Solnit / Kalmus: We may win if we fight, though 1.5C is coming

From an opinion by Rebecca Solnit:

"A significant percentage of the general public speaks of climate change with a strange combination of confidence and defeatism: confidence in positions often based on inaccurate or outdated or maybe no information; defeatism about what we can do to make a livable future. ... They’re surrendering in advance and inspiring others to do the same. If you announce that the outcome has already been decided and we’ve already lost, you strip away the motivation to participate – and of course if we do nothing we settle for the worst outcome. It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win."

Also:

"I don’t know why so many people seem to think it’s their job to spread discouragement, but it seems to be a muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings. I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis. You can feel absolutely devastated about the situation and not assume this predicts outcome; you can have your feelings and can still chase down facts from reliable sources, and the facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now."

— Rebecca Solnit. "We can’t afford to be climate doomers" The Guardian, July 26, 2023

From an opinion by Peter Kalmus:

"...it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. The Amazon rainforest may already be past its tipping point. Coral reefs as we know them will be gone from our planet by mid-century, and possibly much earlier given this surge in sea-surface temperatures. These are cosmic losses."

"No amount of tree planting, recycling, carbon offsetting, or wishful carbon-capture thinking will ever change this." End fossil fuels, Kalmus says. "Every speck of fossil fuel sold and burnt combusts into carbon dioxide, forcing the planet to heat."

"Biden’s refusal to declare a climate emergency and his eagerness to push new pipelines and new drilling – at an even faster pace than Trump – goes against science, goes against common sense, goes against life on Earth. In the world of politics-as-usual, with its short-term goals and calculus of “safer to follow than to lead”, I suppose there are reasons and rationalizations for this planet-destroying choice. But speaking as a scientist, it seems ignorant and short-sighted. It’s certainly a form of climate denial."

"Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating." We didn't do it.

— Peter Kalmus. Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency. And he must do so now. The Guardian. July 27, 2023.

Related

"We know who's responsible for orange sky". It's a 2-minute read on Medium.

“Changing the discourse did not prevent” a lot of stuff from going wrong, Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger.

“‘We did change the discourse...,’ a friend remarked to me the other day, and then the thought trailed off. We did. But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those screens. A torrent that assiduously amplifies the most operatic forms of virtue performance and the most cynical forms of pipiking [that is, trivializing through nonsense-making].”

Klein again:

"...it would seem that Greta [Thunberg] no longer believes in that theory of change. She has come to the place at which so many of us have arrived: the realization that no one is coming to save us but us, and whatever action we can leverage through our cooperation, organization, and solidarities.

There is a power in naming this, rather than just filling up airtime. Because if you find yourself saying, as some activists more diplomatic than Greta did, that a climate summit is a 'good start' and that the summit is officially called Conference of the Parties 26 — because it had literally happened every year since 1995 at that point (save Covid-wracked 2020) — then it might be time to admit that words are no longer doing what we expect them to do."

— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Also, Klein says, there has been a common narrative that "people of good conscience, across all the lines meant to divide us, can band together, build power, and transform our societies into something fairer and greener, just in the nick of time. But that story is getting harder to believe with each day that goes by."

See also

Goal Of Capping Global Warming At 1.5 Degrees Celsius Is 'On Life Support,' UN Chief Warns: “There is no kind way to put it,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said. Lydia O'Connor, HuffPost, Mar 21, 2022

Oh, it happened

"Global warming surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past 12 months for the first time on record, new data shows, breaching a critical threshold that, if it continues, will push the limits of life on Earth to adapt."
— The world just marked a year above a critical climate limit scientists have warned about, Angela Dewan, CNN, February 8, 2024

In 2022, the 'current policies' projection of warming was 2.6C. In 2024, it's 2.9C. This is what I mean when I urge caution and over-excitement about stuff like huge solar capacity growth. *This* is the number that matters - and it's getting ****worse**** www.carbonbrief.org/unep-new-cli...

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— Ket-arbon Emissions Joshi (@ketanjoshi.co) October 25, 2024 at 3:02 AM

To fear darkness is to fear ourselves

Two quotes from
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times. Boulder, Colo.: Sounds True, 2023.

