Source! It’s this talk:

So I’ll be on transcription duty for some time.

29:40:

…and that strong arguments have been made that it was actually colonialism and the kind of capitalism that it spawned that established the binary and heteronormative framework for thinking about and living gender for the first time. Indeed, if we consider the work of Maria Lugones, drawing on the work of Anibal Quijano, then colonial arrangements are the context and course of a wide range of issues that we think of as belonging to normative gender relations, including heteronormativity, dimorphic idealism, the patriarchal family, and the very norms that govern appearance. 30:24

So there we go, she does indeed say it. Now I’ll have to find out wtf “dimorphic idealism” is.

I suspect this project will take days. My Xmas present!

Furthermore, why is David Brooks a thing? I’ve been wondering that every time I’m reminded of him for twenty or thirty or a hundred years now. The latest reminder was accidentally seeing a few seconds of some pompous PBS chat show last night with him pompously saying words on it. Why? Who cares what he thinks? Why do the Approved Media keep asking for his input?

The Nation wondered the same thing last August.

Take heed, American reprobates! Your self-appointed spiritual doctor, David Brooks, is diagnosing your faults, sins, and self-serving moral evasions, and his findings are grim. In successive turns at the bully pulpits of The New York Times and The Atlantic, Brooks has detected a collective failure to grow up and lay aside the childish things that haunt our epoch: self-absorption, incivility, tribalism, and other just plain rude repudiations of character and virtue.

This line of argument has been a recurring theme in Brooks’s never-ending tenure as a commentator of mysteriously high profile.

Emphasis added. That. Why?? Why does he have such a high profile, and why has he had it for so long? He’s not another Christopher Hitchens now is he, so why?

Speaking of Christophers…

Brooks’s recent New York Times outburst—titled, of course, “Grow Up, America”—repeatedly cites [Christopher] Lasch’s best known work, the 1979 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, as it happens, was my adviser in graduate school, and it’s been a grim intellectual crucible for me to see his work cited admiringly—and in predictably bowdlerized, stunted, and distorted fashion—on the American right. In his invocations of The Culture of Narcissism, Brooks carries on this appalling annexation project—and does so by once again excising all of the book’s many discussions of the central role that the capitalist political economy plays in the rise of a collective American narcissistic personality. Brooks approvingly quotes Lasch’s diagnosis of a debilitating brand of narcissism that leaves its sufferer doomed to seek “neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it,” while of course neglecting entirely to note Lasch’s own characterization of those conditions.

Brooks is a boring mediocre hack yet he’s a darling of public broadcasting and The New Atlantic York Times. It’s interesting that the same Major Media are all-in on trans ideology.

I should add, however, that I haven’t been able to confirm that Judith Butler did say that.

Here’s one talk that fits the description:

But searching the transcript turns up no hits for “imposition” or “sexual dimorphism” and the hit for “colonialist” doesn’t match the quotation. Maybe there are other talks where she does say that, but I have my doubts.

Ok then let’s see you pee standing up without soaking your shoes.

If sexual dimorphism is an observational imposition of Christian colonialism then how have people managed to reproduce all this time? How have animals known how to reproduce all this time? How have genitalia been different all this time? What are ovaries and what are they for? Why don’t babies emerge from men? Why can’t gay couples make babies without outside assistance?

Also why Christian colonialism but not Islamic colonialism? Was the Iberian peninsula packed full of people born via a miracle?

So many questions.

Oh you mean it’s malpractice? Huh.

fter Iowa lawmakers passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in March, managers of an LGBTQ+ health clinic located just across the state line in Moline, Illinois, decided to start offering that care.

The added services would provide care to patients who live in largely rural eastern Iowa, including some of the hundreds previously treated at a University of Iowa clinic, saving them half-day drives to clinics in larger cities like Chicago and Minneapolis.

