From the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, a tale of romantic complication:

The feeling of being, shall we say, misled can do that, I suppose.

Twist incoming.

Oh my, a spotlight shared. Awkward. Or, “Woman who wants to pretend she’s a gay man is thwarted by male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps.”

As I said, complications.

Readers are welcome to speculate as to whose feelings are more, er, valid in the scenario above.

And before you ask, the outlook isn’t great:

Update, via the comments:

Regarding this,

Mags adds,

Indeed. A notable omission. One that results in finger-wagging from fellow forum regulars:

It’s a bold claim. And despite which, the person being scolded, a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. There’s no she or her, just a grudging them. Which does rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

Readers who poke through the subsequent replies will note how almost any kind of questioning – even expressions of surprise and concern from an intimate partner – is promptly dismissed as “hurtful,” “transphobic,” and “pretty shitty,” something to apologise for. As if anything short of immediate and gushing affirmation – pretty much any hesitation at all – were an act of wickedness.

Also, this caught my eye:

Which is something of a drawback, given the odds on that matter.

One of the commenters then replies that “drag queen is a look,” by which they mean valid, a possible aspiration, and that one should “interrogate those feelings” that looking like a drag queen is probably not ideal.

Via Rafi.

In other, happier news, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Lifted from the comments, where WTP alerts us to more fun times for commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area:

❓ Did you know ❓

You can ask any station agent for BART’s free bystander intervention cards, which you can use if you’re experiencing or witnessing harassment in stations and trains.

Here’s how they work 👇 pic.twitter.com/09WmyquxVS

— BART (@SFBART) March 29, 2024

The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Though given the consequences of recent attempts at intervention – or what Bay Area Rapid Transit refers to as “allyship” – readers may wonder whether prompt and meaningful assistance may be less frequent than one might wish.

In case you had doubts, WTP adds, “This is not parody.”

Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.  It also calls to mind this uplifting scene from no-less-progressive Portland:

What the card for that would say, I leave to the reader.

Update, via the comments:

Diogenese asks, if direct and effective intervention has been discouraged and entails a serious risk of punishment,

Well, I’m assuming the point is largely to misdirect, to conjure an illusion. To give credulous progressive women, like the ladies in the video, the impression that the situation isn’t as bizarrely horrible as it actually is. And to make credulous progressive women imagine that progressives are The Ones Who Care, while so much of what they touch gets much worse, quite rapidly.

By issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

But hey, if you’re travelling to work on a BART train and some deranged creep starts masturbating against your leg, or pissing on the floor, or you find yourself standing next to yet another knife fight, or overdose, or commuter mugging – and no-one else does anything, or dares to do anything, except watch impotently and demoralised – because even noticing such things is racist – at least you’ll have a little card to clutch. Apparently that’s something.

And – and – every woman in the explanatory video, every single one of them, has brown skin. So there’s that.

Progress!

Time for something grotesque, I think. Grotesque, but very of our times:

I’ll spare you the grim details, but what Mr Sonia did to the victim, a thirteen-year-old girl, over several months, was sufficiently vile to repel over a dozen jurors, who said they would be unable to sit on a case so disturbing. Suffice it to say, Mr Sonia was found guilty and incarcerated for a minimum of 22 years. During which time,

Or, convicted paedophile demands pampering, women’s undies.

As I said, it’s very now.

Because that’s what we do now with male child-rapists. And obviously, it can only go well. No bizarre complications could possibly ensue.

Despite this seemingly intermittent maleness, Mr Sonia has launched a lawsuit against staff at both the Washington Department of Corrections and his previous male prison, citing “cruel and unusual punishment.” Specifically, a failure to provide, at taxpayer expense, “breast augmentation” and “hair removal of the face, neck and jaw,” which is, we’re told, of “paramount importance.” And a lack of which allegedly results in “severe emotional anguish.”

Depending, one assumes, on whether Mr Sonia claims to be a man or a woman on any given day.

At which point, readers may wonder whether Mr Sonia’s mental health shortcomings predate their supposed causes.

