Also, that definition is full of sneaky distortions, aka lies.

Imagine if a group of white people identified as black on the basis of having a feeling of being black (see, e.g., Rachel Dolezal) and then, when black people questioned this, accused the black people of "transracism." pic.twitter.com/53vpcygV8D

— Prof. Gary Francione (@garylfrancione) January 17, 2024

Second sentence. There’s no such thing as “discrimination of.”

Third sentence. No, misogyny is not “the hatred and devaluation of femininity.” That’s a new, manipulative definition sneaked in to make the word “misogyny” apply to men who playact being women. Misogyny is the hatred of women, end of story. Men who playact being women don’t get to help themselves to that word.

Fourth sentence … Read the rest

Trump defies claims that he defamed E. Jean Carroll by noisily defaming her.

As he arrived at a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, Donald Trump’s Truth Social account released an avalanche of posts attacking E Jean Carroll, who is suing the former president for defamation.

A jury in New York City will determine what damages he owes Ms Carroll, whom Mr Trump defamed by repeatedly calling her a liar and denying that he sexually assaulted her.

…

In a series of posts on his Truth Social on Tuesday, as he was arriving in the courtroom and while he was seated with his attorneys, without his phone, Mr Trump repeated false claims that are at the centre

This is our world now: magazines for teenage girls encourage them to get their healthy breasts cut off.

Liv Hewson Knows That Transphobes Are Just Chicken: "This is who I am, and that's actually wonderful.” https://t.co/slhmZtEUrD

— Teen Vogue (@TeenVogue) January 16, 2024

The article is from last June, but apparently Teen Vogue just can’t get enough of urging teenage girls to cut their healthy breasts off.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on When in doubt, let the men cheat.

Really, the questions shouldn’t focus on “do they have a competitive advantage?” but rather “is there reason to have a category for female athletes?” and “are these athletes female?”. Because they don’t want to answer “no” to the second question, and because they can only think of “performance advantage” for the first one, they get all confused. There are age groups, there are leagues for people who are students at particular schools, and there are few cases where anyone says “Well, this person doesn’t fit the eligibility criteria, but he doesn’t have a performance advantage, so let him participate”.

This is very well … Read the rest

Uh oh.

Ayodhya in the news again:

Frenzied construction work provided the backdrop in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya – a vast centre to welcome pilgrims, arched sandstone gates, a broad corridor leading to a grand new $217m (£170m) temple for the Hindu deity. A multi-billion dollar makeover has seen swathes of the city bulldozed to turn it into what some Hindu nationalist leaders are calling a “Hindu Vatican“.

And that’s a bad thing. “Holy” cities are bad things. Rome, Salt Lake City, Mecca, Jerusalem – all bad ideas, all lead to trouble. Theocracy is not a good political system.

Next week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will fulfil a decades-long Hindu nationalist pledge by opening the

Julie Bindel points out a few facts about JK Rowling for the benefit of Nick Hilton:

So when I read podcast producer Nick Hilton’s ignorant and vitriolic attack on J.K. Rowling in the New Statesman – the magazine of choice for champagne-swigging socialists – I was furious.

Hilton’s article, published earlier this week, is as bizarre as it is defamatory. It labels the author ‘Britain’s nastiest novelist’, attacks her most recent books and even finds time to bemoan ‘child abuse, murder and torture’ in the beloved Harry Potter series.

…

While Hilton has since claimed he was writing only about her books, it is very clear he was using them as a means of launching a thinly-veiled sexist rant

One problem with being a Donald Trump is that you’re a Donald Trump. It means a lot of people will avoid you, not necessarily for political reasons but because you’re a Donald Trump.

Donald Trump lost three of his lawyers in one day when attorney Joe Tacopina filed a declaration requesting the withdrawal of his firm’s representation of the former president in multiple lawsuits.

…

Tacopina withdrew his firm’s legal services from the hush money case only two months before the trial was set to start, at the end of March. Tacopina also requested to withdraw his firm’s legal services from E. Jean Carroll‘s civil defamation and battery case against Trump, which awarded the former Elle columnist $5

Ooooh that’s a tough one, we’ll get back to you in 20 years or so when we have the data.

In a paper published today in BMC Psychology, researchers recommend that "until there is direct and consistent scientific evidence supporting the notion of transgender competitors having an advantage, transgender individuals should be allowed to compete […] without restrictions… pic.twitter.com/OWXzxDhYFE

— boysvswomen.com (@boysvswomen) January 16, 2024

… Read the rest

Sex Matters has a new report:

A major new report launched today by Sex Matters reveals in shocking detail that leaders in the women’s sector who advocate for female-only services are routinely subjected to investigations, ostracisation, bullying and employment loss, and have been pressured into adopting policies that compromise women’s welfare and safety. 

Yet a new poll has found that the British public strongly backs single-sex support for women who have been the victims of rape, sexual assault or domestic violence, with 84% believing such women should have access to female-only services.

I’m even more crazy-radical than that: I think all women should have access to female-only services.

The report, titled Women’s services: A sector silenced, is the

Another tribunal. ERCC is Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

RA: So I went for a walk with [a manager] and asked how it was going, the trans inclusion in what had been a women-only service, and I just got blanked – told "transwomen are women, there's nothing to discuss".

— Tribunal Tweets (@tribunaltweets) January 15, 2024

RA: Saw things eg from MW about "white saviour feminism", and people saying sex does not matter, which just did not fit with what I was hearing from the people using the service.

— Tribunal Tweets (@tribunaltweets) January 15, 2024

MW is Mridul Wadhwa, the trans-identifying man who is the head of Edinburgh RAPE CRISIS Centre.

