The Public Discourse September 2020:

The American Journal of Psychiatry has issued a major correction to a recent study. The Bränström study reanalysis demonstrated that neither “gender-affirming hormone treatment” nor “gender-affirming surgery” reduced the need of transgender-identifying people for mental health services. Fad medicine is bad medicine, and gender-anxious people deserve better.

And that’s all the more true when the “medicine” isn’t medicine at all. The only purpose of “gender-affirming hormone treatment” and “gender-affirming surgery” is, well, to affirm gender, and affirming gender is a mental/emotional/psychological thing, not a medical thing. Gender-affirming hormones and surgeries don’t treat an illness or heal an injury, they attempt to make people feel less unhappy in their bodies. If people don’t even feel … Read the rest

Depends on how you look at it.

State laws restricting transition care for minors have surged over the past few months, as part of a Republican movement to regulate the lives of transgender youth.

But is there even such a thing as “transition care”? Trans ideology wants us to think so, of course, but trans ideology isn’t the same thing as medical knowledge. In other words “transition” isn’t really “care” – it’s a drastic intervention that may or may not help the patient psychologically. It should be a last resort, not a swiftly and eagerly performed tampering with a patient’s sex.

And it’s tendentious to call regulation of these interventions “regulating the lives of transgender youth.” Restricting drastic (and … Read the rest

The small but meaningful flare of rage at this…

Fellow Terven, I hope you are remembering to flutter your eyes in that secret-code way that only girls know how to. pic.twitter.com/a9y1o2Qwvh

— HocusPocusTheRealWitch KPSS (@TheRealPocus) June 5, 2023

I’ve never “fluttered my eyes” in my life, nor do I give any “slow, warm smile.” I don’t manipulate, I don’t play coy, I don’t pretend to be adorable or tiny or bashful or cute or kittenish or feeble or dim or helpless or half-witted. I don’t and I never have, even when barely hatched. I despise this kind of thing and it makes me want to vomit to see men pretending to be women and resurrecting all that stupid bullshit. … Read the rest

Let’s flop onto the couch and watch a good old cop show mystery comedy soap non-binary top surgery conversation.

The BBC has been criticised over an episode of Casualty which shows a non-binary character discussing top surgery.

A what discussing what? A woman discussing non-medical mastectomy.

The episode, which aired at 8.20pm on Saturday on BBC One, includes a character discussing their “top surgery” and being presented with a surprise cake shaped like breasts.

Her. Her top surgery. She has breasts. She couldn’t have them cut off if she didn’t have them.

Arin Smethurst, the non-binary trans actor who plays Sah, previously told Metro: “Sah is really interesting for me to play for a number of reasons. I think

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on What is wrong with this guy?

He needs to clarify when he’s talking about definitions, and when he’s talking about frames. For example, he claims that “your definition of what “big” means might not be the same as mine,” but I very much doubt that his definition of “big” matches my definition of, say, “green” or “lawn mower”. I suspect that we would all agree that “big” means something like “substantially larger than normal”. How we apply that definition, though, depends on the frame of reference: what’s big for a dog may be small for a horse. And when there’s a mismatch in our frames, we may disagree on whether an exemplar … Read the rest

Still pushing this line. Is he six?

People attacking Nina Turner for having an opinion should also answer:

– What is big?
– What is god?
– What is a Christian?
– What is right?
– What is wrong?

Yes a woman has traditionally been defined as a “female human.”

The problem is that male vs. female is not always…

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) June 4, 2023

“What is a woman?” is not the same kind of question as “What is big?” or “What is right and what is wrong?”

He must be confusing “What is a woman?” with “Tell me everything there is to know about women.” The first question is just a definitional question with a very concise … Read the rest

Speaking of religions and their impositions on human beings…yesterday I hopped a bus to the other side of the city to walk along the lake –

– and I paused to allow a woman in full hijab carrying a child to cross the sidewalk in front of me. She too paused to wait for me so we did the politeness standoff for a few seconds but I wouldn’t budge, because she was the one carrying a heavy child. I smiled implacably so she went ahead. She joined a family or maybe a couple of families with several kids. The boys were in shorts and nothing else and playing in the water…and the girls were all in full stifling hijab, and … Read the rest

Frank, you do realize that if you say this about one you’re implying it about all?

Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real”, Pope Francis has said, in what appears to be an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to a town near Rome to pray before a statue that she claimed shed tears of blood.

Right but so Frank how do we know which is which? How does the church know? How do you know? How does anyone know?

“Don’t look there,” the pontiff said during an interview with Rai 1 on Sunday when asked about apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

“There are images of the Madonna that are real, but the Madonna

Telegraph columnist Zoe Stempel wrote a piece about the lunacy and destructiveness of trans ideology, so Jonathan “India” Willoughby sent her an unsolicited selfie. Ick.

Hi @realzoestrimpel – what do you think? Should I buy? pic.twitter.com/STWBOPHZ07

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) June 4, 2023

… Read the rest

Kathleen Stock on that day out in Oxford, including some details from a previous day out in Cambridge:

Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and being asked to leave.

