Mike Johnson is Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

I wrote about Why the Republicans Chose Mike Johnson (unpaywalled friend link on Medium).

New Speaker Mike Johnson’s Long History With The Religious Right
Come for the Noah's Ark theme park, stay for the relentless efforts to strip women's and LGBTQ+ rights.
Jennifer Bendery
HuffPost
Oct 25, 2023

"'...what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,' Johnson said in a 2021 interview with Ark Encounter founder Ken Ham while guest-hosting the radio show of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an evangelical activist group."
New House Speaker Thinks Creationist Museum Is 'Pointing People To The Truth' An ark replica with dinosaurs "is one way to bring people to this recognition ... that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Mike Johnson said.
Liz Skalka and Paul Blumenthal
HuffPost
Oct 26, 2023

New House Speaker Tells Hannity, ‘Go Pick Up a Bible Off Your Shelf and Read It – That’s My Worldview’
Michael Luciano
Mediaite
Oct 26, 2023

New House speaker's views on LGBTQ issues come under fresh scrutiny Rep. Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has called same-sex marriage a “dark harbinger of chaos” and suggested it could lead to people wedding their pets. Matt Lavietes, NBC News, October 26, 2023

“House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family.” Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Washington Post, October 29, 2023

"Johnson spoke about the lawsuit at his church, the Airline Drive Church of Christ in Shreveport, before taking on the case. He warned the congregation what was at stake with cases like the Jewish family suing to keep Christian activities out of a public school.

'The ultimate goal of the enemy is silencing the gospel,' said Johnson, according to an April 2004 story in the Shreveport Times about the lawsuit. 'This is spiritual warfare.'"

— House Speaker Mike Johnson Spent Years Defending Christian Speech In Public Schools “The ultimate goal of the enemy is silencing the Gospel," the Republican said in 2004 after Jewish parents sued a school for pushing Christianity on their kids. Jennifer Bendery, HuffPost, Nov 24, 2023

Thomas Zimmer on Substack called this article "ostensibly an investigation into Johnson’s roots, written by a Post reporter whose beat is described as 'Red states.' Yet the final product is indistinguishable from a political ad campaign for the politician at the center of the 'reporting' – or from a sympathetic home story for a reality TV contestant. This is a rather bizarre kind of political journalism: It is 'reporting' in the sense that a reporter goes to a place and collects impressions and interviews. But the result is a tendentious collage that entirely obscures that which it supposedly set out to illuminate." For example, one individual quoted in the article says "People here are rugged individualists who want to make their own decisions." "Well," Zimmer points out, "and also the freedom to impose their decisions, their faith, their ideas on the rest of the country – after all, the new Speaker is co-sponsoring a national 'Don’t Say Gay' bill, and he is rather all in on mobilizing the coercive powers of the state to criminalize all those whose behaviors he deems 'deviant.' But sure, 'rugged individualists.'" As another example, while the reporter quotes two people described as "Democratic," one of them voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and the other simply expresses unfounded optimism that Johnson will "help all those back home."

'Fox & Friends' Simply Cannot Separate Church And State In Gush Over Mike Johnson
Kayleigh McEnany and Ainsley Earhardt served up an awkward slice of piety in promoting an interview with the new speaker of the House.
Ron Dicker, HuffPost, Oct 31, 2023

"Before he became a politician, House Speaker Mike Johnson partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group," Andrew Kaczynski, CNN, November 1, 2023

"Does New Speaker of the House Mike Johnson Have a Bank Account?" Speaker Mike Johnson has never listed a bank account on his financial disclosure. In fact, on his newest disclosure he doesn’t list a single asset at all. Roger Sollenberger, Daily Beast, Nov 01, 2023

The New York Times explains covenant marriage, November 3, 2023

"The Supreme Court Shot Down Mike Johnson’s Argument Against Certifying The 2020 Election." In 2023’s Moore v. Harper, the court rejected the independent state legislature theory that Johnson used to try to justify voting to steal the 2020 election. Paul Blumenthal, HuffPost, Nov 4, 2023

Mike Johnson Admits He and His Son Monitor Each Other’s Porn Intake in Resurfaced Video
"I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate," Speaker of the House says of his "accountability partner"
Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone, November 5, 2023

"He not only hates LGBQT people and finds them the source of all evil, he actually ran a gay conversion clinic several years ago. And he bragged that his wife had spent the last three weeks on her knees praying for something or other.

Being a good wife, in other words.

Then he proposed a bill to fund Israel but tied it to another provision crippling the IRS’s ability to go after rich tax cheats. That

connection drew the wrath of Mitch McConnell and a bunch of Senate Republicans, who understand something about political reality and why we defend Ukraine (which Johnson doesn’t support).

This bone-headed move tells us everything we need to know about the degree of fanaticism that drives this guy. He is on a mission from God, always a problem in a profession that relies on common sense and compromise."

— "The Witness Chronicles November 8, 2023," Martin Edic, The Grasshopper (Substack)

On November 14, 2023, on CNBC, Johnson said "we need more" religion in American life. "Not an establishment of any national religion, but we need everybody’s vibrant expression of faith because it’s such an important part of who we are as a nation." He said: "The separation of church and state is a misnomer, people misunderstand it." — HuffPost

On December 5, 2023, Johnson told the National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ award gala in Washington, D.C. that God told him to be "the new Moses."

Of Johnson's ascendancy, Sarah Kendzior says: "I'm less worried about the specific seditionist selected to head the House than I am the lack of accountability for a coordinated and violent coup attempt."

That's an ongoing issue. Speaking of that coup attempt, I've also written about The Narrative of the January 6th Committee (unpaywalled friend link on Medium).

