The BBC celebrates a male rugby player who has moved to a women’s team:

Kelly Morgan is a trailblazer.

Born Nicholas Gareth Morgan, she played representative rugby for east Wales as a teenager.

Then he spent ten years “wrestling with gender identity” and now is playing with (and against) the wims.

Transgender women participating in female sport is a divisive subject, and one not confined to Welsh rugby.

Brushing it off with “divisive” is lazy and cowardly. The BBC might as well say it’s “divisive” for men to punch women in the face whenever they get annoyed.

Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) guidelines – which are “fully committed to the principles of equality” – state Kelly can play providing her blood-measured testosterone levels are within a certain range.

They can say they’re fully committed to the principles of equality all they like, but that doesn’t make it true, and letting people with male bodies trample over women has nothing to do with any “principles of equality.” It has to do with letting men get what they want while women get stomped.

Kelly has been taking estrogen for 18 months. Kelly still has a male body.

At nearly 6ft she stands out among her team-mates, and club captain Jessica Minty-Madley recounts a time she folded an opponent “like a deckchair”.

I guess Minty-Madley is ok with that because the folded one was an opponent? But that’s called “cheating” and it’s frowned on.

But coach Wayne Mansell notes: “I’ve seen Kelly struggling more than a lot of the girls with the demands our of training.”

That said, Kelly, 33, accepts transgender women may have an advantage in terms of size and strength.

“I do feel guilty, but what can you do?” she says. “I don’t go out to hurt anybody. I just want to play rugby.”

What can you do? What can you do? WHAT CAN YOU DO? You can refrain from cheating, that’s what. You can grasp that you feel guilty for a reason and stop doing the bad thing you’re doing that makes you feel guilty. Play mixed-sex non-professional rugby if there is such a thing, or play on a men’s team if there isn’t, but don’t make women pay the price for your desire to play rugby while pretending to be a woman.

Brian Minty, who founded the team four years ago, says: “I’ve always taken rugby as a totally inclusive sport and we’re happy to welcome Kelly to the club.”

Inclusive how? Anyone can be on the team, no matter what the level of skill or fitness or preparation? Toddlers can play alongside huge adult men?

“Inclusive” in this context ought to mean no arbitrary barriers – no exclusion for race or class or sexual orientation or political allegiance or immigration status and the like. But if you have a women’s team, as they do, it’s not arbitrary to exclude men from the women’s team. Possession of a male body is not an arbitrary attribute in this context.

“One of the main things Kelly does is give confidence to the other people around her. We’ve got a number of people who’ve only just started playing.”

He can’t resist a joke, though, adding: “She’s going to be a good, good player for the next few years, as long as we can stop her injuring players in training.”

Oh hahahahahahahaha that is hilarious, it’s funny the way Trump’s jokes are funny. Hahahahahaha he might injure the women hahahahahaha what could be funnier than that.

Minty-Madley says Kelly is not treated differently to other members of the squad.

“Kelly has become completely and utterly absorbed into the team,” she says.

“She’s one of us. She comes in, trains hard, plays hard and parties hard with us afterwards.

“She folded a girl like a deckchair during a game, which was quite funny, but they’re still friends.”

So funny. So very hilariously uproariously funny.

Mansell sees Kelly as a great addition to his squad.

“Straight away we just saw there was a load of ability there,” he says.

“Some days are good, some days are bad, but at the end of the day can you really exclude people?”

Can you really exclude men from playing on women’s teams? Yes of course you can, and you have to.

I thought this was just some random (albeit blue-checked) person on Twitter responding to a Fox News tweet about Ocasio-Cortez’s saying the Electoral College is a scam.

Actually @AOC, eliminating the Electoral College would silence our voices here in Iowa and in many other states across the country.

This is just more evidence of how out of touch the Democrats have become.

So I pointed out that an equal vote doesn’t silence anyone and it’s the outsize vote for less populated states that’s the real silencing, and then I looked to see who she is.

She’s a senator! A US senator!

And it’s the Democrats who are out of touch. Oy.

About that Amazon rain forest…

Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.

That’s the gist of an announcement this week by the country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in the Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year, and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.

Over half of those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as all of 2018 combined. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities such as São Paulo.

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus puts it this way:

The Amazon rainforest—an irreplaceable part of what makes life on Earth possible—is burning at a record rate. Global CO2 emissions are at a record high. Last month was the hottest month on our planet in recorded history. We are in a climate emergency.

You know what happened to Rapanui, aka Easter Island?

The Easter Island of ancient times supported a sub-tropical forest complete with the tall Easter Island Palm, a tree suitable for building homes, canoes, and latticing necessary for the construction of such statues. With the vegetation of the island, natives had fuelwood and the resources to make rope. With their sea-worthy canoes, Easter Islanders lived off a steady diet of porpoise. A complex social structure developed complete with a centralized government and religious priests.

It was this Easter Island society that built the famous statues and hauled them around the island using wooden platforms and rope constructed from the forest. The construction of these statues peaked from 1200 to 1500 AD, probably when the civilization was at its greatest level. However, pollen analysis shows that at this time the tree population of the island was rapidly declining as deforestation took its toll.

Around 1400 the Easter Island palm became extinct due to overharvesting. Its capability to reproduce has become severely limited by the proliferation of rats, introduced by the islanders when they first arrived, which ate its seeds. In the years after the disappearance of the palm, ancient garbage piles reveal that porpoise bones declined sharply. The islanders, no longer with the palm wood needed for canoe building, could no longer make journeys out to sea. Consequently, the consumption of land birds, migratory birds, and mollusks increased. Soon land birds went extinct and migratory bird numbers were severely reduced, thus spelling an end for Easter Island’s forests. Already under intense pressure by the human population for firewood and building material, the forests lost their animal pollinators and seed dispersers with the disappearance of the birds. Today, only one of the original 22 species of seabird still nests on Easter Island.

