Joanne Harris (Society of Authors important person) is still doing her Sneer At The Feminists thing.

Hur hur Hadley Freeman geddit – the fact that the Guardian wouldn’t let her write about gender ideology doesn’t mean she was canceled hur hur it just means she couldn’t write in the Guardian about an important trend harmful to women despite being a female, feminist columnist at the Guardian. That’s not being canceled hur hur.

Yesterday I spent an hour+ in tears on a zoom meeting explaining everything that has happened to me over the last 3 years. It's not funny or clever.

— Rachel Rooney (@RooneyRachel) December 6, 2022

It is too so funny hur hur!

Really? Working at the Guardian, a

Lucy Bannerman at The Times reported in 2018 that Natacha Kennedy was “behind a smear campaign aimed at academics.” (I wrote about it at the time.) Cool to see Sally Hines citing Kennedy as a valuable source a couple of days ago, and even cooler to see Open Democracy publishing an article by Kennedy – an article throwing muck at feminist women who don’t kiss the asses of men who claim to be women.

A transgender lecturer orchestrated a smear campaign against academics across the UK in which universities were described as dangerous and accused of “hate crime” if they refused to accept activists’ views that biological males can be women, it can be revealed.

Natacha Kennedy, a

Sally Hines chastises the BBC for not pampering trans people enough.

⁦@BBCWomansHour⁩ Given the airtime you gave your ‘silenced’ guest this morning, this is an especially timely and extremely relevant article. Please read and reflect. It’s embarrassing how you fall for such disingenuousness https://t.co/5BP8kkDH8b

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) December 5, 2022

It’s embarrassing how seriously the BBC takes trans ideology, that’s what’s embarrassing.

I read the Open Democracy piece the other day and was underwhelmed but if Sally Hines thinks it’s timely n relevant who am I to continue to ignore it. It’s by Natacha Kennedy.

The recent backlash against Graham Norton’s entirely reasonable suggestion that the media talks to more trans people was more revealing than people

Joan Smith says goodbye Eddie Izzard:

Eddie Izzard likes pink. Pink coats, pink jackets — they’re all over the website promoting his failed bid to stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election. Labour’s colour is traditionally red but pink is for girls, and Izzard has been campaigning in what he coyly calls ‘girl mode’ for months now.

Triply insulting, isn’t it – the fetish for pink, the pretending to be a woman, the coyly calling it girl mode. Ugh. Imagine a grown woman doing that; now imagine a grown woman doing that in campaigning for public office. Making a game and a joke and an embarrassment of being a female person when you are in fact … Read the rest

Define “moderate.”

Republican moderate refuses to disown Trump over constitution threat

It doesn’t seem very “moderate” to me to give tacit support to a reckless self-serving criminal bully who says we should tear up the constitution and make him dictator.

“Whoever the Republicans end up picking, I’ll fall in behind” them, Dave Joyce of Ohio told ABC’s This Week, adding that he thought Americans did not want to look back to the 2020 election, the subject of Trump’s lies about electoral fraud and demand for extra-constitutional action.

We don’t want to “look back” at things that happened a few hours ago?

Joyce said: “I will support whoever the Republican nominee is. And I just don’t think that at this point

So that’s good news anyway.

We are so proud to have selected our next Parliamentary candidate, @Abtisam_Mohamed! pic.twitter.com/SnFzt0Azg9

— Sheffield Central Labour Party (@CenSheffLab) December 4, 2022

Not Eddie Izzard.… Read the rest

No that’s not it.

It’s not “reducing” people to anything to know what definitions are. Nobody says female body parts are the sum total of women, are what women are about, are all there is to know about women. They’re just the basic equipment, that’s all.

Feminism has challenged the assumption among advertisers and sexist men that tits and ass are all there is to women, but that doesn’t entail saying women don’t have tits.… Read the rest

There’s that misogyny.

I have a theory👇 hear me out. Most blokes in partic don’t think women are capable of being cruel or the aggressor. A flutter of the eyelashes, a plea for protection. A claim of vulnerability. It hits a deep chord. GCs play on it. You’d think this was just a normal office party. pic.twitter.com/x5a4mpL4Xs

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) December 4, 2022

Uh huh, a flutter of the eyelashes, that’s us – we’re all Scarlett O’Hara. Just look at all those women fluttering their eyelashes and pleading for protection. The nerve of them.… Read the rest

Jo Bartosch on the elite feminism that can’t define women:

Even seasoned Westminster watchers could be forgiven for not having heard of the Women’s Equality Party (WEP). Co-founded by luvvie-extraordinaire Sandi Toksvig, the group works towards the laudable, if somewhat woolly, aim of making “equality a reality”. But their brand of insipid dinner party feminism is sinking into irrelevance; washed away by a wave of grassroots women’s rights activists who are tired of playing nice.

I love the combination of luvvie-extraordinaire and insipid dinner party feminism. I mean the verbal combination; the actual combination I don’t love at all.

To date, the most notable achievement of WEP’s leader Mandu Reid has been to stand next to a woman who

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Seven lousy days.

My dad thought unions were just greedy arms of the mobs until he watched Reagan fire and basically destroy Patelco, the air traffic controllers union. Dad was a Republican government employee of the Customs and all of a sudden he understood at a visceral level what it means to not have the ability to use a strike as bargaining power. It’s amazing that this was all it took to turn a Republican into a Democrat who in his later years took any opportunity he could to lampoon whichever Bush happened to be in the White House.