Fast forward 31 years, and I’m walking in there again, surrounded by security and being chased by photographers, accidentally dressed like a cut-price Kendall Roy from Succession. The image will make national front pages the next day.

It’s a very droll image.

Cambridge also provided a stunning bit of theatre: an undercover non-binary student called

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A substantial cohort of self-identified feminists.

For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means.

Well, that says more about you and what you think “makes sense” than it does about feminism.

Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways.

And right here, we have something that makes no sense. Trans people (can we have a definition, please?) are mostly saying that the physical, material, biological basis for the oppression of women means fuck all, and can be “identified” into and out of willy nilly. Men can become women, and women can become men. While certainly … Read the rest

Catharine MacKinnon Exploring Transgender Law and Politics:

For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means. Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways.

She must have watched a different movie from the one I’ve seen.

And for some time, escalating since 2004 with the proposed revisions in the UK Gender Recognition Act,[1] a substantial cohort of self-identified feminists have opposed trans peoples’ existence as trans.

No, not existence as trans. What we oppose is the insistence – backed up with every form of punishment available – that men who are trans are literally women in every sense. We oppose the intrusions and thefts … Read the rest

Oh come on BBC.

Pride 2023 on BBC Three

I Kissed A Boy: The Reunion

Ahead of the final of BBC Three’s ground-breaking dating series, I Kissed A Boy, this one-off studio special will see Dannii Minogue getting the latest goss from the boys (their love lives, their newfound fame, any lingering chemistry…)…

This is Gay

As part of a batch of brand new BBC Comedy Short Films, This is Gay – written and created by Kirk Flash – makes it’s linear debut on BBC Three. They’re called ‘gays’ – but what are they? Who are they? And why? Part mockumentary, part sketch show, This is Gay attempts to answer these important questions…

Keeping up with Krystal Versace

Keeping Up

Well that’s the best headline I’ve seen in a while.

Utah primary schools ban Bible for ‘vulgarity and violence’

Right on! The vulgarity is off the charts.

Utah’s Republican government passed a law in 2022 banning “pornographic or indecent” books from schools.

In other words they made a noose for their own necks. The Bible is hella indecent.

The Utah decision was made this week by the Davis School District north of Salt Lake City after a complaint filed in December 2022. Officials say they have already removed the seven or eight copies of the Bible they had on their shelves, noting that the text was never part of students’ curriculum.

The committee did not elaborate on its reasoning or

How do people get themselves here? People old enough to vote and drive and enlist?

What is a Woman?

Up until 5 years ago I would have admittedly said "a woman is someone with a vagina."

But time, education and an openness to try and understand other people's perspectives has changed my views.

If you were to ask me "What is a woman" today, I, like a lot of… pic.twitter.com/6bd4ucmc4o

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) June 2, 2023

If you were to ask me “What is a woman” today, I, like a lot of people would struggle to give an answer. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a belief. What it comes down to is that what a woman is to

And a new nation is born…

If Trump’s friends or family loved him, rather than just loving his money, they would have had him involuntarily committed by now. MAGADONIANS, seriously? pic.twitter.com/76rymgkpdJ

— Sgt Joker (@TheSGTJoker) June 2, 2023

The followup one is the best, because it demonstrates how anarchic his “thinking” and “writing” are. “I’ll call them smart no make that brilliant but don’t change the word just say the first one and then the second one and keep going because momentum is all and coherence is what even is that?”… Read the rest

Oh puhleeze. A man doesn’t magically become a not-man just because he calls himself “non-binary.”

A non-binary shopper said they felt ‘dehumanised’ and accused a fashion brand of being ‘transphobic’ after they were refused entry to a women’s changing room.

The “non-binary shopper” is a man. That’s why he was refused entry to a room where women change their clothes. Capeesh?

Giorgio Firico, 21, tried to go to the ladies changing room at Zara in Oxford when the female assistant told them it was against the rules and refused to give them a number for the clothing.

Giorgio, who studies in the US and is in Oxford visiting a friend, said: “I was wearing men’s clothing but I had two

Reduxx reports:

A lesbian bar that has operated in Rennes, France for nearly a decade has been forced to close its doors following a disturbing swell of vandalism and death threats by trans activists. Orane Guéneau, the owner and manager of lesbian bar La Part des Anges, was publicly denounced as “transphobic” and accused of “misgendering” by critics.

Speaking with Ouest France, Guéneau said she made the decision to shut down the venue to protect her employees in response to increased aggression, both online and at her storefront. On April 14, four unnamed trans activists spray painted the menacing message “Fuck TERFs,” accompanied by a trans symbol, on the front door of the venue during activities that were

Brilliant.

Oxford is – this is the way it’s always going to go, I mean, this is a large number of students doing this – it’s a small number of students with a strong social media presence who have seized upon this as their Hero’s Journey while they’re at Oxford before they go on to management consultancy or law.

Scholarship to the resue:

The British Library has limited replies. I guess only fish can respond.… Read the rest