Good to know.

This is a huge deal. Exemplary damages are very rare in the employment tribunal. Theyre used to signal extreme disapproval of egregious behaviour, in this case by Social Work England, the regulator. Whoever gave SWE legal advice that didn't consist of "you've massively screwed… https://t.co/AfUwjL6Wol

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) April 28, 2024

This is a huge deal. Exemplary damages are very rare in the employment tribunal. Theyre used to signal extreme disapproval of egregious behaviour, in this case by Social Work England, the regulator. Whoever gave SWE legal advice that didn’t consist of “you’ve massively screwed up, apologise immediately, offer a decent settlement and undertake to get proper training in belief discrimination” really doesn’t deserve to get

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Different complex views.

“But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a common cause – that the fascists are after anyone who is different, any minority. But you need those experiences to discover that solidarity.”

But Billy, you don’t find solidarity with absolutely every “different” minority, do you? You don’t accept them all. Murders, arsonists, and rapists are all “different,” and all (thankfully) minorities. So are fascists themselves. I daresay that some of them would claim to be unjustly persecuted. Do you find common cause with them? How is it that you choose the “worthy” minorities whose struggles you support?

…Bragg suggested he was embarrassed to have

A win!

A social worker who was suspended over her gender critical views has been awarded almost £58,000 in damages from Westminster city council and Social Work England.

In what lawyers described as an unprecedented move by a court to award exemplary damages against a regulator, an employment tribunal called for both the council and the watchdog to train their staff in the principles of freedom of speech.

Legal Feminist has details:

The Legal Feminists are not aware of any other case in which exemplary damages have been awarded against a regulator.

— Legal Feminist (@legalfeminist) April 28, 2024

The people who rabidly defend trans ideology are peculiarly horrible to people who disobey their orders.

Both respondents must also

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Result.

Last year a report by the think tank Policy Exchange said NHS trusts were compromising women’s rights by providing same-sex intimate care based not on their biological sex but their self-declared gender identity.

I’m not sure this is the original wording but if “sex” and “gender” are supposed to be different (as genderists are wont to tell us – when it suits them) “same-sex intimate care” could never have been based on “their self-declared gender identity.” It was only the opportunistic conflation of the two that permitted them to do this. The deliberate, ideologically driven suppression of the basic fact that humans can’t change sex is what let them … Read the rest

Tim Adams chats with Billy Bragg for The Observer:

He smiles. “One thing was I had never met an out gay man until then. I’m sure I had met gay men in Barking but none of them were out. And then on stage Tom Robinson starting up with (Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay and all around me these blokes started kissing each other. I thought: ‘Fucking hell, what’s this?’ But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a common cause – that the fascists are after anyone who is different, any minority. But you need those experiences to discover that solidarity.”

It’s a memory of that moment, I think, that has prompted his partisan

JKR taking NO prisoners today.

This comment by @billybragg perfectly sums up what left wing women have taken from left wing men over the last few years. The problem isn’t whether Julie Bindel and I are correct on the issues, but that certain right-wingers agree with us.

If you’ve spent any time at all on the… pic.twitter.com/4Xhcu2n0Cv

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 28, 2024

If you’ve spent any time at all on the left of politics, you’re familiar with the progressive male class warrior, usually middle-class himself, whose interest in women’s issues begins and ends with sex work, stripping and abortions. He might claim to be a feminist ally and mutter vaguely about ‘equality’ if the need arises, but when

So you’re saying trans ideology is a religion. We agree! It’s a religion, not a politics, and sure as hell not a progressive or egalitarian or liberationist movement.

Fred and his chums have lawst the plot. pic.twitter.com/MLMtDqDcVR

— Binky (@TheOnlyGuru) April 28, 2024

… Read the rest

Karens are complaining about being murdered yet again:

Rallies have taken place across Australia in response to a wave of recent violence against women. Demonstrators want gender-based violence to be declared a national emergency and stricter laws put in place to stop it. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the issue was a national crisis. In Australia, a woman has been killed on average every four days so far this year.

…

Speaking at a march in the capital Canberra attended by thousands of protesters, Mr Albanese admitted the government at all levels needed to do better.

“We need to change culture, the attitudes, the legal system and the approach by all governments,” he said. “We need to make sure

Finalleeeeeeeeeeeee

The NHS is to crack down on transgender ideology in hospitals, with terms like “chestfeeding” set to be banned.

Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, will this week announce a series of changes to the NHS constitution which sets out patients’ rights. Referring to “people who have ovaries” rather than “women” will also be prohibited under plans to ensure hospitals use clear language based on biological sex.

The new constitution will ban transgender women from being treated on single-sex female hospital wards to ensure women and girls receive “privacy and protection” in hospitals. Patients will also be given the right to request that intimate care is carried out by someone of the same biological sex.

It’s about god … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Artymorty on And what about toast, and earthworms?

I’ve seen this a lot, the condensing of all ostensibly progressive causes into a great, faceless ideological black hole. The logical endpoint of the moral-bidding-war meltdown that is “wokeness” is that it becomes a singularity: to those inside, it’s a realm of infinte virtue. To everyone else it looks literally pointless. “Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.