---

"Open land, a forest, the sky, and the deep ocean are physical representations of our vast darkness. Being willing to open to darkness is to be willing to open to unknown dimensions of life, creating the vastness that nature presents. We are the dark waters and the dark earth. To fear darkness and avoid it is to turn against ourselves. When we turn against ourselves, darkness intensifies and is turbulent (personally and collectively)."

---

"[Lucille] Clifton is among many who have recorded clear messages and warnings that we humans have violated the earth in ways that we might not survive. We experience great grief in what we are losing and have lost in darkness."

---

For more about this book: " We Can’t Prepare for This Moment". It's a 5-minute read on Medium.

Detail from the cover of Opening to Darkness

How much will humans suffer under heatwave before we stop destroying the Earth?

Right now: July 2023

Under this heat, humans won't be able to grow food. Cereal crops and other commodities including olives and tomatoes hit by Europe’s heatwave Grace Duncan, The Grocer, 27 July 2023

Last year: September 2022

"California Endures Worst Days Of Severe, Relentless Heat Wave: Temperatures have reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the state, which is suffering through a deep drought." Lydia O'Connor. Huffington Post. September 6, 2022.

Update: May 2024

"Temperatures rose above 52 degrees Celsius (125.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh, the highest reading of the summer and close to the country’s record high amid an ongoing heat wave..." CNN, May 28, 2024

Update: June 2024

It already is. The heat dome over Africa this week is going to kill 1000s in the Sudan this week and nobody other than UNICEF seems to be even talking about it.🥺

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— Evo Daily (@evodaily.bsky.social) Jun 17, 2024 at 3:52 PM

Hundreds of Hajj pilgrims die as Mecca temperatures hit 120 Fahrenheit, Lauren Kent, Caroline Faraj and Hande Atay Alam, CNN, June 20, 2024

Related

"We know who's responsible for orange sky". It's a 2-minute read on Medium. If you hit the paywall, consider becoming a member.

Your carbon dioxide birth number

When I used carbon dioxide birth number (CO2BN) in Most Famous Short Film of All Time, I didn't know others were doing it, but they were, and here's how you can find yours.

For human safety in heatwave: Use the heat index or wet bulb globe temperature

Today I learned

Air temperature alone doesn't tell you whether the heat is dangerous to you. You have to consider humidity, too. High humidity prevents your own sweat from helping you cool off, so humidity matters more as the temperature rises.

In a heatwave, for most purposes, you can probably use the common "heat index" or your local weather warnings, but if you're doing strenuous activity outside, consult the wet bulb globe temperature (WGBT).

See the article, with my subscriber gift link: "The world needs a new way to talk about heat," advice by Michael J. Coren, Climate Advice Columnist, Washington Post, July 25, 2023

"Last year [2023], tens of thousands of people around the globe died in climate-change-induced weather events – and that’s likely an under-estimate." — Katharine Hayhoe

See also: "This number can measure how dangerous a heat wave is for you: What is the wet bulb temperature? And why is it so important?," Umair Irfan, Vox, Jun 17, 2024

Related

Read more: "We know who's responsible for orange sky". It's a 2-minute read on Medium. If you hit the paywall, consider becoming a member.

Republicans restrict spending on social programs that serve diverse groups

Leaders of the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia had "turned to Washington for some help." Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) requested the funding and

"nearly secured $1.8 million in federal aid for renovations — until House Republicans mounted an extraordinary blockade this week, denying a request to fund the organization and other lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender-focused groups in two states. ... At the height of the annual appropriations process — as members of Congress race to fund the government and avert a shutdown — the GOP’s far-right flank has scrubbed spending bills to eliminate money that would protect LGBTQ rights, ensure gender equality and promote racial justice.

* * *

The dynamic nearly overwhelmed the chamber only a week earlier, as Republican lawmakers scrambled to complete work on an annual measure that authorizes spending at the Pentagon. With the backing of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the roughly three dozen members in the House Freedom Caucus transformed the bill — historically, a bipartisan affair — into a fraught battleground over abortion, transgender healthcare and diversity."

