A little compilation for your weekend enjoyment.

Platform number one to Brighton. But of course.

The investigation into Kishwer Falkner has been suspended.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has announced it has “paused” an independent investigation into its Chair Baroness Kishwer Falkner.

On Tuesday, this programme revealed that Baroness Falkner was under investigation by an external barrister after allegations about her conduct from a number of staff. Our report also examined claims of a toxic culture at the Commission, allegations of bullying and harassment, claims that there is a high level of staff turnover and internal concerns about its independence and impartiality. The report sparked a lively debate, with accusations that Falkner was the target of a “hit job” by radical pro-trans activists inside the Commission. Today the Board said it had decided to pause the investigation so that it could seek legal advice on the impact of leaked confidential information. It said it must ensure the investigation’s integrity and that it is fair to all parties concerned.

Interesting.

Let’s look at the Bridges statement in more detail.

British Cycling has just banned us from racing. This was to be announced at 11 am today. But I’m done with this whole conversation being on their terms, and being controlled by them.

They have no authority to control this conversation anymore. Does it surprise me that the same organisation funded directly by a state that ships vulnerable refugees to Rwanda, violently clamps down on any political dissent that they disapprove of, or starves their people?

He lost track of his wording there. He surely can’t be claiming that British Cycling violently clamps down on dissent or starves their people, but that’s what he wrote. He seems to have meant can this organization funded by this state that does these bad things itself do bad things to me, yes of course it can.

At any rate the point is he had the fucking audacity to compare his being prevented from cheating women in sports to actual significant human rights abuses. That takes some impressive entitlement.

British Cycling is a failed organisation, the racing scene is dying under your watch and all you do is take money from petrochemical companies and engage in culture wars. You don’t care about making sport more diverse, you want to make yourself look better and you’re even failing at that. Cycling is still one of the whitest, straightest sports out there, and you couldn’t care less.

So he’s pretending that his participation in women’s cycling would make cycling less white and less straight. How would that work exactly? I’m not seeing the mechanism.

This is a violent act. When the Government is expressing admiration towards Ron DeSantis fascist state which kidnaps children, and is itching to pass legislation to ban us from public life, this is a violent act. British Cycling are supporting this, they are furthering a genocide against us. 

He says preventing him from cheating women in sport is a violent act. What’s violent about it? His cheating is closer to violence than enforcing a rule against cheating is. His cheating is “violent” in the sense that it’s physical: he’s bigger and stronger and that’s why he wins.

He also says it’s “furthering” genocide, which is grotesque on its face. No it isn’t. He can stay alive and compete against men. He may lose races. That’s not genocide.

I know a lot of people will think I’m being dramatic, or overplaying how scary things are at the moment. I’m having to consider an exit plan from this terrible island and figure out what point enough is enough. It terrifies me to exist at the moment, I have friends getting hate crimed all the time, and my reality is that I can’t look ahead to the future or make plans because I don’t know if I’II be allowed to live that long. Do you have any idea what that does to someone psychologically? To constantly see your existence being put up for debate, and the other side openly calling for our eradication?

Do you have any idea how ludicrous all that is? Of course you do. Does he have any idea of the stats on violence against women? Does he care? Of course he doesn’t.

What a thoroughly horrible person.

This.

It’s not “furthering genocide” to keep men (however they identify) out of women’s sports. Men don’t drop dead on being told they can’t compete against women.

It is, in fact, simply another outrage to add to the long list, to appropriate the word “genocide” to name one’s unjustifiable resentment at being told “No you can’t destroy women’s sports.” The egotism and entitlement of it should be glaringly obvious even to the BBC.

Another thing about the reporting on this, by the way…in case it’s not clear enough already…is the way the news media ignore the reason “trans women” are so keen to do this: because it’s cheating. “Emily” isn’t really upset because “transphobia” or because he’s not being “validated” as a genuine authentic really real solid gold woman, he’s upset because he can no longer cheat.

The BBC implies (without actually saying) that it’s all about “trans rights” and incloosion and diversittee and respect and love and idenniny and yadda yadda when it must know damn well that it’s all about gaining an unfair advantage. They’re not children, they’re the god damn BBC, they’re not so stupid they don’t notice the fuss is all about the male cheats, but they pretend otherwise.

Makes me want to puke.

BBC World at One’s reporting on the British Cycling ruling is jaw-droppingly disgusting. Everybody who talks is practically in floods of tears for poor darling fragile victim “Emily” Bridges and other men who want to cheat, and completely indifferent to women who don’t want to be forced to compete against men in their own sport. It’s so bad and unbalanced and just fucking misogynist I can hardly believe what I’m listening to.

