Grooming much?

Scottish primary schools are appointing children as “LGBT champions” and are being urged to ask pupils as young as four if they are gay, lesbian or trans, The Telegraph can reveal.

Documents show that schools are setting up LGBT clubs and “gender and sexual orientation alliance groups” for pupils as part of their membership of a scheme run by the charity LGBT Youth Scotland.

The charity, which received nearly £1 million of taxpayer’s money last year, also urges head teachers to install gender neutral toilets and mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, an event critics say is designed to reinforce myths spread by trans activists.

Wait, I have an idea. Here’s what you do: just change every child’s genitalia at birth. Boom! Problem solved – no more need for boring clubs and alliance groups and charities trying to nudge people into being Gender Special, just make everyone Gender Special from the outset and then you can focus on other things at last. Think of all the free time that suddenly opens up!

Carolyn Brown, an educational psychologist, said: “Children of primary school age are very suggestible and are still at a very early stage of their psychological and emotional development. What we are seeing here is the product placement of gender ideology in schools which is potentially very harmful. Kids in primary school cannot possibly know if they are LGBT because biologically, psychologically and emotionally they will not yet have the capacity.”

Right, so just decide it for them with the progressive genitalia switch the moment they pop out.

LGBT Youth Scotland states that it has trained more than 5,000 teachers since 2021 and that its scheme means it is “reaching a minimum of 30,000 young people” and successfully changing the “culture and ethos” of Scottish schools.

Well, that would explain a lot.

Has Hamza Yousaf been sitting in on these trainings? Is that what explains him?

More stupid stuff to round out the day:

Humza Yousaf has hit back at [retorted to] JK Rowling over her “ludicrous” outspoken attack on his plans to ensure biological men identifying as female are protected by a new misogyny law.

The Harry Potter author accused Mr Yousaf of displaying “absolute contempt for women” on Tuesday after he said transgender women would fall within the scope of the legislation.

…

He insisted that extending the law to transgender people did not diminish the protection being offered to women as he hit out at rebuked “bad faith actors” who are “intent on turning every issue into a culture war”.

Mr Yousaf also accused them of “deliberate disinformation” and argued it made no “logical sense” for Rowling to accuse a government bringing forward misogyny legislation of having no respect for women.

It makes sense because it’s an afterthought. Yousaf produced his shiny new hate crime law that ignored women and the hatred women deal with. Yes, bro, that is misogyny.

The new hate crime laws, which came into force in Scotland on Apr 1, gives protection against people “stirring up hatred” on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.

However, sex was not included and Mr Yousaf has said separate misogyny legislation will be introduced instead.

Exactly. Why? Why “instead”? Why ignore women in the first one? Why include the very rare and specialized (not to say invented) “transgender idenniny” while excluding women?

Mr Yousaf took to X, formerly Twitter, to hit back at dispute Rowling’s argument that trans women should not be included in the legislation.

That’s the third time this journalist talks about hitting when he means disagreeing. It’s stupid.

The First Minister said that the legislation would deal with the perception of the accused, rather than the status of the victim.

“If a man threatens to rape a woman, he is unlikely to know if the victim is born a woman or a trans woman. That behaviour should logically be seen as misogynistic,” he added.

That’s even stupider.

Originally a comment by Papito on Peaceful but conspicuous.

The greatest amount of coercion employed in this “not very subtle form of proselytising” is against other Muslims, or people who were born Muslim and may be moving away from Islam. The rest of the students are just “kafirs” and the holy rollers don’t really care about them. Group prayer serves a function of guarding a society against apostasy – whoever didn’t show up and participate properly can be persecuted. Unlike in many other modern religions, in Islam apostasy is very strictly judged – it is punishable by death in some countries. Insisting on group prayer is insisting that you can do violence to those who waver.

The ruling was absolutely correct. A community school is no place to impose Sharia. As the headmistress said, the group prayer ban occurred “against a backdrop of events including violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment of our teachers.” This is what the parents and students who insisted they get to turn all schools into madrassas did to the teachers and to other students, and it’s not random, it’s part and parcel of an intolerant and aggressive system of beliefs. People who want to live like that should just choose a different school, and leave alone the kids who want to be free of such impositions.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on How not to change minds.

I understood that she had received unacceptable abuse…

But some abuse is acceptable?

…and had been taken unawares by the responses to her initial feelings.

