Incredibly, you can still buy these from the Trump campaign’s online shop.

I have some other suggestions. Turkeys for Christmas, perhaps. Women For Weinstein. Gypsies for Hitler.
We’re all doomed
Incredibly, you can still buy these from the Trump campaign’s online shop.

I have some other suggestions. Turkeys for Christmas, perhaps. Women For Weinstein. Gypsies for Hitler.
The Gender Recognition Act consultation is now closed, thank God. In the short months since it began it’s been used by conservatives to mount a shockingly vicious campaign against trans people. Some 53,000 responses had been received by Friday. That isn’t a consultation. It’s a pile-on.
It’s yet more evidence that human rights shouldn’t be subject to referendums. 75% of Americans were against civil rights for black people. 75% of people in the UK thought homosexuality was an aberration just before Section 28 made gay people’s lives hell. I have no doubt that a similar proportion of GRA responses were anti-trans. In recent years, every single referendum on equality has been poisoned by money and activists from the religious right.
As in the US, the campaign used the invented spectre of trans people as dangerous predators to argue against human rights for trans people. And as in the US, it was suspiciously well funded and clearly linked to US evangelical conservatives, with supposedly liberal voices joining the worst conservative columnists in parroting religious groups’ fact-free propaganda.
I kept waiting for left-wing, liberal commentators to look around and realise that they were thinking what Rod Liddle was thinking, what Melanie Phillips was thinking, what Richard Littlejohn was thinking. But they never did.
And when anybody had the temerity to criticise them, or even point towards some actual facts, they yelled just like the conservatives: I’m being silenced! They were silenced in the Mail, and the Times, and the Sunday Times, and the Guardian, and the New Statesman, and The Spectator, and in Private Eye, and in the Herald, and in the Scotsman, and in The National, and on Radio 4, and on Radio Scotland, and on BBC1, and on Channel 4, and in the Economist, and on social media.

Here’s how that ends.
Over the weekend, a leaked memo detailed the Trump administration’s plan to remove human rights from trans people. Trans people are not deserving of human rights, and should have those rights removed.
Human rights are universal, but here we have a government arguing quite simply that some people are less human than others.
The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.
We’re not the first. The Trump administration has targeted Latinx people and people of colour. Trans people are just next on the list, a convenient proxy for all of the people religious conservatives don’t like. Trans people, gay people, lesbian people, women who want birth control, women who have abortions.
I don’t like slippery slope arguments but this is an exception. As soon as you say that some humans are less human than others, you’re on the side of evil.
Here, we’re some way behind. But you can see the wheels turning. Groups that previously said they were against Gender Recognition Act reform now advocate repeal of the original 2004 Act, and of the 2010 Equality Act. They share anti-semitic memes and accept money from anti-abortionists. They’re finding approving ears in Parliament from the likes of David Davies, whose record on not just LGBT rights but women’s rights is shockingly poor.
The strategy is working. Over on Mumsnet, where much UK anti-trans activism is discussed, supposed radical left-wing feminists are praising Trump: a sexual abuser, a defender of rapists, a harasser of women, an enemy of women’s reproductive rights.
Writing in the NYT, Jenny Boylan is sickened and saddened.
I admit that I’m reluctant to react to this latest cruelty, which is obviously just one more cynical move clearly designed to stir the pot ahead of the election. Trans people are the latest conservative whipping girl, like African-Americans in the 1950s, or gay people in the 1990s and 2000s. Nothing is more dependable now than the passion the heartless display when trans people’s humanity is offered up for mockery.
The conservatives are on the wrong side of science, of medical knowledge and of history. As the National Center for Transgender Equality points out:
In the name of preempting some misinformation, let’s talk about what this proposed rule would not do. It would not eliminate the precedents set by dozens of federal courts over the last two decades affirming the full rights and identities of transgender people. It would not undo the consensus of the medical providers and scientists across the globe who see transgender people, know transgender people, and urge everyone to accept us for who we are. And no rule — no administration — can erase the experiences of transgender people and our families. While foolish, this proposed rule deflates itself in the face of the facts, and the facts don’t care how the Trump administration feels.
But like any act of vandalism, you can do a lot of damage in a very short time. And this could have a terrible effect on the lives of the estimated 1.4 million trans people in the USA.
The longer this continues, the worse it will get. If the religious right get the freedom to discriminate against us, they will want the freedom to discriminate to discriminate against gay people, lesbian people, women. The usual targets.
If you’re white, straight, middle-class, anti-abortion and cisgender, your rights are probably okay.
But if you aren’t all of those things, you should be very frightened of anything that enables bigots to decide that some groups of people are less deserving of human rights than others.
Because once they’re done with us, they’ll come for you.
Dawn Foster has written a brave, gut-wrenching, important piece about online misogyny and abuse.
The majority of men are not like this, but unbidden, I find myself more on guard than I ever was before. Too many men have proudly sent lengthy pen portraits of my imagined rape, murder or maiming, glutted with detail, and have expended plenty of energy on these dreams. These men aren’t easy to spot on public transport, and now I’m warier than I have been at any other point in my life.
I have only experienced a tiny fraction of what women like Foster have experienced. But even then I find myself thinking about online abusers when I’m on public transport, or in a crowd. Can I tell which of these people are hateful bastards just by looking at them? Is it him? Or him? Or her?
As Foster writes:
The internet is still seen as the Wild West – a consequence-free zone where normal social mores can be cast off as cumbersome shackles.
We’ve been played. The tech firms told us that we needed free speech, but what they really meant was they needed freedom from taking responsibility for the shit being pumped through their servers. YouTube has become a radicalisation machine. Facebook is implicated in genocide – genocide! – in Myanmar. Twitter has become a megaphone for bigots of all stripes.
Online spaces are no different from real world spaces. We decide what’s acceptable, and what isn’t. For too long we’ve been accepting the unacceptable. And the longer we shrug it off, the worse it will become.