Climate Hawks Urge Biden To Reject Latest GOP Demand For Ukraine Aid: An emerging plan from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would condition U.S. aid to Ukraine on more permits for liquefied natural gas exports. Igor Bobic and Jonathan Nicholson, HuffPost, Apr 1, 2024

"Biden’s LNG ‘pause’ threatens Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry: Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), The Hill, April 3, 2024

"It took less than six months for Speaker Mike Johnson to reach his existential moment...Now, as Johnson tries to pass billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — vital to protecting US allies from Russian, Iranian and Chinese totalitarianism and preserving US power and prestige – he’s having to put his own job on the line to confront GOP extremists who accuse him of betraying the party’s base." (Stephen Collinson, CNN, April 18, 2024)

How Johnson came to embrace Ukraine aid and defy his right flank, Annie Grayer, Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju, CNN, April 21, 2024

Mike Johnson and the "homosexual agenda": Trump's ally in Congress has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ hate The Republican House Speaker has for decades lobbied against efforts to extend legal rights to the LGBTQ+ community, Nicholas Liu, June 5, 2024

Mike Johnson: There’s No Rush For Congress To Approve Hurricane Relief “We’ll be back in session immediately after the election,” the House speaker said of waiting until November for Congress to vote on emergency funding. Nina Golgowski, HuffPost, Oct 7, 2024

GOP House speaker struggles to defend Trump’s Arnold Palmer penis rant by Oliver Willis, Daily Kos Staff, Oct 21, 2024

"Johnson was previously a litigator and spokesperson for the anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, a self-described “Christian law firm” whose legal strategy often pits Christians unfairly against LGBTQ+ people in a legal gambit to undermine nondiscrimination laws through claims of “religious freedom.” The strategy implies and asserts that Christianity and LGBTQ+ identity are inherently mutually exclusive. The group also claims credit for helping overturn constitutional protections for abortion and, in 2023, led the legal push to eliminate access to reproductive and LGBTQ+ health care primarily by amplifying pseudoscientific claims about abortion and LGBTQ+ identity. Speaker Johnson’s ascension, despite his association with the hate group and parroting of conspiracy, is testament to the level of influence these theocratic ideologies wield within the Republican Party.

That relationship was perhaps most clearly revealed in 2023 with the release of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project” and its accompanying 900-plus-page “Mandate for Leadership,” a sweeping plan to reshape presidential powers and the federal bureaucracy in the image of dominionism. Since its release, many of Project 2025’s recommendations were adopted or parroted by former President Trump’s election campaign."

— A Year of Preparation Under the Specter of Conspiracy, R.G. Cravens, Alon Milwicki, and Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon, SPLC, June 4, 2024

Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell wants to pretend he opposes Trump now, in an upcoming book The Price of Power...

McConnell says ‘MAGA movement is completely wrong’ and Reagan ‘wouldn’t recognize’ Trump’s GOP, Morgan Rimmer, CNN, October 23, 2024

...but it wasn't 4 years ago that he voted to acquit Trump for inciting an insurrection.

McConnell blames Trump but voted not guilty anyway, Alex Rogers and Manu Raju, CNN, February 13, 2021

All previous intelligent life has destroyed itself?

See: NASA Scientists Present Theory About Why We Haven't Met Other Intelligent Life. It's Crushing. Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost, Nov 13, 2022.

That theory: "All intelligent life, they argue, has likely destroyed itself before reaching a sophisticated enough point in evolution to support such an encounter. And the same fate likely awaits humans unless we take action, they believe."

But also:

The World Solved Acid Rain. We Can Also Solve Climate Change Lessons from how we tackled acid rain can be applied to our world today, Hannah Ritchie, Scientific American, October 25, 2023

But if we don't act immediately?

Shades of Blue: What will our world look like if we don't act now? A scientist. A sustainability expert. An environmentalist. A climatologist. A psychologist. A policy maker. A writer. We assemble a proverbial roadmap for the path we must forge to ensure the future of our planet Ava Gilchrist, Grazia 15, 2023

“The agreement to create a so-called loss and damage fund was an important conclusion at the last COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt...But after most a year of fraught negotiations...the fourth round of talks in the Egyptian city of Aswan ended in discord over who should fund it, where it should be based and who would be eligible for support.”
— Climate fund talks collapse as rich and developing countries clash Failure to agree on loss and damage arrangements sets course for difficult COP28 Attracta Mooney, Financial Times, Oct 21, 2023

"A special UN committee tasked with implementing the fund met for a fifth time in Abu Dhabi this week — following a deadlock in Egypt last month — to finalize recommendations that will be put to governments when they meet for the annual climate summit COP28 in Dubai in less than four weeks’ time. The goal is to get the fund up and running by 2024."
"World Bank to host climate damages fund despite opposition from developing nations," Reuters, November 5, 2023

To the extent that it's not going to be fixed, one approach: Resilience.

IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, FAQ 6: What is Climate Resilient Development and how do we pursue it?

Or: rehoming.
"These animals are racing towards extinction. A new home might be their last chance."
Some of the most threatened animals might not survive in their current habitat because of climate change. Researchers are testing a controversial strategy to relocate them before it’s too late — starting with Australia’s rarest reptile. Clare Watson, Nature, September 5, 2023

We should not rehome our trash to outer space. (NYT, November 5, 2023)

Climate crisis: We're burning and melting

This is the theme of the year:

"In April [2023], global ocean temperature soared to 69.98 degrees Fahrenheit (21.1 degrees Celsius), which was attributed to the combination of greenhouse gas emissions and the early El Nino formation. Newly published data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service documented “exceptionally warm” ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic with “extreme” marine heat waves near Ireland, the U.K., and in the Baltic Sea.
* * *
Scientists are watching Antarctic sea ice shrink to record lows. The 4.5 million square miles (11.7 million square kilometers) covered by the sheet on June 27 was almost 1 million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers) less than average for that date for the period from 1981-2010, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center."

