All entries by this author

Offensive comparison

Mar 15th, 2022 7:00 am | By

More from Luke Easley:

“Offensive” he whines. Easy for him. Predatory men aren’t a threat to him.

He understands it now. He’s the HR guy, and was the HR guy when they pushed Maya out, but he didn’t understand that there are predatory men, and that women have … Read the rest



The mess Labour has got itself into

Mar 15th, 2022 6:32 am | By

Joan Smith on Keir Starmer’s Message to the Estonians:

Employing the forensic skills that made him a QC, he homed in on the most significant issue of the day: “Trans women are women”, he declared. “And that is not just my view — that is actually the law”.

The Estonians may have thought they had bigger things to worry about, what with Putin having his tantrum right next door, but Starmer knew better.

To be cruelly frank, women are being gaslighted. Labour’s leaders say they believe in single-sex spaces, but what does that mean when they also insist that trans women are no different from natal women? Starmer’s own position is a statement of the law as he

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Deliberately vague

Mar 15th, 2022 6:19 am | By

There’s just so much daftery in Luke Easley’s replies at the tribunal.

In other words the head of HR at this economics research institution “had a problem” with renewing Maya’s contract because he thought she might possibly “misgender” someone even though she had told him she would not. Apart from anything else it’s just so tiny and childish.

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Will make history

Mar 14th, 2022 5:10 pm | By

Lia gonna make history this week.

This week, a male collegiate swimmer who identifies as a woman will compete in the women’s NCAA Div. 1 Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships. Lia Thomas is the top seed in both the 200-yard and 500-yard freestyle races and will make history as one of the first openly transgender athletes in women’s collegiate sports, no matter how he performs.

It’s a crappy kind of history to make though – embarrassing as opposed to glorious. Or not so much embarrassing as shameful. Shameful of him, and shameful of all the people letting it happen. People would get this if it were a huge muscular man “making history” by playing Little League baseball, but somehow … Read the rest



An identity after all

Mar 14th, 2022 4:40 pm | By

Wait though. Hold the phone. We may have a case of corpsephobia here.

Corpsegender is a xenogender so surely Luke Easley is violating his own principles.… Read the rest



The bosses

Mar 14th, 2022 4:35 pm | By

His view.

https://twitter.com/Lachlan_Edi/status/1503481019961417733

But then Luke Easley is denying Maya’s reality, and not only Maya’s but many other people’s too, many many many other people’s. Furthermore he’s denying an objective, material, factual reality, and furthermore again he’s denying an objective reality that is at the root of the fundamental human inequality, that between women and men. That’s a lot of reality-denial for a guy who wants to banish women for denying an eccentric new fantasy-based “reality” about being Born In The Wrong Body.… Read the rest



Hearts and minds

Mar 14th, 2022 12:23 pm | By

Life under Russian occupation:

Russian soldiers patrol the streets of Berdyansk in cars and armoured vehicles marked with the “Z” symbol that denotes the Russian occupying force.

Local government officials in this city in southern Ukraine, which has been controlled by Russian troops for the past two weeks, have been kicked out of their offices, and the local radio station plays Soviet ballads and Russian pop songs, interspersed with excerpts from Vladimir Putin’s speeches and news items about Ukraine being “liberated from Nazis”.

Many towns in southern Ukraine are already under Russian occupation.

In Berdyansk, a port city to the west of Mariupol with a population of a little over 100,000, the majority of city councillors have remained loyal

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You conflate identity and reality

Mar 14th, 2022 11:42 am | By

From the Maya Forstater tribunal today [LE is Luke Easley, a Vice President at the Center for Global Development]:

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Define “equality”

Mar 14th, 2022 10:03 am | By

The first two sentences of this Spectator piece by Stephen Daisley need a post of their own before I read the rest.

Sir Keir Starmer’s interpretation of the Equality Act has caused something of a stir. The Labour leader cited the Brown-era legislation to support his assertion that ‘trans women are women’ and that this ‘happens to be the law in the United Kingdom’.

What does equality have to do with the assertion that “trans women are women”?

Even if the Act does say that (which apparently it doesn’t), what does equality have to do with it? Nothing. “Equality” doesn’t mean “you get to force everyone to agree with whatever you say about yourself.” Even if the fatuous repetition of … Read the rest



Kinder and more generous than you

Mar 14th, 2022 6:59 am | By

An item from yesterday:

This is of interest because Featherstone is a former LibDem MP.

That’s a lot of bad packed into one brief retort. The final sentence is a passive-aggressive insult, but it’s the first that’s so striking – flatter yourself in public much?

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He likes to carve up women

Mar 14th, 2022 6:11 am | By
He likes to carve up women

We live in confused times.

Headline: She Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third.

Subhead: Harvey Marcelin was charged with murder after a head was found in her Brooklyn apartment. Officials said it belonged to a dismembered body discovered in a shopping cart.

The reporters:

The story:

An 83-year-old Brooklyn woman convicted twice of killing women she lived with was charged with murder on Thursday, after investigators found a head in her apartment that, officials said, belonged to a body discovered in a shopping cart last week.

