Welcome to Sunday, February 22, 2026, Sabbath for non-Jewish cats and National Margarita Day, celebrating everyone’s favorite frozen drink. In fact, I could drink one now although it’s 5:30 a.m. on Saturday as I begin this post. Note that, according to Wikipedia, the history of this drink is “shrouded in mystery.”
It’s also George Washington’s Birthday, National Cook a Sweet Potato Day, National Wildlife Day, and World Thinking Day. Here’s a thought exercise that my dad posed to me when I was a kid: “Jerry, think of the face of someone you’ve never seen before.” I couldn’t do it; it always turned into the face of someone I knew. But AI can do it easily!
There’s a Google Doodle on this last day of the Winter Olympics. Click to see where it goes.
And don’t forget the men’s ice hockey finals; here are the details
Where to watch USA vs. Canada
Date: Sunday, Feb. 22 | Time: 8:10 a.m. ET
Location: Milano Santagiulia Arena — Milan, Italy
TV: NBC
Odds: Canada -125, USA +105
Here’s where to watch it. Most links aren’t available in the U.S. or will cost you $$,but the CBC Gem link might work:
- Men’s Ice Hockey Final: Sunday, Feb. 22 at 8.10am ET / 5.10am PT / 1.10pm GMT
- FREE streams: CBC Gem (Canada) / BBC iPlayer (UK) / 9Now (Aus)
- Stream USA vs Canada on Peacock (US)
- Unlock your stream with Norton VPN
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 22 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*After the Supreme Court struck down most of Trump’s tariffs two days ago, the Weasel in Chief, as predicted, is finding ways to circumvent the decision. (Article archived here.)
President Trump moved swiftly on Friday to resurrect his punishing tariffs and circumvent a stunning loss at the Supreme Court, ordering a new 10 percent tax on all imports along with other trade actions in a bid to preserve his primary source of economic leverage around the world.
Striking a defiant tone in the face of a legal defeat, Mr. Trump asserted at a news conference that he remained unbowed in a global trade war that has come to define his second term in office. The president even signaled that the tariffs he is now pursuing may yet prove more painful and lasting than those they are meant to replace.
“I can charge much more than I was charging,” Mr. Trump declared as he brandished his remaining trade powers, contending at one point that he could still “destroy foreign countries” by other means.
Mr. Trump said he would revive his tariffs using a series of authorities provided under the 1974 Trade Act. He took his first steps late Friday, invoking a provision of the law known as Section 122 to impose a 10 percent tariff starting on February 24. No president before him had invoked that provision.
Mr. Trump also said he would tap a second set of authorities under Section 301 to open investigations into other countries’ unfair trade practices, which would most likely yield additional tariffs. It was not immediately clear if the administration had commenced that process, or which countries it had targeted.
Together, Mr. Trump tried to frame the twin actions as a close substitute for his newly invalidated emergency duties, many of which he enacted on a historic scale during the highly disruptive rollout billed as “Liberation Day” last spring.
Well, we’ll see if this second “Liberation Day” stands up. The petulance shown in “I can charge much more than I was charging,” is typical Trump. Remember: TARIFFS ARE BAD FOR AMERICA. The longer they stay on, the more Americans will pay and the less they’ll approve of Trump. This puts us Democrats between a rock and a hard place. But I don’t want the tariffs on, as we shouldn’t punish consumers just to favor our own party.
And yes, he said he was raising global tariffs to 15%. What a stoat!
*Andrew Sullivan handles a hot potato in his Weekly Dish column: “What the Dems should say on trans rights.”
I had dinner this week with a young gay man who was castrated and had his endocrine system permanently wrecked as a result of “gender-affirming care” for minors. He was super girly as a kid and had an undiagnosed testosterone deficiency which delayed his male development. He liked playing with girls, seemed to act like one, and when he socially transitioned as a teen, he passed easily. Suddenly all the sneers of “faggot” he’d endured as a boy went away. In today’s “gender-affirming care” environment, that was enough.
“Compassion” and “science” took a gay boy, flooded his young male body with estrogen, and removed his genitals — because the docs and the shrinks determined he was too effeminate to be a “real man.” Only when he personally figured this out as an adult and got himself off estrogen and onto testosterone did everything change. He felt energy and mental clarity for the first time. And his life as a man could finally begin — although his body will never be fully repaired.
Readers keep telling me to shut up about this topic (I can hear your groans now). I’m obsessed, you say, and this is a trivial (boring) matter. I’ve lost some good friends who feel very much that way, and my social life has shrunk. But then I meet someone like Mike (a pseudonym) — and I’ve met many others, gay and lesbian — and realize not a single gay group or resource is on his side. In fact, the “LGBTQIA+” lobby all but denies he exists, or dismisses him as transphobic — a dreaded “detransitioner”.
