If questioned, say it’s complicated and you haven’t figured it out yet.

The captains or vice-captains of eight inter-county teams playing in the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) league finals have been advised by the association’s media team to avoid expressing opinions on its new transgender policy.

The LGFA will host a round of media interviews on Tuesday with the players ahead of the four finals. The Sunday Independent has obtained a copy of an LGFA briefing issued to the players that contains suggested responses to questions on controversial topics journalists might ask.

A question about the LGFA’s new transgender policy, which was introduced in February, is listed at the top of the likely topics to be raised.

And what is the new policy? Silly question. The usual “Let the gentleman play and shut up about it, ladies.”

The LGFA has refused to give any details of what consultation or medical advice it relied on before introducing the policy, which has been criticised by some players and referees as “dangerous” for allowing transgender women to play once they meet criteria set down by a new transgender applications committee.

How can it possibly be dangerous to let men play on women’s teams??! It’s not as if men are bigger and stronger and faster so how can they possibly be a risk to women??????

After the LGFA’s new transgender policy was published a few weeks ago, Kildare goalkeeper Mary Hulgraine tweeted: “Really? I’m all for equality and inclusion. But in a high intensity sport where there 100pc is physical contact… this is just dangerous. Genetically this is wrong. It goes against why female sports was created in the first place.”

But female sports was created by a lot of backward unenlightened bigoted bad people who didn’t understand about trans women.

Rubbing Our Noses In It chapter eleventy billion:

Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney has secured another major partnership deal, days after Bud Light was criticized for partnering with her.

Mulvaney, an actor and comedian who has been documenting her transition across social media, is now a sports bra model for Nike. 

Wait wait wait wait wait.

What is a sports bra? What is the whole point of a sports bra? Why is a sports bra necessary?

Because breasts, that’s why. Because breasts stick out from the body, and bounce if the body is in rapid motion, and that’s uncomfortable at best. Because breasts need support in the activities that make up sports.

Dylan Mulvaney doesn’t have breasts.

It’s just so fucking insulting, this kind of thing – deliberately insulting. “Haha ladies it pisses you off that we pay Dylan to model makeup and dresses? Ok we’ll ratchet it up: now it’s Tampax, and sports bras for his flat chest! Hahaha sucks to be you, Karen.”

Ah yes, trans ballet at last; just what we all needed.

Do check out the Missoula Gala Performance. The dancers do the moves and then he just hangs out, tiptoeing around a bit like a burglar looking for the exit. The dancers are on pointe and he’s not, yet he’s somehow the star. Sums up the whole ludicrous mess.

A new front is opened in Musk’s war on all of us. Nick Cohen explains:

If you follow the tech news, you will know that Elon Musk has gone to war against Substack. He wants to punish it for launching a feature called Notes, which he fears may compete with his increasingly rickety Twitter platform.

Yesterday morning I found that no one could retweet Substack links to my pieces. By the evening, Musk had lifted the ban. But if Twitter users clicked on a link, they received a warning that made it sound as if they were about to enter the dark web.

It’s true. I tried it and sure enough I got the warning. Furthermore, I was unable to reply to Nick’s tweet telling him so. I had to send him a DM to tell him Musk appears to have blocked replies to him. What a shit that man is.

Texas senator is fine with a Supreme Court justice’s acceptance of bribes.

How does the Wall Street Journal defend Thomas’s cheery acceptance of bribes?

The left’s assault on the Supreme Court is continuing, and the latest front is the news that Justice Clarence Thomas has a rich friend who has hosted the Justice on his private plane, his yacht, and his vacation resort. That’s it. That’s the story. Yet this non-bombshell has triggered breathless claims that the Court must be investigated, and that Justice Thomas must resign or be impeached. Those demands give away the real political game here.

But “the left” didn’t invent the rule that travel donations (aka “his private plane, his yacht”) must be reported.

The left didn’t even invent the fact that lavish gifts can look like, and can be, bribes.

ProPublica, a left-leaning website, kicked off the fun with a report Thursday that Justice Thomas has a longtime friendship with Harlan Crow, a wealthy Texas real-estate developer. The intrepid reporters roamed far and wide to discover that the Justice has sometimes traveled on Mr. Crow’s “Bombardier Global 5000 jet” and that each summer the Justice and his wife spend a vacation week at Mr. Crow’s place in the Adirondacks.

