“Community” seeks to banish the witch:

Kauai’s Bethany Hamilton is a surfer, author, mother, and shark attack survivor. 

She recently gave birth to her fourth child, competed in the Vans Pipe Masters, and was invited to attend the Oshkosh Women’s Fund’s Annual Power of the Purse event as the keynote speaker in Wisconsin. 

But in light of Hamilton’s stance on transgender athletes, the event’s been met with backlash as community members demand that she be replaced. 

Yeah what stance is that? Does she pile them up and stand on top of them?

The controversy stems from Hamilton’s early 2023 announcement that she would officially withdraw from future World Surf League competitions in response to its policy on

The Adams vs Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre tribunal continues. Nicole Jones is testifying now. MW=Mridul Wadhwa, the man who runs ERCC.

NC: Can you describe the event
NJ: Event was called 'Inclusion is beautiful but including is ugly" with MW, organised by a university network. MW talking about his work, his journey coming to work at ERCC and making it more inclusive. About his life really.

— Tribunal Tweets (@tribunaltweets) January 18, 2024

Man in charge of rape crisis centre burbles about himself and his journey.

NJ: Much talk of TERFs and transphobes. Whether or not MW had GRC was called a "transphobic" question. Talk of Beira's Place – said it was a very different organisation.

— Tribunal Tweets (@tribunaltweets)

How to turn feminism inside out and gloat in public about the clicks you’re getting as a result:

transphobes are having a field day over @TeenVogue's profile of Liv Hewson and their top surgery. it's cool we're getting clicks as a result! Liv and I actually talked about this:

"Your squeamishness is not what the world turns on; it doesn't matter."https://t.co/m5eti9FKxM pic.twitter.com/x1t72xux0L

— Lex McMenamin (they/them) (@leximcmenamin) January 17, 2024

Liv Hewson clearly has no idea what “misogyny” means. It’s not hatred of women to say that teenage girls who get their breasts cut off for a fad belief in magic switchable gender are making a mistake. I don’t hate the girls who make that mistake, I hate … Read the rest

Please go soak your head.

Please read Laura's statement pic.twitter.com/gaxWHrnV71

— Hackney Labour (@HackneyLabour) January 17, 2024

What are we to conclude? That it’s a mistake to “cause offence” to a few hundred men who claim to be women but not a mistake to insult millions of women by knuckling under to petulant men who claim to be women.

Why are a few men more important than millions of women?

No one has explained that yet.

What did she say?

Laura Pascal was announced to be running for the position by Hackney Labour back in December. In recent weeks, tweets have been found from the potential councillor where she states that trans women are not women.

They’re not.

So she … Read the rest

Newsweek:

 transgender woman in Oregon was recently arrested after posting photos showing several guns and speaking about being angry over transphobia.

FBI agents in Oregon arrested Elizabeth West last week after reviewing several social media posts that included photographs of guns, a criminal complaint reviewed by Newsweek said. West was accused of interstate threatening communications, according to the criminal complaint.

The complaint states that on September 26, 2023, FBI agents in Eugene, Oregon, received a tip regarding a social media post made by West in a “Trans Woman Support Group” page on Facebook that showcased two guns and mentioned being bullied by “trans phobic” individuals.

“Well, I wish I had better news to tell but what I’m writing to

It’s about a culture of intolerance.

My article for the Free Press about why I left Harvard was published today. Thanks to @bariweiss who encouraged me to write about my experience, and to the editorial staff at @TheFP who made it shine.

I wanted to use my story to explain that "cancel culture" is not mainly…

— Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) January 17, 2024

I wanted to use my story to explain that “cancel culture” is not mainly about being fired or even losing a platform; it’s about a culture of intolerance and its effect on free speech. When one’s own institution abandons its founding values, it abandons those who are working to uphold them. Being personally attacked for that work,

Will Keir Starmer ever admit that men are not women?

It has been reported that Laura Pascal, the Labour candidate in a forthcoming local council by-election in London, has been suspended by her party. It is believed that this happened after complaints were made against her that she has deviated from the one true faith of transgenderism. “Trans women are not female,” she is reported to have stated on X (formerly known as Twitter). “By definition they are male.” A pinned post on her account reads: “My embodied reality as a member of the oppressed sex class is experienced in a world where biology has a significant impact.” 

It will be of great interest to see what the end result

This is suitable. The UCSB Resource Center for Sexual & Gender Diversity is having an astrology night! In fact it’s this very night so you could still make it if you hustled!

Join us for an unforgettable evening on Wednesday, January 17th from 5-7pm in the MCC Lounge with Astrologer Afiya Sunflower, where you’ll dive into the mesmerizing world of astrology without the stress.

Astrologer Afiya Sunflower – it just doesn’t get any better than that, does it. And diving into a mesmerizing world of bullshit is what trans-world is all about. Dive in and within minutes you’ll have lost all your critical faculties.

Uncover the mysteries of your birth chart, share insights in a welcoming group discussion, and

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