Thanks, Guardian. Even when talking about women’s safety, do be sure to include a man who pretends to be a woman, despite the fact that that kneecaps the whole issue.

Saoirse Ronan’s comment about women’s safety on The Graham Norton Show has gone viral after she said using a phone as a weapon is something “girls have to think about all the time”. Ronan later said the reaction has been “wild” and that the moment was “opening a conversation”.

Here, six women tell us what they think about the comments and how they feel about women’s safety.

Except it’s actually five women plus one man for the sake of inclooooooooosion. Which is like having one tiger in a conversation about humans’ safety from large predatory animals.

I’m a trans woman who only came out fully a couple of years ago. My style is everyday, nothing provocative, and I’m always taken for a woman. Walking home from the bus at night for the first time and feeling really unsafe I suddenly realised – this is what women go through the whole time. I’ve always been aware and supportive of women’s issues but even so, it was a horrible, shaming epiphany to realise that I’d seen past this basic fact of women’s lives. It’s so easy to ignore a danger or threat if you don’t have to experience it yourself. Kim, 60, classical musician, Sweden

To be fair, he is admitting his own cluelessness about this basic fact about women’s lives, but still – when the Guardian tells us here are six women commenting it should refrain from sneaking in a man.

If the union won’t stand up for women, women will walk. Janice Turner in The Times:

[Lisa] Lockey, 51, is one of five Darlington nurses in dispute with their NHS trust over its policy of allowing a trans-identified male colleague to use female changing rooms. When the health secretary, Wes Streeting, heard they were suing for sexual harassment and sex discrimination he was “horrified” and offered to meet them. Last week they travelled to London where he heard their concerns, including those of a nurse who has PTSD after being sexually abused as a child.

This meeting incensed North. It was “deeply concerning”, he tweeted, “that Wes Streeting appears to be once again pandering to anti-trans bigotry”. Three quarters of the workers North represents are female, yet here he castigates a Labour minister for listening to women, including some of his own members.

And there it is – the boulder we keep crashing into. Women are required to sit down and shut up and obey, because men who pretend to be women matter more – far far far more – than they do. Than we do. We women are the brutal oppressors, and men who announce that they’re women are our victims. BANG that’s the end of women’s rights. We finally had some, after all these centuries, but now they’re being yanked back again, on behalf of men who think they’re the only women who matter.

None of the Darlington nurses had a view on the “trans debate” until last August: they were too busy caring for patients or their own families. Then a male theatre nurse who calls himself Rose began using the female facilities where they change before and after a shift. Rose has not transitioned. He wears men’s clothes and apart from long hair he presents wholly as male, nor, say his colleagues, does he take hormones because he and his girlfriend are trying to conceive. Parading around in boxer shorts, staring at nurses in their bras and asking one woman repeatedly “are you going to get undressed yet?”, Rose made nurses feel so uncomfortable some started changing in the disabled toilet.

Yeah women always do that – ask other women in the locker room “are you going to take your clothes off yet?” We just can’t stand the waiting.

But when they complained to management they learnt that the policy of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust is that trans staff can self-identity into any changing room they choose.

Which means that female staff can’t. If men who claim to be women can self-identity into any changing room they choose, then women can’t choose a changing room with no men in it, because the men will always choose to follow them in. Heads they win tails women lose.

This policy is pure Stonewall playbook, part of the trans “toolkit” of measures it has long insisted every institution or company adopts, especially the rule that it is unhappy women who must be banished from their own facilities rather than — as the nurses have requested — a dignified third space being found for a trans person.

It’s almost as if that’s the whole point, isn’t it. Not really the female soul trapped in a woman’s body, but the male soul rejoicing to have found a way to bully women and watch them take their clothes off.

A vicious, vengeful trans lobby, which dubs opponents bigots, has frightened many into silence. The Darlington nurses were always whispering in hospital kitchens with distressed colleagues too fearful to go public. But they are determined neither to resign from jobs they love, nor to back down. Their tribunal case, which has a preliminary hearing this month, could set a major precedent. They also have a strong ally in Streeting, Labour’s least tribal thinker, who is determined to unravel NHS policy at source. Introduced by stealth it has turned loyal, hard-working nurses into unlikely campaigners.

Solidarity.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on The rules of play.