The piece is loaded with words and phrases intended to convey that this is all somehow disreputable: “superyacht”; “luxury trips”; “exclusive California all-male retreat”; “sprawling ranch”; “private chefs”; “elegant accommodation”; “opulent lodge”; “lavishing the justice with gifts.” And more.

Are those words and phrases intended to convey that it’s all disreputable or that it’s all very lavish? There’s a difference. The lavishitude certainly contributes to the disreputability, but then, that’s quite a sound reason for reporting it, no?

Ben Bradshaw’s grotesque waving away of femicide is from a New Statesman interview with Rosie Duffield.

For at least half a decade now, Labour, like many political parties in the West, has struggled with the contentious issue of “self-ID” – the proposed right of people to self-identity as another sex or gender.

Notice a funny thing about this. The word or label “self-ID” doesn’t literally mean to self-identity as another sex or gender. It just means [the right to] self-identify. We’re given a translation that claims it means [only] to self-identify as another sex or gender. Not, you see, to self-identify as an animal or a tree or a building or a planet – just as another sex or gender. Well what does that tell you? That self-identifying as something you’re not is, in every other context, just an absurdity, or a game. It tells you that everyone knows that self-identifying as something is not magic and does not make you that something unless you already are it. It gives the game away – “We all know that you can’t really do this, but we’ve decided to humor this one category of people who pretend you can.”

Some Labour members and voters, and an undetermined number of the party’s MPs, think that self-ID threatens the rights of women to single-sex spaces. The most prominent critic of the idea within the party is Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury since 2017.

…

Why is the subject so fraught? For Duffield, who lived through the fights within Labour over Brexit and anti-Semitism, “this is the only issue I’ve been involved in where there is no attempt at collegiate discussion. It’s so divided.” Any fence-sitting by Starmer, she believes, is only going to alienate both sides.

Ben Bradshaw, a fellow Labour MP and the former culture secretary, is a public critic of Duffield’s. He pushed back against some of her views when we spoke. “Ireland already has self-ID, of course, as do a growing number of European countries. So I think the tide of history is going steadily in one direction,” he argues.

“As far as I’m concerned, Labour’s position is absolutely clear and should not be controversial,” Bradshaw continues, “which is that we favour reforming the gender recognition process to demedicalise it, to reduce the degrading treatment that trans people who want to transition need to go through. We believe there’s absolutely no conflict between trans rights and the protection of safe spaces under the Equality Act.” Bradshaw believes this is “certainly Keir’s position” and the position of most Labour MPs. 

I put the polling data to him. “Of course public opinion in a democracy matters,” he says. “But if governments had always only been guided by public opinion, we wouldn’t have had any of the social advances in this country.”

Nimble footwork. One minute “we believe,” next minute “never mind what most of us believe.” The tide of history is with us, also ignore public opinion.

The complacent waving away of the thousands of women killed every year is the next paragraph.

My god. Sometimes it just knocks the breath right out of you.

Ben Bradshaw is a Labour MP. Yes that’s right: a Labour MP.

Says the Labour MP from the demographic that is not the target of violent misogynist men.

Reduxx reports:

Athletics Canada’s former head coach has come forward to reveal that he was threatened by the Canadian Olympic Committee lawyers after expressing discontent with the results of the women’s 800m at the 2016 Olympic Games. The competition saw three biological males take the top spots, displacing the female Canadian bid to fourth place.

Peter Eriksson, the record-making former head coach for the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic program, spoke to Reduxx about what happened at the 2016 session in Rio, and the consequences he faced if he spoke out on behalf of Canadian athlete Melissa Bishop. Bishop placed fourth after three males competed in the female division.

In the 800m women’s race, Caster Semenya of South Africa took home gold, with Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi placing silver and Margaret Nyairera Wambui of Kenya finishing with bronze. All three of the athletes have Differences of Sexual Development (DSD) and while they are recognized as “female” legally, they possess XY chromosomes and are biologically male.

…

Speaking to Reduxx, former Athletics Canada head coach Peter Eriksson says that he was outraged at the results of the 2016 women’s 800m, and had wanted to speak out against the injustice on behalf of Melissa Bishop, the Canadian female runner who would have come in first place if not for the three male athletes.