— "House GOP blocks funds to LGBT groups, using budget for cultural fights," Tony Romm, Washington Post, July 20, 2023

Referring to white male entertainers whining on the BBC in 2018, Claire Dederer says:

"None of these guys has the bandwidth to even entertain the idea that a woman’s or person of color’s point of view might be just as 'normal' as theirs, just as central. They seem incapable of understanding that theirs is not the universal point of view and that their own comedy has left people out. That exclusion is not necessarily a problem for me, it’s just a fact. As lifelong excluders, they shouldn’t use their own (ridiculous) feelings of exclusion as a critique of the work of people who look different from them."
Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

See also: "Donald Trump's Corruption Serves Oil Interests". It's a 5-minute read on Medium.

Exploitative businessmen heated the world & are still heating it. We can do something today.

'Accepting $61 million in bribes...for passing...one of the worst anti-climate laws'

We're dealing with a lot of bad. Consider how planet-destroying laws are passed.

"Not Arrested: Charles Jones, former CEO of FirstEnergy

"Last month, Ohio’s former Speaker of the House Larry Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison for accepting $61 million in bribes from the electric utility FirstEnergy in exchange for passing HB6, one of the worst anti-climate laws in the nation.

Charles Jones, FirstEnergy’s former CEO, was revealed to be the architect of the plan when lawyers for FirstEnergy said Jones and a colleague “devised and orchestrated FirstEnergy’s payments to public officials in exchange for favorable legislation and regulatory action.” Jones hasn’t been charged with any crimes."

— "Who gets arrested for climate crimes?: People protesting the climate crisis are getting arrested around the world while actual alleged climate criminals walk free." Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson. Heated. July 18, 2023.

Since 1960, oil and gas companies have had to pay a bond of $10,000 for each lease on federal lands. This security is "to help pay to plug wells or secure leaky ones if firms go out of business or abandon their wells." In 2023, the Bureau of Land Management, part of the Interior Department, proposed raising it to $150,000 — since it hadn't been increased in 63 years. Also, the minimum royalty rate (12.5%) hasn't been raised in a century; that's the rate the government is paid from these operations on federal lands. The proposed new rate is 16.67%.

Companies know this business isn't sustainable. "Climate change and the uninsurable future." Kurt Cobb, originally published by Resource Insights, resilience, July 16, 2023

'Doing something will always be better than nothing'

Because less bad is better than more bad.

"'I want to prepare my son,' said my brilliant, hilarious, artsy friend, who had somehow leapfrogged from mild climate concern straight to preppery and teaching his son to spearfish. I say this not to disparage but to highlight what absolutely cannot happen. ...we can change this. Be a hot stepper before a prepper.

* * *

Worse than climate chaos not radicalizing people (it won’t) is climate chaos sending people directly to It’s-Too-Late Avenue. It’s not, and it never will be. Because 1.9 degrees will always be better than 2. Because doing something will always be better than nothing. And because we actually can’t prep our way out of this. Nor can you, bunker boys of New Zealand."

— "Together we can, today we start, tomorrow we dance!: Or, there's a step before ya prep." Sara Lazarovic. Minimum Viable Planet (Substack). July 16, 2023.

You can have conversations. A resource I came across: Post doom: Regenerative conversations, connections, and resources for moving beyond doom.

You can literally plant a garden. Every flower helps. From a few years ago, immediately pre-covid: "Why I Stopped Protesting and Started a Garden" John Halstead. February 5, 2020

December 2023

Biden, seeking reelection, apparently is trying to balance keeping oil prices low (as many seem to expect him to do) and doing something to mitigate climate change (as many others want him to do). These goals are incompatible.

Thus: "You won’t hear President Biden talking about it much, but a key record has been broken during his watch: The United States is producing more oil than any country ever has." — "U.S. oil production hit a record under Biden. He seldom mentions it." Evan Halper and Toluse Olorunnipa, Washington Post, Dec 31, 2023

It is known: 'Trans people simply exist'

Quote:

"Trans people simply exist. You can prove they exist by pointing to them.

The demand for a philosophical proof trans people exist isn't about what a man or a woman is, it's a demand for trans people to be repressed and silenced until we're invisible.

