Jack Smith left the door open just a fraction.

In fact, this move could be an effort to keep the cases alive in the long term. An interesting tell in each motion is Smith’s request to dismiss the cases “without prejudice.” That means that the cases can be filed again. By dismissing the cases now on his own terms, Smith blocks Trump’s attorney general from dismissing the cases for all time.

Which of course Trump’s attorney general would be required to do.

In addition, by filing his motions pre-emptively, Smith was able to explain his reasons for dismissing the case, rather than allowing Trump’s future AG to mischaracterize them. According to Smith, he was dismissing the case not because of the merits or strength of the cases, but because he had to. As Smith explains, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are “binding” on the special counsel, has concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or criminally prosecuted under the Constitution…

But Smith was careful to note that this relief from criminal prosecution is “temporary,” and ends when the president leaves office. Smith cites OLC as concluding that this form of immunity for a sitting president “would generally result in the delay, but not the forbearance, of any criminal trial” That is, Trump gets a reprieve, but only during his term in office.

But the statute of limitations would be in effect by January 2029. But there’s a fix for that.

Smith’s brief contains another tell when he writes that OLC has “noted the possibility that a court might equitably toll the statute of limitations to permit proceeding against the President once out of office.” That is, a court could call a timeout, pausing it on Trump’s inauguration day on Jan. 21, 2025, and then restarting the clock when Trump leaves office in 2029. That would give prosecutors plenty of time to refile charges. Certainly, the tolling issue would be litigated, but by dismissing the case now, Smith preserves this issue for future prosecutors to argue.

It won’t happen, but it’s a nice thought.

As OLC has written, the bar on prosecuting a president is not forever — a president “is ultimately accountable for his misconduct that occurs before, during, and after his service to the country.” As Smith writes, “the president lacks the prerogatives of a king and his protection from prosecution.”

Officially, maybe, but unofficially, he has one hell of a lot of prerogatives he shouldn’t have.

Does Amnesty Hate Women?

Well duh. Of course it does. Obviously.

It’s not a human rights issue to pretend to be something you’re not and force everyone else to play along with your pretense.

It’s glaringly obviously not a human right to force women to agree that men are women if they say so, welcome men into all our spaces, give them all our prizes, put them in charge of all our organizations, make them CEO of all our rape crisis services.

Amnesty is garbage.

I was thinking Jack Smith shut down the Trump case because he had to, but Adam Schiff implies he didn’t.

“I think this is a serious mistake by the department,” Schiff told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, saying that while Smith sought to dismiss the cases without prejudice — meaning they can be brought against Trump once his term is over — it now means that the “status quo” is to not bring any charges against the president.

If it’s a mistake, that implies it wasn’t mandatory.

“But it is nevertheless a very serious distinction, because the status quo now is no charges against the president,” Schiff, who served on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, continued. “You would have to upset that status quo to later bring charges again, as opposed to merely postponing the proceedings, in which case the presumption is they continue when he leaves office.”

…

Schiff added that the “mistake” by Smith’s team to pull the plug on the cases is compounded by a host of other concerns.

“It compounds the mistake that you alluded to, which is they waited a year before they even brought this case forward or began the investigation,” the California Democrat told Psaki, President Biden’s former press secretary. “And then you have the Supreme Court with this immunity decision.”

“And now you have a potential nominee in Pam Bondi, who is saying she’s going to prosecute the prosecutors,” he continued, adding that “all of that goes against what Jack Smith said in his brief motion, which is that no one’s above the law. So, we’re hearing that phrase a lot, but we’re not giving validity to it by these actions.”

Well quite.

Can ya fix it?

Why Bad Kennedy should not be the boss of Health and Human Services, by former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey S. Flier.

RFK Jr. was nominated precisely because of his stated positions on a wide range of health and scientific matters: vaccines, AIDS, the reputed harms of electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi and cell phones, and many other topics. So these views are central to assessing his suitability for the role. 

The scientific process requires skepticism about prevailing consensus. Some Kennedy supporters see his skepticism on a wide variety of scientific and medical issues, including policies during the Covid epidemic, as a positive that will enable him to disrupt the medical and research establishment.

But there’s informed skepticism and there’s crank skepticism. Bad Ken is crank rather than informed.

Our task is to evaluate his qualifications as a potential leader of HHS. I argue that by repeatedly making claims about important issues that are known to be false or that are devoid of evidence, RFK Jr. has disqualified himself from this position. 

Well, yes. That seems like a pretty good rule.

