Joanna Moorhead at The Guardian interviews Kathleen Stock:

Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, says the key question she addresses – itself offensive to many – is this: do trans women count as women?

Whatever else about her views is controversial, she is surely on firm ground when she writes that this question has become surrounded by toxicity. But the problem for her is, at least partly, that many people do anything they can to avoid answering it. “Very few people who are sceptical talk about it directly, because they’re frightened,” she says. “It’s so hard psychologically to say, in reply: ‘I’m afraid not.’”

Maybe it’s easier if you just say no, of course … Read the rest

Jesus, Scotland, get a grip.

On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts within the Viewforth Avenue area of Kirkcaldy.

Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact ourselves or @FifeCouncil so that their removal can be arranged.— Kirkcaldy Police (@KirkcaldyPolice) May 21, 2021

Of what nature? The people of Kirkcaldy are supposed to let them know if they (the people) see any stickers “of this nature” but they (the police) forgot to say what “this nature” IS. The word “controversial” doesn’t narrow it down enough to be useful.

Maybe all the phones are ringing off the hooks with people reporting every single sticker on every single lamppost in not … Read the rest

One of those times when your eyes bug out because you just cannot believe what you’re reading.

https://twitter.com/millar_marion/status/1396039076680282112 https://twitter.com/millar_marion/status/1396039079930834944 https://twitter.com/millar_marion/status/1396039083261112332

wheesht.

FOR TWEETS. For tweets that some damn fool of a cop considers “homophobic” or “transphobic” (and why do I suspect that “homophobic” is tossed in there to shield the “transphobic” bit when it’s really the “transphobic” they’re in a lather about?). Are all the cops in Scotland hunched over their phones reading all the tweets in the universe to find people to interrogate and charge?

It’s their damn fool “hate crimes” law.

MSPs have passed Scotland’s controversial new hate crime law.

The legislation consolidates existing law and extends protection for vulnerable groups with a new offence of “stirring

… Read the rest

Matthew Parris on Stonewall:

You hear talk of “identities” but your gay identity overlaps with so many others you feel that it needn’t define you. Nevertheless, as “a member of the gay community” (a fiction that can make you grind your teeth) you may feel there’s still a need for an organisation to speak up for gay men and lesbian women’s rights and needs: to do “outreach” work in British schools and workplaces, and maybe abroad where your fellowgays still face the gallows. You might join and pay your subs to such an organisation.

I did — until last year. I was one of that organisation’s fourteen founders. Stonewall, formed on May 24, 1989, was set up during the

… Read the rest

The Times on how Essex University got it so wrong:

Forster’s apologies came as Essex University published the damning report of an 18-month independent inquiry by barrister Akua Reindorf. It found that Essex had failed to uphold free speech, labelled Phoenix and Freedman transphobes, and subjected them to mass complaints in what Phoenix has described as a “mob atmosphere”. The two professors believe that men cannot become women by surgery and that it is important to protect women-only spaces in institutions such as prisons and refuges, views which are anathema to some trans activists.

That puts it the wrong way around though. It’s not that they “believe” that men cannot become women by surgery so much as it … Read the rest

Wait a second.

Its reputation is that of an idyll for cyclists, a city freed from the torment of cars. But while Amsterdam remains a model to most of the world, there are signs of trouble in paradise.

A series of developments have led the Amsterdam branch of the Fietsersbond, the Dutch cyclists’ union, to claim the municipality has turned on them, unfairly prioritising pedestrians in the city’s historic centre.

……………………..Unfairly prioritising pedestrians? But pedestrians are more vulnerable to cyclists than cyclists are to pedestrians.

Where once the cyclist was king, free to weave around the small roads of the centrum with abandon, it is claimed there has been a discernible change of attitude. At best cyclists are being

… Read the rest

A petition to Parliament:

Make non-binary a legally recognised gender identity in the UK

Have non binary be included as an option under the GRP (Gender Recognition Panel)/ GRC (Gender Recognition Certificate), in order to allow those identifying as non binary to be legally seen as their true gender identity. As well as having ‘Non-binary’ be seen as a valid transgender identity.

What does it mean to be “legally seen as”? What does the government have to do with how people are “seen” or what people are “seen as”? What is the point of petitioning the government to make it possible for you to be “seen as” some meaningless category?

Why not just simplify this whole thing and petition … Read the rest

The commandment of the age – don’t mention women. Just don’t, ok?

Smear test invitations should not refer to women as it is discouraging trans men from accessing cancer screenings, a new study has suggested.

Researchers said that gender neutral invitations should be used instead to encourage uptake from trans men to get screened.

While at the same time discouraging uptake from women.

Current NHS guidance means that anyone with a cervix between 25 and 64 is eligible for cervical screening, including trans men and non-binary people.

In other words women are eligible for cervical screening, of course including the ones who call themselves trans men or non-binary.

The new study, published in the British Journal of General

… Read the rest

It depends what “are” means. NBC News reports:

The number of young people who are gender-diverse — including transgender, nonbinary and genderqueer — may be significantly higher than previously thought, according to a new study.

That makes it sound as if “gender-diverse” refers to something real, solid, empirical, testable, when in fact “gender-diverse” is just a trendy way of labeling people who don’t follow every single convention about how female people and male people are supposed to behave differently from each other. Young John wears makeup? Young Susan has a buzzcut? Add them to the list!

Researchers in Pittsburgh found that nearly 1 in 10 students in over a dozen public high schools identified as gender-diverse — five times

… Read the rest

Michael Cohen says Trump will flip on his own children.

