Lesbian Ousted From LGBTQ Commission for Believing in Biology

The "transgender" movement is dangerous to actual women.

Julia Beck is a lesbian woman who was recently kicked off an LGBTQ commission for daring to acknowledge the reality of biology. In an article entitled “How I became the most hated lesbian in Baltimore,” Beck relays her brief experience on Baltimore’s LGBTQ Commission and how her refusal to use a female pronoun when addressing a “transwoman” — i.e., a man claiming to be a woman — got her thrown off.

In her article, Beck argued that treating and viewing “transgender women” as biological females was in fact dangerous to actual women. She writes, “I brought up Karen White, a convicted pedophile and rapist who was placed in a UK women’s prison, despite being legally male and undergoing no steps to socially or medically transition, where he then raped two inmates. White’s case illustrates how easy it is for men to manipulate the law, but Pipitone [a self-identified transwoman] smirked and claimed I was being performative. In delicate tones, he expressed concern with my leadership. He claimed Lesbianism and transgenderism are incongruent political forces (probably the only thing we agree on). Instead of enacting ‘lateral violence’ against transfolk by crashing ‘our parades,’ he argued that lesbians should assimilate with male lesbians to ‘punch up’ at an unnamed oppressor.”

In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Beck explained her reasoning for refusing to adopt the transgender paradigm: “I believe in the truth.” That’s debatable given her own life choices, but it’s interesting nonetheless. She added, “When we get down to it, women and girls all share a biological reality. We are all female. But if any man, if any male person, can call himself a woman, or be legally identified as female, then predatory men will do so in order to gain access to women’s single-sex spaces, and it puts every woman and girl at risk.” Hmm… that sounds a lot like the argument we’ve been making since this whole “transgender” crusade reared its twisted head.

It will be interesting to see how many more folks within the Rainbow Mafia ranks start stepping out to call foul over the obviously incongruent ideologies currently being artificially forced together under one big tent.

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McCarthyism is back: Among the Left

Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of  an anti-EU party?

Praising UKIP. That is the great sin that led Katie Ghose to step down last week from her job as CEO of Women’s Aid.

As the Guardian reports, the London Black Women’s Project wrote to Women’s Aid earlier this month demanding Ghose be sacked – all because members of the group had come across a clip of her addressing UKIP’s party conference in 2015.

Ghose was then chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. In her speech, she praised UKIP – along with the Lib Dems, the Greens and Plaid Cymru, other small parties who felt disadvantaged by Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system – for backing the campaign for a more proportional electoral system.

She said Douglas Carswell, then UKIP’s sole member of parliament, was ‘an outstanding MP’, lamenting that, after the 2015 election, UKIP’s four million votes had only produced one seat in Westminster.

Nigel Farage and others in UKIP, she added, were ‘champions’ of electoral reform.

That was it. She didn’t praise Kippers’ policies, or endorse them for office, purple Union Flag fluttering behind her.

Indeed, as British Future’s Sunder Katwala has pointed out, Ghose has a reputation as a ‘liberal campaigner on democratic reform, human rights, feminism’, and narrowly missed out on being selected to stand for Labour at the 2015 election.

All she did was speak out about what she saw as the unfairness of the electoral system for smaller parties like the (then) insurgent UKIP, and welcomed its support for reform.

But apparently saying anything remotely positive about right-wing politicians is enough to render people like Ghose compromised, unsuitable to run a women’s charity.

Another supposedly damning clip has also surfaced: at the same conference, the ERS hosted a fringe event featuring Katie Hopkins, at which she joked about gassing the House of Lords, while Ghose, the chair, failed to rebuke her.

We can argue about whether Hopkins was an appropriate panellist. In 2015 she had long established herself as an inflammatory troll, and anyone looking to have a serious discussion would have been wise to look elsewhere.

But the idea that any of this made Ghose’s leadership of Women’s Aid ‘untenable’, as activists claim, is ridiculous. Worse, it reflects the remarkable McCarthyite bent of many in public life today.

Whether it is editors being edged out for commissioning controversial pieces or academics being hounded for merely attending controversial conferences, it isn’t just your own beliefs that Twittermobs will go after you for these days.

Merely offering a platform to those deemed to be guilty of wrongthink, merely trying to engage with people whose views you might otherwise dislike, is held up as proof as one’s moral taint.

As happened during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s, guilt by association is fast becoming the weapon of choice in our Twittermobbing era.

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Covington Boys Cleared, but MAGA Hats Still Trigger

Private investigators conclude the obvious: The Catholic students were innocent all along.


