This in an ongoing theme, or pair of themes or set of nested themes – the selectivity of concerns about violence, slaughter, rape, genocide, torture, kidnapping, massacres.

One place you really don’t want to see that kind of selectivity is the UN.

George Santos too much even for some Republicans.

The difference between the first two unsuccessful expulsion attempts and this one was the release of a damning ethics committee report that provided extensive details of alleged misconduct by Mr Santos.

“Damning” may be an understatement, in fact. The 56-page report detailed “substantial evidence” of corruption, fraud and misuse of campaign funds that included personal expenditures on clothing, Botox treatments and OnlyFans, a platform where users pay for content, including pornography.

Hahahahahaha botox and porn. What a twerp.

When combined with Mr Santos’s well-established lying about his personal history during his 2022 congressional campaign and his multi-count federal indictment for money laundering, fraud, identity theft and falsifying documents, a near majority of House Republicans had more than enough cover to finally abandon their colleague.

Oh is that all it took. How very ethical they are.

He can still enjoy the privileges afforded former members of Congress who leave under less controversial circumstances. As long as he isn’t criminally convicted, and doesn’t work as a foreign lobbyist or advocate for a specific piece of legislation, he will be able to stroll the halls of the Congress and access the floor of the House of Representatives. He can dine in the exclusive House restaurant, exercise in the Capitol gym and borrow books from the Library of Congress.

And no work to do! Win-win!

This is how they talk about the woman they pay to gestate a baby for them:

The egg donor. Them. That person. Someone.

And then the consumerist box ticking – must be both gorgeous and brilliant. Nothing but the best for team Manufacture a Baby!

Oh my god.

First I saw this:

So I dug around (had to dig since U of T had closed everything) and found this:

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women

which has the subtitle

Care, Healing, and Justice: Addressing Transmisogyny and Ending Gender-Based Violence for All

Even on this one day, even when they’re pretending to talk about violence against women, even then they make it about men who call themselves women. Even then.

U of T smugly goes on:

On December 6, U of T joins communities across Canada in remembering the 14 women killed in a devastating act of misogyny at the engineering school at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989. 

This event is co-hosted by the Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office, the Community Safety Office, the Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Office at UTM, the Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Office at UTSC, the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Hart House, The Division of People Strategy, Equity, & Culture, the Institutional Equity Office, the Sexual and Gender Diversity Office, and the Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Centre. 

Anti-racism, safety, equity, people, gender – but not one appearance of the word “woman” or “women” – as if it’s become the worst blasphemy and filth in the language. But oh yes this is still National Day of Blah Blah Blah about women.

Keynote

CARE, HEALING, AND JUSTICE: ADDRESSING TRANSMISOGYNY AND ENDING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE FOR ALL

This event will include a keynote presentation from a Toronto-based writer and performer on the rise in transmisogyny and violence against queer and trans women globally. Together, we will co-create a space for healing, and move towards meaningful, intersectional action that prioritizes an end to gender-based violence for all.

Keynote. A keynote from a man, talking about men, on a day – the only day – intended as a day to talk about women.

It’s a deliberate punch in the face. They must all be laughing themselves silly.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Define “suitable”.

… there’s an exercise at the end. It’s a Gender Comparison Activity. Children are asked to write down things which make them feel like the gender they are – like the way they dress, their favourite colours, the way they act, the games and toys they like to play with. Then they’re asked to make a separate list of things which are associated with the opposite gender – like if they are a boy but they like to play with dolls (that is the actual example given).

Then the children are asked to think whether those lists make them feel any differently about their gender.

If they weren’t thinking about themselves and what they like in terms of conforming to gender stereotypes before, they will be now.

Earlier in the book there’s a section on how it’s fine for men and women to break gender stereotypes ( man wearing make up, woman with toolbox) and if all the other stuff about transgender identities was eliminated, I could see the above exercise helping drive home the point about non-conformity. That is, I could see it helping if it didn’t mention how these things make us “feel the gender we are.” And I could imagine it being useful if we weren’t talking about young children at a stage of development which makes them much more likely to be impressed by the lists of What Boys Are Like and What Girls Are Like than a follow-up mention that oh, hey, no, they’re not… always.

Add in the trans stuff and it absolutely reinforces gender stereotypes. Even adults can’t describe what makes a trans person who doesn’t conform to the socially constructed beliefs about gender nevertheless identify as trans. It’s like describing God — if you haven’t experienced it, you can’t understand it. What’s concrete and comprehensible, on the other hand, is stereotypes.

