That’s a whopper of a retraction

The Boston Globe seems to have noticed that they made a libelous claim.

Editor’s note A significant error was made in a headline on a story in Friday’s print sports section about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif incorrectly describing her as transgender. She is not. Additionally, our initial correction of this error neglected to note that she was born female. We recognize the magnitude of this mistake and have corrected it in the epaper, the electronic version of the printed Globe. This editing lapse is regretful and unacceptable and we apologize to Khelif, to Associated Press writer Greg Beacham, and to you, our readers.
The Boston Globe

I wonder if they’ll learn their lesson — that TERFs and transvestigators are not trustworthy sources — and if other nasty accusers will follow suit? JK Rowling & Jerry Coyne come to mind as two people who leapt on a lot of false premises and faulty conclusions in this non-story.

As we all know, real women lose at sports

As usual, the conservatives have found an absurd issue at the Olympics to have a screaming fit over. First it was an opening ceremony that they thought mocked the Last Supper (it didn’t, unless you think Jesus’ last meal was a wild bacchanal), and now it’s a women’s boxing match that the transvestigators have decided was unfair because the winnner was a man.

She wasn’t.

The inaccurate statements about her identity were boosted by prominent anti-trans individuals like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, as well as politicians like US Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and conservative Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Their statements stirred up a storm of anger on the right despite the fact that Khelif is a cisgender woman.

As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos has explained, there aren’t any transgender athletes at the Olympics this year who are competing outside of the sex they were assigned at birth, though IOC rules don’t bar their inclusion so long as they meet certain eligibility criteria. “There has been some confusion that somehow it’s a man fighting a woman,” International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesperson Mark Adams told reporters. “The question you have to ask yourself is, are these athletes women? The answer is yes.”

Imane Khelif is not trans, and was assigned female at birth. She’s a cis woman! But somehow, because she’s strong and can punch hard, attributes any woman who becomes an Olympic boxing competitor would share, her sex and gender are called into question.

That reaction has since spawned scrutiny of Khelif, who was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman. False claims that she is a trans person or that she is a man pretending to be a woman quickly spread thanks to reports she was disqualified from a 2023 International Boxing Association event and the resurfacing of comments by the president of that organization suggesting that her elimination was because she failed a hormone test.

She probably has some unusual physiological characteristics that confused officials of the IBA, but every Olympic competitor is a genetic freak, or they wouldn’t be operating at such a high level of performance. Simone Biles is way out there on the edge of human capability; Michael Phelps has an unusual morphology that made him a strong swimmer. Shall we disqualify them because they don’t have average athletic ability? That’s the whole point of the Olympics, to single out people with exceptional physical characteristics! You don’t get to whine that it’s unfair when an athlete at that level is amazingly good at what they do…or even worse, call into question their identity or history or social role or sexual preferences because you don’t like that they win.

There’s another ugly side to this whole affair.

Beyond questions of sex, there are racial dynamics at play in the perceptions of this match. Female athletes of color — particularly those of African and African American descent — have long been accused of being men when they’ve beaten white women in competition. This happened most notably with tennis phenom Serena Williams and track star Caster Semenya, both of whom endured tropes that cast Black women as more masculine and threatening.

I guess conservatives just want to police women’s behavior. Surprise.

Vivian Wilson strikes back!

After Elon Musk declared his daughter dead because she was trans, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It has. Vivian Wilson has delivered an interview that is pure fire.

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”

Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present.

“He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”

Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school.

“I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,” she said. “It was cruel.”

I know how some of that felt — my father was a high school football jock, and he did accuse me of being weak and effeminate because I took after my mother, being bookish and quiet, but he grew as a person as he got older and he was also caring and supportive. Musk was a monster. He is still monstrous. He doubled down on Twitter.

And in a post on X, Musk said Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and that, at age 4, she fit certain gay stereotypes, such as loving musicals and using the exclamation “fabulous!” to describe certain clothing. Wilson told NBC News that the anecdotes aren’t true, though she said she did act stereotypically feminine in other ways as a child.

Wilson also addressed Musk’s recent comments in a series of posts Thursday on the social media app Threads.

“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she wrote. “And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”

“I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype,” she continued. “I think that says alot about how he views queer people and children in general.”

Jesus Christ. Using three-syllable words and liking Rodgers and Hammerstein are not diagnostic of sexual orientation. How shallow and inane can he get? And he used that as an excuse to abuse his hown child!

