But wait, there’s more! (I didn’t wait. Wasn’t possible. I couldn’t leave that bit of Emptyspeak unmocked for one second.)

It’s genius, isn’t it?

WHAT KIND OF BEHAVIOR??

Did they forget, between the second tweet and the third, that they hadn’t said what “kind of behaviour” they were talking about? The word “remarks” doesn’t quite cover it. We can’t believe they would never knowingly book an artist known for making remarks. There must be something specific about the remarks that they disapprobate, but they haven’t said what that something is.

Trans ideology makes people stupid.

This is the sort of thing up with which one must not put.

Could it be any more stupidly meaningless? “Somebody told us somebody said something not in keeping with some values. As soon as somebody told us, somebody pulled somebody’s performance.”

It’s bound to be about trans something, because people don’t talk this stupidly and meaninglessly about anything else, but even beyond the trans-bullying aspect, the vapidity of the statement is enough to make you despair of the human species.

Whooo-eeeee, we’ve got a live one here.

What?????

Andrew Tate is our fault????

How, exactly? Show your work.

But wait, there’s more.

Imagine what we could have achieved by now if men who pretend to be women hadn’t smashed women’s rights into a billion pieces.

What a horrible man.

Expertise is a powerful thing.

I do wonder how he knows that though. I wonder how he could know it. Is it possible to know all there is to know about every human society through all of history? Even if some of them left no records of any kind? Do we know, for a fact, that every human society through all of history has left records that tell us some members of all those human societies were trans? I don’t think we do, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because some human societies left very minimal traces. That’s it, that’s the how. There aren’t written or pictographic or similar records for every human society through all of history. Think of Ötzi for instance, aka the Ice Man. Scholars were beside themselves with joy over the informative baggage Ötzi had with him, because informative baggage going that far back is extremely rare. I’m pretty sure there was nothing with Ötzi that established the existence of trans people in his circles. Ötzi is just one guy. There were other human societies contemporary with him that scholars know nothing about, because the evidence is either gone or inaccessible.

If Fogg is willing to make this silly claim why should we be persuaded by his fervent belief in the reality of male women?

The Telegraph:

A patient who was referred to the controversial Tavistock transgender clinic at age 15 has spoken out saying she feels like a “mutilated experiment gone wrong” after undergoing a mastectomy.

Jasmine, who was born a girl, decided to identify as a boy but has since detransitioned – meaning she has returned to identifying as female.

Or to put it another way, she decided to pretend to be a boy but then changed her mind. What is the difference between pretending and identifying as? Is there any? Is the second just more polite? If that’s the reason maybe we should stop saying it, because too much politeness is how we got here.

“Identifying as” sounds kind of more grown-up and thoughtful, but as we all know, the reality is startlingly childish and credulous. It would probably be better for everyone over the long haul if we stopped being tactful about it. Men can pretend to be women, but that’s all it is – pretending. It’s no more real or serious or adult than children pretending to be horses.

Jasmine was referred to the GIDS clinic for children and young people at London’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust by a trans charity when she was 15. She was seen by professionals there three times.

From the age of 17, GIDS patients were transferred to adult services where they could then undergo gender reassignment surgery.

At her second 45-minute appointment at the adult clinic, she said she was referred to be prescribed cross-sex hormones and put on the waiting list for “top surgery”, or a mastectomy, which she said did not “help” or “fix” her but “made things a lot worse”.

Her second appointment. Cool that they didn’t rush her into it on her first appointment.

She’s just one person, of course. Some people are happy with their “transition,” as the Telegraph makes clear. But…on her second appointment???

Here’s the BBC slobbering over Paris Lees in 2013:

The annual Pink List named Paris Lees as the most influential lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender figure in the UK. But her rise from being a “silly teenage boy in a prison cell” has been far from simple.

Huh. The “silly teenage boy in a prison cell” makes it sound so cute, but the reason he was in a prison cell was because he had been in a teenage gang that beat up an elderly man who died soon after the beating (it’s disputed whether the beating was the cause of death). There’s nothing cute or “silly” about that. It’s weird of the BBC to put it like that, to fail to explain why the silly boy was in a prison cell, to fail to mention the victim at all. Instead the BBC proceeds to burble about Lees at an awards ceremony/party.