By June, The Project of the Quad Cities, as the Illinois clinic is called, had hired a provider who specializes in transgender health care. So, Andy Rowe, The Project’s health care operations director, called the clinic’s insurance broker to see about getting the new provider added to the nonprofit’s malpractice policy.

“I didn’t anticipate that it was going to be a big deal,” Rowe said. Then the insurance carriers’ quotes came. The first one specifically excluded gender-affirming care for minors. The next response was the same. And the one after that. By early November, more than a dozen malpractice insurers had declined to offer the clinic a policy.

Gee I wonder why.

Not really. The people whose job it is to think about risk and profit and lawsuits are not going to be bowled over by soaring rhetoric about “authentic selves” nor are they going to be intimidated by shouty “activists” on Twitter.

Nearly half the states have banned medication or surgical treatment for transgender youth. Independent clinics and medical practices located in states where such care is either allowed or protected have moved to fill that void for patients commuting or relocating across state lines. But as the risk of litigation rises for clinics, obtaining malpractice insurance on the commercial marketplace has become a quiet barrier to offering care, even in states with legal protections for health care for trans people.

See journalists are still as stupid about this as the activists they’re trying to impress. Actuaries are probably less likely to see mutilation as “health care” even for trans people.

In extreme cases, lawmakers have deployed malpractice insurance regulations against gender-affirming care in states where courts have slowed or blocked anti-trans legislation.

Is the legislation “anti-trans”? Or is it anti-reckless haste to mutilate teenagers in the belief that they were born in the wrong body?

Five months after starting his search for malpractice insurance, Rowe said, he received a quote for a policy that would allow The Project to treat trans youth. That’s when he realized finding a policy was only the first hurdle. He expected the coverage to cost $8,000 to $10,000 a year, but he was quoted $50,000.

Gee, just imagine, you have to pay a lot for insurance when you’re mutilating children on the grounds that they’re the opposite sex of their own bodies.

The Bridge to Total Freedom…

Dawn Butler v Mumsnet:

The founder of parenting message board Mumsnet has hit back at a Labour MP who has threatened to report the website to the Metropolitan Police after users on the site slammed her reaction to the Brianna Ghey murder trial verdict.

Dawn Butler told critics to ‘get a life’ after they hit out at her suggestion that the trans teenager’s death at the hands of two teenagers in Cheshire earlier this year had been driven by ‘hate towards the trans community’ from within the government.

They sure do love that “hit back slammed hit out at hit hit hit” trick at the Daily Mail, which I suppose is not surprising. Dawn Butler talked nonsense and people at Mumsnet said it was nonsense. No one hit anyone.

The Brent Central MP’s post was then shared on Mumsnet, and she claimed this prompted an influx of messages from ‘nasty, vicious, inhumane’ people on X, formerly Twitter. The MP then said she would report the message board to the Met.

In a statement to MailOnline, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts said the website allowed ‘legal discussion’, adding: ‘(This) sometimes means people will make comments that individuals don’t agree with or like.’

Well then they will have to be reported to the Met. What else is there to do?

In a statement to MailOnline, Mumsnet founder and CEO Justine Roberts said: ‘Our forum guidelines are pretty clear. We allow legal discussion, which sometimes means people will make comments that individuals don’t agree with or like. We specifically disallow hate speech and deliberately inflammatory posts and we have an active moderation team who respond, on average in under an hour, to complaints about posts. 

‘It’s somewhat ironic that Ms Butler chose to post her attack on Mumsnet on X (formerly Twitter) which regularly hosts comments that wouldn’t last a moment on Mumsnet and where the moderation is light touch at best. We see this kind of double standard a lot and I’m beginning to wonder if it might be because Mumsnet is the only major platform dominated by women’s voices.’

‘Beginning to wonder’ – nice sarcasm.

Ah Joly. Never change. You’re comedy gold.

This headline, in The Times, is flatly untrue. I have not been questioned by the police. At the judges’ [sic] request, they contacted me with her question. There has never been, as this headline suggest [sic], any police investigation.