The part where a woman voices Bridges’s statement starts at 12:06.

The BBC’s reporting on it is of course ridiculous.

British Cycling is to ban transgender women from the female category of its competitions following a nine-month review and consultation. Under a new participation policy that the governing body said was “predicated on fairness”, such athletes will compete in an ‘open category’ with men. Female races will be “for those whose sex was assigned female at birth”.

The changes will prevent riders such as Emily Bridges potentially being part of the British women’s team.

The Beeb goes on to quote at vast length from Bridges’s “who gives a fuck about women” statement. Oddly enough there is no matching statement quoted at vast length from one of the women harmed by Bridges’s invasion of women’s cycling.

Critics of transgender athletes’ participation in some women’s sports argue that gives them a disproportionate advantage over their peers and limits opportunities for their rivals.

However, others argue there is not enough detailed research in the area, that the science is not clear, and that with very few elite transgender athletes, sport should be more inclusive, with open categories criticised for being discriminatory.

Utter bullshit. We don’t let adults do this to children and we don’t whine that the science isn’t clear that adults have an advantage.

The BBC is helping India Willoughby and Emily Bridges campaign to destroy women’s rights.

And he knows why “Emily” doesn’t sound like that, too. The BBC as a whole knows, but still it’s eager to enforce the fiction and stomp all over women in the process. It’s nauseating.

Willoughby really is leaning into the witch-hunting.

Uproar among men who want to cheat in sports. It’s genocide to stop them, genocide I tell you!

“There is no science” to justify separate sports for women, but there is lots and lots and lots of science that says men who claim to be women are indeed women. Uh huh.

Good old Willoughby. Women should all die by age 37, am I right?

Ah here he is. “Molly” Cameron.

Replies are not…affectionate.

Another shameless cheat steps up.

Cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat.

Stewart Rhodes sentenced to 18 years.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison Thursday in the first punishments to be handed down for seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. U.S. prosecutors asked for up to 25 years in prison and the longest sentence by far in the rioting to deter future acts of domestic terrorism, arguing Rhodes played a significant role in spreading doubt about the 2020 presidential election and led more than 20 other Americans to seek to use violence against the government to thwart the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

Of course it’s really Trump who should be in the slammer.

Rhodes and followers dressed in combat-style gear converged on the Capitol after staging an “arsenal” of weapons at nearby hotels, ready to take up arms at Rhodes’s direction, prosecutors said. Rhodes did not enter the building but was in contact with “ground team” leader Meggs, an auto dealer manager, just before Meggsled a line of members in military-style tactical gear up the East Capitol steps, where they helped a crowd force entry.

…

[P]rosecutors presented evidence that after networks declared the election for Biden on Nov. 7, 2020, Rhodes asked a “Friends of Stone” chat group — that included Stone and Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio — “What’s the plan?” and shared a Serbian academic’s proposal for storming Congress. Over the next two months, Rhodes amplified Trump’s bogus stolen election claims and used his platform as one of the extremist anti-government movement’s most visible leaders to urge followers to be ready for an “armed rebellion,” including in two open letters to Trump and a personal message intended for him pressing the president to use the military to hold on to power against Democratic opponents.

…

“We will have to rise up in insurrection (rebellion)” if Trump does not act, Rhodes texted one associate on Dec. 10. Four days after Jan. 6, Rhodes was recorded telling another that if Trump was “just gonna let himself be removed illegally, then we should have brought rifles,” and, “We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang f—-ing Pelosi from the lamppost,” referring to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Trump is campaigning to be president again.

Jo Bartosch at Spiked on Ed Davey and the LibDems and the odd penis joke:

Davey’s intellectually flaccid flapping over this question points to the war raging within the Liberal Democrats – between those pushing for a return to reality and the party’s longstanding, vocal trans allies. These allies include self-described pansexual MP Layla Moran, who memorably claimed in parliament that she could see the gendered ‘souls’ of trans-identified people. Then there is Baroness Lynne Featherstone, who told ‘those who believe they can… exclude trans women from women-only spaces’ that their views ‘are not welcome in the Liberal Democrats’. And there is Baroness Liz Barker, who pushed for the removal of the word ‘mother’ from a maternity-leave bill.

People who don’t believe that men can be women are not welcome in the Liberal Democrats. It never ceases to amaze me, this kind of thing. It’s as if nearly everyone suddenly decided that Avatar was a real, true, factual story, like any true factual story you might read in the NY Times, and at the same time that refusal to believe it is comparable to refusing to believe the Holocaust happened. Nobody should be required to believe either of those things, let alone both of them! Stay with me now. THEY. ARE. NOT. TRUE.

