Underneath the Telegraph’s sloppy report on the sinister “investigation” of Louise Chivers is a think piece by Chivers herself titled Social workers must be allowed to think critically. It should have its own url but it doesn’t. It should because it makes an important point.

Every week, social workers have to make decisions on whether people have “capacity” in a whole range of choices.

They then have to make “best interest decisions” if the person doesn’t, which requires critical thinking skills.

Social workers who do not think critically and follow the affirmation dogma will set vulnerable adults on false affirmation pathways.

I’ve heard of social workers in children’s services threaten child removal if parents don’t follow gender ideology and of kids sent straight to gender reassignment clinics after one trip to a doctor.

Social workers need to be aware of the social contagion phenomenon, particularly in teenage girls and the inherent homophobia in telling gender non-conforming youth they can achieve the impossible and “be” the other sex.

Read the whole thing; it matters.

So part 2 of Louise Chivers told she can’t apply for social services jobs pending an investigation after her comments on trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney:

Ms Chivers, a lesbian from Northamptonshire who works in adult social care, said: “On this particular occasion, we had been discussing gender-neutral toilets and I said I wasn’t comfortable using them because statistics show women are eight times more likely to be raped in one.

We don’t know who the “we” there are because the Telegraph never says. The conversation went on to climate protests and Nike clothes and Dylan Mulvaney modeling sports bras and mocking women.

“Afterwards, I was contacted by my managers who demanded to know what I had said. I was then told by the recruitment agencies that I use to apply for jobs that they would not find me work until conclusion of the investigation.”

The Telegraph never explains how and why the managers got involved.

Ms Chivers added: “I do have to bite my tongue in a lot of these training sessions, I once attended an ‘Alphabet Soup’ session run by Cambridgeshire County Council when a member of staff expressed concerns about people misgendering dogs.

“It is getting ridiculous. None of this improves the social work we do. Like a lot of people, I’m fed up with this obsession about gender ideology and just want to get on with my job.”

That is indeed a major part of the problem with gender ideology: it keeps using up all the oxygen. It keeps interrupting absolutely everything in order to talk about itself.

A spokesman for Leicestershire County Council said: “We’re committed to equalities, diversity and inclusion and like other organisations, will take action if we believe legislation or professional standards have been breached.

“The matter has been referred to Social Work England. The recruitment agency has been informed so that they may consider the issues raised.”

Blah blah blah – vapid meaningless generalities instead of grappling with facts and specifics. Somebody said somebody did something so someone else said somebody is being investigated to find out if somebody did something unapproved. You’re welcome.

Gender-critical social worker ‘blacklisted’ for trans views

A social worker with 25 years experience has been told she cannot apply for more work after she questioned whether transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney was the right person to model sports bras for Nike.

Mother of two Louise Chivers, 52, has been told she cannot apply for social services jobs pending an investigation after a manager at Leicestershire County Council suggested there was a risk she “might misgender someone”.

Has been told, has been told – who told her that? Why the passive voice? Why not say up front who did the telling? I do wish news outlets would not be so coy with the basic facts.

She has now been referred to Social Work England, the body that regulates social workers, and the company that recruited her has launched an investigation.

Referred by whom? The company that recruited her, or someone else? Basic facts up front please!

Instead of giving us the basic facts the Telegraph moves to quoting Chivers on the politics; one has to skip many paragraphs to get to who did what.

A spokesman for Leicestershire County Council said: “We’re committed to equalities, diversity and inclusion and like other organisations, will take action if we believe legislation or professional standards have been breached.

“The matter has been referred to Social Work England. The recruitment agency has been informed so that they may consider the issues raised.”

So was it Leicestershire County Council that did the telling, or someone else?

Journalism 101 failure.

Biology professors have to issue warning notes now?

Eneraldo is right. What a stupid slogan this is.

For the millionth time, it is not a rule that we have to believe whatever people tell us. It’s never been a rule, for reasons that ought to be obvious even for the very slowest thinkers. It ought to be obvious to Amnesty! Tyrants and torturers tell us they’re good people doing the right thing. They’re not automatically who they say they are. Look at Donald Trump – is he what he says he is? Of course not!

That girl in the shirt – if she tells us she’s Barack Obama, do we have to believe her?

Glinner nailed this three years ago.

Amnesty International has released a powerful new campaign called ‘I am who I say I am”. In it, they use several key trans voices to detail the empowering nature of self-declaration of identity. Here’s a preview.

Starring Aimee Challenor, Barbie Kardashian, Jessica Yaniv, Rachel McKinnon and more.

Reminds me of all those marches for women when the cops joined us and marched along with us.

Just kidding. The police never did that.

Willoughby hitching a ride on everyone else’s oppression, again.

“We are the new suffragettes,” he says. No they’re not. They’re not denied the right to vote. They’re not banned from the professions and from higher education. They’re not treated as children under the law.

“Trans apartheid, because that’s what it is,” he says. No it’s not. He’s not Black in apartheid-era South Africa. He’s not persecuted or denied rights or shunned or punished in any way. He’s a smug smirking triumphalist aggressive man who hates women and says so every chance he gets.

