Proud Boys convicted.

Former Proud Boys extremist group leader Enrique Tarrio has been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

The conviction follows a seven-day jury deliberation on five members of the far-right neo-fascist organizations who have been accused of conspiring against the peaceful power transition between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in January 2021.

Three other members of the Proud Boys – Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl – have also been convicted after facing a slew of charges including conspiracy charges, evidence tampering and obstruction of the Electoral College vote.

Enjoy your stay.

Kezia Dugdale, former leader of the Scottish Labour Party, does the “hurr hurr Joanna Cherry isn’t being silenced, look, she’s still talking!!” routine.

In one interview yesterday she said: “Lesbian feminists and women such as myself are being prevented from speaking in public about our views”.

This is a literal quote from the teatime STV News bulletin watched by hundreds of thousands of people. Her views were being broadcast to, let’s say, the equivalent of Edinburgh, compared to the venue capacity of The Stand?

An operator yes, a martyr no.

In other words the Streisand effect. The Stand withdrew its invitation to her, and the result was a lot of bad publicity for The Stand. You know what? That’s not Joanna Cherry’s fault.

But never mind that, because she has views that are unacceptable. Why are they unacceptable?

The runner up in the SNP Leadership race Kate Forbes has lent her support to Ms Cherry via her own newspaper column.

In it, she says “When you believe in the strength of your case, you do not fear debate. It’s those without a case to answer who run from arguments… in a fair, free and respectful debate, the truth always wins.”

That’s a powerful bit of writing until you remember this isn’t some theoretical school debating club. It’s about people’s lives.

Ohhhhhh, people’s lives.

But here’s a puzzler. The women who resist the pressure to pretend that men are women in all circumstances and locations also have lives. Of course it’s about people’s lives; that’s why we refuse to obey.

There are trans people who feel their very existence and identity are threatened by the words of people who share Ms Cherry’s outlook. They are not up for “debate”.

If the staff in the Stand are trans, or know trans people or just understand the above in their own bones, surely they have a moral right to withdraw their labour and hope a good employer would respect that?

That’s an extraordinarily bad argument. The fact that some enraged loonies “feel their very existence and identity are threatened by the words of people who share Ms Cherry’s outlook” does not make what they “feel” true.

It doesn’t even demonstrate that they really “feel” that. It could be pure rhetoric all the way down.

Yes, we know that there are shockingly many people who make frenzied catastrophizing claims about their Very Existence being threatened, and we also know that’s one of the signs this “activism” is irrational and dangerously aggressive. Gender critical feminists don’t assault trans activists; the same cannot be said in reverse.

Originally a comment by Papito on Top of the roller-coaster.

My peak happened rather suddenly when my son announced to us that he was really a woman inside. This was patently absurd. His pediatrician wanted to send him straight to the gender clinic. He said to me, “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?” I said to him, “I brought my son to you because he was cutting himself. I would like the cutting to stop, not for a professional to do it instead.”

FYI, my son is over it now. I was able to steer him carefully around all the eager affirmers, and find him a real therapist. He’s autistic, he’s not like the other boys, and he feels uncomfortable in his body. The TRAs would have you think that means his Johnson must be cut off, and he must present henceforth as a simulacrum of a woman. He eventually realized that would not be an improvement.

One of the things that struck a bell in my mind in the Cambridge.org article linked above is this sentence:

The notion of conversion therapy for those seeing themselves as transgender relies on another binary – that of ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’ – being set, closed, biologically anchored categories without overlap, rather than a more plausible hypothesis that one’s gender identity is flexible, informed by one’s culture, personality, personal preferences and social milieu.

That’s it, that’s what the epithet “trans kids” means: all kids can be sorted, from birth and permanently, into two categories: trans and cis. The binary goes away, the binary comes back.

Why? Why must the TRAs insist that the natural categories of male and female are nebulous, arbitrary, wobbly, and made up by Victorian colonialists, at the very same time they insist that as soon as a child utters the magic words “I’m trans!” he jumps irrevocably into the other box and may nevermore be “cis?” He is now a “trans kid,” and any consideration that this self-identification may be temporary, may be mistaken, and may later be regretted, any consideration whatsoever that human beings are complicated, children grow and learn, or that we are not fully known to ourselves, is nothing but oppression, by one side of this binary against the other.