Fortunately, Vivian had one supportive parent.

Wilson said she came out twice in life: once as gay in eighth grade and a second time as transgender when she was 16. She said that she doesn’t recall Musk’s response the first time and that she wasn’t present when Musk heard from others that she was transgender, because by then the pandemic had started and she was living full-time with her mother.

“She’s very supportive. I love her a lot,” Wilson said of her mom.

Maybe, instead of working to cure the non-existent “woke mind virus,” Musk should refocus his efforts on treating the “bad dad virus.” He could be the first patient!

This is not a super-villain origin story

Although it sounds like it, its roots have to be much deeper. Elon Musk sees his children as props that he spends little time with, pumping gametes into his serial wives and throwing money at them, and it’s unsurprising that at least one of them wants nothing to do with him. Musk has disowned Vivian Wilson, his transgender daughter, for betraying him by not being the person he wanted her to be.

In a controversial interview with Daily Wire on Monday, the Tesla CEO said that his transgender daughter Vivian, who transitioned in 2022, was killed by the woke-mind virus.

I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier, the billionaire told psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson, using the 20-year-old’s deadname and incorrect gender, per Page Six. Musk claims that he was essentially deceived into signing documents to allow for the child’s medical gender reassignment.

This is before I had any understanding of what was going on. COVID was going on, so there was a lot of confusion, and I was told Xavier might commit suicide if he doesn’t [make the change], Musk continued, again insensitively referring to his daughter by her deadname.

Elsewhere in the interview, he said he lost his child and said again that he had been tricked.

They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason, he added. The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead. My son Xavier is dead — killed by the woke-mind virus.

The SpaceX founder added, I vowed to destroy the woke-mind virus after that. And we’re making some progress.

Now Jordan Peterson…that guy belongs in a comic book, he’s even got the costume already. Musk is just a terrible father.

There’s this awful patriarchal belief that children are extensions of yourself, rather than autonomous, independent people who will follow their own unique paths and become something other than your puppet. Musk has it bad. Vivian Wilson is her own self, and that offends Elon Musk.

I grew up as one of six kids, all different, all complicated, and while we all loved our father, we were not him at all…and he respected that, helped us as much as he could, but let us go our own way. That’s how I feel about my own kids: they are good people, but they are not me, and I wouldn’t want them to be.

Vivian looks pretty alive to me. She’d probably be more interesting to talk to than Elon Musk.

Hey, how is he planning to destroy his imaginary woke-mind virus? Since it doesn’t exist, and is nothing but the reification of his own fears and misconceptions, the only way to defeat it is by waking up himself.

Translation, please

I don’t know what the hell JK Rowling is babbling about now.

I’ve heard straight men talk about trans women as though they’re fallen men to whom sympathy ought to be automatically extended, but there’s deeper stuff going on, too.
I asked a lefty straight man I know (this is irl) whether he was aware how many penised ‘lesbians’ are involved in the push to access female spaces. The subject made him incredibly uncomfortable. He simply didn’t want to hear it. I then asked him whether he knew what his straight male friends wanted from women in the bedroom, kink/sex wise. Horrified look: ‘no, of course I bloody don’t’
I said to him that if you put 100 straight and bi women of our age and average sexual experience in a room together, they could write an authoritative compendium on straight male kink in an afternoon, from their own direct experience or that of women they know. I said I presumed he knew that a cross-dressing fetish is one of the most common paraphilias in heterosexual men and that this has been in the psychological literature since Freud.
I cannot overstate how little he wanted to talk about this, let alone acknowledge that any of it was real and happening. I don’t know whether it was the idea that women actually talk about what they meet in the bedroom that touched a nerve, or whether he found the whole subject ick, or didn’t like the suggestion that he was naive or poorly informed, but the impression given was that I was depraved to say such things aloud, and that he’d much prefer a seemly silence.

straight men talk about trans women as though they’re fallen men…what? Who? Does anyone actually think like that?

penised ‘lesbians’? Is this how TERFs talk among themselves? So she’s talking to a guy who confesses that men don’t talk much among themselves about personal sexual preferences…news at 11.

Neanwhile, she claims that she and her buddies are better authorities on straight male kink than men themselves, and pontificates on the cross-dressing fetish, as if it’s relevant, and cites Freud. Is she confusing trans with cross-dressing? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Also, who is she delivering this lecture to?

