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How did it all go crazy all at once?

Remember the beginning of the abortion fight?

Sorry. Stupid question. Anything older than two weeks is Not Memorable in the Mediacene.

The abortion fight geared up in the 1970s after the widespread use of birth control. Before that, even fully patriarchal white evangelicals didn’t have a big problem with it. Then the shocked realization descended. Women couldn’t be controlled by fear of pregnancy. This could not stand. At that rate who knew how much male control they might flip off next.

The next thing we knew fetuses had become “babies” and here we are. Women can be stopped from leaving Texas in a throwback to the days of escaping slaves. Totally appropriate, of course, for the current three fifths humans who might be trying to evade their primary function as incubators.

The things is, definitions are important. Vital. Critical. Essential. Do I need to put it in bold all caps?

That’s not a new thought. Socrates pointed it out a few years ago. So let’s start by defining who’s human, in the sense that matters to being a legal person, and who isn’t.

Corpses have rights. Organs cannot be removed from a corpse, even to save someone’s life, without prior permission. Compulsory organ donation is not a thing. People are not allowed to use other people’s bodies for their own benefit, even to save lives.

But wait, you say. Forcing women to carry pregnancies is compulsory life support on a grand scale. And it’s done all the time. It’s different.

Yes, it is different. Only women can do pregnancy. Corpses and organ donors might be male. That’s the only difference between whose body can be used by others and whose can’t. There’s no other difference in principle between forcing some people to provide life support but not others.

That train of reasoning shows it doesn’t matter whether you think a fetus is a legal person or not. It’s irrelevant to the question of why women, and only women, are forced to provide organ donation to save lives.

For the sake of completeness, though, let’s see whether fetuses are legally persons. Again, it doesn’t matter if they are. No legal person, except if they’re women, can be sacrificed for another. But, legally, fetal personhood does not extend to, for instance, counting as a second occupant of a car driven by a pregnant woman in an High Occupancy Vehicle commuter lane on a highway. Fetuses don’t inherit if their mothers die intestate, as children would. Birthdays don’t count from conception (except in Korea) but from, well, birth. I could go on.

The longer one goes on, the clearer it becomes that the only situation in which fetuses are persons — and not only persons but ones with more rights than anyone else: the right to take over someone else’s body — is when the body in question is female. That quiet part was even said out loud in an Alabama case.

Alabama’s new blanket ban on abortion “protects the sanctity of unborn life,” with one curious exception: The law deems only fertilized eggs inside a womb worthy of protection, not ones routinely destroyed in the process of fertility treatment.
“The egg in the lab doesn’t apply,” Clyde Chambliss, state senator and sponsor of the abortion bill, said during the Alabama legislative debate. “It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

If it’s all about the “babies,” this makes no sense.

So, in the abortion power grab we’ve seen what happens when we don’t bother to define which rights are involved or who is a legal person. Abortion is not about a right to privacy (although privacy is important). Nor is it about health care (although that’s important, too.) It’s about something more basic than that. It’s about the right to control your own body, the right not to be the property of the state or anyone else.

By not seeing that clearly — by still not seeing that clearly — we’ve fallen back into a situation where women are deprived of their most basic rights. And people barely notice. It’s about “health care,” isn’t it? Lots of people can’t get the health care they need. What’s the big deal?

Now we’re falling down the cliff of the same type of error in the fight over sex, gender, trans rights, and women’s rights.

The main defense, the only(?) defense that’s been consistently applied so far, is in the UK. Beliefs that womanhood is a sex-based category are as worthy of free speech protections as the belief that womanhood is gender-based according to one’s own sense of gender.

And that’s where I start screaming.

Hello? Have you all gone mad? This is not like being a flat-earther. Without any other knowledge, our eyes tell us we do live on a flat earth. This is worse.

Going by the evidence of your own everyday eyes, without any knowledge of math or science, the existence of female and male sexes is an absolute bedrock FACT. It is not a belief. The essence of facts is they go on being facts no matter what you think. You can believe babies are picked up in a cabbage patch. It doesn’t matter. In mammals like humans, they will still arise by a combination of egg and sperm and subsequent pregnancy ending in birth. That’s what a fact looks like.

In contrast, the statement that we have a gendered essence of masculinity or femininity is a belief. It’s a similar concept to the soul. There is no physical, material evidence anyone can point to of, say, a little nugget buried perhaps near the pineal gland which is the locus of a gendered essence.

That’s not to say the belief is wrong. Giordano Bruno believed there were thousands of peopled worlds. He was judged insane (and a heretic). Recently, the probabilities are turning toward his view, although we still have no proof. We have no factual proof of the existence of God, which just means we don’t _know_. A strong feeling that God does or does not exist is not proof. A strong feeling that a gendered essence exists is not proof. It’s meaningful to the believer; not necessarily to anyone else.

Pretending that a fact is somehow equivalent to a belief is nonsense. Facts remain, whether they’re believed or not. Facts will have consequences whether they’re believed or not. Facts must be accommodated so that their consequences aren’t damaging.

Beliefs, on the other hand, just have to be kept to oneself and one’s co-believers. Nobody is under an obligation to participate in someone’s beliefs. Pretending they’re facts to live by just ends in instant absurdity. Imagine a religion (I’m sure there are none like that) which considers nonbelievers subhuman, while the nonbelievers believe the same of the religionists. Since there are no verifiable facts involved, nothing exists to agree on even if they wanted to. The only way out of the absurdity is if one side can annihilate the other. Unless you want eternal war, beliefs can’t be forced on others.

Pretending they’re equivalent also implies facts are optional. We don’t have to live by someone else’s beliefs, so we also don’t have to live by any facts they point out. Except that facts go on having consequences no matter what we believe. Eventually, facts can be stubborn enough to kill people if we’re stupid enough to ignore them.

That’s the once and current disaster with the abortion issue. That’s the train we’re on with the trans issue.

Trans civil rights must be respected the same as everyone else’s. One of those rights is to believe what they like. That’s everyone’s right. The UK is making a start by pointing out that beliefs can’t be imposed on others.

The next step is to acknowledge the existence of facts. One of them is the existence of biological sexes.

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Covid is not gone, not mild, and we’re helping it get worse

The myth of increasing mildness allowed economies to go back to “normal” without spending more money. No need to improve ventilation. No need to provide vaccines against transmission and infection, only against “serious disease.”

But … we had been warned. The early data pointed toward this:

[A friend’s] third bout of Covid was significantly worse than the previous time they caught it.

“I thought every time you catch an illness it’s supposed to be a bit better each time?”

The misleading codswallop around covid drives me straight into podium pounding. A BBC article has several examples.

This year even fewer people are being offered the vaccine [in the UK, but also everywhere else]. … Prof Openshaw says he is not a “doomster”, but thinks the result will be “a lot of people having a pretty nasty illness that is going to knock them out for several days or weeks.”

“I’m also hearing of people having nasty bouts of Covid, who are otherwise young and fit. It’s a surprisingly devious virus, sometimes making people quite ill and occasionally leading to having ‘long Covid’,” he says. …

The official government decision in the UK is to vaccinate those at risk of dying from Covid or needing hospital treatment. This relieves pressure on the National Health Service.

Prof Riley argues: “But that’s not to say people who are under 65 are not going to get Covid, and are not going to feel pretty rough. ..

“A lot of people have very little immunity to the Omicron viruses and their variants.”

If you are feeling rough with Covid – or rougher than you have done before – it could be this combination of waning antibodies and evolving viruses.

So where does this leave the thought that Covid is on a trajectory towards becoming a mild, innocuous infection?

There are four other human coronaviruses, related to Covid, that cause common cold symptoms. One of the reasons they are thought to be mild is we catch them in childhood and then throughout our lives.

Prof Openshaw is clear “we are not there yet” with Covid, but “with repeated infection we should build up natural immunity”.

In the meantime will some of us have to suck up a grotty winter?

“I fear so,” says Prof Riley.

Let’s take these in turn.

Regarding government decisions to vaccinate only those likely to end up in hospitals. This means nobody else needs the vaccine, right? Because nobody else gets sick, right? No. Wrong. We would have heard about the end of covid among all younger people. We haven’t. Quite the contrary. So governments have some other reason for limiting vaccinations. Money is one that comes to mind.

