So sometimes the UN does know which people are women. Unless there’s an unspoken “including/especially trans women” here.

The gender gap in food security has risen dramatically over the last 3 years, as more women and girls go hungry.@UN_Women explores the unique challenges & opportunities presented to women when it comes to food security. https://t.co/iaZS4EsG49 pic.twitter.com/hJAzFqmMsK

— United Nations (@UN) February 19, 2023

… Read the rest

News out of Florida:

Art lovers in Miami looked on in horror on Thursday night, when a collector accidentally knocked a $42,000 (£34,870) sculpture by US pop artist Jeff Koons to the ground.

Oh no, $42,000 gone, just like that!

The statue – one of Koons’ iconic Dog Balloons – smashed into tiny shards, and had to be swept into dustpans by gallery staff.

…

Luckily for the woman, the piece is covered by insurance, Bénédicte Caluch, an art advisor with Bel-Air Fine Art galleries which represents the sculpture, said.

Whew, that’s a relief!

But what I want to know is, in what sense was the piece actually “worth” 42k?

In the sense that someone might be willing to … Read the rest

The usual apologies for the Mail, but it reports that medical people are being told to talk in Gender Neutral unless told otherwise. 1% of people claim to be Gender Interesting so everyone has to be confused by doctors and nurses carefully avoiding calling them women or men.

Steve Barclay last night ordered an urgent investigation into new guidelines that tell NHS staff to treat all patients as gender-neutral.

Nobody is gender-neutral, so it’s bonkers to treat patients as gender-neutral because a few wannabe originals pretend they’re neither women nor men.

It instructs doctors and nurses not to use phrases such as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ until a patient has confirmed their gender identity.

Mind you, … Read the rest

There is textual evidence that Fox knowingly lies.

What Fox’s loyal viewers wanted to watch — and what Fox News was willing to do to keep them — emerged this week as a central question in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against the network by Dominion Voting Systems.

A stunning cache of internal correspondence and deposition testimony obtained by the software company and made public on Thursday in a Delaware court filing showed high-level Fox executives and on-air stars privately agonizing over the wild and false claims of a stolen election that Trump allies promoted on Fox airwaves in the weeks after the 2020 election. “Sidney Powell is lying,” prime-time star Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer about

Trans woman Juno Dawson is angry at his MP.

He guesses to this man he does not count as a vulnerable woman. Well of course he doesn’t, because he’s a man. Of course he’s not “vulnerable” in the way women are. In other ways he may be, but not the ways specific to women.

The names he childishly smeared out are Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce. More power to their elbows.… Read the rest

Phoenix is already lethal.

America’s fifth biggest city has always been hot, but day and night temperatures have been rising due to global heating and the city’s unchecked development, which has created a sprawling urban heat island that has literally become unliveable for some residents. In the past three years, 911 calls and emergency room visits for heat-related emergencies have skyrocketed and more than a thousand people have died from extreme heat.

I did not know that. You’d think it would prompt a mass exodus.

The city is scattered with cooling centres – air conditioned places where residents can go to cool down – but clearly this isn’t working for many people. I wanted to spend a good

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

I’ve been studying social aspects of science as a layperson for at least 25 years, some college courses before that, and through discussions with working scientists on my podcast since, and just chatting with Greg Laden. I don’t claim to be an expert on science by any means, since I have limited practical experience designing and conducting experiments only when they are part of an undergraduate course and so that just gives basic context of how some science works. But it’s such a broad area of investigation, that even among working scientists there are concepts in the philosophy of science that they don’t accept or … Read the rest

I haven’t read much Roald Dahl because I was put off by his unabashed hatred of women decades ago.

You still have a story in which evil witches who want to kill kids are hiding amongst us, looking like "normal" women, and if only you knew who they were straight away, you'd be able to eliminate them. It's still basically how people find Dahl appalling write about Mumsnet today.

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) February 18, 2023

"They look like everyday women, but they're not, and violence against them would be self-defence!" runs through The Witches. It's very now. The people who have a problem with it really shouldn't.

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) February 18, 2023

Hatred of women never goes … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Will the real pseudoscience please stand up.

…an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language…

Like bleeders, uterus-havers, clownfish, cis and TERF? Or is the problem the fact the NYT didn’t use their preferred terms like bleeders, uterus-havers, cis and TERF?

…while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.

Or maybe the Times reported on the contoversy surrounding how best to treat dysphoric children, and discussed options other than just “gender affirming” care. And as for the omission of “relevant information,” how about an admission that humans can’t change sex? Call me mad, but that seems somewhat relevant to me. And what about … Read the rest

It seems Buttigieg has been neglecting his job.