Recent events that indicate Earth's climate has entered uncharted territory, Isabella O'Malley, AP News, July 6, 2023

Today is no different:

"An international team of scientists on Tuesday issued a new assessment of planetary health that says the world has entered 'uncharted climate territory' and that 'life on planet Earth is under siege.'

The report, published in the journal BioScience, found that 20 of 35 identified 'vital signs' of the planet — from human population and greenhouse gas emissions to sea level rise and ocean acidity — have reached record extremes.

The analysis, authored by a dozen expert scientists, is as much a desperate warning as an urgent call for action."

— 'Time Is Up': Scientists Warn Earth Has Entered 'Uncharted Climate Territory'
A new climate report provides a raw, stunning assessment of the world we’ve unraveled.
Chris D'Angelo, HuffPost, Oct 24, 2023

Record-breaking temperatures are expected from Arizona to New York
CNN Meteorologist Allison Chinchar gives an overview of the weather forecast in the US this week. More than 60 record-high temperatures are expected from Arizona to New York.
CNN, November 5, 2023

"For the month of October, the combined U.S. and Canada area had the lowest snowfall on record using the ERA5 Reanalysis database. Alaska was strongly below normal, the Contiguous U.S. (Lower 48) was near normal, but Canada had a record low October total." — Brian Brettschneider, November 5, 2023, on Mastodon

Not fast enough

The International Energy Angency "said it expects there to be nearly 10 times as many electric cars on the road globally by the end of the decade, and for renewables to account for almost half of the global energy mix, up from 30% today." (‘Unstoppable’ energy transition means demand for oil, gas, and coal set to peak by 2030 Anna Cooban, CNN, October 24, 2023) But that hardly seems fast enough, right?

To a growing number of scientists, climate change is an ‘emergency’, The Washington Post, October 30, 2023

December 2023

"More monster waves will collide with the California coast after injuring onlookers and causing serious flooding," Elizabeth Wolfe, Robert Shackelford, Mary Gilbert and Cindy Von Quednow, CNN, December 29, 2023

April 2024

Athens turns orange, Helsinki goes white as Europe’s weather springs a surprise, Sugam Pokharel, Chris Liakos, Radina Gigova and Eve Brennan, CNN, April 24, 2024

"The world's oceans just broke an important climate change record": Temperature records in the ocean have been broken every single day of the past year, according to new research, Matthew Rozsa, Salon, May 8, 2024

Gender transition: Like abortion, a thing that humans can be allowed to do

Before Roe v. Wade, the term "therapeutic abortion" referred to abortions to save a woman's life.(See, for example, California in the 1960s.) Mental illness, for example, psychosis, could be a pretext for a "therapeutic abortion."

Today, Lydia Paar writes that U.S. doctors told her 18-year-old mother in the 1960s that "she 'didn't look sad enough'" to qualify for an abortion. As a result, "my grandmother had flown my mom to Japan" to get the abortion. So when Lydia, at age 20, wanted her tubes tied, her mother, "instead of telling me to 'just wait and see' or that I would 'probably change my mind' like so many other people have, she called around...Within a week or two, I had an outpatient tubal ligation procedure."
— "I Told My Mom I Wanted To Get My Tubes Tied At Age 20. Her Response Changed My Life.": "I went and talked to the only person I felt might really understand my need to not mother: my mother." Lydia Paar. HuffPost Personal. Oct 24, 2023.

There are some parallels to discourse about trans people today. Trans people are expected to report "dysphoria," i.e. severe unhappiness interfering with ability to function in life, to qualify for hormones and surgery. Essentially, if we don't "look sad enough," we're told we don't qualify. Even if we do express sadness, we're told we should "just wait and see" because we'll "probably change [our] mind."

We can just have autonomy to transition, because that is a thing that human beings can be allowed to do.

It is a thing that humans can know we want to do.

We shouldn't need to prove that we'll never change our minds — that's impossible for anyone to do regarding how they'll feel about any present-day choice from some future standpoint.

We should be allowed to make choices.

Preventing trans people from changing our bodies to reflect our sense of sex, gender and sexuality has parallels in preventing pregnant people from getting abortions. Transphobia is a cousin of sexism.

How about that for a flash of insight

"I am located in Canada, where we're starting to have anti-trans bills that would have been mostly unheard of just five years ago. In the U.S., the fact that the courts are so stacked by Trump appointees at the federal level has been particularly daunting. We are seeing alliances between the anti-reproductive justice and anti-trans movements, which is really concerning."
— Florence Ashley, interviewed by OpenMind, April 2024

Gillian Branstetter says: "how they cast doubt on something like the Turnaway Study--the most comprehensive survey of those denied an abortion to date--is just copy-and-pasted onto the USTS and transgender care" (Bluesky, login-only, April 25, 2024)

The dignity of choosing your life

Of Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Dobbs, Moira Donegan tells us that Sotomayor wasn't writing to "the judicial public" (i.e., other judges), but "to people like us."

"This is not technical writing. This is writing in sweeping historic and moral terms. It is writing about the values of the nation. It is writing about what constitutes citizenship. It is writing about dignity as well as about material fairness. It is not about the technicalities of the law or the petty little rationalizations, often quite impressive in their flights of reasoning, that this court has made to justify a lot of its opinions. This is a moral document.

It is also, we should acknowledge, a document of defeat. This is the kind of thing that feminists really don’t like to do, to admit when things are going badly or to dwell in the futility of many feminist efforts. There can be this pansy-ass denial and Pollyannaish optimism in the face of what are frankly catastrophes.

Dobbs was a catastrophe. It has made us less free than our mothers were. It will mean that the women who are in positions of authority or power or prominence now will slowly disappear from those positions as more and more of them are pushed out of the workforce. It means women who are entering public life are going to lose their mentors. It means that women and trans people who become pregnant will be denied the foundational dignity to determine the course and content of their lives. Something I appreciate Sotomayor doing here is addressing American women in a way misogyny never wants to, which is as adults."

