There are a number of people who genuinely believe that they are trapped in the wrong body, and they want to be recognized as the gender that their mind and soul have always told them that they are.

People can genuinely believe lots of things that aren’t true, and even things that are obviously absurd. Religions are good at coming up with whole elaborate systems of untrue things for people to believe. Trans ideology is very like religion in this sense.

The entertainment industry is also quite good at coming up with untrue stories for our entertainment and even enlightenment. The Wizard of Oz is not true, but it’s a good story. Big is not true, but it’s a good story.

We are our bodies. We may dislike aspects of them, we may dislike everything about them, but they are still ours and not anyone else’s.

No. No, he really doesn’t. Even in their terms he really doesn’t. I mean come on – an unconvincing dyed combover? A dyed blond combover on a man in his seventies? “Looking hard” would be a grizzled crewcut, not brassy strands fluffed and pasted over a naked scalp. And the fake tan. And the dumb perpetual blue suit red tie white shirt. And the fact that he looks like a spoiled child who just broke his favorite air-rifle.

He’s petulant, whiny, demanding, greedy, self-involved. It’s true that he has no morals or scruples or empathy, but that by itself doesn’t make him what Fox fool means by “hard.”

So if you’re indicted as the boss of a crime gang the thing to do is milk it for publicity and $$$.

Mr Trump posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, for the first time since January 2021 to share the address of his website and the mugshot with an all-capital letters caption: “Election interference. Never surrender!”

Within hours, his campaign website was selling mugshot-branded mugs, t-shirts and drink coolers.

John Bolton, who served as national security advisor under Mr Trump, said the image was likely carefully staged. “I think it’s intended to be a sign of intimidation against the prosecutors and the judges,” he told CNN. “He could’ve smiled. He could’ve looked benign,” Mr Bolton added. “Instead he looks like a thug.”

A sign of intimidation??? Oh surely not.

Some right-wing commentators have been drawing analogies with Nelson Mandela and Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who had mugshots taken, including in an iconic 1963 shot from Birmingham Jail.

“They did the same thing to Martin Luther King Jr,” tweeted comedian and Trump supporter Terrence K Williams. “They go after the good guys and especially the ones who fight for freedom and expose evilness and corruption. I stand with President Trump and this mugshot makes me want to vote for him even more.”

Sigh.

Trump is back on Musk’s toy.

Election interference, he screams. The election interference is coming from inside the house. That phone call to Raffensperger for instance? Stark staring election interference. Telling a secretary of state to “find” the exact number of votes needed to give Trump the Georgia electoral votes instead of Biden – that, sir, is election interference.

Pink News posted that tweet (aka “post”) twice, eight hours ago and one hour ago. Always do your libeling twice, just to be thorough.

Let’s read the article.

The caption under the photo at the top:

A bomb threat, which followed Riley Gaines spreading outrage over a California library’s handling of hate speech, saw the branch and nearby elementary school forced to evacuate.

Lots of things “follow” lots of other things. Correlation does not equal causation.

Subhead:

Anti-trans harassment pedalled on social media by former US college swimmer Riley Gaines has been linked with a bomb threat at a California library. 

They mean “peddled” not “pedalled.” But more to the point, they’re lying about the “anti-trans harassment.” Disputing an ideology is not harassment.

On Monday (21 August), Mary L. Stephens library in Davis, a city about 14 miles from Sacramento, received an anonymous bomb threat in a phone call that included anti-LGBTQ+ speech. The building and a nearby elementary school were evacuated. 

Of course we don’t know what “anti-LGBTQ+ speech” means here. The label serves the usual purpose of insinuating that lesbians and gays were subjected to hostility, when the issue is probably trans ideology. Pink News is routinely and resolutely dishonest this way in its “reporting.”

The threat came a day after the Yolo county chapter of Moms for Liberty hosted a meeting during which trans inclusion in sport was criticised.

That’s a lie. Inclusion of men in women’s sport is the issue, not “trans inclusion” in general.

During the event, library staff were forced to repeatedly warn speakers that misgendering athletes broke the library’s code of conduct.

Forced how? Cattle prods?

After continuing to misgender trans athletes, a staff member asked them to leave. 

Whoops! Dangling participle. Silly staff member, continuing to misgender trans athletes and then asking them to leave.

Jumping ahead:

Gaines has actively campaigned against trans participation in women’s sports after she tied with trans swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place in the women’s 200m freestyle final at the 2022 National Collegiate Athletics Association swimming and diving championships. 

Same old same old lie. The issue is not “trans participation in women’s sports,” it’s men’s invasion of women’s sports.

Punch line:

PinkNews has contacted Mary L. Stephens library and Riley Gaines for comment. 

Riley says Pink News has not said a word to her via any medium.

Pink News wants Riley Gaines to sue them. Success!

