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JK Rowling is right - sex is real and it is not a "spectrum"

Colin Wright
Quillette
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 05:16 UTC
jk rowling
J. K. Rowling
JK Rowling recently drew fire on social media for tweeting the statements to the effect that "biological sex is real." The tweets began when she mocked an opinion piece that used the term "people who menstruate" in place of "women" to account for the fact that transgender men also menstruate, and prefer not to be described as women.


The backlash on Twitter has been swift and cacophonous, and headlines have followed. GLAAD, an LGBT advocacy group, issued a response on Twitter, calling Rowling's tweets "inaccurate and cruel." One commenter wrote "I know you know this because you have been told over and over and over again, but transgender men can menstruate. Non-binary people menstruate. I, a 37-year old woman with a uterus, have not menstruated in a decade. Women are not defined by their periods."

Till now, even the most thematically ambitious feminist theorists have acknowledged that sex itself is a real biological phenomenon, and that sexual dimorphism is an important component of human existence as well as human rights. Yet increasingly, such common-sense propositions as JK Rowling's are now cast as hate speech.

As more and more people refer to themselves as trans, nonbinary, two-spirited, and gender-non-conforming, there's been a push to realign the objective reality of biological sex to match one's subjectively experienced gender identity. In the emerging view, the very notion of males and females existing as real biological entities is now seen as obsolete. Instead, some argue, we have only varying degrees of "male-ness" and "female-ness." And so the very idea of segregating sports (or anything, for that matter) using binary sex categories is seen as illegitimate, since, if no definitive line can be drawn, who's to say a purported "male" athlete isn't really female?

Comment: See also:

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NPC

Not woke enough: NYT editorial page director 'resigns' after Tom Cotton op-ed controversy

Rebecca Klar
The Hill
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:54 UTC
James Bennet The New York Times
© Larry Neumeister/Associated PressJames Bennet, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times, in 2017.
New York Times editorial page director James Bennet resigned Sunday, the newspaper announced, following the newspaper's decision to publish a controversial op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) that sparked backlash.

The Times said Bennet's resignation is effective immediately. He had been in the position since May 2016.

Jim Dao, the deputy editorial page editor, is stepping off the masthead and will be reassigned to the newsroom, the Times said.

Katie Kingsbury, who joined the Times in 2017, will be named acting editorial page editor through the November election.

"The journalism of Times Opinion has never mattered more than in this time of crisis at home and around the world, and I've been honored to be part of it," Bennet said in a statement. "I'm so proud of the work my colleagues and I have done to focus attention on injustice and threats to freedom and to enrich debate about the right path forward by bringing new voices and ideas to Times readers."

Comment: The Left continues to eat its own.

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Books

Total Marxist nonsense: Your bookshelf may be part of the problem

Juan Vidal
NPR
Sat, 06 Jun 2020 23:48 UTC
colored bookshelf
© Marcus Ramberg
One of my favorite passages from Black Boy, Richard Wright's poetic and searing memoir, which turns 75 this year, goes like this:
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
Black Boy traces Wright's development from a troubled youth who encountered bigotry daily in the Jim Crow-era American South to a self-educated man whose reading shaped his understanding of society. I think about Wright's words often, these and others. Especially now, as cries from black men and women demanding agency reverberate across the nation and the world. It feels like the summer of our discontent is only just beginning.


Comment: Bigotry of the Jim Crow-era is not the bigotry of today. Today, just as then, there is segregation and bigotry. However, this time around the actors have switched and it's the minorities demanding they be separated from the evil white people because of how racist they are. My, oh my, how things change yet still remain the same.


Books, when people come to them early enough or at the right time, have the power to be transformative. And for a lot of readers, this is the right time — witness the many anti-racist book lists circulating on social media. We must recognize the inherent value that good literature has, and the ability of language to strike an emotional chord. But someone, at some point, has to get down to the business of reading — as Lauren Michele Jackson writes at Vulture. Simply handing someone a book cannot automatically make them care. This is something I remind myself whenever anti-racist lists start to make the rounds online.


Comment: One can scream, burn buildings, and shame people for not getting on their knees, but it's impossible to force everyone to change their hearts and minds.