For decades, RFK Jr. has been a vocal advocate of the anti-vaccine movement. He was founder and chair of Children’s Health Defense, an organization that campaigns against childhood vaccinations whose beneficial effects on children’s health are firmly established. 

Most remarkable among his repeated claims is that childhood vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella has caused the increase in autism. Just last year he said on Fox News: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” This is long after the 1998 paper that advanced the idea was retracted as fraudulent in 2010. The author of the paper has been stripped of his medical license. Kennedy’s willful ignorance of this evidence should disqualify him from leadership in the health and research ecosystem. He has promoted a fear of vaccines that has—and will—lead to the return of diseases like measles and polio.

Aka diseases that can kill.

RFK Jr. repeatedly challenged the now well-established fact that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, a discovery that led to a Nobel Prize and highly effective treatments that save millions of lives. 

In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy repeated his concerns about this discovery, saying he takes “no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. Then, in a 2023 interview with New York magazine, he said that research into the causal connection between HIV and AIDS was “phony” and “crooked.” This is scientific ignorance, not the healthy skepticism that some supporters allege. No one who asserts such nonsense should be at the helm of Health and Human Services. 

Which is why Trum appointed him.

Dang. The BBC wins another prize for maximum hatred of women.

It’s the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

UN Women (which doesn’t always know which people are women) tells us:

Violence against women and girls remains one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations in the world. Globally, almost one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both, at least once in their life.

For at least 51,100 women in 2023, the cycle of gender-based violence ended with one final and brutal act—their murder by partners and family members. That means a woman was killed every 10 minutes.

So are we talking about women here? Or about women plus men who pretend to be women? It does make a difference, because men kill women more than women kill men.

I think maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention to Brianna Wu, a 6’4″ man who calls himself a woman and wants to make himself safe by putting women in danger. Like…

See what he does there? Apparently without even noticing? Claims he would speedily be raped and/or assaulted if he used the men’s restroom, in order to defend his right to threaten women with rape and/or assault by barging into their restroom. He doesn’t want to be around men so he forces women to be around him. Men get to trample over women to make themselves safe from men, but women don’t get to do anything to be safe from men.

Did I mention that Wu is 6’4″?

This is so sick.

Jack Smith files to drop Jan. 6 charges against Donald Trump

Not because he didn’t do it, not because there’s no evidence he did it, but because there’s a law that says he can’t be prosecuted.

Special counsel Jack Smith has filed a motion to drop all four felony charges against President-elect Donald Trump in connection with his effort to overturn his 2020 presidential election in the lead-up to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S Capitol.

Trump was first indicted on four felonies in August 2023: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. The case was then put on hold for months as Trump’s team argued that Trump could not be prosecuted.

…

“The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed. But the circumstances have,” Smith’s office wrote in Monday’s filing, adding that it is seeking to dismiss the charges ahead of Trump’s inauguration, in line with the Justice Department’s longstanding position that it can’t charge a sitting president.

“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” the special counsel added.

So he’s an absolute monarch. What a brilliant system we’ve set up here.

I can hear the shrieks of laughter all the way over on the left coast.

So declaring a particular month “Pride” month is now mandatory, and refusal is a human rights violation? Really?

The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has found the township of Emo will have to pay damages after refusing to proclaim Pride Month back in 2020.

I do love it that the township is Emo. No YOU are.

Borderland Pride requested Emo to declare June as Pride Month and display a rainbow flag for one week but the township refused, resulting in a years-long process in which the tribunal ruled against the township. The tribunal ruled Borderland Pride will be awarded $15,000, with $10,000 coming from the township itself and the other $5,000 coming from Emo mayor Harold McQuaker.

Another apt name. Could they find anyone named McHedonist to balance things out?

But anyway. I’m not seeing it. Emo should support and defend LGB rights by all means, but should it be required by the government to declare a “Pride Month” for one small segment of the population? There’s no “Pride Month” for women you know. Should governments be requiring Pride Month for Catholics, Mormon, Baptists? Buddhists, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses? You can see where this is going: there aren’t enough months. More broadly, it’s just not obvious or clear that naming months after something to promote it or defend it or celebrate it should be mandatory for reasons to do with human rights. It’s not clear at all, in fact it’s quite foggy.

Doug Judson is a lawyer in Fort Frances and one of the directors on the board of Borderland Pride, and said they’re elated to have finally brought it to a close and is a significant victory for the organization.

“We didn’t pursue this because of the money. We pursued this because we were treated in a discriminatory fashion by a municipal government, and municipalities have obligations under the Ontario Human Rights Code not to discriminate in the provision of a service,” said Judson.