“I was the first one to see Melissa after the race and what do you even say in that scenario? ‘You’re the best woman in the race?’ You don’t get a medal for that,” Eriksson says. “This was such an injustice I wanted to speak out, and then I got a call from the Canadian Olympic Committee’s lawyer saying that if I opened my mouth, I would be banned for life in sport.”

Isn’t that interesting. Three men cheat three women out of medals, and the Canadian Olympic Committee’s lawyer threatens a coach into shutting up about it.

Eriksson explained that, at the time, World Athletics claimed there was a lack of evidence on the advantage possessed by DSD athletes, but that there had been no confusion on the ground about what Semenya and the others were.

“Everybody knew Caster Semenya, for example, was a male. Everybody was aware of it, but I think that World Athletics didn’t want to do anything,” Eriksson says.

Cool. When in doubt, go for letting the men cheat the women out of their medals. When in doubt, let the stronger trample the weaker in the usual way.

Linda Blade, a Canadian coach and vocal advocate for the rights of female athletes, was first to renew interest in the results of the 2016 women’s 800m results after posting information about the threats Eriksson received to her Twitter.

Blade added her own commentary to the matter, tweeting: “Our own country’s leadership would rather sellout to a cult rather than to defend one of our champions – even at the expense of waving GOODBYE to #Olympic Gold!!  Sacrificing a woman and her entire career on the alter of #GenderIdeology. Just let that sink in.” 

…

Blade has called on the International Olympic Committee and World Athletics to rectify the results of the 2016 Olympics for Bishop, asking for the gold to be retroactively reassigned in the same way that is sometimes done in doping cases.

Eriksson agrees with Blade, and also believes that Bishop should be given her medal.

But it won’t happen.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Web of confusion.

You’ve just announced that you think of girl-being as a matter of self-identifying rather than fact or body, so you don’t center the experiences of young women and girls, you center the experiences of people who tell you they think of themselves as women or girls.

You can’t do both. You can’t insist that being female is a matter of “identifying as” and still pretend you center the experience of female people.

I’ll bet the TiMs attending would be some pissed off it it ended up being all TiMs and only TiMs in attendence. I think that’s why they insist on having it both ways. They need women and girls there to validate them, to show everyone they’re just “one of the girls.” They can’t do that if it’s a total TiM sausage fest. Then they’d be being ghettoized, and they’d have to find some group with actual validating females in it so they could join. Again. Any exclusively TiM accomodation (which you’d think they’d be happy with) denies them the validation that sharing exropriating women’s facilities and resources they crave. A sporting event made up entirely of TiMs would be a complete failure. They’d just be competing against other cheats. Where’s the fun (or validation) in that?

As much as they’d hate to admit it, they need women present. Women are the secret ingedient that they can’t do without because TiMs can’t validate each other. It doesn’t work that way. How many “trans lesbians” date other “trans lesbians”? The “cotton ceiling” doesn’t refer to TiMs. Why is that? Without actual lesbians in the mix, any TiM is just a heterosexual male, and they know it. It’s really quite a bind they’ve put themselves into, and they’re doing their damnedest to use women to get themselves out of it. But there’s no resolving this inherent contradiction, especially when gatekeeping women “withhold” the validation that TiMs so desperately need. Why can’t women just shut up and be kind?

It’s just like the attempted hostile takeover of the word “woman.” Changing the meaning of the word “woman” so that it includes men destroys the meaning they’re so desperate to latch onto. If women abandoned the word and took up a new one for themselves, TiMs would come around to appropriate that new word too. They can’t be their “true selves” without women being forced to accept them as women. It’s like TiMs are trying to extract some sort of stamp of authenticity from the women they’re forcing themselves on. It’s sick and twisted. Just as TiMs reject third spaces for toilet facilities, open categories in sports, trans exclusive rape crisis accomodations and counselling, they demand access to women’s spaces and, ironically, women’s approval. Anything else marks them out as not being women, which of course, they’re not. I can’t but imagine that helplessness in the face of this insurmountable contradiction must fuel some of their anger.

Women who refuse to submit quietly underline the fundamental untruth and delusion behind gender ideology and its demands. Without women, any gathering of TiMs is just a bunch of guys in dresses. Women are the needed, forced audience. It’s no fun if you’re not transgressing anything or anyone. Who do you lord it over and demand “centering” from if not women? Being given your own facilities robs you of the validation that using women’s facilities supplies you with. Third spaces will never be acceptable because they’re transphobic, cutting you off from the women’s spaces you need and deserve. If women pack up their tent and leave, you will follow them, because like it or not, you need them. Women are the fact that won’t go away, and that you can’t let escape.