I’m sure she had a very good idea of what she was in for when she posted her “This is not a drill” message in support of Maya Forestater. And, she’s received abuse over saying facts, not over “feelings.”

Latterly I felt she could have been calmer & kinder …/

Tell that to those who continue to smear her and heap abuse on her. Tell us why Rowling is not entitled to use all the anger, sarcasm, and disdain at her disposal when dealing with the liars, cheats, and frauds that constitute so much of the trans “rights” brigade? That’s your side. That’s what you’re defending. If you feel upset or targeted by her righteous fury that’s too fucking bad. Stop defending the indefensible. Stop pretending that the trans lobby is innocent and powerless when it is neither. Stop letting them use children as human shields to destroy women’s rights. Stop defending the destruction of children’s lives. Stop making mealy-mouthed, bullshit “both sides” arguments that fail to address the abusiveness of trans activism. Just stop.

Rowling’s “insulating wealth and enormous influence” have allowed her to champion the rights of women in a way that many others are unable to because of the viciousness and vindictiveness of this same trans “rights” movement you’re defending, which targets any woman who says “no” to their agenda, or any woman who stands against them with truth and facts that destroy their claims. Why aren’t you standing with those women too?

I think there’s a whole lot of “disturbing bigotry” (misogyny, homophobia, ageism just for starters) on the trans “rights” side that you’re missing, or giving a pass to. You probably believe that calling a man a man is “disturbing bigotry”; this is odd, because being triggered by simple biological truths would indicate that your “disturbing” meter is set to such an extremely high level of sensitivity that I find it difficult to believe that it could possibly miss all the shit coming from “your” side.

I can’t even imagine the contortions you must put yourself through in order to stick your head above the parapet when, clearly, it’s still firmly stuck up your ass.

Someone called Kirstie Allsop has been doing a lot of clueless uninformed social media lecturing on How To Be Kind to our trans siblings blah blah blah, so I finally got exasperated enough to find out who she is to be lecturing from such a great height.

She’s a tv personality.

Gareth Roberts at Spiked almost exactly a year ago:

We all know people who are totally unaware of the complexities of a situation, but who are still totally confident in opening their big gob to pronounce on it…For much of the past week, I’ve been watching with a mixture of amusement and horror at the Twitter travails of TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who has now entered the trans debate.

The amiable host of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location first piped up to defend American performance artist and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney has documented every day of his imaginary transformation to the female sex. He has been rewarded handsomely for this, with corporate sponsorships…

After US conservatives started to boycott Bud Light, following its partnership with Mulvaney, up piped Allsopp to ask what all the fuss was about. She said of his TikToks: ‘Childish perhaps, a bit silly arguably, but they don’t threaten me or any women I know. There are issues to debate, but Dylan isn’t the problem and targeting her is bullying’ (sic).

Mulvaney isn’t the problem, but he’s certainly a conspicuous beneficiary of the problem, and he’s certainly a problem.

To say that we should laugh off Mulvaney is pretty much like expecting black people to accept that a white person covered in boot polish is merely ‘childish and a bit silly’. But this was only the start. Over the days that followed, Kirstie dropped a series of ever bigger, ever more staggeringly uninformed clangers. ‘Using preferred pronouns is simply good manners’, said Rip van Allsopp, just waking up from 2012. When Olympic athlete and tireless campaigner for women’s sports Sharron Davies had a polite word, Kirstie demanded of her: ‘Who is telling children they can change biological sex?’ Where has she been?

And now a year later she’s popped up to do the same thing all over again.

Yes it’s always best to have “debates” with people who know nothing about the topic of debate.

She’s a martyr! It’s tragic!

She’s like a saint, you know?

Trump thought he was supposed to be able to reject as many jurors as he wanted.

Donald Trump complained Wednesday that his lawyers were not given “unlimited” chances to reject prospective jurors at his New York criminal hush money trial.

Mr Sir, if you could reject prospective jurors without limit, then there would never be a trial at all. That’s not how this works. Hope that helps.

“I thought STRIKES were supposed to be ‘unlimited’ when we were picking our jury?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Imagine admitting you’re that stupid. Imagine making it public of your own free will.

Samantha Chorny, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City, told CNBC that if there were unlimited peremptory strikes, as Trump wants, “I mean, no one would ever pick a jury.”

I managed to figure that out without even going to law school.

Wrong.