But, the problem is that there were not enough union members who saw … Read the rest

It’s Joe Manchin’s fault. Again. Charles Pierce explains:

Seven paid sick days. That’s what the U.S. Senate couldn’t cough up for the people who work for the country’s railroads, at considerably more risk and for considerably less money than anyone in the U.S. Senate takes or earns. The Senate—especially Joe “Friend Of The Working Man” Manchin, who couldn’t cough up seven lousy sick days—hung the president out to dry on this one, not to mention all the actual rail workers. Marco Rubio voted for the seven sick days. So did Ted Cruz, for pity’s sake. But Joe Manchin couldn’t be bothered. He was too busy planning another TV interview about how the Democrats have lost touch with their

Now there’s a headline.

Trump’s call for ‘end’ of constitution condemned by Democrats

Only Democrats? Democrats only? So Republicans are fine with it? Let’s tear up the constitution because Trump says so?

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Mr Trump’s comments were “anathema to the soul of our nation”.

“You cannot only love America when you win,” Mr Bates said in a statement. He added that Mr Trump’s comments should be “universally condemned” – seemingly a pointed jab at senior Republicans who have so far avoided criticising the former president’s outburst.

What I’m saying. Trump is publicly saying he should be forcibly installed as dictator and Republicans are just nodding along.… Read the rest

Hadley Freeman in the Times:

What is now known as LGBT rights have firmly taken precedence over women’s rights. In 2021, Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood, an organisation originally established to provide women with contraception, wrote an apology in the New York Times, saying Planned Parenthood had focused “too narrowly on ‘women’s health’, we have excluded trans and non-binary people”. 

It makes me want to smash things. “Too narrowly.” Imagine BLM saying “We’ve focused too narrowly on Black people” – saying it and apologizing for it. Imagine trans people saying they’ve focused too narrowly on trans people…and apologizing for it. It’s only women who are expected to go hungry while the real people … Read the rest

Planned Parenthood still at it.

Planned Parenthood will do whatever it takes except of course mentioning women.… Read the rest

Trump urges throwing out the Constitution.

Trump on Saturday morning raged on his anti-Twitter app Truth Social about non-existent “fraud and deception” in the November 8th midterm elections – and he proposed scrapping the United States Constitution as a means to reinstall himself into the presidency.

Did he ask nicely?

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the

Investigation ratchets up:

The Charity Commission has escalated its investigations into Mermaids, the regulatory body announced on Friday, responding to “newly identified issues” about the governance and management of the transgender children’s charity.

Which being interpreted means: “This is worse than we thought.”

The commission will investigate whether there is “serious systemic failing” in Mermaids’ governance and management. The trustees have cooperated fully, but the regulator said their response had “not provided the necessary reassurance or satisfied the commission at this stage”.

But their response identifies as the necessary reassurance.

Investigators will assess whether the charity’s governance is appropriate in relation to the activities it carries out, which involve vulnerable children and young people.

Which involve vulnerable children and … Read the rest

It’s all so maddeningly circular.

Devastating to see the hate that activists working to end male #VAWG are receiving from other feminists because we are trans allies. I know for a fact that many women's organisations want to publicly support the trans community but fear they could be sued & vilified by feminists.

— Dr Charlotte Proudman (@DrProudman) December 3, 2022

How can you be an activist to end violence against women and girls and at the same time insist that men who call themselves women are not men? How can you be an activist to end violence against women and girls if you don’t know which people are women and girls? How can you be an activist to end … Read the rest

Sigh. The rot is everywhere.

Citizens Advice is facing a backlash from staff for an “ideological instruction” to wear gender pronoun badges.

…

Dame Clare Moriarty, its £170,000-a-year chief executive, told all staff last month that pronouns are “an important way of affirming their gender identity” and “we shouldn’t assume someone’s gender based on their appearance”.

No they’re not and of course we should.

Her internal memo on Citizens Advice’s intranet, seen by The Telegraph, added: “You can help to normalise sharing pronouns by sharing yours. We’ve created some button badges with different pronouns that can be fastened to a lanyard or your clothing.”

But we don’t want to “normalise sharing pronouns.” Sharing pronouns is utterly moronic and … Read the rest

Teamster honcho Sean O’Brien:

The fact that there are not 60 senators willing to stand up to Big Business and fight for basic rights for U.S. rail workers is horrific.

— Sean M. O'Brien (@TeamsterSOB) December 1, 2022

Let me be clear. This struggle is not over. I will do everything I can to make sure that rail workers in America are treated with dignity and respect. pic.twitter.com/WVGLodsr7B

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 1, 2022

https://twitter.com/TeamsterSOB/status/1598479379318857728

#43Cowardshttps://t.co/Pfkp8IhSGL

— Sean M. O'Brien (@TeamsterSOB) December 2, 2022

Ya know, Joe, a commonsense idea would have been to give rail workers paid sick days. But you blew that one. Don’t pretend like you care about people’s concerns. You care about money and

When in doubt, do it to the workers.

President Joe Biden signed legislation Friday to block a national U.S. railroad strike that could have devastated the American economy.

That is, Biden broke a strike for paid sick leave. Railroad workers have to go on working despite not having paid sick leave, while Musk and Bezos count their billions.

The U.S. Senate voted 80 to 15 on Thursday to impose a tentative contract deal reached in September on a dozen unions representing 115,000 workers, who could have gone on strike on Dec. 9. But the Senate failed to approve a measure that would have provided paid sick days to railroad workers.

Listen, if you want paid sick leave, you … Read the rest