"You can’t prove" whether any given woman will be worse off for not being allowed to have an abortion. However:

"It’s entirely possible that if these women who are being denied abortions now were able to get them, they would not become doctors and lawyers and politicians and Nobel Prize–winning geniuses. Some of them would. But a lot of them would live quieter, more ordinary lives that would simply be endowed with the dignity of having been chosen lives. I think that’s a worthwhile point a lot of critics of these abortion-rights counterfactuals often make.

Sotomayor here is drawing our attention to an absence, to the lives that will go unlived, the possibilities that will go unfulfilled. It’s hard to see an absence. You have to gesture at the shape of it. The future that has been denied to you is not exactly a deprivation because it’s something you never had, and now it’s something you’ll never be allowed to have."

— A Gender Emergency, Moira Donegan, interviewed by Merve Emre, Episode Five of “The Critic and Her Publics”, New York Review of Books, March 26, 2024

Abortion funds need money

"'I’m afraid that there is this level of complacency that has happened post-Dobbs,' [National Network of Abortion Funds executive director Oriaku] Njoku said. 'This is not the same movement that it was five years ago, let alone 50 years ago, and yet we’re still operating and funding as if it were the same issue as it was before.'"
— Abortion Funds Are In ‘A State Of Emergency’ 2 Years After Dobbs: After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, donations flowed to abortion funds, but over time the money has dried up -- endangering care for people across the country. Alanna Vagianos, HuffPost, Jun 24, 2024

Rowling is still saying that trans people endanger cis people, and claiming that she's the victim

A while back, I wrote this article. I forgot to share it here, so here it is:
I’m disappointed in the ‘Witch Trials’ 16-min ⏰⏰⏰⏰
J.K. Rowling’s image-polishing podcast doesn’t grapple with the real problem
When someone accuses Rowling of transphobia, her team’s refrain is: When has she ever been transphobic? At this point, I hear it as a running joke.

Other background:

"JK Rowling made a choice to center herself in the discussion of her work, starting with how her 'rags to riches' story was used to market her novels. ... I don't see how you could want to spend a lot of time living and exploring and playing and adventuring in a world that is so tightly owned and controlled by someone who puts so much of her power toward ensuring trans people don't get to exist in the real world. The whole notion of 'anybody can come and explore this thing I created' feels antithetical to how unwelcoming Rowling is in real life."
— Charlie Jane Anders, J.K. Rowling and "Separating the Art from the Artist", Happy Dancing, February 11, 2023

In the Scottish Times, October 16, 2022, Rowling said: "It is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence."

"A New Podcast About J.K. Rowling Is Already Sparking Backlash": Youtuber Contrapoints has said that 'The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling' doesn't 'grasp that trans people are fighting for our lives.' By Samantha Riedel. Them. February 24, 2023

From that video:

"And when asked why they worship an overprivileged jerk, they balk. How is she transphobic? Fan fave, and I'm glad you asked. The next time you're online and you see someone say, What has she ever said that's transphobic? Because I've never seen anything! ask them what level of evidence they would require to change their mind. Ask them: What's transphobia? Often, their reply won't even be subtle. [For example, they might say] There's no such thing as transphobia... ... The reason they ask you for a list of receipts every time you call her transphobic or a bigot is that they want to waste your time. They want to fight. And unlike you, they likely won't worry about being disingenuous, deceitful, or downright genocidal. It's unreasonable and unrealistic to expect people to have a 20-tweet thread ready on demand for every slug that pupates and crawls out of Mumsnet and slithers over to Twitter. And if you refuse to play their game, it appears to any onlookers that you simply cannot provide any real evidence for your accusation."
(9:33–58, 10:15–45)

In my Medium article, I included this tweet:

Of course she implies she's being witch-hunted, on her "Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling" podcast and elsewhere.

October 2023 article

On October 13, 2023, she tweeted her usual fare: endorsing someone saying 'a woman is an adult human female'.

On October 15, the Telegraph published a short news report saying that Rowling spoke at the FiLiA Women’s Rights Conference in Glasgow. Written by India McTaggart and Ewan Somerville, the article described Rowling as "a widely celebrated feminist" who has "sold more than 500 million books and generated billions of dollars for the box office" and has been "vilified by transgender activists for her views on gender and women’s rights."

They quoted Rowling as saying "This has never been about trans rights," while also (in the article body and headline) describing her as "speak[ing] out about trans issues." That seems contradictory, unless they have some other unnamed "trans issues" apart from "trans rights" in mind.

Whatever "this" might be — the "this" that has supposedly "never been about trans rights" — isn't defined in the article. The article does say, however, that Rowling "has called for women-only spaces to be for biological women only" (trans people generally object to this use of the term "biological" because of how it implies that trans people don't have bodies or that our bodies are invalid). The article also characterizes Rowling and her ideological compatriots as those who "believe people cannot change their sex," a belief that they imply is what has drawn the ire of "trans activists."

after taking your first dose of HRT you transition away from “person” into “Activist”

— june (@junlper.bsky.social) Jun 18, 2024 at 10:49 AM

In this article, Rowling is quoted as setting up a win-lose schema between trans rights and cis rights by saying: "I want trans people to be safe. I just don’t want women and girls to be any less safe." In other words, Rowling says that some sorts of trans rights are somehow placing [cis] women and girls at risk.

That is Rowling's perennial claim: that trans people's existence poses a danger to cis people. It is that, more so than her claim that people cannot change their sex, that upsets trans people.

Rowling portrays herself as a victim who "take[s] the hit" for her anti-trans attitude and behavior.

A couple days later, she shared this. Was she responding to anything in particular? Had there been some event we missed? No, this photo was five years old. She'd pulled out a five-year-old photo for the sake of being transphobic at the air.

