That whole Don Lemon thing? CNN talking head telling millions that women become worthless in their 40s? Pfft. Not a problem.

If you turned on CNN on Wednesday morning curious to see how Don Lemon would address his mini sexism scandal after his mini sabbatical and his “formal training,” the answer is that he wouldn’t address it, at least not on air.

A few moments before his show began, the news anchor tweeted that he appreciated “the opportunity to be back” and, to his colleagues and viewers, wrote, “I’ve heard you, I’m learning from you, and I’m committed to doing better.” Once “CNN This Morning” started, though, it was business as usual. Co-host Kaitlan Collins reported from Poland while Lemon and Poppy Harlow were back at their table, shuffling papers.

How old is Kaitlan Collins? How old is Poppy Harlow? Does Lemon think they’re both “past their prime”?

He was absent from the air Monday and Tuesday, and his return Wednesday came after CNN CEO Chris Licht promised via internal memo that Lemon had “agreed to participate in formal training, as well as continuing to listen and learn.”

Why does he need “formal training” at his age (he’s 56) to know that men don’t get to announce that women are worthless past age 40? Why does he need formal training to grasp that a woman running for political office shouldn’t be judged on whether or not Don Lemon thinks she’s fuckable. Why doesn’t he already know that???

His error was not borderline, as if he’d enthusiastically commented that Haley “looked great for her age.” His error was unforced and repeated. The noteworthy thing isn’t that Lemon believed that women, like steaks, have sell-by dates. The noteworthy thing is that he believed his opinions were so universal as to be unremarkable. Something he could say on air. He did not anticipate blowback.

…

Here is what bothers me about Lemon, and I’m sorry you had to read this whole thing for me to figure it out: Good journalists are curious about the world around them. They are interested in societal changes. In what is fair, what is accurate, what is just and in how understanding those concepts can change as we all evolve. Good journalists pay attention to things. It’s the bare minimum of the profession.

Corporate formal training tends to be good at helping employees keep their mouths shut before they say bad things. It’s less good at helping employees learn about the societal forces — centuries’ worth of casual misogyny — that infiltrated their brains to begin with.

This is what I’m saying. How the hell did he not know that women running for office should not be subject to “Nah not her she’s way too old and gross” from tv talking heads?

Don Lemon didn’t pay attention. He didn’t pay attention to the fact that his dismissive old-women tropes were no longer acceptable, that they would reflect badly on himself and would harm his colleagues. It definitely makes me question how great he is on women’s issues. It kinda makes me question how great he is at his job.

Not me. It makes me think he’s crap at his job.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Black and white thinking.

On the trans issue the thing I find most checkable in my thinking is what it feels like. Maybe the feeling is so intense, so agonizing, so impossible to get rid of, that…well, that what?

But at any rate, I can agree that I don’t fully understand what it feels like.

Neither can I. On the other hand, just because it feels like something doesn’t mean that’s what it is. People are not always the best judge of their own experiences. The explanations we reach for first might not be correct. We can be mistaken, or fooled; we can dream or hallucinate. Our subjectivity is no guaranty of accuracy or veracity; our proximity to the feelings and phenomenon might be the very source of our misperception rather than proof against it.

How can anyone feel that they “are” or “must be” something they’re not, and can’t ever be? I can understand that people feel terrible discomfort, but I don’t believe that they have any grounds to say “The discomfort I feel is because I’m really supposed to be, I really am the other sex.” How could they have any standard of comparison to make that claim? It’s like voting for the best restaurant in town when you’ve only ever been to one. Without eating at others, you can’t know there aren’t better. Well, when it comes to our selves we’re stuck in our one and only restaurant for life. The doors are locked, there’s no way out. I can only know what it’s like to be me. I will never have experiences as anyone but me. It’s like the old saying: “Wherever you go, there you are.” You can’t get outside of yourself. No taste tests, no test drives. You can use imagination and empathy to inform yourself, to imagine and empathize, but you can’t be someone else . Not really. Not ever. However distressed or agonized I might be, I can not believably claim that I feel this way because I’m not actually the only person I’ve ever been (and the only one I will ever be) able to experience. Certainly you can agree that my discomfort and distress are real without accepting my claims about their origin.