Despite being known as the party of softly spoken sandal wearers, the Lib Dem leadership has sent a hard message to members who deviate from the ‘transwomen are women’ line. At the Lib Dem conference earlier this year, Liberal Voice for Women claimed on Twitter that its attempts to debate a motion on ‘women’s representation on internal committees was prevented from being heard’. On the final day of the conference, party publication Lib Dem Voice produced an article headlined ‘It’s time for gender-critical people to leave’, which proclaimed that ‘there is no space for bigotry in this party’.

See? See what I mean? A grown-up political party calling people bigots for failing to believe in a magical gender soul that overrides the physical body. It’s framed as being similar to not believing that other races are fully human, but IT IS NOT LIKE THAT. It’s not like that at all. It’s very very different.

Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan tries to convince us that abortion rights and “trans rights” are much the same sort of thing (when in fact they’re antagonists).

Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements…

Trans “rights” are mostly antagonistic to lesbian and gay rights too. Governments of course already do in some senses “claim the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies.” We can’t use our bodies, “sexed” or otherwise, to murder or steal or kidnap or set fires – the list is long. We are our bodies, so laws that govern us govern our bodies. Trans people aren’t special in this way.

 Abortion bans have been proliferating wildly in the year since the US supreme court eliminated the right in their Dobbs decision, declaring that any state can compel women to remain pregnant, and creating different, lesser entitlements to bodily freedom and self-determination based on sex. But as the abortion bans have spread like an infection across the American south, midwest, and mountain west, they have been accompanied by a related political disease: laws seeking to prohibit minors and sometimes adults, from accessing medical treatments that facilitate gender transitions.

It’s not related though. Trying to change your sex via surgeries and hormones is not related to ending a pregnancy. The two are different, and it’s not cute to try to link women’s right to say no to a pregnancy to narcissists’ putative right to amputate healthy body parts in a doomed effort to mimic the opposite sex.

It is not a coincidence that the states which have the most punitive and draconian bans on abortion have also adopted the most aggressive targeting of transgender people and medical care. The bills are part of the same project by conservatives, who have been emboldened in their campaign of gender revanchism in the wake of Dobbs. Both abortion bans and transition care bans further the same goal: to transform the social category of gender into an enforceable legal status, linked to the sexed body at birth and to prescribe a narrow and claustrophobic view of what that gender status must mean.

No. It may sound plausible but it’s not really true. Abortion bans aren’t about enforcing gender rules on women, though they have that effect in some ways. Abortion bans are about forcing women to bear children against their will. The lawmakers don’t care if those women wear jeans and hiking boots, they care about forcing them to push out that baby just as God intended.

Abortion and trans rights activists have long insisted that both abortion and transition are healthcare. 

So what? People can insist things that aren’t true.

Abortion and trans rights activists have long insisted that both abortion and transition are healthcare. It’s an apt and worthy argument, considering that both involve the interventions of medical professionals, both facilitate the wellbeing and happiness of those who receive them, and both result in horrific health complications when denied, from the high rates of mental distress and horrific, needless pregnancy complications that have been ushered in by Dobbs, to the dramatic rates of suicidal ideation and mental health problems in trans people who are denied the ability to transition.

She forgot to mention the horrific health complications of transition. Botched surgeries, regrets, despair – they all happen.

Tim Harris is our poet laureate.

A BALLAD, a whole BALLAD?

Oh, I forbid ye ladies a’

Unless ye hae nae fear,

To come or gae by Starbuck Ha’

For fell Ms Spain works there.

There’s nane that gaes to Starbuck Ha’

But they maun get the pronouns reet,

Gif they ken, or gif they dinna,

Else Ms Spain will greet.

(‘greet’ in Scots means cry or whimper)

But that’s enough.

I think a limerick might be easier

There once was a lady called Spain

Who had rages again and again.

When others misgendered

Pronouns she’d tendered,

She wanted to cause them pain.

Starbucks drama king still yelling and screaming about his tedious game of Pretend I’m a Woman Or Else.

A video of the incident went viral, but Ms Spain has broken her silence, claiming that the footage does not tell the whole story.

She insisted: ‘I’m the victim of a transphobic hate crime, but I’m being treated like a criminal. The viral video doesn’t show the customer calling us trannies and going on a rant about gender. 

‘It doesn’t show how it started with her screaming about why we don’t accept cash and demanding that we do. The internet’s been filled with lies.’

Nobody cares, child. The way to deal with an unreasonably angry customer is to be very detached and calm and non-reactive, not to fly into a screaming rage and clap your hands in her face.

Ms Thomas claimed the whole row stemmed from her using the word ‘lady’ to describe a member of staff serving her without realising that they did not identify as a woman.

