Well, they’re getting one thing right. Only one, but it’s That one.

Stonewall could be forced to cut up to half of its staff after President Trump’s decision to freeze foreign aid, The Times understands. Workers at the LGBTQ+ charity were told on Thursday that restructuring would take place, and that only roles with dedicated funding would be safe.

Simon Blake, the chief executive of Stonewall, made the announcement in an office-wide Teams call, which was said to have left its 114 staff “shellshocked”.

Sources said they believed up to half of the workforce could be made redundant in the move, which they were told would “secure the future of Stonewall for the long term as a significant LGBTQ+

There aren’t enough planks in the world to measure how thick Ash Sarkar is.

Feeling like a queen this morning ngl pic.twitter.com/zujEOnt44G

— Venice Allan (@roseveniceallan) February 23, 2025

And I’ll tell you the sort of classic example of this, which I’ll go into some detail, you know that whole can a woman have a penis thing. [compliant host says yes] Right [hands up in dramatic gesture] fuuuucckkkin hell, can a woman have a penis – overnight it became theeeee preferred line of questioning for basically every political interviewer on British television – and I wondered where had this come from – like where had this line of questioning emerged from.

Golly gee, yes, where on earth could such a … Read the rest

The scorching shame of it.

The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday on a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for its occupied territory to be returned that passed overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly.

The stench will never go away.

The U.S. delegation also abstained on its own separate resolution that called simply for a negotiated end to the war after European-sponsored amendments inserting new anti-Russian language also passed the 193-member body by a wide margin.

No anti-Russian language for us, no sirree. We love our Vlad.

… Read the rest

Mike Bendzela asks:

I’m toying with a semi-autobiographical piece that I would like to publish at 3 Quarks Daily. It’s a “what-if” look at a kinda-effeminate boy (me) who grew up in the 1960s and what would happen if he were transplanted into the present with its trans mania: Would he be allowed to grow up to be a normal gay male adult?

I suspect many of these young “trans girls” are effeminate gay boys so full of internalized homophobia that they would do anything (with the support of parents and churches, of course) to avoid the dreaded fate of growing up to be gay.

I’m wondering if there are any clear, citable instances of young gay boys who were … Read the rest

Doc Stock is on fire here:

When a doctor announces to colleagues that he wishes henceforth to be known as the opposite sex, it seems he is offered a new GMC number to go with the new name and pronouns, wiping out his past. Wes Streeting has raised concerns that this could be hiding the adverse findings of any previous disciplinaries from the public, supposed to be traceable via the same number.

In other words that’s part of the purpose of the GMC number, so it should be obvious that it should stay the same throughout a doctor’s career regardless of adjectival changes.

The health secretary’s point about safeguarding is so blindingly obvious you’d think it might have been

I was going to run with this but then I paused. It could be fake. I think it might be fake. It’s just that little bit too much.

It’s that very last bit that overdoes it. Asking them to limit their own concerns to one day out of three or four a week so that he can feel happy is just that little bit too much. Just that little bit too Wally Smith, if you remember him.… Read the rest

USAID still being wiped off the map.

The Trump administration said Sunday that it was placing all but a fraction of staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave worldwide and eliminating at least 1,600 U.S.-based jobs.

The move was the latest and one of the biggest steps yet toward what President Donald Trump and cost-cutting ally Elon Musk say is their goal of gutting the six-decade-old aid and development agency in a broader campaign to slash the size of the federal government.

The move comes after a federal judge on Friday allowed the administration to move forward with its plan to pull thousands of USAID staffers off the job in the United States and around

How lucky for Musk that he just happens to be in a position to fire federal employees at will.

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is eliminating jobs at the vehicle safety agency that oversees his Tesla Inc., regulates the autonomous vehicles he says represents its future and has launched investigations into deadly crashes involving the Texas-based company’s cars.

Deadly crashes are the price we pay for other people having dangerous cars. Aren’t we lucky?

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has cut a “modest” amount of positions at the agency, which is tasked with ensuring safety on U.S. roads, it said in a statement Saturday.

The loss of three of the seven members of the specialized unit overseeing autonomous vehicles

It turns out Trump doesn’t actually have the power to do what he’s doing. It looks as if nobody’s going to stop him all the same. I have to wonder why there are no enforcement mechanisms built in to all these rules and limits.

President Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government.

If Congress established the regulatory agencies as independent from direct White House control then Trump should be unable to get greater authority over them. Why are there no guardrails?

The order requires independent agencies to submit their proposed

Oh come ON.

How trans rights took over Scottish politics — and aren’t going away

Henceforth, no medical diagnosis would be needed and a person would be required to “live in” their acquired identity for only three months before becoming eligible for a GRC. The age at which such certificates could be gained would also be lowered to 16. In effect, a person could “self-identify” as a man or a woman as they saw fit and the system, the nuts and bolts of officialdom, would accept this as a manifestation of their true selves. The proposals would “make the lives of trans people in this country that little bit better and easier”, Sturgeon said, “and I think that is something

Crude boy asks crude question, makes crude threat.