Update, via the comments, where Mags suggests,

It does seem – shall we say, possible – that Mr Sonia is so irredeemably broken and malevolent, so committed to antagonism, that, having been obstructed from further child-raping, he now channels his antisocial urges into nuisance lawsuits and the feigning of victimhood.

I mean, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Jen adds,

Well, we’ve already seen the scrupulously intersectional priorities of, for instance, Canadian women’s shelters, in which a deranged dysmorphic man roaming the halls wearing only a bra and brandishing his genitals, along with several stolen kitchen knives, is deemed of much less importance than the fact that a female resident had dared to “misgender” him.

Can you not feel the progress…?

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Lifted from the comments, where Mr Muldoon directs us to,

There is a dull mediocrity, a predictable trajectory:

I think it’s fair to say that, whatever her creative limitations, Liberal Jane, aka Ms Caitlin Blunnie, does like her slogans. One might say incantations. Almost all of which have an air of self-satisfaction, as if some previously unregistered profundity had been heroically unearthed.

One creation extols the radical virtues of skiving in the workplace and not doing the work one is being paid to do. “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” reads another. Also, “Self-love is self-care.” “Riots, not diets.” “Hex the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” “Fantasy is for everyone.” “Abortion builds new futures.” Oh, and “Smash the state and masturbate,” and “Stretch marks are ubiquitous to the human experience.”

And if even more excitement is called for:

The item below is a recent and fairly topical example of Ms Blunnie’s morally corrective offerings to the world:

Happy #InternationalWomensDay! 💜 pic.twitter.com/8LEdvZDeSj

— Liberal Jane (@liberaljanee) March 8, 2024

At which point, readers may note just how often progressive posturing seems to require a fairly high tolerance of contrivance and short-cuts, internal contradiction, and the kind of begged-question soundbites that are all but designed to shut down thought. A kind of pre-emptive short circuit.

For instance, in Ms Blunnie’s X feed, a professed concern for “bodily autonomy” appears alongside the slogans “Abortion builds new futures,” and “Funding abortion is an act of radical empathy,” along with a jolly pink poster for “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day,” which suggests that the bodily autonomy of some people, very small ones, doesn’t count.

And even if “bodily autonomy” applies only, and rather conveniently, to women, or a subset of women, one might have thought that it could extend to concerns regarding creepy, mentally ill men barging into women’s intimate spaces for a furtive wank.

But apparently not. Because “a woman is anyone who identifies as one.”

Update, via the comments:

Via Uma Thurman’s Feet, some educational news:

The particulars of which, we’ll get to in a moment. But in the meantime, do feel free to take a guess. Perhaps it could be the basis for a drinking game.

The email to union members, sent by John Vince, the chief negotiator for Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation district 27, is positively heaving with thou-shalt-nots:

As we’ve seen, many times, some teachers and educational bureaucrats do seem rather titillated by the prospect of actively deceiving parents. As, for instance, when middle-school teachers in Missouri were urged to fabricate and publish a false curriculum, purely to hide from parents the details of their activism and what they were actually up to in class. A move pre-emptively described by its proponent, Natalie Fallert, as “not being deceitful.” And regarding which, I wrote:

But I digress. Let’s get back to Mr Vince’s emailed instructions to Ontario educators:

Apparently, tardiness is a human right. Other sins to be avoided include the words blind spot, and the immensely oppressive phrase ladies and gentlemen. 

Also forbidden are:

These, it turns out, are “right-wing” opinions, and therefore have soul-blackening properties.

Needless to say, this quoted selection is but a small sample, a mere appetiser. Teachers are also warned not to congratulate parents on their child’s performance in a school play. Why this humdrum politeness should be avoided, with the threat of disciplinary consequences, is not entirely obvious and no hints are offered as to the reasoning. It is, however, framed as equal in sinfulness to informing a parent that their child has been “snorting a white powder.”

Because if little Billy is chopping them out in class, it’s now a teacher’s duty to keep parents in the dark, you see.

The full text of the email in question can be found via the link above. Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Oh, and by all means consider this an open thread.