Trump says it’s such a ridiculous, made-up story. Just ridiculous!

Donald Trump called a writer’s claims that he raped her at a Manhattan department store “the most ridiculous, disgusting story,” testifying in a deposition shown in court Wednesday that the allegations were “made up” and that the assault never happened.

Lawyers for accuser E. Jean Carroll played about 30 minutes of excerpts from the former president’s deposition, including his emphatic denial of the longtime advice columnist’s accusation that he attacked her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

It does seem like an odd story, for sure. And yet…

…we’ve all heard him saying “You can grab them by the pussy.”

He said it. He said it voluntarily, chatting with some tv flunkies he felt like impressing. He said “You can grab them by the pussy,” which implies that he knows this because he’s done it. If it’s such a “ridiculous” story why did he tell it about himself, unprompted?

Judge to Trump: No.

A New York judge has tossed out Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times, and ordered the former president to pay all attorneys fees, legal expenses, and associated costs.

Trump filed the lawsuit in 2021, alleging that the newspaper, three of its reporters and his niece Mary Trump engaged in an “insidious plot” to obtain his private records for a Pulitzer-winning story about his tax issues.

…

The twice-impeached former president’s claims against the defendants “fail as a matter of constitutional law,” New York Supreme Court Justice Robert R. Reed wrote in his ruling filed on Wednesday afternoon, deeming the paper’s newsgathering as being at “the very core of protected First Amendment activity.”

Someone will have to explain that to Trump. Too many abstract words.

Reed further ruled that Trump failed to demonstrate any tortious interference, unjust enrichment, or negligent supervision on the parts of the Times or reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow, and Russell Buettner.

In the original lawsuit Trump alleged that the Times colluded with his niece to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over ” to the paper despite a confidentiality agreement she signed in 2001 during a family dispute. He further claimed that Craig, Barstow, and Buettner were “motivated, at least in part, by their actual malice” in reporting on the details within tax returns he’d refused to disclose.

No, Don, we don’t hate you because of malice, we hate you because of everything about you.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Smoke and mirrors.

You gave us a “nutshell” summary with what was wrong with the Tavistock. Here’s a nutshell with what is wrong with trans activism:

None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people.

The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing.

Trans activists lie to conceal what their opponents say; they lie to conceal what exactly they are demanding. They rewrite the language to do both, launching their political attacks from a platform of novel, repurposed meanings designed to hide truth. It’s all lies and deception, bullshit and bullying. There is no “good faith.”

Actual human rights and social justice campaigns depend upon clear communication and truth to achieve their goals, because they are describing a wrong and counting on public support to correct it. Discussion and dialogue are central to this process. What better way to advance a just cause than to have a public airing of the issues involved? A just cause has nothing to fear from robust, open discussion and lively debate. Ideally, this is how democratic politics works. But not with trans activism, the “social justice” movement that is neither social nor just. It is a campaign that is dangerous to women’s rights that has been reliant on secret, back-room deals designed to avoid and short-circuit public scrutiny, questioning, and accountability. It is thus a danger to democracy, too. It’s no accident that one of their rallying cries is “NO DEBATE!” Honest, open debate is poison to their program. Truth is its enemy. Truth is “transphobic.” Having forgone the normal channels used by rights campaigns to win public acceptance for its goals, trans activism has no choice but to rely on coercion to hang on to whatever gains it manages to make in secret. Any movement that is, at its very foundations, so fundamentally reliant upon lies and the secrecy required to maintain them, will inevitably and unavoidably corrupt any individual or organization that embraces and supports it.

Trans-identifying man Jennifer Finney Boylan says sex is not in the body, it’s in the brain.

When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?

Nothing. It means nothing.

Or it means something, but the something it means is about fantasy and imagination; it’s not about material reality. We can think we “feel like” anything, and that can be a fine pathway to empathy and broader sympathies. It can be, but it can also be a lousy rotten stinking pathway to telling people you know more about being those people than they do.

Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology.

They don’t say that about everything. Nobody cares what fantasies people have about themselves unless those fantasies impinge on other people’s rights.

In Florida, a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) keeps “biological males” from playing on the women’s sports teams in public schools.

Yes, because it’s not fair for males to play on women’s sports teams, regardless of what their fantasies about themselves are. This does not mean the males have to drop their fantasies; it just means they can’t live their fantasies at the expense of the rights of girls and women.