Comment: These ladies have the right response to this author's pathological thinking:





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Bad Guys

Glasgow campaign to change slave owner street names smacks of white saviour complex, patronises black people

Chris Sweeney
RT
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:32 UTC
Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow
© Getty Images / PA Images / Andrew MilliganGallery of Modern Art in Glasgow
Politicians in Glasgow want to erase part of the city's history by renaming major streets. But this won't make up for the mistakes of the past, so why bother?

We can't change the past. That statement is so ubiquitous, it's become a cliche. However, it fits so much of what's happening now in the wake of George Floyd's killing.

Glasgow in Scotland was the Second City of the British Empire, back when it stretched so far across the globe the sun never set on it. Its positioning on a major river — the Clyde — meant it was a gateway for international trade to and from the Americas for the likes of sugar, cotton and tobacco.
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Propaganda

German magazine declares Trump's the DEVIL to be blamed for all that ails America

Helen Buyniski
RT
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 23:02 UTC
Der Spiegel, Trump
© Tim O’Brien / DER SPIEGEL
German media covering US President Donald Trump's response to the protests, rioting and violence stemming from the police killing of George Floyd have gone to cartoonish lengths to pin all the nation's problems on Bad Orange Man.

Der Spiegel, never one to look too kindly on the president, nevertheless outdid itself with this week's cover-story, depicting Trump at his desk holding a match while America burns outside his window. The title? "Der Feuerteufel," which translates to 'The Fire Devil'. Subtlety is not their strong suit.

Trump, the center-left outlet proclaims, is "fueling hatred to distract from [his] own failure" and deploying "questionable methods" to secure re-election.

Blaming the president for the rioting and destruction gripping dozens of American cities is nothing new - it's certainly a ubiquitous narrative across US media. But should Trump beat the odds and snag another four-year term, Der Spiegel has completely painted itself into a narrative corner. What's more evil than the devil, after all? Siamese twin devils? A devil walking another devil on a leash?
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Smiley

Comedians must never apologize if comedy is to survive in the age of cancel culture

Michael McCaffrey
RT
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 17:36 UTC
Jimmy Fallon, Leigh Francis
© (L) YouTube / The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; (R) Instagram / keithlemon
Jimmy Fallon, Leigh Francis and other feckless comedians cowering to appease cancel culture are committing artistic suicide. They should look to the comic masters for inspiration and courage.

As America and the UK have devolved to become little more than a diabolically sensitive human resources department devoted to cancel culture, comedy has become a decidedly tricky proposition.

It is within this stifling comedy climate that the question has often been raised: Should a comedian ever apologize for offending someone?

None of the greats, such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle, have ever apologized.

It would seem to me that if a comedian isn't offending somebody, they probably aren't doing it right, and being unapologetic about that is a basic requirement to achieve comedy greatness.
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No Entry

Not woke enough: Minneapolis protesters eject mayor from gathering because he doesn't want to defund police


RT
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 21:06 UTC
mayor frey
© RuptlyMinneapolis mayor ejected from George Floyd protest after he shuns call to ‘defund police’
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, got the opposite of a red-carpet welcome when he turned up at a protest against police brutality in his own city, with the crowd chanting "resign" and "shame," forcing him to flee.

Frey attempted to join protesters who took to Minneapolis streets on Saturday afternoon for yet another rally against racial discrimination and police brutality. Similar protests have swept US states after the May 25 death of George Floyd. A Minneapolis police officer kneeled on the African-American man's neck for almost nine minutes.

When he showed up to the rally, just outside the mayor's residence, Frey was given the floor by the organizers and addressed the crowd.

"I've been coming to grips with my own brokenness in this situation, my own failures, my own shortcomings," the mayor said. He added that he believes there is a pressing need for a "deep-seated structural reform" in the way police operate.


At first, the liberal mayor's words about responsibility for the government's failure to eradicate racial bias within the police appeared to have struck a chord with the demonstrators.

Comment: Yep, that's this Mayor Frey: Warning to the 'wise': revolutions always eat their own. And because ideological perfection is impossible - and becomes of secondary importance as an ideological movement devolves - anyone can become a target.