They were discussing why Starbucks did not accept cash and as Ms Spain, who was standing nearby intervened, Ms Thomas claims that she told her: ‘I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to the lady behind the counter.’

This prompted Ms Spain, who was standing close by, to confront her for using the wrong gender to describe her colleague.

Ms Spain insisted that Ms Thomas’s use of the word ‘lady’ was ‘deliberate and spiteful’.

Other way around, chum. It’s this stupid and ludicrous idea that people have to pretend that strangers are a customized sex that they obviously aren’t, when all we want to do is get our coffee or pay for our tomatoes and bread or get to our destination and walk away, that is Deliberate and Spiteful. Nobody cares. Nobody. Nobody cares about other people’s luxury pronouns, or their highly polished gender identity. It’s extremely simple: nobody you encounter in shops or coffee places or buses or dressing rooms is as interested in you as you are. This is one of the first things people need to learn about the world, and it’s tragic to see how badly the pronoun people have been neglected here. What were their parents and teachers doing???

I wonder if he’ll still be raving about the Starbucks Karen 50 years from now.

Two months ago but still relevant.

It’s not something you can choose. That’s your whole problem right there: it’s not a choice. You can’t choose to be born, you can’t choose to be human (or not), you can’t choose to be a mammal (or not), you can’t choose to be immortal, you can’t choose to be a contemporary of Euripides. You can’t choose to be a woman.

There’s a lot in life that we just never get a choice about, and what sex we are is one item on that massive list.

Everybody, literally everybody, used to know this. The baby talk in that tweet is astounding to me.

Here’s the Channel 4 hit job on Falkner:

Starting at 3:29 they tell us where the “bloke in lipstick” remark came from. Emma Laslett is the guy who inspired news outlets to claim that the quiz show Brain of Britain had had its first all-women panel, when in fact it wasn’t an all-women panel, because it had Emma Laslett on it. Channel 4 solemnly listens while the guy tells us how terrible terrible terrible it all is.

Well. He is a bloke. He did not make that panel an all-woman panel. He does fit this pattern of men taking things meant for women while publicly trashing women who resist.

He’s also very very very unmistakably male.

The Telegraph take:

[Falkner] has made it her mission to attempt to find consensus in the vicious clash between women, same sex attracted people and the transgender community since she began chairing the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2020, but has quickly been forced to fight fires internally instead.

Senior leaders at the taxpayer-funded body say they were left “blindsided” when a dossier, titled “Governance Concerns” from an unknown number of complainants, began circulating in February.

It contained dozens of generic allegations of ‘bullying”, “harassment” and “discrimination” and claimed that “unacceptable behaviour from the chairwoman is becoming normalised”, without providing many examples.

Trans activism in a nutshell innit – endless howling about disskriminashun by which is meant knowing that men are not women.

The complaints coincide with Baroness Falkner’s most recent intervention in the trans debate, following lengthy discussions with board members, to recommend that the Government consider protecting “biological sex” rather than just “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act to “bring legal clarity” to areas such as sports, which Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, will now take forward. This infuriated transgender activists.

Why? Because “transgender activists” are determined to put purported “trans rights” way ahead of women’s rights – determined, in fact, to allow them to demolish women’s rights. It’s like handing the union over to the bosses.

On Tuesday night, Channel 4 News claimed it had spoken to 20 current and former staff members with complaints about the EHRC’s direction, including allegations that they were “on calls where staff were crying”, that they feel they “are effectively puppets on strings… to deliver a Tory agenda”.

Oh no, staff were crying! Not at all manipulatively! Real, scalding, salty tears!

Among those who have criticised the EHRC recently are Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN’s independent expert on gender identity, who said he was “shocked to hear” about its recommendation to clarify the meaning of biological sex in equality law and this would be “discriminatory” as, he said, “a trans woman who does have a Gender Recognition Certificate is a woman under the current case law”.

Therefore women have no rights a man is bound to respect. Thanks, Victor Madrigal-Borloz.

Ian Acheson, who was the chief operating officer of the EHRC from 2012 to 2015, said: “I spent an enormous amount of my time looking inwards to the organisation trying to deal with multiple factional disputes by a politicised workforce, more than delivering the core mission of a fairer Britain.

“I am saddened but not surprised that Baroness Falkner finds herself in this position because there will still be significant numbers of staff within the organisation who remain ideologically opposed to both the government of the day and that anything other than unconditional acceptance of people’s declaration of their gender identity is acceptable, along with the implications for the safety and dignity of women and girls.”

That is, numbers of staff who remain ideologically opposed to the government of the day and adamant that anything other than unconditional acceptance of people’s declaration of their gender identity is unacceptable.