Cheltenham Literary Festival is in a panic because – oh my god – people might have unpopular thoughts which they might utter aloud.

Cheltenham Literature Festival has come under fire after issuing a warning notice to speakers comparing gender-critical views with racism and homophobia.

The festival, which begins today, sent an email to people who are hosting talks at the event, asking them to follow new guidance “in order to protect both yourselves and the [festival] from complaints”. It said: “If, during any of your events, a speaker shares an opinion that could be deemed controversial, please reinforce that everyone is entitled to express an opinion, however Cheltenham Festivals [the organiser] does not endorse the views shared on stage. By

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Yebbut that’s not what competitive sports does. That’s not how it works. The whole point is that somebody wins, which entails that somebody loses. It’s not about “being kind”; it’s about being the best.

San Jose State volleyball played its first game on Thursday night since three Mountain West schools announced they would forfeit rather than play the Spartans and transgender starter Blaire Fleming. 

After the match, Spartans head coach Todd Kress said he was “disappointed” that his team was “losing opportunities to play” but did not reference why, exactly, schools don’t want to face San Jose State. 

Well, Coach Kress, people are “choosing not to play” your team because your team chooses to roster a biological male. … Read the rest

Gee, why don’t female athletes want to go up against teams that include male players? I just can’t figure it out.

San Jose State volleyball played its first game on Thursday night since three Mountain West schools announced they would forfeit rather than play the Spartans and transgender starter Blaire Fleming. 

That is, rather than play the Spartans, who have a male player.

After the match, Spartans head coach Todd Kress said he was “disappointed” that his team was “losing opportunities to play” but did not reference why, exactly, schools don’t want to face San Jose State. 

…

“It’s not just us that are losing opportunities to play,” Kress continued. “It’s the people choosing not to play us, and

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I guess Cheltenham Literary Festival identifies as disdainful of literature. Seems odd, given the name.

https://twitter.com/cheltfestivals/status/1840330864711864694 The lit fest isn’t just words on a page – ew, how gross would that be? Words on a page are for snobs and toffs and probably terfs. Ew.… Read the rest

A win…but how grotesque that there was ever a contest. Frederick Attenborough at the Free Speech Union underlines how grotesque it all is:

A gender critical social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled. Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender critical views at an online meeting.

The background to Ms Pitt’s claim is that she made various comments during a Zoom meeting of the county council’s LGBTQIA+ Group in January 2023. The meeting began with a male colleague claiming that his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog

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Sometimes you just have to track down the source.

I saw this on Facebook, posted by Jay Novella.

So I wanted to know more, because was it really that incoherent and nothing to do with the question asked and random and babbling about an award? And the answer is yes but more so. There’s some punctuation in the version Novella shared that is not there in the reality.

Question:,What actions will you take to ensure that our jobs stay in America?

Trump: I was honored as the man of the year. Maybe 20 years ago. The fake news heard about it and said, it never happened… pic.twitter.com/eqOvGHNmiL

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2024

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Chelt Lit Fest puts a target on women who know men are not women.

https://twitter.com/soniasodha/status/1842122518259175430 Watch out for opinions that could be deemed controversial, folks.

Of course, that’s all opinions, so maybe you should just stay home, with all the doors locked and all the windows covered.

Also, notice that Chelt Lit Fest puts awareness that men are not women right at the top of the list. It seems that the most potentially controversial opinion one can have is that men are not women. I wonder if it occurs to CLF that they’re saying basically all people hold an opinion that is The Most Potentially Controversial aka evil evil evil. All people know that men are not women, even the … Read the rest

Hmm. Pink News:

The founder of a social media app designed for “females” is appealing against a finding that it discriminated against a transgender woman.

For “”females””? Really? Scare quotes on the word “female” because there’s no such thing? A man is a transgender woman, but women are “””females”””? The male category exists but the female one is just a sad pathetic joke?

Duly noted, Pink News. By the way you can’t have pink. If we can’t have female, you can’t have pink.

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Project 2025 even wants to reimpose the sabbath on us. Annie Laurie Gaylor has the details:

Today, we take for granted that you can do many of the things on Sunday that you can do on other days, perhaps reduced hours notwithstanding. Will this still be the case if Project 2025 becomes a reality? Not if the Heritage Foundation gets its way. Let’s turn to page 589 of Project 2025, to a subsection titled “Sabbath Rest.”

“God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day,” states the document. “Moreover, a shared day off makes it

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Even the Mayo Clinic does this. I’m not sure I knew.

Feminizing surgery, also called gender-affirming surgery, involves procedures that help better align the body with a person’s gender identity. Research has found that gender-affirming surgery can have a positive impact on well-being and sexual function.

Feminizing surgery includes several options, such as top surgery to increase the size of the breasts. That procedure also is called breast augmentation.

That is, surgery on men to increase the size of men’s “breasts.” Do men even have breasts? Nipples, yes, but breasts?