It's a demand we stop existing.

What's the Galileo quote?

"Nevertheless, it moves."

You can logically prove trans people do not exist, cannot exist, and woul be an affront to God if we did exist.

And yet, we do exist.

Any phlosophical theory that doesn't start from the observation that we do, in fact, exist has a flawed start.

We did exist. Your theory proving we logically should not exist is refuted by our continued existence.

So, the only question left is what to do about it.

Trans people want to be treated like fully equal human beings, and anti-trans extremists want us to be hounded and persecuted into silence.

That's it. That's the whole debate. Everything else is obfuscation."

— Evan Urquhart, Twitter, July 16, 2023
https://twitter.com/assignedmedia/status/1680724068914348032

Also:

"Parents don't 'transition their children.' Trans kids exist. In every type of family."

— Aidan Comerford, Twitter, July 16, 2023
https://twitter.com/AidanCTweets/status/1680458808437481472

"It is completely okay for everyone to know at any age that trans people exist, that people around you will be trans, that trans people are real and will always exist, and yes, it is possible that you yourself could be trans."

— Zinnia Jones, Twitter, July 16, 2023

https://twitter.com/ZJemptv/status/1680612511035293696

James Greig:

"It might sound like a trite, affirmative slogan to say that trans people exist, but it’s a fact which has important implications. Whatever happens at the level of government policy or what gets taught in schools, there will be people who transition, people who live at odds with the sex they were assigned at birth – just as there always have been. “Gender identity” becomes real the second it’s acted upon. As long as medical transition is even remotely possible, it’s a choice that some people will make, because they want to, no matter how difficult or inaccessible it becomes. Trans people are a (more or less) cohesive demographic, with civil society organisations, public representatives and political demands. These are not “contested facts” as the Tory government’s recent guidance – endorsed now by Starmer – claims, but undeniable and concrete realities.

The question is: what do we tell young children about this aspect of the society which they will one day enter? Do we teach them that the trans community, like any other group of people, deserves to be treated with dignity and respect? Do we tell them that it’s OK for them to grow up to be trans, that it’s OK if they already are? Or do we lie to them and tell them that transitioning is not an option (which it is)? It is of course “ideological” to tell young people that they have autonomy over their bodies, that they can choose to lead the life that they want. But the alternative is just as ideological, as well as being more limiting, dogmatic and cruel. What’s really at stake is how hellish we want to make life for people who will grow up to be trans regardless of what the government says or what they learned in Sex Ed. Plenty of people who went to school during the Section 28 era – when the “promotion of homosexuality” was against the law, and there was a strikingly similar moral panic about gay rights – still ended up being gay. Sorry, Mx Thatcher!"

— Keir Starmer celebrates Pride by promising to ban ‘gender ideology’: By embracing transphobic talking points, Starmer is shifting labour to the right on LGBTQ+ rights, James Greig, Dazed, June 24, 2024

In November 2024, Iker Seisdedos asked: "Does Trump’s victory mark some kind of end to identity politics?" His interviewee, Judith Butler, responded:

"Identity is, for me, a point of departure for alliances, which need to include all kinds of people... Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties."
— Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’, Iker Seisdedos, El Pais, December 14, 2024

Climate change is causing the extreme weather: Today's article by James Dyke

Today, James Dyke @JamesGDyke has this 6-tweet thread. In case Twitter doesn't stick around long, here are the comments and the links:

As someone who has spent over a decade writing/talking about climate change, I’ve often felt like I have been waiting for the penny to drop: for society to recognise the catastrophe that we are heading towards. 1/6

Would the brutal heat afflicting much of southern Europe finally be the moment when we would look up and realise things are going seriously wrong with the weather? 2/6

Killer Cerberus heatwave sweeping Europe turns heat maps black as health alerts issued: Greece and Spain give alerts to residents amid heat in excess of 40C, William Mata, July 13, 2023

The Telegraph did offer some advice on what to pack for a European holiday during a 45°C heatwave. 3/6