The party – hosted by leading gay magazine Attitude – may have been glamorous but Paris was invited because of her work as a journalist, broadcaster and activist.

Plus the pretend-woman thing.

With the organisation All About Trans she is determinedly changing media representation of transgender people like herself. And as the first transgender presenter for Radio 1 and Channel 4, she is making a mainstream audience aware of trans issues.

It’s hard to believe she had difficulty leaving the house a few years ago and could not get a job answering phones because of her criminal record. “I genuinely thought I wouldn’t be able to function or have a normal life or do anything so it’s gobsmacking that I’ve got any semblance of normality, let alone do all these fabulous things,” she says.

Yeah it is kind of gobsmacking. Women are pretty gobsmacked that this guy is considered newsworthy and exactly the right person to explain girlhood to all of us.

“I had a lot of time for thinking when I was in prison.”

Paris felt like she was at “the bottom of society” but had a vision of who she wanted to be.

The vision included giving up smoking, going back to college to do her A-levels, and becoming female.

A David Copperfield or Jude Fawley, except for the becoming female part.

Paris worked hard and was released early on a curfew, but she carried on living as a boy when she went back to college.

“I knew I wanted a transition and I was so jealous of all the girls at college that looked pretty and had boys talking to them and all those things,” she says.

Ooooooh yeah all those things – that’s the best summary of girlhood ever. They’re like paper dolls, but in 3-D.

Paris stopped wearing boyish clothes and moved to Brighton to study English at university.

“In the space of six weeks I went from living in Nottingham as a boy with my grandma still alive, to living in Brighton as a girl,” she says.

Yep. That’s all there is to it. Just stop wearing boyish clothes and bam, you’re a girl.

Thanks, BBC. It’s about time we had more men explaining us what it feels like for a girl.

The Telegraph story on school children who meow when asked a question reads like a parody of Gender Religion.

Difficult as it may be to believe, children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat. 

The Year 8 pupils were told they would be reported to a senior leader after their teacher said they had “really upset” the fellow pupil by telling them: “You’re a girl.”

And, aha, one of the clever girls recorded the whole thing so now everyone knows how batshit it was.

The incident at Rye College, first reported by The Daily Telegraph yesterday, was not a one-off. Inquiries by this newspaper have established that other children at other schools are also identifying as animals, and the responses of parents suggest that the schools in question are hopelessly out of their depth on the question of how to handle the pupils’ behaviour. 

Gee, I wonder why. I don’t suppose it could be because people have been screaming ever more deafeningly for the past decade or so that TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN could it? It couldn’t be because of the sacralization of identity could it?

Schools have established protocols when it comes to transgender pupils, but the issue of “furries” is more complex. 

Is it simply a spillover from early childhood imaginative play, or the growing phenomenon of cosplay – in which participants dress up as superheroes, aliens, animals or whatever else they choose – being brought into the classroom, where children should be politely told to leave their fantasies at the gates?

People of all ages should be told (not necessarily politely) to leave their fantasies at all the gates, every last one of them.

The teachers are also letting down other pupils whose education is being disrupted by the affirming of children with abnormal behaviour. 

That, too, applies more broadly. Everything is being disrupted by the affirming of men with abnormal behavior and vast contempt for women.

One pupil at a state secondary school in Wales told The Telegraph of a fellow pupil who “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.” 

…

“It’s affecting other people and their education and everybody in their lessons. It’s distracting to sit in a lesson and have someone meow to a teacher rather than answer in English, especially at secondary school age. 

“That’s going to take a lot out of a lesson because people are going to spend the entire lesson talking about whoever it is over there meowing to the teacher. 

“It’s a big ask to sit there and listen to someone answer like that and not have that be the main talk of the classroom rather than the lesson going on.” 

Check, check, check. It’s like a parable about the ridiculous situation we’re all stuck in, being bullied and called names for refusing to play along with the stupid boring fantasies of people like India Willoughby. We have our own damn lives and work and interests so why should we have to devote ourselves to the fantasies of strangers? We shouldn’t. It’s simple.