I was thinking about Mike as I read the latest polling — out this week in a liberal online mag, The Argument. The poll shows what we well know: 63 percent of Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination. This isn’t a transphobic country. But, equally, 62 percent oppose transing minors (50 percent strongly), 60 percent support banning transwomen competing against women in sports, and 53 percent want to ban gender ideology in elementary schools. These numbers have gone up the more the debate has raged. The backlash is so intense it has even reversed the public’s previous opposition to bathroom bills.
Now check out the liberal response. Bluesky erupted in fury that the poll was published at all. “Please help us,” one X member tweeted with direct appeals to Tim Cook and McKenzie Scott, who have bankrolled this campaign. Jill Filipovic complained that the “Dems … should have focused on things like ending discrimination in housing and employment,” rather than sports and kids, unaware that the Bostock decision already did that with employment. Most liberals have literally no idea that trans people already have civil rights. Off-message.
In this air-tight ideological bubble, where Bostock is unknown, the Dems flounder. “This isn’t happening” was the first gambit. Good try. Then: “this has all been ginned up by the far right, and Dems did nothing.” Did they miss the Obama and Biden Title IX diktats, Admiral Levine’s removal of lower age limits for transing kids, Biden’s “nonbinary” official Sam Brinton stealing dresses, or other embarrassments like the White House invite to Dylan Mulvaney? Then they say it’s a tiny issue. But it helped Trump massively in 2024. And if it’s tiny, why not compromise? After that, it’s just MLK-envy all the way down, the desire to be the next Rosa Parks. But it’s odd to campaign for “civil rights” when you already have them.
After trying to debate, you come to realize it’s pointless. The woke mind is not really a mind; it’s more like a bunch of synapses. Presented with an actual argument, they snap shut. This is part of what Eric Kaufmann calls the “sacralization” of minorities. For the woke, the “oppressed” are sacred. And in the social justice hierarchy, no minority is as oppressed and thereby as sacred as trans.
The solution:
So what should the Dems do now? Nothing much — because there’s not much left to do but fight the military ban and discrimination in housing and medicine for adults, which are worthy enough goals. What to actually say? How about something like this:
Trans people are under attack today and we need to defend their dignity, equality, and civil rights. We strongly back laws protecting trans people from discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and the military. We support health insurance for adult transitions and believe children with acute gender dysphoria should get much more support, much more therapy, and boundless love. We must not leave them behind.
But we also believe medical interventions should be kept for adults, who alone can give meaningful consent. And we believe that, in the few areas where biology really matters — in sports, medicine and intimate spaces — sex trumps gender. That’s just common sense. We can defend women’s rights and trans rights. We are all in this together.
Maybe I’ll lose friends as well (remember that I’ve publicly been called “anti-trans” by the head of my department’s DEI Committee), but I think Sullivan is right overall. I too am against against “the military ban and discrimination in housing and medicine for adults” against trans people; but that’s not enough to save you from demonization. If you oppose trans-identified men competing in women’s sports or residing in women’s prisons, you’re “anti-trans.” There’s no discussion with such authoritarians.
*In a NYT op-ed c0nversation with John Guida, Nate Silver assesses the 2028 Democratic Presidential candidates, while on his own site he ranks them in order, though it’s paywalled and I can see only the top three (from the top down, Newsom, Ocasio-Cortez, and Buttigieg. Shoot me now;: the only one of these three I like is the last! From the NYT
John Guida: You’re a big sports fan, so you know the great drama and symbolic importance of the first overall pick in a draft. Drum roll, please: The first pick was …
Nate Silver: The first pick, made by Galen Druke, was Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. But I would have taken Newsom, too. Either he or Kamala Harris is ahead in basically every poll. And he’s moved well ahead in prediction markets, which, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, are a convenient enough summary of the conventional wisdom.
But it’s important to articulate a distinction here: These are our picks based on who we think is most likely to be chosen by Democratic voters and delegates, not whom we would necessarily pick. Personally, I think Newsom is cut from the same cloth as some past losing Democratic nominees like Harris.
. . . Guida: The second pick also comes from a blue coastal state, New York: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was followed by Pete Buttigieg, the former Biden transportation secretary. Maybe we can bring in some broader context here in terms of how you size up the Democratic Party at the moment. You laid out a taxonomy of three factions within the party: Why those three, and how do you see them shaping the invisible primary, if indeed you do?
. . . . Silver: The one thing pretty much all Democrats agree upon after 2024 is that the party needs to change course. And there are three different solutions to that. The left-populists think, well, the party needs to be more populist, especially on economic issues and “affordability,” inspired by Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York. Then there’s what I call the “abundance libs.” The name is slightly fraught because it comes from the book written by Ezra Klein of The Times and Derek Thompson, and I think the label has come to be used in ways they wouldn’t necessarily endorse. But it’s become the brand associated with people who think the party ought to move to the center, with “smart” economic policies and perhaps following public opinion more on culture war issues.