Pro Publica reports Clarence Thomas’s “explanation.”

In response to a ProPublica report, Thomas explained why he did not disclose lavish travel provided by billionaire Harlan Crow. But legal experts maintain the justice was required to make these disclosures.

You might think that because he’s on the Supreme Court he’s more of a legal expert than these legal experts who say what he doesn’t like. But that’s not the case. The appointments of justices are political, and presidents don’t necessarily choose the most expert experts. To put it mildly. Clarence Thomas was most definitely not Bush’s pick because of his expertise.

But seven legal ethics experts consulted by ProPublica, including former ethics lawyers for Congress and the White House, said the law clearly requires that gifts of transportation, including private jet flights, be disclosed. If Thomas is arguing otherwise, the experts said, he is incorrect.

A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions for Thomas about the specifics of the advice he was given or who he consulted.

And probably never will.

ProPublica’s story Thursday revealed that Thomas had taken international cruises on Crow’s superyacht, flown on Crow’s private jet and regularly vacationed at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. In one instance, Thomas flew on Crow’s jet from Washington Dulles airport to New Haven, Connecticut, then flew back three hours later.

Not exactly a fuel-efficient way to get from DC to New Haven and back.

A law passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Ethics in Government Act, requires Supreme Court justices and many other federal officials to report most gifts to the public. Justices are generally required to report all gifts worth more than $415, defined as “anything of value” that they don’t repay the full cost of. Gifts are disclosed in an annual financial report that is made public.

Oh so it is a law. I was saying earlier (based on the story I’d just read) that it was a rule or code of ethics or something rather than a law. I was wrong.ProPublica asked the seven legal ethics experts about the exception and Thomas’ statement. All said that the law’s language clearly requires that gifts of transportation, such as private jet travel or cruises on a yacht, be disclosed and said Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to report them.

ProPublica asked the seven legal ethics experts about the exception and Thomas’ statement. All said that the law’s language clearly requires that gifts of transportation, such as private jet travel or cruises on a yacht, be disclosed and said Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to report them.

Well you asked the wrong experts! Ask some bent ones!

”It is absolutely impossible that anyone could reasonably interpret that exception to apply to private jet flights,” said Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. “Not in any universe.”

Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush White House, said Thomas’ explanation of why he didn’t disclose the trips “makes absolutely no sense.” Painter emphasized that the exemption only covers three categories: food, lodging and entertainment. Private jet flights would fall into none of those, he said.

“Justice Thomas likes to focus on the language of authoritative texts, and that’s not what he’s doing in this statement,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Zing!

Right side of history yeah?

The Guardian on changing the Equality Act:

A significant change to the 2010 Equality Act is being pursued by the government, which would redefine “sex” to refer specifically to a person’s sex at birth. That would be designed to make it legal for those who are transgender to be banned from single-sex spaces and events, such as book groups and hospital wards.

Book groups? Is it currently illegal to have all-women book groups? Really?

Currently, trans people can have their identity formally recognised by applying for a gender recognition certificate.

What does that mean? What does “their identity” mean? Identity isn’t a synonym for sex. This issue is such a mess of lies and obfuscation that it becomes necessary to re-write everything that’s said about it, because it’s always so misleading and confused.

This affirms their gender change in law, allowing them to update their birth or adoption certificate and have their gender recognised on a marriage or death certificate.

In other words they have state permission to falsify their sex on official documents.

That process is not expected to change, but the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, wants to make a clearer distinction in law between those who are born a particular sex and those who transition or identify as a gender different from their birth one.

Between the normies and the magic people.

Those who advocate for sex-based rights say it would affirm hard-fought protections for those who are born biologically female. But the impact on trans people would probably be detrimental.

Only if you think they absolutely have to be able to say they are what they are not at all times and in all situations. If you think the detriment to billions of women is far less important than the notional detriment to a tiny number of trans people, you’re delusional.

Critics of changing the Equality Act also say trans people would feel they were being targeted, with the potential for real-world hostility towards them rising.

No, you know what’s doing that? All this deranged over-reach. Telling women to shut up and fuck off and kiss the ring. Bullying women while treating men who claim to be women like darling little kittens. Taking women’s rights away and giving them to men. That kind of thing.