From the Cass review and various whistleblowers, we can be pretty sure that the castrations are a punishment for the crime of being a little boy who displays all the behaviours associated with a high likelihood of becoming a gay man after puberty. As has been announced in the Westminster parliament, the Tavistock clinic, who were brought little gender-nonconforming children by their panicking homophobic parents, and egged on by the homophobic sociopaths of Mermaids and Stonewall, were openly ‘transing the gay away’.

My siblings and I, and our children, and my grandchildren, were allowed to play with whatever toys we wished. As the meme says, if the toy isn’t for the genitals, it’s for both boys and girls; if it IS for the genitals, it’s not for either. Yet, so far, not one of the boys who played with ‘girl toys’ – not even the one who displayed all the other signs of being a proto-gay – has turned out to be anything other than straight, after having gone through a normal adolescence.

If Suzie Green hadn’t been so afraid of her son possibly growing up to be gay, he could now be a healthy young man, both physically and mentally. Possibly gay, probably straight (as most men are) but in either case, intact and cognitively mature. Instead, he’s mutilated and brainwashed. Even worse, his evil mother took over and changed Mermaids, which used to reassure parents that gender confusion was almost inevitably solved by going through puberty, and turned it into a cult organisation, ensuring that many more parents would ensure that their poor gender-nonconforming kids (disproportionately same-sex attracted and/or autistic) went through the same process as her son, retroactively justifying her otherwise unjustified manipulative behaviour.

At this point in time, I’m amazed that so many same-sex attracted people still support the parasitic attachment of the T and all the other alphabetti spaghetti to the LGB.

Anne Applebaum on the “vermin” trope:

The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin did the same thing, she goes on to say. So did Mao, so did Pol Pot.

It doesn’t just influence the audience, that kind of thing; it also influences the people saying it. Call sets of people “vermin” enough times and you start to think of them as literal vermin.

Normally I wouldn’t write about reactions to my writing: I have opinions and others have them too. But this time, the response of Trump supporters – or rather, people who are going to vote for Trump because he might lower their taxes – interested me, because it reminded me of things I’ve seen in other places.  Other than the usual suspects – posters on 4chan, the website of Russia Today, and Elon Musk – I also got a response from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Under the headline “the fascist meme re-emerges,” the editorial board dismissed my article and others as “hyperbole,” said that there’s nothing to worry about and, tellingly, threw some insults at Joe Biden. A couple of weeks later the historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the Daily Mail, dismissed the whole conversation about “fascism” and then attacked Kamala Harris as undemocratic on the grounds that some people around her have argued for constitutional change. This is a phenomenon that the Poles call symmetrism: whenever something ugly emerges about  someone in your political camp, search immediately for something ugly to say about your opponents, whether or not it is equivalent.

It’s also called lying.

H/t Tim Harris

Meanwhile, Twitter itself considers it violence or threats or harassment to say that trans women are men and that men don’t experience rape exactly the way women do because men are more physically powerful than women.

Oh surely not. Surely I exaggerate. Don’t I?

This morning I’m in receipt of an email from the Twitter censors telling me:

Your post was detected by our systems and has had its visibility limited for violating the X rules. Specifically:We have determined your post violated our rules against Hateful Conduct.You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. Ophelia Benson@OpheliaBenson@fran_amery There are no “cis” women. There are only women. “Trans women” are men. Men DON’T experience the exact same thing when raped, because men are more physically powerful than women.

Women are not allowed to say men are stronger than we are and therefore we need some spaces where men can’t follow us. NOT ALLOWED.

Any man can declare himself to be a woman without restrictions or security checks.

And that doesn’t mean just call himself a woman in his own living room. It means forcing everyone else to call him a woman on pain of a 10,000 Euro fine.

By “vulnerable people” she does not mean women, or migrants, or refugees, or workers, or lesbians and gay men, or survivors of genocide, or people with physical handicaps, or people of color, or indigenous people, or homeless people, or addicts, or political prisoners…

Originally a comment by Mosnae on More than just a parade.

I think it’s important to emphasize a distinction in meaning here – in this case, as in most, “LGBTQ+” does not mean (the set of all people referred to by some letter within the initialism), but rather (a fairly specific political movement which purports to represent that set). Of course, the whole movement feeds deeply on conflation and on this idea of a huge, united, sociopolitically monolithic “community,” even though this is not only absurd and self-contradictory given the alleged nature of the community, but also quite patronizing to the individuals it claims to defend, and blatantly in disagreement with reality: there are many “members of the LGBTQ+ community” who don’t actually feel that they have some sort of deep and inextricable connection to each other, and who have their own sets of values and beliefs.

