Joan Smith on the SNP’s free speech problem:

The silence speaks volumes. Where are the politicians showing solidarity with a colleague who has been no-platformed by a leading Edinburgh venue? Joanna Cherry is an Edinburgh MP, a human rights lawyer and a powerful voice for women’s rights. It’s another example of the demonising of women who hold perfectly legitimate views, allowing them to be picked off and isolated from mainstream politics. 

Anyone who claims to believe in basic freedoms should be horrified. So where is Humza Yousaf, leader of the SNP and Cherry’s long-standing colleague? Where is Stephen Flynn, the party leader at Westminster, where Cherry is an MP?

…

[L]eading lawyers have spoken out about the decision to

Brendan O’Neill on the Scottish Inquisition:

Imagine a country where every time women tried to speak up about their rights they were insulted and abused by mobs of men. A country where women were continually prevented by gangs of misogynists from showing a film about womanhood. A country where women who express their political views run the risk of being branded old hags and even threatened with death. A country where members of the ruling party can be seen standing next to placards calling for women to be beheaded. A country where lesbians can be censored for daring to say women are real. A country where even wearing the Suffragette colours is a risky business.

In other words Imagine … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Sastra on Top of the roller coaster.

Silent Bob #21 wrote:

And what has it got to do with “pretending” anything? Trans people are people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies. What does this have to do with any pretence? What pretence? I

Are we assigned “gender” at birth? I thought we were supposed to be assigned sex. Gender involves masculinity and femininity. Assigning gender at birth would be putting pink frilly bonnets on girl babies and calling them “quite the little princess” or shoving a male infant into a miniature Green Bay Packers onesie. Which, admittedly, we do.… Read the rest

Cycling news tells us in the headline:

‘It is incredibly painful to be othered’ – Austin Killips on division, debate and building dialogue

Gee, you know what else is incredibly painful? To lose a race to Austin Killips. If you lose a race to Austin Killips you’re a woman, because that’s where he races: in the women’s races. This means that you’ve lost a women’s race to a man who claims to be a woman. Painful? I’d say so. It’s also painful when he assaults you during the race.

Here’s an interesting fact. There are clips of Killips assaulting a woman during a race but Google images pretends there are none. I just tried to search and all I get … Read the rest

Corrupt enough yet?

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source

Proud Boys convicted.

Former Proud Boys extremist group leader Enrique Tarrio has been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

The conviction follows a seven-day jury deliberation on five members of the far-right neo-fascist organizations who have been accused of conspiring against the peaceful power transition between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in January 2021.

Three other members of the Proud Boys – Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl – have also been convicted after facing a slew of charges including conspiracy charges, evidence tampering and obstruction of the Electoral College vote.

Enjoy your stay.… Read the rest

Kezia Dugdale, former leader of the Scottish Labour Party, does the “hurr hurr Joanna Cherry isn’t being silenced, look, she’s still talking!!” routine.

In one interview yesterday she said: “Lesbian feminists and women such as myself are being prevented from speaking in public about our views”.

This is a literal quote from the teatime STV News bulletin watched by hundreds of thousands of people. Her views were being broadcast to, let’s say, the equivalent of Edinburgh, compared to the venue capacity of The Stand?

An operator yes, a martyr no.

In other words the Streisand effect. The Stand withdrew its invitation to her, and the result was a lot of bad publicity for The Stand. You know what? That’s … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Papito on Top of the roller-coaster.

My peak happened rather suddenly when my son announced to us that he was really a woman inside. This was patently absurd. His pediatrician wanted to send him straight to the gender clinic. He said to me, “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?” I said to him, “I brought my son to you because he was cutting himself. I would like the cutting to stop, not for a professional to do it instead.”

FYI, my son is over it now. I was able to steer him carefully around all the eager affirmers, and find him a real therapist. He’s autistic, he’s not like the other … Read the rest

Trump says it’s such a ridiculous, made-up story. Just ridiculous!

Donald Trump called a writer’s claims that he raped her at a Manhattan department store “the most ridiculous, disgusting story,” testifying in a deposition shown in court Wednesday that the allegations were “made up” and that the assault never happened.

Lawyers for accuser E. Jean Carroll played about 30 minutes of excerpts from the former president’s deposition, including his emphatic denial of the longtime advice columnist’s accusation that he attacked her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

It does seem like an odd story, for sure. And yet…

…we’ve all heard him saying “You can grab them by the pussy.”

He said it. He said it … Read the rest

Judge to Trump: No.

A New York judge has tossed out Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times, and ordered the former president to pay all attorneys fees, legal expenses, and associated costs.

Trump filed the lawsuit in 2021, alleging that the newspaper, three of its reporters and his niece Mary Trump engaged in an “insidious plot” to obtain his private records for a Pulitzer-winning story about his tax issues.

