Have regained the use of speech somewhat. May still be slightly truncated and explosive.

The oh so clever Indy headline writer calls feminist women terrible people.

The propagandist who created the image goes for the gut.

The Indy scribbler, Ian O’Dell, pours on the verbal acid.

“Gender critical” activists – some of whom proudly brand themselves a ‘terf’ (short for trans-exclusionary radical feminist) in their Twitter bios – are now upset at the anti-poverty organisation Oxfam for an LGBT+ Pride advert painting ‘terfs’ as evil people.

Misogynist activists – some of whom purport to be journalists – have no qualms about displaying their own glaring throbbing misogyny.

[I]t was an illustration displayed as they spoke of “hate groups” which has caused Oxfam to be subject to a social media pile-on – an illustration which saw three people with red eyes and angry faces towering over six figures in the colours of the rainbow.

Red eyes and distorted twisted evil faces.

The central character, a white woman with short brown hair, is seen wearing an orange badge on her which says ‘terf’ – and those opposed to trans rights are saying the image “demonises” older women.

Notice what the “reporter” carefully doesn’t say – the “white woman with short brown hair” is JK Rowling.

The war on women drags on and on and on.

Speechless.

Oh come ON.

She actually says that – the damn fool in the clip.

“The misconception that lesbian means a woman who loves other women um and actually the definition is non-men who are attracted to and love other non-men.”

Is the definition of gay man non-non men who are attracted to and love other non-non men?

Second question: has it been officially ruled that the word “woman” is now 100% taboo?

“Throughout history there have always been gender-nonconforming lesbians? um and it’s interesting to see nowadays that there are folks who kind of try to gatekeep that identity? and only include folks who identify as women um and that’s not what being lesbian is all about, there are trans men who identified as lesbian for many many years and still feel comfurble in that communinny and that idenniny – there are non-binary folks of all kinds who identify as lesbians, there’s just, there’s like a zillion different ways to be a lesbian? ann if that word is comfurble for you then nobody can they can’t gatekeep it from you.”

Suddenly she mashes her hands together.

“I am non-binary transmasculine and I am a lesbian.”

The stupid the stupid the stupid. We’re drowning in it.

More hilarity.

…as in not not wot wot as in not not not not…

Actual gynecologist. And woman.

[Updating to say sorry, the tweet with the question to which the answer is yes was deleted by the tweeter. It was a pair of images of Dylan Mulvaney parodying girlyhood and the question “Is this a woman?”]

I have to wonder what part of her training as a gynecologist tells her Dylan Mulvaney is a woman.

Not fake? An inverted penis is not a fake vagina? Inverted penises are perfectly functional as vaginas? Really?

Replies (and now quote-tweets) are many, scathing, graphic, enraged, and hilarious.

The Public Discourse September 2020:

The American Journal of Psychiatry has issued a major correction to a recent study. The Bränström study reanalysis demonstrated that neither “gender-affirming hormone treatment” nor “gender-affirming surgery” reduced the need of transgender-identifying people for mental health services. Fad medicine is bad medicine, and gender-anxious people deserve better.

And that’s all the more true when the “medicine” isn’t medicine at all. The only purpose of “gender-affirming hormone treatment” and “gender-affirming surgery” is, well, to affirm gender, and affirming gender is a mental/emotional/psychological thing, not a medical thing. Gender-affirming hormones and surgeries don’t treat an illness or heal an injury, they attempt to make people feel less unhappy in their bodies. If people don’t even feel less unhappy in their bodies after the hormones or surgeries maybe stop doing them? Seeing as how the side effects are pretty major?

A major correction has been issued by the American Journal of Psychiatry. The authors and editors of an October 2019 study, titled “Reduction in mental health treatment utilization among transgender individuals after gender-affirming surgeries: a total population study,” have retracted its primary conclusion. Letters to the editor by twelve authors, including ourselves, led to a reanalysis of the data and a corrected conclusion stating that in fact the data showed no improvement after surgical treatment.

So…surgical or pharmacological mutilation with no improvement. Fabulous.

Our co-author Dr. Paul McHugh ended sex reassignment surgeries at John Hopkins Medical School when a study from his department revealed that the mental and social health of patients undergoing sex reassignment surgery did not improve. He adds here that this paper, and even the correction, misdirects clinical thought in many ways. Most crucially it presumes an unproblematic future for these subjects, despite evidence that the psychological state of many will, after surgery, worsen with time. Our experience at Hopkins, when we first recognized that the psychological well-being of patients undergoing surgery did not improve, rested on relatively short-term assessments. The long-term Swedish study of Dhejne demonstrated that the serious fallouts including suicide emerged only after ten years. None of this clinical experience is reflected in this paper or its correction.

