1/ Blocked so can't reply directly but it was a specific choice on the part of the activist groups to pathologize the idea that people have an original biological sex, to treat this as some sort of forbidden knowledge that can't be uttered aloud. This was always an insane...
2/ ...decision because people understand what sex is and what the answers to questions like Hawley's are. Activists -- not, by any means, all or even most trans people -- have ignored, like, a decade's worth of feedback on their chosen framing. It failed completely. This is...
3/ ...partly a class thing. The people who believe the weirdest versions of Butlerian gender theory and its offshoots tend to be highly educated and enmeshed in progressive circles. The activist/consultant class. If you talk to just normal trans people, they themselves have...
4/ ...a much wider and in general more normie-friendly set of views about sex and gender than you would think watching these political-theater equivalents of snuff films. I don't understand why progressives won't just *stop* being weirdos on this. What is being gained?
5/ As Pritchard is indicating, there are a million ways to answer this question without sounding like you have terminal Bluesky poisoning and while continuing to defend trans people's dignity. You can literally just say "If by 'men' you mean 'biological males,' no."
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Lot going on in the world so it's mportant to stay updated about BlueSky:
Someone replies to the CEO demanding for the 500000th time I be banned (HIPPO), CEO makes the grave error of responding jokingly instead of with the seriousness the situation warrants, it doesn't go well
2/ These people have created a world in which they relentlessly harass and dox and death-threat anyone they dislike enough while simultaneously convincing themselves that all the stuff they do to other people is being done to them. It's truly an asylum
3/ The folks running Bluesky appear to have had enough. They've been getting screamed at, nonstop, by some of the angriest and most unhappy people on the internet for almost a year and it has to just get brain-breaking
1/ After Jordan Neely randomly punched a 67-year-old woman in the face, which led to one of his three dozen or so arrests, several for assault, he spent 15 months in jail, max. Then The Helpers arrived(!), leading to "a carefully planned strategy between the city and his lawyers to allow him to get treatment and stay out of prison."
2/ The traumatized, violent, deeply mentally ill guy got to do basically an honor-code type of deal where he sorta pinky-swore to stay in treatment. But 13 days later he just walked out (because of course he did!).
3/ Then outreach workers saw him on the subway. They approached him and he started pissing in front of them. They called the cops, who didn't bother to check if he had a warrant out -- they just shooed him off the train. Three weeks later he was killed.
[con't] There's a consistent error American liberals make, which is that it will be ~obvious~ to persuadable American voters that Trump is beyond the pale, that he is steamrolling important norms. Voters don't see it that way! They see both sides endlessly screaming.
[con't] Persuadable voter is going to land on something like "Maybe Trump made some cuts he shouldn't have, but weren't the Dems also bad on covid? And what about that weird gender stuff?" You gotta meet voters where they're at not pretend there's *nothing* to Jennings' argument
3/ Gordon Guyatt and Romina Brignardello-Petersen emailed the authors of all five systematic reviews McMaster worked on w/SEGM and proposed inserting language about bans being "unconscionable." As Guyatt admitted to me, this is very unusual language for a systematic review.
"No one can invest significantly in the U.S. if they have no idea what the policy is going to be from day to day" is a concept that understandable by a bright 6-year-old. There's really *no one* left in Trump's orbit with *any* power to deter him from this garbage?
2/ None of this is even internally consistent. He will reward other countries just for *calling* us, regardless of what was said or how productive the conversation was? The man has no idea how to negotiate.
3/
1. announce tariffs, wiping out trillions
2. temporarily *partially* suspend *some* of them because some countries... called
3. retain huge tariffs on largest producer in world
4. *all of this is* re-re-reversible at *any* point, for *any* reason, if DJT feels like it
1/ Emma is well beyond reasoning with, but for anyone who is close to her and actually cares: According to pretty basic tenets of suicide research, it's likely dangerous to constantly spread the idea that trans kids are on the verge of killing themselves over policy disputes
2/ This simply isn't how suicide works, usually, thankfully. In a vaccuum, it's uncommon for someone to receive bad political news and kill themselves. What's more common is for already-at-risk kids to internalize the meme that suicide is a common/rational response to adversity
3/ None of this is to say that there's no connection between a group's mental health and how that group is treated by society. But it's a lot more complex than Emma is suggesting, in part because adversity can cause people to come together, seek support, etc. If you have a