Breast surgery. Surgery to increase breast size is called top surgery or breast augmentation. It can be done through implants, the placement of tissue expanders under breast tissue, or

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It’s not clear what county council this is (possibly Hampshire), but whatever council it is, it’s interesting in more than one way. Or maybe it’s just variations on one way. It’s interesting but highly irritating that any council or anyone else is trying to train anyone via childish cartoons.

This is a real training module from a local council in England on what to do if someone who works there shares “anti-immigration views.”

The answer according to the module? Call counter-terrorism police on them.pic.twitter.com/ssL89Je0u9

— Lewis Brackpool (@Lewis_Brackpool) October 3, 2024

If you play it you will see how insultingly crude and infantile it is, and you will wonder what the hell is the point. Who in charge thinks … Read the rest

Appropriate advertising to have on public transportation? Or no?

So @MayorofLondon on the one hand we have posters up on public transport warning us about unwanted staring, on the other hand we have adverts like this on London trains.
Literally encouraging staring pic.twitter.com/n8Sc0P03NF

— Lily Maynard (@LilyLilyMaynard) October 2, 2024

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Tom Harris at the Telegraph on Duffield v Starmer:

Starmer only became an MP in 2015, but was already talked about as a future leader, despite his lack of campaigning or political experience. It is the complaint most often heard from Labour politicians and ex-politicians: he’s just not that political.

This lack of political skills nearly condemned him to political oblivion just one year after being elected leader of his party, with the loss of the Hartlepool by-election. Sitting governments winning a seat from the official opposition half-way through a parliament is a strange and rare event. Fortunately for Starmer, the Conservative Party came to his aid with a series of fratricidal misjudgments, dispensing of two prime ministers and

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Probably not random:

A 14-year-old schoolgirl has been seriously injured after a substance, believed to be acidic, was thrown at her and another teenager outside her school in west London, with a staff member also becoming hurt while trying to help them. The girl remains in hospital with potentially life-changing injuries following the incident at Westminster Academy, Westbourne Park, which took place after school hours on Monday afternoon.

The Metropolitan Police says it believes the two teens were approached on Alfred Road by a male “who threw a substance at them before fleeing down Harrow Road”.

I think “potentially life-changing” probably means the acid melted her face.… Read the rest

Wellllll he didn’t support a national ban on abortion, he said he wanted a national ban on abortion. Totally different thing. To be fair.

J.D. Vance attempted to distort his own position on abortion in the vice presidential debate on Oct. 1, suggesting that he “never supported a national ban.” In the past, he has said that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and was “sympathetic” to the view that a national ban was needed to stop women from going to another state to get an abortion.

It’s silly to say “suggesting” when it’s simply what he said. Sometimes you just have to use the same word over and over, for the sake of meaning.

Anyway, … Read the rest

Pro Publica reports on one pregnancy made fatal by Georgia’s woman-hating law.

Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her. “They said it was going to be more painful and her body might not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.

But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.

At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she

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Georgia women get to make decisions about their own bodies and lives again.

A judge in Georgia has struck down the state’s abortion law that has prohibited abortions after six weeks of pregnancy since it took effect in 2022. Georgia’s Life Act was fully nullified by Judge Robert McBurney’s decision, meaning that the state must now allow abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.

The judge wrote in his order that “liberty in Georgia” includes “the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices”.

It’s quite an important liberty, when you think about it.

Gov Kemp’s office criticised the judge’s ruling

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Maggie Chapman MSP throws women under a whole fleet of buses.

The selling off of public recreational grounds, widespread sexual abuse by coaches, including the Olympic beach volleyball player who got to represent his country despite being convicted of rape. (2/6)

— Maggie Chapman MSP (@MaggieChapman) October 2, 2024

But this debate was not really about sport.

The participation of transgender women in sport, as in culture and the arts, in voluntary work, in public life or business, is no barrier to others. (4/6)

— Maggie Chapman MSP (@MaggieChapman) October 2, 2024

Yes it is. Of course it is. Men displace women, and they’re a physical danger to women.

Sport can be a source of health, friendship, & sheer joy.

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“The prophet he told us in the hadith”

In August, AbdulRahman Hassan warned wicked women in a talk at the Darussalam mosque in Southall, a charity. If they wear perfume outside the home, they are no better than "fornicators". It's "very dangerous".

He spent almost an hour dictating what women can wear and do.

Bleak. pic.twitter.com/NOZN1iJN0m

— habibi (@habibi_uk) September 30, 2024

“a woman should not allowed [sic] to put perfume on if she leaves the house”

Is that so? What if it’s her house, and she lives there without any men? Who’s going to do the not allowing? Will the local mosque be sending parole officers to sniff her for perfume?… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on One rough hour.

Someone who says out loud that he’d love to suspend due process isn’t someone you want to have in power. At all. I’m sure your Founding Fathers had something to say about that. Oh yeah, it’s called THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, which, in the past, Trump has sworn to defend. Guess it didn’t take. I’m a goddamn foreigner and I know his tiny mind’s little thought experiment is completely illegal, and exactly the sort of abuse of government power the framers were so very keen to prevent when establishing your Republic. They had very different ideas about what would make America “great.” Besides, Trump has … Read the rest