On November 3, Rowling posted a news article regarding an expectation in South Australia that people's pronouns be respected in court proceedings. Rowling's comment was: "Asking a woman to refer to her male rapist or violent assaulter as 'she' in court is a form of state-sanctioned abuse. Female victims of male violence are further traumatised by being forced to speak a lie." Someone replied, urging against “treating trans women like predators when they’re statistically far more likely to be victims.” Rowling called him a “rapists’ rights activists.” And “rapists need brave guys like you.”

Hadn't Rowling just said a couple weeks earlier: "I want trans people to be safe"? If so, she should consider the experiences of trans victims of violence. And if we can see why a victim might be upset by referring to her assaulter as "she," can we also see (please) why a victim might be upset when others call her — not her attacker, but the victim herself — "he"?

This tweet on November 4 made the observation: "And there it is, JK Rowling just straight up calling all trans women rapists."

Also this statement: KJK already openly calls for the killing of trans people, and Rowling looks close to doing so. (More about KJK at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology.

Judith Butler, upon being asked for their opinion, looks up Rowling's latest 2024 tweet:

'Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilized, resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses.' I see, so she’s making fun of us.

You know, I’m a parent. I didn’t give birth to anybody. I’m no less of a parent than somebody who did. When she talks that way, she’s putting down adoptive parents, she’s putting down blended families, she’s putting down all kinds of kinship arrangements where kids end up with new guardians or new parents after having lost theirs — in war, or through forcible migration, or any number of issues. It’s deeply insensitive. It doesn’t actually understand that parenting happens in all kinds of ways and that kinship happens outside of those connections with birth mothers."

— Judith Butler Knows What Makes Transphobes Tick, interview by Wren Sanders, Them, April 5, 2024

"After recent rants opposing a transgender-inclusive hate crime law and implying that trans people are criminals who don’t need legal protections, billionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling recently published a 709-word social media post explaining her anti-trans views and what she has decided defines a woman.

Her April 6 post ends with two tired transphobic tropes: that trans women are a violent threat to cis women and gender-affirming care harms children. Neither one is true..."

— J.K. Rowling posts 700-word diatribe trying to justify her transphobia: Rowling's transphobia has only grown more unhinged over time. Daniel Villarreal, LGBTQ Nation, April 13, 2024

On April 10, 2024, "J.K. Rowling suggests she will not forgive her Harry Potter stars for going against her views on trans rights in the wake of a new report criticizing current gender care treatments for young people." When a Rowling supporter said they hoped that former Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson would give a "public apology" to Rowling, "safe in the knowledge that you will forgive them," Rowling replied:

"Not safe, I’m afraid. Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces."

Rowling was simultaneously discussing the Cass report as "a watershed moment."

Rachel Saunders discusses the Cass Report on Medium.

Radcliffe doesn't speak to Rowling. He said in an Atlantic interview published April 30, 2024:

"Jo, obviously Harry Potter would not have happened without her, so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person. But that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life."

In May 2024, regarding a new Harry Potter series that HBO Max is planning, Radcliffe said he would "watch as an audience member" but that it probably would not "work" for him to be involved, even were he involved merely to pass the torch.

What's happened over the years

Rolling Stone gives this summary ("J.K. Rowling Used to Want to Debate Gender. Now She Just Insults Trans People," Miles Klee, May 13, 2024):

"Since 2018, Rowling has shown an affinity for anti-trans influencers and helped to stoke panic over changing norms around gender identity and language. Notably, she used to couch her criticism in a “live and let live” frame, cautioning that while she had no problem with trans individuals per se, she feared that trans women posed a privacy and safety risk to cisgender women in female-only spaces. When defending a U.K. researcher whose employment contract was not renewed at a think tank after her online anti-trans activism came to light in 2019, Rowling still prefaced her supportive tweet by saying that people should dress and identify however they want while living their “best life in peace and security.” In 2020, she claimed to “know and love trans people.”

In the past year, that note of tolerance has vanished from Rowling’s public comments on trans women — and she now tweets about little else, whether proclaiming that she’d go to prison before using their correct pronouns or simply misgendering specific individuals online because she can."

(For the record, I disagree that she ever expressed her views about trans people with a true "note of tolerance," but otherwise I agree. Her "notes of tolerance" were obvious fig leaves. They were deceptive from the start, and they didn't deceive trans people.)

Rolling Stone continues..."Rowling posted more than 30 tweets in the next week either arguing that women’s spaces are made unsafe by trans inclusivity, deliberately misgendering trans women, or otherwise fighting with anyone who challenged her ideas on gender. This culminated with the Lucy Clark incident" in which she seized on a congratulatory post about a trans woman who got a job, calling her a "bloke" — that is (for those who aren't British) a man and not a woman.

Then,

"while sparring with an X user whose bio indicates that they are 17 years old, Rowling spun out a bizarre hypothetical about whether she would “get to be black if I like Motown and fancy myself in cornrows.” The parallel drew widespread allegations of racism, with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist behind the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, warning: 'Stop using Black people as your comparison group because it almost always reveals more about you than you think it does.'"

What she has now is

"manic posting and deranged rhetoric, her toxic social feed (a veritable who’s who of “gender critical” types), her newfound proximity to dangerous extremists (Chaya Raichik, who runs the transphobic hate account Libs of TikTok, has lately started tagging and replying to her), her sharing of material from dubious groups such as the Gay Men’s Network (which frames “gender identity ideology” as a type of “homophobia”) and her inability to stop denouncing [trans] people..."

So, again, I wouldn't have phrased the final line this way: "What was once a trickle of worrying hints is now a torrent of abuse." I don't think Rowling ever gave merely "worrying hints." Certainly not since her 2020 essay. For trans people, she was always mask-off. But otherwise I think this is a good summary.

