Horrifying Republican response to Bishop's sermon

Sorry, refers to this from the Butler quote above.

It is up to us to produce a compelling counter-vision, one that would affirm the rights and freedoms of embodied life that we can, and should, protect”

From the pdf @JessaWoo links to:
"Goal #5: Instituting Greater Transparency, Accountability, and Over-sight.
The next Administration should guard against the regulatory capture of our
public health agencies by pharmaceutical companies, insurers, hospital conglomerates, and related economic interests that these agencies are meant to regulate. We
must erect robust firewalls to mitigate these obvious financial conflicts of interest.
All National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration regulators should be entirely free from private biopharmaceutical funding. In this realm, “public–private partnerships” is a euphemism for agency capture, a thin veneer for corporatism. Funding for agencies and individual government researchers must come directly from the government
with robust congressional oversight.
We must shut and lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma."
WOW, this is not what I was expecting to read.
2025 might turn out to be my year of DO NOT ASSUME.
Politics really is in a tumble dryer at the moment - the old left and right all jumble up.
ETA Most of the document is what I was expecting, socially conservative, morality emerging from Catholic and Evangelical Christianity, didn't want to give the impression it's different to that overall, just sharing what stuck out to me. Hippie nurses like me have been dreaming of reforming US big pharma for decades.

“Embodied life”? So life that coincides with having a body. Is there life without a body of some shape or form? Jeepers, call David Attenborough. It took a social ‘scientist’ to do Science properly. Better than the real thing.

Has anyone said that "the Left is responsible for what other people do" or "the Left are responsible for the odiousness of the Right"? I think what people here have said is that the left is responsible for its own policies which mean that some people feel unable to vote for them. In a two party state like the US that means that people vote Republican or don't vote at all.

How do you suggest that those of us who are anti-genderism "work on whatever is wrong within the Labour/Democrats"? How do you suppose we work with Labour when they have government ministers who call us "rights hoarding dinosaurs"? How do American women work with the Democrats when their presidential candidate wrote to Dylan Mulvaney praising him for his performance of womanface? (Just a couple of examples. There are hundreds more.)

Do these sound like people who would be open to discussion about the harm that genderism is doing? If you think you have a way of reaching people like that, please share it.

From your OP:

These are tweets from Matt Walsh on X about Bishop Marian Budde and her sermon earlier today in Washington, attacking her womanhood and ability in a sexist and ageist tirade. It seems the clarion call has gone out to the rest of the Trump X minions, as they are all tweeting the same sentiments - including Kellie-Jay Keen and Donald Trump Jnr. Rep. Mike Collins całłed for her deportation, although she is American. Do you still support Trump after this?

Women are not responsible for what Matt Walsh, Trump Jr, or Mike Collins do. KJK is her own woman and we aren't responsible for her either.

You assume that any of us "support" Trump in the first place. "Do you still support Trump after this?" is the political equivalent of "when did you stop hitting your wife?" in that it is based on an unjustified assumption to begin with. I support my cat by paying for his food. I support my sister by helping her to move house. Do I support Trump?

• I agree with some of the EOs he's signed, but not others.
• I recognise why US voters chose him.
• I admire his commitment to actually doing what he said he'd do.
• I wouldn't want to be alone in a room with him.
• I am utterly dismayed that US politics has got to the point where he is the least-worst option for a majority of voters.
• I am terrified because he has undone the AI safety stuff that Biden put in place.
• I am really glad that he has signed the EO that gets men out of women's prisons.

Is that "support" for Trump?

Completely unrelated: are you using a Polish keyboard? You've used L with a stroke twice in the word "called".

even though the word 'woman' is supposedly reclaimed, women themselves are reduced to vehicles of sex, baby-carriers and homemakers. All the work feminism has done could be erased.

From the journal article I linked to:

"These distinctions also suggest that ‘one-size-fits-all’ counter approaches may be less effective than tactics and strategies that address the specific concerns and motivations of different strands."

You are leveraging our concerns as feminists about women's participation in society to try to get us to condemn Trump. This EO doesn't remove women's right to participate in society, so it's a straw man argument. Trump's team contains women; hiring women isn't the action of a man who wants us back in the home. Him committing rape doesn't extrapolate to him wanting us chained to the kitchen sink.

It's possible to accept that someone awful can do a useful and good thing.