It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.

Then be a womany man or a manny woman.

H/t John Reed

Glinner is explaining to David Baddiel about peaking, and I saw this reply.

The bit about first you climb up believing all kinds of nonsense.

I never did actually believe it.

What did I do? Kept my mouth shut. Watched and waited. Avoided. Evaded. Bracketed. Ignored.

I guess to be more precise what I never did actually believe is that people are or can be the other sex, but I thought maybe possibly it could be that it’s to their benefit to pretend they can. I was far from passionately convinced even of that, but I thought it might be the case, and that I didn’t know much about it.

So I just kept quiet about it for several years. One specific occasion I remember is when Michelle Goldberg wrote a (very good) skeptical piece on the subject in The New Yorker and some people I was then friends with called her every name in the book. I thought they were wrong, but I wasn’t sure enough to disagree with them, so instead I just said nothing.

That was a million times easier to do then. The subject hadn’t devoured everything yet.

“For all the hypersensitive whiny little cis women”

Summing up – “You know because womanhood, it doesn’t really have a meaning – you know it’s kind of what you want it to mean – it’s a social construct – I know that’s complicated for y’all”

A piquant NY Times headline:

Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’

A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race.

The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing.

His views aren’t all that private.

In the message, sent to one of his producers in the hours after violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Carlson described how he had recently watched a video of a group of men — Trump supporters, he said — violently attacking “an Antifa kid.”

It was “three against one, at least,” he wrote.

And then he expressed a sense of dismay that the attackers, like him, were white.

“Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously,” he wrote.

“It’s not how white men fight,” he said. But he said he found himself for a moment wanting the group to kill the person he had described as the Antifa kid.

Even though he’s a white man.

The Fox people were worried about this not because it’s poisonous but because it would make Fox look bad (i.e. poisonous) and they had that trial to worry about. It was just all too much.

The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson that led the company’s leadership to conclude he was more of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people with knowledge of the decision. In other messages he had referred to women — including a senior Fox executive — in crude and misogynistic terms. The message about the fight also played a role in the company’s decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a defamation case.

It must be very delicate work, figuring out how poisonous is poisonous enough without being too poisonous. “Does this poison make my butt look too big?”

It remains unclear how the text escaped more notice earlier, given that the Fox legal team was aware of it and other offensive texts written by Mr. Carlson.

Well quite! How shocked can they be? Being “offensive” is his whole thing.

A recurring theme of his show during the six years that it ran in prime time on Fox News was the displacement of white Americans by people of color. Mr. Carlson often framed topics in the news as part of a larger struggle between “us” and “them,” with immigrants and other marginalized groups steadily and surely taking from whites what had long been theirs: political and cultural power in the United States.

He attacked Black social justice activists and portrayed immigrants from Central America as a blight on the nation. He said in 2018 that immigrants make the country “dirtier.”

I guess that’s how white men fight.

Joan Smith notes politicians’ refusal to stand up for Joanna Cherry.

Starmer is a KC, like Cherry, and leading lawyers have spoken out about the decision to cancel her appearance at The Stand. Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, wrote on Twitter the decision was “plainly unlawful”. Michael Foran, lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow, agreed that it was “unlawful discrimination”. 

Such things should not be happening in a democratic country, governed by the rule of law. On this occasion, the venue has put out a mealy-mouthed statement, blaming the cancellation on the fact that a number of key staff, including management and box office personnel, “are unwilling to work on this event”. They say they are ensuring that their employees’ views are respected, a position that suggests those views are reasonable.

They are not. Every time this happens, the objections are based on things the victims of no-platforming have not said. None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people. They have not demanded that trans people should lose their jobs, be prevented from holding meetings or stopped from carrying out academic research. They are simply upholding the rights of another group, women and especially lesbians, to whom all these things are being done in the name of “trans rights”. 

Let me repeat that key point. None of the individuals who have been targeted have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people. We keep being told that’s what’s happening, and we keep pointing out that it’s not.

The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing. At protests organised by trans activists, we don’t see placards demanding “let men use women’s toilets now” or “make women share cells with rapists”. Instead, we see banners claiming that feminists are calling for “genocide” and comparing a belief in biological sex to Nazi eugenics. 

The truth is not a crowd-pleaser, so they lie about us instead. How progressive.