Then she concludes by admitting that she’d been grossing out the person she was talking about, and that he just wanted her to shut up. Finally! Something I can understand and totally relate to!

The rest just informs me that she’s been talking with her cult/clique and has cultivated a whole bunch of weird-ass ingrown assumptions and biases.

Come back, Dave Futrelle!

He had been talking about this for years at We Hunted the Mammoth, how strange little nazi babies had been complaing about how video game women weren’t sufficiently feminine or pulchritudinous or pornified for their taste, and they’d go on and on about how they’d cracked open their calipers and determined that character facial structures were actually male. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never masturbated to Lara Croft, so those people were telling on themselves, I think.

Today, Stephanie Sterling is covering that beat. The nerdzis (her coining, I like it) are claiming that video game characters have “woke chins,” and think there is a conspiracy to inject obviously trans protagonists into their shoot-em-ups. Because they can tell. By looking at their chins.

I have the reverse problem on Instagram. I’m mainly interested in a few friends and macrophotography, but “The Algorithm” insists on sprinkling my doom scrolling with reels of random short videos of women with pathologically bloated breasts and butts who just stand there in skimpy clothing and jiggle, with comments about how they really like older men. I’m an older man with creaky old bones, and I glance at them and all I can think about is how much their backs must hurt. They aren’t enticing at all. But maybe those women ought to get together with the guys who think their cartoon characters aren’t sexy enough and find true happiness together.

Although…next time one of those bouncy women pop up on my phone, I’ll have to look up at their chins. Maybe they won’t be good enough for the gamer boys.

Hatred can be so oblivious to itself

Beth Bourne is an administrator at the UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies. She is also the president of her local Moms for Liberty chapter. She took off to Hawai’i for vacation, and discovered that the native people have a tradition she does not like at all.

Māhū (‘in the middle’) in Native Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures are third gender people with traditional spiritual and social roles within the culture, similar to Tongan fakaleiti and Samoan fa’afafine. Historically, the term māhū referred to people assigned male at birth (AMAB), but in modern usage, māhū can refer to a variety of genders and sexual orientations.

According to present-day māhū kumu hula Kaua’i Iki:

Māhū were particularly respected as teachers, usually of hula dance and chant. In pre-contact times māhū performed the roles of goddesses in hula dances that took place in temples which were off-limits to women. Māhū were also valued as the keepers of cultural traditions, such as the passing down of genealogies. Traditionally parents would ask māhū to name their children.

The hotel she was staying at was hosting a māhū luncheon. In public, no less. They were relaxing in the lobby! Well, now how can a conservative white American deal with that? By tantrums, hysterical accusations, demanding to see the hotel manager, and calling for the police, of course.

What shocks me is that Beth Bourne herself recorded her ridiculous melt-down and proudly posted it on Twitter for all to see. She put on a spectacle of intolerance, hatred, and stupidity, while the māhū sat quietly, calmly, gracefully, and responded politely, and she thought we’d all see how awful drag queens are by posting it? Weird. The police came, and escorted Bourne off the hotel premises, and UC Davis issued a rebuke, and she still thought this was a good idea? I’m much more impressed with Marina Del Rey’s response.

I think it’s telling that this video stirred up strong emotions in many viewers. There was prior dialog from her ahead of what I filmed and ultimately she was taken off the property by the @honolulupd. I would like to say a huge THANK U again to the @alohilaniresort for your care and concerns during and after, to all of us…. those within witness – guest or staff – many extended compassion of which Im very very grateful.
To give some context – a few of us were on the hotel property to film a video for an upcoming pageant, playing roles as hotel staff in drag. This woman saw us filming and came to a slow burn and then she popped off. Her rant went on and on – possibly with the attempt to get a riled angered response. She didn’t get one. In this video – you see my perspective. In her video – u will see three drag queens surrounded by staff and guests – just sitting down.
Im not here to figure her out, incite hate against her, or call her names —— Im here to remind you, many meet worse daily, the ugliness of this happens without regard to where, why, how etc….Even in the lobby of your hotel.
Love more on those beside you. Love on those who are turned away by their own….and thank u to everyone who has sent messages of concern and care. we are all okay. A little shook & saddened but grateful to the people we were in the company of and everyone who reached out. and still keeping faith in humanity.🤙🏼

Tradwives rising, rising, rising…falling, falling, falling

I’m hoping that the right-wing troll economy is bottoming out. We’re living with the dregs of a few decades of far-right hyperbole generating wealth from rage clicks, but Alex Jones is being taken to the cleaners at last, Tucker Carlson has been banished from Fox News, Steve Bannon is going to jail — maybe people will start realizing that outrageous hate is only going to tap the wallets of a minority of bigots, and that has some downsides. Still, that’s a fruitful line of grift, since the subjects are all gullible and delusional.