That leaves the third faction, the “Resistance libs,” which might actually be the majority faction. They usually attribute Democrats’ problems in 2024 to poor messaging or the failure to take on Donald Trump aggressively enough. They want a fighter. And Newsom plays expertly into that.
. . . . Ocasio-Cortez is definitely a populist. And she might have that lane to herself. There are two other highly successful politicians from this group, but they’re Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and not eligible to run for president, and Bernie Sanders, who at 84 is even older than Joe Biden. Ocasio-Cortez’s recent international trip suggests that she wants to broaden her profile, but as inequality worsens, especially at the very top of the scale, as affordability remains a perpetual concern, this is arguably a more valuable message than it has been in a long time.
Guida gives the results of Silver’s scoring, the ones I can’t see on Silver’s site. Here they are:
Guida: Here are the full results of the draft, and then we can continue in categories:
(1) Newsom; (2) Ocasio-Cortez; (3) Buttigieg; (4) Gretchen Whitmer; (5) Ruben Gallego; (6) Josh Shapiro; (7) Wes Moore; (8) Harris; (9) Cory Booker; (10) Raphael Warnock; (11) Jon Ossoff; (12) Mark Kelly; (13) Jon Stewart; (14) J.B. Pritzker; (15) Andy Beshear; (16) Ro Khanna; (17) Amy Klobuchar; (18) Chris Murphy.
Silver avers that moderation rather than “progressivism” is the way forward for Democrats, and “electability” (e.g., success in purple states) may be the best criterion for a Democratic candidate, which would give the nod to people like Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, but they aren’t getting much attention from Democrats. Let’s face, we will hang together or surely we’ll hang seprately, governed by J. D. Vance.
*The Torygraph reports more anti-semitism (as well as sexism and racism), and this time it’s in Oxfam! “Former Oxfam chief claims charity is ‘toxic and anti-Semitic’.” (Article archived here.)
Oxfam’s former chief executive has accused the charity of being toxic and anti-Semitic during her tenure.
Halima Begum resigned as the chief executive of Oxfam GB in December amid allegations that she was bullying staff.
Now she has accused the charity of having a disproportionate focus on Gaza compared with other world crises, and said it was too quick to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.
Ms Begum, who is taking Oxfam to an employment tribunal over her departure, also accused the charity of racism and sexism from “board members” at “two board meetings”.
In her tribunal claim, she accuses the organisation of having a “toxic anti-Semitic culture”.
Ms Begum, who was appointed in 2024, told Channel 4 News: “It’s important to work around the rule of law and maintain that the international rule of law must not be compromised. But we have to show consistency with other crises in the world, and it always felt as though we were disproportionately working around the crisis in Gaza.”
Referring to Gaza, she added: “But other examples include quite strong pushback when we were not ready yet to use the word ‘genocide’.
“To use the word ‘genocide’, it has to be something we arrive at with consultation and evidence and good legal advice and to try and use that term before we are ready as an organisation feels quite risky to me.”
The charity adopted the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza in summer 2025 and accused the Israeli government of routinely blocking aid.
Ms Begum added that even “as a Muslim woman” it was difficult to hold on to “neutrality and impartiality” within the organisation.
She claimed that during the charity’s restructure, in which large numbers of UK staff were made redundant, a member of the senior team called the all-female leadership team a “bunch of s–ts.” In December, the charity’s board found Ms Begum’s £130,000-a-year position had become “untenable” after she allegedly created a “climate of fear”.
Oxfam has denied Begum’s claims, though Israel has banned dozens of NGOs, including MSF and Oxfam, from operating in Gaza because they wouldn’t comply with restrictions, including identifying members of their Palestinian staff (there’s a good reason for that given what UNRWA did).
*Finally, here are a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Bad for business class.”
→ AOC’s big European tour: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up at the Munich Security Conference to debut as a world leader, and it did not go smoothly. She seemed tired (I get it) and stumbled over questions. As a forever Hillary Clinton voter, I’m biased, sure. Hilz would never stutter on a foreign policy question. Taiwan? If China sneezes toward Taiwan, if a tiny fishing boat accidentally turned two degrees left, Hillary would invade Beijing and go back to calling it Peking. It’s America’s world, and you’re Peking again. That’s what my Hillary would say, and she’d make sure the mic was nice and centered when she said it. In Munich, an interviewer asked AOC: “Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan, if China were to move?” AOC responded: “You know, I think that, uh, this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, um, this is of course a very long-standing, um, policy of the United States, uh, and I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.” Perfect. Stuck the landing.
Here’s AOC on Venezuela: “It is not a remark on who [Nicolás] Maduro was as a leader—he canceled elections, he was an anti-democratic leader—that doesn’t mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator.” But Venezuela is entirely north of the equator?! So it’s kosher now?