Amputees experiencing “phantom limb syndrome” are experiencing something, but it does not, can not involve a continued connection to the limb that has been removed. Similarly, people suffering from the mistaken belief that their arm is not their own, but some sort of alien or robotic imposter are indeed suffering, but not because their arm is not actually theirs. The arms are not the problem, and it would be cruelly destructive to patients to tell them that they were correct. Even without the neurological underpinning that we now have to explain these strange claims and perceptions, we would have been under no obligation to agree with the sufferers’ preferred, but impossible rationalizations for these sensations. Claims of being “born into the wrong body” or “being the other sex” are entirely internal and private; there’s no publicly accessible stump, or bodily contiguity we can point to to refute these claims, but I believe they are just as impossible as phantom or alien limbs.

Is there any reason to believe in a “gendered soul” that must be given priority over our material bodies, for which we have more than sufficient evidence? Are we really readmitting Cartesian dualism into neuroscience? It would be like reintroducing phlogiston into chemistry. Without very good evidence, it is reckless to carry on as if drugging and carving the only body we will ever have in order to conform to the unquestionable demands of a gender “entity” that likely does not exist, consitutes a “treatment” for anything. It is no more effective than clothing a phantom limb or amputating an “alien” one.

Originally a pair of comments by Tim Harris on Imperialism: not THAT bad.

I came across a historian (English) who was educated at Cambridge, and taught at universities outside Britain; he was much exercised by anyone paying attention to slavery, and said the proper field of interest should be colonial history, by which he appeared to mean rehearsing the old tales of Clive of India, Cecil Rhodes et al. I remarked that slavery was an integral part of colonialism so that I did not see how it could be ignored. I find nothing positive, morally or otherwise, about slavery, the constant use of violence, and the extreme violence that was used if slaves rebelled; and I find nothing positive about the torture, mutilation, rape and murder of members of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya in the last century, something that British governments sought to cover up for years.

One reason, of course, why India was ‘more complicated’ than the Americas was because the people of India were not susceptible to the Old World diseases that European adventurers brought to the New World. Africa, which is a continent, is a great deal more complicated than many people would like to suppose, and it always has been. But few people in the West are seriously interested in the history of Africa south of those nations bordering on the Mediterranean, largely because they don’t suppose it had a history, or, rather, many histories.

Australia seems to be at last coming to some sort of terms with the violent history of its treatment (which included many massacres) of the original people who settled there, as does New Zealand; and if that involves a bit of ‘woo’, I really do not care, since it is not going to change the present course of science – science that in the past included the kind of ideas that remain dear to the heart of the still extant James Watson.

No doubt there were some positives in colonialism, and I do not wish to deny them, but I am reminded by those who dwell on them of something my Japanese wife heard from a colleague at the music university where she taught, here in Japan. The colleague was complaining about Chinese ingratitude because, after all, ‘we Japanese’ had built railways there prior to the Second World War. I have heard the same words with respect to India from British people.

Look up the name of Ram Mohan Roy in connexion with suttee; you will find that its banning was certainly not due solely to the enlightened members of the East India Company. He also fought against polygamy, child marriage and the caste system, and for property inheritance rights for women.

As for the benefits of colonialism, Roy, as well as other Indians, criticised the ‘drain’ whereby around one-half of the total revenue collected in India ‘was sent to England, leaving India, with a considerably larger population, to use the remaining money to maintain social well-being.’ (See Wikipedia)

And here’s something from the Economic Times of India:

JAIPUR: The East India Company knew the best way to conquer India was to control its trade and that is why controlling of ports became so important for them, noted politician and writer Shashi Tharoor said here today.

Tharoor, who was speaking at a session at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival here, said the company indulged in “fair amount of loot” and was “ruthless” in exaction of taxes.

“They found they could not succeed by buying Indian textiles and have to destroy it (textile industry) and they did that systematically,” he said, noting that there were “vested interests” involved that kept the company going.

According to him, the “horrendous” organisation did not even spare weavers and cut their funds.

“The Company also cut the funds of the weavers. The largest exporter of textiles was reduced to importing textiles from England,” he said, adding that India also had a “sophisticated” banking system.

Tharoor was in conversation with historian William Dalrymple at a session titled, “The Dishonourable Company: How the East India Company Took Over India”, where he also talked about his latest book, “An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India” which attempts to challenge the notion that the British rule was beneficial for India.

He said the British were in India only for money and also controlled the revenue in the country.

Agreeing with Tharoor’s description, Dalrymple said the company was a “tiny multi-national which created mayhem”.

Trump went to East Palestine Ohio today and…handed out bottles of Trump-brand water. No word on whether he threw them or not.

In what one former GOP official told Politico was a “clear” political stunt, former President Donald Trump visited East Palestine on Wednesday, nearly three weeks after a catastrophic train derailment. The trip also comes one day ahead of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s own trip to the Ohio town.