It’s a secular school, which means it’s open to children from all religious backgrounds and none. Group public prayers go against that. Runnymede Trust should have a long hard think about the moral pressure public prayers exert on other children from Muslim backgrounds at that school.

Public prayer is a not very subtle form of proselytizing. Secular schools should not be forced to allow it.

Joan Smith on Humza Yousaf and misogyny and law:

Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, let the cat out of the bag when he revealed yesterday the real intention behind the SNP’s proposal to bring in a standalone law on misogyny.

Yousaf claims that men can be victims of misogyny — and that they’re as or more likely to be targets than women. “Trans women will be protected as well, as they will often be the ones who suffer threats of rape or threats of disfigurement for example,” he said, offering no evidence for the assertion.

And also, of course, offering no reason to believe that men can be women.

Yousaf doubled down, repeating one of the most cherished illusions of trans-identified males. “When a trans woman is walking down the street and a threat of rape is made against them, the man making the threat doesn’t know if they are a trans woman or a cis woman,” he claimed.

Yeah right.

Very few men who have gone through male puberty are able to “pass” as women, a fact revealed by constant complaints from trans women about being “misgendered”. One of the first things we notice about another human being is their sex, and understandably so — because men are responsible for the vast majority of violence against women.

Now Scotland’s most powerful politician is telling us that trans women are indistinguishable from biological women. Not just that: he is arguing that a law against misogyny is needed to protect the very people who categorically cannot experience it.

And who categorically can express it, act on it, big it up.

It’s a backdoor way of getting the courts to recognise “gender identity”, creating another opportunity for men to be addressed as women in the criminal justice system. Misogyny is real and it affects every woman, but the law should not be misused to affirm men’s “inner feelings”. Do we really want to risk a ludicrous situation where a gender-critical woman finds herself in court, accused of misogyny by a man who claims to be a woman?

We don’t, but they do.

No YOU are.

Whittle thinks that our awareness that people can’t change sex will one day strike us as “absurd, even unhinged.”

That day will not arrive. Why not? Because people can’t change sex, and we won’t one day decide they can, just as we won’t one day decide that people can fly or live under water or pick up the Chrysler building with one hand.

We’re not the absurd, even unhinged ones in this brawl. The absurdity is insisting that people can change sex, or that they can have a sex that’s the opposite of the one their bodies are.

It’s not absurd or unhinged in the same way to think that it’s “kind” to pretend that people can change sex, and that we ought to do so because it’s kind. It’s wrong, but not absurd/unhinged the way believing in magic gender is.

I remember when Republicans were the Law n Order party. Seems like forever ago.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of a charge federal prosecutors have lodged against hundreds of people who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

While the court’s three-justice liberal wing signaled support for the charge, the conservative majority raised a series of skeptical questions about its potential scope and whether it would criminalize other conduct, such as protests.

A decision against the government could reopen some 350 cases in which defendants have been charged with “obstructing” an official proceeding by pushing their way into the Capitol in 2021. The charge can tack up to 20 years onto a prison sentence.

I mean honestly. If people physically violently bashing their way into the Capitol is okie doke then what would be obstructing an official proceeding? Dropping nukes?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The Three Anti-imperialists.

I’ve never understood people who worship Marx like a god and treat his writings like holy text. The philosophers and thinkers of the past had good ideas and bad ones. As I see it, the general rule is, the further back you go in time, the more surprising it is to find good ideas that hold up today — and the more credit is due to those who came up with them — and the more apt you are to find bad ones that didn’t hold up so well. Because that’s how knowledge is built: over time. So it seems weird to me that anyone would revere thinkers from centuries past beyond merely admiring them for what they did in the context of their time.

Like, say, Freud: amazing that he got people thinking about the human mind like that. Credit where it’s due in the context of his time and place. But the “Freudians” who take his nonsense literally today? Ridiculous!

Kant? Hume? Adam Smith? Great stuff! For their time. Even Darwin — even Einstein — they didn’t get everything right. Evolutionary biologists and quantum physicists get this. They take delight in showing where their fields have moved beyond their great founders’ texts. It’s a sign of how much those fields have grown.

Not so much with the Marxists, with their worldview seemingly set in amber. Is it just me who feels like they take his extremely out-of-date prescriptions for how the world should be organized far too literally? We tried applying a lot of Marx’s theories in the real world over the last one hundred years. Tens of millions of dead bodies later, it’s safe to say the ideas, radical as they were, and influential they have been, they needed a little finessing. They shouldn’t be taken at face value today.

