We are learning to Be Kinder.

Can everyone just start being a bit kinder, like India Willoughby please. pic.twitter.com/miXYoPo4kk

— Nicky Clark (@MrsNickyClark) May 14, 2024

… Read the rest

An interesting detail from Michael Cohen’s testimony yesterday:

He reported directly to Mr Trump, on “whatever concerned him, whatever he wanted”, Cohen said, calling his ex-boss a micromanager. “Everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off,” he said.

At the same time, Mr Trump was careful about paper trails, Cohen said. The Trump Organization founder never had an email address, telling Cohen that “emails are like written papers”.

“There are too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said Mr Trump once told him.

Gone down, eh? As in, been exposed as criminals? If Trump did say that it tells us he knows he’s a crook and takes … Read the rest

Many many people, especially women, are asking why the BBC keeps promoting drag and why it doesn’t equally promote blackface. It’s a fair question.

Amir Dean, also known as Lady Bushra, is one of the UK's most well-known British Asian drag artists.

Since debuting Lady Bushra four years ago, Amir has travelled the world performing with the hope of encouraging people to "be more like Bushra" pic.twitter.com/KL7lZjRSOJ

— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) May 14, 2024

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on True Selves.

His “true self” being the woman he is not. His fake true self, his pretend true self, his fantasy true self. Back in the before times a true self meant something along the lines of a self not repressed and stifled by convention. It didn’t mean childish fantasy. Adults didn’t prance around saying their true selves were birds or race cars or space travelers or Nobel laureates or ponies. Fantasy and delusion are now what’s real, so I guess truth and sanity are fake.

How are we supposed to even try to show compassion for people who may or may not have debilitating dysphoria when so many of the most … Read the rest

That’s embarrassing. She’s a lawyer and a journalist and that’s her reading comprehension level?

Probably not, most of the time. Probably it’s an excess of anger that caused her to miss the point so thoroughly. Let that be a lesson to us all: when in a rage, slow down and read carefully before you rush to denounce. Otherwise you’re gonna look like a damn fool in front of all those sages and wits on social meeja.

Motown and cornrows. That’s what this dizzy bitch thinks being Black is about.

Motown and cornrows. https://t.co/lOJYLgyjM2

— Imani Gandy (Orca’s Version) ⚓️ (@AngryBlackLady) May 13, 2024

… Read the rest

“A terf, a bullet, social justice”

« Une TERF, une balle, justice sociale » : des appels au meurtre envers @Margueritestern et moi, en plein paris, devant la police, devant l’université ASSAS à Paris où l’on s’apprêtait à donner une conférence sur notre livre #TRANSMANIA.

La police ne les embarque pas. Pas de… pic.twitter.com/FKp6rWCvsv

— Dora Moutot (@doramoutot) May 7, 2024

The cop who escorts Moutot seems to be laughing.… Read the rest

An amusing bit in a Bloomberg piece by Timothy O’Brien:

Cohen, a lawyer, didn’t work for Trump because he was a deft attorney, a skillful accountant or a brilliant money manager. He worked for him because he knew just enough about the law, accounting and greed to help Trump engineer end runs and cover-ups. “I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them,” Cohen wrote in Disloyal, a memoir of his Trump years. “I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.”

“Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen wrote. “In some ways, I knew him

Ridiculous man thinks it’s personal.

So JK, Posie, Glinner and the rest of you out there hating on my community and myself guess what IDGAF…you keep hating and I will keep on smiling and living my best life. Maybe you should all give it a try eh

— Lucy Clark. (@lucyclarkref) May 11, 2024

Dude. It’s not about you the person. It’s about this ridiculous destructive ideology, and the myriad ways it harms women (and children, and lesbians and gay men, and confused people). We don’t want you to live your worst life, we just don’t want you demolishing our rights.… Read the rest

The FA did a puff piece on “Lucy” Clark in February 2019.

February is LGBT History Month and Wembley Stadium hosted the Just A Ball Game #StrongerTogether conference on Tuesday 5 February. One of the guest speakers was Lucy Clark, who became English football’s first transgender referee at the start of the 2018-19 season. Here, she tells her story and how the campaign has gone so far…

Notice how they avoid spelling it out, as the media and organizations so regularly do. Just “transgender,” not trans which gender.

The game has always been my outlet throughout life. As a child, a teenager and an adult, my life always revolved around football, whether I was a player, a manager or

Oh what do you know, it turns out that “Lucy” Clark, who is being hailed as the first “trans football referee,” is not some random fella who just happened to be the star of this story, he’s a Celebrity Personality with multiple masks.

Clark and his wife run many Twitter accs and have a public profile. They are very vocal about the “horrors” of “terfs” and their eagerness to support the medicalisation of children.
They are not in any way anonymous and together push a sexist agenda. Why should they be ignored? https://t.co/PAgs6XWa7x

— 🦖Leonora Christina 🦕 (@JammersMinde) May 13, 2024

They do? They are?

Why yes.

Careful now, Clark doesn't like ladies who tweet. https://t.co/vzusCYS97z

— SaintCirce (@SaintCirce) May

Yet another guy tries to tell JKR how to bee nither to the nithe men thtealing all our thtuff.

By me for @spectator: "The quote-Tweet is possibly the most brutal weapon that exists on social media … Anything an opponent says can be captured and broadcast to your audience. Sarcasm, ridicule, or downright abuse then set the tone for the mob"https://t.co/NDVMoxcsOJ

— Dr Debbie Hayton (@DebbieHayton) May 13, 2024

She’s not playing. None of us are playing.