With the loss of their forest, the quality of life for Islanders plummeted. Streams and drinking water supplies dried up. Crop yields declined as wind, rain, and sunlight eroded topsoils. Fires became a luxury since no wood could be found on the island, and grasses had to be used for fuel. No longer could rope by manufactured to move the stone statues and they were abandoned. The Easter Islanders began to starve, lacking their access to porpoise meat and having depleted the island of birds.

We’re doing the same thing to the whole planet, and the disappearances and dryings up and plummetings are speeding up.

In his Shout at the Reporters session this morning Trump pretended he can change the Constitution all by himself.

Nah. He can’t.

Trump said on Wednesday that his administration was seriously looking at ending the right of citizenship for U.S.-born children of noncitizens and people who immigrated to the United States illegally.

“We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby – congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen. … It’s frankly ridiculous,” Trump told reporters outside the White House.

He can look at it very seriously all he wants, but he can’t do anything about it.

The Constitution’s 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War to ensure that black Americans had full citizenship rights, granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

It has since routinely been interpreted to grant citizenship to most people born in the United States, whether or not their parents are American citizens or legally living in the United States.

He can’t just wave his pudgy little fist around and make that go away.

Sure sure, we want more women, definitely, just not right now.

Labour has been warned it could be “going backwards on equality” by two senior MPs who expressed their alarm at the decision not to replace some departing female colleagues with all-women shortlists.

The concerns of Labour MPs Gloria De Piero and Harriet Harman follow criticism of the party’s procedures by the Unison general secretary, Dave Prentis, who accused the Labour leadership of “trading” seats intended for female candidates in order to allow “favourite sons” to take up the safest Labour seats.

De Piero, who has said she will step down as the MP for the hyper-marginal seat of Ashfield at the next election, said she was pleased her seat would be replaced with an all-women shortlist but said she was angered that was not the case in other seats.

Well you see it’s like this, women are so brilliant and talented that they can achieve equality even when they’re only 10% of the total.

A guy goes to the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and shows his penis to a housekeeper. It doesn’t work out well for him.

The man exposed himself to a housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta hotel and the housekeeper informed hotel security, according to Atlanta Police Department Investigator James White III.

When security personnel attempted to confront the man, he tried to escape by leaping from one balcony on the 11th floor to another. That’s when he fell, police said.

He was pronounced dead at the scene after the incident on Monday. His identity has not been released.

Hotel housekeepers are not there to do involuntary inspections of the male guests’ equipment. Keep your pants zipped and live to eat breakfast in the morning.

What a difference a ______ makes.

The Guardian last June:

Edinburgh LGBT+ committee resigns in row over speakers at feminist meeting

• University network says opposition to event was censored
• Speaker Julie Bindel left ‘shaken’ after alleged abuse

The Guardian three days ago:

Owen Jones attacked outside London pub

Guardian columnist claims attack was ‘premeditated assault’

I wonder what accounts for the differences.

Peter Tatchell is permanently confused.

I speak out against transphobia. Gender is more than genitals. New science suggests that trans identity is rooted in different brain structures. As feminists USED to say: Biology is NOT destiny. Now some say it IS destiny. LISTEN 1 hr 3 min http://ow.ly/lt4S50vBsqk @MunroeBergdorf

No, we’re not taking instruction in feminism from Peter Tatchell thank you very much. He’s not a feminist and he knows nothing about feminism.

We’re also not taking instruction in anything from Munroe Bergdorf. Feminist women really don’t need or want instruction from men who think being a woman=being like Munroe Bergdorf.

No, feminism has not shifted from saying biology is not destiny to saying it is destiny. The point of “biology is not destiny” was to say that your sex doesn’t determine your skills or talents or interests or personality or anything other than your literal physical sex. We still say that. What we don’t say is that you can flip your sex either through the Magic of Words or the technology of surgery and hormones.

It’s not complicated. The refusal to get it is the offspring of misogyny and entitlement.

The Institute of Art and Ideas asked philosophers to say a little on How Can Philosophy Help Us Understand Transgender Experiences? Rebecca Kukla is one of the philosophers who said a little. It’s interesting.

Much of my own research is in the philosophy of language. What does this have to do with the lives and experiences of trans folks? I am interested in thinking about the pragmatic effects of speech acts such as calling someone by a name or pronoun – one that they identify with, one they have asked to be called by, or one they have asked not to be called by. Sometimes people act as though verbal disagreements over what name or pronoun to use for someone are simple disagreements over fact, in which people are making competing assertions. In contrast, I think that addressing someone by a name or pronoun is a speech act more complex and with more morally significant effects than merely describing them accurately or inaccurately. Recognizing someone as having a gender or name places them in social space, and helps determine concrete facts about how they will be treated, what expectations will be placed on them, and what they can and cannot do.

(First, an aside – “folks” again? Really? Must we? It’s so annoying.)

Surprise ending: I agree with her. I agree that addressing someone by a name or pronoun is a speech act more complex and with more morally significant effects than merely describing them accurately or inaccurately. I think she’s quite right that using a particular name or pronoun places people in social space and helps determine concrete facts about how they will be treated, what expectations will be placed on them, and what they can and cannot do. That’s exactly why I object to making it mandatory to use fake ones. I think for instance using “she” and “her” and a woman’s name in reference to a trans woman nudges us into thinking of that trans woman as literally a woman. That may be harmless sometimes, but it’s not harmless at all times. When it’s a male rapist in prison? When it’s a man playing cricket against women or a man winning all the cycle competitions or a male wrestler winning gold medals that should have gone to women or male runners ditto? Then I don’t think it’s harmless.