The steadfast belief that children and teens simply could not be influenced into thinking they’re trans if they’re not really trans reminds me of the similar conviction regarding children and sexual molestation during the Satanic Panic and similar panics on child abuse. No matter what leading questions were asked or what coercive techniques were used over what amount of time, a five year old would never say someone touched them inappropriately if it didn’t happen. Never — it’s like a special gift of clarity and purity that rises above the massive evidence we have on psychological influence under social pressure.

Thus, kids who aren’t trans absolutely know their gender with the unerring accuracy of those who know their true gender doesn’t match up to what others see. Perhaps that’s why the book skips over defining critical terms. The kids already know, having burst upon this world trailing clouds of gender. The lesson is only to jog their memory.

Very Romantic.

Really? They’re going with that? “No safeguarding for children in schools!!!” They think that’s a good move?

What we say not what we do.

King Charles III challenged a gathering of world leaders to take “genuine transformational action” to slow the spiral of greenhouse gas emissions, declaring that “the hope of the world rests on the decisions you must take.”

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, Charles listed a cascade of climate-related natural disasters that had afflicted the world in the last year: wildfires in Canada; floods in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; cyclones in the Pacific; and a drought in East Africa.

He’s not wrong, of course, but…

For Charles, who was asked by the British government not to attend the 2022 COP meeting in Egypt, this was a high-profile return to the stage on an issue he has championed since before climate change was part of everyday vocabulary.

…

“I’ve spent a large proportion of my life trying to warn of the existential threats facing us,” said Charles, who recently turned 75. But despite his efforts, he noted that “there is 30 percent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now then there was” when he first began warning about greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes but…

Of course. Of course some horses are tigers. Of course some cars are hammers. Of course some trees are daffodils. Of course some people are witches. Of course we can just announce that words now mean something new and absurd and order everyone to agree with us on pain of banishment.

This is a book for FIVE year olds??

 When I saw that Jessica Kingsley were publishing a new book for children on gender, I was immediately interested. Jessica Kingsley are a respected publisher who often produce specialist psychology books. They have a solid reputation and I have many colleagues who have published books with them. I was predisposed to liking the book.

I order The Gender Book. It is advertised as suitable for five to twelve year olds, but the illustrations make it clear that it’s focused more on the younger kids. It’s brightly coloured and looks like lots of other picture books. The characters are ethnically diverse and wide-eyed. Two of them, Casey and Ellie, are our guides. They start off by telling us their pronouns.

Little kids don’t think in terms of “pronouns,” let alone luxury personalized pronouns.

There’s only one mention of biological sex in this book. It’s this.  “When each person is born, they’re given an assigned gender at birth based on their perceived biological sex. Generally this gender will be either male or female’. 

Excuse me? In a book for young children? Wtf is an “assigned gender” to a small child? It’s nonsense to sane adults, but to little kids it’s just jabberwocky. And as for “perceived biological sex”…come on. That one word “perceived” stands for a tricky abstract concept that is way beyond the ken of a 5 or 6 or 7.

The language seems quite complicated for five-year-olds, and I wonder how they’ll explain ‘perceived biological sex’. They don’t.

Understatement. It’s absurdly complicated for fives.

In the next page we’re told that being assigned male or female at birth is determined by chromosomes, but there’s no explanation of reproductive differences or what being male or female actually means.

Fives know all about chromosomes do they?

From here on in it gets more confusing.  We’re told that people can be gender non-conforming – the picture shows a man with long hair and make up, and a woman with short hair and a tool box. Then we learn about cis people and trans people, there’s a cis man baking cookies and a transwoman knitting.  We’re told that there’s a difference between gender identity and gender expression. The gender identity is the ‘gender that most feels like ours’ – but how do we know? What does it mean to feel like a male or female? The book doesn’t explain.

The book continues to throw confusing statements at us. We meet new people, one of them is agender, another is greygender. It’s not clear what any of it means or why a person might decide that that is the right label for them. We’re told that 1.7% of people are ‘intersex’, which seems a bit complicated for young children who may not yet have learned how to add and subtract – but it’s also wrong. This statistic is often quoted and is not backed up by evidence because the definition used for ‘intersex’ is not a valid one. The real figure is 0.018%.

Enough. Throw it all away. Give the kids Pooh and Tigger, Laura and Mary and Ma and Pa, Ballet Shoes, Mary Poppins, Swallows and Amazons. Let kids be kids.