Call it a day, kids. It’s Gavin Newsom’s turn. . .
→ News of the Jews: There was an effigy of an “Israeli” at an annual carnival in Andorra, and partygoers strung it up in the air and shot at it. See, it had a Star of David on its face, but it wasn’t antisemitic, just political. This was criticism of a foreign government’s policies, silly, don’t you see that?
The whole scene is straight out of Borat. Who remembers “the running of the Jew”? And the Hamas tunnels are getting a major PR makeover. First, there’s a presentation at City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law: “This anthropologic investigation will examine the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization.” U.S.-based Dutch artist Robert Roest is finding inspiration in Hamas tunnel glorification: “The light that may appear at some point might be the flashlight of an occupation soldier or a resistance militant, who then ends your life or saves it.” So hopeless, those in the tunnels, just waiting for the righteous flashlight of the resistance militant.
Meanwhile, Matt Lucas, a British Jewish actor/comedian not known for speaking about the conflict, was chased around and videotaped through the London Tube by someone demanding that he Free Palestine. All normal, political speech. Don’t go losing your head!
→ Loud and Clear Voice Woman: Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan is a member of the White Earth Nation, which is a federally recognized Ojibwe tribe, and I need you to know her Native American name. “My Ojibwe name is Gizhiiwewidamoonkwe, which means ‘Speaks in a Loud and Clear Voice Woman’,” she told a podcast a couple weeks ago. A tribal leader was like, your name is going to be loud aggressive woman. He fully means it as an insult, and she fully takes it as a compliment. It’s beautiful. My Ojibwe name means ‘Woman With Woman No Husband Why, Maybe Tits Saggy.’ It’s so meaningful to me.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is doing a military-style inspection of the bedroom:
Hili: I see a hair from Szaron’s fur.
Andrzej: That’s terrible.
Hili: No, it’s proof that he was here too.
Hili: Widzę włos z sierści Szarona.
Ja: To straszne.
Hili: Nie, to dowód, że on tu też był.
*******************
From This Cat is Guilty:
From: Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From Stacy:
From Masih, student protests in Iran, a country that the U.S. may well soon attack,
Students Rise Across Iran: “Death to Khamenei” Echoes Through Universities
On the very first day of universities reopening, students across Iran took to the streets and campus grounds, chanting slogans against the regime and directly against Khamenei.
Student protests, reported… pic.twitter.com/mT16SVkXUr
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 21, 2026
A good catch from Luana: Agustín Fuentes, in his book Sex is a Spectrum, appears to have presented as real data the results of a simulated example. Didn’t he check?
Incredible.
One of the people behind a nonsense book arguing that sex is a spectrum (it’s binary) seemingly didn’t realize that he was using simulated unrealistic data from someone else when he was making a point about height overlap. https://t.co/QrRkmgIH7R pic.twitter.com/ACuphi4il1
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) February 20, 2026
J. K. Rowling tweets condolences to a Harry Potter fan shot in Iran by the government:
My deepest condolences to all who loved him.
Rest in peace, Sina Ashgbousi 🇮🇷🐍⚡️ https://t.co/gCVeFvr5HD— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 9, 2026
I get a mention from The Pinkah, but, more important, he enumerates all the once-liberal organizations that, like PEN America, have been ideologically captured:
Hard-left activists, particularly militant transgender ideologues and despisers of Israel, are laying waste to liberal organizations: ACLU, American Humanists, Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, and now PEN America. Jerry Coyne: PEN…
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) February 20, 2026
One from my feed: origami. Remember that this involve just a single sheet of paper:
Il y a les origamis. Et puis il y a les créations en papier de l’artiste vietnamien Thien Dinh pic.twitter.com/8etJv1cGEz
— Nathalie Chalard bis (@BisChalard57545) February 21, 2026
I had to put this up because it’s so amazing. Look how gentle the elephant is with the kitten:
ลูกใครค้าาาาาาาาาาาาาา pic.twitter.com/IpMcazNnHi
— Eaaaw (@Eaaaw) February 20, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old, and would be 88 today had she lived. https://t.co/sCAKWOcVsk
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 22, 2026
And an optical illusion from Dr. Cobb. Check for yourself with a ruler:
The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!
— Kevin Mitchell (@wiringthebrain.bsky.social) 2026-02-21T16:36:43.829Z
Re: Democratic Candidates for President
Ron Emanuel too far-fetched? He sounds sane to me.
Chicago didn’t like him as Mayor.
Rahm is sounding increasingly sane, especially in relation to some of the progressives. IDK how big a barrier Chicago would be, maybe that depends on the power of the teachers’ union. I assume Obama would back him.
Unfortunately, Rahm’s name is Hebrew (רם), and he did
volunteer work in Israel. A significant wing of the Dems will therefore accuse him being a genocidal-settler-colonialist.
