In a study that’s caused much appalled amusement, researchers at Penn State have discovered that men avoid things such as using reusable shopping bags for fear others will perceive them as gay.

It’s interesting but not surprising that the policing of this stuff is done by both men and women.

In a series of studies, the researchers evaluated specific pro-environmental behaviors that previous research suggested were seen as either “feminine” or “masculine” and examined whether they affected how people were perceived.

They found that men and women were more likely to question a man’s sexual orientation if he engaged in “feminine” pro-environmental behaviors, such as using reusable shopping bags. They were also more likely to question a woman’s sexual orientation if she engaged in “masculine” pro-environmental behaviors, such as caulking windows.

A man with a Bag For Life is gay; a woman doing minor DIY is a lesbian.

The researchers found that participants whose behaviors conformed to their gender were seen as more heterosexual than those whose behaviors did not conform to their gender, which may suggest participants were using traditional gender roles as clues to sexual identity.

There’s a whole knot to unravel here, but ultimately it’s about the way we – often unconsciously – reinforce stereotypes. A man who does the recycling isn’t manly; a woman who can fix something isn’t womanly. Clearly, that means they’re gay.

These beliefs are so facile there’s no point digging into them here. But the wider point is that these beliefs aren’t just perpetuated. They’re policed.

It’s not just the policing by others that happens, although God knows that happens. We police ourselves too. We internalise the rules and actively try to ensure we don’t break them for fear of the consequences. Sometimes we pass on those rules to our siblings or our children, sometimes as advice and sometimes as mockery.

Every day in myriad ways we’re told to stay in our lanes.

The culture wars over trans people have made their way to the philosophers’ community, with some high-profile anti-trans people wrapping their views in philosophical arguments. Unfortunately, Luke Roelofs writes, those arguments don’t make sense.

This is a long read, but it’s interesting if you’d like to understand why issues such as policing bathrooms are so complex and potentially bad for all women.

Here’s a quick extract.

So in practice, ‘gender-critical’ doctrines just provide rationales for policing gender nonconformity. And the big lie at the heart of it, that people are seeking transition to better fit gender stereotypes, justifies this by painting the nonconforming people being policed as the real gender police.

Just like with bathrooms, the whole GC discourse about gender roles ultimately functions to obscure the real stakes and the real options. You can police people’s gender expression, or you can dismantle the prison of gender, but you can’t do both. GCRF [Gender Critical Radical Feminism] is a feminist fig leaf waved in front of social conservatism.

One of the things anti-trans writers like to go on about is the spectre of “detransition” and surgical regret: according to them, trans-related surgeries are acts of mutilation that many people will go on to regret.

As ever, the facts tell a very different story. I’ve mentioned previously that the NHS in England reported a detransition rate somewhat different from the 80% claimed by the anti-trans mob: it was 0.47%.

Here’s more data, this time covering surgical regret rates from a much bigger sample: 6,793 people over 43 years.

Despite the large increase in treated transgender people, the people who underwent surgery but regretted their decision was 0.5%.

By comparison, the regret rate for knee replacement surgery is 20%.

As Christine Burns MBE, author of Trans Britain, points out:

If any other branch of medicine had such good results the doctors involved would be given medals. It says volumes about the state of mind of anti-trans commentators that they keep on trying to pretend that an outstandingly successful medical treatment is vastly regretted.

Back in March, I wrote about the people protesting outside a Birmingham school over inclusive education and noted that while the protests were reported as Muslim, many of them were Christians. Also in March, I wrote that “US money is incoming and these protests will become more widespread.”

Yesterday, INews reported that the protests are going nationwide thanks to the sudden appearance of “grass roots” activist groups.

We’ve seen this pattern over the last couple of years with anti-trans groups, many of which have proven links with the US religious right. But trans people were only the testing ground for the evangelicals and their money.

Now the focus is moving onto the wider LGBT+ community and women’s reproductive freedom. That was always the plan.

A network of fringe activist groups such as Stop RSE, Parent Power, The Values Foundation and the School Gate Campaign have been set up over the past year, and campaigners are reportedly preparing to step up protests in September, encouraging parents to challenge the “radical sexualisation of kids” at schools.

The School Gate Campaign, set up by an evangelical Christian mother, claims on its website that teaching children about gay people “hijacks and potentially perverts the course of natural child development.”

Claiming that teaching about other people is “radical sexualisation” is of course a key claim of the religious right. Compare and contrast the bit from the article with the Family Research Council, the US’s horrific anti-LGBT+ evangelical group, who said this earlier this year:

“Parents across the country pulled their children out of public schools on Monday for the “Sex Ed Sit Out”—a grassroots awakening of frustrated parents who are sick of the sexualization of children in their taxpayer-funded schools.”