Lauren Smith at Spiked tells us:

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust to release details of its communication with Mermaids. In 2021, a concerned parent made a Freedom of Information request to see what, if any, correspondence there had been between the Tavistock and Mermaids – including emails or minutes of meetings. Initially, the Tavistock refused to comply, arguing that doing so would cause ‘a disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption, irritation or distress’. When the ICO asked the Tavistock to justify its refusal, the Tavistock took back its original excuse and instead claimed that there was no relevant information to hand over.

I’m fascinated to learn that the Tavistock thinks it can refuse a Freedom of Information request on the grounds that it’s irritating. No you’re irritating.

In a judgement published at the end of March, the ICO ruled that the Tavistock most likely does hold information relevant to the request. And if it does not present this information by the end of this week, the Tavistock trust could face a fine for contempt of court.

But that would cause irritation.

Whistleblowers at the Tavistock have long tried to warn the public about its relationship with Mermaids. Sue Evans, a mental-health nurse and psychotherapist at the Tavistock between 2003 and 2007, claimed that Mermaids and similar charities were always ‘involved in helping formulate the materials that the service used, [and] how to talk about things’.

Another Tavistock whistleblower, Sonia Appleby, also mentioned Mermaids by name during an employment tribunal in 2021. According to Appleby, there were a number of Tavistock staff who were concerned about the influence of Mermaids and similar organisations. Pressure from the trans lobby, she said, had led clinicians to become increasingly ideological. This made them more likely to affirm children in their belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’.

See that’s the whole damn thing in a nutshell. On the one hand the ideologues insist being trans is a real, documented, physical, in the body thing – read this Scientific American article, it proves it!! – and on the other hand the medical people are coached and lobbied and pressured and pushed by the pack of deranged fundamentalists that is Mermaids. It’s real, it’s science, and Mermaids is our Leader.

MPs acting like high school bullies. In public.

They’re snickering about Joanna Cherry.

The Sydney Morning Herald is distraught because a man is not allowed to join a women’s basketball team.

Transgender athlete Lexi Rodgers will be given advice and support by Basketball Australia if she chooses to reapply to join a women’s semi-professional league after her application was denied on Tuesday.

That is, a man who claims to be a woman will be given advice and support by Basketball Australia if he chooses to reapply to join a women’s semi-professional league after his application was denied on Tuesday.

Why? Why should he be given advice and support? He shouldn’t be trying to join a women’s league in the first place. Tell him to knock it off and go away. Support the women for a change.

Look at what a deplorable terf I am. How did I get this way? Why am I so heartless and cruel toward my trans sisters?

I can explain how. It’s this shit, repeated a billion times over the past ten years or so. How did the people who think all this is just fine get this way? Why are they so indifferent about the women who are being harmed by this bizarre belief system?

Rodgers said on social media that she was saddened by the decision, but says it is not the end of her journey as an athlete. Basketball legend Andrew Gaze backed Basketball Australia’s process, but said he was disappointed for Rodgers.

Why? Men don’t get to play on women’s teams. Everyone knows why.

Rodgers put out a statement on Instagram saying his passion for basketball motivates him to play to the best of his abilities “against the toughest competitors at the highest levels.”

But if that were true he wouldn’t be trying to join a women’s league. Women are smaller than men, and not as strong, and not as fast. That’s why sports have to be divided by sex. Women aren’t “the toughest competitors,” because their bodies have to do the work of childbearing rather than the work of getting balls into nets. Rodgers is just lying when he says his love of the game inspires him to take on the toughest competitors.

Australia v women part 2.

In the article targeted by the eSafety Commissioner, Reduxx had revealed that Dennis was one of as many as five trans-identified male players currently competing against women in Football New South Wales competitions. An initial report from The Daily Mail Australia had chosen not to identify him when reporting on the injuries he was alleged to have caused, censoring images of him and declining to provide his name.

Thus making it easier for Riley Dennis to continue injuring women, and making it harder for women to know how to avoid injury from him. Protect the man doing the injuring at the expense of the women being injured – outstanding police work there chief!

In addition to Smith and Reduxx, pro-woman Reddit alternative Ovarit also received a censorship notice from the eSafety Commissioner.

Nothing is too good for Riley. Riley must be protected from the evil women at all cost.