It feels very religion-y, the Marx worship. The way even moderate Christians talk like the Bible is this great source of moral knowledge. In its day, two thousand years ago, the New Testament was radical, sure. Nowadays, we’ve built up a body of knowledge that cancels out a good three quarters or so of Jesus’s moral ideas.

I used to have lunch with a Muslim colleague every day, and one of the things that really surprised me was his inverse view of progress: that the world was perfect in Mohammed’s time, and the further we get from it as we move forward in time, the more corrupt the world becomes. His idea of progress was literally my idea of regress.

I sense the Marxists pine for a glorious past in the same vein.

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Looking fixedly in the other direction.

In the James Rieger edition (1974/1982) of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), Rieger’s introduction says this about Shelley’s father William Godwin:

Of all the tracts published by the Johnson circle, none had so great or enduring an impact as Godwin’s Enquiry considering Political Justice (1793).

Godwin argued that once the mind has been cleansed of superstition, emotionalism, and respect for custom, the free and rational man will necessarily perform virtuous actions, which will be socially useful and, at the same time, personally pleasurable.

Legislatures, courts of law, monarchy, marriage, and all other forms of “positive institution” with wither away, and the wise world will enter upon an era of benevolent, self-sustaining anarchy.

This passage is my bar for humanism. For humanism to be “Good Without a God” it should be self-aware of such naïveté, and do better than things like this.

Hamza Yousef says men will be protected under new misogyny laws.

Scotland’s first minister has said transgender women will be protected under any new misogyny laws. Humza Yousaf insisted that “anyone affected” by misogyny would be covered, whatever their biological sex.

That is moronic. Anyone can be “affected” by anything; it’s meaningless. Hatred of women is bad for women. There’s no “anyone” here; the word is quite specific.

Women were not included in the recent Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 that was introduced on 1 April – a decision that Mr Yousaf said had followed discussions with a number of women’s groups.

What kind of discussions? The kind where Mr Yousaf says “You bitches don’t need protection” and the bitches agree with him? Or what?

When asked whether fresh legislation would cover transgender women, Mr Yousaf said that it would, as whoever was directing misogynistic abuse would be unaware if a woman was trans or not.

What a disgusting liar he is. Of course people are “aware” if and when a man is claiming to be a woman.

The Alba Party MSP Ash Regan said the first minister’s reference to cis women was “offensive”. She added “Women are not a subclass of our sex. Trans-identifying people are protected under the Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021, yet despite crime against women being a scourge in our society, women are not.”

The author JK Rowling, who has been an outspoken critic of the Hate Crime Act, said the first minister’s remarks showed “absolute contempt” for women. On X, formerly known as Twitter, she said: “Women were excluded from his nonsensical hate crime law, now he introduces a ‘misogyny law’ designed to also protect men.”

It’s not enough for him to take great care to insult women once; he needs to do it twice.

Originally a comment by Sonderval on And a crime in Germany?

Actually, the situation is more complicated than described in the article by Tagesspiegel.

A biology PhD student (who is the focus of a lot of TRA criticism and hate since she dared trying to give a talk about the biology of sex) said that the Nazis did not pursue trans people. TRA activists then accused her on Twitter of being a holocaust denier.

The court clearly said that she is not a holocaust denier in the normal sense or anything like that, but that if you are a trans activist focused on this topic only (and only then), your opinion that the Nazis did pursue trans people is an opinion you are entitled to, even if it is not factually correct.

The court also stated that trans activists are trying to re-frame the holocaust to center trans people (“Deutungshoheit” is the wonderful German word for this). And because they do this, they are free to call you a holocaust denier if you say that trans people were not targeted by the holocaust.

And as Lady Mondegreen said, being a transvestite was not a problem in Nazi Germany (as you can see by the fact that you could even get a certificate for that), there are also lots of pictures of Wehrmacht soldiers dressing as women for fun and giggles. Being homosexual (especially gay) was what the Nazis persecuted as Lady Mondegreen also said.

Attempt to force secular school to stop being secular fails:

A Muslim student at a London school has lost a High Court challenge against its ban on prayer rituals. Michaela School in Wembley was taken to court by the girl over the policy, which she argued was discriminatory. The non-faith state secondary school previously told the High Court that allowing prayer rituals risked “undermining inclusion” among pupils.