About those evolving viruses:

  • First, let’s consider the soothing assurance they’ll get more mild. Yes, that can happen, as with common colds. The reason it happens is because some people died, the ones in whom it was not mild. The reason it happens is because some people stayed too sick to produce children.
  • Evolution rewards producing more progeny. Nothing else. (If you’d like more information, this is all basic biology. A first year college biology textbook can get you started.)
  • The process of weeding out susceptible people takes centuries. If you’re one of them, the process is not going to feel “mild.” If one of them is your child or your partner, or your parents, the process is not going to feel mild.
  • So, sure, with repeated infection we’ll build up natural immunity. There’s a lot of death and disability and grief and poverty along the way, though. And we’re just at the earliest days of the process with covid.
  • There is one driver toward “mildness” on the viral side. The virus produces the most progeny if the host stays well enough to keep mingling with others, at least initially. Once it’s spread, it does not care what happens to you. You can be incapacitated or die. It doesn’t change the success of the virus. So, yes, there’s evolutionary pressure for initial mildness. There is none, on the viral side, for making sure you’ll be okay.

While I’m on the subject of evolution, let’s talk about what makes a virus become unimportant. One route is it kills the people who have problems so none of the remaining people notice any suffering. The second route is the virus evolves away from being able to infect people. (That does happen, but rarely.) A third option, only available recently due to science, is to vaccinate everyone so universally that transmission is impossible and the virus dies out in humans. (That was achieved with smallpox, and almost with polio until some antivaxxers felt that getting sick was better.)

The key point is how the virus evolves. In smallpox, for instance, production of new variants is very slow (for a virus). So it can’t quickly jump across species. That means the human variant is found only in humans and there is no animal reservoir that can reinfect people even if it’s stamped out.

In covid the rate of new variant production is very high. That means only very strict anti-transmission measures (lockdowns) would have helped, and (once it was available) vaccination of everybody very fast to stamp it out before variants appeared that could escape. We didn’t do that because it was too much trouble and who wants their tax dollars going to vaccinate some foreigners. Now we have omicron variants that are highly infectious. The kind where walking through a room two hours after an infected person is enough to catch it.

[2023-12-21 Edited to add: the newest ‘variant of concern’ JN.1, offshoot of BA 2.86 on the omicron branch, is the most infectious yet. This is not by accident. Viral variants that are better at spreading will spread more (um, duh), meaning they produce the most progeny, which equals evolutionary success. So the more viruses we allow to be out there, the more we’ll see increasingly infectious variants.]

Variants are random. The virus is throwing things at the wall, so to speak. Sometimes those changes are not good for the virus and it dies out, as I mentioned above. Sometimes the changes do little. And sometimes they make the virus worse for humans. The worst would be a variant that spreads while people don’t even feel sick (covid? check), have high infectivity (covid? check), and then a disabling or lethal progression in most people (covid? not yet).

The more viruses there are “throwing things at the wall,” the more likelihood one of those millions of throws will be a lethal variant.

That’s what we’re enabling by telling everyone to get sick and not worry about it.

 

Are there solutions? Of course. They cost money or tiny changes in behavior. Governments and too many people would rather pretend they’re immortal than make the effort.

  • Inhaled mucosal vaccines, aka nasal vaccines, that prevent transmission, not just death. There are some very promising candidates in animal trials and early stage clinical trials (e.g. more here). If governments cared about more than headlines, and supported mucosal vaccines the way they did the (brilliant!) injected mRNA vaccines, we’d have them already.
  • UVC lighting. Ultraviolet-C light is lethal to bacteria and viruses, but too weak to harm people. Those who know say you can even look straight at it without damage to your eyes, although I wouldn’t test that on myself. But there’s no need to stare at it. So long as the lights are directed toward walls or ceilings, or into a disinfecting unit, they can clean room air down to undetectable quantities of virus.
  • Ventilation improvements. Room air needs at least five changes per hour with fresh air, not recirculated, and to pass through HEPA or equivalent filters to remove viral particles. Corsi boxes are a do-it-yourself way to do this until building regulations catch up. UVC lighting can be incorporated into the system to disinfect the circulating air. These ventilation changes would drive down the incidence of all respiratory diseases to mere hundredths of what they are now, just like closed sewers drove down all the diseases dependent on the fecal-oral pathway.
  • Accurate, free testing (at point of use), universally applied, to avoid asymptomatic spread. Number of repeat tests needed for certainty depends on the frequency of false negatives in a given test.
  • Financial support to all who have positive tests so they can stay home and not spread disease.
  • Masking on buses and any other enclosed spaces where people gather on a transient basis. (Yes, masking, I know, how unbearably awful. You know what? You get used to it if you don’t drive yourself up a tree about it, and if the disease is at low enough levels that you only have to do it for short periods of time, like on a bus.)

So, the short version is: almost all the covid suffering is preventable. Stupid money-serving myths about mildness only create the suffering we’re desperate to pretend away.

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I’m not saying anything about The Indictment except

Duh. There aren’t enough pixels in the world for a “Duh” that’s big enough. Meanwhile, with evidence right in the indictment that Trump was swanning around Bedminster, boasting about his loot, that place still hasn’t been searched.

Wake me up when he’s in jail.

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Trans rights and anti-trans legislation in the USA

Since I’m always fuming about those trans “rights” which are just privileges being pushed by misogynists, I have to comment on the recent garbage.

Apparently, we’re doing this. Texas and Montana and Florida and who-knows-who-else-I-can’t-keep-up have been passing laws making it illegal to be trans, making it “legal” to take children away from parents for letting children switch gender, making it illegal for doctors to provide any cross-sex medical care to minors, and so on and so forth and so on.

(If you have a WashPost subscription, Philip Bump has a good article about the frequency of these laws in the various states. As for, as he says, it being “explicitly political, following an intentional effort to elevate transgender issues by right-wing activists,” yours truly pointed out that they’d be doing this years ago.)

These are human rights violations. Totally beyond the pale. A disgrace, a travesty, and a crime.

(Another parenthetical comment, which wouldn’t be necessary in a rational world. Feminists who advocate for women’s spaces are on the opposite side of trans issues from rightwingers. Feminists’ point is that you don’t need to cut biological bits to fit yourself into a socially determined cage. Feminists want to eliminate the cages. They advocate for women’s spaces to help women in our current misogynist world, not to limit them. Rightwingers, patriarchal caste system boosters, and general misogynists want to make the cages compulsory. The two are opposites. (Yes, I’m shouting.) Repubs are the opposite of feminists when they ballyhoo anti-trans legislation. Yes, both want to safeguard women’s spaces and stop minors from making decisions they could regret. For opposite reasons. The philosophy behind it becomes important when they can push their agenda through. Feminist implementation increases self-determination; misogynists just make stronger cages.)

There’s a right to control your own body, to control your own medical care, which is about as basic as it gets. Because children don’t have enough life experience to always know what they’re getting into, some caveats are essential for them which I’ll get to in a moment.

Nobody has the right to tell another human being what kind of sex to have or who to have it with or how to look while they’re having it, always providing all parties involved are pleased with the situation and are adults capable of understanding their choices.

In the case of children, nobody has the right to shut off their futures without knowing anything about them. The function of parents is to support and guide them into keeping their options open. Not closed.

So in the case of desperately unhappy children who want to be another sex, there has to be counseling. There has to be feminist counseling which can help them see how much of the desire is real and how much is the hope of escaping idiotic gender straitjackets imposed by sexists.

Kids being kids, I’d think it’s quite likely many of them would be happiest with being able to experiment. Wear whatever clothes they want, call themselves what they like, and see how things go. Medical treatments that close off their future sexual and reproductive lives seem like a really bad idea. But counselors see the one in a million exceptions, and there may well be some children for whom medical treatment is appropriate. That is a private decision for the child involved and those professionals helping them.

The point here is that it’s never a decision for politicians to make. They can require counseling for children before sex-changing medical treatment (and provide the funding for counseling). They cannot tell anyone which medical treatment to have or not to have.

And, unless the children have made it clear to social workers that they’re trying to escape, they certainly can’t take children away from their parents.

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We’re invisible. Nobody is hurt

I thought I might be somebody!
They tell me I was wrong.
For no one was harmed in the race we ran;
I was no one all along.
Mary Leng

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. (William Gibson, whenever he said it.)