We’re a selfish species, by and large. If something doesn’t directly affect us we tend to take the approach that “I’m all right, Jack.”
Sometimes that means we resist changes that would make the world a slightly better place for other people. Sometimes we choose to believe the lone voice against the settled science because it tells us what we want to hear. And sometimes we sacrifice long-term safety for short-term comfort.
Here’s an example in microcosm. The UK government is scrapping the subsidies for hybrid cars and reducing subsidy for electric ones.
It’s penny pinching of the worst kind: while we’re chucking away billions on Brexit, we’re taking money from something that’s a little but important part of the battle against climate change.
The latest depressing evidence of climate change’s terrible effects comes from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report, which isn’t called “Jesus fucking Christ! We’re fucking doomed!” but should be.
Climate change is already killing thousands of people, with previously freak weather events becoming depressingly familiar. We’ve got about 12 years left to do something before everything starts getting really out of control. If that happens, millions of people will die and millions more will have to leave their homes in order to survive. Huge parts of the world will become uninhabitable. Some will disappear underwater. Others will suffer murderous heat.
This isn’t lefty, liberal, Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing scaremongering. Scientists are, to use a scientific expression, losing their shit. We’re past the point where we can stop climate change. Our best hope is to slow it and prevent it becoming a global catastrophe.
The thing is, it’s not really affecting people who aren’t black or brown yet. So we’ll do nothing.
Australia’s going to miss its emission targets. Ireland too. Most of Europe’s going to miss the Paris Agreement targets; Trump wants the US out of that altogether. We can’t even commit to subsiding electric cars, let alone the massive changes to our infrastructure and way of life – from farming to housing – that are needed to prevent climate change at its most catastrophic.
There are some reasons to be optimistic. China has U-turned from believing climate change to be a Western hoax to understanding it as an existential threat (China is one of the regions likely to suffer the most devastating heatwaves by around 2100 if global temperatures rise much more).
But by and large the people creating climate change are the ones most isolated to its effects. We’ll complain about petrol duty and demand the right to pollute our cities, we’ll moan about recycling and put climate deniers on TV. And when the world burns, we’ll turn the air conditioning up a notch.
Some people think UKIP is just a party of racists. Nope! It’s a party for bigots of every kind. Whether you hate the blacks, the gays, the muslims or the trans, UKIP is the party that’ll tell you the problem isn’t you, it’s them.
I’ve been reading the latest UKIP interim manifesto – yes, this is what my Saturday mornings are like; yes, I’m amazed I’m single too – and the whole thing is of course a horrific pile of shit. But there’s a new addition to it this year: the blatant anti-LGBT bigotry previously limited to stallholders at the UKIP conference is now official party policy.
The phrase “Cultural Marxism” is always a giveaway: it’s right-wing shorthand for “boo hoo we’re not allowed to be bigots all the time any more”. UKIP says cultural Marxism “seeks to close down discussion and alternative views, so that only one extreme left-wing ‘politically correct’ viewpoint is allowed.”
You can see their point of view. You can’t turn on Newsnight or pick up the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Sun or the Daily Telegraph without being subjected to nothing but one extreme left-wing politically correct viewpoint.

