Confusing.

The Radical Left Fascists?

Also, why the commas before and after “quickly”? They don’t, make, any sense.

Retorts on the bird.

On the bright side – that appalling article in The Nation is getting absolutely hosed, both on Twitter and in comments on the article. The more scathing the comment the more upvotes it gets. The rare comment that agrees with the article gets a mass of downvotes. This is good news.

KEITH DANISH says:

May 12, 2023 at 1:24 pm

Sad to see women-hating made respectable.

204 approve, 7 disapprove.

nina rodrigues says:

May 12, 2023 at 7:22 pm

“There is no evidence that trans women have an unfair advantage over the others.” Oh please, there are very good reasons why men cannot compete with women in sports. Darts? Perhaps? I’m not transphobic. I know trans women and trans men. Have you asked yourselves why there’s no one complaining about trans men competing with others in men’s sports? Why women do? What’s the difference? There are difference in endurance, speed, strength, muscles and so on. That’s the way it is. Don’t bully the women for stating the facts.

216 yay, 4 nay.

The most recent and my favorite:

Edward Szewczyk says:

May 13, 2023 at 9:24 pm

Maybe female swimmers become “transphobic” because they work their asses off, getting up at 4:30 every morning to swim God knows how many miles, lift weights & do whatever else they do to prepare & improve, so they resent having their efforts defeated because trans-women, who have the strength, endurance, coordination and athletic ability of men, are creating unfair competition.

194 yes, 3 no.

Hey, The Nation, ask a stupid question why doncha.

“a frenzy” – yes those hysterical women, how dare they get in “a frenzy” just because a large ruthless self-serving man forces himself on them and cheats them at their own sport.

The author of this garbage is one Frankie de la Cretaz. Google turns up the information that “they” is a freelance writer and a “they” After a lot of scrolling I still can’t find whether they is a he-they or a she-they. From the ruthless smugness and smug ruthlessness I’m guessing they’s a he.

The question is why The Nation sees fit to publish this kind of offensive openly misogynist insulting dreck.

The title is insulting – “How Women’s Swimming Got So Transphobic” – it’s not transphobic for women to want women’s sports to go on being for women. It’s sexist to call women names for wanting to keep their own sports.

The subtitle is insulting – “Almost no other sport is as hostile to trans athletes—and that’s because its culture created the perfect conditions for transphobia to take root.” I repeat – it’s not transphobic for women to want women’s sports to go on being for women. Also it’s not “hostile to trans athletes” to keep men out of women’s sports. The issue is not that he’s trans, it’s that he’s male. Male trans people could solve this problem in a heartbeat by not bullying women.

So. The article.

When Lia Thomas first entered the women’s NCAA swimming scene in 2021, her presence was immediately felt. National media outlets became obsessed with her. She got the kind of attention rarely given to swimming athletes outside of the Olympics.

Thomas was good, but she wasn’t the next Simone Biles of her field. So what explained such a frenzy? Simple: Thomas was a transgender woman having success in the women’s division.

No shit, Sherlock. He got a lot of attention because he was cheating women in their own sport. That’s a bad thing to do, and he shouldn’t be allowed to do it. It’s not fair to the women.

There was a lot of news media attention, Cretaz notes.

“That level of coverage of women’s swimming, specifically, has not come close to being matched in the year after the end of [Thomas’s] swimming career,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters. “They like to say that this is coming from a place of caring about women’s sports, but it’s hard not to notice that they don’t really cover women’s sports unless trans women are competing in them.”

I think you’ll find that’s a pattern all over the news media. They don’t really cover victims of mass shootings until the mass shootings. They don’t really cover Ukraine until Russia invades it. They don’t really cover global warming until it’s far too late to do anything about it. The news media don’t cover things that aren’t news.

The intensity of the critical media coverage helped fuel an equally intense backlash against Thomas. Sixteen of her University of Pennsylvania teammates signed a letter midway through the season saying that she had an unfair advantage.

Because he does.

That letter was organized by former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who, along with fellow Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona, is a founding member of the Women’s Sport Policy Working Group, which has been leading the movement to ban trans women and girls from competing in the women’s division in sports across the board. (The Human Rights Campaign has called the WSPWG “a hate group.”) 