What to pack for a holiday in a 45-degree ultra-heatwave: With Mediterranean temperatures set to soar into the 40s, here’s how to stay sweat-free and stylish. Caroline Leaper, 12 July 2023

Good Morning Britain broadcast a surreal segment about whether the summer holiday period should be moved because getting heatstroke in a beachside resort isn’t most people’s idea of fun. 4/6

Not even a mention of the impact flying to these destinations has on the climate. Yes we must adapt to climate change, but this is unhinged! 5/6

Analysis: Aviation could consume a quarter of 1.5C carbon budget by 2050, August 8, 2016

Anyay, I ranted about this as part of my @theipaper column about heatwaves, climate change and our continued descent into the inferno. I hope those affected by Cerberus stay safe. 6/6

Is the extreme weather in Europe because of climate change? Yes, and here’s the evidence: Our route to safety is stopping burning coal, oil, and gas. Until then, we will continue our descent into the inferno, James Dyke, inews.co.uk, July 14, 2023

Hundreds are dead in Spain's floods. Scientists see a connection to climate change. Julia Simon, NPR. November 2, 2024

New Climate Action Tracker report - international aviation is wildly off track to fit in with climate goals. I've never seen a projected future trend so far from even the worst possible range (we should start with axing frequent flyer programs) climateactiontracker.org/sectors/avia...

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— Ket-arbon Emissions Joshi (@ketanjoshi.co) October 29, 2024 at 4:34 AM

Martin Edic on climate change: 'We're here...and we are not prepared'

Martin Edic:

"I've been writing about climate for years but this feels like a tipping point, some kind of corner we are turning into a new more hostile world.

This didn’t need to happen but that doesn’t matter now. We’re here, not in the past, and we are not prepared.

We’re not prepared because a years long, massive global campaign to keep it that way has been financed by the fossil fuels industry. Another news report from the Guardian this morning details how 1500 oil and gas lobbyists have worked their way into the entire anti-climate change world, as double agents of a sort, spending money for influence that is not to our benefit."

— Martin Edic, "The Witness Chronicles, July 12, 2023," The Grasshopper on Substack

Update

"European Scientists Make It Official. July Was The Hottest Month On Record By Far." The European climate monitoring organization made it official: July 2023 was Earth’s hottest month on record by a wide margin. Seth Borenstein, HuffPost, Aug 8, 2023

Earth sees hottest-ever March, the 10th record-breaking month in a row, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Washington Post, April 9, 2024

Before and after: See Dubai flooding from space, Mary Gilbert, CNN Meteorologist, April 22, 2024

Scientists find the fingerprints of climate change on Dubai’s deadly floods, Angela Dewan, CNN, April 25, 2024

For more: "Climate change is expensive, but that's not the point". It's a 9-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

An early example of the 'Drop the T' in 2015–2016

In a December 2016 anti-transgender essay “Not My Rights Movement,” Fred Litwin claims that while “the latest data from the U.K. suggests that 20 in 100,000 are transsexual,” nonetheless “referrals to gender dysphoria clinics are skyrocketing” and puberty blockers are “not uncommon,” yet “few people actually go forward to surgery.” To reconcile the elements of this narrative, he claims that children falsely believe they are “in the wrong bodies” because trans people are overrepresented in the media, and I guess later they figure themselves out.

He linked his article to an online petition started in November 2015 by a group LGB Voice. Their 2015 petition no longer exists live but is archived. Similarly, their website lgbvoice.org was only live during 2016, when they featured a few human rights stories with phrases like "LGB Syrian refugees" and "gay asylum seekers" in the headlines and were very clear in their topmost articles that their mission was to "drop the T." Their "About" page said: "We are a group of normal, everyday Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people," but they did not name themselves.

"When I was growing up,” Litwin says in his article — he was born in the mid-1950s — there were transsexuals and transvestites, but “Transgender” aka “Trans” is a new thing that means something else. He uses the word “trans” inconsistently: sometimes he says it means nonbinary identity, not getting hormones or surgery, or the belief that gender is a social construct. At other times, he uses "trans" as a synonym for “transsexual,” as when he quotes a psychiatrist “helping people transition” and these people are referred to as “trans patients.” In any case, he complains about “the omnipresent ideology of transgenderism,” for which he plainly has no definition, which suggests to me it isn't an ideology, less so an omnipresent one.