Elon Musk said Saturday that federal employees must detail their accomplishments at work or risk losing their jobs, the latest move by the Trump administration to overhaul the government that prompted confusion among the workforce.

“Consistent with President [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk posted on X.

The email created confusion across the federal government. One senior government official said some federal employees started checking with their own legal advisers about how best to respond. One Justice Department official sent out an email asking their staff members to

Twitter summary:

Maine Governor Defies Trump on Transgender Sports Ban

Last updated 21 minutes ago

Maine Governor Janet Mills has publicly opposed an executive order by President Donald Trump that aims to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. The dispute escalated after Governor Mills challenged Trump’s threat to cut federal funding to Maine, leading to a commitment to legal action. This confrontation has sparked a broader conversation on transgender rights in sports, highlighted by social media reactions from various figures, including a notable appearance of Mills at a drag show in Portland, which has stirred both support and criticism.

This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its

Adam Serwer in the Atlantic:

Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously

The wording is interesting.

Schools following Scottish Government gender guidance could be next in line for a Sandie Peggie-style legal case, John Swinney has been warned. For Women Scotland described First Minister John Swinney’s stance on single-sex spaces as “very cowardly” as the group used a Scottish Labour fringe event to call on councillors to reject national guidance.

The Scottish Labour conference rejected a motion calling for the Scottish Government to have single-sex spaces for boys and girls based on biology. It said current Scottish Government guidance “relies on the necessity of unquestioning affirmation” of transgender identity from a school pupil.

The wording is interesting because it’s so obviously nuts. How can unquestioning affirmation of anything a school pupil says … Read the rest

O what a noble university is here o’erthrown.

This is the start of a lecture at Oxford University this week on 'Queerness and monsters from antiquity to today:  The monsters of ancient Greek myth and literature and, through this [learning], we can explore what it means to create, to possess and to celebrate a trans body' pic.twitter.com/NaMMorusiG

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) February 22, 2025

That’s DOCTOR Alexandra Hardwick to you. Yes he’s a guy.

(Also why do they put a glass of water right next to the laptop? I’d bump into it 4 seconds in.)… Read the rest

Part two of The Open University’s censorship and punishment of Dr Almut Gadow:

Dr Gadow had alleged that the university’s equality, diversion and inclusion (EDI) department announced plans to “incorporate its political ideologies” across the curriculum in the 2021-22 academic year. She claimed she voiced concerns that a criminal lawyer’s role “is to present facts” and that “sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies”.

The academic also argued that “no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts”. Dr Gadow said she was told that her posts on the online staff forum amounted to “serious insubordination” because she had been told it was not the

It can be expensive to fire academics for knowing and saying that people can’t change sex.

A law lecturer who was sacked by the Open University after expressing gender-critical beliefs has been handed a payout from the institution. Dr Almut Gadow was dismissed for gross misconduct in November 2022 after she criticised changes to the curriculum based on gender identity in an online forum. She claimed the university was introducing requirements to “indoctrinate students in gender identity theory”.

The lecturer, who taught law at the university for almost a decade, claimed she had raised concerns about new teaching requirements, including making students use offenders’ preferred pronouns.

Brilliant. Requiring teachers to require students to lie about the sex of offenders … Read the rest

Shouldn’t that be “inseminated thing”?

EXCLUSIVE: Democrat Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has introduced a bill that will change state law to replace the word "mother" with "inseminated person." pic.twitter.com/uJ8mPypFC4

— Dan O'Donnell (@DanODonnellShow) February 21, 2025

DemocratIC Governor. “Democrat” is a noun, not an adjective. The adjective is “democratic.”

But anyway – the determination to erase women continues. Men can’t be inseminated, so there’s no point in changing “pregnant woman” to “inseminated person.” If women who claim to be men are offended by “pregnant woman” that’s just too bad.… Read the rest

Tom Nichols at the Atlantic:

President Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.

…

The chairman is the most senior officer in the United States and by law the principal military adviser to the president. He does not direct military forces and is not in the chain of command. Normally, the chairman serves a four-year term; the position, like that of FBI director, is meant

CNN reports the latest insanity:

In an unprecedented purge of the military’s senior leadership Friday night, President Donald Trump fired the top US general just moments before his defense secretary fired the chief of the US Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force.

Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine – an extraordinary move since Caine is retired, according to an Air Force official, and is not a four-star general.

Trump called Brown a “fine gentleman” and an “outstanding leader,” while hinting at the firings to come. “Finally, I have also directed Secretary [of Defense Pete] Hegseth