(The Human Rights Campaign is wrong.)

And World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion.

No, it doesn’t ban them from competing, it bans them from competing against women. This is such shitty dishonest “reporting” – how is it that The Nation waved it through?

And why shouldn’t men face “incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion” in women’s sports? Why shouldn’t they just be told “No”? Why don’t women matter here?

(As I have written previously, there is no real evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage over their cisgender counterparts.)

I repeat: the issue is not trans athletes, it’s male athletes in women’s sports. Does The Nation not have any editors? Why did it publish this dishonest pile of dung uncorrected?

The World Aquatics policy was the culmination of a long-simmering anti-trans sentiment in the sport of women’s swimming, particularly in Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. While most sporting bodies have taken a hard turn to the right in recent years when it comes to allowing transgender athletes—and transgender women, in particular—to compete, women’s swimming is, in some ways, uniquely anti-trans.

It’s not “anti-trans,” it’s not a “sentiment,” it’s not “a hard turn to the right” or any turn to the right at all.

Jumping ahead –

How did someone like Hogshead-Makar, who fought so hard for girls to be protected in the world of sports, end up on the perpetrating end of such a targeted campaign of harassment and exclusion? If you ask her, she believes she is still “protecting” girls—by defining girlhood as exclusively belonging to cisgender girls and seeing transgender girls as a threat. In doing so, she has fallen for one of the most insidious transphobic talking points—that transgender girls are “biological men” and therefore a threat both on the sporting field and in the locker room.

Yes how dare she “define” girlhood as meaning girls instead of girls and some boys who pretend to be girls? So archaic, so strange, so hard to believe.

There’s more. Lots, lots more. I don’t know if I can face reading any more of it. I would still love to know how The Nation manages to think this merits publication.

Holly is pushing back against the bullying.

A feminist philosopher targeted by trans activists has lodged a formal complaint against the University of Melbourne, alleging it failed to provide a safe workplace.

Associate professor of philosophy Holly Lawford-Smith, in a complaint lodged last week with WorkSafe Victoria, accuses her employer of occupational health and safety breaches, of bullying her for her political views, and of undermining the university’s stated commitment to academic freedom.

Sound familiar? Kathleen Stock? Rebecca Tuvel?

The gender-critical feminist, who is opposed to trans women having access to women-only spaces and services, said she lodged the complaint following a two-year campaign against her that reached a crescendo following her attendance at the now notorious Let Women Speak rally, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.

“The institutional culture at Melbourne [University] and the way they allow gender-critical feminists to be treated is unacceptable and violates academic freedom and what a university should be about,” Lawford-Smith said.

Hear hear.

The author of Gender Critical Feminism and a second book, Sex Matters, published by Oxford University Press, has for the past six weeks been the subject of an anonymous boycott campaign by student and trans rights activists against her second-year feminism class. She has also been the subject of disciplinary processes initiated by the university.

I didn’t know that. How horrible.

Stickers and posters produced under the banner of Fight Transphobia Uni Melb started appearing on campus about a week after Lawford-Smith attended the March 18 rally…

Ugly bullying snotty stickers and posters they are. The Age has photos.

Amelia Bright, a 23-year-old trans woman and gender studies student, said she was not involved in the boycott campaign but called for the university to commission an external review of Lawford-Smith’s second-year subject by experts in teaching and learning, psychological safety, trans issues and feminism.

“Dr Lawford-Smith fundamentally doesn’t believe in hearing out trans people, in considering their safety or having them in public life,” said Bright, the editor of a report by the student union’s Queer Political Action Collective into Lawford-Smith’s feminism class.

“All of her personal views absolutely seep into this subject. Frankly, you wouldn’t let a flat-earther teach an astronomy class.”

Uh, no. I hate to break it to you, but you’re the flat-earther in this scenario.

I had to stop and say om for a long time.

Just kidding. I never say om.

Anyway, the Times goes on:

Lawford-Smith, an associate professor in political philosophy at Melbourne University, hit back, saying: “Obviously, almost none of what Eugenia says is true”. She described her comments as the “familiar sort of ludicrous hyperbole coming from trans activists”.

Speaking of ludicrous hyperbole, she didn’t “hit back,” obviously; she responded. She disagreed. She retorted.