But discriminatory how? Does Emo have a Straight Month? If it does then I might agree with Judson, but I’m pretty confident it doesn’t, on account of how 1. that’s not a thing and 2. it would be asking for trouble. Assuming there is no Straight Month, how exactly is it discriminatory to turn down the opportunity to have a Pride one? It may be churlish, but discriminatory? I call that language-creep.

“The tribunal’s decision affirms that. That is the important thing we were seeking here was validation that as 2SLGBTQA plus people, we’re entitled to treatment without discrimination when we try to seek services from our local government.”

But naming a month isn’t a service. It isn’t among the services local governments provide. It’s also not discrimination not to provide it; see above. Naming a month is something else – a display of solidarity or a display of virtue or a bit of both.

Judson said one of the messages it sends to other townships and municipalities is that Pride needs to be in the smallest and most remote communities just as it is in larger cities, and in some of the places “where it can be really hard to help people understand why it’s so important”

“I hope that it emboldens and strengthens people in communities like Emo and other places like that across Ontario to know that they have entitlements from their government,” said Judson.

But this is all symbols. It’s just wrapping paper. It’s a display of CorrectThink. It’s advertising, it’s public relations. There’s a place for that kind of thing, certainly, but that doesn’t make it an “entitlement from their government.” Pride months and weeks and days and years are very old news at this point, and kind of stale. We have more urgent things to quarrel over.

The Telegraph:

The British Transport Police (BTP) is facing legal action over new guidance that allows trans officers to strip-search women.

No, stupid: guidance that allows male officers to strip-search women. The issue is not that they’re trans but that they’re male.

Revealed by The Telegraph, the guidance allows male staff identifying as female to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

Why not give out species recognition certificates to bears so that they can intimately search humans?

Cathy Larkman, retired police superintendent and national policing lead for the WRN, said: “The letter before action to British Transport Police by Sex Matters is a significant development in this sorry tale of police forces putting ideology, and the unjustifiable self-interest of very few individuals, before the dignity, privacy and safety of women.

“Men are not women and men cannot become women. That applies to police officers too. A vulnerable woman being strip-searched is presented with a man in front of her, regardless of whatever £5 official piece of paper he holds.

“Strip-searching by its very nature can be degrading and embarrassing, for the woman being searched, and for the policewoman doing the searching.

“When the state allows men to strip women and touch them, then that in my view is state-sanctioned sexual assault. It beggars belief that police leaders view this as a carrot to dangle to get more trans-identified men into the service.”

She’s not wrong.

Amnesty UK kicks women again.

No wonder they dragged their feet.

So the thinking is that women in the UK are spoiled pampered bitch Karens because they’re not Syrian refugees? Safety and privacy are not a general need and right but a privilege, which Karens haven’t earned? Is that it?

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

I don’t claim any expertise on social media algorithms, but I assume they are basically designed to maximize the number of clicks by applying heuristics like “people who clicked on X in the past were more likely than expected by chance to also click on Y” (I am sure there are others here who can correct me if I’m completely off the mark). If so, it’s telling that the YouTube algorithm started suggesting a lot more Right-wing crap after I began specifically looking for gender critical material. There’s a twist to the story, however. Recently (for reasons I hope are only too obvious) I have, once again, been watching a lot of material on the threats to liberal democracy from the MAGA crowd. And, what do you know, suddenly there’s noticeable uptick in TERF-bashing material in my suggestions!

As I have previously said, I have no doubt that this is largely due to the fact that Right-leaning sources tend to be the only ones willing to give a platform to anyone not 100% uncritical of gender ideology (just like Left-leaning sources tend to be the most welcoming platforms for material critical of Trump). Once again, we’re not in the luxurious position of having lots of attractive options to chose from, and sometimes you have to make a common cause with Stalin to defeat Hitler. But as I pointed out back then, some of the people on the gender critical “side” had already been saying things that made me uncomfortable (usually along the lines of “Trump may not be perfect, but…”), and many others have joined them since then.