Theocrats will of course retort that secularism undermines inclusion of theocrats, which is true enough, but secularism has the advantage of neutrality. If the school allowed prayers for one religion then it would risk “undermining inclusion” for all the other religions and for secular neutrality. That, of course, is the goal.

In an 83-page written judgment dismissing the student’s case, Mr Justice Linden said: “The claimant at the very least impliedly accepted, when she enrolled at the school, that she would be subject to restrictions on her ability to manifest her religion.”

Why? Because it’s a secular school. That’s the whole point.

About half the school’s roughly 700 pupils are Muslim, the court previously heard. Students are expected to adhere to strict rules including focusing on teachers extensively during lessons and remaining silent in corridors, as well as observing restrictions on uniforms.

In March 2023, up to 30 students began praying in the school’s yard, using blazers to kneel on, the High Court heard. Pupils are not allowed to gather in groups of more than four, including in the school yard. The school introduced the ban in the same month due to concerns about a “culture shift” towards “segregation between religious groups and intimidation within the group of Muslim pupils”, the court was told.

Which is the goal of all this praying in public routine. It’s meant to be a firm shove in the direction of religious conformity.

There is no legal requirement for schools to allow pupils a time or a place to pray, although most schools are still required to provide “broadly Christian” collective worship.

Yeah there’s your problem right there. Get rid of that requirement. Schools are not churches and should not be providing any kind of “collective worship.” It’s not “providing”; it’s coercing.

Lawyers for the pupil told the judge at a hearing in January that she was making a “modest” request to be allowed to pray for about five minutes at lunchtime, on dates when faith rules required it, but not during lessons. Representing the student, Sarah Hannett KC told the court that the school’s policy had the “practical effect of only preventing Muslims from praying, because their prayer by nature has a ritualised nature rather than being internal”.

Or to put it another way, because Muslim prayer is set up to coerce bystanders into religious conformity.

The case has led to renewed discussion about the broader role of faith within England’s education system. The National Secular Society, Humanists UK and others have long campaigned for reform, saying faith has no place in school.

Quite right.

The glorious future.

I’m pretty sure Willoughby is lying about this.

Smithsonian Magazine did an article on the Nazis and “trans people” last September, except that it admits up front that it’s not exactly about “trans people” for the simple reason that they weren’t a thing at the time.

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case. It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians before issuing an opinion that essentially acknowledges that trans people were victimized by the Nazi regime.

“Essentially” – that is, if you pretend that the Nazi regime meant X when it said Y.

In 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler took power, the police in Essen, Germany, revoked [Toni] Simon’s permit to dress as a woman in public. Simon, who was in her mid-40s, had been living as a woman for many years.

The Weimar Republic, the more tolerant democratic government that existed before Hitler, recognized the rights of trans people, though in a begrudging, limited way. Under the republic, police granted trans people permits like the one Simon had.

In the 1930s, transgender people were called “transvestites,” which is rarely a preferred term for trans people today, but at the time approximated what’s now meant by “transgender.” 

Oh really?

What if it’s the other way around? What if people have taken what used to be called “transvestism” and magnified it into a whole bonkers ideology? What if femme men were then just one way of being a gay man and butch women were just one way of being a lesbian? What if both were just one way of living as a same-sex attracted person, without any grandiose ontological claims, let alone threats?

In Berlin, transgender people published several magazines and had a political club. Some glamorous trans women worked at the internationally famous Eldorado cabaret. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, advocated for the rights of transgender people.

But we don’t know that they were transgender people. We have zero reason to think that butch lesbians and femme men thought of themselves in the terms that people who now claim to be transgender do. It’s not something Smithsonian Magazine should just assume.

Simon was a brave person. I first came across her police file when I was researching trans people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Essen police knew Simon as the sassy proprietor of an underground club where LGBTQ people gathered. 

No they didn’t. They didn’t call themselves that. No one did. Not least, it’s not even German.

At the Hamburg State Archive, I read about H. Bode, who often went out in public dressed as a woman and dated men. Under the Weimar Republic, she held a transvestite certificate. Nazi police went after her for “cross-dressing” and for having sex with men. They considered her male, so her relationships were homosexual and illegal. They sent her to the concentration camp Buchenwald, where she was murdered.

Liddy Bacroff of Hamburg also had a transvestite pass under the republic. She made her living selling sex to male clients. After 1933, the police went after her. They wrote that she was “fundamentally a transvestite” and a “morals criminal of the worst sort.” She too was sent to a camp, Mauthausen, and murdered.