The gag order tells Trump not to shout insults and threats at the judge and his staff, so what does our resourceful monstrosity do? He shouts insults at the judge’s wife. Of course he does.

Trump on Wednesday attacked Dawn Engoron, the wife of the judge, Arthur Engoron, and the judge’s clerk, on his social media platform Truth Social.

He called Dawn Engoron a “Trump hating wife” and said that she and Arthur Engoron’s law clerk had “taken over control of the New York State Witch Hunt Trial aimed at me, my family, and the Republican Party”.

On Thursday, the gag order against him, which had been paused two weeks ago, was reinstated, but it did not stop Trump lashing out further. The order only specifies comments about members of Judge Engoron’s staff, not his family.

Trump posted screenshots of vulgar and profane anti-Trump messages on X, formerly known as Twitter, purported to have been made by Dawn Engoron – prompting her swiftly to assert that she does not have an account.

“I do not have a Twitter account. This is not me. I have not posted any anti-Trump messages,” Dawn Engoron told Newsweek.

It’s a wonder he didn’t call her a bitch and a slut and a whore.

One meme shows Trump digitally altered into wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and mopping floors. The caption read: “He’ll never be in the WHITE HOUSE again. He’s headed for the BIG HOUSE.”

Trump then added captions to his posts, such as one that read: “This is the Judge’s Wife and Family that are putting these things out. I am not entitled to a Jury under this Statute. Can this be happening in America?”

Can it be happening that we all have to live in the horrible school playground that is Trump’s brain?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on No YOU are.

And I’m pretty sure no GC feminist has told anyone who is trans (or an ‘ally’) to die in a grease fire. I am willing to be corrected on that if anyone has evidence otherwise.

If transactivists had evidence for any of the horrible things that feminists have been accused of doing, they’d be broadcasting it 24/7. They would only need one example, and they’d be repeating it over and over. Forever. But they don’t. They can’t even honestly report the actual words of JKR, because they’re completely innocuous. But because she says “No” she is bigoted, subhuman scum. If she was a tenth as evil as her reputation amongst trans activists (and the Three Ingrates she made rich and famous), she’d already be serving multiple life sentences for crimes against humanity.

Despite their desperate oppression envy, the threats, bullying, and violence are all in the other direction. Do women stalk and harass transactivists? No. Do they try to get trans meetings and events cancelled, or disrupt them when they can’t? No. Do women regularly assault transactivists, and openly call for their murder on their placards and online-purchased apparel? No. So transactivists have to resort to dogwhistles, innuendo, and subtext (in which “misgendering,” for example, can be indicative of anything and everything up to and including “trans genocide”). But trans activism’s awfulness to women is the gift that keeps on giving. They keep doing and saying horrible things, perpetually refreshing the ever-growing compendium of examples of terrible behaviour.

Wisconsin Public Radio reports:

The U.S. Department of Education is opening an investigation into whether the Sun Prairie Area School District failed to report sexual harassment following an incident this spring involving a transgender student in a girls’ locker room.   

Note the usual obfuscation – a transgender student who is male, they mean but carefully don’t say.

Dawn Matthias with the department’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to the conservative law firm, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, on Wednesday, confirming the Title IX investigation.  

So the progressive law firms think girls should just shut the fuck up about boys in their locker rooms? What’s progressive about that?

WILL filed a complaint against the district in June alleging the school district violated Title IX rules in March, when, according to the law firm, four 14-year-old freshman girls at East High School were exposed to the genitalia of an 18-year-old senior who is transgender.

That is, the school forced them to share their locker room with an 18-year-old boy, on the grounds that he claims to be a girl. That doesn’t sound at all progressive to me.

Lux said the Sun Prairie Area School District does not condone “any student of one sex being present in a state of undress in the presence of students of another sex on school property, or a student of one sex showering in the presence of students of another sex.”

“What happened in this incident was not in line with our district’s practices,” Lux said. 

So it’s not school policy to let boys who claim to be girls use the girls’ locker room?

Really?

H/t J.A.

The gag order on Trump is back.

An appeals court on Thursday reinstated a narrow gag order on Donald J. Trump that bars him from attacking court staff in his civil fraud trial in New York. The former president has already violated the order twice, incurring a total of $15,000 in fines.

The order was first put in place by the trial judge, Arthur F. Engoron, in early October, after Mr. Trump attacked the judge’s law clerk on social media…

With their client barred from attacking Ms. Greenfield, Mr. Trump’s lawyers continued to take issue with her prominence…

Eventually, Justice Engoron placed a gag order on the lawyers as well, prohibiting them from commenting on his conferences and written exchanges with Ms. Greenfield.