Yes, he says, “protect trans people from discrimination in housing and employment,” as for any minority. “But" — these people always do the but — "pronoun use?” And so he gave high praise to Jordan Peterson for “crusading against federal Bill C-16 which amends the Canadian Human Rights Act and the hate crimes section of the Criminal Code to include gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination and hate speech.”

So then I read his book I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak (see my comment on Goodreads). It did not address my question of why he would reject this one conspiracy theory and yet embrace transphobia which is another kind of conspiracy theory.

They restrict puberty-blockers and then keep you out of sports because you went through puberty

Quote:

"'Oh, now we care about fairness? Now we care about women’s sports? That’s total bulls**t. And show me all the trans people who are nefariously taking advantage of being trans in sports. It’s just not happening,' said Rapinoe, who over the weekend announced she would retire from professional soccer at the end of the 2023 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) season.

* * *

The latest [March 2023 World Athletics] regulations prohibit athletes who have gone through what WA calls 'male puberty' from participating in female world rankings competitions. WA said the exclusion would apply to 'male-to-female transgender athletes who have been through male puberty.'

Meanwhile, multiple US states have passed legislation restricting trans youths’ access to the hormone therapies known as 'puberty blockers' – meaning some trans girls will be forced to undergo the very 'male puberty' that would now prevent them from competing in WA events."
— "Megan Rapinoe says US has ‘weaponized’ women’s sports against trans people, ‘trying to legislate away people’s full humanity’," Ben Morse, CNN, July 10, 2023

Also:

"In 2013, I started www.transathlete.com, a compilation of trans-inclusive policies. … But in 2019 I began noticing a backslide, with a spike of anti-trans lawmakers and hate groups … The first state in the United States to ban trans youth from school sports was Idaho in 2020. Following that, a wave of bills was introduced in over two-thirds of the country. In most states, lawmakers could not name a single trans youth in sports in their state nor an instance where there was any reason to bar them. In other states, the bills targeted just a handful of youth. Sports quite literally saved my life as an adolescent, and the thought of another young person not being allowed to have the same experiences is absolutely heartbreaking."
— Chris Mosier, “Running, Away and To,” in Surviving Transphobia. ed. Laura A. Jacobs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023.

(Update: Idaho also tried to ban gender-affirming care....but in early 2024, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction.)

Also, this attitude doesn't only affect trans people. Transphobia is linked to homophobia, which affects all kinds of LGBTQ people.

For example, in June 2023, the National Hockey League in the US and Canada (NHL) banned players from wearing Pride jerseys, and the following October, they banned players from using sticks wrapped in rainbow-colored tape even for warmups. The league explained that the athletes shouldn't be "put in the position of having to demonstrate (or where they may be appearing to demonstrate) personal support for any Special Initiatives."

Parker Molloy explained on Substack:

"You truly can't go, 'Get politics out of sports! Get things unrelated to the game out of sports! Just play the game! Shut up and dribble!' without being a hypocrite unless you actually mean to get all politics out of sports, including military displays and national anthems."

Then again, some gay people also explicitly exclude trans people. (Which might be internalized homophobia talking, or might be due to other reasons.) The thing is, no gay person or group is the gatekeeper for who else is gay.

But now Martina Navratilova is saying "Omg...a bloke cannot be a lesbian." (X, November 28, 2023) "She made the assertions," the Advocate reports, "in response to a video by Stonewall that promoted diversity and inclusion of lesbians from diverse backgrounds, including transgender women who identify as lesbians." (The Advocate)

Anyway, at first, someone might have been listening to Martina Navratilova's opinions on sports, like: Oh, she's an athlete, so she's informed about who can compete fairly in women's sports and who has an unfair advantage, and also she has a personal stake in the outcome because (though now 67) she's part of a community of athletes.

But then you realize that Martina Navratilova has opinions about who is a lesbian, and the fact that she's a former pro tennis player gives her no moral authority to go around saying who's legitimately gay. And then you realize: Oh, when she was talking about sports before, her opinions went broader and deeper. This was part of her plan the whole time.