Or the news media coverage of the subject or the sloganeering of the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, National Organization for Women, Stonewall…

Thanks to guest for the link.

Depends on how you look at it.

State laws restricting transition care for minors have surged over the past few months, as part of a Republican movement to regulate the lives of transgender youth.

But is there even such a thing as “transition care”? Trans ideology wants us to think so, of course, but trans ideology isn’t the same thing as medical knowledge. In other words “transition” isn’t really “care” – it’s a drastic intervention that may or may not help the patient psychologically. It should be a last resort, not a swiftly and eagerly performed tampering with a patient’s sex.

And it’s tendentious to call regulation of these interventions “regulating the lives of transgender youth.” Restricting drastic (and still experimental) attempts to make people resemble the sex they’re not is not the same as regulating lives. If all this does turn out to be a social contagion and a big mistake, the people who didn’t try to change their sex will be the very very lucky ones.

In a little over two years, Republican-led state legislatures have enacted restrictions on a host of L.G.B.T.Q.-related issues, including gender-affirming medical care, bathroom access, and sports participation for transgender children and teenagers.

None of that has anything to do with LGB. It’s all T.

This year alone, 16 states have enacted bans or significant new restrictions on some or all gender-affirming care for minors, most ending the use of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Shock horror, but what if it turns out that cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are bad for people and should not be offered as “care”? What if there’s no such thing as gender-affirming care but only mutilation and hormone-experimentation? What if for once the Republicans have it right and the Democrats are horribly destructively wrong?

Legislators who support the restrictions have said they are seeking to protect children from irreversible decisions.

And that’s not automatically or obviously evil.

Lawmakers this year have also passed a series of laws prohibiting transgender students from using the restroom that matches their gender identity.

In other words a series of laws keeping boys out of girls’ restrooms. It’s not just obvious that the freedom of boys to go into girls’ toilets is something to cheer on.

The Times moves on to the sports issue, and continues to shrug off the obvious harms to female people.

Republicans have called this issue “a battle for the very survival of women’s sports,” pointing to a debate at the most elite level of sports as well as at high schools and colleges. Critics say that these rules affect very small numbers of students and that the bills keep transgender children and adolescents from joining social activities.

That’s a lie though. Children and adolescents can join social activities according to their sex instead of their Magic Gender. Brushing off the unfairness to girls as “very small numbers” is beneath contempt.

The small but meaningful flare of rage at this…

I’ve never “fluttered my eyes” in my life, nor do I give any “slow, warm smile.” I don’t manipulate, I don’t play coy, I don’t pretend to be adorable or tiny or bashful or cute or kittenish or feeble or dim or helpless or half-witted. I don’t and I never have, even when barely hatched. I despise this kind of thing and it makes me want to vomit to see men pretending to be women and resurrecting all that stupid bullshit. Just stop.

Let’s flop onto the couch and watch a good old cop show mystery comedy soap non-binary top surgery conversation.

The BBC has been criticised over an episode of Casualty which shows a non-binary character discussing top surgery.

A what discussing what? A woman discussing non-medical mastectomy.

The episode, which aired at 8.20pm on Saturday on BBC One, includes a character discussing their “top surgery” and being presented with a surprise cake shaped like breasts.

Her. Her top surgery. She has breasts. She couldn’t have them cut off if she didn’t have them.

Arin Smethurst, the non-binary trans actor who plays Sah, previously told Metro: “Sah is really interesting for me to play for a number of reasons. I think that I’ve figured out more about my queer identity than they have when you meet them in the show.

“I am familiar and comfy with my sexuality and I’m uncovering new parts of my gender identity at a rapid pace. I am non-binary and also transmasculine, which means that I consider myself to lean more towards masculinity. I’m more boy than anything else, but still not a man.”

Above all she’s self-obsessed and convinced that she’s far more interesting than she is.

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on What is wrong with this guy?

He needs to clarify when he’s talking about definitions, and when he’s talking about frames. For example, he claims that “your definition of what “big” means might not be the same as mine,” but I very much doubt that his definition of “big” matches my definition of, say, “green” or “lawn mower”. I suspect that we would all agree that “big” means something like “substantially larger than normal”. How we apply that definition, though, depends on the frame of reference: what’s big for a dog may be small for a horse. And when there’s a mismatch in our frames, we may disagree on whether an exemplar of a category is big or not (think of Europeans and Americans discussing cars).

