Jolyon Maugham urging more more more puberty blockers.

Updating to add – the replies to Maugham’s tweet are almost all in dissent. That’s encouraging.

Trump’s incredulity:

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Mr Trump said he had been summoned to appear on Tuesday afternoon at a federal court in Miami, Florida, where the charges against him will be read.

“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States,” Mr Trump wrote.

That’s another symptom of his profound stupidity. He thought he could get away with anything because of his sacred status. Of course, he wouldn’t have said the same thing about Obama.

Prosecutors had also presented evidence in court in Washington DC, but a decision to file the indictment in southern Florida instead may offer some consolation for the Trump team.

Legal experts say the state – where the former Republican president is popular – is likely to produce a less Democratic-leaning jury pool than if the case had been prosecuted in the US capital.

And the judge will be Aileen Cannon, the hack Trump appointed who is so eager to give him every break she can.

Golly, I wasn’t expecting that while cruising for Trump news – the four children lost in the Amazon have all been found alive.

[Colombian] President Gustavo Petro said finding the group was a “magical day”, adding: “They were alone, they themselves achieved an example of total survival which will remain in history.”

The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group. Mr Petro shared a photograph of several members of the military and Indigenous community caring for the siblings, who had been missing for 40 days. One of the rescuers held a bottle up to the mouth of the smallest child, while another fed one of the other children from a mug with a spoon.

Updating to add:

A dog on one of the search teams went missing…he was following a set of footprints…

This has to stop. It’s journalistic malpractice that is a massive danger to women.

A more accurate headline and less of a threat to women. It’s not women who are running around threatening to kill people, and news media have to stop saying it is.

The man who threatened Kellie-Jay Keen:

from Norm Eisen

Good god. What’s coming out is…I’ve run out of words for it.

Screechy Monkey told us to see Robert Costa’s thread on the subject, so I see it, and holy shit.

(Thread) learning some new things this morning about WHY this all happened and the motivation, especially for the audio from 2021 discussing classified material. In short, it comes down to one person: *Milley.* Trump loathed his coverage in press, in books, per multiple sources…

— Robert Costa (@costareports) June 9, 2023

This isn’t that loony guy in the park, this is former president.

So what began as an attempt to keep some docs from Crossfire Hurricane + other episodes that frustrated him, eventually became situation where he began to cite what he had about an issue that gnawed at him: Milley's public profile + what he saw as reputation building by the Gen.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) June 9, 2023

Why, yes, that is very damning indeed.

How he carefully stored these documents:

That top left one? That’s the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago.

One interesting detail in the Trump indictment –

On two occasions in 2021, Trump showed classified documents to others, according to the indictment. One instance, which The Washington Post has previously reported on, was a July 2021 meeting at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., when Trump showed a writer, publisher and two members of his staff what he described as a “plan of attack” that Trump claimed was prepared for him by the Defense Department and a senior military official. None of the individuals present at the meeting, which was audio-recorded, had a security clearance.

Ah. He kept the stuff as souvenirs…he wanted to relive the glory days, when important people prepared plans of attack for him – for HIM, little Donnie from Queens, wouldja believe it?

Trump indicted.

Former president Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he had been indicted in federal court in Florida over the classified information found at his Mar-a-Lago home. 

…

Trump is charged under a part of the Espionage Act that bars willful retention of national defense information by someone not authorized to have it, according to people familiar with the case. Such information is defined as “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Technically, that information does not have to be classified, but in practice the law is almost exclusively used to prosecute retention of classified material.

A conviction does not require any evidence of a desire to disseminate the classified information; having it in an unauthorized location is enough. But the crime requires a “willful” mishandling of material “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Charges are generally not brought without some aggravating factor making clear the retention was not accidental — such as evidence of intent to share the information, signs of disloyalty to the U.S. government, or simply the amount of documents taken.

Do we think Trump has provided enough signs of disloyalty to the US government?

Obstruction of justice: Trump is also charged [with] obstruction of justice for his alleged efforts to stymie the federal investigation, according to people familiar with the charges. People familiar with the investigation say the government gathered evidence that Trump directed his aides to hide classified papers in advance of an FBI search and told advisers and lawyers to falsely assert that all classified documents in his possession had been returned to the federal government.