The listing of candidates was from a live recording of the GD Politics podcast (Galen Druke’s successor to the 538 podcast) with Silver and Clare Malone as guests. They generated their list and then got audience reactions going through the list (cheer/clap for your favorite). Given a youngish audience in a New York comedy club loud cheers for AOC and Pete Buttegeig were predictable, what was notable was the total silence that followed Kamala Harris. Clearly not a favorite with that crowd either.
Seeing the origami prompted me to think about reader Robert Lang and hope that his rebuilding from the Altadena fire is progressing and that he is back to his wonderful creations.
As far as I know, the rebuilding is gong well and there was no damage from the recent mudslides or rains.
I was reminded of him, too🤞🤞
I agree with Sullivan’s thoughts except for this one: “We support health insurance for adult transitions.”
I say absolutely not. Adults should be allowed to transition, but on their own dime. Only medically indicated procedures should be paid for by insurance.
I agree with you 100% Michael. These are elective cosmetic procedures. The claim is made that they improve quality of life for those with gender dysphoria, but I don’t think the evidence for that is much stronger than the evidence supporting transition for minors. Meanwhile the whole shebang rests on an incoherent and non-falsifiable concept: “gender identity”.
I’m also inclined to disagree with Sullivan when he says, “Trans people are under attack today.” Ideas embraced by trans activists and imposed on society are rightly under attack. But the trans movement equates attacks on trans ideology with attacks on trans-identified people. It’s a tactic designed to present “trans folks” as victims, and therefore sacred.
100%. Many trans people consider using the correct, sex-based, pronouns to be a literal attack. That needs to be remembered when they claim that a huge percentage of trans people have been ‘attacked’. It doesn’t help them to make such claims because people end up completely dismissing their statistics as they aren’t honest about how many real attacks there are.
Interesting that it is Andorra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorra_(play)
Having said that, I always thought that it was a really bad move on the part of Frisch (one of the best-known 20th-century German-language (he was Swiss) authors) to use the name of a real country for his fictional country in the play. Yes, he stated that they weren’t the same except in name, but why?
I recently saw a new film of Frisch’s Stiller. The premise is absurd: a Swiss person pretends to be someone from the USA, meets his former wife, who believes his story, despite having been married to him. (In the film, he also has no American accent, which is strange—but then the whole film is not in Swiss German, which would have been reaslistic).
It is hard to believe that the Democrats have chosen “no strict voter identification” as their current hill to die on. This position is guaranteed to alienate any nonpartisan voters and moderate Republicans. Trump is going to have a lot of fun with this. It is the best gift that they could give him. It feeds right into his narrative that the 2020 election was stolen. How can the Dems be this stupid?
Of course it is not the first time that they have shot themselves in the foot. Why do they keep doing this? There must be some structural flaw in the party’s decision-making processes.
It is a difficult position for us, because if it is articulated in the simple terms that there ‘should be no strict voter identification’, then the Republicans will effectively attack that because average Americans are agreeable to requiring voter ID. But the better message should be that voter ID should be required, but it must be easy to get while also being secure. Republicans have and will enact roadblocks to having identification that are aimed at blocking voting rights of marginalized Democratic voters. There is ample proof of that, as was detailed here about a week ago. Their aim is not about requiring voter ID. Their aim is to cheat to win.
“But the better message should be that voter ID should be required, but it must be easy to get while also being secure.”
Yes, that is concise and appealing to nearly everyone. The Republicans are really good at capturing the narrative. The Dems aren’t very good at it.
I do believe that the principal motivation for the Dems objection to voter IDs is that the Republicans are for it. What is best for the country as a whole, or their constituents in particular, is of no consequence or interest to either party. The strategy of both parties is to oppose the other in all respects. They hope by doing so they’ll gain or hold on to power, which is ultimately the only thing they want. What is right, just, or in the best interest of people is entirely orthogonal to either party’s goals. If our government was ever truly effective at governing, those days are gone forever.
The real issue is not Voter ID, but vote-by-mail. Vote-by-mail is highly prone towards corruption. Basically, blank postal ballots are ‘collected’ and marked with the name of a preferred candidate. This has happened in the UK and the US. See “Dirty tricks exposed over postal ballot” (https://tinyurl.com/4j2s96c8.The) secret ballot fixes these problems. People are free to vote as they please without someone looking over their shoulder.
It’s called “progressivism”.
This is what Brianna Wu, a so-called “real transsexual”, said on Twitter:
“Actual trans women are very rare, there are about 100 cross-dressers for every one of us.”
“Men that get off from wearing women’s clothes are actually very common. About 1 out of 100 men. Pretty much every woman I know has encountered one.”