In most of the OECD, most disasters haven’t hit most people hard yet. Covid maybe came the closest. In some of the US some women are brought to death’s door because life is sacred. Not their life, obviously. There are wildfires. Floods. People die. But mostly the disasters just loom. They happen to other people. Even so, cartoons are the least of our worries, right? So I’m not sure why this one tipped me over the edge. But it did.

 

Barney & Clyde cartoon. Child asks teacher whether Shakespeare's plays had men in drag. Teacher confers with standby lawyer and then responds, 'On the advice of counsel'
Barney and Clyde cartoon referring to Republican bans on mentioning anything except Stepford wives in class.

 

Yes, it’s beyond the pale for the Republicans to censor books, to tell people what kind of sex to have or how to talk about it, to subject women to forced pregnancies, or to tell unhappy children they can’t get help for their conditions (yes, I do mean kids who feel trans and I do mean help).

But while we’re virtuously against racists and Nazis and homophobes and transphobes, there’s a giant elephant in the room. Totally unseen.

Does anyone honestly think that the reason men played women’s parts in drag in Shakespeare’s day is that theatres were being bravely transgressive? That the public was eager to stick it to The Man by gender-bending? That they were less hung up on sexist stereotypes than dumb Republicans?

Men played the women’s parts because women couldn’t. Women were men’s possessions, kept boxed in at home, not out in public. They certainly weren’t to prance around on a stage. They could expect violence and worse if they tried to run around loose.

They still can.

If you’re one of the people making that worse, you know what? It doesn’t matter what your reasons are. It doesn’t matter whether you think women are subhuman, like an incel. Or whether it’s because you’re so progressive you’re only concerned about trans people. Either way, women count for nothing to you. It’s the same old misogyny dressed in makeup and spangles.

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Red alert: Republicans say sky is blue

And at once, like a platoon of triggered Daleks droning, “Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate” the Democratic side of the argument is puffing in outrage. Oppose. Oppose. Oppose. How very dare they. How wrong can you be. The sky is lime-green!

The thing about reality is it stays the same whether you believe in it or not. It stays the same no matter how you explain it.

If Republicans say the sky is blue because they spray painted it to make it lovely, it doesn’t matter. It stays blue.

If the Democrats insist it’s lime-green because they know the Republicans don’t even own a can of spray paint, it doesn’t matter. It stays blue.

Seriously, people. You can agree on plain, measurable, stubborn facts without tainting yourself as a believer in bullshit.

And yet, when it comes to the trans issue, the Dems can’t bear to acknowledge facts, any facts, because the Repubs have taken to using a few.

How stupid can everybody get? (Don’t answer that.)

Fact recap: Vertebrate mammals come in two sexes. (The arrangements in fungi and clownfish and snakes are irrelevant to that fact.) The female sex produces eggs and, if not a marsupial, grows the young in a womb. In vertebrate mammals, the homogametic sex is female, with two similar sex chromosomes, XX, in every cell in her body. Males are heterogametic, XY. Women have a 99%+ role in producing the next generation. All the downstream consequences are what humans make of the biological facts.

Those facts are directly related to women’s life trajectories. Women’s biological ability to produce babies could make them significant or make them a very valuable commodity, depending on how society organizes itself. Given the human tendency to get while the gettin’s good, we know how that choice was usually resolved.

Then, of course, once you’ve decided to keep women as brood mares, plus servants and comfort animals in their otherwise unoccupied time, you need a whole mythology justifying it and sexism is born. Once you’ve decided to exploit someone, they have to be inferior (else you’ll be the baddie for treating them badly), and misogyny is born right next to the sexism.

The Repubs have decided to take the path of maintaining the system at all costs. Pretend it’s based on reality by pointing out sexes exists and there are two of them. Use that to justify the whole invented superstructure confining everyone to one of two roles.

The Dems could have pointed out that, certainly, sexes exist. Biological facts require protections and accommodations for women. Larding on stories about it has nothing to do with reality.

But that, horrors, would have meant “agreeing” with the Repubs.

Actually, no. Recognizing common reality just marks you as sane. It’s not agreement.

It does mean that people hear you recognize a blatantly obvious fact, that two sexes exist, so it may be worth considering the rest of what you say.

But no. The Dems had to go all in on denying everything, right back to the existence of sex. Transwomen-are-women is part of the credo, including obvious counterfactuals such as male-bodied people can somehow compete “fairly” with women, even though they’re in a completely different weight class. The sky, they shout, is lime-green! And they’re hoping to make it stick by repetition, just like a creationist or a flat earther or a climate crisis denier.

That does not work. The facts stay the same. The earth stays spherical. Evolution keeps working. The climate crisis gets worse. Babies get made by women.

All you accomplish is to label yourself an ideological nutcase willing to sacrifice half the human race to weird beliefs. Which is a label rightfully belonging to Republicans. But you just handed them your strong suit on a plate and let them pretend they’re the ones who are reality-based.

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Is it all over?

We’re reaching the end of the line. The US Supreme Court looks forward to turning women (back) into livestock.

If you don’t control your own reproduction, you are livestock.

Too many Supremes and a shitload of Republicans want women in that position. They haven’t yet reached the Taliban zone where they want women penned up, but give them time.

Meanwhile, what is the left concerned about? In the perfect words of Helen Lewis,

The right has declared a war on women. The left has responded by declaring a war on saying “women.”

So half of humanity is shoved into body slave status, but the important thing is the feelings of a few thousand people who have the time to worry about their gender identity.

That is the end of the line. When nobody, anywhere, on any side of politics, has a clue which way is up.

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Women might be easier to see as chattel slaves

I’m tired. I can’t even work up interest in the back and forth going on now among the Supremes.

Sotomayor doing her best by reminding her colleagues they have a personal stake in not looking like pawns. Hollow laughter. Ki-i-i-i-d, I want to say, if any of them cared whether they look like fools, they would have stopped acting like clowns years ago.

And then all the yammering about viability. Of the fetus, of course. ZOMG if anyone else’s rights are at stake, anyone’s at all, ever, anywhere, so long as they might be male, anyone!, then of course the incubator has to do its job. Maybe if women had an actual price on their heads, somebody would notice that the property depreciates from the huge marathon of pregnancy and delivery?

So, forgive me while I shout.

Women are human beings who have the right to control their own bodies.

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It’s all the fault of us college teachers

Well, maybe not all, but look at the state of reporting now. From Jennifer Rubin, one of the best, quoting another one:

Journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen observes that “the incremental coverage, the focus on the inside game, the notion of tactics and strategy, and the joining up of the political class with the information junkies” does little to inform voters about major pieces of legislation. We get nonstop coverage of the “sausage making” but little about the content of bills that cost trillions.

And I just keep flashing back to teaching basic biology to all kinds of pre-med hopefuls way back in the Stone Ages. We’d joke about how the students who did not remotely have what it takes should “go into journalism.” (Not in front of the students, it should go without saying. Just when us teaching assistants were trying to preserve sanity after grading endless bafflegab lab reports.)

I’d be willing to bet they made the same jokes in history departments. And performing arts. And accounting.

Because, really, from the outside, journalism (subsequently “Communications”) looked like the one field where you could get through on bullshit alone.

We were wrong, of course.

It’s obvious now that actual journalism takes analytical ability, perseverance, and a rare willingness to be disliked.

But the BS artists drifted to Communications, too many of them squeaked through, used their flimflam successfully in the job market and the promotion ladder, and here we are. Days of discussion about people’s suits (tan?, pants!, blue). Weeks of discussion whether A insulted B. Were there corn dogs or pizza? Was the pizza eaten correctly? Constant focus on elimination brackets, mostly in fantasy playoffs. Meanwhile, the fate of the humanity hinges on understanding the climate crisis and how juvenile fascism grows up.

It all shares one thing. (Two things, actually. One being easy clicks which is vital to for-profit “news.”) None of it requires any actual knowledge. You have your article/newscast/whatever ready to go after skimming TV or twitter feeds, and no need to sprain your brain. And we, by not having the heart to bounce these yoyos out of college entirely, enabled that mess.

