genital waxing for women out of her living room refused to wax Yaniv’s balls. It got rowdy.

At one point, the complainant compared the business owner to a neo-Nazi. The lawyer for the business owner accused the complainant of engaging in “half-truths and fabrications.” Tribunal adjudicator Devyn Cousineau frequently had to interject to maintain decorum and to keep the hearing from careening off course.

But a substantive question remained at the core of the raucous daylong hearing: should a business be allowed to deny service on the basis of gender identity?

But that is not the substantive question. That’s pretty much the opposite of the substantive question. The substantive question is: should a woman be allowed to refuse to wax a man’s balls in her living room regardless of how he “identifies”?

To put it another way, the issue isn’t “I refuse to wax your balls because of your gender identity,” it’s “I refuse to wax your balls because I wax women only and you’re a man.”

(Frankly I don’t think anybody should wax anybody’s genitalia, because I don’t think people should wax their genitalia in the first place, and I think the whole stupid porny trend is sick, but that’s another matter.)

Jessica Yaniv, the complainant, told the hearing she was entitled to receive the advertised wax service and that if the tribunal ruled against her it could lead to a “dangerous” precedent.

“You cannot choose who your clientele is going to be,” she said.

When you’re going to be fiddling around with their genitalia in your living room with no one else around? Yes you can. When the two sets of genitalia are not identical and require different training to wax and you have only one kind of training? Yes you can.

The complaint heard Wednesday is one of more than a dozen filed by Yaniv, who describes herself as a digital marketing expert and LGBTQ activist. All allege she was the subject of discrimination by salons. A few complaints have been settled without hearing or withdrawn.

That is to say, Yaniv has been systematically seeking out women who offer waxing services in private in order to sue them. Yaniv is an evil human being.

Earlier this month the JCCF also represented two other aestheticians who were the subject of similar complaints from Yaniv. One of them, a Sikh woman, said she declined to provide the waxing service for religious and safety reasons, according to a column posted by John Carpay, the centre’s president, on the website The Post Millennial.

Businesses shouldn’t be allowed to use religion and culture to refuse service, Yaniv said.

Yanivs shouldn’t be allowed to use trans ideology to persecute women.

Originally a comment by latsot on Watch for the nod.

I’ve been talking and writing about the breaking of checks and balances in the tech industry for a couple of years and there’s a possibly useful analogy to politics. We know that checks and balances aren’t worth anything now but I think that’s because we’ve forgotten what checks and balances are.

In the tech industry, we’ve got used to everyone stealing and misusing our data in return for supplying us with things we probably don’t really want in the first place. We’ve got used to DRM being the norm so that we don’t own any of the things we buy (including things like vehicles and houses as well as things like music and books) and don’t have an unrestricted right to repair or sell them.

We’ve become used to companies like Facebook and Google overturning the sort of rights we thought we had. And some legislators around the world have started to think that perhaps we were wrong to allow those companies to be so big and have so much influence and perhaps we should break them up.

I’m all for that in principle, but I’m not sure that throwing laws about the place is really going to help. I think that because of the ease with which such companies ignore or rise above laws. These buggers pay very little tax and simply ignore laws for years or decades. Facebook’s share price went up when it received a fine of $5bn. It was less than expected. It’s about a month’s revenue. Facebook knows it got away with rather less than a slap on the wrist for doing dodgy as fuck everything.

Laws seem unlikely to work, although I welcome better ones. What we really need to do is remember what checks and balances actually are and who owns them. We do. We are the ones who need to hold companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon to account. We can’t do much about laws or how they are enforced, but we can collectively do things about the checks and balances.

For instance, there’s an Amazon warehouse opening in the town nearest to me. The checks and balances here are about exposing awful working conditions and zero hour gig economy contracts if and when (and it’s when) they appear. Changing the laws won’t work (at least, not for a while) but changing what we stand for might.

Isn’t the same true about government? Aren’t we the ones to agree to the legitimacy of democracy, for example, but refuse the false idea that MPs ought to support Brexit by default?

It’s checks and balances that are broken and we own those. We can mobilise around them. I’m sick of everyone feeling that checks and balances are things governments are supposed to do. They’re what we should do.

The BBC does a nice job of underlining how thoroughly Trump did not discourage the chanting at his Nazi rally.

President Trump told a reporter he “disagreed” with his supporters chanting: “Send her back” at Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

He also said he quickly told his supporters at a campaign rally to stop their chant.

Here’s what actually happened.

They count the seconds for us.