The proposed solutions are the usual pie of guff: repeal of all hate speech legislation and guidelines, the end of Public Space Protection orders, repeal of the Equality Act 2010, and a free golliwog and Roy Chubby Brown DVD for every pure-bred Englishman, woman and child.
In a sane world we’d just laugh at these clowns. Sadly it’s not a sane world.

The Sky News / Tommy Robinson fiasco is a good example of something that’s all too common in media: smart people being really, really stupid.
There’s an idea, oft expressed, that sunlight is the best disinfectant; that exposing terrible ideas to the harsh glare of publicity will make those terrible ideas wither and die.
Unfortunately that isn’t true.
Giving extremists a platform fuels them.
And smart people are often too stupid to realise that that’s what they’re doing: they tell us they want to have a debate, when really what we’re seeing is a performance.
They’re not providing a platform. They’re providing a stage.
Laurie Penny, writing for Longreads:
If we deny racists a platform, they feed off the appearance of censorship, but if we give them a platform, they’ve also won by being respectfully invited into the penumbra of mainstream legitimacy. Either way, what matters to them is not debate, but airtime and attention. They have no interest in winning on the issues. Their image of a better world is one with their face on every television screen.
Look at Tommy Robinson in my previous post, happy as a pig in shit: he got on the telly and still managed to claim he was being silenced.
You see exactly the same with anti-trans bigots, homophobes and other terrible people. They don’t debate the facts because they don’t care about the facts. They don’t listen to the debate because to them it isn’t a debate. It’s an opportunity to get their message across, to reach their supporters and give the impression that extreme, bigoted beliefs aren’t so extreme and bigoted after all.
You only listen to the other guy so you can work out how to beat him, and ideally, humiliate him.
It’s a growing problem because all too often, broadcasters in particular thrive on conflict. If they have one person who believes X, because X is indisputably true, they will comb the darker corners of the internet to find someone who says X is false – often someone who is very good at sounding convincing even when they’re spouting absolute garbage. The viewer or listener is then left with the false belief that there are two sides to the story when really, there aren’t.
I’ve refused to take part in such discussions, and I know very many people who do the same. They simply won’t lend their name to the legitimisation of extremist views.
As Penny puts it, in her case with reference to Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon:
Inviting someone like Steve Bannon to your conference about how to build a free and open society is a little like inviting Ronald McDonald to your convention on solving world hunger.
She argues that sunlight, far from being a disinfectant, enables some of the world’s worst people to build a brand. The rise and fall of right-wing troll Milo is a good example of that; his star rose as the column inches about him increased, but when he finally got booted off Twitter and stopped making news his career went into what I sincerely hope is terminal decline.
Penny:
What stopped him was progressives collectively refusing to put up with his horseshit.
…there is a choice, and this, to my mind, is the sensible one:Â To refuse to dignify these people with prestigious public platforms, or to share them. To refuse to offer them airtime or engage them in public debate.
If you give people with dangerous agendas a platform, you’re not impartial. You’re complicit.
Sky News was very proud of its exclusive last night: an interview with former EDL leader and Nazi poster boy Tommy Robinson. Don’t do it, they were urged. All you’re doing is giving fascists the oxygen of publicity they so crave, and helping create the impression that they’re a legitimate group with legitimate concerns. He’ll use the slot to get his talking points aired and then tell his followers how he outsmarted you.
Robinson on Twitter today:


There’s nothing I can say about this horrific, pathetic excuse for a man that isn’t expressed better by the faces of the every single woman in this photograph.