The lawyers appealed, and another judge, David Friedman, halted both gag orders, giving Mr. Trump free rein to attack Ms. Greenfield, who, like the judge, is a Democrat. He did so, frequently insulting her on social media as partisan. As recently as Wednesday, he called her “disturbed and angry.”

Unlike the extremely placid and mellow Donald Trump.

On Thursday, a panel of appeals court judges put the orders back in place in a written order. Shortly after that decision, Justice Engoron alerted Mr. Trump’s lawyers in open court.

It’s all so disgusting and shaming, watching this horrendous sadistic vulgarian acting out his sadistic vulgarity in public.

Lawyers for the court system had fought to have the gag orders reinstated. In an affidavit, a courts employee, Charles Hollon, who handles security for judges and their staff, said that after Mr. Trump’s initial attack on Ms. Greenfield, she began to receive serious and credible threats and disparaging comments, many of which were antisemitic.

I bet they were also extremely sexist.

Will it be Jolyon???

If you get mugged and beaten up in the street your birthday party will be cancelled.

No Hanukkah this year for Havering Council in London.

Havering Council, a municipality located in East London, announced today that the annual Hanukkah installation would not be taking place this year due to “conflict in the Middle East.”

In a statement, the council released: “The Council has taken the difficult decision to pause the planned installation of the Chanukah Menorah outside Havering Town Hall this year. We appreciate this is a hugely sensitive issue but in light of escalating tensions from the conflict in the Middle East, installing the candelabra now will not be without risk to the Council, our partners, staff and local residents.”

You could argue that councils have no business putting up religious installations in the first place, but if you’re not doing that but just saying no to this one religion and set of people…well yes, that’s “a hugely sensitive issue.”

Ok Jones has had enough now. He’s angry. You’ve been warned.

He’s taking advice. I wonder if it will be anything like “Dude you don’t have a case. The claims have to be false or else you don’t have a case.”

Yes, and?

Martina Navratilova Says Transgender Women Can’t Be Lesbians

Well of course they fucking can’t. Frying pans can’t be owls, cities can’t be paella, we could go on like this forever.

It’s The Advocate whining this whine. Not much of an advocate these days, is it.

Martina Navratilova, the renowned out tennis star, recently sparked controversy with her remarks on a tribute by Stonewall, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the U.K. Navratilova took to social media on Tuesday to voice her opposition to the inclusion of a transgender woman in Stonewall’s Lesbian Visibility tribute, bluntly writing, “a bloke cannot be a lesbian.”

Oooh how rude of her to be so blunt.

But we have to these days, don’t we. We’re surrounded by mystifications about who is what.

The former athlete continued her troubling commentary, “No matter what they say, no matter how they feel, no matter how much they try to convince us otherwise. A bloke≠ a lesbian.”

Troubling shmoubling. News flash: it’s a million times more troubling that formerly LGB outlets are now scolding people for not pretending that bloke over there is a laydee. What does lesbian or gay or straight even mean if people are not allowed to know which people are which sex?

She made the assertions in response to a video by Stonewall that promoted diversity and inclusion of lesbians from diverse backgrounds, including transgender women who identify as lesbians. 

Yeeah that’s cute but a man claiming to be a lesbian isn’t “from a diverse background”; he’s a man claiming to be a lesbian.

Her remarks, widely perceived as transphobic, have occurred amidst growing tensions and discussions about inclusivity within the LGBTQ+ community.

“Widely perceived” – well that’s easy to say, but how do you know? And how widely perceived as simply the truth are her remarks? And anyway why should we care? Lesbians and gays were once “widely perceived” as scary perverts, so what’s your point?

We know what their point is of course. To denounce and demonize and rebuke a lesbian for knowing that men are not lesbians. Pathetic.

Endless spiral of opposites until we get lost in the not not not nots.

You can shout “AGAIN” all you want but it’s still the opposite of the reality. The women you’re calling “terfs” are not misogynists (nor are we misandrists, for that matter). We’re women who know that men are not women. That’s all it is. Hate is an emotion; facts are not emotions. It’s not hate to know a man when we see one.

It is true that we reject and dislike the ideology that tries to force us to agree that men are women if they say they are, but that’s in no way a hatred of women aka misogyny. It’s brazen theft to pretend it is.