False statements: Jim Trusty, an attorney for Trump, said on CNN that the former president is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators. It is unclear so far what those particular statements are. Publicly, Trump has suggested without evidence that FBI agents planted classified evidence at his home and claimed that anything sensitive found there had been declassified.

Grinding slowly.

First

A couple of points.

One, his claim is stupid and wrong. There are some surface resemblances, but the actual substance is very different.

Two, it’s quite staggering how bad he is at professional talking. That’s what professors do, it’s the “profess” in “professional” and “professor” – they talk well. This buffoon does it almost as badly as Kathleen Stock’s hilarious interlocutor at the Oxford Union. A million “kind of”s and almost as many “you know”s. He talks fast instead of well, and the result is a machine-gun delivery of stuttering and repetition with very little content. Why did Oxford make him an endowed professor?

Baroness Nicholson sent a letter:

“The purpose of this letter is [to] request you ensure this highly political exercise in social engineering is not allowed anywhere near healthcare leaders.”

“On the basis of a misrepresentation of the Equality Act”

“The issue of rapes and serious sexual assaults in NHS hospitals is already serious enough.”

“This is a partial and prejudicial report.”

News on the gender incongruence services front:

Today (Friday 9 June) NHS England has published an interim service specification for specialist gender incongruence services for children and young people to support Phase 1 providers in developing their new services. The public consultation on this draft interim service specification ran on the NHS England website for 45 days from 20 October to 4 December 2022. It received 5,183 responses in total. We would like to sincerely thank all those individuals and organisations who took the time to submit responses to this consultation. Read more about the consultation feedback and NHS England’s response.

We have previously made clear, including the draft interim service specification we consulted on, the intention that the NHS will only commission puberty supressing hormones as part of clinical research. This approach follows advice from Dr Hilary Cass’ Independent Review highlighting the significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments.

We are now going out to targeted stakeholder testing on an interim clinical commissioning policy proposing that, outside of a research setting, puberty suppressing hormones should not be routinely commissioned for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence/dysphoria.

It’s a step.

H/t latsot

Anna Slatz at Reduxx:

A Seattle court has ruled that a female-only nude spa lacks the “constitutional right” to bar males from their facilities. The decision comes after the spa sued the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC), which had forced them to change their sex-exclusive policy due to the complaint of a transgender patron.

Human rights are for trans people, especially male trans people. They’re not for women. Obviously.

In May of 2020, a trans-identified male submitted a complaint to the WSHRC alleging discrimination on the basis of his gender identity.

Haven Wilvich had sought a membership at the Olympus Spa in January of 2020, but had been denied on the basis that he had not undergone “gender reassignment” surgeries and his penis was fully intact.

So?????? He says he’s a woman, and that’s the only criterion.

…the WSHRC ruled that the spa had violated Washington anti-discrimination law, stating that the female-only policy “denies services to transgender women who have not had surgery … because their physical appearance is not ‘consistent’ with the traditional understanding of biological women.”

Well that’s dishonest manipulative bullshit. It’s not about “appearance” – the penis can be deployed to rape women, and that’s not actually a rare or astonishing circumstance. The point is not “Oh no he doesn’t look like our antiquated idea of a woman,” the point is “This is for women and he’s a man.”

Haven Wilvich, the trans-identified male whose complaint resulted in the loss of the female-only space, boasted about his success on Facebook after the initial WSHRC ruling.

He doesn’t look like that.

The Telegraph reports:

Patients may be found guilty of discrimination if they refuse the care of a transgender medic, according to new NHS guidance.

Health bosses have been warned that patients have no right to be told a healthcare worker’s assigned sex at birth.

No rights for patients; rights are only for transgender nurses and doctors. Patients are scum, transgender nurses and doctors are Ascended Beings.

However, transgender health workers can choose not to treat patients if they feel uncomfortable doing so, the report by NHS Confederation says.

Of course, because only transgender people have rights. Non-transgender people have only the obligation to submit.

The report, published earlier this month in partnership with the LGBT Foundation, says patients can only request care from a same-sex staff member in limited circumstances, such as if they are having an intimate examination.

It states that when a patient requests an employee administering care to be a woman or a man, “the comfort of the staff member should be prioritised”.

