Originally a comment by Piglet on Could be.

There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be?

No, I’ve seen this being seriously argued. The idea is that men are faster, stronger etc than women because they have stronger encouragement to do sport, better coaches, more resources etc. Which is why it’s so important to let male people barge in and hog the meagre resources that female athletes DO have. /s

I read the paper and it’s actually quite funny in a way—it reads like an assignment given to undergraduates so that they can demonstrate statistical methods. What I think they’ve done in this … Read the rest

Just fancy, being tethered to a phone all day every day isn’t good for the intellect.

PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.

Never mind. AI will do the math for us.

Screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director

Dawn Butler working the crowd.

But the trial revealed that the murder wasn’t about trans or “the Trans community.”

Never mind. She’s too busy reporting Mumsnet to the police to bother with pesky facts.… Read the rest

Macron is all bros before hos.

President Emmanuel Macron of France this week condemned what he called a “manhunt” targeting Gérard Depardieu, the embattled French actor whose worldwide fame has been tarnished in recent years by allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Really. Why should mere harassment and assault of women tarnish the fame of a movie star dude? Obviously movie stardom is far more important and valuable than the feelings of 10 or 100 or however many stupid whiny women.

Macron’s comments, which prompted swift criticism, came after a documentary that aired in France this month showed the actor making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea.

Who cares? It’s only women. … Read the rest

Totally normal.

In the 24 hours since the Colorado Supreme Court kicked former President Donald Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot, social media outlets have been flooded with threats against the justices who ruled in the case, according to a report obtained by NBC News.

The Colorado Supreme Court didn’t “kick” Trump off anything. That’s like the BBC and the Guardian constantly saying people “hit out at” and “hit back at” when they mean “disputed.” It’s a metaphor but news media should avoid that kind of metaphor because it’s far too emotive and manipulative.

Anyway.

Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research, identified “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats, often in direct

Rebecca Solnit kneecaps her own argument immediately after making it.

Republicans have sought to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote against them and to undermine the systems set up to protect elections from corruption. They’ve sought to give corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the gun industry, immunity from accountability as both climate change and gun deaths devastate the nation, as well as to liberate dark money to dominate politics.

The legislation and legal cases they have pursued makes women unequal to men by overturning the bodily autonomy necessary to make women free and equal participants in society. Having overturned abortion rights in their pliant supreme court, and launched a new era of persecution of both pregnant

A new discovery lights up the headlines.

Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity

Ya think???

Sex may be a more useful explanatory variable than gender identity for predicting the performance of athletes in mass-participation races, a new paper has found.

A new paper has found what everyone has always known. Humans are sexually dimorphic.

Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes.

Surely they mean sex disparities in outcomes.

More to the point, what theory? There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological … Read the rest

How dare a woman say that men shouldn’t take women’s scholarships?

Anti-Trans Swimmer Slammed After Causing Trans Teen To Lose Volleyball Scholarship

That is, woman yelled at after she points out that a boy won a scholarship intended for girls. The boy didn’t “lose” anything; he was never entitled to that scholarship, because it’s for girls.

Peter Karleby writes:

Anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines has once again sparked outrage after her public campaign against a trans high school student resulted in the teen’s college scholarship being revoked.

That is, Riley Gaines “sparked outrage” in a male journalist after she pointed out that a scholarship for girls had been awarded to a boy.

It’s unclear how Gaines knew about the

Woke dogs! Gaslighting dog-havers! DEI for the canine set!

Comment sections filled with discussions on “woke idiots” in dog training. “Radicals are Hijacking Dog Training” posted one trainer, calling force-free training, the anti-aversive movement of which Mr. George is arguably the most prominent face, an “ideology” and a “cult” with a “radicalized agenda” — language that sounded awfully familiar.

Even before this, I’d seen the occasional Instagram post by a trainer using terminology that seemed drawn from another context: I’d paused on several posts that applied the term “consent” to dogs — as in, we should get their consent before we pet them. In some cases, the trainer’s vocabulary seemed drawn from even more distant shores: “I

Will he be sued? Is he trawling to be sued? Does he have wistful daydreams about being sued? Does he identify as being sued?

Given how deep the pockets of @jk_rowling @rickygervais and @piersmorgan are, this seems a mighty stupid tweet – is @IndiaWilloughby hoping to be sued? pic.twitter.com/HdZLzyeVnG

— Le_Sorelle_Arduino KPSS (@Sorelle_Arduino) December 20, 2023

By the way it’s not “denigrating” anyone to point out that people can’t change sex.… Read the rest

Not a hate crime after all?

Within 48 hours of Brianna Ghey’s murder, DCS Mike Evans of Cheshire police told the media that the force had “no information or intelligence to suggest it was a hate crime”. The statement caused an immediate uproar, particularly among the LGBTQ+ community, who held vigils in her memory. Many people suspected that Brianna’s being a transgender girl [might] well have played a role in her killing and were angry that detectives seemed so quick to rule out transphobia as a motive.