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Mandragora swallows the moon and the oceans turn to fire

Is it a prion disease? Have aliens orbited Make’EmStupid Satellites to keep us in our place? Why is this happening everywhere at once all over the world?

Fundamentalists in India gobble up Modi’s us-against-them bullshit and start torching mosques. They’re Hindu fundies, not Christian, but it doesn’t seem to help one bit. Duterte, Putin, Trump, LePen (although the French managed to avoid electing her), Taliban, Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping, the list goes on and on, everywhere. Reality disappears behind made-up stories people kill for. Or would like to kill for.

The top-of-mind recent example is antivaxxers. They invent metastasizing conspiracies in favor of a devastating disease to avoid the safest medical intervention there is. Covid vaccines are gobsmackingly safe. Safer than aspirin. Safer than burgers. Safer than lettuce, for all I know. I don’t think we collect statistics on lettuce. But if we did, I wouldn’t be surprised if vaccines turned out to be safer. Antivaxxers condemn people to die rather than admit that all — all! — of the evidence is against them.

There’s the anti-choice crowd. They’ve twisted “my body, my choice” into its opposite. Reproductive choice means women don’t die from botched abortions. Nor does it kill their neighbors. Antivaxxers are saying they can do whatever they want, no matter whether it kills you. It is the opposite. But words mean nothing now and nobody cares that “Don’t kill me” morphed into “Shut up while I kill you.”

Then there’s the whole melee about transwomen. (Transmen barely appear, which gives the game away. Misogyny 101.) Instead of escaping society’s invented gender boxes, that movement has decided sex doesn’t exist. Biological sex. The method for making babies, which leaves babies everywhere, which would kind of prove it exists. They’ve decided it doesn’t. It’d be news to Silurian fish that sex is vague. It’d be news to pine trees, if pine trees read the news. Evolution could barely happen without it. It’s a denial of reality on the order of flat earthers. (To be clear, you can believe what you like in your own world, where it doesn’t damage nonbelievers. Nobody else has to buy into your sense that it’s turtles all the way down.) But a bunch of trans rights activists (#NotAllTranswomen) have decided to believe in the transubstantiation of the flesh of men into the essence of women, and ruin and death to the heretics.

The biggest and most lethal group, though, is the deniers of the climate crisis. The chemistry that means carbon dioxide in the air traps heat has been known since the 1800s:

In a series of experiments conducted in 1856, Eunice Newton Foote — a scientist and women’s rights campaigner from Seneca Falls, New York — became the first person to discover that altering the proportion of carbon dioxide (then called “carbonic acid gas”) in the atmosphere would change its temperature. This relationship between carbon dioxide and the earth’s climate has since become one of the key principles of modern meteorology, the greenhouse effect, and climate science. … [N]o one acknowledged Foote was the first to make this discovery for more than a century

Meanwhile, right up until now (yes, I mean Manchin), people whose salary depends on not understanding that fact tell themselves stories about natural variation or a hotter sun or tech solutions or that we’ll just turn up the A/C. Anything to force somebody else to take care of it, even when it kills people.

(Just for the record: No, the variation is off the charts. No, the other planets aren’t warming. No, people make and use technology. If technology was the solution, rather than people being the problem, the tech would have already been applied. No, there’s no way to turn up the A/C for all of nature, except by not idiotically warming the planet to begin with.)

The climate crisis deniers are the worst of the lot because they’ll kill billions of people. Billions with a “b.”

So here we are, trapped in alternative “facts.” If the loonies don’t get us for ignoring them, reality will when it crashes down.

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Why Bernie’s BS Matters

Bernie Sanders was talked about a while ago, blathering his usual blather about how there is nothing but class struggle. Racism? Caused by poverty. (In which case, why aren’t poor blacks racist against whites?) Trumpism? Caused by poverty. (But, but, but, his fans give him boat parades. Have you priced boats lately?) Crime? Caused by poverty. (Has he never heard of Madoff? Or, for that matter, Trump?)

Now, admittedly, poverty is tough. People tend to react badly to it and bother their neighbors trying to get out of it. But that’s a whole different matter from poverty causing bigotry. Plus it does nothing to explain centuries and millenia of elites sneering at the stupidity and laziness of their underlings. If only poverty could cause that, elites should be the intelligent, highminded people they imagine themselves to be.

What does follow a pattern, though, is that people make sure they think poorly of anyone they hurt. After all, if the piefaced whatnot didn’t deserve it, they are the bad guys for inflicting harm.

The more harm, and the more baked-into-the-society and structural the harm, the greater the contempt for the underclass who are made to suffer.

In other words, Bernie has it backwards. It’s not poverty that causes racism. It’s the need to justify exploitation. Damaging others causes racism. And sexism.

That means the solution is not to make poor whites richer, to take an example at random. Or to make men more confident of their masculinity, to take another. It’s not to increase the status of the group causing harm.

It’s to remove it. It’s to maintain real equality.

Equals have enough social status to inflict a cost when someone tries to get something for nothing out of them. Without the ability to get away with hurting each other, there’s also no need to label others contemptible enough to deserve it. With real equality the need for contempt to justify bad treatment gradually fades.

Bernie’s BS would make the problem worse, and it sends people hoping for the solution down the wrong road. That’s why his BS is not simply silly.

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Wrecked but alive: thoughts on Inauguration Day

A few things to remember while we’re boneless with relief that so many of us survived the kakistocracy.

1) This is just back to normal. Remember normal? It’s great compared to being in the grip of a tarantula that thinks we’re food items. It really is. But normal isn’t genius. It’s just okay.

For his whole political career, Biden has just been a white male fossil. He’s graduated to old white male fossil, but he has not, on the whole, shown any particular flashes of brilliance that I can remember.

He may start showing them now, when he’s more concerned about his legacy than his future career in politics. We can hope. It’s a good omen that he’s signed Executive Orders on the first day to turn around some of the Dump’s worst excesses.

The times demand brilliance. Remember climate change? Still there. Inequality? Which corrodes every society it touches? Worse than ever because of the pandemic. Plus the pandemic itself. That’s just a tedious, logistical problem that needs people to follow obvious public health rules. Something that’s totally beyond enough leaders and people to be a disaster.

At least Biden understands government administration. That could count for a lot, given the herculean clean-up job he’s been given.

2) Yes, I’m glad Kamala Harris is in the picture. No, I can’t get over the crushing weight of sexism that gave her the place she’s got.

She should have been President. It’s her slot Biden stepped into.

With a heavy heart, I have to agree with all the millions of people who were pretty sure sexism would have stopped her from winning. We barely squeaked by with the old white male fossil at the top of the ticket, even after four years of the Pile of Garbage trashing the country and the world.

So, yes, her ability to make lemonade out of lemons is a good thing. And it may well set her up to be a future president. But the anger is merely diluted with water. There’s no sugar in it. It’s still very sour.

And that’s especially so because there’s almost no recognition of the gap. Nobody pointing out what’s been taken from her, even if it was necessary when the country is still so drenched in despising women. Almost nobody remembering the idiots who said there’d be no difference between Hillary Clinton and TheDonald. (Just a few differences.) Almost nobody apologizing for the blinding sexism that allows them to let such bullshit pass. Very few pointing out that Clinton was right about everything, and that sexism delivered us into the jaws of the tarantula.

Yes, racism is a huge factor. All the bigotries are limbs of the same monster. It’s the unrecognized limbs that can grab you. You can tell which ones those are by paying attention to which ones are ignored the most. Racism is ignored a lot when it comes to getting rid of it, not just talking about it.

With sexism, we’re barely at the talking stage.

3) Last and most important for fixing the problems in the immediate future: Remember that there would be little to celebrate without the work of Stacey Abrams. We’d still be at the non-existent mercy of Moscow Mitch.

She’s the one who saw the solution was the slogwork of increasing turnout. She’s the one who mucked right in and started working, years ago. She’s the one who inspired hundreds and thousands to take on the work with her. She’s the one who delivered the deciding votes and delivered us from Mitch. She’s the one who made it possible to start walking back from the shitshow of the last four years.

There’s a lot of her influence in the first and vital bill the Democrats plan to present, a voting rights act. It could go a long way to easing the chokehold of minority rule on the USA if it actually gets turned into law.