Pink News wants it to be the new normal that knowing men are not women=”anti-trans harassment”.

Mugshot has landed, repeat, mugshot has landed.

He’s such an idiot. Clearly the idea is Mister Defiant. You can’t get me, you’re all a bunch of communists, I’ll have your guts for garters, I AM A TOUGH GUY. But he just looks stupid and infantile. A disdainful smirk would have been much more effective, but he’s too stupid to think of it.

Of course, I say stupid, but he may win in the end all the same. This tells us, depressingly, that there are a lot more people who are both stupid and mean than we realized.

I skowll achoo. Im tuff. I will kill yooo.

Self-righteous much?

Replies turned off of course. Quote-tweets highly critical. One I was surprised to see –

I would have expected him to be with the cool kids.

Because trans ideology is a secular religion. Heretics must be hunted down and punished.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Out of place but possible.

I’m skeptical that a male could carry a fetus to term at all. Ectopic pregnancies in women are still in women. Male and female hormone systems, and even the basic composition of their blood, are fundamentally different to each other. I know very little about the biology of pregnancy, but I don’t have to know much to know that hormones, bloodstream, metabolism, even antibodies… pretty much every system of the female body plays some kind of role throughout gestation. I just can’t see an embryo, even one inside a uterus, plopped into a male body somehow coming out remotely okay, because I’m highly skeptical that male bodies have evolved to have these same kinds of complex reactions to a fetus showing up inside them. It’s just nuts.

This stuff jumps readily to mind, because I’ve been reading a lot about the biology of homosexuality, which is a good example of the sensitive nature of the interaction between mother and embryo/fetus. Same-sex preference in humans is caused in part by subtle shifts in hormone exposure in the early stages of gestation, which can be influenced by antibodies present in women. (E.g., the famous “birth order effect”, in which each subsequent male fetus pregnancy is more likely to become a homosexual in adulthood, because of subtle changes in the immune system of the mother.) It’s all a very elaborate and finely calibrated physical process, and the whole of a woman takes part in the creation of a child inside her. The idea that we should just assume men can probably do this, too, based on nothing but their desire to be able to, is even more bonkers than allowing men in women’s sports.

There really is no bottom to the craziness of gender identity ideology.

Headin’ down South to the land of the pine

to get arrested for a PERFECT PHONE CALL.

Stollen:

Stolen:

Hahaha this was bound to happen.

Etc.

Creeping fascism continues its creep.

I don’t mean metaphorically or hyperbolically. This is how it’s done – this perversion of courts and legislative bodies.

House Republicans took aim on Thursday at the Georgia prosecutor bringing a sweeping felony racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, moving to investigate the woman pursuing the case just hours before Mr. Trump was to be booked at an Atlanta jail.

Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced he was opening an inquiry into Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, questioning whether she had collaborated with Biden administration officials and targeting any federal funding her office receives.

Trump is the guy who tried to muscle the Georgia Secretary of State into “giving” him the votes to move Georgia’s electors to his side, and here’s a member of the federal legislature pretending it’s the other guy who’s dirty.

In a letter to Ms. Willis sent on Thursday, Mr. Jordan accused her of carrying out a politically motivated prosecution.

The phone call. The phone call to Brad Raffensperger. Willis didn’t do that, Trump did. It’s a Mafia-style move and there’s no way Jim Jordan doesn’t know that.

“I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law,” she said. “The law is completely nonpartisan. That’s how decisions are made in every case.” She added that her office had brought 11 other racketeering cases before filing charges against Mr. Trump: “We followed the same process. We look at the facts. We look at the law, and we bring charges.”

Sure but when it’s Trump you’re supposed to let him off, because that’s the integrityous thing to do.

Originally a comment by Seanna Watson on Nope.

“Ectopic” technically just means “out of place” – in the case of a pregnancy that means it’s not in the uterus. The most common misplaced location is in the Fallopian tube, since that’s where eggs tend to be. (If untreated, tubal pregnancies are usually fatal to the mother.) But there is also the remote possibility of the egg being fertilized while floating free in the abdomen, and implanting in some random location. Bodies are indeed weird, and the development of the parasitic organism (aka embryo) apparently does not actually require the uterus – it can make its own placenta attached anywhere as long as it can find sufficient connection to do blood exchange. Unsurprisingly, the rates of complications for this are very high for both mother and baby. The delivery has to be surgical, and the attachment site of the placenta is extremely susceptible to hemorrhage (the post-delivery contraction of the uterus (usually) does the job of preventing this in normal pregnancies.

All of which is to say that yes, it does seem that it would be technically possible to develop a way to get a fertilized egg to implant in the abdomen of a transwoman, albeit at significant risk for both the pregnancy and the host.