—
FB: that means that trans population is 1 in 10000
—
“A stereotypical early onset trans girl. Hates her genitals as a child, frequently states she is a girl or will grow up to be a girl. Shatters during puberty. Will have permanent developmental damage without medical and psychological intervention.”
“a young homosexual boy find himself attracted to make up dress dresses and heels as a child. Find stereotypical feminine behavior fun to express. As puberty onsets there’s no mismatch between their body and their gender identity and they just become gay.”
—
FB: The challenge is to identify, during childhood, those very rare cases of transsexuality and clearly differentiate them from homosexuality.
Assuming that those cases of real transsexuality actually exist.
In any case, as far as the political debate goes, the overwhelming majority of the woke believe in self-ID, so they can’t claim the right to differentiate between the real and the false.
I do accept that real trans-identifying people do exist, based on evidence of adults who continue to claim their ID as their truth. I know of no reason to not believe them as I believe the claims of gay people, cross-dressers, and drag queens. Curiously, the existence of the latter two varieties don’t come up in these debates, as if they are being erased.
“Actual trans women are very rare, there are about 100 cross-dressers for every one of us.”
Where do these numbers come from, I wonder. Has this person done (or analyzed) all the medical and statistical research to back up this assertion?
Brianna, on Twitter:
“ I’m basically rounding the numbers we did in the 90s. Before progressive ideology wrecked the whole project.”
“3 percent of Gen Z claims to be transsexual. In the 90s, we were estimated to be 0.003% of the population.
So you either believe this population has exploded by 99,900% or you have to believe progressives redefined the politics and most of these people are not trans.”
—
If those studies were right, trans people are about as rare as intersex people.
The last statistic I saw was that 95% of trans identified men are fully intact. I suspect that a vast number of the 95% are autogynephiles [AGP], which would explain why so many dress like hookers. There are, of course, some who want sex assignment surgery but can’t afford it, or can’t get it on insurance, but that still leaves a lot of AGPs who like their penis and want to keep it working.
The post op transexuals I speak with on X almost all know that they are men. They aren’t women, but they understand women a lot better than AGPs, which is why they continue to use men’s spaces. AGPs demand to use spaces specifically for women because they get a sexual thrill from it.
There are many types of dysphoria, and I’m sure gender dysphoria can be real and difficult to live with, but AGPs are fetishists rather than dysphorics and they are causing problems for those with genuine dysphoria.
Thanks to both of you for the solid responses.
Identifying homosexuality in children before puberty starts (and distinguishing it from “true” transexuality) is a contradiction in terms, because prepubertal children are pre-sexual. A boy would have no way to answer the question, “Are you sexually attracted to girls, other boys, or both?” At that age he knows only that he prefers to hang around with other boys and tries to be accepted into their play groups, and thinks girls are gross. (The feeling is reciprocated.) The ones who prefer to play with girls aren’t sexually attracted to them. That’s another meaningless question. If they come out as gay, the adolescent girls will reject them.
The challenge is to identify prospectively, i.e., before puberty starts, that there is a group of boys whose atypical behaviour is down to transsexuality and not just to the effemininity that will cause them to declare as gay. This is crucial, because according to Wu, these boys must have their puberty blocked and their bodies iatrogencially harmed to prevent their “shattering”, before puberty can sort this out. Even retrospectively, I would challenge Wu to point to a selection of publicly known people who say they’re trans and pick out the ones who, according to him, aren’t really trans. How much interobserver agreement might we expect if all the activists got to evaluate one another? Would Florence Ashley, Brianna Wu, and Erin in the Morning agree, or would they say, “anyone who says she’s a transwoman, is a transwoman.) Whose opinion in the matter should rule? Is “I’m a true transwoman”, a caste identification, like one’s family having come over on the Mayflower?
Even if you can diagnose “true trans” in childhood, as being different from benign effemininity that’s going to manifest as homosexuality, you still have to demonstrate that treating this diagnosed group does them more good than harm. Wu’s own story doesn’t suggest there is much to this idea:
https://www.thefp.com/p/brianna-wu-bari-weiss-gamergate-progressive-antisemitism-honestly
Nor does the UK PATHWAYS Trial (now on hold) claim to limit enrolment to “true trans” children who won’t grow out of by ID’ing as gay. Dame Cass acknowledged that these children might indeed exist but said there is no way to identify them with present knowledge. Anyone with a strong desire to be the other “gender” and who has a strong self-proclaimed dislike of their genitals can be included.
Brianna Wu says that it’s possible. You can tell that a boy is a trans girl if he “Hates her genitals as a child, frequently states she is a girl or will grow up to be a girl.”
I disagree. First, you need to show that such cases exist in boys with no traumatic childhoods — which doesn’t apply to Brianna, who is adopted and had a very troubled relationship with her adoptive family. Maybe there aren’t any, and true transsexuals are simply deeply traumatized gay people.
