New dark age

[Laura Bassi]

[Marie Curie]

The future includes trans people like me – whether you like it or not - Victoria Longstaff
Civility between a trans person and a “gender critical” ideologue exists to the extent that civility can exist between someone with a boot on their neck and the person wearing the boot.



I went through the trans healthcare system – we need to let Helen Joyce speak - Charlie Bentley-Astor
You call the likes of Joyce “transphobic”. To this I say, what have you to fear from conversations about appropriate healthcare? What are you afraid of?

[Alex Trebek]

[Mary Tyler Mann]

• The right side of history^[1]
• More right side of history^[2]
• The warm embrace of history^[3]
• Etc.,^[4] etc.,^[5] etc.^[6]

clicky

Possible objections:
1. The irony of linking to the man's tweet rather than the woman's
2. "Hate group"
3. Torygraph innit
4. Daily Heil
5. Don't click, you'll catch populism
6. Clearly has something against small castrated men and the queer patriarchy

[Mark Twain]

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.

Emily Bridges documentary - comments

There are still two sexes

*Citation required*

Sex Denialism: A new religion

I’ve been working on a legal document and was discussing with a colleague about my efforts to find a citation for the statement: “there are two sexes, male and female”. He laughed at the idea that this would require a citation, told me to check a textbook, then realised that this statement is so simple that it would not even be included in a textbook.

And he’s right. I can find chapters in textbooks and hundreds of academic papers dedicated to how males and females are made, how they develop, how they differ, yet very few that feel the need to preface any of this with the statement “There are two sexes, male and female”. It is apparently something that biologists do not think needs to be said.

But of course, I think they are wrong, and that we live in a time where it does need to be said, where some aspects of society are being restructured around a scientific untruth, and where females will suffer...

I do not exaggerate when I say we are dealing with a new type of religion, a new form of creationism and a new assault on scientific truth. This is the Age of Unenlightenment.

See also Statement from British Cycling

* No citation, alas

[sam]

A good antidote for malware. Mind Zeno's arrow.

Stay tuned for more reality:

[Paddy Chayefsky]

Utah Just Became the First State of 2023 to Ban Gender-Affirming Care – Julia Lurie
Some of the bills, which are backed by longtime GOP operatives and Christian nationalist groups, have nearly identical language, suggesting a common template...


Do a search on that and you'll definitely see a common template. Here's a typical example from Axios, whose mission statement is of particular interest:

We launched Axios in January 2017 based on this shared belief: The world needed smarter, more efficient coverage of the topics shaping the fast-changing world. We pledged to put our audience first, always.

We met our promise and offered an antidote to this madness. Now, we are focusing our minds and manpower on a much bigger problem faced by all consumers: the erosion of truth, trust, safety and sanity in news. This is an existential threat to our democracy. It will require extraordinary effort by us and others to correct.

A dose of sanity:
The dangers of gender-affirmative care – Eliza Mondegreen
Rather than bending the arc of history toward justice, the Biden administration has put the full force of the federal government behind a treatment model that amounts to little more than an unregulated medical experiment on vulnerable children and adolescents. Don’t let the language of civil rights fool you.

Ah, language.

Back in 2016 IPSO issued some ‘guidance’ regarding the reporting of stories involving transgender individuals. This guidance, like transgender guidance introduced elsewhere (eg The Equal Treatment Benchbook for the judiciary) was pretty much entirely written by trans activists and implemented without consulting anyone else or thinking through the inevitable consequences (the road to hell really IS paved with good intentions)...

Speaking of hell, the devil herself:

Thomas Paine, whose birthday it is along with Chayefsky's, said "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." The forces of darkness are giving it their best shot.

[Barbara Tuchman]

There's a better way to treat trans prisoners – Janice Turner
Mark it in your diary: the bicentenary of the Gaols Act 1823. The work of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, this landmark law mandated sex-segregated prisons with female inmates guarded by female wardens. When women were incarcerated among men, Fry observed, they were exploited, terrified and raped. She established a principle which became enshrined in international law, from UN protocols to the Geneva conventions. How, then, was history rewound, 200 years of evidence memory-holed...?

Template for risk assessment
"For several years we wrote, researched, asked questions, tried to raise awareness. We were monstered, silenced, mocked, belittled and ignored. And now here we are."