    
We’d file this one under “Better Late Than Never,” although a lot of damage was done before the record was corrected. Private investigators have concluded, after 240 man hours of interviews with 43 students, 13 chaperones, and several eyewitnesses, as well as scouring YouTube and news articles, that the MAGA-hat-wearing Covington Catholic boys did nothing wrong while at the March for Life in January. Greater Cincinnati Investigation, Inc. was hired by the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School to get to the bottom of the story once and for all.

In late January, the Leftmedia pounced on the boys for alleged racist taunting and bullying of a Native American on the National Mall. But the resulting hate-narrative lynch mob had the facts all wrong. Not only were the boys not the aggressors, they were the recipients of racial epithets from the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group of racist haters advocating black supremacy. Then Nathan Phillips, a well-documented liar and fraud, showed up to beat his Native American drum in the face of the most famous of the boys, Nick Sandmann. The video evidence is clear, and investigators concluded that the statements they received “are remarkably consistent” with each other and “with the videos we reviewed.”

Investigators could not reach Phillips, however, even when they parked outside his home for a day. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t want to talk to them. He’s much more comfortable spouting lies on CNN.

Nevertheless, the reason that even a few conservative outlets initially dumped on the Catholic students was that their own diocese was so quick to throw them under the bus. Within hours of the initial reports, Covington Catholic High School and its Kentucky diocese shamefully issued a joint apology to Phillips, noting, “This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

That apology was taken down from the web, and Bishop Roger Foys of Covington soon issued an apology to the students. In fact, he now says “I commend them” for what “one might even say [was] laudatory” behavior. That’s as it should be, but, again, a lot of damage had been done already.

Unfortunately, there will also be those who are so deeply insulted at the mere sight of a MAGA hat that the truth is irrelevant. Guy Jones, a Hunkpapa Lakota and member of the Greater Cincinnati Native American Coalition, complained after the report, “The fact that you have these students wearing these MAGA hats and they were doing the tomahawk chop — that was a statement.” Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a member of Colville Confederated Tribes in California and professor of American Indian studies at California State University at San Marcos, likewise grumbled, “They were all wearing MAGA gear, which is, unfortunately, a visual cue.”

Sandmann’s attorney, Lin Wood, was having none of that nonsense. “The MAGA cap that Nick was wearing provides no legal excuse or justification for the politically motivated accusers, rather it only confirms their bias and malice. Anyone who falsely attacked, disparaged, or threatened a minor because of the cap he was wearing should hang his or her head in shame and be held fully accountable in a court of law.” Well said.

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How Tech Giants Are Banning True Speech About Biological Sex

Like a strong cocktail that promises a quick buzz, social media offers us instant gratification that can be hard to resist.

But just as alcohol disguises the smell of chemicals, social media hides the bitter poison of identity politics—a poison that increasingly dominates the content we read.

This toxic cocktail is killing our freedom to speak the truth. And sadly, some of the world’s most powerful companies are siding against freedom and truth.

Twitter’s latest move against free thought came in the form of a ban on “misgendering” and “deadnaming.” This essentially means users who use pronouns and names that align with a person’s biology rather than their professed gender identity will be punished.

This is a victory of feelings over facts. Big tech is enabling identity politics to dominate the virtual public square—and it’s even aiding its takeover of the real one, too.

Take the United Kingdom. In England, police have already used tweets to investigate and arrest citizens for referring to individuals according to their biology rather than transgender ideology. In two separate incidents, police responded to complaints against women from men who identify as women.

Police arrested Kate Scottow at home in front of her children and then held her in a jail cell for seven hours after transgender activist Anthony Halliday (aka Stephanie Hayden) accused her of “misgendering” him.

Halliday/Hayden also seemed to suggest that transgender activists ought to “[storm] into” a parish church to ask “robust questions” of a priest’s wife who has opposed transgender ideology.

Police also went after a 74-year–old woman named Margaret Nelson. The reason: She posted two statements on Twitter that didn’t accord with transgender ideology: “gender is fashionable nonsense” and “in life or in death, trans women are not women, no matter how many times you say it’s so.”

Forced to Speak Untruths

In the novel “1984,” George Orwell coined the phrase “Big Brother is watching” to refer to the government. Today, he’d have to include social media companies as enforcers.

Twitter’s ban on “misgendering” and “deadnaming” crosses a red line. Twitter users should be able to choose what pronouns and names they use for each other. When Twitter punishes users for misgendering and deadnaming, the company pressures us to speak untruths.