I agree with the rest, but am sceptical about the first paragraph. OK, I know that I was somewhat atypical (but far from the only person I knew) as a boy (who turned out to be heterosexual) who never went through “girls are gross” stage, but years before puberty essentially all the boys were into girls (well, not literally). If any would turn out to be gay, they hid it well (even into high school—early 80s—where a very good friend is now a well known gay activist and I—and most others—had no idea). And many pre-puberty girls are attracted to boys and men; almost every girl in my second-grade class had a notebook, lunchbox, whatever with Shaun Cassidy or his brother David or Donny Osmond or whomever.
“Identifying homosexuality in children before puberty starts (and distinguishing it from “true” transexuality) is a contradiction in terms, because prepubertal children are pre-sexual. A boy would have no way to answer the question, “Are you sexually attracted to girls, other boys, or both?”
I’m afraid I don’t agree with you, Leslie. My
guess is that heterosexual kids don’t need to bother to ask such a question, because they know they’re attracted to the other sex, and they further know that that is “normal”. Homosexual kids do ask this question however, because they know what their attraction is, and also know that it is “abnormal”, and needs to be analyzed.
Six-year olds have sexual attraction?
You’re moving the goalposts, since kids twice the age of six may still be prepubuscent. But even so, yes, I believe that sexual orientation may be felt quite early in life (through certainly not in any Freudian sense whatsoever). I am out of comments for today. Have a good evening.
I did.
While your argument about pre-puberty sexuality makes sense, based on personal experience, I don’t buy it (at least in all cases). I liked girls in the early years of elementary school, and had crushes long before I knew what sex was. And I definitely did not hang out with girls, because I was too shy to approach them. I hung around with boys and was happy to do so, but never had any feelings toward them that were similar to my feelings toward girls, even if I could not define the latter. I knew what sex I was attracted to, and as far as I could tell from my classmates at the time, so did they.
Most of the girls showed similar interest in the opposite sex, though it was clear, even back then, that there were a couple of girls who were clearly interested in other girls.
I am not saying that people do not develop SSA in later years, especially at puberty and following years. Nor am I making ny claims about numbers as a function of age. I am just reporting that my interest in girls preceded my interest in, or knowledge of, sex—by several years.
I can think of a face of someone I’ve never met: Abraham Lincoln.
Sorry, that is probably annoying.
I tried to think of someone who existed, but whose depiction I had not seen. A fat stage actor keeps getting in the way. I wish that I could wish him away. But there he is still 🙁
Please abide by the “not too frequent comments” Rool.
Don’t think so. The video shows that he’s folding the fins from separate bits of paper (observe the fin-less body in the background on the desk prior to fin attachment). Still a lovely artwork.
It’s more than thirty months to the election, and more than two years until the conventions. That seems like a long time to be in campaign mode. Besides, is the DNC going to let the people pick a candidate this time?
Speaking of the “resistant libs” who want their next presidential candidate to be a “fighter,” I’ll put up this bit by writer Dave Barry from his “The Year in Review:”
I don’t believe in the existence of God, the “It’s For the People Meat,” or, alas, the kindly elephant.
I was tipped by the absence of any description of what cut of meat was in the package, and by the “Obvious Plant” symbol masquerading as an “organic” imprimatur.
The website pastureone dot com doesn’t exist.
Kentucky St. is a short residential and downtown street in Petaluma, no farms or meat-packing plants.
Fritz Pfeiffer is a deceased American artist. Googling him further turns up:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMagnusArchives/comments/aer15p/ummmmm/
Turns out “Obvious Plant” is (or was — it’s old) a prolific creator of packaging parodies.
Unlike many parodies these days, this one seems to be “real”, not AI, so full marks for that. The lettering on the package is faithful English, the place where AI goes wrong because it can’t actually “read” and “write”, doesn’t even “know its letters.” I don’t see the point of the creator going to the trouble to make this, though. It’s not Soylent Green.
I am happy to report that Obvious Plant is still going strong. As it happens, I met its creator, Jeff Wysaski, just a few weeks ago. Got his autograph.
Wes Moore, currently running seventh, is someone to watch on the Democratic side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wes_Moore.
And yes. I saw the “running of the Jew” in Andorra (online, not in person!), but I hope that the world won’t notice and emulate it elsewhere.
If you squint heavily at that last image, the bars draw into parallel. What’s the basis of that?
I noticed the exact same thing. I can’t figure out how it works!
I can only assume that squinting removes the finer details of the image that trick the higher-order angle-detector neurons in the visual cortex.
I believe the elephant and the kitten video is AI. There are many animal-animal and animal-people interaction video shorts circulating now that are AI; see “dog saving baby from a cougar”, etc
Of course it is. It even has the “AI Generated” mark in the top left!