But if trans girls take puberty blockers from a young age, they won't go through male puberty and then they can fairly compete with other teen girls, right?

Oh wait — sometimes you get puberty blockers and are still told you can't play girls' sports. Why? Because Florida. A trans girl, on hormone blockers since she was 11, played on a girls' volleyball team at a high school near Fort Lauderdale, and in November 2023, the principal and other staffers were reassigned due to "allegations of improper student participation in sports." (HuffPost)

But so many kids are on puberty blockers, right? So many? Wait:

See this

Pink News, July 1, 2024:

[Martina Navratilova said:] “I’ve been jettisoned by a lot of the groups in the LGBT community. But I’ve been speaking my mind for a long time. I’m not going to change that. ... I know I’m on the right side of history. I’m right on most people’s opinion about women’s sex-based spaces, and especially sports. ... “Women are asked to be kind and inclusive, yet by including transgender-identified males in women’s sports, you’re excluding women.”

To which Megan Rapinoe has said:

“Show me all the trans people who are nefariously taking advantage of being trans in sports. It’s just not happening.

Rapinoe made a further point:

“When Martina or Sage [Steele, a former ESPN sports news anchor] are talking about this, people aren’t hearing it just in the context of elite sports. They’re saying: ‘The rest of my life, this is how I’m going to treat trans people’.”

Martina Navratilova rips the left over criticism of her fight to keep women's sports fair Navratilova spoke at a 'Take Back Title IX' rally, Ryan Gaydos, Fox, June 26, 2024

Also

Next Level Girls Basketball, based in Wilder, Kentucky, coaches girls in 3rd grade through high school. A 6th-grade team recently (according to a WVX story):

"entered a city-wide basketball league run by Southwestern Ohio Basketball. At the end of the regular season, the team posted a 7-1 record and was preparing to fight for the year-end tournament title in February. But they soon found out they were banned from playing because of one glaring issue: the league was for boys.

A text from the league's president, Tom Sunderman, was sent to Next Level's Director Larry McGraw, informing him that his team's participation in the league presented a liability risk.

McGraw believes another factor may have been at play."

The director, Larry McGraw, registered the girls for the boys' league. Why? According to the article, "Often times, teams with younger players playing at high levels might enter a league with older players for a new challenge, he says. It's also not unheard of for a girl to play on a boys team or for a girls team to play against boys..." In response: "Southwestern Ohio Basketball claims Next Level was deceptive by listing the team's gender as "male" in its registration, breaking the league's rules."

"University of Cincinnati assistant professor Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown says the issue is not whether Next Level broke the rules, but instead the rules themselves and their impact on young girls.

Brown focuses on Black women and girls in sports and how they're presented in media and culture. She says the team's banning is another unfortunate instance of girls getting punished for having success.

'It happens all the time,' Brown said, 'There's this mythos that boys and men are innately always better than girls and women when it comes to sports.'

Brown says this mythos stems from the idea that men have to present masculine traits and women must be feminine, pointing to examples in sports history where women were accused of 'gender fraud' for excelling in athletics and not fulfilling a specific gender stereotype."

In response to controversy, Southwestern Ohio Basketball issued a statement regarding, as WVX put it, "possible physical retaliation from other teams if the girls were to win the tournament." In other words, they were worried that boys with fragile egos, in response to losing a game to a girls' team, might (in the statement's own words) "retaliate against a girl. Then we have liability issues." The league decided that the appropriate way to deal with this risk to the girls was to prevent the girls from playing at all.

— A girls basketball team kept beating the boys. The league called foul Zack Carreon, 91.7 WVX, March 4, 2024 at 3:27 AM EST

See also

"World Athletics’ policy limiting trans women participation is ‘here to stay,’ says president Sebastian Coe," Amanda Davies, CNN, March 2, 2024

Helen Lewis’ Bait and Switch, Evan Urquhart, Assigned Media, March 19, 2024

For more on this topic: Oh, It's About Sports, Is It? It's a 14-minute read on Medium.