So the main thing to say on this day is

Thank you, Stacey Abrams!

photo from her web page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacey_Abrams
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The Coup That Was

There’s an easy sense that internet violence is just some fantasy. Just cosplaying. Just nothing.

I’ve long thought that was a mistake when it came to the vicious threats thrown at women. That regularly bleeds over into real life.

But I wrote off the radical right wing yammering about destroying the government as stupid fantasists full of cosplay.

That’s the transformative power of not being the target.

Well, these goonies with their GoPros and gear and internet messages asking for the snacks are obviously cosplayers. The part I missed was that doesn’t stop it from bleeding over into reality.

Just because they’re clowns doesn’t mean they can’t kill real people.

 
 

They believed the stuff about this being the beginning of the real war which would put them on top. (evidence: all over Parler)

They had a President telling them to go to it. Jenn Budd:

 
“Trump ordered his supporters to come to DC on January 6th. They made shirts that said “Civil War January 6, 2021.” Then once there, he spoke in public to them and told them to march on the Capitol.”
 

They had collaborators inside the Capitol Police (and elsewhere no doubt?). The “Pentagon” (i.e. Trump’s very recently installed Acting Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller) put significant restrictions on D.C. Guard ahead of pro-Trump protests.

 
When help finally came, it was VP Pence who sent it, not Trump.
 

The rioters constructed hangmen’s platforms with rope nooses near the Capitol.

 
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP
 

Their fantasy included the execution of the “enemies of the people.” (evidence: all over Parler)

Some of them carried zipties to handcuff people.

 
from Phil Bird
 

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the people, “enemies,” being led off to those newly constructed gallows.

The President who told them to go to it had a tent with video feeds and drinks and food and cronies where they could all watch the progress of the Glorious Victory.

 
Screenshot from video from Samira Edi
 

Their grip on reality was so pathetic they couldn’t see that their Klown Kar Koup was never going anywhere. But that changes nothing.

They were hoping for a coup.

It won’t be enough to laugh and move on. They were hoping for a coup. It has to be treated like one. The whole mentality that led to it has to be rooted out. That has to start with evicting Trump from the Presidency now. Yesterday. Anything less shows stupidity about the scope of the disaster.

Otherwise this is our last warning. Next time the Klowns will have more than cosplayers. They’ll have a planner or two.

 

 

Update Jan10: Something heartening: Igor Bobic filmed a quick thinking Capitol Police officer, by himself, as he eggs on a mob to chase him (toward his backup…) instead of charging in to the Senate room with Senators still inside.

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The Abuser Gets Worse When You’re Leaving

So the only thing Trump and McConnell and the gang are doing now is trying to make sure that Social Security and the Post Office and Federal lands and the Arctic and cybersecurity and the economy and all international relations and the pandemic and, well, Absolutely Everything, are as awful as possible so Biden starts out with massive failures everywhere.

Which they’ll then try to blame him for and try to use to worm their way back into power in all of Congress in 2022.

There’s only one thing to say and Jeff Tiedrich said it.

holy fucking shit, the president of the united states is up late at night plotting a military coup to overturn the election and I guess what I want to know is, why do we even have a 25th amendment if we’re not going to use it on this fucking unhinged raving anti-American lunatic

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Say a prayer for the hardworking people

Say a prayer for the salt of the earth.

People working for little or no money to make this a real election.

 

old woman pollworker

 

pollworkers-mother-and-daughter

 

 

workers at dropbox

 

pollworkers

 

recruiting-volunteers

 

 

postal worker

 

96 year-old pollworker

 

pollworker

 

pollworker

 

counting-the-votes

 

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The Wokeus Dei Are Pushing Us Into A Republican Trap

The Republican Noise Machine™ shows all the signs of testing a new rile-up-the-vote message. Unless the reality-based community wakes up it’s going to blindside us.

Here’s how it works. Step 1 is to support anti-transgender issues. It’s the typical trampling of civil rights. The Repub base loves it. The Dems speak out against it. Then say it’s the end of civilization as we know it and, look!, those horrible Dems are in favor of it.

In the case of migrants, it was Caravans! They’ll overrun the country! You’ll never get a burger again! You’ll have to live on tacos!

In the case of civil rights for trans people it’s They’ll get in your school! They’ll twist your kid’s mind! (Link is to Drag Queens Story Hour, so not necessarily trans, but it’s much the same to Repubs.) Big Hairy Men will be in your daughter’s bathroom!

There’s a new wrinkle, though. There’s an element of truth to the trans scaremongering. It’s going to work even better for them than the laughable notion that a few thousand workers can destroy a country of hundreds of millions.

Unfortunately, the reality-based community didn’t stop to check with reality before reflexively coming down against whatever the Repubs might be saying.

Another difference is this isn’t about some caravan a thousand miles away. This is about people’s children. Nobody has any tolerance for risks to their kids. In order to explain which risks are real and which are bogus, we have to have some clue about the difference ourselves. Otherwise we don’t stand the chance of a grain of sense in a Trump tweetstorm.

Feminists: Don’t change biology. Change society. Eliminate gender boxes.

Traditionalists: gender must match biology.

Transactivists: gender must match internal essence, biology is irrelevant.

Most people like to think of themselves as fairminded, and the trans rights movement hooks in to that by borrowing the language of gay rights. When it comes to civil rights, that’s as it should be. But gay rights never took anything away from women. On the contrary. Gay rights supported and furthered women’s rights. No movement for civil rights, whether for blacks or the disabled or any other group, takes actual rights away from anyone else. That’s the essence of it. Rights enable us to mind our own business and stop at the point where they damage someone else’s right to do the same thing. (I have a long discussion on the implications of that small sentence here.)

Some of the trans movement didn’t stop there. It’s important to note it is #NotAllTrans, but it is a very vocal subset. They feel that women, and children, should just learn to deal with it when trans activist issues affect them. And since women are the only group remaining whose rights can be described as a “pet rock” without causing more than a few verbal tut-tuts, the activist message that women should be quiet and make no demands has met with its usual success in a sexist society. That doesn’t make it fair or good. It doesn’t mean there will be no resentment or lost votes in the privacy of the voting booth. And if there’s one thing the Republicans are good at, it’s using resentment for their own purposes. That’s why it’s vital to be clear on what really is fair. To everybody. To articulate which demands are civil rights and must be respected, and which are not.

So the first step, as Socrates pointed out thousands of years ago, is to define terms. I’ve tried to make a potted summary in Table 1 of the simplified differences between the viewpoints.

The biggest difference in practical terms are the highlighted points. Feminists say, “Don’t change biology. Change society. Eliminate gender boxes.” The traditionalists want the status quo ante, preferably all the way back to 1820 or so, it seems. And the transactivists believe deeply in gender. They just think they’re in the wrong one.

Table 1.

“traditional”

feminist

transactivist*

biological sex comes with whole sets of masculine and feminine traits biological sex does not imply non-sexual traits. Masculinity and femininity are learned and called genders as opposed to sexes. biological sex does not exist. Gender is assigned at birth, but that may not match the internal essence of gender a person feels.

how to deal with people who are “outside the box”

force them into one of two boxes based on their biology variations are fine, there are no boxes maintain boxes, but people can switch among them depending on their sense of their internal essence (self-ID as a woman, man, or other genders such as asexual or maverique)

how other types of self ID are viewed

self ID not accepted because biology is a fact, a material reality. self ID not accepted because biology is a fact, a material reality. only gender self-ID accepted       self-ID as a race, for instance, is not valid because race is real like gender, whereas sex is a social construct that can be changed.

attitude to males in women’s spaces

not allowed males allowed in some cases: transitioned, appear womanly, are committed to participating in society as women. (E.g.: public toilets, yes; rape crisis centers, probably no.) always allowed, whether visibly transitioned or not, because the felt essence is what matters

the source of the problem

Problem? What problem? oppression and the loss of self-determination because of gender straitjackets lack of belief in self-identified genders

the solution

everybody must believe in and act according to biologically based gender everyone can live their own way but not past the point where it stops others from doing so everybody must believe in and act according to a felt gender.

*Not all trans people have this extreme view (eg Debbie Hayton, Miranda Yardley, Fionne Orlander, many others), but the most visible trans activists try, often successfully, to give the impression it’s universal.