Same tactics. Same messaging. Same objective.

Inviting organisations to talk about issues in schools can be a positive thing: for example, the Time For Inclusive Education campaign helps battle the bullying of LGBT+ kids. But what if the organisation has a track record of falsification and shock tactics?

In an article about the tactics of anti-abortion groups, The Overtake notes that the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child regularly gives presentations to Scots schoolchildren. 

Statistics for England are “unavailable”, but in Scotland SPUC delivers talks in around 50 schools per year, often to meet a curriculum need.

The SPUC declined to let the writer see any of the materials they use to meet this curriculum need.

That’s deeply worrying. Here’s The Guardian, 11 years ago:

Spuc, for example, tells teenagers there are links between abortion and breast cancer, although organisations such as Cancer Research UK and Breakthrough Breast Cancer have consistently presented research to prove there is no link. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) categorically states that abortion is not associated with an increase in breast-cancer risk.

Here’s The Overtake, this week.

a catalogue of educational leaflets are available from its website, many of which make for interesting reading. Its Abortion Pack includes a quotation from Dr Thomas Stuttaford which claims an “unusually high proportion” of women who had undergone an abortion later developed breast cancer. “Such women are up to four times more likely to develop breast cancer,” he says.

Its pamphlet on Abortion and Women’s Health, dated April 2017 and authored by devout Catholic Dr Greg Pike, persists with the view that the relationship between abortion and elevated risk of breast cancer is “a controversial question”

The facts, the science, hasn’t changed in the last decade.

That’s just one example. The organisation also makes false claims about mental health and about how contraception works.

Back to The Guardian:

Many anti-abortion organisations refer to “post-abortion syndrome”, whose symptoms can include panic attacks, relationship problems, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse, and depression. In fact, it is not a recognised medical condition. In August, the American Psychological Association concluded: “There is no credible evidence that single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental-health problems for adult women.”

…Spuc opts for both types of pictures. Having watched its presentation, labelled “standard abortion talk 2008”, I am not surprised to hear that in one class of 16- and 17-year-olds shown the presentation in July, half the students left distressed and some were physically sick.

I can’t help wondering what the Venn diagram of “people who don’t want kids to learn that LGBT+ folks exist” and “people who are fine with forced birthers peddling verifiably false claims” would look like.

Letting religious groups peddle demonstrably false information and make children vomit isn’t balance. It’s bullshit.

The Guardian:

Nobody I spoke to suggested that anti-abortion views should be shielded from young people. But, says Furedi, any discussion in school must be honest and provide accurate, impartial and up-to-date information. “Better still,” she says, “let’s move it out of the RE room and be much more upfront about the fact that one in three women will have an abortion at some time in their lives and that basically, if you’re fertile and sexually active, you are at risk of an unwanted pregnancy.”

Children should learn about abortion. I’ve had several conversations with my 11-year-old daughter about it, conversations in which both sides of the argument have been explored. But it’s a health issue, not a religious issue, and should be taught as such.

One of the things that characterises the anti-trans movement in the UK is its use of crowdfunding, essentially an online begging bowl. But unlike many women’s organisations, the anti-trans groups don’t seem to put much effort into promoting their crowdfunders; also unlike many women’s groups, they attract suspiciously large donations.

For example, the Transgender Trend group (effectively one individual, a sculptor who’s found a new career spreading anti-trans scaremongering) recently banked two anonymous donations totalling £35,000 within minutes of each other. Crowdfunding doesn’t usually work like that. Donations are usually £10 here, £20 there: even three figures is rare.

In recent months, UK anti-trans groups and individuals have raised over £280,000 via crowdfunding. That money’s been raised to pay legal costs for cases that never went to trial, to raise money for “living expenses” and to sit in individuals’ bank accounts while they borrow from it to help their cash flow. A lot of it is apparently sitting around, unspent.

When over a quarter of a million pounds has mysteriously appeared (and sometimes, mysteriously disappeared), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that something rotten is going on here: tax evasion, dark money, possibly money laundering and in some cases what looks awfully like grifting.

We know the US religious right has spent millions on funding supposed grassroots groups throughout Europe via dark money, and we know that the UK anti-trans movement has strong links with the US religious right.

At least £279,729 has flowed into the coffers of UK anti-trans groups recently. That’s likely to be the tip of the iceberg: one group paid for a Metro wrap-around, market value £45K, before it started seriously fundraising; others accept donations via PayPal, which aren’t public (the UK Brexit party used this method to disguise its donors)).

There’s an astonishing amount of money being moved around here.

Imagine what a difference that kind of money could make to organisations such as, say, Rape Crisis Scotland instead of paying for bigots’ bedding.

Where’s the money coming from?