She said: “Oxford University Press must not let a small group of zealots control its processes. Freedom of inquiry is of paramount importance and should be protected at all costs, whether the threat to it comes dressed up in social justice costume or otherwise. The idea that feminism about females could be fairly characterised as either genocidal or fascist is just absurd.”

Absurd but also frankly abusive. One it’s a lie, and two it’s defamatory.

Proponents of gender-critical feminism, also known by opponents as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, believe biological sex should be prized above gender identity, and therefore trans women are not women.

Oh come on. Do better, Times. It’s not about “prizing” one or the other more highly ffs, it’s about reality. Gender identity can’t change what sex people are, just as fairy tales, religion, a really long conversation, and greeting cards can’t change what sex people are. Trans women are not women because they’re men.

It was news that a second book, Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, would be published which led Zuroski to withdraw her upcoming title, A Funny Thing: The Undisciplined Eighteenth Century.

Zuroski doesn’t deserve the Eighteenth Century. It’s better than she is.

The Times reports on this triumph of self-cancellation:

An academic has withdrawn her upcoming book from Oxford University Press and accused the publisher of helping to launder “genocidal fascism” against trans people as apolitical philosophies.

The publisher defended its right to publish works on “a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints” after Eugenia Zuroski, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada, attacked it and withdrew her book on 18th-century humour.

I have to say, someone who could claim that feminist women who don’t believe men can be women represent “genocidal fascism” seems to me the wrong kind of person to write about 18th century humor. Alexander Pope she ain’t.

I mean that literally. It’s a ridiculous, ignorant claim, hyperbolic for the sake of it and obviously not even slightly true. It’s stupid, it’s childish, it’s way beneath a working academic. Men don’t drop dead because we don’t believe they’re women, and nobody tries to slaughter them because we don’t believe they’re women. There is no genocide here.

In a blog post, she claimed the decision by the OUP to publish a second book by Holly Lawford-Smith, a gender-critical feminist from Australia, had contributed to a genocidal agenda, and that the publisher was helping to launder “transphobia”.

…

She wrote: “Honestly, it makes me sick. I cannot stomach the thought of allowing my own labours to feed a press willing to lend its reputation to ‘gender critical’ fascism.” She also pointed to research by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, an American charity, which claimed the gender-critical movement “advanced a genocidal agenda through tactics that include laundering fascist ideas as apolitical ‘philosophies’”, adding: “OUP’s publication of this kind of material therefore directly contributes to this agenda by granting it scholarly credibility.”

Oh ffs, that’s embarrassing. As we discovered months ago, “the Lemkin Institute” is a big nothing, a shopfront, a name on a letterhead and nothing else. There is no institute. It’s a crank pretending to be an institute, and fooling people like Zuroski.

I’ll have to dig up her wretched blog post now.

Cutting off her nose to spite women who know what a woman is.

Grey Slavery is impressed.

“The genocide dimension” ffs! WHAT GENOCIDE DIMENSION? There is none, and using the word for this cheap tawdry stupid bullying just drains it of meaning, in a world where literal genocide is all too real.

But, good – she’s punishing herself instead of women, which makes a nice change.

Daughters excluded from peerage due to gender outraged by trans Tory standing for Lords seat

Matilda Simon, the 3rd Baron of Wythenshawe, is tipped to stand in a by-election to replace the Liberal Democrat Viscount Falkland, voted on by all sitting peers, with entries closing on May 15.

If successful, [he] would become the only woman, self-identified, among the chamber’s 92 hereditary peers, despite holding a title because [he was] born a man.

Daughters who have been shunned from their families’ hereditary lines because they are not men have called on Matilda Simon to “stop having her cake and eating it”.

His. His cake. That’s the whole point, isn’t it. He gets to be a Baron because he is a man.

Matilda Simon, born in 1955, inherited the title because they were born male. 

Their elder sister, Margaret, who was born two years earlier, would have inherited the title if Matilda Simon had been born a woman.

Women aren’t good enough to inherit titles, you see. Only men can do the title-inheriting. Those cudgels are heavy.

Under a legal loophole in the Gender Recognition Act 2014, a person changing gender “does not affect the descent of any peerage or dignity or title of honour”. 