In addition to the censorship experienced by Smith, Reduxx, and Ovarit, concerned citizens and parents who have been participating in online discussions of Football New South Wales’ (FNSW) gender self-identification policy have been sent threatening “notices” urging them to remove social media posts.

A community that opposes the admission of males into female sports categories has congregated at the Facebook-based NSW NPL Banter Page.

A representative for the page spoke anonymously with Reduxx to confirm that there had been multiple reports from concerned individuals that the sporting authority had been warning critics that they may be “sanctioned” for their comments and posts on social media.

Men should stay tf out of women’s sports. Come at me, Australia.

Now we’re not allowed to talk about it. Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx:

An Australian woman was reported to police after making posts on social media about a male who identifies as transgender participating in the women’s football league. Kirralie Smith was visited by New South Wales Police after speaking to media about Riley Dennis, a trans activist who had been the subject of mass complaint last month after reportedly injuring female players.

Police visited Smith on March 30 and handed her an Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) requiring that she does not discuss or approach Dennis – despite the fact that Smith lives over 200 miles from Dennis. The AVO acts as an interim order that will stand until a hearing later this month, at which point the court will decide whether it is justified.

So now the police are ordering women to shut up about men who are invading women’s sports and physically harming them.

It’s insane. Just fucking insane.

Included among the stipulations of the AVO lodged against Smith by Dennis are prohibitions against electronic harassment. As a result, her statements on social media have come under legal scrutiny and, in some cases, have been censored by an arm of the Australian government dedicated to combatting “cyber abuse.”

On February 20, Smith’s public Facebook page was removed at the request of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. Smith had set up the page in 2016 and used the platform to advocate for the rights of women and girls being harmed by gender identity policies. At the time of its deletion, Smith’s page had over 47,000 followers.

What about the eSafety, and real world safety, of women? What about the threat Riley Dennis poses to women? Why aren’t the police and Julie Inman Grant worried about that? Why are men allowed to steal women’s sports and bash the women who persist in continuing to play, while women are punished for talking about it?

The actions taken against Smith by eSafety Commissioner Grant are not the first instances of a government-endorsed push to digitally protect Dennis.

Last week, Reduxx was contacted by the eSafety Commissioner and advised to censor or delete an article naming Dennis as having been the subject of complaint after he was alleged to have injured female players during a match in March.

Riley Dennis is a current active threat to women. Why is Australian officialdom intent on protecting him and thus putting women at even greater risk?

The Times has more on Killips’s cheating.

A victory by a transgender cyclist in an elite women’s race has prompted renewed criticism of the UCI’s eligibility rules.

Austin Killips took the title of “Queen of the Mountains” after winning the Tour of the Gila in the United States, a five-stage race that is sanctioned by the UCI, cycling’s international governing body. It is the biggest cycle race won by a transgender rider so far.

Unlike swimming or athletics, the UCI permits trans women who have gone through male puberty to take part in elite women’s events if they have had reduced testosterone levels of 2.5 nanomoles per litre for the previous two years (men usually have ten to 35nmol/l, while a woman’s natural level is usually 0.5 to 2.4nmol/l).

It’s so stupid. Reduced testosterone doesn’t erase all the physical advantages, to put it mildly. This never should have been allowed, not for a second. It just underlines the fundamental indifference to female people that seems to be baked in.

Alison Sydor, a Canadian who was a cycling cross-country world champion and Olympic silver-medal winner, said on Twitter that the UCI’s transgender rules “are not fair to female athletes” and were “passed with no discussion [or] consultation with the people who have to live with these rules today”.

Naturally not; they’re female, so [yawwwwwwn]

[Killips] said on Instagram after winning the tour: “After a week of nonsense on the internet I’m especially thankful to everyone in the peloton and sport who continue to affirm that Twitter is not real life. I love my peers and competitors and am grateful for every opportunity I get to learn and grow as a person and athlete on course together.”

Pig. That “nonsense on the internet” is women objecting to the unfairness of this horrible man taking their prizes.

Another American cyclist, Hannah Arensman, said in a document submitted to a US court that she had retired from the sport after finishing in fourth place behind Killips in the US’s National Cyclocross Championships in November. Footage of the race shows Killips at one point pushing Arensman over as she attempts to overtake.

But that’s just “nonsense on the internet,” right?