(The incident with Clark is also explained here: Cruel JK Rowling calls trans soccer official a “crossdressing straight man” for no reason: The wealthy author with millions of followers said it's not "punching down" to lash out at a relatively obscure trans woman. Molly Sprayregen, LGBTQ Nation, May 13, 2024)

JK Rowling denies bullying trans football manager she called a ‘bloke’ and ‘crossdresser’, Emily Chudy, Pink News, May 13, 2024

(See also: JK Rowling slammed for asking if she can be Black if she likes “Motown & fancy myself in cornrows”: "With all due disrespect, KEEP THE BLACK COMMUNITY OUR OF YOUR MOUTH!" Alex Bollinger, LGBTQ Nation, May 13, 2024)

Rowling tweeted on June 23, 2024:

"Crossdressing men aren't female. He calls himself trans precisely because he's male. It's right there in the terms and conditions."

More: Bluesky post1, post2

Riddles in literature

Thinking about riddles in literature. Douglas E. Cowan says:

"'Solving the riddle' of a film, novel, or short story, however, is an attempt to bring meaning under control, often by restricting its interpretation within the bounds of a particular worldview. … Interpretations such as this, though, often require us to read a text eisegetically, injecting our assumptions into it and rejecting much of what is happening in front of us in favor of an analysis more suited to those presuppositions. These approaches often refuse to take the storyworld for what it is and ask what it means to explore that world: a place where the Elder Gods do exist, and messages from a 3-D picture of Jesus are possible. For metanarrative approaches, elusiveness of meaning is a problem that demands confinement and constraint. ... Riddles reinforce the boundaries of one’s worldview, since the answers — whatever they may be — are already contained within those boundaries, and the gatekeepers of the answer determine the correctness of the response. Because enigmas advance the possibility that there is no fixed meaning, no binding answer to the puzzle, they challenge not only the boundaries of this or that consensus reality but the possibility that consensus reality exists at all."
— Douglas E. Cowan. The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2022.

Just so you all know, there's a riddle in my novel, Most Famous Short Film of All Time.

Read trans authors

Read trans authors, said Maya Deane last year:

We are weird and dreamy and sad and joyful, as in Jeanne Thornton’s magical music history novel “Summer Fun”; we are tragic and catty and fucked up in Torrey Peters’ arch satire “Detransition, Baby”; we are brutal, vulnerable, scared, throbbing with life in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s post-apocalyptic “Manhunt”; we are sad and tender and confused in Casey Plett’s family drama “Little Fish”; we are hilarious and lyrical and bizarre in Ryka Aoki’s musical space opera “Light From Uncommon Stars”; we are scared and hurt and determined in April Daniels’ “Dreadnought” and Charlie Jane Anders’ “Victories Greater Than Death”; we are blustery and heroic and resourceful in Alina Boyden’s “Stealing Thunder”; and, yes, we are epic and dark and magnificent in my own “Wrath Goddess Sing.”

We’re taking our chance and we’re doing something magical. They told us that we were broken and didn’t matter, the people whose stories were hidden away — but we do matter, and we will not be hidden again, least of all from ourselves.

If you want to see and know us and welcome us and love us, read our stories. You just have to.

— I'm An Author And A Trans Woman. Here’s Why I Won’t Stop Telling Our Stories. "There are vanishingly few books by trans women even now." Maya Deane. HuffPost, Apr 27, 2022.

Trans Christians

"Austen Hartke, Shannon T.L. Kearns, and Alex Clare-Young have each written books about their trans journeys and trans issues from their perspectives as Christians."
— Eric Sentell, "If This Is the Best Intellectual Argument Against Trans People...: Carl Trueman’s ‘The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self’." An Injustice!, August 17, 2024

'Nobody knows when the end comes' (Urrea) — but it's predicted

These are the places that could become ‘unlivable’ as the Earth warms [subscriber gift link] In the hottest parts of the world, high temperatures and humidity will, for longer stretches, surpass a threshold that even young and healthy people could struggle to survive as the planet warms, study says. Scott Dance, Washington Post, October 9, 2023

Also:

"By now, Canada has abandoned any hope of controlling a significant percentage of the fires raging in remote areas of the country and is simply allowing them to burn themselves out. Such areas are relatively unpopulated, but they do house numerous indigenous communities whose lands have been destroyed and who have been forced to flee, perhaps permanently. Were this a one-time event, you could certainly say that Canada still remains an intact, functioning society. But given the likelihood that the number and extent of wildfires will only increase in the years ahead as temperatures continue to rise, Canada — hard as it might be to believe — can be said to be on the verge of becoming a failed state."
— We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse. Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland? Michael T. Klare. The Nation. August 22, 2023.

A reflection:

"When you had seventy years ahead of you, nothing mattered, though you thought it all mattered greatly. But you didn't really feel the pressing need to do anything about it. Suddenly, though, there comes a birthday when you think: I have twenty years at best. And those years slide into the dark until you think: I have fifteen. I have ten. I have five. And your wife tells you, 'Live, don't fret. You could be hit by a bus tomorrow! Nobody knows when the end comes.'

But you know she lies in the dark beside you counting the years she has left, even if she won't admit it. Wondering if every twinge in her left shoulder is the final heart attack. And then you find that you have no years left. You have days.

That is the prize: to realize, at the end, that every minute was worth fighting for with every ounce of blood and fire. And the majority of them poured down the toilet, unheeded. He had seen only sxity-nine Christmas mornings. Goddamn it! Sorry, Lord. Not enough. Not nearly enough."

— Luis Alberto Urrea. The House of Broken Angels. Back Bay Books, 2019.