Hmmm. Something odd here. Ohio Capital Journal July 25:

Male anti-abortion religious leaders mull murder charges for pregnant people at a national event.

An all-male panel of anti-abortion religious leaders from around the country met Friday night to discuss the strategies that should be used to end abortion in every state at any stage of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape and incest, and with criminal punishment for the pregnant person in line with existing criminal penalties for murder, which includes the death penalty.

Odd. We are told the sex of the people discussing the strategies but not the sex of the people they are planning to punish and kill.

Why’s that? Why is it ok to specify men and males but not women and females?

Friday’s speakers included Wisconsin-based Operation Save America Director Jason Storms and former OSA director Rusty Thomas, along with Arizona-based End Abortion Now communications director Zachary Conover, Georgia Right to Life President Ricardo Davis, and Gabriel Rench, a member of the extremist Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

How does the reporter, Kelcie Moseley-Morris, know all those speakers are men? Is it because of the names? Jason, Rusty, Zachary, Ricardo, Gabriel? Names are unmistakable but pregnancy is not?

The panel focused on legislation they call “equal protection” bills, such as Georgia’s House Bill 496, also called the Georgia Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which was introduced in February but did not advance in the state’s House of Representatives. An “equal protection” bill, by their definition, is one that adds criminal penalties to a pregnant person for the intentional termination of a pregnancy at any stage, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The law would make an exception if the abortion was performed to prevent the pregnant person’s “imminent death or great bodily injury.”

It’s a funny thing, this. Surely the point of saying these are all men is that it’s part of the never-ending war on women – that it’s men forcing women to stay pregnant against their will – that it’s men taking rights away from women – that it’s men forcing physical labor and pain on women – that it’s men forcing women to do something that men will never have to do. But that point is thrown away if you then go on to claim that pregnancy is something that happens to “people” rather than specifically women. Why make the point that this is men working to enslave women and then cancel your own point by pretending the victims are people in general?

H/t Mike B.

Originally a comment by Sonderval on Too small to measure.

I think this topic is so popular with politicians because it is like a towel in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost.”

Support for “trans rights” is like a towel: If you express vocal support for “trans rights”, you can automatically be assumed to be right on all the other issues the left cares about. “Trans rights” are optimal here for three reasons:

1. They negatively affect only something deemed unimportant by most (women’s rights).

2. Implementing measures to ensure “trans rights” is easy and does not interrupt existing power structures. If you were to fight for racial equality, for the poor etc., you would have to actually DO something about it (increase taxes for the rich, improve social measures for the poor, fight against racial prejudice etc.). Trans rights are like an easy-to-carry-along towel: You can simply say “Let everyone be considered a woman who wants to” and you’re done and everyone will assume that you would also fight for other social justice measures even if you never do.

3. They are so contrary to common sense that you also signal to be a person of great sophistication who is able to overcome wrong misconceptions and prejudices (and if you can do this here, the towel effect makes sure that people will believe you do it everywhere). It is the ultimate virtue signalling.

A tiny step in the right direction, perhaps.

A senior member of the Labour frontbench has offered an apology to a fellow MP, Rosie Duffield, who has said she felt ostracised by the party because of her views on gender reforms.

Duffield had also accused male party colleagues of trying to shout her down in the Commons earlier this year when she spoke to back the government’s move to block gender reforms proposed in Scotland.

Well it’s not just a matter of “accusation”; we saw them do it.

“There are times when Rosie’s kind of tweeted or liked certain things and I’ve been really upset and there were times where, you know, I’ve taken a much more defensive position around trans equality and Rosie’s felt that [I] personally, and others, haven’t listened.”

What the hell is “trans equality” and what does it have to do with anything? Nobody on Team Gender Critical wants to make trans people “unequal” in any way. That’s a massive part of this whole problem: we’re accused of wanting to take away “trans rights” or taking a wrong position on “trans equality” when those are not the issue. It’s trans-identifying men who want to encroach on or just destroy women’s rights; it’s not the other way around.

A tiny tiny step.

Wait a second Don, there’s more.

A former Trump White House lawyer said the evidence against the former president over his handling of classified documents was now “overwhelming” and would “last an antiquity”, after new charges were filed in the case on Thursday.

New charges. New charges!

“I think this original indictment was engineered to last a thousand years and now this superseding indictment will last an antiquity,” Ty Cobb told CNN. “This is such a tight case, the evidence is so overwhelming.”

In June, the special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump on 37 counts regarding his handling of classified records after leaving the White House.

On Thursday, in a superseding indictment filed in a Florida court, four more charges were outlined. A second Trump staffer, the Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira, was charged, alongside Walt Nauta, Trump’s valet. Nauta previously pleaded not guilty.

Trump was accused of attempting to destroy evidence and inducing someone else to destroy evidence. He also faces a new count under the Espionage Act, for keeping a document about US plans to attack Iran which he memorably discussed on tape.