Calling it a “legal loophole” is very polite. It’s a gaping cavern of unfair rules-engineering. Heads he wins, tails she loses.

With more by-elections looming, even if Matilda Simon does not stand this time to replace Viscount Falkland, who was elected in 1999, women have hit out at the “absolute farce” and labelled it an “absurd” situation.

Sigh. There it is again. Objected to; criticized; fumed at; denounced. Talk like a grownup.

Lady Simon graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, before becoming a lecturer at Manchester University. Now a furniture maker, she describes herself online as a feminist, socialist and LGBT+ advocate.

He is emphatically not a feminist.

Tom Holland a couple of weeks ago pondered the religiosity of the coronation hoopla.

The United Kingdom is alone in Europe in marking the accession of a new monarch with a coronation. Key elements of the ceremony – that it should be presided over by the archbishop of Canterbury, that two bishops should escort the king, that the congregation at the end of the service should join in acclaiming the newly crowned monarch – date back to the coronation in 973 of Edgar, the great-grandson of Alfred the Great. Dunstan, the formidable archbishop who composed the order of service, had in turn drawn on even older exemplars: some native to Britain, others reaching back to Roman times.

Oldest of all, however, and most imbued with a sense of the sacred, was one ritual in particular: an anointing. The inspiration for this, older than England, older than the house of Wessex, older than Christianity itself, was to be found in the Old Testament: “Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king.” This same verse, chanted at Edgar’s coronation and famously put to music by Handel, will be sung as well during Saturday’s service. Charles III will share in a ritual that originally marked out the kings of Israel – Saul and David and Solomon – as the adopted ones of God. The 21st century will be joined by means of a living ceremony to the bronze age.

It’s very archaic and it’s very theocratic. That’s one compelling reason to object to the whole thing, and indeed to protest it, even though that leads to 12 or 13 hours of imprisonment in today’s Britain. Charles is just another human, and a ceremony of “anointing” doesn’t change that, but everyone is supposed to pretend it does.

The British are an immeasurably more secular people than they were when the last coronation was staged 70 years ago. Almost 40% of the population of England and Wales described themselves in the most recent census as belonging to “no religion”. Meanwhile, the Churches of England and Scotland, both of which the monarch is constitutionally pledged to defend, are in decline relative both to various other Christian denominations and to religions that had barely registered in Britain when Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne.

There are many in the country who are not just hostile to Christianity but wholly ignorant of its history, its doctrines, its ceremonies. That its head of state rules by virtue of claims that are rooted not merely in the supernatural, but in a specifically Christian understanding of the supernatural, is an aspect of the constitution that often remains discreetly veiled. There will be no hiding it, though, at the coronation. The insistence of Charles III on following the example of his mother, and refusing to allow his anointing to be screened on TV, will serve only to heighten viewers’ sense of the sacral quality of the ritual. A British coronation stands in a line of descent from the age of Solomon or it is nothing.

Most people watching the service next weekend probably will not care very much. A spectacle is a spectacle, after all, no matter its theological underpinnings. Yet it is likely that a substantial minority of people in Britain, rather than being dazzled by the display in Westminster Abbey, will find their distaste both for the monarchy itself and for its supernatural pretensions only confirmed by the pomp and ritual of the coronation. Catherine Bennett, writing in this paper recently, despaired of how arguments for a secular coronation “appear to have dented neither the church’s coronation ambitions nor the palace’s matching enthusiasm for spiritual choreography and knick-knacks”.

God-bothering plus servile adoration of rank. I’m not a fan.

Scottish PEN trips and falls down in the last sentence.

Regret blah blah atmosphere blah blah pursuant to which blah, disinvited, canceled, not to offend, Oscar Wilde, not to offend, opposition to the suppression –

AND BY THE WAY DON’T GO THINKING WE SUPPORT HATE SPEECH.

Why do this?

Really: why? Why send a man who is a walking talking smirking parody of women to talk to a woman about her novel about an adolescent girl? Why do that? What is the point? The only point that springs to mind is to mock and belittle and taunt women. So…why do that?

H/t Mostly Cloudy

All we can do is hope his head explodes.

