All entries by this author

Johnson also said

Apr 6th, 2022 10:38 am | By

When the left is mired up to its nostrils in fantasies sometimes even Boris Johnson gets it right.

Boris Johnson has said he does not “think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events”, amid the fallout from his decision not to ban conversion practices for people questioning their gender.

Well, as we have seen, that all depends on what you’re calling “conversion.” I don’t consider it “conversion” to tell a man he’s not a woman.

Johnson also said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which were “dedicated to women”.

Imagine that. Just imagine thinking a woman in prison shouldn’t have to share a cell with a rapist.

He also insisted it

Read the rest


Insight manager

Apr 6th, 2022 8:53 am | By

More on Fawcett. Check out their staffmost of them were hired in the last six months. It doesn’t say how long the CEO has been there, but other than the CEO the staffer who has been there the longest (hired in 2016) is…

…a man.

ANDREW BAZELEY, POLICY, INSIGHT & PUBLIC AFFAIRS MANAGER

Andrew joined Fawcett in 2016. He works across the breadth of issues Fawcett campaigns on, developing research proposals, formulating policy based on that evidence, and advocating for change in a lead role within our public affairs team. He has led on work including our Local Government Commission, in the development of our Equal Pay Bill, and on our Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood.

Read the rest


Et tu Fawcett Society?

Apr 6th, 2022 8:24 am | By

Pathetic. The Fawcett Society responds to EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers:

The recently published EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers confirms our understanding of the current law. Providers of single-sex services can restrict or modify access for trans people when doing so is necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and when the action taken is proportionate in balancing impacts on different groups of women.

But (yet again) the issue isn’t “trans people,” it’s men who claim to be trans women.

But much more to the point – “balancing impacts on different groups of women” shouldn’t have anything to do with impacts on men, including men who claim to be trans women. The set … Read the rest



Not for the woman

Apr 5th, 2022 4:37 pm | By

And another thing.

Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.

Bollocks. Forcing women to gestate and push out babies they don’t want is extreme torture. It’s beside the point that the bill also punishes doctors, because the whole concept of forced pregnancy is punitive.

Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.

Dead wrong. Forcing women to bear children is slavery – literal slavery. It’s hard labor, it’s not paid, it’s against their … Read the rest



Another twist

Apr 5th, 2022 4:12 pm | By

The war on women continues to rage.

Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.

And this doesn’t make forced pregnancy the law in Oklahoma, it also catches Texas women in its trap.

More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas

Read the rest


Zooming with the historians

Apr 5th, 2022 11:51 am | By

Trump has been trying to tell historians what to say about him.

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”

Point missed. HeRead the rest



Graphics

Apr 5th, 2022 11:28 am | By
Graphics

The current issue of Free Inquiry arrived yesterday. One of the esteemed editors found the perfect illustration for a column I wrote.

Read the rest


Use the right word

Apr 5th, 2022 10:19 am | By

But “conversion therapy” is the wrong label. Why does the BBC keep using it?

More than 100 organisations have pulled out of the UK’s first ever global LGBT+ conference over the government’s stance on conversion therapy.

The UK government had promised to ban conversion therapy but last week decided to exclude conversion therapy for transgender people in the ban.

Probably because it’s not conversion therapy. Sexual orientation is not the same as “gender identity.” The two are different. The most noticeable and consequential difference is that sexual orientation entails no surgical or pharmaceutical interventions at all. This discrepancy is why medical professionals need to be very cautious about agreeing with the self-diagnoses of adolescents who say they are trans: … Read the rest



Looking to establish

Apr 5th, 2022 8:14 am | By

So now let’s read the Equality and Human Rights Commission guide.

Who this guide is for

This guide is for service providers (anyone who provides goods, facilities or services to the public) who are looking to establish and operate a separate or single-sex service.

There was a time when that mostly meant service providers who excluded women from men’s clubs and bars and gyms, which was not only sexist in itself but also an extreme barrier to women working in various professions and businesses where a lot of the networking and jockeying for position took place in…clubs and bars and gyms.

Now it doesn’t mean that any more, now it means service providers who exclude men from women’s toiletsRead the rest



Likely

Apr 5th, 2022 7:43 am | By

Trans Twitter urges veto on…well, on following the law.

Likely to be found unlawful on judicial review…according to some people on Twitter.

Read the rest


Asking deeper questions

Apr 4th, 2022 4:15 pm | By

On pronouns:

If it’s all well-intentioned then why should we not adopt the pronoun game as a universal custom? There are several reasons why I believe we should not: because it undermines self-confidence and resilience by asserting that one’s self-concept is rightly dependent upon external-validation, it endorses and encourages narcissistic behavior, and it creates a world of bizarre and unnecessary confusion for children around the topics of sex and gender. Put simply: it does more harm than good both to those it seeks to aid and everyone else.