Clarence Thomas says he followed the rules to the letter.

In a statement released by the Supreme Court, the justice said that he had followed guidance from others at the court and that he believed he was not required to report the trips.

“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable,” Justice Thomas said. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”

No. That’s not credible. If you’re a Supreme Court justice and you just happen to have these billionaire Close Personal Friends who became your “friends” after you were appointed to the court, you know damn well that that’s an issue. Justices aren’t just random people off the street appointed to the court in a lottery. They’re supposed to know something about the law, and about the norms and expectations that govern people with extra power in relation to that law. He wasn’t some hayseed learning how to work the Xerox machine, he was A SUPREME COURT JUSTICE. Come on now.

And another thing. There’s a tacky bit of attempted manipulation in there.

…and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable,” Justice Thomas said. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure”

See what he did there? He says he made a strenuous effort to follow the counsel to keep the bribes secret – in other words he claims to have worked hard to do nothing about the bribes, so that we would admire his diligence and effort. It didn’t take any “endeavor” for him to fail to report the bribes; all he had to do was just not report the bribes, which was of course the easiest and pleasantest path to take. Tawdry as well as corrupt.

Trump is hoping to use his criminality as a campaign boost.

At one end of the palatial Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, the former president made his first public comments about his arrest. At the opposite end of the hall — a space illuminated by 16 crystal chandeliers and bigger than four professional basketball courts — were several cardboard boxes stuffed with white campaign T-shirts.

[Interjection. What the hell is that “bigger than four professional basketball courts” for? How are we supposed to know how big that is?! Not everyone on the planet goes to professional basketball games. What is it with football fields and basketball courts as units of measurement? Cut it out.]

The shirts read “I STAND WITH TRUMP,” and had a date printed on them in bold type: 03-30-2023 — the day Mr. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his role in a hush-money scandal.

Tacky enough? Repulsive enough? I’m a criminal, elect me!

His legal calculation, according to aides and allies close to him, is that his pressure campaign against the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, will lead to his acquittal and deter other prosecutors from seeking additional indictments — though some of his lawyers have warned him that’s unlikely.

A bully to the bitter end.

“President Trump isn’t just right to speak this way, he has a duty to use his bully pulpit to expose corrupt and uncontrolled prosecutors,” said Rod R. Blagojevich, a former Democratic governor of Illinois who was imprisoned for corruption until Mr. Trump commuted his sentence in 2020. “I applaud him for it.”

Now there’s a classy endorsement!

The campaign has sent more than three dozen fund-raising appeals to supporters this week — each one referring to Mr. Trump’s legal battles. On Tuesday, one email solicited campaign contributions in return for T-shirts printed with a fake mug shot of the former president and the words “not guilty.” (The authorities in New York opted not to take an actual mug shot.)

Vote for the mug shot guy! His resort is as big as 275 baseball diamonds!

Y?CA Scotland.

First: “We refer to our primary audience as self-identifying young women and girls.” Why self-identifying? Why not just young women and girls? Silly question. Because that would be transphobic. It has to be a matter of opinion rather than a matter of fact, because otherwise it’s exclooosionary.

But the YWCA has always been for young women and girls, just as the YMCA has always been for young men and boys. They’ve never been the YSIWCA ad YSIMCA. It was always an objective observable fact, not a self-identifying mental state. Why change it? To appease people who go off like sirens if they’re not appeased.

And then, not satisfied with having already given away the W to people who call themselves women, they do it all over again but worded differently. Their audience is inclooosive of people of marginalised genders – which are who now? Plural marginalised genders? What are we talking about? How do we know? Why is the fog so thick? And “who feel comfortable in a space that centres the experience of young women and girls” – but you’ve just revealed that you don’t center the experiences of young women and girls. You’ve just announced that you think of girl-being as a matter of self-identifying rather than fact or body, so you don’t center the experiences of young women and girls, you center the experiences of people who tell you they think of themselves as women or girls.

You can’t do both. You can’t insist that being female is a matter of “identifying as” and still pretend you center the experience of female people.

That went well.

A very reasonable, compassionate, justice-seeking group. I especially like the “Bye bitch!”

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Grounds for removal.