All in all, I feel that a lot of “LGBTQ+” discourse and initiatives are just lumping a bunch of unrelated people in a box in order to exploit the resulting image for self-interested purposes. Since the associated rituals are capable of bringing significant popularity while requiring little effort and having little concrete impact on anything, they are very convenient for politicians. There are places out there where homosexuals are routinely put to death; surely stopping this would be a worthy cause, yet we seem to hear much less about it than we do about, say, correct pronominalization. I propose that this is because it’s easier. So, if you will, there is little LEGITIMATE “focus on LGBTQ+.”

It is likewise, I think, that there is so little focus on women. Actually putting an end to the rampant sexism of current societies would be a huge deal of work, require lots of changes in our ways of thinking, and that’s just plain hard. People aren’t up to it, and politicians aren’t bold enough. On the other hand, coming up with a narrative about pink and blue brains that are sometimes located in the wrong bodies is easy. Why take on legitimate causes when there are much cheaper ways to achieve gratification?

Worse by the hour.

Donald Trump said former Rep. Liz Cheney is a “war hawk” who should be fired upon, as he raged against one of his most prominent intra-party critics while campaigning Thursday night in Arizona.

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” the former president said at a campaign event in Glendale with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Hey, same to you, Captain Bonespurs.

Cheney responded to Trump’s comments overnight, saying: “This is how dictators destroy free nations.”

In a post on X, the former congresswoman goes on to say: “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

No, we can’t, so here’s hoping we don’t.

Harris has pointed to Trump’s actions and rhetoric — including in a speech she delivered this week from the Ellipse in Washington, the same site where Trump delivered his January 6, 2021, speech — as she tries to court independents and moderate Republicans.

“Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls ‘the enemy from within.’ This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better,” Harris said in her Tuesday night remarks. “This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”

And that’s only some of what’s wrong with him.

Whether we like it or not.

Donald Trump took his frequent habit of describing himself as a “protector” of women further on Wednesday night in Wisconsin, when he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not” if he wins a second term in the White House.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,’” Trump said. “I’m going to protect them.”

Of course he did. That’s how he thinks of women. The best ones are hotties he wants to grab by the pussy and the worst ones tell us what a loathsome lump of flesh he is. Either way we’re not independent humans, we’re just things men get to use and boss around and punish.

Trump told the rally crowd on Wednesday that his advisers had been counseling him against describing himself as a “protector” for women.

“They said, ‘Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say.’ I pay these guys a lot of money; can you believe it?” Trump said.

Yes, you dolt. They’re telling you to stop talking about women as if we were children, because it’s insulting.

Trump began talking about himself as a “protector of women” at a rally in September, when he said, “I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector.”

In other words you’re telling us we’re defective and need your “protection.”

We’re not; we don’t.

Nothing is too good for the gender-special.

LGBTQ group ACON given $7 million to produce non-gendered language cancer campaign meant for Indigenous and migrant women

Who needs a “non-gendered language cancer campaign”? What’s the point of such a thing? To spare the tender feelings of the tiny minority of people who think they’re the sex they’re not? To spare those purported feelings by putting real women in danger? Real women who are indigenous or migrant and thus face language barriers? A super-special luxury cancer campaign crafted to obscure the language around cancers that happen to women, in order to make the gender-special feel cuddled and looked after and pampered. The hell with indigenous and migrant women, yeah? They’re just there as a photo op for men who like to pretend to be women.

The federal government awarded a $7 million contract to a LGBTQ lobby group to produce a women’s cancer campaign using non-gendered language, despite the public health message meant primarily for Indigenous and migrant women.

Despite the fact that the message was meant for, that is.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information reveal the Department of Health and Ageing granted the lucrative funding to ACON, which describes itself as NSW’s “leading HIV and LGBTQ+ health organisation”, without the contract going to tender.

The seven-figure deal was struck in spite of a quarter of women surveyed raising concerns about the use of “confusing” and “political” language in the campaign.

Spend 7 million bucks to make health information for women more obscure, for the sake of the feefees of a small number of petulant men.