Views on biological sex

Denying biological sex exists is half the source of all the downstream issues because it denies reality. (The other half is denying the reality that women are the targets of abuse because of their sex. I’ll get to that.) To say biological sex doesn’t exist requires denialism on the order of the Flat Earth Society. There are bacteria that reproduce entirely asexually, and that’s about it. They also don’t evolve much because they don’t have the variability to do it. Everything else we see survived because it uses the advantages conferred by sex. They’re not what you might think. Sex vastly increases the variability among organisms by giving a way to mix and match DNA from different ones. And since evolution requires variability to favor useful traits, sex speeds up adaptability a lot and results in the endless variety of life we see around us.

That doesn’t have anything to do with sex being necessarily binary. Some fungi, for instance, have dozens of mating strains. Mammals, the group of animals that includes humans, are not like that. They produce two kinds and only two kinds of gametes. The larger and therefore not too mobile gamete is defined as the egg, the smaller mobile one is the sperm. In mammals, sex is irretrievably binary.

Biological sex exists. If it didn’t, women would identify right out of being raped.

Trying to pretend away misogynist power structures doesn’t make it so. It just ignores all their harm. Their victims don’t have that luxury.

Pretence ends in attitudes that say having a penis does not make someone male, but wearing eyeshadow does make them female.

Denialism never happens without an agenda. The big effort of maintaining fictions has to be worth it, whether it’s trying not to understand evolution, the roundness of the earth, climate change, or vaccination. Or sex. The payoff for pretending sex doesn’t exist is being able to pretend the whole patriarchal power structure and all its attendant oppressions don’t exist. Better yet, since they don’t exist you can avoid doing anything about them.

Women can’t identify out of being paid less. They can’t identify out of violence by male partners. They can’t identify out of rape. Female embryos can’t identify out of being aborted. The scale of that violence can be hard to grasp partly because it’s so horrible, but also partly because the data aren’t even collected (Karen Ingala-Smith, Caroline Criado-Perez).

Fifty thousand (50,000) women are killed by male partners or male family members per year. (Global numbers for 2017. Approximately 87,000 killed per year total, overwhelmingly, as in over 90%, by men.) 500,000 in ten years. Six million within the lifetimes of many people alive now. The violence shows no signs of slowing down. So another six million will be exterminated within the lifetimes of present day teenagers. And that’s just the fatalities. That doesn’t count women crippled by violence or suffering permanent post traumatic stress disorder. Women have PTSD at higher rates than combat soldiers. (This is not because women are more prone to it.) They have higher rates of brain injury than soldiers and NFL football players combined.

One hundred and sixty three million (163,000,000) female fetuses were aborted in Asia (pdf). The numbers are from 2005. They would be higher now, and higher if the whole world was included. One hundred and sixty three million. Half the population of the USA. Gone because all women do is produce the next generation and take care of everybody. They’re worthless.

On that background, we hear that the rates of murder and violence for trans people are much worse. The trans suicide rate is said to be sky high unless transitioning treatment is immediately available. Let’s look at those numbers.

Any suicide is awful, as is any violent death. But, the high number for trans people comes from unfortunate sources. One study which is the source for widely repeated statistics is McNeil et al. 2012. Although it’s clearly stated to be a pilot study, it’s been cited as if it had bulletproof methods. It did not. The data was collected using internet surveys publicized in the trans community, the respondents were self-selected, and the issues discussed were self-reported. There was no control group. This would be similar to floating a survey on Amazon about a Widget and finding a high proportion of respondents were dissatisfied. Not too surprising since unhappy people are much more prone to take the trouble to let surveys know. As for self-reporting, that’s like asking people in a web survey how closely they stick to a new diet. Without actual independent measures, there’s no way to know how close to reality their answers are, even when they think they’re close. So the fact that 48% of 436 respondents reported a suicide attempt at some point or points in their lives tells us nothing about the prevalence of suicide attempts even among the 436 respondents, to say nothing of all trans people.

Methodologically less fraught studies do not show trans suicides as being any higher than the rest of their demographic group, as summarized by Paul Hewson. Dhejne et al. 2011 found that severe issues were actually more frequent after sex reassignment surgery.

Numbers for the murders of trans people also lack accuracy due to poor methods. Some very high numbers are global and skewed by the horrifically high rates in Brazil and SE Asia where transgender prostitution is much more common (together with other forms of prostitution). I haven’t seen any evidence that those murders were due to trans status rather than prostitute status. Prostitution is by far the most dangerous way to make money. Just as an indication: yearly numbers for prostitutes of fatalities due to violence: 229 per 100,000; the next most dangerous occupation, fishermen: 132 per 100,000 or in other statistics, loggers, 136 per 100,000. All numbers from USA. The outrage would be better directed at the enormous amount of male violence victimizing prostitutes. Trans prostitutes compared to all prostitutes are murdered at about the same appalling rate.

To get a sense of how the murder statistics compare within one Western country, the folowing are from Adrian Sullivan, USA 2016 rates, using Human Rights Commission and FBI data, showing murder per 100,000:

0.8 – females who are trans 1.6 – all trans people 2.1 – males who are trans
2.1 – females 5.0 – black females 5.4 – all US population
7.4 – males 18.3 – black people 32.7 – black males

204.0 – prostitutes (2004 data, comparable 2016 number is higher)

At least in the US, trans people appear to be safer than non-trans, if anything.

On the background of this massive, war-scale violence inflicted on women, the staggering absolute numbers of suffering involved, and the evidence that trans people are not any more targeted than other disadvantaged groups, on this background there are men on the web insisting that there is no real damage to women from making them more vulnerable to male-bodied people so that they, the male-bodied people, can feel accepted as women. This was an exchange recently on Twitter, since disappeared on both @Glinner and @bloggerheads, by Tim Ireland:

  • TI: Why are you so convinced that rights for Trans people means fewer rights for women?
  • Graham Linehan: because of the examples we’ve seen with the prison system in Denmark and Ireland, the clear effect it’s already had on women’s sports, the fact that feminists can’t talk without being harassed and threatened. The question is why are you *not* convinced?
  • TI: … The hill you’ve chosen to die on is both very small, and very far away.

Women dying in their millions are minor and “far away”to this guy. Or inconsequential. Which would be even worse. As if women were just aphids who can pile up on the ground after pesticide spray and why would anyone care?

More charitably, motivated reasoning may play a part in pretending women aren’t human. There’s a problem with insisting that transwomen are women, but then also insisting that they take precedence over women whenever there’s a conflict. In an attempt to make that work, first one has to deny that women are a class with their own rights and needs. Make them something as nebulous as a feeling, and there can be no conflict of rights. There’s nobody to have a conflict with. And second deny the mountain of evidence of violent abuse, so that transwomen’s own troubles stand out more starkly. See Jane Clare Jones for a thorough analysis of this whole line of thinking. If women don’t exist and they don’t hurt, then there’s no problem.

Male violence against women isn’t often articulated as part of a system functioning to keep women down, but there’s not a woman alive who really ignores it. We all feel and act like we live in a war zone, even if many of us try to convince ourselves otherwise for our own sanity. There’s a huge body of evidence that shows women are unsafe. Not bigotry, not imagination. Evidence. If Repubs try to scaremonger women about “big, hairy men” on top of that background, how successful do you think they’ll be?

Republicans are going to win that PR battle before they even start unless Dems can wrap their heads around the fact that women and girls have legitimate safety concerns which need to be accommodated.

I’ll answer a few objections before they’re trotted out as usual. One is that no true transwoman would commit such crimes, so nothing I’ve said justifies excluding them. However, the innocence of all transwomen is not supported by the evidence. (Transmen don’t seem to appear as an issue.) In the UK, 90% of assaults, harassment and voyeurism occur in unisex changing rooms, although they’re less than half the total of those facilities.

Once the UK decided to allow self-ID’ed male-bodied prisoners in women’s jails, reports of rapes and harassment started. (Yes, the link is to the Mail which is right wing. The events are not invented. They happened.) In the UK, suspicious numbers of male offenders announce their trans status so that they’re jailed among women. (Another conservative newspaper. They love these stories. It’s not often they have any reality on their side.) Saying the prisoners are not really trans doesn’t change anything for the traumatised women. Besides, if self-ID is gospel, how can you say they’re not really trans? Do only good people discover they are trans?