You can say much the same about his other examples. Something that is wrong goes against the established norms of a frame (2+2=5 in arithmetic; eating pork among Orthodox Jews); we may have different frames, or disagree about the norms within the frame, but we generally understand what someone is trying to say when they say something is wrong.

But there’s really only one relevant frame for the word “woman”, and that’s the human species. Everyone agrees on that frame (how could it be otherwise?), so we are arguing about definitions. What we say a woman is (adult human female) is not what they say, but they haven’t come up with a coherent definition, and they tacitly acknowledge the need for a word or phrase that covers the same semantic ground when the say things like “people with uteruses”.

Still pushing this line. Is he six?

“What is a woman?” is not the same kind of question as “What is big?” or “What is right and what is wrong?”

He must be confusing “What is a woman?” with “Tell me everything there is to know about women.” The first question is just a definitional question with a very concise answer. The second, obviously, is not.

But based on these idiotic deepities we’re supposed to agree that anybody can be a woman just by claiming to be one.

Speaking of religions and their impositions on human beings…yesterday I hopped a bus to the other side of the city to walk along the lake –

– and I paused to allow a woman in full hijab carrying a child to cross the sidewalk in front of me. She too paused to wait for me so we did the politeness standoff for a few seconds but I wouldn’t budge, because she was the one carrying a heavy child. I smiled implacably so she went ahead. She joined a family or maybe a couple of families with several kids. The boys were in shorts and nothing else and playing in the water…and the girls were all in full stifling hijab, and not allowed to play in the water. I saw one girl being tut-tutted by a man – he called out to her and then literally wagged his finger back and forth like a parody bad cop parent. She had stepped into the water a little bit.

Arrrrggghh. It’s not new but I hate it all the same. It was a beautiful day, warm but not unpleasantly hot, bright, clear, sparkling, and there was the lake all temptingly spread out, and there were the boys playing…and the little girls, three or four of them, were all muffled up and not allowed to do anything. Why??? They weren’t old enough to be “a temptation” so there’s not even that bogus reason. It’s just goddy misogyny, that’s all it is. (Note also that none of the men went to take the heavy child from the woman. I guess that’s her burden.)

Frank, you do realize that if you say this about one you’re implying it about all?

Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real”, Pope Francis has said, in what appears to be an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to a town near Rome to pray before a statue that she claimed shed tears of blood.

Right but so Frank how do we know which is which? How does the church know? How do you know? How does anyone know?

“Don’t look there,” the pontiff said during an interview with Rai 1 on Sunday when asked about apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

“There are images of the Madonna that are real, but the Madonna has never drawn [attention] to herself,” he said. “I like to see her with her finger pointing up to Jesus. When Marian devotion is too self-centred, it’s not good. Both in the devotion and in the people who carry it forward.”

Yeah. See, she’s a woman. We can’t be doing with women in the god biz. Women are the other sex, the lower sex, the inferior sex, the weak sex, the stupid sex. Women are servants. Women can be nuns, but not priests. Women can be mothers of jesuses, but there is no Jessica or Jessalina who gets to sit next to Jesus. Women aren’t good enough, ok?

The interview was aired a few days after residents in Trevignano called on Francis to intervene against Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla, who has been nicknamed “the Saint” and “clairvoyant”. For five years she has organised monthly ceremonies in a park overlooking Lake Bracciano where a statue of the Virgin Mary sits in a glass case.

The statue sits there because Scarpulla put it there. I suspect it works much the same way with all those statues of Jesus we see around.

Scarpulla is facing a judicial investigation after a private investigator alleged that the blood stains on the statue came from a pig, and after some of her followers claimed they had been scammed.

Scarpulla, who in the past had been convicted of bankruptcy fraud, created a foundation through which she collected donations, which she reportedly said would go towards setting up a centre for sick children. One man told La Repubblica that he and his wife had donated €123,000 (£106,000) to her foundation.

Terrible. On the other hand all those billions of donations to Catholic churches are absolutely fine.

Telegraph columnist Zoe Stempel wrote a piece about the lunacy and destructiveness of trans ideology, so Jonathan “India” Willoughby sent her an unsolicited selfie. Ick.