Why? Why would anyone, even the most gender-besotted, think this is a good idea?

London planning bid to host World Pride 2030

Head of Pride in London, Christopher Joell-Deshields, said the gala would be more than “just a parade”, but would accommodate discussions on topics including LGBTQ+ inclusive education and banning so-called conversion therapy. London Mayor Sadiq Khan described the city as “a beacon of inclusiveness, acceptance and diversity”. He added that he was “hugely proud” that London would be in the mix to host the event.

Ok but why so much focus on LGBTQ+ and so little focus on, say, women?

Why not women? Why never women?

There’s never any answer.

So I walked down the hill to drop my vote into the Voting drop box. I didn’t have to, I could have just dropped it into a mailbox, but I wanted to. It was raining a lot harder than I thought, though, so I got very soaked. After dropping, therefore, I walked a block down to KEXP to warm up and dry off.

KEXP is a few-years-old radio station on the edge of Seattle Center (and next to a bus stop). It has a huge barn-like open space with old couches and chairs and tables and (of course) a little coffee shop in one corner, and we’re all welcome to use it. It’s a very nice and useful public amenity, and I think well of KEXP for providing it. However…KEXP is also very into the trans thing, so there are little slogans here and there about the communinny yadda yadda, because of course there are.

So, today, because drenched, I went into the women’s room to grab some paper towels to dry off a bit. One stall was closed, I noticed, but then I noticed a pair of feet pointing the wrong way and wearing large engineering boots. Uh, I thought. I did some hair and jacket blotting and the door opened and out came a large bearded guy. I looked at him. He looked at me, and then turned to the sinks. Huh, thought I, and left.

I was thinking he’d simply bumbled, but oh no. Gee, why are both doors all gouged up? What’s that little sign?

The little sign, of course, says KEXP supports gender diversity and everybody is welcome to use whichever toilet everybody wants to. The doors are gouged up because the fools actually vandalized their own doors to get the women/men words off. They had the usual arrangement for several years but at some recent point decided oh dear that will never do, so now women have to expect to find men in what used to be the women’s toilet.

Assholes.

Alona Ferber at Prospect bashes women who know that men are not women.

She starts with Imane Khelif’s punch to the head of Angela Carini and Carini’s forfeit of the match because she didn’t want to be killed.

The Russian-run International Boxing Association, stripped last year of its recognition by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), claimed that the 25-year-old, who had competed in women’s boxing for years, had been disqualified from the 2023 boxing world championships over a failed gender eligibility test. The IOC rejected this, saying of the bout with Carini, “Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman.”

On X, users speculated whether Khelif—who was born female and has never identified as either trans or intersex—was male or a man or something or other that made her inclusion in the competition unfair, even dangerous.

Khelif was not born female. Ferber simply made that up. What he “identifies as” is irrelevant when it comes to male v female bodies in a boxing ring.

That day, the Algerian boxer found herself hurled straight into an impasse in the discourse over biological sex, the notion of gender and the idea that trans rights compete with those of cisgendered women, a term that refers to someone whose gender identity is the same as their sex at birth. 

It’s not a “notion” you condescending sellout creep. When “trans rights” means the right for men to invade women’s spaces and sports and refuges, it’s about a bunch of hard painful facts.

What do you mean, that is a completely normal healthy sun-tanned outdoorsy virile athletical face.

Whiny male union boss tells women to shut up and take it. The union he’s boss of, I’m told, is 75% women.

He gets to choose who can see him, but those stupid bad phobic women who don’t want men watching them in the locker room do not get to choose who can see them. Bitches.

Snowless in October.

Japan’s Mount Fuji remained snowless on Tuesday, marking the latest date that its slopes have been bare since records began 130 years ago, the country’s weather agency said. The volcano’s snowcap begins forming on 2 October on average, and last year snow was first detected there on 5 October.

But because of warm weather, this year no snowfall had yet been observed on Japan’s highest mountain, said Yutaka Katsuta, a forecaster at Kofu Local Meteorological Office.

…

Japan’s summer this year was the joint hottest on record – equalling the level seen in 2023 – as extreme heatwaves fuelled by climate change engulfed many parts of the globe.

If it’s any comfort, Mount Rainier is never bare naked like that. It rejoices in 35 square miles of permanent ice and snow.

For now.

Get the labels right.