It would be one thing if these people were consistently portraying Trump as the lesser of two evils (I would still think they were wrong, but “reasonable people can disagree” and all that), but in many cases their ethical standards seem to have been adjusted to the point where Trump is no longer considered an obvious “evil” at all. Once again, I think cognitive dissonance is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Even if you just make an entirely “pragmatic” decision to work with the MAGA crowd to stop the medical experimentation on children, the destruction of female-only spaces etc., you now have a stake in defending your choice (“if they really were that awful, a decent person like myself wouldn’t be working with them”). You also have a stake in keeping the alliance together, not antagonizing your new bedfellows etc., and, before you know it, you’re in a justification spiral pushing you ever further to the Right, until attempts to overturn an election, inciting a violent insurrection, sucking up to Putin, a lifetime of crime and corruption, grabbing women by the pussy, suggesting that the “Second Amendment People” take care of one’s political rival etc. are all within your standards of acceptable behavior.

I also suspect there’s a justification working in the opposite direction: We can’t defeat the Trumpist assault on liberal democracy alone, and the only realistic alternatives* are the same people who endorse medical experimentation on children as well as biological males in women’s toilets, changing rooms, sports, prisons, rape and domestic abuse shelters etc. But since the latter, at the very least, remain dedicated to basic democratic rules of the game, like accepting the outcome of elections, you decide to support them against the MAGA crowd, which, once again, means you have a stake in defending your choice: “if they really were that awful, a decent person like myself wouldn’t be voting for them”, so you start making excuses for the excesses of gender ideology, and, once again, you’re in a justification spiral pushing you ever further towards the (woke) left. Either way, liberal values, the respect for evidence and logic etc. lose.

*Obviously the American two-party system makes this problem a whole lot worse.

So, looking for a few specks of gold in the giant pool of dung, we find Bad Kennedy saying Big Sugar and Big Salt are not all that good for us.

The former environmental attorney – who still must face confirmation by the Senate – is considered by many to be a controversial pick, given his history of making baseless health claims, including that vaccines can cause autism and that wifi technology causes cancer.

Yet some of his ideas around reforming the FDA have found support from health experts, lawmakers and concerned consumers alike – including some Democrats.

…

Leading up to the election, Kennedy – a former Democrat – offered several ideas for tackling chronic diseases under his slogan “Make America Healthy Again”.

He has frequently advocated for eliminating ultra-processed foods – products altered to include added fats, starches and sugars, like frozen pizzas, crisps and sugary breakfast cereals, that are linked to health problems like cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

There. Finally. An advocacy that’s not completely wacko. The thing about those ultra-processed foods is that in addition to being empty calories, they are also addictive. Bad combination. They’re not addictive like heroin, of course, but they are in the sense that they make it all too easy to keep munching away – they’re engineered to do that.

Part of Kennedy’s new mandate will include overseeing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has over 18,000 employees.

The agency is in charge of ensuring the safety of pharmaceuticals and the US food supply, but has come under fire in recent years from some lawmakers and consumer groups, who have accused it of a lack of transparency and action on food safety.

…

“There are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA … that have to go, that are not doing their job,” Kennedy told MSNBC this month.

But then he also promotes drinking raw milk, so we’re back in the giant pool of dung.

Exactly so.

New monster much like the old monster.

Elon Musk is so excited to start his new gig ruining the federal government that he’s getting an early start by goading his millions of followers to cyberbully government employees.

This week, Musk took aim at Ashley Thomas, the director of climate diversification for the U.S. International Finance Corporation—a highly technical role that involves developing ways of securing agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather, one agency official told The Wall Street Journal.

Well we can’t have that. We mustn’t do anything to make sure agriculture and infrastructure can withstand extreme weather. Who needs agriculture and infrastructure?

Speaking of fake jobs, last week, Donald Trump announced that Musk would be co-heading the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory board set on slashing the government budget by a trillion dollars, hoping to cut personnel and essential government services … so they can be snatched up by government contractors or outsourced to private companies … owned by billionaires … like Musk.

As long as the billionaires are making more billions, everything is fine.

Here is Janet Inglis explaining what’s wrong with Tim “Sarah” McBride intruding on women:

He’s a man.

A man who has taken photos of himself entering women’s toilets.

A man who has campaigned relentlessly for an end to women’s single sex spaces and sports.

A man who uses resources intended for women only.

A man who uses women only services.

These are all services, mitigations and safeguards intended for women so we can more fairly enjoy the freedoms and amenity of an advanced society that has largely been created by and for men.

Women need these things.

Men like Tim McBride want to destroy them.

The fact he wears his womanface costume in the corridors of power is a shocking affront to all women.

What the hell has happened to people?!

Men pretending to be women and demanding the rest of us pretend to believe them is not okay!

He is now a powerful tool for the destruction of women’s rights, safety and autonomy in one of the most powerful places in the world.