Christina of Sweden - in 'To Climates Unknown'

Today I learned something about Queen Christina

"In July 1661, Sweden's Stockholm Bank issued the first bank note in Europe to compensate for a shortage of silver coins. Although Sweden lacked silver, it possessed bountiful copper resources, and the government of Queen Christina (1634-1654) issued large copper sheets called platmynt (plate money), which weighed approximately 4 pounds each."
Jack Weatherford. The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997. p. 130.

If you'd like alternate history about King Christina...

To Climates Unknown

Bookshop will ship it within the US. The ebook is on Kobo. Yes, also Amazon.

Everyone should hire sensitivity readers

Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, explains that

"having a trans-sensitive proofreader for his work was not out of fear of being 'cancelled', but to ensure that it does not 'wound or misrepresent' certain demographics.

The Scottish writer, 64, said that as a writer it was important to keep “an open mind” about a new culture in which “archetypes haven’t been established yet”.

* * *

His most recent novel, The Long Knives, features trans characters..."

Read the article on STV News.

'The Incel Rebellion': What is incel?

Lisa Sugiura's book The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women (2021) is open access. It argues "that the ideology espoused by groups such as incels in the manosphere" predates the internet and continues to be "linked with the wider sociopolitical climate."

Homophobia and misogyny

MGTOW members are homophobic and sexist, tending to reject the idea that their members can or should have relationships with women, and "they use online harassment to police the borders of hegemonic and toxic masculinity." They "are influenced by the mythopoetic movement led by poet and author Robert Bly (1990), who suggested that men should return to their ingrained nature by embracing homosocial solidarity."

Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo's critical discourse analysis (CDA) found that Donald Trump's vocabulary about women in his 2016 campaign "perpetuates a male-centric hierarchy, significantly impacting upon his supporters...Seven core lexical and rhetorical strategies were identified by di Carlo (2020), which sound remarkably familiar to incel attitudes towards women ... Like incels, Trump’s Tweets portrayed his misogyny in an overt way, often used under the guise of humour..." Also, Trump invoked the "manosphere looks numerical scale," i.e., rating women on a scale of 1–10. The difference between Trump and incels is that Trump had a huge audience and was able to gain power.

Public figures who are "part of the so-called intellectual dark web" and are "the faces of men's supremacist movements" critique "the mainstream" (which they're actually part of) and serve as the "'respectable' faces of misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism."

What is incel?

The "essence of incel" is the idea that "men are marginalised from society, and are victims of the ‘natural social order’, initiated by second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s." To explain their "loneliness and self-loathing," they use "novel language...that obstructs outsiders and further perpetuates misogyny, racism, homophobia and ableism." This language aids in their community formation.

"Incels deny any connections with the alt-right [i.e., white supremacists and fascists] or, indeed, having a political purpose; however, there are overlapping ideologies..."

"Whiteness...is positioned as dominant of the racial hierarchy that exists within incels. ... homosexuality and transgender are disregarded and denounced ... Non-white incels are often told to commit suicide more than their white counterparts..."

Their ideology is fuzzy on the idea of choice. While they criticize women "for being uniquely superficial and shallow," they similarly mock women they find unattractive. Their continual rejection of the possibility of relationships with women suggests that their celibacy is chosen. What's the difference between an incel and a volcel? It isn't clear. Also, they choose to label themselves incels, to adopt the blackpill ideology (i.e., self-hating nihilism), and to be part of incel community.

Are they a cult?

"...ex-incels, those who have ascended – were able to leave the community – speak of feeling as if they were part of a cult. This is an interesting and concerning claim, and although I do not explore incel as a cult in depth, there is scope to describe it in this manner..."

Online, they perpetrate "overt misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism and ableism," excusing themselves by claiming they're being ironic or satirical.

What are their demographics?

The 2020 incel.co poll of 665 respondents found that 81% of their online users are from Europe and North America and 90% were under 30. Most are white. They claim to be depressed, physically unattractive, have low social skills, and have "never had a sexual relationship or kissed a woman." Despite the incel ideology that worries about heteronormative sexual attraction and conventional good lucks, height doesn't really determine who becomes an incel, as the average user claims to be of average height.

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