The Telegraph also spoke to a pupil at a school where one student, who identifies as “moonself”, wears a cloak to school, described by a fellow pupil as “like a Harry Potter wizard cape”. 

The child in question did not identify as the Moon, but as a moon, and said they could put curses on people. 

But while other pupils would be pulled up for wearing non-uniform items, such as facial piercings or dyed hair, children who identified as cats or moons would be allowed to wear cat ears or cloaks to express their “true self”, breeding resentment among other pupils. 

It does breed resentment to treat this one small group of silly people as combination saints and victims of the worst oppression on the planet.

Teachers are not helped by the fact that respected organisations to which they might turn for guidance can themselves be caught up in the confusion between cosplay and self-identity. 

Well what is the difference? Is there much? Is there any?

The Safer Schools organisation (not to be confused with the Safer Schools Alliance), which claims to be a “multi-award-winning safeguarding ecosystem” has issued guidance to parents and teachers in which it says: “The furry community itself is a complex one, made up of many different identities and definitions of what it means to be a ‘furry’.” 

It also advises parents and teachers to “engage in conversation about what it means to be a furry and the benefits of the furry community”. 

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh the furry community. Once it’s baptized as a “community” all hope is lost. It’s an idenniny and it has a communniny; resistance is futile.

If teachers – or parents – hope that the Government will clear up the whole mess when it issues its new guidance on self-identity this week, then they will be sorely disappointed. 

The Department for Education said the issue of children identifying as animals will not be addressed in the guidance, with a spokesman saying that the department trusted teachers to apply “common sense” in each individual case.

Because there’s been so much common sense about this identity nonsense all along? Please.

Modernity! Progress! Change for the sake of change!

Shared, all-gender washrooms the future for Burnaby schools

Why? Why can’t washrooms (toilets, restrooms, bathrooms) go on being single-gender? Why can’t girls continue to have privacy when taking their pants down?

Not everyone is happy with all-gender washrooms installed at a Burnaby elementary school last year, but the school district says the concept is the bathroom of the future for local schools.

Oh well, kids who aren’t happy can just hold it for eight hours.

The NOW got a tour of the new bathrooms last week.

Instead of a door marked “boys” or “girls” there is now an open entrance way that leads to a space with banks of individual, locking cubicles on each side for everyone to use.

Unlike traditional stalls, the door and sides are longer, extending nearly up to the ceiling and down to the floor.

Nearly. So spy photography will be possible, and sounds will be audible.

“These inclusive washrooms are very private,” school district secretary-treasurer Russell Horswill told the NOW in an emailed statement.

Since when are toilets supposed to be “inclusive”? They should include all students of course, and they shouldn’t separate students for bad reasons, but the reasons for separating by sex for, say, changing tampons are not bad reasons. We don’t always have to be “inclusive.” We’re allowed to have privacy at times. Children and adolescents need that permission even more than adults.

Horswill said parents who have questions should reach out to their school principal.

“When the renovations and additions to Parkcrest were complete, there were a couple of parents who didn’t know why we would change washroom styles,” he said. “The principal gave them a tour, so they could see for themselves how students’ privacy was protected and how gender-neutral washrooms support inclusivity. While you’ll see this style of washroom in restaurants, other businesses, and schools in other districts, it’s perfectly normal for people to have questions when there is a change to how something has always been done at their child’s school.”

You’ll see complaints about them in restaurants and other businesses, too. See the outrage when the Old Vic made all the women’s toilets “inclusive” but left the men’s as they were. Don’t be like the Old Vic, or like the Burnaby School District either.

Let’s just pause a moment to savor the first few words of the headline.

Judge issues order that Trump keep quiet

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh…music.

Ok, the actual full headline not quite so magical.

Judge issues order that Trump keep quiet about disclosure of discovery material issued in classified documents case

Among the restrictions approved by US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who previously approved the search warrant the FBI executed at Mar-a-Lago last year, is that “The Discovery Materials, along with any information derived therefrom, shall not be disclosed to the public or the news media, or disseminated on any news or social media platform, without prior notice to and consent of the United States or approval of the Court.”