Former Trump Organization Vice President Michael Cohen, upon learning of the now-criminal probe, said of the Trump children, “I think Trump is going to flip on them.” While we have no idea what the future will hold, we do know that what this all means is that — if they haven’t already — it’s time for members of the Trump family who served as organization employees to each retain experienced criminal defense lawyers.

Each. Each get her or his own. That means you too, Jared. They have to get their own because they’re all going to try to rat each other out. It will be a most edifying … Read the rest

Ok that one is pretty funny.… Read the rest

The Palmer Report:

The Trump Department of Justice received secret access to several reporters’ phone and email accounts. The content was not available to them but the recipients’ email and phone record of contact was given to them.

The reasons that this is a big deal is that:

1) records were obtained secretly.

2) the person and their organization were not notified within 90 days after the records were obtained.

3) Bill Barr had to have authorized secretly getting these records but didn’t follow required procedures.

4) this is more of the Trump Administration’s vendetta against the free press

One more for the file.… Read the rest

Via Arty Morty, meet “gender therapist” Wallace Wong:

Last month [i.e. March 2019], Justice Gregory Bowden of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada ruled that a 14-year-old girl may begin receiving testosterone injections without parental consent. Bowden’s ruling, hailed as a “massive legal win” by the American LGBTQNation, ensured treatment would proceed without parental influence by declaring that if either of the girl’s parents refer to their daughter as a girl, they will be considered guilty of family violence under the Canadian Family Law Act.

If their daughter decides she’s a giraffe but her parents refer to her as a human will they be considered guilty of family violence under the Canadian Family Law Act? How … Read the rest

James Kirkup sees reasons for optimism.

An example of that came at the weekend when Baroness Falkner, the new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, told the Times that women should not be penalised or abused if they believe that transgender women do not become female by dint of their professed identity.

‘Someone can believe that people who self-identify as a different sex are not the different sex that they self-identify,’ she said. ‘A lot of people would find this an entirely reasonable belief.’

Does that also mean we can say it, write it, tweet it, underline it, campaign for it?

When I started writing about these issues, it was partly because I was worried that politics

… Read the rest

The Washington State ACLU is what???

Important case update! Judge's ruling has confirmed reports that male rapists are being housed with vulnerable women in Washington prisons, and that @ACLU_WA is trying to suppress official complaints of sexual assault by these men from within the prison.https://t.co/5Fs7bCuWrY

— WoLF (@WomensLibFront) May 19, 2021

From the WoLF piece:

The judge has issued a ruling in Andrea Kelly’s motion to intervene against the ACLU’s attempts to prevent the lawful public disclosure of records about male transfers into Washington State female correctional facilities. Judge Thomas Rice, who expressed clear indications from the beginning of the case that he sympathizes with the ACLU’s attempts to protect males transferred into women’s prisons, denied the motion

… Read the rest

It turns out Obama doesn’t think much of Trump. Who could have imagined that?

According to a new book, Obama called Trump a “madman”, a “racist, sexist pig”, “that fucking lunatic” and a “corrupt motherfucker”.

Check, check, check, check.

The remarks are reported in Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer at the Atlantic, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy. …

“He’s a madman,” Dovere reports Obama telling “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation”.

“More often: ‘I didn’t think it would be this bad.’ Sometimes: ‘I didn’t

… Read the rest

Where did Ireland get the idea for industrial schools? From those go-getting Protestants to the east of them:

The Industrial Schools Act was intended in 1857 to solve problems of juvenile vagrancy in England by removing poor and neglected children from their home environment to a boarding school. The Act allowed magistrates to send disorderly children to a residential industrial school. An 1876 Act led to nonresidential day schools of a similar kind.

There were similar arrangements in Scotland, where the Industrial Schools Act came into force in 1866. The schools cared for neglected children and taught them a trade,^[1] with an emphasis on preventing crime. Glasgow Industrial School for Girls is an example formed in

… Read the rest

The reversal of reality aspect is soooooooo gaslighty. Daily Beast asked Stephen King about a falling out with JK Rowling.

King said: “Jo cancelled me. She sorta blocked me and all that. Here’s the thing: She is welcome to her opinion. That’s the way that the world works.

“If she thinks that trans women are dangerous, or that trans women are somehow not women, or whatever problem she has with it – the idea that someone ‘masquerading’ as a woman is going to assault a ‘real’ woman in the toilet – if she believes all those things, she has a right to her opinion.”

This is what I mean by the reversal – this “or that trans women are … Read the rest

Lego is making…lesbian and gay and bi and trans dolls? But how do you do that with Lego dolls? Or any dolls? That’s like saying Lego is making liberal dolls and conservative dolls, or Jewish dolls and Christian dolls, or vegan dolls and keto dolls.

Everyone Is Awesome: Lego to launch first LGBTQ+ set

Can’t you just see little Sophie and Aidan staging a war between the fabulous trans dolls and the monstrous gender critical dolls?

Can you pick out which ones are lesbian and which are gay and which are trans? Are there any non-binary dolls? How about queer? Can you tell?

In the “spraying room” at Lego HQ, tiny figurines are layered with bright, glossy paint before being placed on

… Read the rest

Here’s a surprise – the House did approve the January 6 commission because 35 Republicans voted for it.

The House of Representatives voted 252-175 on Wednesday to pass a bill to set up a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Why it matters: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy andGOP leadership oppose the commission, but 35 House Republicans voted in support of the bill, underscoring the fault lines within the party in the aftermath of the insurrection.

The amount of Republican support makes it far more difficult for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to try and dismiss the commission outright as a partisan effort.

Interesting.… Read the rest