Kathleen Stock on that day out in Oxford, including some details from a previous day out in Cambridge:

Life as a gender-critical feminist can be quite strange. The first time I ever entered the Oxford Union, I was a 19-year-old fresher. All I really remember is getting very drunk on peach schnapps, crashing into a trestle table, and being asked to leave.

Fast forward 31 years, and I’m walking in there again, surrounded by security and being chased by photographers, accidentally dressed like a cut-price Kendall Roy from Succession. The image will make national front pages the next day.

It’s a very droll image.

Cambridge also provided a stunning bit of theatre: an undercover non-binary student called Kass cunningly disguised as a six-foot-plus man in a tuxedo. The results of Kass’s intervention upon my emotional equilibrium can be seen in the Channel 4 documentary Gender Wars, which coincidentally aired on the same day as the Oxford event.

Under false pretences, Kass had auditioned to speak for my side of the motion, arriving at the Union in full male-associated attire and dining convivially with me first, before sensationally dropping the act in order to denounce me as “disgusting” to everyone in the chamber. And things only went downhill from there. I was the only female speaker in the debate. Standing at full height next to me during their speech, Kass described to the audience how frightening it was to walk about the streets of Cambridge at night thanks to women like me.

That kind of thing. How do they manage it? I’ll never understand. Huge guy, towers over her, gets up to whine about how frightened he is because of women like her. And why because of women like her? She’s not campaigning to persecute him or people like him (assuming he’s trans or otherwise gender special). If he does fear violence on the streets of Cambridge at night does he really think it’s because of Kathleen Stock?

In comparison to all this, the Oxford audience this week barely made any effort to make me feel awful. In fact, they offered enthusiastic applause as I entered the room. And in an unprecedented turn of events, many of my main objectors seemed actually to have read my book.

Even the four protestors who tried to create a rumpus inside the building were relatively meek. One stood up and shouted something, then left. Two others also shouted slogans rather apologetically, unfurled a flag, and threw some leaflets before hastily exiting too. The most intrepid of the four, dramatically unveiling a “No More Dead Trans Kids” T-shirt, used superglue to stick one hand to the floor right in front of me, but still complied docilely when five police officers — armed with blue plastic gloves and solvent, a lot of forms to fill in, and some very patient smiles — eventually arrived to sort it all out. The careful act of glueing itself seemed a bit Blue Peter.

“Use just enough glue, children, not too much or you’ll get it all over everything.”

It seemed to me that the four protestors were not representative. I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that many in the chamber were pushing back against the sort of tired and hyperbolic cliches usually wielded to shut them up. Certainly, there was little apparent sympathy in the room for the superglued superhero, eventually escorted out to the sound of good-natured cheers and some booing. At times, the atmosphere bordered on riotous rather than rioting.

Could they be getting bored with the melodrama at last? That would be good. That would be brilliant.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A substantial cohort of self-identified feminists.

For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means.

Well, that says more about you and what you think “makes sense” than it does about feminism.

Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways.

And right here, we have something that makes no sense. Trans people (can we have a definition, please?) are mostly saying that the physical, material, biological basis for the oppression of women means fuck all, and can be “identified” into and out of willy nilly. Men can become women, and women can become men. While certainly “new,” it’s not so much an “illuminating insight” into the meaning of feminism as its complete negation. This is at the heart of “feminism is for everyone.” Game over, case closed, turn out the lights when you shut the door.

…a substantial cohort of self-identified feminists have opposed trans peoples’ existence as trans.

The implication being that these “self-identified feminists” aren’t really feminists at all. Yet being a feminist only requires that a woman espouses and upholds a particular set of beliefs and principles grounded on the idea and goal of the liberation of females from patriarchal oppression. You’re attempting to deny that they are feminists by unilaterally redefining what the word “feminist” means. Well congratulations; you’re making their point for them, as men who claim to be “self-identifed” women can only be so by redefining what the word “woman” means.

Unlike feminism, which any woman can claim as her own, there are no beliefs or principles that a man can hold which will make him a woman. He might as well (and with as much success) claim to become invisible through sheer force of will. A man can no more identify into being female than he can identify out of maleness. Maleness is a life sentence into which one is born, a condition as ineluctable as being made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons of ordinary matter. One is no more “assigned” maleness than one is “assigned” one’s molecular structure. That’s not how these things work, and to pretend otherwise is delusional. This is the “illuminating, insightful” view of sex and gender that trans people have to offer? It is a narcissistic fantasy. Utter bullshit. To defend such a nonsensical view and enforce others’ adherence to it is wicked and harmful.