Of course, not all or even many transwomen are predators. Transwomen are not the problem. Predators are the problem no matter how they identify. Self-ID is a problem because it opens the door and lays down the welcome mat for predators. It allows any predatory man to self identify as female to gain access to women or children.

There are mountains of evidence — again, not bigotry, not imagination, evidence — that men use deceit to get at their victims. The Catholic Church and Scoutmaster sex abuse scandals are only some of the examples. Unlike the gay panics of the bad old days, which were not based on evidence, women’s fear of males is based on reality. (Men who don’t like being reminded of that should curb the other men creating the problem, not the information that it exists.)

Because some men are horrible, transwomen run a risk of violence using male spaces. That says they need their own spaces without violent males, not that women don’t. Insisting that transwomen have a right to be safe does not explain why women must become less safe. Also, men are causing the problem. So why is it up to women to compensate for it?

Male-to-female trans have shown themselves capable of crimes against women.

Predatory men also use any available trick to get within striking distance of women (and boys) to prey on.

Women have the same right to physical safety as anyone, without the added burden of mindreading whether random males are harmless or not.

 

One peculiar bogus objection is that men victimize women anyway, so why bother excluding males. No, excluding men doesn’t stop all attacks. Unfortunately. But it does reduce them. That’s all the law ever hopes for. You could as well say we shouldn’t have laws against drunk driving because some people will drink and drive regardless. Women have the same right as everyone else to physical safety, without having to read the minds of random males to guess their intentions. So women have the right to keep men out of their public toilets, changing rooms, dormitories, prisons, and refuges from male violence, just on the grounds of the right to personal safety.

Allowing male-bodied people to compete in women’s sports is another absurdity resulting from the attempt to deny biological reality.

Weight classes in boxing are separated by a few pounds. But women are supposed to compete against males of completely different build and be happy to lose championships, prize money, and scholarships.

Flyweight boxers are not ignored like that. Only women.

Men’s boxing has eight categories separated by a few kilos. But somehow women’s sports are supposed to be fair when athletes who went through male puberty and are in a completely different physical category compete against them. This is just nonsense. Why not have college baseball players identify into Little League? They could win everything and get into the Majors, right? As usual with nonsense, it’s astonishing how often it’s applied only against women. It’s only women who are supposed to compete on a steeply tilted playing field, lose scholarships and championships and sponsorships, and act like there’s no problem. And don’t kid yourself, it is about taking away the benefits. You don’t see male-bodied competitors breaking in to sports where those bodies are not an advantage, like women’s gymnastics.

As a final absurd example of pretending biological sex doesn’t exist, transactivists insist having a penis does not make anyone male, but at least one feels wearing eyeshadow makes him female. When the Repubs sneer at that kind of thing to discredit Dems, the reality-based community has to be ready to come down on the side of reality or lose all credibility with anyone who still has a grasp of it.

It’s a bitter pill, but we better get used to agreeing with the Repubs about the reality of biological sex. Then when we say that forcing people into one of two genders is a violation of civil rights, we’ll still have enough reality-based cred to sound right instead of stupid.

Attitude to Gender

In this case, it’s the transactivists who agree with the traditionalists. Both see gender as an immutable essence expressed as a set of character traits. The difference is that traditionalists see them as irrevocably bound to biology, whereas transactivists think biology doesn’t exist. Gender depends only on an internal sense of having it.

It’s worth pointing out that any belief in an immutable essence, tied to biology or not, is a belief. There’s no scientific evidence for any internal sense of femininity or masculinity any more than there is for souls or God or similar concepts. It’s an article of faith. It’s in the same category as religious beliefs. That doesn’t mean it’s unreal to the person holding it, but it does mean it’s objectively unverifiable. (Hence the title, using Graham Linehan’s great term for the Church of the WokeBros who want to burn all unbelievers at the stake.) Like other beliefs, it must be respected in a civilized free society, to the extent that it does not encroach on other people’s fundamental rights.

There is no objective, scientific evidence on which feelings of gender can be based.

Belief in a gender may be deeply felt, but that does not change the fact that it is an article of faith, a belief.

I need to go on a tangent here about rights since it helps clarify how to handle conflicts between them.

Rights are universally applicable. My free speech has no effect on your ability to speak freely, unless I’m shouting too loud right next to you. Then I’m not exercising a right. I’m being a harasser. Rights also have a hierarchy in that some are dependent on others. We understand this intuitively, which is why killing an attacker in self-defense is allowed. Physical safety, control over your own body, is the absolute first right which must be respected. Without that, all the other rights are meaningless. You’re not going to be exercising much freedom of speech if you can be whipped for it. Or lose your livelihood. Freedom of movement and assembly have to both be available before freedom to worship in the place of your choice has any meaning. Freedom of assembly depends on being able to define your own group, if that group has relatively less power. A union meeting that bosses could make themselves members of would not do the union much good.

Those points have direct relevance to some of the controversies around male-bodied people in women’s spaces where women are more vulnerable, such as dormitories, changing rooms, and toilets, as well as those where they’re trying to recover from problems due to men, such as counseling groups, rape crisis centers, or family violence refuges.

One is that they have the same right to safety as everyone else. Two is that women have the same right to assembly as anyone else. If women want to run a music festival or a discussion group or a rape crisis center limited to people born female, the right to assemble means that they can. Having a right means that it is illegal to harass anyone for exercising it. You don’t have to give them jobs or prizes, you can ignore them, you can argue against them with logic and evidence, but it is very wrong to try to make them so miserable they shut up, go away, and stop exercising their right. There’s no way to insist women must accept males without arguing that every other group has to accept everyone who wants to join: Cherokee can’t self-define, unions can’t, blacks can’t. Even transwomen can’t. Nobody can. Unless you want to say that women are not really people and don’t have rights like real people.

Transwomen may want validation that others see them as women, which is much like the many other social recognitions we provide each other whether or not we feel them ourselves. However, that does not confer some kind of right to insist that everyone has to participate in those ambitions. Especially when the price of a social courtesy can be the lifelong trauma of a sexual attack. Transactivists often don’t feel that provision of separate space is a solution for them. They have to be in women’s spaces. That shows the first priority is validation, not safety.

Other forms of self-ID

The feeling of being in the wrong body has other forms besides gender dysphoria.

Anorexia is a feeling of being in the “wrong” body (a fat one in that case).

The “transabled” identify with a disability to the point of maiming themselves to create it.

Race, age, poverty have all been assumed as identities.

Except in the case of gender, all the other body dysphorias are viewed as disorders.

The best known recent example involved a woman, Rachel Dolezal, who self-ID’ed as black even though she didn’t have traceable black ancestors. The predominant feeling was that she had no business appropriating a black identity. A 52 year old man decided he was a six year old girl and wanted to participate in playgroups with other six year olds. Hilarity did not ensue. A 69 year old Dutchman insisted you’re as young as you feel and wanted the government to shift his birth date by 20 years so he’d have better luck on Tinder. They didn’t. There are the “transabled” who identify so strongly with a disability some even maim themselves. Anorexia is yet another form of feeling trapped in the wrong body, as discussed by the always brilliant Victoria Smith, aka Glosswitch.

Interestingly, except for gender mismatch, the other dissatisfactions with one’s body are considered to show a need for therapy, not facilitation. So much so that dysphoria is used in the case of gender and dysmorphia for all the others. I could see a feminist argument that gender straitjackets are the unhealthiest social constructs, so attempts to escape them are a sign of sanity. Although when the escape requires a whole new set of straitjackets, it’s maybe not the best route out.

Shutting down discussion

Considering how obvious all these issues are, it’s strange that convoluted transactivist thinking is everywhere. In part that’s because women don’t count and their rights are constantly overlooked. In part, it’s because it turns out there really is some central coordination. But I think the largest factor is that no other viewpoint is allowed. Thinking critically is not allowed. The harassment has to be seen to be believed. People, almost always women, have been silenced for discussing or trying to discuss their own rights. Jane Clare Jones has written many outstanding pieces, such as this one about the treatment of Martina Navratilova for stating the obvious.