Got it. He has not been questioned by the police, the police have merely asked him a question. Glad we got that straightened out.

Originally a comment by Sastra on An innate sense of bulllshit.

It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself

And yet both gender — and sex — are supposed to be social constructs.

It’s quite a contradiction, this denial of objective categories consisting of the objectively true coupled with an intense belief in the innate and immutable truth of one’s own Identity. According to Yascha Mounk ( in his book The Identity Trap) this circle was squared by what’s called “strategic essentialism.”

While it is important to bear in mind the theoretical fact that identity groups are socially constructed, for practical purposes the strategic imperative to encourage the formation of identity groups that can become a locus for resistance against domination must take precedence. Over time, practice won out over theory, and the emphasis shifted from the idea that these concepts are socially constructed to the prescription that they should, to all intents and purposes, be treated as an objectively given fact.

Thus, the ability to believe two opposing things at once. We’re using metaphysical layers.

It would be a good idea I think for the Genderists to consider the distinct possibility that our deepest knowledge of our heart, soul, and being is also socially constructed, given how our nature was and is influenced and shaped from birth by our environment. All the talk of neural wiring causing transgender identities ignores the plasticity of the brain under different conditions. I am willing to entertain the idea that, given different circumstances in my upbringing and socialization, I might now be identifying as transgender. I might even be gay. If nothing is written in stone, fewer things were written in the prenatal brain than we can ourselves discern. Being extremely close doesn’t necessarily give us perspective.

At any rate, the contradiction between gender as social construct and gender as the inviolable Me-ness of Me gets to sit on the Science of Gender shelf next to the contradiction between wanting to eliminate strict binaries between the sexes while screaming that being referred to as one sex when you’re really the other strips away your humanity. Gender GP’s description of “the true nature of gender incongruence “ is nicely incongruent itself.

Gender GP explains the science of gender.

We at GenderGP understand the true nature of gender incongruence where someone’s true gender identity is different to the one that society expects them to have based on their genitals.

Being transgender is not a lifestyle choice, a preference or a cool thing to do. It is an innate sense of self.

Wait. How are those different things? How is “an innate sense of self” not a lifestyle choice or a cool thing to do or a preference? What exactly is “an innate sense of self”? How does Gender GP know? How does Gender GP distinguish between “an innate sense of self” and what people grow up being told about the self and their own selves?

There’s no such thing as “an innate sense of self.” There’s only growing up and being told things. A child raised by goats wouldn’t have any “innate sense of self.”

It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself.

Woofle woofle woofle. Pretty words that mean nothing. Get drunk on your own rhetoric all you want, but leave everyone else out of it.

People who are gender incongruent, transgender, trans, gender diverse – whatever we want to call it, are real. They exist, they are honest, they are telling us something simple. Society expects them to be male, but actually they are female. Society expects them to be female, but actually they are male. Society is saying they must label themselves as either male or female, when neither feels right. Society expects them to fit within a picture of gender that has been constructed over time, but does not match reality.

Simple and stupid. Simple and crude. Simple and wrong.

No one child deserves any better treatment than another child. White, cisgender, able children do not need to be protected from any child that is black, trans or less abled simply because that is what they are. All the children in your school need to be protected from harm – equally.

Notice what they carefully leave out. Of course they do. They leave out male and female, because that would remind everyone that being male is an advantage just as being white or able is an advantage. (“Cis” is just nonsense.) They mustn’t remind us of that because it makes it too obvious what a disaster their ideology is.

Chip chip chip slowly but steadily every gain women have made over the past 50 years or so is being taken back.

Canada rewards this disgusting pig of a man for defunding a rape shelter. A woman stands next to him while he gloats. He appears to be manipulating the levers on her back, probably trying to make her smile more energetically.

Good law guy apologizes to the court for potentially prejudicing a trial. What a genius.

Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, has apologised after a judge castigated him for tweeting ­during the Brianna Ghey trial about the defendants’ supposed transphobia.