On the subject of faces you have never seen, I saw a YouTube clip with a man blind from birth. The interviewer asked him if it bothered him that he didn’t know what he looked like and he said that it didn’t because he didn’t know what anyone looked like. He went on to say that if he was suddenly granted his sight and was shown a line-up including himself, he would have no idea which one was him. A weird thought!
I don’t know anyone who is anti trans. Men must be free to dress as they want, adults should be free to chop bits off and add bits on. But men are not free to remove women’s human rights to safety and dignity under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Any biological male who accesses women’s spaces without our consent is, by definition, a predator
I am not transphobic, I am predatorphobic.
Well said. I would only add that it’s not just predators that are a problem, but those that wish to compete unfairly against women in sports. It astounds me how many people think that either of those scenarios is okay.
Here we have clash of rights. In the USA, it is illegal (Bostock*) to discriminate against trans people at work. What will be the impact on the women in the workplace if the employer, fearful of being sued, hires a trans-identified man? Why, just as in NHS Fife, he will want to use the women’s bathrooms and locker rooms and other spaces reserved for women. And he will expect the employer to discipline any women who misgender “her” by telling “him” to get out of their reserved spaces. The employer will have the most disagreeable task of telling them, “Sorry, ladies, these aren’t your spaces. You don’t have any ‘consent’ entitlement over their use. They are my spaces as the owner of the business. And the government tells me that, as the owner of the business, I must not prevent a transwoman from using spaces that I set out for the use of women, because under the law of non-discrimination, I can’t treat her differently from other women. And get this: I must take disciplinary action against you for misgendering this aggrieved, deeply hurt employee, and for defaming her as a predator, else she will start an expensive civil rights action against me. So shut up or get fired”. Nurse Sandra Peggie might not have been “anti-trans” before, but after being BOHICA’ed by NHS Fife in favour of Dr. Upton, I bet she is now. Perhaps she felt it would be OK working with a trans doctor as long as he stayed out of her changing room as common sense and decency would require. But of course he was never going to do that, and NHS Fife was never going to make him. So Ms. Peggie got punished.
(*Mr. Bostock himself is homosexual and most of Justice Gorsuch’s legal reasoning was shoehorning sexual orientation into the definition of “sex” under the relevant civil rights law, which covers only race and sex without defining the latter. The trans defendant had died by the time the case got to the Supreme Court and the opinion essentially just says, “That too” on making gender identity the same as sex. Women are women, no matter whether they were born women or became women. You can’t fire a man because he became a woman (as the employer did there) any more than you can fire a woman for being a woman.)
We are luckier. The UK Supreme Court ruled last year that if a space is marked ‘women’ or ‘female’, then it is for bio women only, and even a man with GRC [Gender Recognition Certificate] can’t use it. It recognised that women and trans identified men have equal rights, but that you cannot have equal rights if men’s rights to dignity overrule women’s rights to dignity.
The judge in the Peggie case tried to overrule the Supreme Court ruling and included made up quotes in his judgement. The ruling was such a mess that it is expected to be rejected on appeal.
Hopefully the USA will implement the same ruling so that women and girls aren’t expected to undress front of men. There are also a lot of men who don’t want to undress in front of women. Men deserve dignity too.
I don’t think Sandie is anti trans, she is just against being expected to undress in front of a man, especially a fully intact heterosexual man who kept asking the nurses when they were going to get changed so he could go the room at the same time.
No man can ‘become a woman’. They are men who self identify as women, and that’s not the same. A GRC here allows a man to be treated as if he is a woman, but there are legal exceptions, because it is recognised that they are not literally women.
For a thought-provoking account of the childhood of someone who was brought up as a boy but transitioned as an adult (after having fathered four children), see Sophie Grace Chappell’s book Transfigured. As he describes his childhood, he obsessively wished throughout his childhood to turn into a girl, and was stopped by his mother from going to school dressed as a girl. He hoped and prayed each night on going to sleep, that he would wake up and find he had become a girl.
Emanuel thought he would go back to Chicago as Mayor, become Governor of Illinois, and then the first Jewish President of the United States. Didn’t work out that way.
I agree with Andrew Sullivan, JKR, and PCCE on the ‘trans’ issue. ‘Trans’ people should not be discriminated against in employment and housing (in my opinion). However, sports, prisons, bathrooms, etc. are another story. Mutilating minors is particularly offensive. Obviously, I don’t speak for AS, JKR, and PCCE. Biden put males in female sports on his first day in office. Check out Executive Order 13988. I would actually draw a distinction between folks who have “bottom surgery” and those (most) that have not. In the aftermath of “bottom surgery” males are no danger to biological women in bathrooms and prisons. Sports remain an issue in all cases.
The list of “captured” institutions provided by Pinker, is good, but incomplete. I would add many (most) medical organizations, many (most) Universities, the Smithsonian, etc. The list is long.