Oliver Brown at The Telegraph on the latest outrage:

In what has been described as a “Lia Thomas moment” for cycling, Austin Killips, a 27-year-old transgender rider, has won first prize for women at the Tour of the Gila, the premier road race in New Mexico.

It marked the most significant result yet for Killips, a trans-identifying biological male from Chicago, who also won a medal in women’s cyclo-cross at the US National Championships and who is now tipped to challenge for a place at the Tour de France Femmes and at next summer’s Paris Olympics.

Another man steals another prize from women, and hopes to steal more.

This year’s running of the Tour of the Gila marked the first time in the event’s 36-year history that equal prize money had been offered, with a total purse of $35,350 (£28,145) in both the men’s and women’s races. Killips, who only took up cycling in 2019 before starting on hormone replacement therapy, earned almost £8,000 for finishing top of the women’s general classification, plus an £800 bonus as “Queen of the Mountains”.

Equal prize money for men and women but hahahahaha we’re counting men as women if they tell us to so actually all the money goes to men hahahahaha sucks to be you, bitches.

Killips’ name first came to wider attention in March, after being cited by former cyclo-cross champion Hannah Arensman in a Supreme Court filing explaining why she was retiring from the sport at 24. Arensman had lost out on a podium place to Killips in the national finals in December, later accusing her transgender opponent of repeatedly shoving her during the race – a claim Killips denied.

He denied it despite the existence of video clips showing him doing it.

“I have decided to end my cycling career,” Arensman said. “My sister and family sobbed as they watched a man finish in front of me, having witnessed several physical interactions with him during the race. I feel for young girls learning to compete, who no longer have a fair chance at being the new record-holders and champions in cycling because men want to compete in our division.”

Amid the Killips controversy, Thompson, who came third at the women’s Tour de France in 1986 and 1989, argued that the pattern was becoming more common. “These women are young, and there’s a lot of bullying,” she said. “They get cancelled, they get silenced, their jobs are threatened. They get put on the TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] list. If they say anything, they are eviscerated. And so, instead of fighting this, they just walk away.”

…

With results rapidly improving, Killips is allowed to compete as a consequence of the UCI’s liberal [anti-woman] transgender policy, which stands starkly at odds with World Athletics’ approach of banning all post-puberty males from the female category.

Flagrant injustice.

Dear _____, it has come to our attention that there is a show going on next month in your basement showcasing three women. Why is this being allowed in your venue? Why did you not seek our permission before inviting these witches to say words? Who do you think you are? Who do they think they are?

The Inquisitor General will be paying you a visit shortly. Have all your papers ready.

It’s like mission creep on steroids, or to put it another way, it’s like doing the opposite of your mission while pretending to be still doing the mission. It’s flashing a surface version of the existing mission while in reality throwing the mission out of a window at the top of the Burj Khalifa.

The WI’s new incloosion policy is what I mean.

I wonder who came up with it, and forced it on the entire organization. I wonder how much dissent and fury there was. I wonder how many women left. I wonder why the people who did this thought it was necessary. I wonder why guilt and shame didn’t stop them.

Why have a women’s institute at all if you’re going to turn it into a people’s institute? Why go on calling it a women’s institute when you’ve issued a policy statement saying it isn’t? Why try to have it both ways? Why go on calling it the WI when it isn’t for W any more?

Revisiting the EDI Policy…

The WI was founded on democratic ideals over 100 years ago and this commitment
to equality is still central to our ethos today. The WI – the UK’s largest women’s
membership organisation – is an inclusive, welcoming, supportive and progressive
organisation for all women who live as women, including transgender women.

First sentence. Democratic ideals are not the same thing as commitment to equality. Being founded on democratic ideals isn’t the same thing as having a commitment to equality. Policy statements should be clear and precise, not woolly and obscure.

But above all I want to know what they mean by “live as women.” It’s irritating me, not knowing. I for one don’t “live as a woman” so I guess I wouldn’t be eligible for the WI. I am a woman, but apparently that’s not good enough?

But since I don’t know what “live as a woman” means I guess I could be wrong; I guess it’s possible that I do live as woman without knowing it.

I wonder if it means checkable externals? A list of things like what you wear, how you talk, how you spend your time? Or does it mean you have announced that you are a woman, and bullied a minimum of twenty people into saying yes indeed you are a woman?

I don’t know. I don’t know what the WI means. I wonder if the WI knows what it means.