The barrister and staunch supporter of trans rights posted a series of tweets on November 27, the first day of the trial, in which he wrote that “the killers exchanged transphobic slurs”.

He’s not some random gossip on Twitter, he’s a barrister. He’s even a barrister who calls himself Good Law.

Following a complaint about the tweet from the prosecution, Mrs Justice Yip said that the comment was potentially in contempt of court, a crime that can result in a jail term for those judged to have prejudiced a trial.

Maugham was spoken to by police on behalf of the court and deleted the tweet, the court heard. He said he had later apologised to the judge.

How generous of him.

Yet another deliberate insult.

There are simply no women who could do that. Not one. It just has to be a man in girly makeup.

He says he’s incredibly proud. I bet he is – women are incredulous too.

Even a Catholic college.

Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic women’s college in Notre Dame, Indiana, has reversed a new policy that would consider transgender women for admission following public outcry.

In November, a local student newspaper, The Observer, reported that Saint Mary’s had notified students of an update to its non-discrimination policy, which was approved in June. Saint Mary’s would have considered cis women as well as individuals who “consistently live and identify as women,” for admission beginning in fall 2024, according to the college.

Classic, isn’t it? The Catholic church keeps women down in every way it can think of, but when it’s a matter of men pretending to be women (and taking what belongs to women) why then the church is delighted to give its approval. Heads women are screwed, tails women are screwed.

The LGBTQ+ community, especially the transgender community, has been targeted in recent years as they fight for inclusion and equal rights. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently tracking more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills across the U.S. While progressives push the LGBTQ+ community to be protected, conservatives see them as a threat to gender and sexuality norms.

Wrong. There are plenty of progressives who don’t want men invading and taking everything that belongs to women. It’s a split within the left as well as a split between left and right.

Originally a comment by Piglet on Could be.

There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be?

No, I’ve seen this being seriously argued. The idea is that men are faster, stronger etc than women because they have stronger encouragement to do sport, better coaches, more resources etc. Which is why it’s so important to let male people barge in and hog the meagre resources that female athletes DO have. /s

I read the paper and it’s actually quite funny in a way—it reads like an assignment given to undergraduates so that they can demonstrate statistical methods. What I think they’ve done in this paper is the gender equivalent of The Art of War.

A lot of people read that book (there’s this peculiar idea that it’s useful in business management) and come away thinking it’s all too bleeding obvious. Understand your enemy, focus on his weak points, big whoop. But Sun Tzu was specifically writing a how-to guide for inbred idiotic noblemen whose family connections meant they were leading an army with no idea what they were doing, and he needed a basic handbook to throw at them (possibly literally). There’s a definite sense of “FINE, I’ll actually codify these extremely basic and obvious principles so you don’t lose ANOTHER thousand men in another rout…”

Just fancy, being tethered to a phone all day every day isn’t good for the intellect.

PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.

Never mind. AI will do the math for us.

Screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA survey, wrote that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt “nervous” or “anxious” when they didn’t have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.

There are other surveys.

Studies have shown that students on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information from class, that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs, that students who text a lot in class do worse on tests, and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests. As Haidt, a psychologist, has written in The Atlantic, the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention.

One could stop right at that “students who text a lot in class” – why are they even allowed to do that? Is it because they could be taking notes and the teachers can’t be checking everyone all the time? Or because everyone’s just given up?

Oh well. AI will do our thinking for us.

Dawn Butler working the crowd.

But the trial revealed that the murder wasn’t about trans or “the Trans community.”

Never mind. She’s too busy reporting Mumsnet to the police to bother with pesky facts.

Macron is all bros before hos.

President Emmanuel Macron of France this week condemned what he called a “manhunt” targeting Gérard Depardieu, the embattled French actor whose worldwide fame has been tarnished in recent years by allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Really. Why should mere harassment and assault of women tarnish the fame of a movie star dude? Obviously movie stardom is far more important and valuable than the feelings of 10 or 100 or however many stupid whiny women.