Rubin and Echols book recs, found in Stryker

In Susan Stryker's famous essay "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix" (1994), the first footnote provides information on [emphasis mine]:

"a substantial debate on the status of transgender practices and identities in leshian feminism. H. S. Rubin, in a sociology dissertation in progress at Brandeis University, argues that the pronounced demographic upsurge in the female-to-male transsexual population during the 1970s and 1980s is directly related to the ascendancy within lesbianism of a 'cultural feminism' that disparaged and marginalized practices smacking of an unliberated 'gender inversion' model of homosexuality — especially the butch-femme roles associated with working-class lesbian bar culture. Cultural feminism thus consolidated a lesbian-feminist alliance with heterosexual feminism on a middle-class basis by capitulating to dominant ideologies of gender. The same suppression of transgender aspects of lesbian practice, I would add, simultaneously raised the spectre of male-to-female transsexual lesbians as a particular threat to the stability and purity of nontranssexual lesbian-feminist identity. See [Alice] Echols for the broader context of this debate, and [Janice] Raymond for the most vehement example of the anti-transgender position."
— Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ, Vol. 1 (1994): 237–254.)

Henry Rubin (Brandeis, PhD 1996) went on to publish Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment Among Transsexual Men (Vanderbilt University Press, 2003).

Here's the Echols book that Stryker cites in this essay:

Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

And she is of course also referring to:

Raymond, Janice G. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Boston: Beacon, 1979.

I encourage you not to pay money for The Transsexual Empire so that Raymond does not profit from it. Instead, please see my long essay, "Transphobia since the 1970s," that unpacks the book. It's a 24-minute read on Medium. This link gives you unpaywalled access to my essay.

Woodland wanderer by Etienne Marais from Pixabay

Yes, trans people 'know in intimate detail the history of this recent medical intervention' (Stryker)

This passage is speaking to me. It's from Susan Stryker's famous essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” I bolded a part in the middle that feels important to me right now. Frankenstein's monster knows itself, understands that someone else has made it who it is, understands that this makes other people perceive it as a monster, and can tell its own origin story as well as how it feels about it. This describes how transphobes are forever pointing out that trans-ness is a construction, and trans people say, Yes, and? Cis-ness is a construction too. So? In this essay, Stryker makes roughly that point, three decades ago.

"While hiking on the glaciers in the shadow of Mont Blanc, above the village of Chamounix, Frankenstein spies a familiar figure approaching him across the ice. Of course, it is the monster, who demands an audience with its maker. Frankenstein agrees, and the two retire together to a mountaineer’s cabin. There, in a monologue that occupies nearly a quarter of the novel, the monster tells Frankenstein the tale of its creation from its own point of view, explaining to him how it became so enraged.

These are my words to Victor Frankenstein, above the village of Chamounix. Like the monster, I could speak of my earliest memories, and how I became aware of my difference from everyone around me. I can describe how I acquired a monstrous identity by taking on the label 'transsexual' to name parts of myself that I could not otherwise explain. I, too, have discovered the journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bodies of creatures like me since the 1930s. I know in intimate detail the history of this recent medical intervention into the enactment of transgendered subjectivity; science seeks to contain and colonize the radical threat posed by a particular transgender strategy of resistance to the coerciveness of gender: physical alteration of the genitals. I live daily with the consequences of medicine's definition of my identity as an emotional disorder. Through the filter of this official pathologization, the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed as the confused ranting of a diseased mind.

Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival."

— Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (PDF). GLQ, Vol. 1 (1994). This passage is from pp. 243–244.

The anger is an important part of this too. When you're marginalized and also told that you can't possibly know who you are, what other emotion is appropriate?

Woodland wanderer by Etienne Marais from Pixabay

Trump is winning in New Hampshire, but Quattrucci is out as deputy director

The Trump 2024 Campaign's deputy director in New Hampshire — the second-highest position in that state's campaign — was at the Capitol riot on January 6. He tweeted complaining about a cut on his finger and said there was tear gas. (That's a WMUR report; his tweets have since been deleted. There is also video of him saying that day: “If you are a police officer and are going to abide by unconstitutional bullshit, I want you to do me a favor right now and go hang yourself, because you’re a piece of shit. Go fuck yourself." I don't know exactly what time of day it was, but there was tear gas on the West Capitol Steps at 4:20 p.m., and the video of Quattrucci seems to have been taken just after sunset. In early October 2023, within a couple months of a news report about the video, Quattrucci left his position with the Trump campaign.

For more info, see the Timeline of the January 6 United States Capitol attack on Wikipedia.

While the specific embarrassment may be fresh, his positions are not new. This video was posted to Rumble c. 2021.

According to the video description, Quattrucci has "suffered persecution" for being a Trump supporter and endorses "the Judeo-Christian and Constitutional Foundational Principles that Made America Great."

As of October 9 polling, Trump is set to win the New Hampshire primary. Source: FiveThirtyEight The Republican primary in that state is expected to be held in January 2024.

Retirees are funding the Trump campaign

Soon after Trump declared his presidential run in 2015, though he'd said he was a billionaire who didn't need political donors,

"he realized that many people were willing to give him money anyway. You can imagine a theoretical moment in which Trump was torn between his stated position about receiving donations and his having achieved his lifelong goal of having people give him money just because of his name. In reality, there was almost certainly no such moment of moral uncertainty, and by the time he won the presidency in 2016, he had fully committed himself to figuring out how to get as much money from people as possible. Even after he lost the presidency in 2020, he kept up the hustle."
— Most of Trump’s personal donations come from retirees, Analysis by Philip Bump, Washington Post, July 28, 2023

While only 7% of Trump's 2016 campaign funding came from retirees (through Sept 30, 2015), in the 2024 campaign, 56% comes from retirees (through June 30, 2023).

'We can do hard things': Fixing our systems for climate

There are 30 feedback loops that will wreck us. "Forever chemicals" are in every fish that's caught, as well as in "surface and groundwaters around the world at levels much higher than many international regulators allow". People are fleeing the effects of natural devastation in their home countries. As if that weren't bad enough, there is not enough snow to ski.

We will have to change our lives. And, as Sarah Lazarovic writes today: "It’s not about sacrifice." It will be hard, but not everything hard is a sacrifice. "Yes, we can do hard things."