Whether you agree with Rowling or not, her tone is remarkably different to the essay she wrote in 2020 when she set out her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender

✍️ Debbie Haytonhttps://t.co/xWuYTHC2r2

— The Spectator (@spectator) May

Originally a comment by Peter N on Backstabbers.

For the record, I’ve been pen-pals with half a dozen federal inmates going back something like 15 years, and I volunteered in a state prison for ten years. I’ve also been active in a local prisoner support group for three years. In all of that, I’ve never heard any first-hand report of rape in prisons. I don’t question that things were very bad in the past, and may remain so in some locations, but it seems to me that today prisons are very, very motivated to avoid rape. Indeed as a volunteer I had to take an anti-rape class mandated by federal law, and re-qualify every year.

What I have heard … Read the rest

Argh. Genevieve Gluck has a thread on the ACLU and its hatred of women, and it’s hard going. Highly informative but painful to read.

The first tweet is cut off, so I’ll just quote it.

The @ACLU hates women and is led by a gay man: a thread. One of the most powerful lobby groups in the United States pushing “gender identity” policies is the ACLU. Currently, the organization is leading the legal fight to place violent men, including sadistic killers and rapists, into women’s prisons. The executive director since 2001 is Anthony Romero. In the past the organization defended NAMBLA, asserted that child pornography is free speech, defended child marriage, took money from pornographers, and argued that sex

Oh yay, a new law in Belgium will provide a labor contract to workers in the sex mines. Solidarity forevaaaa!

The Belgian Parliament voted for the law on May 3, with 93 in favor, zero opposed, and 33 abstentions.  

The legislation is being touted as a win by UTSOPI, the Belgium Union of Sex Workers, which had lobbied extensively for the legislation. The law outlines that prostitutes will receive health insurance, a pension, maternity and holiday leave, and unemployment benefits. Their pimps will be forced to provide them with a “safety button” to use for emergencies.

Their website claims that the law “is a historic step in the battle for sex workers’ rights” and will create a “respectful,

National Organization for Women (aka NOW) on Facebook three days ago:

All women should have access to the gender-affirming care they want and need, including those who are incarcerated.

They linked to an article at The 19th with the headline

Incarcerated trans women won sweeping prison reforms in Colorado

Er. Meaning what? That men who claim to be women get to be in the women’s prisons?

Yes, of course that’s what they mean. This is NOW, remember. The W stands for women.

The state signed a legal agreement meant to make prisons safer for transgender women, who are often the targets of violence and harassment.

By “safer for transgender women” they of course mean much more dangerous for women. … Read the rest

Stupid AND bossy.

Just call people what they want to be called. It’s basic decency.

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) May 12, 2024

Just shut up. You’re not the boss of JKR, you’re not the boss of us.

That’s the bad manners part. Now the bad epistemology part.

Is that right? Is it basic decency to call people what they want to be called? What if they want to be called Hitler? How about Hannibal Lecter? Timothy McVeigh? Stalin?

Booby McBoobtits? Pussy Galore? Slutty Slutface? Katy Cunty?

Marc Lépine? OJ Simpson? Killer O. Women?

Just shut up. It’s basic decency.… Read the rest

The Telegraph taunts the French for being just as stupid as the British about the whole knowing the difference between women and men thing. The French ffs! Cue lascivious Maurice Chevalier-type laughter.

France is failing to learn from Britain’s transgender mistakes, two French feminists who received support from JK Rowling after receiving death threats have told The Telegraph.

Dora Moutot, 36, and Marguerite Stern, 33, have been thrust into the spotlight after releasing Transmania, their bestselling gender-critical book.

Or, to put it another way, Moutot and Stern have written a bestselling gender-critical book. Naturally some spotlight goes along with that, thrust or no thrust. Meanwhile: will you look at that now?! Gender-critical book is best seller! So ha!

Making simple

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Oh no she compared a man to a man.

Transition is literally about the self. It’s definitionally a self-centered phenomenon, based on an assumption of entitlement to not just spaces and benefits and language, but to the perceptions and thoughts of others.

Excellent points. But there’s still the issue of how to explain the acceptance of their pretense of womanhood by so many. How does the thinnest application of stereotypical “womanface” make up for the complete lack of the basic, and again stereotypical, markers of female socialization?

In World War Two, in the run-up to D-Day, the Allies used crude decoy trucks, tanks, and aircraft to fool the Germans … Read the rest

California to women: sucks to be you.

A California surf competition has been told it must allow a transgender woman to compete in the women’s division or it will be in violation of state law. The California Coastal Commission said surf competitions could “not discriminate based on gender”.

So surf competitions can have women’s divisions, but they have to let men compete in them. That means women will never be able to win their own competitions, because there will always be men eager to take advantage of the California Coastal Commission’s idiotic rule.

Why is it ok to discriminate on the basis of sex but not on the basis of gender?

Stupid question: so as to enable men to … Read the rest

Shock horror as woman compares a straight white bloke to a straight white bloke.

Author JK Rowling has been accused of cruelty for mocking the world’s first openly transgender football manager, comparing her to a ‘straight, white, middle-aged bloke’. The transgender referee is the first trans manager in the top five divisions of English Women’s football.

But he’s not a trans manager, he’s a trans man. He’s a real manager. The owners wouldn’t let him be a manager if he were a trans one, they need the real thing.

In the [tweet], JK Rowling said: When I was young all the football managers were straight, white, middle aged blokes, so it’s fantastic to see how much things have changed.’