One day he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The next he was on prime-time television pushing election lies, defending his own coup attempt and refusing to back Ukraine.

…

…Even though McConnell and others privately loathe Trump and wish him gone, they dare not alienate his fervent support base. Rick Wilson, a former Republican consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, sums it up in one word: fear.

“They are afraid of the mob, they’re afraid of the horde, they’re afraid of the anger and the craziness and the rage and the threats that come any time a Republican elected official really stands up and opposes Donald Trump,” Wilson said.

He added: “None of the major elected officials – McConnell, McCarthy, the big state governors – are going to come out and say what they believe and know: that he is a monstrous figure and he is a dangerous figure.”

Because their selfish personal desires are more important than disavowing a dangerous monstrosity.

This week, in a civil case, a New York jury determined that Trump sexually abused and defamed the writer E Jean Carroll, awarding her $5m in damages (Trump is appealing the verdict). That alone would be enough to sink most political careers but McCarthy repeatedly dodged the issue when asked to comment by reporters on Capitol Hill.

Other Republicans went further in expressing their fealty to Trump. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told reporters: “That jury’s a joke. The whole case is a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added: “When it comes to Donald Trump, the New York legal system is off the rails.” Former vice-president Mike Pence told NBC News: “I would tell you, in my four and a half years serving alongside the president, I never heard or witnessed behaviour of that nature.”

What happened to “thou shalt not bear false witness?” We know that can’t possibly be true, because Trump is what he is. Trump goes in for defamation every time he opens his mouth.

I suppose Pence justifies that absurd lie via the word “behavior” – i.e. he never saw Trump grab a woman by the pussy.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “They have refused to divorce themselves from someone that they know is both a political loser for them and who represents things that are completely destructive to our democracy. After everything that we have seen, after everything that the Republican party itself has endured in terms of its underperforming in multiple election cycles, the only reason why they haven’t divorced themselves from Donald Trump is because they don’t want to.”

They’re all hoping he’ll grab them between the legs.

Mark Cunliffe writes about the repressive policing of coronation protests last weekend:

It became very clear early on Coronation Saturday that things were not right. Reports emerged that police had targeted vans belonging to #NotMyKing protesters, and that others were also targeted by police before they had even begun to protest. 

Many MPs were quick to condemn the actions of the police with Nottingham East MP Nadia Whittome tweeting: “Protest is fundamental to democracy. People must have the right to oppose having an unelected head of state, or more than £100m of public funds being spent on a coronation when millions rely on food banks. These arrests should concern us all.”

Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana tweeted “It is deeply disturbing that organisers of the #NotMyKing protest in London have been arrested this morning, before the protest even began. Whatever you think of the monarchy, the right to peaceful protest is fundamental to democracy. This is a chilling violation of that right.”

And why on earth should the monarchy be immune from protest anyway? Nobody asked for the monarchy, let alone voted for it; why shouldn’t people express their opinion of it?

Perhaps even more sinister is that the CEO of Republic, Graham Smith, who was one of 64 arrested at the Coronation, repeatedly stated that he had been in close conversation with the Met for four months prior to the event, that they knew all the details of the protest and had approved them.

This is the same Met that’s notoriously riddled with misogyny, right? The one that included Wayne Couzens in its ranks? Now it pretends to approve protests in advance and then goes “Hahaha busting you anyway, suckaaaaaaaaaaaaas.”

[O]n coronation day the Conservative party’s deputy chair, Lee Anderson Tweeted “Not My King? If you do not wish to live in a country that has a monarchy the solution is not to turn up with your silly boards. The solution is to emigrate.” It’s not quite as easy as that: Brexit took away our rights to live, work and retire in 27 other European states and we are now restricted to just 90-day visits. 

Also that’s not the solution anyway. People are allowed to object to aspects of government, and say so, and protest them. They’re allowed to do that and go on living in the country in question.

Or they could but perhaps under Rishi Sunak’s Public Order Bill they no longer can.

Is it being melodramatic to compare our government’s new laws and the subsequent police action to those of Russia or North Korea? The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, recently warned:

“This new law imposes serious and undue restrictions on these rights that are neither necessary nor proportionate to achieve a legitimate purpose as defined under international law. This law is wholly unnecessary as UK police already have the powers to act against violent and disruptive demonstrations.”