One of the more depressing things about the internet is the way that some publications have embraced hate clicks. Hate clicks are when you publish something terrible and then lots of people share it, not because they agree with it but because they’re shocked by how awful it is. The statistics show that lots of people read it, so the publication commissions more of it and the world gets a little bit worse.
The latest example of that comes once again from Glasgow’s Herald newspaper, which seems increasingly determined to sacrifice its reputation for the sake of a bit of online outrage. Its columnist Brian Beacom is a kind of Tesco Value Richard Littlejohn, writing really tired columns with exactly the kinds of views you’d expect from a straight, white, middle-aged pub bore. Beacom doesn’t have a high opinion of black music, or trans people, or women. And this week’s column is particularly bad.
This is the opening sentence.
TIME to give Zoe Ball a little kicking.
See what he did there? A ball is something you kick. So it’s okay to make a joke about violence against women.
I’m genuinely amazed that made it into print. How many people saw that and thought “yeah, suggesting a woman needs a kicking is absolutely fine”?
Beacom is outraged – he says it’s “anger following on from frustration” – because while “Ball isn’t a bad presenter” she has breasts, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to present the Radio 2 breakfast show. The only way for men to present prestigious radio programmes is for them to grow breasts too.
If you’re a man hoping for radio’s most prestigious slot, the only chance is to transgender and hope the oestrogen pills kick in before Chris Evans sets off to become a reborn Virgin.
It’s a sad day when a professional writer can’t even make his lazy slurs grammatically correct. Transgender is an adjective, not a verb.
Beacom’s argument is that the BBC is “pushing women beyond the level of their talent” and should stick with – surprise! – middle-aged straight white men like him. The Radio 2 breakfast show has always been presented by men, and should continue to be presented by men because it has always been presented by men. QED.
Whether he means it or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it got published, woman-kicking sentiment included, and a bunch of straight white guys in the comments saw it as validation. It even made it to TV, although many of the women journalists approached to appear with him refused on the grounds that “old man has bigoted views” is hardly newsworthy and they had proper journalism to be getting on with.
It’s so, so lazy. Anybody can do it, and most people could do a better job of it than Beacom. The irony here is that he’s claiming the BBC is not a meritocracy from the perspective of a white, middle-aged man who has a newspaper column despite not being any good at writing newspaper columns.
The Herald has clearly pushed him beyond the level of his talent.
I’ve written once or twice that the world is very different when you walk in women’s shoes: if you’re born and socialised as male you inhabit a completely different planet to women. It’s something many of my women friends find blackly funny when I’m outraged by an experience they have every day.
There was a good example of that last night in my local, where as I often do I was sitting at the bar looking at things on my phone. From out of nowhere a pissed bloke had his arms around me and his head against mine, demanding I put down my phone so “we can have a chat”. I politely and then less politely told him to get his hands off me, which he did grudgingly. He didn’t actually do the fucking off I’d requested until one of my friends came over.
He wasn’t a no-neck football fan or a sleazy middle-aged lech in a shiny suit. Just your run of the mill sensitive indie guy who no doubt owns a “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt. He’s got a child, a girl. I know this because I overheard his friend later, apologising to the bar staff for his drunken behaviour. “I’ve been trying to get him into a taxi for five hours. It’s his daughter’s first birthday tomorrow.”
It’s not something I’ve experienced before, because for pretty obvious reasons I don’t tend to be the target of that kind of behaviour. But my women friends deal with it all the time. The same friend who came over last night told me of her own experience the night before: a complete stranger had grabbed her in a bear hug and kissed her on the cheek.
It’s just part of the background noise for women, the entitlement of men who don’t just refuse to take “no” for an answer but don’t ask in the first place. And the more likely a man is to get away with it, the worse the behaviour can be. My great love, live music, has a real problem of men groping women at shows. It’s led to campaigns such as Safe Gigs For Women. And sometimes it’s even worse than that. Sweden has just held a “cis man-free” festival for women, trans women and non-binary people after multiple sexual assaults at a previous music festival.
#NotAllMen, I know. But too many.