RA: I naively thought it was about including everybody.

More about Hvaldimir:

On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.

When a commercial fisherman named Joar Hesten got a closer look, he realized that the whale was in fact wearing a harness: one strap girdling his neck and

The Holocaust Encyclopedia on Lebensraum:

The concept of Lebensraum—or “living space”—served as a critical component in the Nazi worldview that drove both its military conquests and racial policy.

…

Long before the Nazi period, many Germans looked to eastern Europe as the natural source of their Lebensraum. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the social and economic pressures of over-population in the German states had led to a steady colonization of Germanic peoples in eastern Europe. Increasingly by the twentieth century, however, scholars and the public alike began to view the East as a region whose vast natural resources were wasted on racially “inferior” peoples like Slavs and Jews. A biological view of Lebensraum resonated with an inaccurate

A guy wrote a long piece in The New Statesman explaining how terrible JK Rowling is.

His smoking gun is that she…liked a tweet.

That @NewStatesman piece on JK Rowling tries to offer a deep reading of an author's hidden traits, based on textual analysis. In similar vein: author Nick Hilton said he was writing only about the books, but we can all see what his real game was. pic.twitter.com/nP7UwApQC4

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) January 15, 2024

… Read the rest

The NY Times looks at a Michigan bible college’s efforts to help Trump steal the election.

Last July, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, brought felony charges against all 16 of the state’s bogus Trump electors; she has said that her investigation remains open, raising questions about whether more charges might be coming. And while the Michigan indictments were the first stemming from the Trump campaign’s effort to seize electoral votes, at least four other swing states are now pursuing criminal investigations.

Hillsdale administrators declined to be interviewed for this article. But in response to written questions, the college said its officials had acted and spoken in a “personal capacity” regarding the 2020 election.

…

How did

Reconstruction meets Trump:

[Last] Tuesday, in response to the federal case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith over Trump’s alleged role in the January 6 insurrection, Trump threatened a new round of violence – or “bedlam” – if he loses the election. In early February, the US supreme court will also rule on the Colorado supreme court’s decision to disqualify Trump from the state’s ballot for his part in the insurrection.

The two cases might appear to be disconnected, but they are inseparable in law and history. They are united by Congress’s Reconstruction-era action to enforce the 14th amendment’s extension of constitutional rights against the former Confederates’ campaign of racial and political violence – the Ku Klux Klan Acts

Tweeting from DragCon:

Sypario was just magnificent at #dragcon #dragconuk #dragraceitalia and had some of the audience in tears. Posting the whole thing to YouTube later. pic.twitter.com/Ikpg2HVWsp

— daniel (@lordisthisfree) January 14, 2024

Popping off the stage is our Divine Divas in the DragCon UK 2024! @brigiding @VinasDeluxe @PreciousPaulaN

Literally everyone in the crowd brought their cameras out and was screaming! Go DDs! #DragConUK pic.twitter.com/5ezXyLcN6W

— José Alfredo (@uberALFRED) January 14, 2024

https://twitter.com/gatteeno/status/1746310125990609032

They’re no Karens.… Read the rest

From Fair Play for Women:

NEW REPORT: How trans inclusion in sport is harming women and girls

For years women and girls have been facing unfair, and sometimes unsafe, sport because of trans inclusion – which means male inclusion in women’s teams, events and changing rooms. You can read some background on that here and here is the timeline.

The scale of the problem, and its effect on women and girls, has been concealed by the fear around this issue. A culture of intimidation and silencing has forced women to keep quiet or walk away. This is not inclusion, it’s female exclusion.

That even understates it a little. It’s a culture of intimidation and silencing enforced by bullying, punishing, … Read the rest

Oops.

Powerful ‘puberty blocker’ drugs given to hundreds of young people who are confused about their gender significantly risks lowering their IQs, a leading scientific expert has warned.

In an alarming study, Sallie Baxendale, professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London, called for ‘urgent’ research into the impact of the drugs on children’s brain functions.

NHS England stopped routinely prescribing the drugs, which halt bodily changes in puberty, last year after a damning review found that the treatment could interrupt the process of the brain maturing.

But private gender clinics are still giving puberty suppressants to under 16s in the UK – and trans activists insist the drugs are safe.

And if activists don’t know, who does?!!… Read the rest

All very well, but…I can’t help wondering about a parallel BBC news item on a two day blackface convention. Would that happen?

DragCon UK: Drag queens gather for two-day convention

What do we think? Would there be a headline reading

“BlackfaceCon UK: Blackface minstrels gather for two-day convention”?

No, of course there wouldn’t.

Would there be a headline reading

“TowelheadCon UK: Turban-wearers gather for two-day convention”?

Nope.

Why is it ok to mock women but not other despised groups?

The BBC provides photo after photo of men clownishly dressed and shod and made up and hair-puffed.

Around 180 queens “sashayed” down the pink carpet for the official opening of the event before being welcomed by one of the judges on

Surely this has to be parody.

Children wanting to transition ‘can ignore parents’, says Civil Service diversity ambassador

Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a transwoman in the Department for Work and Pensions, compares puberty blockers to taking the contraceptive pill

Saorsa-Amatheia? Cod Irish plus cod Greek? Come on. Not to mention “Tweedale” – which gets us

Violet Tweedale, née Chambers (1862 – 10 December 1936), was a Scottish author, poet, and spiritualist. 

Saorsa-Amatheia’s granny no doubt.

So anyway:

Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a transwoman civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), told colleagues that children who want to transition have the right to ignore their parents’ wishes and compared taking puberty blockers to taking the contraceptive pill.

The official also claimed