Jeopardy
What percentage of transwomen in Canadian jails are sexual offenders?

The idea that males could ever belong in the female estate, that there is ever a context where that is reasonable and acceptable, is predicted entirely on meeting the male need.

This whole mess exists because of this fantasy that some males have an inner mental thingyness that makes them "actually" women so the right place for them is with other women. So now we have the cost and worry, case by case, on how we square the circle of fitting male people into structures that were never intended to be mixed sex, and how we judge just who has the right inner thingyness to qualify, and who is genuine but deluded, and who is just faking. (And forgive me if I don't think "wait till he rapes someone" is the best way of doing that.)

But the thing is, even if this thingyness in truth exists, even there is a root cause, a difference in these men which makes them genuinely different to other males, the jump that this "thingyness" is actually womanhood, and it is this, not the undeniable and inescapable fact of our bodies, that determines the challenges female people face is ludicrous. Laughably inane.

The fantasy that these men could ever be more appropriately housed as women simply does not stand even the smallest of critical thought. But take away that fantasy, and why would anyone ever even need to find a "fair" way to accommodate men in female-only spaces in the first place?

[Clark Gable]

A Message to Those Recently Opining on a Risk to Women Prisoners – Vanessa McCulloch
Fuck all those who abused the concept of inclusion in order to destroy women’s rights, and patronisingly used this word to sneer at and lecture women who sought to debate the consequences of flat-earth gender policies. Fuck those who invoked Section 28, and the fight for equal marriage in disingenuous and ill-thought out analogies, especially those who weren’t even born at the time and can’t be arsed reading the truth. Fuck Stonewall, grinding away like Dickensian Chancery, to line its own pockets with glitter bucks from vacuous “diversity” schemes and unicorn training workshops. Fuck the universities that let them in and helped them hold down a fluffy pillow on the face of educational discourse.

A list of Rowling's transphobic tweets. "I shall file your lost admiration in the box where I keep my missing fucks."

Allow me to direct your attention to Mara Nale-Joakim's gender critical jargon-buster. A single fucked up entry will suffice:

Women’s services. Services such as women’s shelters, women’s refuges, or RCCs. As the GC narative goes, those services were ‘set up by women for women’ after ‘women fought for them for many years’, but were later ‘hijacked’ by ‘men’ who put on ‘skirts’ and ‘invaded’ them. A big problem for GCs is the millions of women who disagree and object to their, frankly, unacceptable rhetoric and conspiracy theories about transgender people and believe in trans inclusion. This includes many of the decision-makers in ‘women’s services’, a significant subset of which provide services to trans women. By the Equality Act of 2010 they are allowed to do this, as the decision on whether to include or exclude trans women is left to the provider. Rather than work on setting up alternatives of their own, GCs prefer to take women’s services to court demanding ‘single sex provision’ making the cash-strapped services spend on lawyers money that could be used to help vulnerable women. The justification for this is to allege a ‘stab in the back’ narrative: supposedly women in the long-forgotten past set up those services only for cis women but their cause was later betrayed by more recent administrators who ‘sold out’ to the ‘TRAs’. No historic evidence is offered that the people who set the services up were trans-exclusionary.

[sam]

The crucifixion of Kate Forbes - Kathleen Stock
What we have here is a clash of two religions. One of them is full of sanctimonious, swivel-eyed moral scolds, rooting out heresy and trying to indoctrinate everybody into their fantastic way of thinking. The other is a branch of Calvinism. One of them asks “what would Jesus do?” and the other “what would Owen Jones think?”. Faced with a choice between their representatives on earth, I know which kind I would prefer to see in high office.

Lost friends because I am not a believer

...it’s not something the majority of people give much thought to yet.

I've been surprised at the number of people I talk to who haven't given it much thought but who believe and are prepared to argue (some of them quite passionately) that:
men can be a sort of woman;
"intersex" means a male-female hybrid;
women prisoners/patients/refuge clients are responsible for the well-being of male prisoners/patients/refuge clients.

They still talk to me, but they say: "I'll bet you support Donald Trump", and "how does it affect you?" and "you've become a right-wing bigot". Many of them are intelligent and academically inclined, and I see that that doesn't make a person invulnerable to propaganda.