…

The twice-impeached former president’s claims against the defendants “fail as a matter of constitutional law,” New York Supreme Court Justice Robert R. Reed wrote in his ruling filed on Wednesday afternoon, deeming the paper’s newsgathering as being at “the very core of protected First Amendment activity.”

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Smoke and mirrors.

You gave us a “nutshell” summary with what was wrong with the Tavistock. Here’s a nutshell with what is wrong with trans activism:

None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people.

The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing.

Trans activists lie to conceal what their opponents say; they lie to conceal what exactly they are demanding. They rewrite the language to do both, launching their political … Read the rest

Trans-identifying man Jennifer Finney Boylan says sex is not in the body, it’s in the brain.

When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?

Nothing. It means nothing.

Or it means something, but the something it means is about fantasy and imagination; it’s not about material reality. We can think we “feel like” anything, and that can be a fine pathway to empathy and broader sympathies. It can be, but it can also be a lousy rotten stinking pathway to telling people you know more about being those people than they do.

Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant.

Glinner is explaining to David Baddiel about peaking, and I saw this reply.

The bit about first you climb up believing all kinds of nonsense.

I never did actually believe it.

What did I do? Kept my mouth shut. Watched and waited. Avoided. Evaded. Bracketed. Ignored.

I guess to be more precise what I never did actually believe is that people are or can be the other sex, but I thought maybe possibly it could be that it’s to their benefit to pretend they can. I was far from passionately convinced even of that, but I thought it might be the case, and that I didn’t know much about it.

So I just kept quiet about it for several … Read the rest

“For all the hypersensitive whiny little cis women”

Do you think @MattWalshBlog could answer this person’s question, because she’s really baffled me. pic.twitter.com/02E6o9afML

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) May 2, 2023

Summing up – “You know because womanhood, it doesn’t really have a meaning – you know it’s kind of what you want it to mean – it’s a social construct – I know that’s complicated for y’all”… Read the rest

A piquant NY Times headline:

Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’

A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race.

The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing.

His views aren’t all that private.

In the message, sent to one of his producers in the hours after violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Carlson described how he had recently watched a video of a group of men —

Joan Smith notes politicians’ refusal to stand up for Joanna Cherry.

Starmer is a KC, like Cherry, and leading lawyers have spoken out about the decision to cancel her appearance at The Stand. Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, wrote on Twitter the decision was “plainly unlawful”. Michael Foran, lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow, agreed that it was “unlawful discrimination”. 

Such things should not be happening in a democratic country, governed by the rule of law. On this occasion, the venue has put out a mealy-mouthed statement, blaming the cancellation on the fact that a number of key staff, including management and box office personnel, “are unwilling to work on this event”. They

Lauren Smith at Spiked tells us:

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust to release details of its communication with Mermaids. In 2021, a concerned parent made a Freedom of Information request to see what, if any, correspondence there had been between the Tavistock and Mermaids – including emails or minutes of meetings. Initially, the Tavistock refused to comply, arguing that doing so would cause ‘a disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption, irritation or distress’. When the ICO asked the Tavistock to justify its refusal, the Tavistock took back its original excuse and instead claimed that there was no relevant information to hand over.

I’m fascinated to learn that the Tavistock thinks … Read the rest

MPs acting like high school bullies. In public.

pic.twitter.com/5INUOOeBlZ

— Emma Roddick MSP (@EmmaRoddickSNP) May 2, 2023

They’re snickering about Joanna Cherry.

If you really think that’s an appropriate and professional response by the minister for equalities towards a member of your own party, I shudder to think what treatment you mete out to others. You are an embarrassment to women, to your party and to Scotland.

— Jane McLenachan (@jane_mclenachan) May 2, 2023

Yeah you know J Cherry was in actual fact cancelled from speaking at the comedy club by activists self-appointing as the thought and speech police? This is an uncontestable truth that no pathetic diversions changes. More people are onto this stasi like behaviour every day.

—

The Sydney Morning Herald is distraught because a man is not allowed to join a women’s basketball team.

Transgender athlete Lexi Rodgers will be given advice and support by Basketball Australia if she chooses to reapply to join a women’s semi-professional league after her application was denied on Tuesday.

That is, a man who claims to be a woman will be given advice and support by Basketball Australia if he chooses to reapply to join a women’s semi-professional league after his application was denied on Tuesday.

Why? Why should he be given advice and support? He shouldn’t be trying to join a women’s league in the first place. Tell him to knock it off and go away. Support the women… Read the rest

Australia v women part 2.

In the article targeted by the eSafety Commissioner, Reduxx had revealed that Dennis was one of as many as five trans-identified male players currently competing against women in Football New South Wales competitions. An initial report from The Daily Mail Australia had chosen not to identify him when reporting on the injuries he was alleged to have caused, censoring images of him and declining to provide his name.

Thus making it easier for Riley Dennis to continue injuring women, and making it harder for women to know how to avoid injury from him. Protect the man doing the injuring at the expense of the women being injured – outstanding police work there chief!

In