The latest goofy grift is tradwives: women who put on dresses and makeup and go online with videos about how they really love staying at home, taking care of their man, cooking and cleaning and popping out babies (the babies are usually not in the videos — they’re catering to men who don’t want the tedium of dealing with actual children, that’s what women are for.) It seems there is a strong market among conservatives for subservient women who are content to be servile.

There is a contradiction in that, since why are these women, who are supposed to be quietly working in the kitchen and bedroom, using media to become popular with the public? No worries, conservatives have been soaking in that contradiction since the days of Phyllis Schlafly.

Is it possible, though, that they can go too far, breaking the illusion? Maybe not — the segment of the public that was unable to see through Andrew Tate’s bullshit may be impervious to reason — but one tradwife, Lilly Gaddis, recently pushed the limits by being too transparently trollish. Amanda Marcotte explains her breakthrough moment:

In the video, Gaddis is decked out in the standard tradwife gear of a cleavage-baring sundress and a cross necklace to justify the sexualized marketing. She is vaguely arranging food while providing a rant tailor-made to tickle the reactionary male brain. She accuses immigrants and Black women of being “gold-diggers,” while insisting Christian white girls like herself will love you, pathetic male viewer, solely for your masculine might, even if you are “broke.” She is going for maximum shock value, dropping not just the n-word, but other five-dollar curses that are clearly meant to to offer a transgressive thrill, coming from a young woman playing at being a more scantily clad June Cleaver.

Some people are trying to defend her by saying she accidentally dropped some racial slurs, but how do you do that by mistake? This was an intentional ploy, and she later confirmed it by arranging interviews on Alex Jones’ show and by promoting Nick Fuentes. Being one attractive women among many making Christmas cookies is not going to make you stand out; being the attractive woman making cookies while damning immigrants with racial epithets is distinctive. For now. The next Lilly Gaddis is going to have to up her game and do much worse.

This wannabe Christian influencer is so obviously out for attention, so it’s tempting to ignore this story in hopes of not letting her have it. Still, Gaddis is an important illustration of the vicious cycle of greed and far-right radicalism driven by the social media ecosystem. The field of strivers wishing to be America’s next top troll is growing faster than can be maintained by the existing audience of incels, white supremacists and other miscreants radicalized online. Becoming the next big thing means attracting the coin of the authoritarian realm: liberal outrage. Yet as liberals get numb to the constant barrage of fascist provocation, the trolls have no choice but to up the ante. So this is how we get a woman in an apron pretending to cook on TikTok while dropping the most notorious of racial slurs.

I’d like to think it can’t go much further before the whole grift disintegrates as a parody of itself, but there is a real segment of the populace that falls for “influencers” all the time, and by their nature seem to be stupid enough to favor far-right bigotry. It’s promising, though, that Lilly Gaddis was fired from her job and banned from Tik Tok, so maybe she’s going to flame out and fall back into the obscurity she deserves.

If only they hadn’t made that last comment

Honestly, I could have ignored this. It’s nothing but familiar anti-trans stupidity, inventing sharp distinctions out of blurry ones, pretending overlaps in morphology don’t exist. There’s just so much of it that I don’t have the will to address it all. But that last bit…I saw red.

Male skeletons literally have more ribs than female skeletons and many other differences. Did you go to an online college?

That is simply not true. Did you go to a bible college?

So that’s what they’re afraid of

People have this absurd fear that fraternizing with different kinds of people will radically transform them in every way.

If you think that, allow me to reassure you: I’ve been friends with and talking to gay and trans people for decades now, and I’m still heterosexual. I’ve just become a liberal, socialist-leaning, humanist-atheist who always votes for the political party with the more tolerant, progressive policies. Nothing to be afraid of there.