He added: “It is especially worrying that the law expands the powers of the police to stop and search individuals, including without suspicion, defines some of the new criminal offences in a vague and overly broad manner and imposes unnecessary and disproportionate criminal sanctions on people organizing or taking part in peaceful protests.”

Grim.

One good thing about Trump’s campaigning: he keeps incriminating himself.

During a town hall event on CNN Wednesday night, former President Donald Trump made multiple incriminating remarks about his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s responses will further hurt his case should Special Counsel Jack Smith charge the former president in connection with his role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol and other attempts to hold onto power unlawfully. Trump’s statements were also valuable to Fulton County DA Fani Willis in her investigation and possible prosecution.

Consider what Trump had to say about former Vice President Pence. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out that Pence has blamed Trump for endangering his life. Trump interjected with a lie. “I don’t think he was in any danger,” Trump claimed.

That is clearly false. Some of Trump’s followers erected a hangman’s gallows outside of the Capitol. And the mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Pence!” Shortly after the Capitol was breached, Secret Service agents had to whisk Pence away to safety (which Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Al) told Trump as it happened). Even so, the rioters came within 40 feet of the vice president.

The main reason the rioters focused their anger at Pence was because Trump repeatedly told them that the vice president had the power to alter the outcome of the election. That is where Trump’s statements Wednesday night were important from a legal perspective.

Trump stated: Pence “did something wrong. He should have put the votes back to the state legislatures. I think we would have had a different outcome, I really do.” The reason that puts the former president in legal jeopardy is because Trump’s own legal adviser (John Eastman) admitted during an Oval Office meeting that the Electoral Count Act would not allow Pence to take such action. Trump’s remarks on CNN provide additional evidence that he does not and did not care about the scope of Pence’s actual legal authority.

Trump is dumb as a stump, so he can say he didn’t know about pretty much anything, but Eisen et al. are saying that legally speaking he can’t. There’s a limit to how much you can just throw up your hands and say you had no idea.

Trump acknowledged during the Jan. 4, 2021 meeting that the vice president didn’t have the legal authority to return electoral votes back to the states. Yet, Trump still demanded that he do so (and defended that unlawful option again on CNN).

Now, Trump is Trump, and it seems more than possible that he can acknowledge that Pence doesn’t have the authority to do X and. immediately after acknowledging, order him to do X without really noticing that he’s telling Pence to commit a crime, because he really is that thick. But legally speaking that doesn’t get him off the hook…unless of course it does, because the people deciding about the hook are trumpies.

Following the attack on the Capitol, Trump wanted to say he would issue a blanket pardon of the rioters, but White House lawyers strongly objected, and no such statement was made. Suffice it to say, Trump’s remarks on CNN exceeded what any reasonable defense lawyer would advise him.

Well that was…you know…more than two years ago. Might as well be two hundred. You can’t expect Trump to keep something in mind for more than two years.

Nor does the legal harm Trump did himself stop there. He also reaffirmed that he would make the damning Jan. 2, 2021 call to Brad Raffensperger again, despite the fact that it may lead to criminal charges by Fulton County DA Fani Willis this summer (and possibly by the Justice Department as well). That is important because it shows he is unrepentant, which is an added incentive for the DA to seek accountability (not as if she needed one).

And not as if Trump is ever anything but unrepentant. He’s incapable of even pretending to be repentant.

The BBC reports:

The comedy club which cancelled a Fringe show by SNP MP Joanna Cherry has reinstated the event.

The Stand had cancelled the show after staff said they were not comfortable with her views on transgender issues.

But the venue has now said the decision was “unfair and constituted unlawful discrimination against Ms Cherry”.

Ms Cherry said it was a “very welcome move by The Stand” and confirmed she will take part in August’s event as originally planned.

She did.

Yes!

Now nobody do this EVER AGAIN.

Bev Jackson tells us about a meeting.

Who is responsible for undermining the rights of lesbians and gays at the United Nations? Why, that would be Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN’s Independent Expert for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI). “What’s that?” you say. Shouldn’t he be protecting the rights of people who are attracted to others of the same sex? Ah, but SOGI is a way of getting round that. Having an advocate for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity is a bit like having one for Veganism and Chicken Farming. It doesn’t work.