Fascism is a form of authoritarianism, but not all authoritarians are fascists. Fascists have a transformative political project: to create a homogeneous people devoted to a messianic leader and to mobilize society for the sake of violent racial conflict. By contrast, monarchs or technocratic authoritarians – think of military dictatorships in Latin America – can be perfectly self-effacing: Europe’s longest-lasting dictatorship during the 20th century was headed by a decidedly uncharismatic Portuguese economist, António Salazar. Fascists, on the other hand, base their legitimacy on popular acclamation: they celebrate mass rallies and create a spectacle of power.

So far Trump is filling the fascist bill without breaking a sweat.

So far so Trumpist, it would seem: the cult of personality administered at large rallies; the increasingly open racism which singles out Trump’s supporters as “the real people” – an expression Trump used as he incited his fanatical followers at the Ellipse on January 6. But a collective project centered on violence? Not quite. To be sure, Trump couldn’t be prouder of the Proud Boys; add to that the militarization of civilian life, driven by a supreme court endlessly creative in inventing 18th-century traditions to justify the proliferation of arms. What’s more, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, today’s leading Trumpist thinktank, has promised a “second American revolution” which, Roberts clarified, “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” – as clear a threat of violence as one can imagine. Yet all this is still not the same as fascist leaders glorifying mortal combat as the ultimate meaning of life.

Hmm. It doesn’t seem very different from it though. Trump does love violence as long as it doesn’t mean he has to get his “hair” mussed.

Trump is also both product and promoter of a consumer capitalism that seeks to demobilize people politically. It’s hard to see that young people today would find the idea of marching around in uniforms the essence of the good life; Trump’s promise to his “real people” – from the rural folks of the supposed “heartland” to lily-white suburbs – is precisely that they don’t need to make sacrifices. His former chief of staff reports that Trump, visiting Arlington, claimed not to see the point of dying in war. But no real fascist leader would have denied that heroic death in combat had meaning.

Well but what about a real fascist who is also very stupid and very lazy and very chickenshit?

The Jackie Green tweet is from 2018 but it’s still worth noting.

Seems harsh.

What we can expect if he.

Priority numero uno is immigration, where Trump has promised to launch “the largest deportation program in history” and begin a promised legal war against birthright citizenship—the constitutional rule contained in the 14th Amendment that children of immigrants are automatic citizens if born in America.

Both of these are long-term projects. There will be a lengthy legal fight if Trump suddenly declares a constitutional guarantee no longer operable. There will be logistical and legal challenges with attempting to uproot millions of people out of their communities. The first shots in each of these fights, however, will likely come in the form of day-one orders.

But Trump has more urgent business, because he’s a convicted felon who wants to punish/eliminate everyone who can or did have anything to do with his convicted felon status.

Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt this week, that he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel currently prosecuting him for a bevy of 2020 election crimes, “within two seconds.”

…

“I don’t think they’ll impeach me if I fire Jack Smith,” Trump told Hewitt. Even if they did, what’s a third impeachment when you’ve already beaten two?

And it’s not like firing Smith would open Trump to any new legal jeopardy: “We got immunity at the Supreme Court,” the former president noted. Whether firing him would be enough is another question: In another recent interview, Trump said that Smith “should be thrown out of the country.”

All very healthy and normal and not a bit putinesque.

It’s anybody’s guess whether Trump would include among his “day one” actions the blanket pardons for January 6th rioters he has been pledging for years. Don’t get me wrong: The pardons are definitely coming. But why rush the logistics on such a joyous occasion?

Imagine it: Trump’s favorite insurrectionists, freed from bondage, invited to the Ellipse to receive their long-overdue thanks for their patriotism. They may not have managed to reinstall Trump in 2020, but wonder of wonders: The American people did it for them just four short years later!

To put it another way, we will be a failed state.

Trump has a particular interest in the post of attorney general, where he is determined to find someone with a particular eye toward his personal interests. His last two, he thinks, were no good—Jeff Sessions failed to protect him from the Mueller investigation, and William Barr failed to help him steal the 2020 election.

Someone who actively helped him try in 2020 will be a good start: perhaps Jeff Clark, who as assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Division worked harder than anyone to help Trump prevent the transfer of power. Clark has since had an ethics panel recommend his law license be suspended and has been indicted alongside Trump in Georgia. He’s perfect

Very very failed.