Hi folks, my name is Kevin Veale. I'm a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and fiction author.

https://wheretofind.me/@krveale

"He/Him." Tangata Tiriti. Pakeha.

I'm into a wide variety of popular culture stuff in lots of different media forms, some of which I write about academically. I reshare stuff that amuses me, post random thoughts or resources, and generally hang out.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

This is like that but in the best of ways.

this deposition by a lambda legal lawyer to exclude a transphobic expert witness with bad qualifications is just.

I have no eloquent way to describe it: it's 307 pages of someone with no qualifications leaning on his statistician credentials, being nailed to a cross over and over again until there's only metal left

Replies Table of Contents (ping if I missed you):


hootOS
@hootOS

i mean this asshole is getting absolutely dismantled in much more substantive ways but this just feels so good right here after having read 106 pages up to now of just substantiating everything this chuckle fuck has legally said in his quest to destroy the rights of queer people across the world, for the sake of completely annihilating his ass in a fucking deposition.

transcript:


NireBryce
@NireBryce

(Q.) Jennifer Altman (lambda legal): Do you believe gender dysphoria exists?
(A.) Michael Biggs, PhD: Yes.

(Q.) JA: Do you believe people can be transgender?
(A.) MB: Yes.

(Q.) JA: Do you believe that being transgender is a choice?
(A.) MB: I'm struggling to answer that question

(Q.) JA: Why?
(A.) MB: Because in some ways, everything is a choice, isn't it?

(Q.) JA: No. Do you have an answer for the question, sir?


exerian
@exerian

now if only i could convince myself that the court actually cares that these asshats have no qualifications whatsoever...


NireBryce
@NireBryce

so, just to clarify abstract strategy here, the reason to do this isn't because you think the courts will punish them (or ignore them in other places once revealed), but to:

  1. prevent their testimony for the case being entered into the court record as fact
  2. and
  3. help journalists build a case by having them admit it on the public record, as something you can cite, instead of just posts on the internet or leaked emails, both of which can be easily dismissed to an audience unfamiliar with their behavior and reputation.
  4. but also
  5. stress their command structure so they've got reduced planning capacity and remain on the back foot.

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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

Every time she says "and we'll talk about that more later" it's so intimidating and ominous I love it. Also the part where she shows her hand Columbo style how much research she's done like when she brings up a testimony he hadn't mentioned in his report and she's like "you sure spend a lot of your time on this" and he says "well, only eight minutes" and she says "actually it was twelve minutes, I've listened to it. Anyway—"

Oh so very satisfying

I was just gonna read a few pages into it and then skim over the rest, but then three hours later I realized I'd read the whole thing. She really did give the dude the Caine Mutiny treatment, and it was SO satisfying to read.

My favorite part is on page 189-191 where he basically tells her "just Google it" and she asks him why he didn't include his Google searches in his documents.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

so it's mostly intimidation. with the side benefit of being able to say, but you've already admitted on record that you have zero qualifications to say the shit you're saying. cool.

no, much better than that -- once it's easy to connect them on record, it becomes much more politically embarassing to do this.

judges calling them as expert witnesses in states that have legislatures cool with trans people can start recalling judges because it's obvious malfeasance at that point.

the orchestrated nature of the bills being based on people who are now on record saying they don't actually have qualifications here now lose most of their appeal to authority, and journalists (of many types, including citizen journalism) can start asking hard questions to the politicians who can no longer use the veil of "just read these papers, the science is not settled yet" to dismiss questions.

and, well, it also makes it much easier to try and get the actual papers they are using to prop all of this up, retracted based on falsification.

there's no... outlined strategy that I know of, everyone sorta just picked up their part and started running the minute the emails dropped.

And huge shoutout to the work Twitter/@zjemptv had done cataloging the florida cases on top of these emails over at Gender Analysis, the people at Trans Safety including Mallory Moore, and, of all the names I didn't think I'd say, Andrea James of trans roadmap for... having a wiki for trans hate groups I didn't even know about until I started googling names from the emails.

that's why most of this is things done outside of those routes, yeah.

the official ones are largely just useful for their side effects, and the pressure it puts these people under because they have to still operate within it. and the more frontlines we open up, the less capacity they have for actually countering us.

this isn't a legal or legislative battle, it's an insurgency. which gives us a great advantage against these people who need to work together in concert as a machine, because that's all they've been trained to do. they're tightly dependent, needing to do long coordinating email threads to get their stories straight before they act if they don't want to alienate some of their vital partners.

so it's an easy system to stress all of the slack out of.

You know the post How Complex Systems Fail? I feel it is far more important as a how-to manual, than a warning.

It's an excellent map to causing cascading failures. And we got so much practice in 2017-2020.