None of which magically makes them what the people of 2024 mean by “trans people.” They couldn’t be that kind of trans people, because the meanings of that label did not exist 90 years ago.

For a long time, the public didn’t know the stories of trans people in Nazi Germany.

Earlier histories tended to misgender trans women, labeling them as men. This is odd given that when you read the records of their police interrogations, they are often remarkably clear about their gender identity, even though they were not helping their cases at all by doing so. Bacroff, for example, told the police, “My sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.”

No, it’s not “odd.” There was no such thing as “gender identity” in Nazi Germany. Men who said they felt like women were just men who said they felt like women. They didn’t spark a new vocabulary and ideology.

So, no, Willoughby is wrong to say the Nazis targeted people “purely for being trans.” For flouting gender norms and even laws against cross-dressing, yes, but for being trans in the contemporary sense, no.

I’m also skeptical that there’s a law that says “Denying trans persecution by the Nazis is Holocaust revisionism and a crime in Germany.” Frontline has a long article on laws restricting Holocaust speech and it says nothing about “trans persecution” – it says nothing about “trans” at all.

It’s in The Sun, so I don’t feel like reading it, but I gotta say, that banner would make me feel the very opposite of welcome.

If all that gender chopped salad is welcome then gender skeptics are not welcome. Just for one thing, we don’t have a colorful stripey flag. We are aflagual.

Guy goes to a shopping mall to kill people.

I say “people” but of course that’s wrong. Sheer habit; sorry.

He went there to kill women. A man tried to stop him so he killed that one man too, but the rest were all women. Women are shit; women need killing.

The man who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre appears to have targeted women, police say.

Appears?

What would it take for the BBC to omit that “appears to have” part?

The New South Wales police commissioner told Australia’s ABC News that it was “obvious” Mr Cauchi focused on women.

The only man killed in the attack was security guard Faraz Tahir, 30, who tried to intervene.

…

“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they?” commissioner Karen Webb said. “It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives… that the offender focused on women and avoided the men.”

But the BBC doesn’t consider it obvious.

Am I wrong to say that no one wants to make trans people less equal?

I get that there are plenty of malevolent people who dislike trans people along with gay people, feminists, lefties, atheists, you name it, but are there people who want to make trans people less equal? What would that even look like?

That question is related to one I ask a lot, which is “what do we mean by ‘trans rights’?” What exactly are trans rights? Trans people should have human rights, obviously, but what are specifically trans rights, and how do we know that anyone should have them?

There’s a lot of sloppy rhetoric about equality and rights all through the trans ControVersy, and I spend a lot of time trying to pin down what is meant.

How about Ron DeSantis? Does he want to make trans people less equal? I’m told he does, but I’m skeptical. What would that look like? What has he said that looks like that? I’m not disagreeing that DeSantis is a malevolent right-winger, but I continue to think making trans people “less equal” is just not on the right-wing agenda, not because they’re better than that but because it’s just not a thing.

With race, now, it’s a thing. With race we have a very clear very explicit history of less equal. See the Dred Scott ruling for example. With sex it’s also a thing: women weren’t allowed to vote.

But trans people? Is anyone saying they shouldn’t have voting rights, or that they have no rights which the cis people are bound to respect? Not that I know of. Maybe I’ve missed something.

Here’s the AP back in December:

A federal judge hearing a challenge to a transgender health care ban for minors and restrictions for adults noted Thursday that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly spread false information about doctors mutilating children’s genitals even though there’s been no such documented cases.

The law was sold as defending children from mutilation when it is actually about preventing trans children from getting health care, Judge Robert Hinkle said to Mohammad Jazil, a lawyer for the state.

But what is called “trans health care” can and does include altering the genitals. Is that health care as opposed to mutilation, or vice versa? Depends on who is talking.

At least 22 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and many of those states face lawsuits. Courts have issued mixed rulings, with the nation’s first law, in Arkansas, struck down by a federal judge who said the ban on care violated the due process rights of transgender youth and their families.

But it’s a choice to call it “medical care.” If it weren’t labeled as “gender-affirming” then it would be mutilation, so that “gender-affirming” is carrying a lot of weight.

Anyway I couldn’t find anything in that article that indicates DeSantis is trying to make trans people less equal. It’s not a form of equality to have your genital mutilation called “medical care” even if you yourself want the genital mutilation or alteration. The whole thing is about something other than equality.