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.

Not so much circular as spiral.

If the Wickes boss had said “axe-wielding murderers are not welcome” there would have been no backlash but so what? We’re supposed to think “therefore it’s fine for the Wickes boss to say people with gender critical views are not welcome” but Tatchell’s analogy is not analogous. Knowing that men are not women is not analogous to racism.

It’s just one of those Big Lies we hear so much about, to claim that women who say men are not women are comparable to racists. Also – you know what else is not comparable to what? Genderism is not comparable to anti-racism. They’re not alike in any way.

It’s actually pretty disgusting for white men to compare themselves to Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and James Chaney. White men qua white men are not relegated to subordinate inferior exploitable status from birth because they are men. Peter Tatchell has no business appropriating anti-racism to glorify men who like to pretend to be women.

The local NPR station, KUOW, reports on a clash between virtue and profit:

The Seattle-based boutique ice cream company, Molly Moon’s, has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Seattle over alleged revenue losses during and after the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, also known as CHOP, in 2020.

The local ice cream chain claims the city violated its constitutional rights by creating a “government-authorized invasion” and acting with “deliberate indifference towards the safety and property” of its store. The suit is seeking an unidentified amount in damages.

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, the Seattle Police Department left the East Precinct headquarters. Protestors then occupied a 10-block area surrounding a Molly Moon’s location.

The suit alleges that SPD’s decision to “abandon and close off” the area encouraged a “hostile occupation of the neighborhood.” It added that it left the neighborhood “unchecked by police, unserved by fire and emergency health services, and inaccessible to the public.”

I remember. It didn’t motivate me to zip over there on the bus to stroll around, I have to admit. Capitol Hill (the larger neighborhood surrounding the CHOP) is always a bit raffish, seedy, noisy, grubby on and around Broadway, but part of the joke here is that the rest of it contains some of the oldest biggest grandest mansions in the city, dating from the early 20th century when magnates were flaunting their magnatehood. I guess that’s “multicultural” yeah?

Due to fears of more violence and safety concerns, the store closed for multiple days. In the past, CEO Molly Moon Neitzel stated that she supports police reform.

In a statement, Molly Moon said the suit is not meant to undermine protestor’s messages.

Cool cool. Can you say “having it both ways”?

H/t Sastra

Originally a comment by Rob on Fundamentally unjust.

I listened to an interview yesterday with Jenny Nguyen. She’s a chef who has opened a bar in Portland called the Sports Bra, that plays only women’s sport on the screens and is billed as inclusive. Jenny is a lesbian and played basketball as a youth. She says the bar is not a lesbian bar, but it is designed for lesbians, but anyone can come.

During the interview she was asked about trans women in women’s sport. She replied that it was her, and the bar’s, position that TWAW. When pressed about the advantage that TW retain, she said she didn’t know anything about that, but given what TW and ‘others in that space’ tell her about the difficulty in being trans, she was sure that any claimed benefits would be negated by those other difficulties. Frankly I wanted to scream at the willful ignorance and obvious grovelling deference to trans. Also, the way she referred to terfs you could feel the disgust and contempt, so clearly gender critical women, even if lesbian, are not welcome in her inclusive space.

It is though possibly symptomatic of the position of many non-trans supporters of that movement. They so desperately want to be kind and include these poor downtrodden most victimised people, that they blind themselves to any contrary information, refuse to process the arguments against the claims, ‘other’ those who are gender critical (all while imagining that they are committing genocide). People like that are unlikely to be peaked anytime soon. It was unsaid, but I think pretty obvious that in the cause of supporting trans women, if that means a few girls and women have to be thrown under the bus, well, that’s the price to pay for a good cause.

Replies are hilarious, I’m afraid I’m going to have to share more of them.

Oh no! What damn fools have been cheering on the Orcas?! They’ll be up here ramming our windows next! What were people thinking?!!

Orcas are not on social media? Oh come on now – I like a contrarian as much as the next person but there’s a limit.

Sometimes people just don’t think things through.

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

Think it through, liberals in Hamtramck (pronounced Hamtrammick). Are you sure a theocratic city council is what you want? Not all Muslims are theocrats, of course, but some are, and it’s a very theocratic-leaning religion. I wouldn’t rejoice for a second if Seattle elected a Catholic-majority city council, or a Southern Baptist-majority one, or a Haredi Jewish-majority one.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

What I’m saying. “Muslim” means something. There are secular Muslims, who view their Muslimitude as an ethnic identity or similar. Many Jews and Christians are like that. But it’s risky to assume everyone is.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

See, just because Trump enjoys bullying Muslim immigrants doesn’t mean all Muslims are warm caring pillars of tolerance.