Harvey Marcelin, who had served decades in prison for murder and manslaughter before her release in 2019, was arrested March 4 and was initially charged with concealment

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Not now

Mar 13th, 2022 12:52 pm | By

Terry Gross talked to Masha Gessen about Putin’s war on Ukraine last Thursday.

My guest, Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist who reported in late January and February from Ukraine, then went to Moscow after the invasion. On the night Putin shut down the last remaining independent source of TV news, Gessen was at that studio. Gessen’s dispatches are being published in The New Yorker, where Gessen is a staff writer. Gessen left Moscow on Thursday and is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia’s leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen

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Today, though, their hair is short

Mar 13th, 2022 12:15 pm | By

Another they does an interview.

Kae Tempest is perched at a table outside a station-side cafe, playing with a cigarette. Murphy, Tempest’s alaskan malamute, stirs as I approach, and on clocking me, Tempest returns the cigarette – still unlit – to their chest pocket. For years, Tempest’s long curly barnet was a trademark look. Today, though, wearing white trainers, upturned jeans and a turquoise jacket, their hair is short, a neat fade that, Tempest says, they still occasionally catch themselves admiring.

Got it? Tempest is special. Tempest is a they, Tempest perches and plays and has a malamute, Tempest has short hair.

In August 2020, in an Instagram post, Tempest came out as non-binary. They announced their

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Girl guides

Mar 13th, 2022 9:02 am | By

Arbeit macht frei, prostitution is empowering.

A clinic which receives NHS funding has been promoting prostitution as a way for transgender people to pay for their transition treatment, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Being a sex worker ‘can be useful and sometimes empowering’, according to a guide produced by CliniQ, a sexual counselling service for transgender people at King’s College Hospital in London. It adds: ‘It can help us pay for parts of our transition.’

Well of course it can; money is money. It can help pay for, or just pay for, anything; that’s how money works. Robbing banks can help pay for stuff too, unless you get caught.

Entitled Cruising: A Trans Guy’s Guide To The Gay

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Gawdelpus

Mar 13th, 2022 8:22 am | By

Not helping what?

First, to repeat myself, I hate this use of “hit” and “hit out at” and “attack” for argument and disagreement. It frames dissent as physical violence, and that’s not a useful or intelligent way to frame it. Nobody hit anybody, Rowling was not hit, she was not hit out at, she didn’t attack the Scottish government. There’s way too much talk of violence in this discussion already, and newspapers shouldn’t be adding to it via stupid metaphors.

Second, nonsense. Women have rights too and we are allowed to remind everyone of that, and insist on keeping them, and resist efforts to take them away.

Third, yes she is “helping.” Who put Slater and Harvie in charge of … Read the rest



Violinists play for Ukraine

Mar 12th, 2022 6:49 pm | By
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Context

Mar 12th, 2022 5:30 pm | By

Yeeeaaahhhhh not his call.

What gay men do amongst each other is wholly irrelevant to whether or not they get to call women they’re trying to bully on Twitter “babe”. If the woman you’re trying to bully says no, you don’t get to push back because gay men call each other it. Sexism is sexism even when gay men do it.… Read the rest



Guest post: The real moral panic

Mar 12th, 2022 5:19 pm | By

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Incomplete picture.

There are many awareness days related to trans issues, but today’s is very important. Detransition Awareness Day is vital because there are so many people in positions of power being led to believe that something so life-changing as gender identity is a fixed awareness that one is “born in a body that doesn’t match their identity.”

I was at the Seattle Public Library Event sponsored by WoLF in February 2020. After exiting, thanks to police guard we were safe from the frothing crowd who were chanting “No hate, no fear, all genders welcome here” with what I perceived as hatred for the women who spoke and attended.

I met up … Read the rest



Guest post: But only one side has been bullying

Mar 12th, 2022 5:14 pm | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Actually the law.

“The process that people have to go through does need to be looked at,” he told The Times. “If you talk to anybody who’s been through the process there’s a real issue about respect and dignity.”

So I wonder if he’s read the Cass report? How long before the continuing scandal and disaster will force him (and others) to moderate and walk back their unqualified support for genderist demands?

He called for a “more considered, respectful, tolerant debate about these issues”. Starmer added: “I don’t think it furthers the interests of anybody to continue the debate in the way that it’s been going on now for some

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Three men complained

Mar 12th, 2022 5:01 pm | By

Another MP saying no. (Usual apologies for linking to Mail but if Guardian won’t report…)

For a woman who, only this week, was reprimanded for wading into the increasingly febrile transgender debate, you’ve got to applaud Tory police and crime commissioner Lisa Townsend for her sheer chutzpah.

‘It is not a “niche” issue, it is not “hysterical” for women to be taking to the street about it,’ Lisa wrote. ‘We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women or from those who enable them,’ she added to her retweet and posted it without a second thought.

Three men, including local Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, complained. The Surrey police and crime panel’s complaints

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