I thought I was being very slightly hyperbolic, but no, they actually say it out loud. The priority is not the patient, the priority is the staff member. If it were a matter of violent patients I could see saying the safety of staff is the priority, but this is the “comfort,” meaning the comfort of being affirmed in a fantasy.

Patients with dementia “should still be challenged” if they express discriminatory views about transgender staff, the 97-page guide states, while their relatives “may be removed from the premises” if they do the same.

But a non-binary medic can refuse to treat a patient, with the advice stating they “should not be forced to deliver care if this would cause undue distress or invalidate their lived experience of gender”.

Who wrote this shite?

What are these privileged bitches complaining about now? Being groped on crowded public transportation? Wah wah wah, big deal.

It was the morning rush hour in Tokyo. The train was packed and rocky. Takako (not her real name) was on her way to school. The 15-year-old tried to hold on to a grab bar. Suddenly, she felt a hand pressing on her behind. She thought someone had accidentally bumped into her. But the hand started to grope her.

And it went on happening, nearly every day.

Many women like Takako are targeted in public by sexual predators. In some cases, they face another violation – the attack is filmed and the videos are sold online.

Most videos follow the same pattern – a man secretly films a woman from behind and follows her on to a train. Seconds later, he sexually abuses her. The men act discreetly, and their victims can seem totally unaware. These graphic videos are then listed on the websites for sale.

So? They’re still alive aren’t they? Unlike all the trans women who kill themselves several times a day.

“Chikan” is a Japanese term describing sexual assault in public, especially groping on public transport. It also describes the offenders themselves. Chikan perpetrators typically take advantage of crowds, and the victims’ fear of causing a scene. In Japan, speaking too directly and openly may be seen as rude.

While filming oneself sexually assaulting women and girls is not? Interesting cultural quirk.

The Japanese police encourage victims and eyewitnesses to speak up, but the crime is far from being eradicated. The problem is so widespread that even the UK and Canadian governments warn travellers to Japan about it.

Chikan has been normalised by its prominence in Japan’s adult entertainment industry. One of the most popular types of pornography in the country – the Chikan genre – has spread to other Asian countries.

Publicly harassing or assaulting women in public is normalized in a lot of places. It’s almost as if women are widely viewed as inferior and subordinate.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I finally get it.

Well ok then. Stand down. It all makes sense now. Plus it’s so adorable.

It’s the old Lone Ranger joke for the millionth time – “Who’s ‘we,’ Kemosabe?” Charles Blow at the Times says “we” a lot but there is no such “we.”

As the L.G.B.T.Q. community celebrates Pride Month, we are besieged by a malicious, coordinated legislative attack.

But there is no such community, at least not without some cautions and stipulations. It’s a very lumpy unwieldy community if it is a community. What unites lesbians and trans women exactly? Especially, what unites them in an environment where all the solidarity is for the trans women and none of it is for the lesbians unless they pretend men can be lesbians every bit as much as women can?

There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.

But most of the bills are about trans issues, not LGB ones.

In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.

Like that. That’s not an anti-LGBT law. It’s not even an anti-T law, properly considered, but even if you agree it’s anti-T that doesn’t make it anti-LGB. But of course Blow shouldn’t be calling it anti-trans to protect children from drastic surgeries. It does seem like overkill to pass laws about pronouns, but then again, it also seems idiotic and ridiculous to teach children nonsense about pronouns.

As Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, recently told me, the number of signed bills is likely to move higher: “There’s 12 more that are sitting on governors’ desks, so you could be at nearly 100 new restrictions on the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community by the end of this cycle.”

For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.

But there is no emergency for LGB people. It’s all about the T, but lumping them together makes it look more tragic and scary.

The way this kind of terrorism works is that it not only punishes expression, condemns identities and cuts off avenues for receiving care but also creates an aura of hostility and issues grievous threats. It’s like burning a cross on someone’s lawn: It’s an attempt to frighten people into compliance and submission.

No, it is not like burning a cross on someone’s lawn. Trans people don’t have a four century history of forced unpaid labor and the violence that backs it. Trans people are not in any way comparable to the descendants of enslaved people.

And one of the saddest aspects of this episode has been seeing a small but vocal group of people who claim to be liberal — and who one would think would be allies — aid and abet the arguments of transphobes.