Screechy’s Comprehensive Guide to SCOTUS:

Thomas: The recent revelations of the depths of his corruption notwithstanding, a sincere right-wing nut. As Elie Mystal said today, he would have voted the same way regardless of what gifts he got. He really believes in all this stuff. He’s even got a few idiosyncratic non-stereotypical conservative views (like on the Confrontation Clause, where he’s made some pro-defendant rulings). But don’t underestimate the “nut” part — he is on record as saying that there is no Constitutional obstacle to, say, Alabama declaring the Baptist Church as the Official Church of Alabama.

Alito: Complete and utter right-wing hack. Has no consistent legal philosophy or principles, and will always rule in the short-term interests of the GOP, and deal with any implications of that precedent later (by which I mean: ignore them).

Roberts: Right-wing dealmaker. Whether because of his natural inclination, or his role as Chief, is very concerned with the Court’s reputation and legitimacy. So he consistently pushes the Court to achieve conservative results in ways designed to not provoke too much outrage. Will happily cut backroom deals towards that end.

Kavanaugh: Not entirely sure of him yet, but seems closest to Roberts except for being a psycho personally who will happily “stick it to the libs” in retaliation for the perceived injustices against him.

Gorsuch: A less radical version of Thomas. Does have actual principles, and so will occasionally surprise with seemingly non-conservative rulings (readers of B&W will be disappointed to be reminded of his ruling in a trans rights case), but still pretty conservative, so he’s going to be a mostly-reliable vote for the conservative bloc.

Coney Barrett: Don’t have a good read on her yet, but my impression is a mix of Alito and Roberts — not quite as hacky as Alito, but doesn’t give a shit about being seen as reasonable.

Kagan: Occasionally frustrating in her naive belief that the conservatives can be reasoned with, and a little too “faculty lounge, can’t we all get along,” but fine. Probably a useful asset to have on the Court because she’ll cut deals with Roberts to make the Court less horrible.

Jackson: too early to say, but seems willing to call out bullshit, which is good since she’s got a couple of decades of writing dissents to look forward to.

Sotomayor: Has had just about enough of this bullshit, but not (yet) prepared to just completely blow shit up.

Clarence Thomas seems to be greedier than most Supreme Court justices.

“Justice Thomas Reports Wealth of Gifts” was the title of a December 2004 front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, detailing how Clarence Thomas had received gifts worth tens of thousands of dollars over the prior six years — far more than the other justices on the Supreme Court at the time.

So he stopped reporting them.

The story appears to have marked a turning point for Thomas and his public disclosures of gifts. Since the news account was published 18 years ago, Thomas has reported receiving just two gifts, according to a Washington Post review of his financial disclosure forms posted online by nonprofit groups Fix the Court and OpenSecrets.

Missed the point rather, didn’t he. It wasn’t the reporting that was the problem, it was the quantity and quality of the bribes.

[Harlan] Crow has also donated money in support of Ginni Thomas’s work,Politico reported more than a decade ago. In 2009, she founded the nonprofit Liberty Central to harness the energy of activists in the growing tea party movement. She launched the group with $500,000 from an anonymous donor, stirring questions about whether such financial support created potential conflicts of interest for her husband on the bench.

Question no more. The answer is “yes.”

How does he know any of that?

But as you will all know there are a small number of people who do not identify with the gender that they were born into, and it can be incredibly stressful. And there are young people who are going through real anguish actually in relation to this, and I’m not gunna join those that just want to [arm shoots out] add to the abuse of that small group of people.

How does he know any of what he says? Ignoring the insult at the end for the moment, how does he know there are “people who do not identify with the gender that they were born into”? How does he even know what it means? How does he know it can be incredibly stressful? How does he know there are people going through real anguish about this? How does he know any of it?

The same way we know anything, you could say. How do we know Trump was president? How do we know Clarence Thomas accepts expensive presents and doesn’t report them? How do we know Trump was indicted on Tuesday?

But it isn’t the same way. There are important differences. None of those bits of knowledge are magical or inherently incredible. They don’t require unquestioning belief in other people’s claims about a magical inner identity that nullifies a humdrum external physical reality. They don’t take the form “Ignore what you see in front of you, accept that I am the opposite of what I appear to be, and that I go through real anguish because of it, while people like you are bovinely contented with the gender you were born into.” Starmer is talking about a bizarre belief about a hidden magical self as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about trade or inflation or the NHS. He’s talking about that bizarre belief and he’s treating it as far more important and more deserving of attention and solidarity than boring old women’s complaints about rape and misogynistic cops and not being listened to.