I missed the superseding indictment. Good news. Also disgusting news that he’s dragged yet another powerless underling down with him.

Xander Elliards at The National [Scotland] recycled The Herald’s story on Police Scotland’s friendliness toward men who punch women in the head, with an original addition of his (xir?) own in the final two paragraphs.

At the protest, the WWW group represented the “gender critical” side of the debate around gender reform. They believe that someone’s sex is immutable and as such transgender people should be barred from women’s only sports and spaces.

A counter-protest of trans rights advocates saw demonstrators hold signs suggesting that WWW were wrong to focus on attacking trans people’s right to exist rather than women’s rights issues such as the gender pay gap or domestic violence.

Poisonous young shit should be fired.

The Herald [Scotland] on the legalization of punching women in the face:

Police Scotland is at the centre of a human rights storm after a woman was assaulted during a women’s rights event in Aberdeen. Julie Marshall said she was punched in the arm and head at a rally organised by Women Won’t Wheesht in the city’s Duthie Park on Sunday. The man responsible received a recorded police warning, sparking anger from campaigners about the leniency of the punishment.

In a letter to Sir Iain Livingstone, Police Scotland’s Chief Constable, the policy analysis collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, expressed concerns over the caution.

The police brushed it off.

Police defended the decision, saying they were acting ”in line with the Lord Advocate’s guidelines.”

Those guidelines are not public.

“It is fine for us to do nothing about a man who punched a woman in the face, neck, and arm in public, because our secret guidelines that you can’t see say so.” That’s justice, that’s standing up for women.

Ms Marshall, who said she was in “excruciating pain” after the attack, told The Herald: “I’m really, really angry at Police Scotland. I feel that giving this man a caution after an unprovoked attack, they’re just saying you can punch these women that you don’t agree with and steal their property with impunity and all you are going to get is a slap on the wrist.”

Ms Marshall said the police had not contacted her since she gave them a statement in Duthie Park. “They didn’t call me to let me know that they’ve given the person a caution. They have had absolutely no contact with me at all.

“And I find that absolutely shameful. Women, or any person regardless of what sex they are, who have suffered an episode of violence should be treated with more bloody respect to be quite honest.”

But especially women because we are at a physical disadvantage compared to men, which (coming around full circle) is exactly why men don’t get to pretend to be women in the first place. It’s why we object to this ideology, it’s why the whole thing is such a ludicrous inversion of fairness and rights and respect.

What about that “warning”?

When the women have it coming they have it coming. Understood?

Joan Smith on police indifference to a violent attack on a woman:

Following the assault on Julie Marshall in Aberdeen last weekend, the policy analysis collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie has written to Sir Iain Livingstone, Police Scotland’s Chief Constable. Their letter asks how the caution [issued to the assaulter] squares with public bodies’ obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights to protect freedom of speech and assembly. Just two months ago, Livingstone admitted the existence of institutional sexism and misogyny at Police Scotland. 

Marshall’s experience points to a very specific problem, however. She has photographs of her injuries and gave a statement to police after the assault, but she was not even informed of the decision to let her assailant off with a warning. It is hard to imagine other circumstances in which an assault, in front of dozens of witnesses and in the presence of police officers, would be treated so lightly. 

The situation seems to be that the women in these situations are viewed by the police as already almost criminals – as at fault, as provoking violence, as having it coming. Women who won’t wheesht are the bullies, the violent, the equivalent of Proud Boys or Nazis or white nationalists. They’re viewed as deserving to be punched in the face by men.

All because they don’t think men are women.

Quite a Catch22, isn’t it. You can’t disagree with men who say they are women, because if you do you become an outlaw with no protection from men who want to (quoting) “punch them in the fucking face” and who put their urge to punch into action when they get the chance.

This is all the more interesting when you keep in mind that women who punch men in the fucking face are unlikely to break anything, while men who punch women in the fucking face are very likely to break something.

Police Scotland claims that handing a caution to Marshall’s assailant is in line with the Lord Advocate’s guidelines which, very conveniently, are not publicly available. But it reinforces the idea that police up and down the country still don’t take violence against women seriously — especially when the victims are feminists.

In fact it reinforces the idea that the police welcome violent against women who know that men are not women.

Also rewarding to read the replies to Jon Pike:

I wonder if the staffers who wouldn’t let the New Statesman publish Dawkins’s article without a contrary view are regretting it now.

It’s both entertaining and cheering to read the many replies to Andy.

It’s a funny thing that the Staggers decided to publish the Jacqueline Rose piece, because it’s so obviously bad and weak and empty. That’s the best they could do? Tells us something, doesn’t it.

Our experience is not hypothetical.

It’s not real persecution; it’s persecution envy. They want to be among The Persecuted not The Persecutors…although not…you know…really persecuted. Just…you know…the pretend kind. The kind no one actually cares about. The kind that’s a pretext for bullying other people. From a position of privilege.

“I am not ‘sir.'” Yeah right up there with do not get rich off my labor, do not rape me or kill me, do not enslave me or lynch me.

Then he tries to bully one of the workers.

He’s right you know.