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[Photos © Shin Nugochi]

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A photobook In Color In Japan is coming soon.

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[Photos © Lee Basford]

sporting bodies.

Despite this evidence, eight major Australian sporting organisations yesterday announced that they had developed ‘inclusion’ policies that make it easier for biological males who identity as women to play women’s sport. These guidelines emerged out of the blue, with no consultation with the general public, women’s groups, or the millions of Australians who play community sport.

Inclusion in sport is important and that’s why we have men’s sport for males, women’s sport for females, junior sport for children and a range of mixed and social sport options. Removing female-only sport as a stand alone category is not inclusive, it is insulting and unfair.

The vast majority of Australians do not want to see safety and fairness in women’s and girls’ sport undermined. We would hate to see an Australian woman miss out on an Olympic medal because she was beaten by a biological male, a girl who has played netball her whole life miss out on selection in a Super Netball squad, or, just as importantly, our local girls footy team miss out on a premiership because the opposition has a dominant player with the physical advantages that result from male puberty.

Commonwealth law specifically recognises the need for single-sex sport, and the Australian taxpayer pours millions of dollars every year into encouraging female participation in sport. Yet Sport Australia, the organisation which receives and distributes much of this funding, won’t even say what their understanding of the word ‘woman’ is, and actively excludes women from consultation on who should be playing women’s sport.

Sporting organisations should expect very close scrutiny on why they have ignored scientific evidence about risks to safety and fairness of female athletes, and how they justify receiving taxpayer dollars to promote women’s sport while actively undermining the very basis of it.

It's grossly unfair for all women's sports, of course, but the inclusion of rugby here is particularly surprising, given that, first, rugby is a notably hard physical sport where a man's extra size and muscle power could be very dangerous for women, and second, that World Rugby is aware of this, has been through a lengthy consultation period, and is expected to announce a ban on transgender women.

A ban on transgender men wishing to play men's rugby has not, as far as I'm aware, been considered. The demand, for some reason, just isn't there.

Walter Mootz, before Dylan was even born:

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

John Vachon – October 1940. "Metal sign blowing in the wind. Doyon, North Dakota."

Emmylou Harris, with the Hot Band in 1976:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipPS2iHg_3I&w=550&h=309]

The original from 1964 by Buck Owens is pretty good too – drenched in pedal steel, thanks to Tom Brumley's outstanding performance.

At Walthamstow Wetlands this morning:

The perfectly legitimate phrase "anti-communist" came to acquire a negative resonance after it was cheapened by the demagoguery of Joe McCarthy. It would be unfortunate, argues Russell Berman in Tablet, if the phrase "far-left fascism" was similarly discarded simply because Trump used it. From Rosa Luxemburg to Hannah Arendt onwards, writers have warned of the dangers of the moment when the left abandons its proclaimed agenda of emancipation and adopts repressive measures that resemble the practices of the fascist far right. Bolshevism was indeed "left fascism", and though the term wasn't yet in use – Mussolini was some years off – the phrase is still worth preserving. Far left and far right – Communists and Nazis, Molotov and Ribbentrop – have often ploughed the same grim furrow.

Well, it's a long piece, but here's Berman's conclusion:

In the end, does the left-fascist shoe fit our current culture moment? Consider the list: programmatic silencing of dissenters, purging of editorial pages, growing fear of transgressing murky viewpoint prohibitions, while university leaders generally refuse (there are some exceptions) to offer a full-throated defense of academic freedom, but instead embrace the stereotypical language of the social justice movement in its opposition to “the system.” They sound more like Heidegger promoting the Nazi revolution in the universities in 1934 than Edward R. Murrow in 1954 pushing back against Joe McCarthy. A lot of that is just cowardice. Equally reminiscent of fascism is the de facto coordination between the crowds in the streets and the pronouncements from corporate boardrooms, as well as the monitoring of political opinion by powerful social media. This imposed conformism, this Gleichschaltung, is playing out against the backdrop of attacks on the rule of law and across-the-board denunciations of all law enforcement. […]

National history has all but disappeared from our curricula, and when it is still taught, it is poisoned with adversarial revisionism, an education for ressentiment and guilt. The failings alone matter: We are always only at 1619 and never at 1865 or 1945 or 1989, a distorted perspective that leads to tearing down, never building up, and embarrassing public rituals of pledging disallegiance. Describing these events as “left fascism,” Trump names the constellation of verbal progressivism mixed with a moralistic vitriol to harass dissenters and indulge in irrational violence, but the worst of our crisis is the contemptuous ignorance of the accomplishments of the nation. It is time to reclaim the history.

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"1952 Ford Customline Tudor Sedan."

"1949 Mercury Eight convertible coupe."

rd questioning gender roles, while advocating on behalf of our sex, as the whole point of feminism. Nor is it accurate to describe us as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”, as Butler did last week. Gender-critical feminism is more varied than that. (My own influences, for example, include Kleinian psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology.)

None of this means “GC” feminists are in favour of bigotry, or don’t care about the obstacles and prejudices faced by transgender people, or that we deny the existence of people with differences in sex development. What it does mean is that we think rejecting sex as a way of thinking about ourselves would be a terrible error. And that we urgently want to be able to discuss this, in a respectful way, with those who disagree.

Kleinian psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology? Some cognitive dissonance there, surely. 

But yes, it shows the absurd state we've reached that it should be in any way controversial to argue that sex is real and is, or should be, fundamental to feminism. Or that gender roles should be questioned by feminism, not taken as evidence of a mysterious gendered mind that may or may not correspond to your actual sex. But here we are.

It's a brave move by Rustin. One hopes her Guardian colleagues aren't as horrified by this as they were by fellow Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore, after she published a robust defence of women's safe spaces against the demands of biological men who say they're women. As a result one poor trans worker claimed she was too terrified now to come in, and a large number of Guardian and Observer employees – 338 to be exact – were so horrified that they wrote a letter to Guardian editor Kath Viner, deploring what they saw as the paper’s “pattern of publishing transphobic content”.

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[Photos © Michael McCluskey]

The series is available as a limited-edition photobook.