Other than that…

Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan frowns in the direction of Republican Nancy Mace, because of Mace’s failure to pretend that a man who calls himself Sarah McBride is a woman. Women are supposed to embrace everyone! It’s in the paperwork! It comes with the territory! Women are not allowed to disbelieve men who claim to be women, because that’s Not Kind.

I would much rather share a ladies’ room or a locker room with Sarah McBride than with Nancy Mace.

McBride, of course, was just elected to Congress and, in January, will be the highest-ranking elected official in America who is transgender. The 34-year-old comes to the US House of Representatives after serving in the Delaware legislature; before that, she was the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.

And, by the way, to be clear, as Sullivan so carefully isn’t, McBride is a man. He’s one of those men who expects everyone to pretend he’s a woman. He also expects flattery and deference for being trans. He wants to have it both ways, as men who claim to be women always do.

Mace, a member of Congress from South Carolina since 2021, has been on an ugly campaign in recent weeks clearly intended to belittle and marginalize McBride – and to get on TV as much as possible doing so. She has filed a resolution, and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, has given it his nod of approval, that would somehow force trans people to keep out of the congressional bathrooms that reflect their gender identity.

But workplace bathrooms aren’t there to reflect people’s idenninies, they’re there so that people can relieve themselves and clean up while at work.

On Wednesday, McBride reacted with dignity to all the performative insults and abuse. She simply responded that she would follow the rules and that she’s in Congress to represent her Delaware district; I’m sure she’ll eventually find ways to continue her admirable advocacy.

Cool about the dignity, but what about the dignity of the women who bump into him in the congressional bathrooms? Why is his dignity more important than theirs? What is actually so very dignified about pretending to be the sex you’re not?

“As a trans person myself, I’m really worried about where this is headed,” wrote Parker Molloy, who writes incisively about politics and media in her newsletter the Present Age. “I spend each day worrying about whether or not the healthcare that keeps me alive will remain legal, whether I’m going to face new restrictions on where I’m allowed to exist in public, what would happen to me if (god forbid) I wound up in prison for some reason, and whether or not my identity documents like my passport will be retroactively made invalid.”

Interesting. Now think about what women worry about. Think about the new and peculiar worries women have to deal with thanks to the juggernaut of trans ideology.

But he won’t, of course, any more than McBride will. They don’t care. The stars of this movie are the men in lipstick, not the women just trying to get away from them.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This miasmic swamp of delusional bullshit.

We keep using the word “trans” as if it meant one thing, when the differences between a sensitive, “girly” boy who likes dolls and dresses (previously likely to grow up gay), a teenage girl with no prior history of gender dysphoria who comes to see herself as a “boy” (or “non-binary”, “queer” etc.) through social contagion from friends and online influencers, and a porn-obsessed straight man who gets turned on by the idea of being his own jerk-off fantasy couldn’t be more glaring. We also keep talking about ”gender dysphoria” as a single, one-size-fits-all diagnosis with a single cause (being born in the wrong body) and a single cure (medically ”correcting” the body), when, in fact, different people seek to escape their sex for very different reasons. If anything “gender dysphoria” is a symptom rather than a disease: Something to be explained rather than an explanation. The following is my modest attempt at identifying the main ingredients of the gender cocktail as I currently understand them.

1. The Social Contagion Aspect

Despite attempts to appropriate non-Western concepts of third genders [1] in support of gender ideology, the modern gender identity movement is very much a recent Western cultural phenomenon. Many have pointed out the parallels between the current explosion in trans identification among teenagers and previous mental health fads like repressed memories, multiple personality disorder, eating disorders, various kinds of self-harm (e.g. cutting) etc. These trends all spread throughout the population over time through social contagion, and in every case teenage girls were vastly over-represented among the afflicted.

The physical and hormonal changes associated with puberty can be distressing enough in themselves, especially for girls, and are often accompanied by additional burdens like body-shame, teasing, unwanted male attention etc. In every age vulnerable girls look to their social circle (and, more recently, the internet) for clues to make sense of their distress, and every age has its own specific answer to offer. In one place at one time it might have been repressed trauma caused by forgotten sexual abuse in childhood. In another place at another time girls might be taught to fixate on their weight as the source of their misery. Today, all over the Western world, the standard explanation, eagerly pushed by activists (#2) as well as friends, teachers, therapists, online influencers, children’s books, the mainstream media, public institutions etc. is “you’re born in the wrong body and need to be fixed”.