There’s no such thing as a “transmisogynist.” That’s a meaningless label.

I do dislike some particular trans ideologues, but that’s not because of “misandry”; it’s because of what they are so determined to do to women, as in this very tweet. This shithead is deliberately working up hatred of women by accusing us of seeing trans women as inferiors to exploit. That’s a disgusting thing to say and ludicrously at odds with the reality. It’s the “Karen” ploy yet again – women who don’t submit to trans bullying are rich white bitches who exploit the working class.

Everything is the opposite of what it is. The world and everything in it is trans; resistance is futile.

The BBC breathlessly tells us that not letting men compete against women is a failure to be inclusive.

A top amateur cyclist says his sport is less inclusive and welcoming than ever after it banned transgender women from competing in the female category. Josh Jones, 31, from Cambridge, believes British Cycling’s new rules “fail the cycling community”.

But that’s stupid. Men can compete in the male category, which is only right, because they’re male. It’s not “less inclusive” to keep on having men compete against men instead of letting a few selected men invade women’s sports because they claim to be trans.

Jones, who has been competing for 12 years, has 44 wins across all disciplines and is currently 13th in the British Cycling National Rankings. He believes he is the first and only openly gay rider to hold a world ranking in any cycling discipline, but recent moves within the sport have left him dismayed.

“Dismayed” that men won’t get to invade and ruin women’s cycling.

Dude needs to stay in his own lane.

How to diversity and inclusion: invent some diverse speakers to promote your conference and then on the day say they all have food poisoning.

After an event organizer, Eduards Sizovs, was accused of making up fake female speakers to attract high-profile speakers to an online developer conference called DevTernity, several of the event’s top-billed speakers promptly withdrew.

…

On Monday, Sizovs confirmed that the conference, DevTernity—which sold tickets for as much as $870 a pop and anticipated 1,300 attendees—was cancelled.

The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday. Orosz alleged that out of three women—Kristine Howard, Julia Krisina, and Anna Boyko—scheduled to speak at DevTernity, Krisina and Boyko were fake profiles created by the event organizers to make the event look diverse in order to “successfully attract some of the most heavy-hitter men speakers in tech.”

Which is so interesting because another way to make the event look “diverse” would be to invite some actual women. I wonder if he thought of that at all.

“The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone,” Sizovs posted on X. “But I won’t defend myself because I don’t feel guilty. I did nothing terrible that I need to apologize for. The conference has always delivered on its promise. It’s an awesome, inclusive, event.”

That post has a community note—X’s fact-checking method—that says, “Sizovs has been shown creating fake female speaker profiles for his conferences. He is claiming one of them was a test/bug, but investigation uncovered he’s done this for multiple years with multiple fake speakers. This presented a fraudulent focus on diversity.”

And also underlined his determination to exclude women from speaker roles at his conferences. If you pretend you’ve invited some when you haven’t, that just makes it clear you don’t want to and don’t plan to. It underlined the fact that this is deliberate with malice aforethought exclusion of women.

Orosz alleged that DevTernity’s addition of Boyko to the lineup was “not a one-off.” He posted what he said is evidence from past years of more fake speakers that were advertised at both DevTernity and other events organized by Sizovs, and 404 Media also claims that a hugely popular female tech influencer Instagram account called Coding Unicorn may have been secretly managed by Sizovs.

According to 404 Media, Coding Unicorn bills itself as the “most popular coding account on Instagram.” It’s allegedly managed by a real woman named Julia Kirsina, but 404 Media found that IP logs, a YouTube video, social media posts, and other evidence seems to suggest Sizovs controls the account.

Perhaps most glaringly obvious, coders revealed to 404 Media that “some of Kirsina’s Instagram posts are word-for-word copies of Sizovs’ LinkedIn posts, sometimes published more than a year later.” In addition, “some of the images [Kirsina] posted on Instagram show computer monitors with code that show her logged in under Sizovs’ name.” But perhaps most striking is the fact that an administrator told 404 Media that both Sizovs’ and Kirsina’s accounts were banned “multiple times” by the Lobste.rs coding forum for “sockpuppeting”—using a false identity to deceive others—in 2019 and 2020.

“At a minimum,” 404 Media concluded that Sizovs has been “heavily influencing” Coding Unicorn’s posts and seemingly had access to at least one of Kirsina’s accounts.

There are no good enough women. They’re all too stupid and too frivolous, so a guy has to fake them to tick the diversity boxes.

H/t Sackbut