The justification is that any criticism of gender identities is like Nazi hate speech because it’s all anti-trans and it kills trans people. That is, it either inflames men to kill trans people or it drives trans to suicide. It’s never women killing trans people. It’s just women’s fault. Since they call it hate speech, nobody should ever hear any of it.

But if anyone did, all they would hear is women who are worried about losing their own right to safety or self-definition, and who are strongly in favor of civil rights and human rights for all trans people. That’s not really hate speech.

Maybe I should repeat that. That is not hate speech.

Research is also silenced. (E.g. James Caspian, Ken Zucker). A mild response to campaigns of harassment, including major consequences such as job loss, was organized by Kathleen Stock. Many were fearful to sign. In a very sketchy case, it turned out that a trans lecturer was encouraging their closed Facebook group to keep lists of academics to target for harassment. (Link is to an available copy. Original at The Times not freely available.)

“Transphobia!” is the instant charge hurled when anyone says women have rights worth respecting. Just recently, Hillary Clinton was tarred for noting that women’s experiences are not identical to those of transwomen. The same happened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It would seem that’s an obvious statement of fact, right up there with “water is wet.” In my book, excommunication for statements of fact says the believer has a problem, not the target.

Just to be clear: there is nothing transphobic about saying trans people should have the same rights as everyone else. There is nothing transphobic about saying they don’t get special privileges, any more than anyone else.

Actual transphobia would be saying they’re not allowed out in public because they cause heebyjeebies, rather like the male Saudi attitude to women. Or claiming “trans panic” as a defense for murder and having that treated seriously in court.

It is not phobia to refuse participation in someone else’s beliefs about their inner essence. Catholics are not Protestantophobics. Atheists are not religiophobes. In a civilized and free society we respect each others’ beliefs by not going out of our way to interfere with them. It is the opposite of respecting beliefs to silence people, even women, on pain of harassment and death threats.

It is not phobia to live and let live. Women do not have to support anyone’s beliefs about themselves, any more than others have to support women. None of this is supportive of transwomen, and plenty of transwomen aren’t supportive of women. Nor do they have to be. We have no right to supportiveness. We only have a right to live our own lives as best we can without encroaching on anyone else’s right to do the same thing.

Women discussing their rights differs from hate speech or denialism in a very important respect. Women are not lying or being vicious. Women do have rights. They’re just like everyone else. When their rights are violated, they get to identify the problem and insist that it stop, just like everyone else. Even when it hurts someone’s feelings. Even when the counterargument is “Fuck TERFs.”

That is the weirdest thing about this whole mess: the invisibility of half the human race to people who think they’re the most inclusive, respectful, progressive group ever.

#FactsMatter

The reality-based community has to distinguish between trans people who’d just like to live their own life their own way — which everyone has a right to do — and weirdos trading on transness and wokeness to practice misogyny or pedophilia — which no one has a right to do. Because that is a real and valid and essential distinction.

Without it, the Repubs will be able to shout about the Yanivs and conflate them with all trans. They’ll say it’s what Dems do when they insist that anyone who self-IDs as trans must instantly have their feelings respected. And they’ll be right. Both sides are currently big on conflation, but one side sees them as all bad while the other thinks they must be all good.

In reality: no. Trans people who respect other people’s rights are fine, just like anyone else who lives a quiet life. Trans people who don’t are not fine. Just like anyone else who violates other people’s rights.

We have to be willing to draw that reality-based distinction or we’ll be playing right into the Repubs’ scaremongering hands.

And, yes, they will be, and are, scaremongering. There’s the Ben Carson comment about hairy men in bathrooms cited earlier. Trump has been doing his bit with Executive Orders to keep the issue simmering. In this case he’s denying their civil rights to serve in the military. A headline in June of this year yelled, “233 Out of 234 House Dems Just Agreed To Let Biological Men Take Over Women’s Athletics.” (conservativeflash.com/2019/06/18/)

Don Trump Jr. seems to be one of the designated Floaters of Trial Balloons on trans issues. In February 2019 he was very concerned about unfairness in women’s sports. There’s a laff-a-minute quality to Don Jr. coming over all concerned about fairness, but the commonest first reaction is going to be “well, yes, it is weird.” Because it is. That kind of inequality isn’t tolerated in any other sport demographic. He’s been continuing to talk about it, including more recently about Rachel McKinnon, mentioned earlier for their appalling celebration of the death of a young woman from brain cancer.

The pattern of generating support for violation of civil rights by stoking resentment over the disregard for women can be expected to ramp up. It serves all their purposes. They can paint themselves as the real Defenders of Women and Children™, they have a sex-related target for hatefests which always works to rile people up, and they can continue to chip away at everybody’s rights.

The UK is ahead of the US again, as it was with election cheating in favor of Brexit during the 2016 referendum. They’ll have another election Dec 12th (a few days from now as I write this), and the always astute Janice Turner points out:

Meanwhile the Conservatives, who were expected to “weaponise” the trans issue, have wisely stayed silent. Their policy of retaining existing law is far more in line with voter opinion than Swinson, whose Twitter feed contains thousands of livid women saying they’ll no longer vote Lib Dem. [note: The Times uses paywalls, so link may not work.]

If the center and left sacrifice women’s rights for woke points, it’s not even necessary for the Cons, or Repubs, to say much. They can just let their opponents have as much rope as they want to hang themselves.

By stressing how bizarre it is to pretend men are women, Republicans can sound like they’re making sense. Then when they crosslink other Democratic attitudes to abortion and homosexuality, they can tar everything with the same brush. It’s all “disrespect of the body.” The Democrats should really stop helping them create that confusion by falling for it themselves. The difference is that the Dems think it’s all good instead of all bad, but in reality both are wrong.

Imagine if the Repubs succeed in making people believe that only their brand of meddling in the details of other people’s sex lives will work to provide women with their rights to privacy and safety. Masses of women will vote for their own safety. Fairness to gay or trans people, or even to women themselves, is a distant second to bogeymen in bathrooms.

The conflation feeds takes like this piece in the Washington Post, “Conservatives find unlikely ally in fighting transgender rights: Radical feminists.” (Just for the record, “radical” feminists are what used to just be called “feminists.” People focused on women’s rights.) In the high and far off times, it took more than agreeing on basic reality to be considered allies. The two parties agree that biological sex exists. The conservatives use it to control women. Feminists want to end oppressions based on it. Those two are opposed to each other. Agreeing that water is wet means only that reality is understood. It’s the opposite of shared politics.

Unlike right wing BS regarding migrants getting free health care, there’s truth buried in the general bigotry about trans people. The women-don’t-matter attitudes really do exist and really are supported by mainstream Democrats.

That article skips lightly over the fact that protections for gender identity without protections for sex-based categories have bizarre downstream consequences. For instance, in addition to all the problems with ignoring biological sex already discussed, medical research on differences in treatments of heart attacks between men and women could be denied funding for being discriminatory against trans people. It’s probably obvious that would mean continued excess deaths among women. It would also legitimize the current version of conversion therapy which transitions same-sex attracted people to the opposite gender. If the law requires everyone to ignore sex, large parts of biological reality become off-limits.

Considering the levels of vitriol mentioned under Shutting Down Discussion, the lack of loud voices disputing transactivists isn’t too surprising, at least in the US mainstream. (The UK has more protestors.) So the Republicans can point to the Left’s uncritical acceptance of unsavory characters like Yaniv and McKinnon, conflate them with all trans people, and put themselves as all that stands between good people™ and perverts. (Update: Yaniv is finally beyond the pale after evidence of pedophilia and racism and loss of a court case.) I’ll be surprised if whipping up anti-trans resentment isn’t a major get-out-the-vote tactic this time around.

The only hope is clarity on when the Repubs are right. If they are, agree with them. The truth is what matters, not the fight. And then when you have to disagree with them about everything else it’s easier for people to see you’re still being honest.

  • Repubs are right about the existence of biological sex. What they’re wrong about is the need to stuff everyone into gender straitjackets. What they’re horribly wrong about is their need to control women’s biology and everyone’s sex lives.

  • Republicans are right about the need for women-only spaces. They’re wrong that women are delicate nitwits who need protecting. The problem is too many men are indelicate nitwits whose idea of fun is attacking others.

  • They’re right about the need for female-only women’s sports, not because women are special but because they aren’t. They deserve the same level playing field everyone else is given.
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