Especially everyone else, and there are a lot more of us, and we’re not the ones making bizarre demands to change the language in order to “center” us.

Why are we

Read the rest


Massive changes? Where’s the fun in that?

Apr 4th, 2022 3:44 pm | By

The BBC puts it more sharply.

After a contentious approval session where scientists and government officials went through the report line by line, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its guidance on what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future.

First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.

This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

I find it pretty annoying myself. I won’t be here for the worst of it, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t … Read the rest



Shooting them as they fled

Apr 4th, 2022 12:24 pm | By

There was Oradour-sur-Glane, there was My Lai, there was Srebrenica, there was Amritsar, and now there’s Bucha.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that Russia’s public image is now one of torture and execution after the retreat of Russian forces in the town of Bucha led to the discovery of the killing of hundreds of civilians.

Ukrainian officials said the bodies of 410 civilians have been found in Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces. Satellite images taken late last week show a 14-metre (45ft) mass grave in Bucha near the Church of St Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints. Maxar, the company that took the pictures, said the first signs of excavation for a mass

Read the rest


Over the next few years

Apr 4th, 2022 11:51 am | By

As always, the word is that we can do it if we really get serious and hurry up, and the obvious problem is that we’re not going to.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, warns that unless countries drastically accelerate efforts over the next few years to slash their emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, will likely be out of reach by the end of this decade.

That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse — grow considerably. 

And … Read the rest



A colossal piece of cheek

Apr 4th, 2022 10:48 am | By
A colossal piece of cheek

Joan Smith on Twitter v Rowling:

One of the biggest lies about the conflict between feminists and trans activists is that ‘the debate is toxic on both sides’. It’s trotted out in just about every article that takes a supposedly neutral position, even though the authors never produce any evidence for this slur on women who’ve never threatened anyone.

OR called anyone the equivalent of “cunt” and the rest of it.

Team Trans on the other hand is not so reasonable.

JK Rowling is a favourite target and now a music video has emerged in which trans campaigner Faye ‘Trust Fund Ozu’ addresses the author with the chilling words ‘hope you fit in a hearse’. The video also features

Read the rest


To stand up to the tyranny

Apr 4th, 2022 7:12 am | By

Maybe it’s the name.

In October, Donald Trump announced he was planning to launch a revolutionary technology company.

“I created Truth Social… to stand up to the tyranny of big tech,” he said.

By which he meant a Twitter clone that would let him tell any lies and scream any insults he wanted to.

The app launched on Presidents’ Day, 21 February, but six weeks later is beset by problems. A waiting list of nearly 1.5 million are unable to use it.

Truth Social looks a lot like Twitter, which banned Mr Trump from posting on the platform after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol on 6 January, 2021. Twitter contended that Donald Trump, by making false

Read the rest


If your fetish is

Apr 3rd, 2022 3:46 pm | By

Hahahahahahaha I love it when that happens.

https://twitter.com/mal_theakstone/status/1510707538639077377

It happened to me once. I was arguing with some guy in comments at Crooked Timber (this was a long time ago) and he told me I would benefit from reading this amusing satirical guide to rhetoric on a website called Butterflies and Wheels. That was fun.… Read the rest



One of nine

Apr 3rd, 2022 11:13 am | By

Hey what’s the deal with people having names that are spelled funny? Huh? What are they trying to do? Are they crazy or something?

Three days into his first term as a Republican congressman, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, then just 33, pulled on a smoke hood and fled the Capitol as rioters invaded the House chamber on January 6. He later voted to certify the election results and ended up being one of nine Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. Since then, Meijer has suffered death threats, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge, and now the indignity of having Trump make fun of his last name at a political rally in his home

Read the rest


He had a big net, see

Apr 3rd, 2022 10:43 am | By

Speaking of the American right and how it’s not accurate or fair to translate it to “conservatives,” take just this one item from Trump’s Event yesterday:

Representative Lisa McClain, a Michigan Republican, claimed on Saturday that former President Donald Trump “caught” former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

McClain, who first entered Congress during the 2020 election with Trump’s endorsement, made the comment as she spoke ahead of the former president during a rally in Washington Township, Michigan. The GOP congresswoman lamented how she and many others view the country to be worse off under President Joe Biden than it was under Trump.

“While President Trump was

Read the rest


Shouty

Apr 3rd, 2022 9:27 am | By

The Times article on Emily Bridges part 3:

The current version of the article has been amended. Fair Play for Women pointed out an error 9 hours ago.

That sentence has been deleted.

Read the rest