The city-funded community centre at the heart of Toronto’s gay village provides a great example. About 20 years ago they put up a mural on the side of the building which loomed over the heart of the neighbourhood. … Read the rest

One question (of many):

It was the third argument before the Court in three months related to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss of the 2020 Presidential election. This one (Trump v. U.S.) was about his claim that Smith’s prosecution of him for election interference (U.S. v. Trump) must be dismissed because a former President is immune from criminal liability for any official acts he undertook in office. 

In what way is it an “official act” for a president to interfere in an election? Especially to interfere in an election in which he is one of the candidates? What’s “official” about that?

Michael Dreeben, arguing for the government, said, “The Framers knew too well the dangers of a king

Whither “woke”?

So where does all of this leave woke itself, or the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice that has been growing roughly ever since the death of Michael Brown in 2014 sparked the Black Lives Matter movement? What happens now to the idea of being more open to sometimes uncomfortable challenge from minority perspectives that were previously suppressed: of saving the planet; uncovering forgotten histories; inclusivity at work; “be kind”? That isn’t dead. If anything, it’s quietly going mainstream.

Wut?

Social justice is not the same thing as “environmental justice” and climate change isn’t fundamentally political. What to do about it is politicized (but shouldn’t be), but the change itself is not responsive to whether we … Read the rest

Is there any room at all to say that Brynn Tannehill at The New Republic is exaggerating?

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Donald Trump’s lawyer, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that would well be an official act.” 

Based on that one line of questioning, Trump’s argument should be going down in flames 9-0. A democracy cannot survive when its supreme leader can arbitrarily decide that it’s in the nation’s best interest to rub out his opponents, and then leave

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic on Alito and Trump and sedition:

[T]his week, [Alito] told us, in essence, that in his view democracy depends on allowing presidents to commit federal crimes, because if ex-presidents were to be prosecuted for such things, the United States would become a banana republic. That’s a Supreme Court justice saying that. And while Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and even Clarence Thomas didn’t go that far Thursday, it was obvious that the court’s conservatives are maneuvering to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn’t see the light of day before the election—in other words, that a sitting president who very clearly wanted Congress to overturn a constitutionally certified election result (about this there is

Yes let’s just throw all the toilets and changing rooms open to everyone, why not.

A gang of voyeurs hid in mixed-gender changing rooms at swimming pools to secretly film more than 5,000 young women getting undressed, a court heard.

Adam Dennis, 39, and Robert Morgan, 33, boasted of “hunting” teenage victims and made catalogues of their pictures to share and trade online.

Inner London crown court heard that the gang used hidden cameras to observe women in pools in east London and Surrey between April 2013 and November 2017. A fellow voyeur, Declan Golden, fled to the United States, while Miguel Jose Sainz’s whereabouts are unknown.

Gosh, they’re all male. What a surprise.… Read the rest

Oh puhleeze.

Transgender Athletes Could Be At A Physical Disadvantage according to major research commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, published in the British Medical Journal. https://t.co/Rr158atVxj

— Joe Brolly (@JoeBrolly1993) April 26, 2024

Same old same old same old cheat – “transgender athletes” instead of “male athletes competing against women.”

See also:

If that slice of the female population happens to come from further towards the “high” end of athleticism, and the male slice is further to the “low” end, of course you’ll find similar performances. Look at the VO2, BMI, Fat %, and you know exactly how this “similarity” was made

— Ross Tucker (@Scienceofsport) April 16, 2024

All this verbal cheating and distorting so that men can … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Because she is a woman.

Somewhat tangential, but:

What kind of idiot puts that sort of thing in writing? People at work don’t always like each other and sometimes talk smack about each other, but leaving a trail is a whole different thing.

Lawyers get to read some interesting stuff that gets produced in discovery, so I could tell you some stories. Except that I can’t.

Emails aren’t quite the gold mine that they were back in the 1990s and 2000s, when people would routinely write things that they would never dare put in an interoffice memo. A lot of that talk has moved to texts and messaging apps, as in this … Read the rest

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control … Read the rest

Quislings everywhere.

We see that @KateOsborneMP, who has spent #LesbianVisibilityWeek blocking lesbian accounts, has now redacted a clip from her own performance in Parliament today, removing the part where she was told to retract an accusation against Joanna Cherry. Here is the clip as it should be. pic.twitter.com/Gh86LnPRyH

— Scottish Lesbians (@ScotLesbians) April 25, 2024

Osborne has the gall to say Joanna Cherry brings “so much hate and toxicity” to a “debate designed to celebrate all lesbians” by which of course she means “including the male ones.”

Hate and toxicity yourself you bad webbis. … Read the rest

What they really think of us:

The chief fire officer (CFO) and assistant chief fire officer (ACFO) of Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service both sent messages suggesting they wanted to kill or harm female colleagues. In the WhatsApp messages – which have been leaked to ITV News – the senior officers also use the words “lazy cow”, “bint” and “useless” to refer to women in the service.

Several of the messages target Area Manager Jan Morris, who resigned from the service this year after reading what had been said about her. “She does the square root of fuck all,” the now ACFO Adam Matthews messaged in February last year. “I’ve got no loyalty to the lazy cow,” he added