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Arrow Up

The failed states of America

Dr. Michael Hurt
Asia Times
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:55 UTC
Mural in Los Angeles
© AFPAs the issue of race continues to impact the USA, a man walks past a mural in Los Angeles featuring the eyes of an African-American.
I am a Rip van Winkle - a man out of time. As I watch America eat itself, I muse upon this fact more deeply. My status as a black American who has lived in South Korea since 2002, with no real plans to go back, has seemed strange to some.

But in recent years, my friends regard this ongoing decision to not return as less strange. And in recent months, it has come to be a point of no small amount of envy to many of my friends who dream of escaping the twin epidemics of Covid-19 and white supremacy-fueled rampant racism in the United States.

In 1670, the Puritan preacher Samuel Danforth warned his fellow colonizers that America had an ongoing moral challenge as it continued its "Errand into the Wilderness." But the Puritan "wilderness" was not a blank swathe of land, those beckoning fields of Little House on the Prairie.

To the contrary, it was a land filled with fearful, fantastic beasts and rapacious monsters. It was a moral maw, a gaping abyss that beckoned the gawker to jump. It was a land of moral risk, of spiritual danger.

The spatial and moral wilderness defined the constant fear that Puritan elders had of going "astray" and falling into the beckoning darkness of civic immorality and spiritual iniquity.

In 1987, pioneer rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy made the declamation that America was an "anti-nigger machine," and that, "If I come out alive ... then they won't come clean."

Indeed, neither Amaud Arbery nor George Floyd made it out alive, but unlike most blacks murdered in the USA, their stories made it out - on video. Which is what made the Rodney King incident so shocking back in 1992: the whole thing was on tape.

But absolutely nothing came clean.
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NPC

J.K. Rowling under fire for pointing out that 'people who menstruate' are women

Hannah Yasharoff
USA Today
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:50 UTC
Author J.K. Rowling
© Carlo Allegri / ReutersAuthor J.K. Rowling
"Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling is again under fire for comments about the transgender community.

Less than six months after the writer, 54, was slammed for showing support for Maya Forstater, a researcher who lost her job at a think tank for stating that people cannot change their biological sex, she made similar comments after criticizing a headline that included the phrase "people who menstruate" in an effort to be more inclusive.

"I'm sure there used to be a word for those people," Rowling tweeted Saturday. "Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?"


After facing backlash, Rowling stood her ground, claiming her life "has been shaped by being female" and defended the exclusionary comments while arguing she still supports transgender people.


Comment: Bias much? In woke-land, there is no question that such comments are "exclusionary". There is a ton of semantic garbage piled into just that one word. Guess what: language is "exclusionary" by its very nature. So is math. A circle is by definition not a square. A woman is by definition not a man. You can believe circles are squares all you want, and you're free to do so, but that doesn't change reality.


"I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives," she wrote in a series of tweets. "It isn't hate to speak the truth ... I respect every trans person's right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it's hateful to say so."


Comment: She's right.

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Bizarro Earth

Netherlands to cull 10,000 mink as coronavirus detected in 10th farm despite only 2 animal-to-human transmission cases known in the world

Toby Sterling
Reuters
Sat, 06 Jun 2020 13:48 UTC
mink farm
© REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw/File PhotoFILE PHOTO: A mink farm is seen during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Oploo, Netherlands June 3, 2020.
Dutch mink farms have begun a government-ordered cull amid concern that animals infected with coronavirus could transmit the illness to humans.

Infected mink have been found on 10 Dutch farms where the ferret-like animals are bred for their fur, according to the country's Food & Wares Authority.

"All mink breeding farms where there is an infection will be cleared, and farms where there are no infections won't be," said spokeswoman Frederique Hermie.

Comment: Of all the claimed cases of coronavirus in the world and there were apparently only 2 cases of animal-to-human transmission and so this cull seems rather unnecessary, moreover it's unsupported by the science. They weren't testing for it before so who knows how long it has been there or when it arrived? In addition, let's not forget how unreliable some of this testing is, because it was only a month ago that the President of Tanzania, rightly skeptical about the manufactured hysteria, sent in samples of numerous items to be tested for coronavirus, only to have the official tests come back claiming that a paw paw fruit and a goat had coronavirus.

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