I think this is where we came in.

The order sought by prosecutors and approved by Reinhart was expected and used standard language. However, it comes in a first-of-its-kind federal criminal case against an ex-president who has a proclivity to express opinions on social media and who is being prosecuted, in part, because of his alleged mishandling of sensitive government information.

In other words he’ll probably disclose whatever he feels like disclosing.

Oops he’s letting his hatred of women show. You’re supposed to hide it, bro!

At 40 seconds he lets the mask slip to do a snotty baby-voice parody of women saying words he doesn’t like. “Oh, we’re just out to protect children and women.” He all but bats his eyes at the camera, then snaps “No yer not.” He makes it very plain that he despises women.

At 1:21 he does it again. “It’s not us who, um, make it unsafe for trans women.” Breathy Marilyn Monroe silly voice again, along with feeble fluttery hesitant delivery. Undisguised unabashed contempt.

We can see you, Willz.

This just in: if you write a book on a subject, that means you are correct on the subject as well as an authority on the subject, and no one can dispute you. [NB: it does not mean you can spell.]

Hooboy.

H/t tigger_the_wing

Magical thinking is the new educational foundation.

A Church of England school teacher told a pupil she was “despicable” after she refused to accept that her classmate identifies as a cat.

The 13-year-old girl and her friend were reprimanded by their teacher at Rye College, in East Sussex, on Friday at the end of a Year 8 class on “life education” in which they were told they can “be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you”.

So the aim of Rye College is to set students up for disappointment and despair?

It’s profoundly untrue that “you can be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you.” Of course you can’t “be who you want to be” without a million exceptions and stipulations. There’s an infinite number of things you can’t be. You can’t be a dragon; you can’t be two dragons; etc. Infinite. Encourage kids to be ambitious by all means, but don’t bullshit them with fictions about magic idenniny.

The row, which has infuriated parents, was allegedly sparked by one of them asking a fellow pupil: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”

Their teacher told them they were being reported to a senior leader and were no longer welcome at the school, part of the Aquinas Trust, a Church of England network of 11 schools, if they continued to express the view that only boys and girls exist.

Meaning cats don’t exist? Cats do exist, it’s just that cats aren’t humans and vice versa. It’s not clear if it’s the teacher or the Telegraph muddling this point.

The Telegraph has heard a recording of the heated exchange taken by one of the pupils, in which the teacher starts by saying “how dare you – you’ve just really upset someone” by “questioning their identity”.

The pupil responded: “If they want to identify as a cat or something then they are genuinely unwell – crazy.”

The teacher then asks the girls “where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders”, adding: “It is not an opinion.”

Wat? Cat isn’t a gender. No, Harold, pussy is not a gender either, sit down.

The teacher said that “gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is about how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson.”

She added that “there is actually three biological sexes because you can be born with male and female body parts or hormones” and “there are lots of genders – there is transgender, there is a gender who are people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.

That’s not a teacher, that’s a loony!

The girls weren’t having it and the teacher got more and more shouty.

The teacher interjected in a raised voice: “What do you mean you can’t have it? It’s not a law … Cisgender is not necessarily the way to be – you are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.”

The teacher suggested they were homophobic and confused, which the girls denied. When the pupils said their mothers would be on their side, the teacher responded: “Well that’s very sad as well then.”

The teacher said that “if you don’t like it you need to go to a different school”, adding: “I’m reporting you to [senior staff], you need to have a proper educational conversation about equality, diversity and inclusion because I’m not having that expressed in my lesson.”

Good god. This isn’t Twitter, this isn’t the pub, this isn’t Pink News, this is school – CofE school at that, which makes it almost funny. But it’s way more disgusting than funny.

Please, tell us more about the dehumanizing language.

To sum up: “these people are literally like rabid dogs, their language is dehumanizing.”

Oh really?