After all, it’s not as if the detectives could have known more about it than the “many people” who were watching from Twitter.

Although transphobia did not come up in the trial, the

Typical Trump: if the reporting says he said something repulsive he then repeats it 9 thousand times to demonstrate that he can be repulsive if he wants to so NYAH.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night denied he was inspired by Hitler while repeating his comments that immigrants were “destroying the blood of our country” — despite coming under intense fire for similar remarks over the weekend.

Not “despite”; because of.

“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing — they’re destroying our country,” Trump said Tuesday at an event in Waterloo, Iowa, echoing comments he made at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday in which he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our

Originally a comment by Sackbut on Its sanitized depiction of slavery.

The NYT article did mention the disturbance of gravesites as part of the reason, but that appears secondary.

The group, which is affiliated with an organization called Save Southern Heritage Florida, sued the Defense Department in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Sunday, arguing that the Pentagon had rushed its decision to take down the monument and that it had circumvented federal law by not preparing an environmental-impact statement. It also said that the work would damage the surrounding graves and headstones. A hearing on the matter was scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday.

I hope this isn’t too much of a digression: there is … Read the rest

Not so fast, Treason Dude.

A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

And the Supreme Court will of course wave him through.

The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

Trump’s attempted coup was also the first of its kind in history.

Dozens of lawsuits

Because the rozzers have NOTHING better to do.

So yeah, they false reported me to the rozzers. On Saturday, I was arrested then interviewed under caution about my interview with @andrewdoyle_com on @GBNEWS and my @StandingforXX speech at #LetWomenSpeak in Leeds. Five hours later I was released from custody and told no action…

— Louise Distras (@LouiseDistras) December 18, 2023

So yeah, they false reported me to the rozzers. On Saturday, I was arrested then interviewed under caution about my interview with @andrewdoyle_com on @GBNEWS and my @StandingforXX speech at #LetWomenSpeak in Leeds. Five hours later I was released from custody and told no action would be taken against me coz I haven’t committed any crimes, obvz. The worst part

Speaking of monuments to the Confederacy and Just Asking Questions about why we should remove them and who is going around defending slavery anyway, let’s take a quick look at Florida and its education standards.

Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, part of new African American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by a state teachers’ union as a “step backward.”

The Florida State Board of Education’s new standards includes controversial language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the

The Times on the Confederate statue and the pause in its removal:

Hours after workers began removing a towering Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily halting the effort to dismantle one of the country’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy on public land.

Emphasis mine, for the benefit of people who pretend to be puzzled about why the monument should be removed.

The memorial has been criticized for its sanitized depiction of slavery, and the plan to remove it from the country’s most famous cemetery is part of a militarywide effort to take down Confederate symbols from bases, ships and other facilities. Dozens of Republican lawmakers have opposed removing the

UK Schools can now say nope.

Schools will be able to overrule parents who want their children to change their gender identity if they feel it goes too far under new guidance.

The long-awaited guidance states that schools must take a “cautious approach” that complies with their legal duties.

It explicitly states that some forms of social transitioning — under which children change their pronouns, names and uniform — “will not be compatible with a school’s statutory responsibilities”.

Responsibilities like providing single-sex toilets and changing rooms, and not letting boys compete against girls in contact sports. (Should be any sports, but it’s a start.)

No duty on schools
Ministers had wanted to ban social transitioning but were unable to

Erm…sound familiar?

Boycott EVERY business owned by Jews. Make a list of every Jewish owned business in your city. Inflict financial pain on them as they have burnt, mutilated, and blown apart little children in Gaza. Stop this madness. https://t.co/VBf49UXpPg

— Rick Wiles (@realRickWiles) December 12, 2023

Yes, of course it sounds familiar. It sounds like Hitler.

Also, he doesn’t even mean “Jews,” he means Israel, or to be more precise Netanyahu’s government.

He’s a man who thinks very highly of himself and his virtue.

Rick Wiles: Disciple of Jesus, TruNews host, Final Day author, Baptist elder, Bible teacher, businessman, global Ambassador for Peace. Unable to swallow BS.

Very very very global ambassador for peace.… Read the rest

By now it’s as familiar as “Once upon a time.”

A Tory deputy chairwoman has had a “hate incident” recorded against her after she described a trans woman as a “man in a wig”.

Rachel Maclean, the MP for Redditch, was accused of transphobia after she shared a post on X, formerly Twitter, about Melissa Poulton, who is standing for the Green Party against Maclean at the next general election.

The post said that Poulton was “a man who wears a wig and calls himself a ‘proud lesbian’” and Maclean added: “‘While the Greens don’t know what a woman is, my Worcestershire neighbours the people of Bromsgrove certainly do.”

It’s also relevant that Maclean is in fact a woman, while … Read the rest