"These differences matter, not only for accurately mapping gender-critical politics, but for developing effective counter-strategies. For example, gender-critical feminists appear to be divided on whether to collaborate with right-wing groups, with some actively distancing themselves from the right and others calling for strategic alliances. These divisions open up potential pressure points. These distinctions also suggest that ‘one-size-fits-all’ counter approaches may be less effective than tactics and strategies that address the specific concerns and motivations of different strands."

The emphasis in the quoted text is mine.

"Look who you're getting into bed with", which in this thread takes the form of "look how men who agree with you on one thing have, without any instructions from you§, been mean to a woman on TwiX", is leveraging those "pressure points" of "some actively distancing themselves from the right".

§ See the first rule of misogyny: what men on TwiX do is somehow women's fault.

Hear you go Jessa. I'm sure when you read the witterings of The Blessed Jude you will see why gender ideology has no hope

Butler calls instead for an alternative vision that can challenge the frame of gender as dangerous ideology. Butler invites us to consider: “How do we develop a counter-imaginary strong enough to expose [the anti-gender] ruse, scatter its force, and stop the efforts at censorship, distortion, and reactionary politics that it empowers? It is up to us to produce a compelling counter-vision, one that would affirm the rights and freedoms of embodied life that we can, and should, protect”

A heads-up: the "look who you've got into bed with" posters are following a new TRA strategy to fracture British gender-critical feminists.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10894160.2024.2356496

Yes, this was my understanding too.

What I said about that kind of law needing regular review with the intention of eventual repeal? This.

'The Left is responsible for this mess!'

is not "Right ideology", it's a factual observation.

I was a Labour Party member until 1st May 2018, the kind that went to ward meetings and leafletted. I still endorse core traditional Labour values like workplace rights, trade unions, social housing, free-at-point-of-use health care funded through general taxation, and a welfare safety net to protect those who cannot work and those who make up what Marx called the "reserve army of labour" aka the unemployed. Yet, I do not recognise the modern Labour Party, with its focus on subjective identity and its anti-Semitism. Past Labour govts have brought in tuition fees and PFI in conflict with those traditional Labour values to the extent that I think they aren't a socialist party at all any more. Given a choice at last GE between a non-socialist Labour who think men can become women and a non-socialist Tories who think you can't change sex, I voted Tory for the first time in my life.

I can see how the Dems in the US, by focussing on subjective identity and "defund the police", have alienated voters in the exact same way. People want to be safe and feel safe. They want to know that they can leave their DD at swim class and there won't be a man in the changing room. They want to know that criminals will be arrested and the police will be there to do that. They want politicians who don't gaslight them that a man can become a woman, they want someone who doesn't lie about basic biology. They don't want someone who campaigns on protecting abortion access and then breaks that promise, they want someone who promises day one EOs and actually signs them on day one on camera.

The Left is absolutely responsible for this mess, on both sides of the Atlantic. Remember that Labour didn't gain many votes here, they won because the Tories lost voters to Reform UK. If Reform UK hadn't been on the ballot paper, the Tories would still be in power.

As far as the affirmative action EO:

It's worth understanding why the original policy was made. It affects mainly civil servants, and at that time, there were a minuscule number of black Americans in the civil service. The idea was that they should be roughly in proportion to their numbers in the population, 12%.

Whether you think that was a good or bad approach, that was the reasoning and those were the numbers.

The federal civil service now is 19% black. Which is to say, black Americans are over-represented compared to the general population.

So is it really necessary to carry on with a scheme meant to bring that group up to proportionate representation? Arguably that could end up over-shooting significantly which means others will be disadvantaged.

As a numbers game the policy has accomplished what it was intended to.

Your DP is female and on testosterone, yes?

If your DP was charged with a crime and remanded in custody awaiting trial, would you want your DP held in a men's prison or a woman's prison?

Because that's the kind of thing that Trump's EO is about.

It's interesting to note the reaction of Reddit to the Ross Ulbricht pardon.

Before Trump the political parts of Reddit were largely behind the campaign to free him or at least reduce the sentence. This was very much a left leaning libertarian stance with the campaign for Ulbricht involving a lot of civil rights organisations who saw the sentence term as incredible state overreach and had concerns over political meddling and a court case that involved elements of corruption.

2015 Reddit would have thrown a party at his pardon. I'm sure you can work out the reaction on the main politics sub this week because it was Trump who did it.