2. The Social Justice aspect

Of course the trans craze has not arisen in a vacuum, but can only be properly understood in the light of wider intellectual and ideological trends whether you prefer to call it “Critical Social Justice” ideology, “wokeism”, “applied postmodernism”, “identity politics”, “the identity synthesis”, or something else entirely. This movement – which traces its ideological roots back to the French postmodernists of the 1960s and 70s, but has mutated into its current form in elite American colleges and universities – understands society in terms of zero-sum power struggles between privileged (oppressors) and marginalized (oppressed) identity groups (races, genders, sexual orientations etc.). According to the prevailing theory of intersectionality your place in the power hierarchy is entirely determined by the various identity categories you happen to fall into. If your intersecting identities put you in the ”privileged” box, you are considered an oppressor by virtue of existing (regardless of your actions, and regardless of the actual circumstances of your life), which means everybody else has a permanent blank check to attack you in the name of ”punching up”, and you don’t have a right to stand up for yourself.

While Critical Race Theory (the lens through which matters of race and ethnicity are analyzed) does not allow you to “identify out of” your whiteness (and hence your responsibility for systemic racism), Queer Theory (the lens through which matters of gender and sexual orientation are analyzed) does allow you to identify out of your “gender” which has, for all intents and purposes, replaced biological sex as a category in woke orthodoxy. Hence, if you’re a straight, white, able-bodied (etc.) kid, pretty much your only way to earn any “oppression points”, and avoid ending up as a permanent punching bag, is to adopt a marginalized gender identity or some kind of mental health diagnosis (another “identity” that has shot through the roof!) or both.

3. The Homosexual Link

Perhaps the saddest irony of the current crusade to medically “correct” young people’s bodies with puberty-blockers, hormone therapy, surgery etc. is that a disproportionately large percentage of them would otherwise almost certainly grow up as gay. Same-sex attracted individuals were often highly gender-nonconforming as children. Especially in a culture in which stereotypically “feminine” or “girly” behavior in boys is still frequently frowned upon [2], it is easy to understand how a sensitive, “proto-gay” boy might come to think he was “meant” to be a girl. But even for girls the pressure to be stereotypically “feminine” seems to have gotten worse rather than better in recent decades, so it’s hardly surprising that many of the more “tomboyish” girls, previously likely to grow up as butch lesbians, come to the conclusion that it would be easier to live as a boy.

Of course it doesn’t help that practically every organization that used to fight for the rights and interests of same-sex attracted people has turned 180° (#2) and no longer even recognizes biological sex – let alone “same-sex attraction” – as a thing. Only “same gender attraction” is still recognized. According to this redefinition, e.g. a “lesbian” is a person of any sex who identifies as a “woman” while being attracted to other people (once again, of any sex) who identify as “women”. To be exclusively attracted to one’s own biological sex (i.e. exactly what it used to mean to be “gay” or “lesbian”) is now actively condemned as bigotry [3], all in the name of “LGBTQ+” rights and interests!

4. The Autism Link

Another group that is greatly over-represented among the young people currently lining up for “gender-affirming” medical treatment are kids on the autism spectrum. These kids often struggle with social awkwardness as well as feelings of being different and not fitting in with their peers, which, in the current climate, can only too easily be reinterpreted as symptoms of gender dysphoria (#1). People on the autism spectrum also tend to gravitate toward rigid, black and white thinking (girls are into dolls and pink dresses, boys are into cars and blue jeans etc.) and are therefore especially vulnerable to the idea that not fitting the prevailing gender stereotypes is a sure sign of being born in the wrong body.

5. The Sexual Abuse Link

A disproportionally large percentage of the young people seeking out “gender-affirming care” have a history of sexual abuse. It’s easy to see how victims of such abuse can come to see their bodies as forever “tainted” by the experience, which must make the idea of “starting over” in a new body (even as a new person!) seem only too appealing. An abused girl may come to see her femaleness as the source of her victimization. From there it’s a just short step to wanting to escape femaleness altogether. Male victims, on the other hand, may see their abuse at the hands of another male as incompatible with “masculinity”. There are also male victims who decide they have to be girls, because the idea of belonging to the same sex as their abuser is just too intolerable.

6. The Porn Link

Even from an early age children can hardly avoid being exposed to vast amounts of increasingly violent and misogynistic online pornography [4] in which women are being choked, slapped, spat in the face etc. for the gratification of men [5]. A certain kind (#7) of trans-identified males (whom the children are taught never to question, criticize, or disagree with for any reason – only a hateful, intolerant bigot could possibly do such a thing, remember!) frequently portray being used as an object for the gratification of men as an inherent part of what it means to be a “woman”. E.g. trans-identified “Andrea” Long Chu famously summed up “femaleness” distilled to “its barest essentials” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. No wonder many girls decide that “if that’s what it means to be a woman, then count me out!”. Come to think of it, if treating women like that is part of what it means to be a “man”, you can probably count a lot of males (myself included!) out as well (#9).