What looms ahead:

In the interview [with Tucker Carlson], Trump said that his administration was hampered by bad staffing choices — picking a kind of Republican he derisively referred to as “Bushies” for top jobs, citing former Attorney General Bill Barr as an example. This time around, Trump said, that won’t happen: “We’ll have even better people if we do this because now I know Washington.”

There’s every reason to believe he’s serious about this. Reporting by the New York Times’s Jonathan Swan and others has revealed extensive preparations to ensure that, this time around, everyone in power is loyal to him — including brazen power grabs like the mass firing of career civil servants and asserting direct presidential control over historically independent federal agencies.

Trump unchained, in short, doesn’t just mean skipping debates to stoke conspiracist flames with Tucker Carlson. It means that, if Trump wins the general election again, he will be even more dangerous than he was the last time around. And if he loses, he will attack the result’s legitimacy however he sees fit — with the weight of a Republican Party, held captive by its own voters, at his back.

We have about a year and a half to live.

Now remember, kids, always be polite even when in a temper. Don’t ever call a trans woman a wanker, call her a cunt. Be polite I tell you.

The Telegraph elucidates:

Calling a trans woman a ‘w—-r’ is discriminatory because the insult is commonly used in reference to men, an employment tribunal has suggested.

“We suggest you call her a ‘cunt’ instead,” the panel suggested.

The swear word is not a gender-neutral term and so using it against someone who has transitioned would constitute a breach of equality laws, a panel concluded.

To insult a trans woman without being discriminatory, female-specific slurs should be used instead, the tribunal suggested.

What a glorious future awaits us, as all the feminist women are locked up and female-specific slurs fill the air.

Its ruling came after a trans bus driver sued the company where she had been working for gender reassignment discrimination. Amanda Fischer claimed that another employee called her a “w—-r”.

…

She lost her case after the panel decided the “w—-r” incident had not actually occurred.

But if it had – IF IT HAD, by golly – that would have been discriminatory and transphobic.

The bus company argued – typical bus company hegemony! – that “wanker” is gender-neutral. The panel said nooooo it’s not.

Employment judge Kathryn Patricia Ramsden said: “Despite the [company’s] position, the Tribunal does not consider the insult ‘w—-r’ to be a gender-neutral term.

“The panel members’ own experiences of use of that term is that it is applied to men, and that there are equivalent but different swear words that are specifically used in common parlance to insult women.”

Excuse me, excuse me! Not equivalent! “Wanker” is not equivalent to “cunt”! Ask any wanker and any cunt!

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Suddenly policing feminism.

If your feminism is inclusive of all, then it ain’t feminism.

Caro also retweeted yesterday about a woman she described as courageous, and that was the correct descriptor.

However, she never sees as courageous those women who stand against men’s intrusion in women’s spaces.

Caro has enormous clout and contact in Australia but never uses that to support oppressed women like those in Tasmania and Victoria who are fighting for Lesbian meetings to exclude males, like Sall Grover, who is fighting for her reputation and her business, like Angie Jones who is harassed by politicians for being a Nazi because nazis happened to march past Let Women Speak in Melbourne.

Caro is the perfect example of the hand maiden.

Yo Molly what’s up?

Love the necklace and bracelet.

Not so sure about that…erm…garment below the navel.

But he just wants to do sports!!!!

Trumps just want to be president and steal all the money. Men just want to compete against women and win all the prizes and money. Won’t someone think of the poor sad men and their dreams?

Trump’s habit of stiffing the help may come back to bite him.

The multiplying charges brought against allies of former President Trump and their mounting legal fees are creating consternation in Trump world — while presenting a real risk to the former president.

Trump has burned through millions of dollars in donor money to pay for legal fees as he defends himself against charges in New York City, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

But the former president, who has built a reputation for stiffing workers, has shown no interest in providing financial aid to former aides charged over their efforts to keep him in power. 

…

As Trump’s aid to allies trickles, some warn failing to take on their legal bills could come back to haunt him if associates seek to cooperate with prosecutors. 

It turns out to be an expensive business, trying to overturn an election. Lots of moving parts, lots of people to pay, lots of indictments to fight.

“Donald’s an idiot,” Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen told CNN. “Let me just be very clear: When it comes to paying money, he is truly an idiot. He has not learned yet that … three people you don’t want to throw under the bus like that: your lawyer, your doctor and your mechanic. Because one way or the other, you’re going to go down the hill, and there’ll be no brakes.”

He mused that Giuliani could present the biggest risk for Trump. Although he’s facing charges in Georgia, he has yet to be indicted in the federal Jan. 6 case, despite being listed as a co-conspirator.

“Allegedly, from Rudy’s own mouth, he claims that he has smoking gun information about Donald,” Cohen said, adding later, “He’s going to need to speak, and he’s going to need to speak before everybody else does.”

Giuliani is facing some of the steepest debts as his cases pile up.

Yeah, whatever, Trump has some golf to play.

No. Get out, Peter. You’re not the boss of women. Get out.