Some are feminists who have essentially argued that full inclusion of trans women is anti-feminist — that it’s harmful to or an assault on the rights of cisgender women.

Because it is. People reading this already know the ways it is so I won’t belabor them, but it’s definitely one of the saddest aspects of this car crash that men like Blow simply brush them aside.

H/t J.A.

Alison Phipps has a new paper [pdf] out, so I’ve read a little. It’s every bit as horrible as I expected, and more so. Page 3 –

In January 2019, at a joint panel with far-right think-tank the Heritage Foundation, Women’s Liberation Front board member Kara Dansky claimed that if the US Equality Act (designed to protect sexual orientation and gender identity) was passed, the following would happen:

Male rapists will go to women’s prisons and will likely assault female inmates as has already happened in the UK. Female survivors of rape will be unable to contest male presence in women’s shelters. Men will dominate women’s sports. Girls who would have taken first place will be denied scholastic opportunity. Women who use male pronouns to talk about men may be arrested, fined, and banned from social media platforms. Girls will stay home from school when they have their periods to avoid harassment by boys in mixed sex toilets. Girls and women will no longer have the right to ask for female medical staff or intimate care providers, including elderly or disabled women who are at serious risk of sexual abuse.

Pleas for protection from this dystopia conveniently disregard the fact that in countries that allow gender self-identification, such as Ireland, Malta, Norway and Portugal, none of these things have happened. Because the facts are not relevant – what is really being evoked here is the ‘purity’ and ‘innocence’ defended in white supremacist culture and the sexualization of the ‘rabble’ that stalked fears of anticolonial resistance.

She doesn’t say how she knows “none of these things have happened” in the countries named. We know at least some of them have happened in Ireland (Barbie Kardsashian anyone?) and I suspect Phipps doesn’t actually know they haven’t happened in Malta, Norway, and Portugal. But whether she’s right or not, the leap to the next sentence is simply disgusting. I can’t read her; she’s too loathsome. Page 3 will have to be as far as I got.

After reading yesterday about Oxfam’s embrace of the fake feminism of Alison Phipps I thought I should see what she’s up to.

Well there you go – same fake feminism – same fake feminism using fake feminism to trash feminism.

Yay! Enjoy this “takedown” of feminism that’s not about men who pretend to be women! Join Alison Phipps in saying feminist women are evil privileged white supremacists while men who pretend to be women are all the new Emmett Till.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on We know less about a person than before.

“LGBTQ+” is an example of a term that gives us less information than we had when the individual letters were broken out into separate attributes. And I suspect that’s a large part of LGBTQ+’s appeal.

LGBTQ+ basically just means “different in a sex and gender kind of way.” Which is deliberately more vague than “sexually attracted to persons of the same sex.”

Deliberately more vague is appealing to lazy journalists who don’t want to bother being specific.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to formerly-LGB-focused lobby groups who want to capture a broader demographic.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to straight people who aren’t actually sexually attracted to persons of the same sex, but who want to claim a place in the rainbow parade now that it’s got cachet.

Deliberately more vague is appealing to men for whom their specific “sex and gender” difference constitutes having sexual paraphilias that they’re too embarrassed to openly admit to; and it’s more appealing to the people who have to interact with these paraphilic men in their family or work life, who would rather not have to address head-on the kinky elephant in the room.

And deliberately more vague is most appealing to the many young people who are struggling to reconcile themselves with the bodies they inhabit, which each come equipped with a sex and a sexual orientation of their own, outside of their inhabitants’ control, and often ill-fitting with the identities these young people are trying to curate online so that they can fit in with their peers.

The primary problem with labelling people — especially young people — as “LGBTQ+” is that we’re taking information away: we’re saying, there’s a cohort of kids who are “different” and it doesn’t actually matter how they’re different. Because a lot of people believe that once someone has found his or her (or their) way to the LGBTQ+ club, they’ve found their oasis of acceptance, free from the malign influence of the far right and the Christian conservatives, and everything that comes afterwards must therefore play out organically without friction or bias, in a kind of utopian paradise where all the misfits find their perfect fit. And that void of critical thinking is irresistible to charlatans, profiteers, crooks and liars.