Because the material state of reality is forever out of reach, trans identified males have nothing but the costume, cosmetics, and mannerisms of patriarchal “femininity” to proclaim as the essence of “womanhood.” They’re like the brutalized rhesus monkeys clinging to the ersatz terrycloth covered wire “mothers” for some semblance of comfort, and god help anyone who tries to explain that their wardrobe and comportment do not make them “women.” If they weren’t so bloody-minded and bullying in their demands for access to female single-sex spaces, one might almost feel sorry for them.

Catharine MacKinnon Exploring Transgender Law and Politics:

For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means. Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways.

She must have watched a different movie from the one I’ve seen.

And for some time, escalating since 2004 with the proposed revisions in the UK Gender Recognition Act,[1] a substantial cohort of self-identified feminists have opposed trans peoples’ existence as trans.

No, not existence as trans. What we oppose is the insistence – backed up with every form of punishment available – that men who are trans are literally women in every sense. We oppose the intrusions and thefts and insults that stem from that insistence. We oppose the punishments meted out to us for disagreeing with the dogma that men literally are women if they say they are.

Much of the current debate has centered on (endlessly obsessed over, actually) whether trans women are women. Honestly, seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling.

Really? Really? How can we challenge the imperatives and limitations if we don’t know which people are subject to them and which people get to impose them?

Would MacKinnon say the same thing if there were a fad for trans-racialism, and a lot of privileged white kids started bullying and punishing non-white people for declining to accept the white kids’ “identity”? I don’t know, of course, but I strongly doubt it.

One might think that trans women—assigned male at birth, leaving masculinity behind, drawn to and embracing womanhood for themselves—would be welcomed.

I tried to look at it that way for a time. It does make a kind of sense. But it was always an attempt, I never really succeeded, and over time the lack of fit just became too obvious. They didn’t leave masculinity behind. They put their masculinity in a skirt and bullied us harder than ever.

Oh come on BBC.

Pride 2023 on BBC Three

I Kissed A Boy: The Reunion

Ahead of the final of BBC Three’s ground-breaking dating series, I Kissed A Boy, this one-off studio special will see Dannii Minogue getting the latest goss from the boys (their love lives, their newfound fame, any lingering chemistry…)…

This is Gay

As part of a batch of brand new BBC Comedy Short Films, This is Gay – written and created by Kirk Flash – makes it’s linear debut on BBC Three. They’re called ‘gays’ – but what are they? Who are they? And why? Part mockumentary, part sketch show, This is Gay attempts to answer these important questions…

Keeping up with Krystal Versace

Keeping Up With Krystal Versace: Keep up with Drag Race UK Series 3 winner Krystal Versace as she prepares for her solo show with her drag family…

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK

Another chance for viewers to enjoy the iconic third series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK as Mama Ru presides over twelve of the nation’s most fabulous queens…

Olly Alexander: Growing up Gay

In this eye-opening film, young pop culture icon Olly Alexander explores why the gay community is more vulnerable to mental health issues, as he opens up about his own long-term battles with depression…

Lily: A Transgender Story

Filmed over five years, this is the story of Lily Jones and her transition from male to female – a journey which began when she was 15 and living with her farming family in mid-Wales…

Pride

BAFTA nominated comedy drama film. In 1984, with Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in power, a group of lesbian and gay activists, led by Mark Ashton, find unlikely allies in a collective of Welsh miners taking industrial action following pit closures…

Oh look! Finally the word “lesbian” appears…in the last item on the page, in combination with “gay.” No item about lesbians and lesbians only. Plural gay men, plural drag/trans, but zero standalone lesbians.

Happy Pride y’all!

H/t Julie Bindel.

Well that’s the best headline I’ve seen in a while.

Utah primary schools ban Bible for ‘vulgarity and violence’

Right on! The vulgarity is off the charts.

Utah’s Republican government passed a law in 2022 banning “pornographic or indecent” books from schools.

In other words they made a noose for their own necks. The Bible is hella indecent.

The Utah decision was made this week by the Davis School District north of Salt Lake City after a complaint filed in December 2022. Officials say they have already removed the seven or eight copies of the Bible they had on their shelves, noting that the text was never part of students’ curriculum.

The committee did not elaborate on its reasoning or which passages contained “vulgarity or violence”.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper, the parent who complained said the King James Bible “has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition”, referring to the 2022 book-ban law.

Yer darn tootin’.