Other males get stuck in an escalating spiral in which they require increasingly extreme stimuli to “get off”. To many trans identified males the road to castration began with an obsession with so-called “sissy-porn” [6] in which males are supposedly “emasculated” and turned into women through endless violence and humiliation.

7. The Autogynephila Link

To most well-meaning liberals and lefties, the word “trans” probably conjures up images of sensitive, “girly”, gay males, as well as “tomboyish”, “hyper-butch”, lesbian females (#3) who only want to live and let live. Who could possibly be so heartless and cruel as to deny these non-threatening, severely distressed young people some special dispensations, even if means making some concessions we probably wouldn’t have made otherwise (being a “man” or a “woman” is about “gender” rather than sex, the only way to determine a person’s “gender” is self-identification etc.)?

There is a problem, however: If you look at many of the loudest trans-identified males out there, they are neither same-sex attracted, nor particularly “effeminate” at all. Quite the contrary, in fact: The last thing these guys can be accused of is displaying too little toxic masculinity, too little aggression, not enough raging entitlement, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being too nurturing, caring, sensitive, empathetic, selfless etc. As Helen Joyce has pointed out, you cannot truly understand how we ended up in the current mess without acknowledging that there are some extremely motivated and entitled men out there who will stop at nothing to get what they want and destroy anyone who gets in their way. Their goal is unrestricted access to female-only spaces (which, of course, makes them no longer “female only”), the way to get there is self-id (i.e. saying you’re a woman obligates everybody else to treat you, and even think of you, as such for all purposes), and the Trojan horse for smuggling in self-id is to reframe it in terms of compassion towards severely distressed, gender-nonconforming children and teenagers. The thousands of young people currently subjected to experimental treatments are collateral damage.

Autogynephilia (meaning “love of oneself as a woman”) is a male fetish or paraphilia [7], more or less synonymous with what used to be known as “transvestism” or “erotic cross-dressing”. Autogynephiles are straight, often quite stereotypically masculine, men who get turned on by the idea of being their own porn-inspired (#6) jerk-off fantasies. So these are the guys who tend to identify as “lesbians” and accuse real lesbians of bigotry for not being interested in their “lady-cock” [8]. They are also behind nearly all attempts by trans-identified males to force themselves into female only spaces, and the narcissistic rage when women’s boundaries get in their way may very well be the single greatest contributor to the frequently cited “toxicity” of the debate around trans issues.

8. The Wolf in Trans Clothing

The standard response whenever gender-critical feminists bring up the safety issues of allowing biological males to self-identify into female-only spaces is “so you’re saying all trans women are rapists?”. Well, no. The point is not that all trans-identified males are rapists, but that they are precisely males, and as such they are neither more nor less likely to be rapists (or voyeurs, flashers, gropers etc. [9]) than other males. While obviously not all males – trans-identified or not – commit sexual assault, enough of them do that it’s a problem. In the absence of telepathic powers you can’t tell in advance who poses a risk and who does not [10], which means women have a legitimate interest in keeping all males out of their most intimate and vulnerable spaces.

But even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, that no true Scotsman “trans woman” is a threat, how do we tell the “true trans women” from opportunistic predators who only pretend to be trans to get access to female only spaces if the only criterion for distinguishing “trans” from “non-trans” is self-id? Considering the lengths to which male predators throughout the ages have been prepared to go (e.g. studying for years to become Catholic priests) in order to get easy access to victims, the idea that no one who isn’t trans would ever claim to be for nefarious ends is frankly absurd. Besides, we’re also told that any trans-identified male who does commit sexual assault is not really trans but a “cis” man pretending to be trans to prey on women – precisely the thing that supposedly never happens! Despite this, the perpetrator must still be allowed to serve in a women’s prison, the victim must still be forced to refer to her rapist as a “woman” (who committed rape with “her penis”), and the rape must still enter the public record as committed by a “woman”. The level of Doublethink is truly staggering!

9. Escaping Toxic Masculinity

To be fair, it is almost certainly too simplistic to split all trans-identified males into effeminate gays and autogynephiles. It is probably also fair to say that not all males with autogynephilic tendencies are raging, entitled narcissists filled with bottomless contempt for women’s boundaries. At least to a first approximation, all trans-identified males who engage in predatory behavior seem to be autogynephiles, but that doesn’t mean that all, or even most, autogynephiles engage in predatory behavior.