There are women based on biology & women based on gender identity, both equally valid, says Tatchell. Is that right? Is that how these things work? Is it just women who are epistemically up for grabs in this generous way? Are there also men based on biology and men based on gender identity? Does Peter have sex with the based on gender identity kind? If not why not? Are there gay men based on biology and gay men based on gender identity? Does Peter consider the based on gender identity kind gay men like him, gay men in the same way he is a gay man, comrades in the campaign for the rights of gay men?

Who tf does he think he is telling us that men who claim to be women “based on gender identity” are “equally valid”? As the saying goes, “woman” is not a costume. Woman is not an idea in a man’s head. Woman is not something you can just put on like a hat or a sweatshirt or a smirk for the camera. Women are not a stack of library books waiting for Peter Tatchell to stamp us.

Man so addicted to posting selfies that even this didn’t stop him.

Why would he take a selfie while his mouth is full of mouthwash?

Doesn’t he realize we can see the thick makeup?

The whole world is asking why he’s wearing a bathmat.

It’s time to recycle the Xmas cards.

Guardianista Kathryn Bromwich tells us what we should worry about:

Judging by column inches alone, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing keeping women awake at night is not femicide, sexual assault, plummeting rape convictions, stalking, unequal pay, the erosion of reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, rampant online misogyny, an institutionally sexist police force, healthcare inequality, insufficient childcare provisions, or never being allowed to age.

While all these issues do get reported, a disproportionate amount of attention is given to another topic: men masquerading as trans women in order to gain access to single-sex spaces.

That’s actually not “another topic.” It’s the same topic. Men pretending to be women are relevant to femicide, sexual assault, rampant online misogyny, along with a lot of things Bromwich carefully didn’t mention, such as opportunities in sports.

Over the past few years this idea has become so pervasive it is now inescapable in the media, culture, higher education, politics and sports; Ipso research shows that reporting of trans issues increased by 400% between 2009 and 2019.

Stop right there. The idea under discussion was men in single-sex spaces. That’s a much narrower subject than “trans issues.”

Either way, though, of course “trans issues” are being reported on more. The number of people calling themselves trans has skyrocketed, just for a start. There’s a feedback loop here: trans is a hot topic so lots more people hear about it lots more often so some of them think “Heyyy, that’s for me,” so there are more people calling themselves trans, so there’s more discussion of them, so more of them think “I’m one!” and on the loop goes.

It is worth noting that trans people make up roughly 0.5% of the UK population; instances of men infiltrating women-only spaces are few and far between (in Ireland, where self-identification has been legal since 2015, there has been no discernible adverse impact).

Is this deliberate deception? She can’t really be that dim, can she? It’s not about just literal physical “spaces” – it’s about jobs and promotions and prizes and sports and politics and pretty much everything. It’s about men supplanting us in every part of life they can get at. It’s about men trying to bully us out of feminism, and often succeeding. It’s about women getting fired, punished, boycotted, berated for not agreeing that men can be women. It’s not just the toilet, it’s the ontology.

With so many real threats to women’s safety, it is confounding that this much time and attention is being lavished on a largely hypothetical risk. Every single case of someone being attacked is unacceptable, and everything must be done to protect women’s safety. Many cisgender women who support trans rights, myself included, have personal experience of sexual assault and take the topic extremely seriously. But the main threat to women comes overwhelmingly from men, not from trans women, who should not be penalised for the actions of predatory men. 

Oh dear god. Yes, the main [physical] threat to women comes overwhelmingly from men, and men who call themselves women are men. That’s the whole point. We’re being ordered, with menaces, to agree that men who say they are women are indeed women, and we refuse because men who say they are women are still men. Anyone can say anything; saying isn’t magic. Men are men, regardless of what they say.

Excluding anyone on the basis of biological difference demonstrates a spectacular failure of empathy…

Huh. Does it? So if I exclude elephants from the category “birds” that’s a spectacular failure of empathy?

Also, speaking of empathy, how about the spectacular failure of empathy of hulking men like Lia Thomas and Rachel McKinnon and Austin Killips destroying women’s sports?

What a contemptible pile of nonsense this article is.

Generous of him to provide all those selfies for free then.