Macron’s comments, which prompted swift criticism, came after a documentary that aired in France this month showed the actor making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea.

Who cares? It’s only women. You can grab them by the pussy, remember?

Feminists and leftist politicians said on Thursday that they were appalled by Macron’s comments.

“Manhunts remain prohibited. The hunt for women, on the other hand, remains open,” Osez Le Féminisme, a feminist group, said on social media, while Sandrine Rousseau, a Green lawmaker, called Macron’s comments “yet another insult to the movement to let victims of sexual violence speak out.”

…

The documentary that set off a new wave of scrutiny aired this month on France 2 and features previously unseen footage of Depardieu on a 2018 trip to North Korea, where he is seen repeatedly making extremely crude and uninhibited sexual and sexist comments about women.

The documentary suggests that sexual jokes, comments and attitudes by Depardieu on movie sets were commonplace and widely-known, but that the French movie industry brushed them off.

Merci to Macron for brushing them off some more.

Totally normal.

In the 24 hours since the Colorado Supreme Court kicked former President Donald Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot, social media outlets have been flooded with threats against the justices who ruled in the case, according to a report obtained by NBC News.

The Colorado Supreme Court didn’t “kick” Trump off anything. That’s like the BBC and the Guardian constantly saying people “hit out at” and “hit back at” when they mean “disputed.” It’s a metaphor but news media should avoid that kind of metaphor because it’s far too emotive and manipulative.

Anyway.

Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research, identified “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats, often in direct response to Trump’s posts about the ruling on his platform Truth Social. They found that some social media users posted justices’ email addresses, phone numbers and office building addresses.

In this case violent rhetoric that means it, as opposed to the sloppy journalistic hitting out and kicking off.

“This ends when we kill these fuckers,” a user wrote on a pro-Trump forum that was used by several Jan. 6 rioters.

“What do you call 7 justices from the Colorado Supreme Court at the bottom of the ocean?” asked another user. “A good start.”

Posts — whose images and links were included in the report — noted a variety of methods that could be used to kill those perceived as Trump’s enemies: hollow-point bullets, rifles, rope, bombs.

“Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete,” read a post on a fringe website. “Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.”

Totally normal.

The threats fit into a predictable and familiar pattern, seen time and time again after legal developments against Trump. After the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, a man who had been at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun while holding an AR-15-style rifle. When a grand jury in Georgia indicted Trump, some of his supporters posted the grand jurors’ addresses online. When U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan was assigned to special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference case against Trump, she faced threats from Trump supporters. A federal appeals court pointed out the pattern when it upheld a narrowed gag order against Trump in his election interference case this month, noting that those he publicly targets are often threatened and harassed.

He knows that, and wants it, and encourages it on purpose.

Rebecca Solnit kneecaps her own argument immediately after making it.

Republicans have sought to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote against them and to undermine the systems set up to protect elections from corruption. They’ve sought to give corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the gun industry, immunity from accountability as both climate change and gun deaths devastate the nation, as well as to liberate dark money to dominate politics.

The legislation and legal cases they have pursued makes women unequal to men by overturning the bodily autonomy necessary to make women free and equal participants in society. Having overturned abortion rights in their pliant supreme court, and launched a new era of persecution of both pregnant people and medical providers in the states they dominate, Republicans are now threatening to overturn marriage equality.

In the first sentence it’s women who have been made unequal, and men they’ve been made unequal to. In the second sentence it’s pregnant people.

How dumb can you get?

Marriage equality threatens conservatives not only by making queer couples equal to straight couples, but by establishing that marriage is a freely negotiated relationship between equals, a blow to patriarchal marriage’s demand that wives submit to husbands. Some Republicans, including the new house speaker, also aspire to eliminate no-fault divorce, which would trap unhappy couples in general and abused women in particular.

Wobble wobble. One minute she knows what women are and knows what patriarchal marriage is, the next minute she’s burbling about pregnant people. Get a damn grip.