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election.

Whew. So close to getting the point but it flew right past. News flash: multiculturalism means different cultural values. You know what that means? Values you don’t share, values you hate, values that are bad values. It sounds like such a friendly word but sometimes different cultural values cannot be reconciled. How had the liberals of Hamtramck not noticed that?

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

It’s sad. People really do need to take on board the fact that religions can be cruel, harsh, narrow, unjust, wrong on the facts and the morals. They’re not just a bit of color; they have substance, lots of it.

This is hilarious, if only Pink News could see it. Demi Lovato stopped “using gender neutral pronouns” because omigod it was so exhausting. I’m pretty sure I know why it was so exhausting.

Demi Lovato, who now uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, publicly came out as non-binary with a preference for they/them pronouns in a moving video in May 2021, just weeks after coming out as pansexual.

Oh I bet that was tremendously moving. It’s always moving watching narcissists tell us all about their pronouns and opinions and struggles and feelings. It’s especially moving that it was just weeks after she came out as pansexual. We should all start coming out as things; apparently it’s very important and moving. I’ll start: I’m coming out as fond of sunsets.

Since then, the “Cool for the Summer” singer has reflected on their gender fluidity as feeling “equally masculine and feminine” and their approach to keeping their identity “open and free” as their gender evolves over time.

Oh oh oh have they? That sounds so unique and fascinating and profound and new.

In May 2022, they made headlines again after quietly updating their pronouns to include she/her again on their Instagram bio. At the time they clarified that they weren’t “paying attention” to the reaction of “ignorant people”, and later added that the pronoun change was due to “feeling more feminine” in an interview with Tamara Dhia on the Spout podcast.

They made headlines? For that? Really?

“I constantly had to educate people and explain why I identified with those pronouns. It was absolutely exhausting,” the 30-year-old singer-songwriter told GQ.

“I just got tired. But for that very reason I know that it is important to continue spreading the word.”

No wait hang on. It’s the other way around. The reason it was so absolutely exhausting is that you were talking complete bullshit. That’s why you had to keep explaining. You see? If you decide to have boutique pronouns for yourself, and you run around announcing the fact, people are going to ask questions. If you want a quiet life without question-exhaustion, skip the boutique parts of speech. It works wonders.

Elsewhere in the interview, they shared their exhaustion at the lack of gender-neutral spaces and the difficulties navigating everyday life as a genderqueer person forced to conform to binary ideas of gender.

“I face this every day,” the Grammy-nominated artist continued. “For example, in public toilets. Having to access the women’s bathroom, even though I don’t completely identify with it.”

Jesus christ. I’ve run out of scornful jokes. These people are so pathetic. Go donate to Ukrainian refugees, campaign against fossile fuels (without glueing yourself to any art works), climb a mountain, watch a sunset, read a book. Do things that aren’t about you.

Pink News sneers at female athletes for wanting fair competition.

An athlete declaring herself the “fastest girl in Connecticut” is suing the state after she lost a race to a trans athlete.

A male athlete. She doesn’t care that he’s trans, she cares that he’s a male competing in female races. Pink News would care too if it had any sense, because there would be less resistance to trans ideology if it gave a damn about fairness to women.

A reference guide for the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) policy states that it would be “fundamentally unjust” to prevent trans athletes from taking part in gender-specific sports categories.

Again. Never mind about trans athletes, just keep males out of women’s sports.

Since filing the complaint, [Chelsea] Mitchell has said on multiple occasions, including in an opinion piece for Fox News, that the lawsuit is about “decrying the unfairness” she claims occurred due to transgender competitors being able to run against cis women.

Again. Not “transgender competitors”; male competitors. The issue isn’t transgender, it’s male. It’s trans ideology that has so many people deluded that men in women’s sports is fair, but the lawsuit is about male competitors.

Defending both Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood is the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut (ACLU), which has said the plaintiff’s arguments are “filled with hypotheticals”.

ACLU LGBTQ+ and HIV Project staff attorney Joshua Block said: “The facts are that these plaintiffs repeatedly outperformed Andraya and Terry, and won an impressive collection of first place trophies in the process.

“There is enough room on the victory podium for transgender girls too,” Block continued. “Under Title IX, all girls, including transgender girls, should be able to participate fully and equally in athletics, in accordance with who they are.”

But transgender girls aren’t girls, which is the whole point. Yes they should be able to participate fully and equally in athletics in accordance with who they are, but who they are is young men.