Many people suffer, but even if we don't believe we suffer in our own comfortable, modern life, Lazarovic says, "it's not true that we don’t know how to suffer, don’t have capacity for suffering. My grandmother didn’t do HIIT workouts in preparation for the invasion of her country. People do hard things when hard things come at them. We’re malleable."

"I'm tired," she says, "of the ‘I couldn't do this’ mentality. Because it's patronizing. To let the planet burn on the presumption that we, the people alive now, cannot rise to the occasion, is such a risibly terrible frame. And this is not about hustle or the treacly platitudes of you-go-girl culture. It's just what is. Let's define humanity not by its susceptibility to the illusory softness of an overacquisitive lifestyle, but by its potential for greatness."

Read Lazarovic's essay

"Can you do hard things? (Is the wrong question) Of course you can." Sarah Lazarovic. Minimum Viable Planet (Substack). October 9, 2023.

Frogs are trying to mate in the UK

So, the problem is that it's about to be winter.

Frog puppet by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay

October 7, 2023: Frogs are trying to mate in the UK. The heat confuses them.

Scientists are alarmed.

"New data shows last month was the hottest September – the fourth consecutive month of such unprecedented heat – putting 2023 firmly on track to be the hottest year in recorded history.
September beat the previous monthly record set in 2020 by a staggering 0.5 degrees Celsius, according to data released Wednesday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. There has never been a month so abnormally hot since Copernicus’ records began in 1940."
— Scientist calls record global heat in September ‘gobsmackingly bananas’, Laura Paddison, CNN, October 5, 2023

"While the most brutal heat will soon come to an end across the north-central US, summerlike heat is only beginning to build for the Northeast. Temperatures 10 to 15 degrees above normal October levels will be common through Thursday across the Great Lakes and Northeast.
It won’t last for long. The coldest air of the season will arrive late this week and usher in conditions that haven’t been felt since early May across the northern US."
— Temperatures are about to come crashing down with a dramatic fall pattern change, Mary Gilbert, CNN Meteorologist, October 4, 2023

"Right now, thanks to our recklessness, the sun is overheating our planet. And by right now, I don’t mean in this century. I mean, in this month. The global temperature readings for September should have been the top story on every newscast in the world, because they were bonkers. June, July, and August were historically hot — we saw the hottest days recorded on the planet in 125,000 years. September wasn’t quite as hot, of course, because it’s fall. But in relative terms September was even more outrageous. It was, the scientists tell us, the most anomalous month we’ve ever seen, with temperatures so far beyond historical norms that the charts don’t even seem to make sense."
— The Rays of the Sun: They cut both ways, hard. Bill McKibben. October 7, 2023.

Just as sudden temperature extremes aren't good for frogs, nor are they good for machines. A year ago, heat damaged an airport runway that had to be repaired on an emergency basis.

London Luton Airport "suspended flights on Monday after high temperatures damaged a runway. Temperatures soared up to 37 degrees Celsius (about 99 degrees Fahrenheit) in some parts of the country. ... An 'essential runway repair' was required 'after high surface temperatures caused a small section to lift,' the airport said...the Royal Air Force (RAF) paused all flights to and from Brize Norton, its biggest air base, in Oxfordshire after a report from Sky News suggested that the runway had 'melted.' The UK Ministry of Defence tweeted a statement on flights..."
— High temperatures caused section of UK airport’s runway ‘to lift’ Vasco Cotovio and Alex Hardie, CNN, July 18, 2022

Climate change causes atmospheric changes in the jet stream and polar vortex. This can cause sudden cold snaps, too.

"Look no further than the heavily populated US Northeast this weekend to see a real-time example of the long-term warming trend being interrupted by tremendous, record-setting cold. ... The wind chill is expected to plunge to dangerous levels of minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 34 Celsius) for millions on Saturday. ... Temperatures in the city of Mohe in northern China plummeted to minus 53 degrees Celsius (minus 63.4 degrees Fahrenheit), the lowest temperature the country has ever recorded. ... Our weather is intimately connected with the jet stream, a wavy river of fast-moving air high in the atmosphere, around the level at which airplanes fly. ... There is also another factor to consider: The polar vortex. This is a belt of strong winds encircling blisteringly cold Arctic air, which sits extremely high in the stratosphere – above the level of the jet stream – around the North Pole. ... The polar vortex is like a spinning top, Cohen said. In its normal state, it rotates very fast, keeping the cold air close to the center, like an ice skater spinning quickly on the spot, arms neatly across their chest. But every now and then it gets disrupted. It’s as if the ice skater hits a crack in the ice and flies off course, arms flailing. The polar vortex wobbles, becoming stretched and distorted, spilling out cold air and influencing the path of the jet stream. ... The theory centers on the Arctic, which is warming up to four times faster than the rest of the world as a result of heat-trapping pollution from burning fossil fuels. Some scientists argue that this warming is triggering changes to the jet stream and polar vortex, causing more frequent winter extremes. This idea gained traction following the publication of a 2012 study, co-authored by Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. ... One of the most prominent papers, co-authored by Cohen in 2021, said it found clear links between Arctic warming and disruptions to the polar vortex. Cohen’s argument is that particularly rapid heating in an area of the Arctic, north of western Russia, combined with increased snowfall in Siberia, amplifies the waviness of the jet stream and pushes energy upwards. This knocks the polar vortex off course, causing very cold air to spill out."
— Extreme cold snaps: Why temperatures still plummet to dangerous levels even as the planet warms, Laura Paddison, Krystina Shveda and Jhasua Razo, CNN, February 3, 2023

James Dinneen writes for the New Scientist ("The jet stream may be starting to shift in response to climate change," 6 Sept 2024):

"Sections of the planet’s jet streams have begun shifting towards the poles over the past several decades. It is most likely that this is a response to global warming due to our greenhouse gas emissions, and could exacerbate heat and drought in regions that depend on the high-altitude winds to steer storms their way."