Why? Because the GI bit insists that the SO bit has to buy into the ideology of the GI bit, which means lesbians have to pretend men can be lesbians and gay men have to pretend women can be gay men. Funnily enough, that’s not always a popular mandate.

Victor is a passionate advocate of gender self-ID. He has an impressive ability to claim over and over again, with a straight face, things that are untrue…One of Victor’s favourite untruths is that international human rights law requires the introduction of gender self-ID. This completely false notion relies on a little-known document — the Yogyakarta Principles or YP — which identifies as “best practice” when it is simply an activist manifesto. 

Which also describes trans ideology. It identifies as factual when it is simply an extended fantasy.

Victor maintains there is no conflict between the rights of LGB people and those claimed under the banner of “trans rights”. Whatever definition of “trans” you choose (and there are as many as there are scandals in the SNP), this is obviously untrue. Either people born male belong on a lesbian dating site, or they don’t. Either persons born female can be in a gay men’s sauna — without revealing their little secret — or they don’t belong there. Either it is fine to say you’re only attracted to people of the same sex, or it isn’t — because saying so out loud is hurtful and makes you a transphobe or a “sexual racist”, as Nancy Kelley (somehow still CEO of Stonewall) has been known to say. In this conflict you can jump one way or the other, but you can’t say no jumping is required.

Emphasis added. Brilliant summing up.

Victor also insists — and this is his favourite mantra — that self-ID has not caused any problems in any country in the world. He has been sent pages of evidence to the contrary: abuses in prisons in countries from Ireland to Canada, explanations that data is becoming impossible to collect, abuses in women’s and girls’ sport, the self-exclusion of women of faith from vital services.

But, it seems, he’s ignored all of it. Every bit. Bev goes through a long list and he claims to be ignorant of every single item.

At this stage there was little point in being conciliatory. Years of polite requests had produced no result. So we bluntly repeated all the things we have been telling him for years. Funnily enough, he professed ignorance of all of it. “Cotton ceiling” (the difficulty trans-identifying males experience getting into lesbians’ pants)? Never heard of it. Homosexual detransitioners — surely part of his mandate in the interests of “inclusion”? Hmmm … please send details of such persons. Keira Bell, Sonia Appleby? Never heard of them. Quote from Dr Hilary Cass on lesbians who had felt pressured to transition? Silence. Had he met with Dr Cass? Didn’t want to say. GIDS clinic due to close because an NHS review found it to be unsafe? Oh, hadn’t heard. David Bell? Who’s that?

And so on. It’s maddening.

The Times does a quick rundown of Trump’s horrors on CNN.

In little over an hour, Donald J. Trump suggested the United States should default on its debts for the first time in history, injected doubt over the country’s commitment to defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, dangled pardons for most of the Capitol rioters convicted of crimes, and refused to say he would abide by the results of the next presidential election.

…

In New Hampshire, the audience of Republicans lapped up Mr. Trump’s one-liners and slew of insults — to Ms. Collins (a “nasty person,” he jeered, echoing his old attack on Hillary Clinton), to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to E. Jean Carroll, the woman whom a jury this week found Mr. Trump liable of sexually abusing and defaming. And the crowd expressed no dissent as he again tried to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn his election loss.

“It was a beautiful day,” Mr. Trump said.

If he becomes president again, he said, he would “most likely” pardon “a large portion” of his supporters who were convicted over their actions on Jan. 6. “They were there with love in their heart,” he said of the crowd, which he beamed had been the “largest” of his career.

We’re doomed.

It’s interesting that Trump was found liable for defaming Jean Carroll and the next day defamed her all over again on a major news network.

Writer E Jean Carroll is considering suing Donald Trump for defamation again after the former US president made disparaging remarks about her during a televised CNN town hall just a day after he was found liable in a civil case for sexually assaulting her.

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But during the Wednesday night CNN event in New Hampshire – which attracted widespread condemnation of the US broadcaster – Trump repeatedly insulted and demeaned Carroll and her experiences.

Trump said her account of a sexual assault was “fake” and a “made-up story” and referred to it as “hanky-panky”.

Meteor. Send the meteor.