On the very day that DeWine was uttering these dire words [telling people to evacuate the area after the East Palestine train disaster], Buttigieg appeared on three Sunday news shows: CNN’s State of the Union, NBC’s Meet the Press, and ABC’s This Week. Remarkably, on none of these programs was Buttigieg asked about the ongoing East Palestine disaster—despite the fact that, as transportation secretary, regulating train safety is one of his responsibilities. Nor did Buttigieg feel it incumbent on himself to raise the issue and offer what guidance and assurances he could. Instead, Buttigieg’s ubiquitous TV appearances were taken up with the transparently hyped-up issue of a

Andrew Sullivan on That Letter.

[T]his week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

It’s an echo of Evergreen and Yale and Middlebury and Reed. The ploys are repeated because they work and there’s no downside. And almost all the university presidents caved.

The letter is available at the elegantly short address nyletter.com.

We write to you as a collective of New York Times contributors with serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.

Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly. Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.

15 thousand in eight months? So under two thousand a month? That’s not a lot. That’s not even close to a lot. An article or two per month. It’s a pressing issue, it’s in the … Read the rest

Another campaign / protest / open letter / list of demands, this time aimed at the New York Times.

The New York Times has been accused by its own writers of fomenting “bigotry and pseudoscience” against trans people in the latest controversy to grip one of America’s biggest-selling newspapers.

Pseudoscience? Because what, trans ideology is based on such authentic genuine non-counterfeit not at all pseudo-type science?

More than 180 contributors, including Sex and The City actress Cynthia Dixon, writer Lena Dunham and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, have penned a letter raising “serious concerns” about the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.

Oh no, not Cynthia Dixon and Lena Dunham. How will the Times survive?

[The letter]

Because female people don’t matter.

Six first-class counties are demanding urgent answers from the England and Wales Cricket Board as to why a middle-aged player who transitioned from a man to a woman is being allowed to compete against girls as young as 12.

A two-fer. Not just a man, but middle-aged. Not just decades older, but male.

One letter from a coach claims the player “hits the ball harder than any other I have seen in the league”.

Gee I wonder what could possibly explain that.

It is understood that the player has previously caused injuries, although inadvertently, including one to an umpire and another to an opponent at county trials who was left unable to play for

NPR yesterday on the East Palestine disaster:

Some residents have reported headaches and rashes in the days since the derailment. And many have expressed frustration at what they say is a lack of answers from the railroad company and public officials.

I suspect the lack of answers is because the answers don’t make the railroad company or public officials look responsible or competent. “We could answer, but then you would come at us with pitchforks.”

On Wednesday night, hundreds of East Palestine residents crowded into a high school gym to press state and local officials for answers about air and water testing and the risks of long-term exposure.

“Why are people getting sick if there’s nothing in the air

Guy loiters in female changing room to watch young girls getting naked. Staff says nothing can be done.

Janayh Wright, a photographer and mother of three, spoke to Reduxx about her own encounter with the man — one she says she had heard about before interacting with [him] herself. Wright explains that she was aware of rumors that a male had been using the women’s facilities at the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre from other parents, some of whom said they had lodged complaints with both staff and local police.

On February 3, Wright was visiting the pool with her daughter and niece. She told Reduxx that she would typically wait for her daughter outside of the changing room, but decided

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on But whose dignity?

Using preferred names and pronouns, referring to TIMs as a kind of “women” (more specifically the “trans” kind as opposed to the “cis” [1] kind), reframing special privileges as “rights”, reframing forced obedience as “respect” or “dignity” etc. are the Trojan horse, the foot in the door, the thin end of the wedge, the seemingly (at the time) benign concession that gets the justification spiral going:

Only a weak-minded dolt would have made these concessions because of simple peer-pressure, tribalism, fear of ostracism etc. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, so if I did make those concessions, it had to be the only reasonable, or even decent, thing to

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on But whose dignity?

The TRAs have shown that there’s no way to give them what they want in the way of dignity and respect in order to get the same back; they want to trample over boundaries, and as soon as one falls, they’re going for the next. (The order of the following may vary from place to place):

If we give in on fetishistic cross-dressing, they demand bespoke pronouns;

If we give in on pronouns, they demand that we cede to them all the other words which apply to our sex;

If we let them have our words, they demand access to our toilets;

If we give them access to our toilets, they … Read the rest

Kathleen Stock reviews Sturgeon’s farewell press conference:

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a

This talk of treating trans people with dignity and respect just as we treat everyone else with dignity and respect could be put another way. It could be described as walking on eggshells.

The only reason there’s an issue about dignity and respect, I think, is the fact that trans people are a challenge to dignity and respect. If you see it as just a fantasy, or social contagion, or a mistake about the self, and the like, then…the dignity part is missing. Being trans is like a pratfall. A pratfall is the opposite of dignity.

This is not helped by the unreasonable nature of the demand, let alone the constant escalation of it, and the abuse dealt out for … Read the rest