Princeton University professor Robert George has warned, “Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from saying things they know or believe to be true. Totalitarians insist on forcing people to say things they know or believe to be untrue.”

Social media companies’ embrace of identity politics has led to biased enforcement of content standards that favors transgender activists.

In Canada, for instance, feminist journalist Meghan Murphy testified before the Canadian Senate against the notorious Bill C-16, which added “misgendering” to the human rights code and criminal code in May 2017. In August 2018, Twitter told her to delete tweets that referred to a biological man, Ryan Kreut (who self-identifies as a woman named Lisa), as a man.

Then, last November, Murphy tweeted several rhetorical questions: “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?” She referred to transgender activist Jonathan Yaniv according to his biology. In the past he had filed lawsuits against female beauticians who refused to give him “bikini waxes.”

Twitter classified these statements from Murphy as hateful and permanently shut down her account. Yaniv then bragged that he was personally responsible for getting Murphy banned from Twitter.

Murphy is now suing Twitter over the ban.

Companies like Twitter clearly see themselves as defending transgender individuals. But they are much more passive about enforcing “hateful conduct” policies when it comes to protecting women from transgender activists.

Trans activists frequently target Murphy and others by name, referring to them as trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). A website called terfisaslur.com displays tweets like “All TERFs deserve to be shot in the head.” “All TERFS need to cease existing. Wipe them from the earth.”

Transgender activists have also targeted Kaeley Triller, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle, a coalition of women opposed to transgender ideology, on Facebook by posting her home address and violently threatening her children.

“Ironically,” Triller says, “the least ‘safe spaces’ in the history of the world are spaces where speech is censored and dissent is punished. If people are not safe to disagree, they are not safe at all.”

Social media companies could be protecting women from the violent, graphic, and threatening content against feminists documented at terfisaslur.com, but instead, Twitter is “protecting” those who identify as transgender from the “hateful conduct” of those who simply say that we are born male and female.

The Eclipse of Women’s Rights

For a brief moment during the #MeToo movement, it seemed that women were ascending the identity politics hierarchy. But as PayPal founder Peter Thiel predicted, when conflict comes between identity groups, the solution will be brokered in a way that most benefits the left as a coalition, not any particular group.

Twitter and Facebook’s double standards are proving Thiel correct. Transgenderism is making war on feminism, and feminists are losing out.

Identity politics is poisonous to freedom. It divides Americans up by ethnicity, race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc., and ranks us in a hierarchy based upon degrees of “victimization.”

This is deeply out of step with America’s founding, which championed the legal equality of each citizen based on inalienable natural rights. It is also out of step with the way most Americans developed their identities—from their families, religious communities, and civic groups.

But as our society has become more atomized, identity politics has filled the void and offered an alternative kind of social identity—albeit a toxic one.

The Marxist struggle, which originally was seen as a struggle for power between economic classes, has been recast as a struggle between social identity groups. Individual guilt, virtue, and responsibility are replaced with collective guilt, virtue, and responsibility.

And because this scheme treats the group as the fundamental unit of responsibility and agency, individual freedoms become irrelevant. At worst, they are seen as tools that “oppressors” can use to exploit the “oppressed.”

We should not be surprised, then, when incidents of identity politics seem to reveal a totalitarian streak. Identity politics doesn’t just produce a grievance culture, it produces a vengeance culture—one that never ends and can never be resolved.

When students and faculty who hold unpopular views are shouted down or even physically assaulted, we are witnessing the fruit of a tree that is rotten to the core.

Identity politics requires the jettisoning of America’s constitutional heritage. It would ultimately replace ordered liberty with a society in which freedoms are enjoyed only by those who have earned them through victimization.

Tech Giants Driving the Train

Twitter, Facebook, and Apple are among 107 major companies that have endorsed federal legislation that would make “misgendering” a punishable offense. Named the “Equality Act,” this bill is anything but.

State and local bureaucrats have already used similar laws and policies to derail the careers of people like high school teacher Peter Vlaming and professor Nicholas Meriwether at Shawnee State University because they referred to students according to biology and not gender ideology.

These laws give government control over our freedom to speak and think according to the truth. The Equality Act would extend that to all 50 states.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who survived life in the Soviet gulag, once told the Nobel Prize Committee: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

As big tech seeks to restructure both our virtual and brick-and-mortar public squares according to the frame of identity politics, now more than ever, we must fight for the freedom to use language to speak the truth.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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