Especially among younger straight males, the desire to distance oneself from precisely this kind of toxic masculinity and predatory behavior seems to be a powerful motive for identifying out of manhood.

[1] Such ideas are typically found in patriarchal cultures with strict gender roles and serve to protect the purity of manhood by defining effeminate (and probably gay) men out of the male sex. Despite claims to the contrary, these men are still not considered women, and none of these cultures fail to distinguish between biological males and biological females.

[2] Suzie Green, the former leader of the trans lobbying group Mermaids is on record talking about how her son’s gender-nonconforming behavior was making her husband uncomfortable, so they took him to Thailand to have him fixed. Others have referred to this practice of converting gay boys into “straight trans girls” (or vice versa) as “trans away the gay”.

[3] Planned Parenthood Toronto famously hosted a horrendously rapey workshop on the topic of “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”, the “Cotton Ceiling” being an obvious reference to women’s underwear, that bothersome obstacle to “Queer Trans Women” (i.e. males) getting into lesbian women’s vaginas.

[4] Typically beginning with more seemingly “innocent” (if somewhat “edgy”) material (cartoons, manga, anime etc.) and escalating over time as the social media algorithms keep suggesting increasingly extreme content.

[5] Children are also taught by woke activists (#2) that only a hateful, intolerant, bigot could possibly see this as anything but “progressive”, “liberatory”, “sex-positive” and even “empowering” to women.

[6] The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), whose guidelines have been adopted as authoritative by health services all over the Western world, has held up “eunuch” as a legitimate gender identity. WPATHs website also used to include a link to a sissy porn site called “The Eunuch Archives” where much of the content was tagged “minor”.

[7] Despite frequent claims that the Autogynephilia diagnosis has been “discredited” or “debunked”, many of these men openly admit the fetishistic aspect of their orientation.

[8] The parallels to “incels” couldn’t be more obvious.

[9] Of course it’s not just a matter of physical “safety”. Women (or men for that matter!) also have a legitimate interest in privacy, dignity, comfort etc.

[10] Although contempt for women’s boundaries – which is precisely what you are demonstrating by forcing your presence on women who don’t want you in their spaces – is a major red flag in itself. Even the “gender-uncritical” feminists used to know this back in the days when so many of them kept eagerly citing the “Schrödinger’s Rapist” argument.

Trump is a hero to the working class!!

Yeah right.

The New Republic has the details:

You probably missed it, because it created barely a ripple in the media, but last Friday, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump struck down one of President Biden’s most pro-worker policies: his effort to ensure that far more Americans benefit from overtime pay. Around four million salaried workers with lower incomes are the losers in this decision, yet it generated startlingly few news stories and no outraged missives from leading columnists.

Well, look, it’s only money. Journalists and columnists focus on Higher Things.

[Biden’s] administrative rule, proposed last year, would raise the existing income threshold for many workers to qualify for extra pay for hours beyond the 40-hour week under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Right now, that threshold is only around $35,000 per year. The rule would raise it to around $58,000.

Around four million additional people would qualify for overtime protections under this change. These are people who make more than $35,000 but less than $58,000 per year, but don’t currently qualify for overtime; to oversimplify, bosses have reclassified many of these workers as managers, exempting them from federal overtime protections.

The Biden rule would make them eligible: According to Labor Department spokesman Jesse Lawder, this group includes hundreds of thousands of people who do many types of manufacturing work as well as those holding low-to-medium-level positions in everything from retail and fast-food franchises to construction.

Well…ok…but let’s face it, that’s boring. It’s not sexy and enthralling like Trans Rights Melodrama, it’s just a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little bit of money; don’t you know that?

Guess who managed to block this rule that would have provided those people with relief? MAGA Republicans allied with business interests, that’s who.

The lawsuit that succeeded combined two suits—one launched by Trumpy Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the other by a consortium of business groups. While the business coalition appears broad, it includes big players. We’re talking about the National Federation of Independent Business, which gave over $500,000 to GOP candidates (and a pittance to Democrats) last cycle; the International Franchise Association, whose board includes executives from fast-food behemoths like McDonald’s; and the National Retail Federation, whose board boasts representatives from giants like Walmart and Target.

Exactly: the real salt of the earth, not like those fancy liberals with their vegetable shoes and their cars that run on coconut oil.