And two years and six weeks after Trump tried to incite a mob to hand him the election he lost.

In his remarks, he seized the opportunity to bash Buttigieg, saying he “should’ve been here already,” and President Joe Biden, advising him: “Get over here.” The former president also said that he was bringing “thousands of bottle of water [sic]—Trump water, actually. Most of it. Some of it, we had to go to a much lesser quality water.”

Attaboy, flog that merch even during an disaster.

Asked about his administration’s rollback of rail regulations, including regular safety audits of railroads, Trump said he “had nothing to do with it,” according to WKBN. 

He had nothing to do with his administration. Interesting.

CNN outdoes even the Guardian. It’s breathtaking how malicious and ugly this is:

For years, J.K. Rowling, one of the best-selling authors of all time, has made inflammatory comments about transgender people, particularly trans women, using dehumanizing language and baselessly accusing them of harming cisgender women. Her words have disappointed legions of “Harry Potter” fans and even the stars who brought Rowling’s books to life.

It’s “for years” only in the most literal sense, i.e. more than one year. The comments are “inflammatory” only in the sense that easily incensed people like “Scottie Andrew,” the author of this inflammatory piece, urge each other to be inflamed about them. “Dehumanizing language” is a straight-up lie. It’s also a lie to say she “accuses trans people of harming cisgender women.” This is plausible deniability at its most punchable. “I didn’t say she accused all trans people of harming cisgender women…I merely implied it. Neener neener.”

The very title of this bowl of sick is disgusting, and indeed “inflammatory”:

What to know about the new J.K. Rowling podcast and her history of harmful anti-trans comments

What to know, as if it were a set of facts instead of a piece of hate-mail from one bratty CNN reporter. “Her history” – he sounds like J. Edgar Hoover. Her comments are not harmful and they’re not anti-trans. Is CNN written by and for teenagers now?

Now, a podcast called “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” indicates she’ll discuss the reaction to those anti-trans comments – in addition to discussing her journey as an author – with host Megan Phelps-Roper, a high-profile former member of the anti-LGBTQ Westboro Baptist Church. Even before its release, the podcast was met with criticism by LGBTQ advocates for seemingly siding with Rowling based on the title alone.

Thanks to people like Scottie Andrew who do their best to convince everyone she’s an evil witch.

H/t a reader who may or may not want to be named.

Is that another crack in the foundation?

Police Scotland has withdrawn from a diversity scheme run by Stonewall, the controversial gay and transgender rights group.

The controversial group that used to campaign for gay rights but now campaigns for trans rights instead, often at the expense of gay rights.

The charity has been criticised for its stance on trans issues. Police Scotland is understood to be the first high-profile Scottish public body to have quit the scheme, which has attracted the support of the Scottish government — currently 89th on Stonewall’s top 100 employers index.

The fanatical, destroy everything else support of the Scottish government.

In 2021, the BBC announced its withdrawal from Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme after concerns about impartiality. The House of Commons, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the House of Lords and Ofcom have also left.

…

Critics claim the scheme wields undue influence over some public sector organisations. The workplace equality index rewards employers for promoting LGBTQ+ ideology both internally and outside the workplace, allowing them to climb the rankings.

But more T ideology than LGB ideology. LGB rights don’t rely on an ideology in the way claims about T rights do. LGB rights don’t require people to lie and ignore and pretend the way purported T rights do.

Stonewall said: “We’re proud of our diversity champions programme, which supports workplaces to create LGBTQ+ inclusive environments where all staff can thrive.”

No it doesn’t. It supports workplaces to create environments where staff are bullied and punished and fired if they don’t agree that men can be women.

H/t Holms

The BBC does a much more adult job of reporting on Prime Suspect JKR’s conversation with Megan Phelps-Roper.

Rowling has attracted extensive criticism for a series of comments voicing concerns about how trans issues affect women’s rights, and her opposition to Scotland’s gender recognition bill.

How refreshing it is to see a news outlet say that in a way that doesn’t nudge the reader to recoil in shock at a woman’s defense of women’s rights.

Her position has been interpreted by some as transphobic, leading to calls for a boycott of the Harry Potter franchise…

By some. Not all, not most, not even many, just some.

The Beeb even allows her to make a persuasive, thoughtful case.

Rowling later said many questions do not necessarily have clear-cut answers.

“There is a huge appeal, and I try to show this in the Potter books, to black and white thinking.

“It’s the easiest place to be and in many ways it’s the safest place to be. If you take an all-or-nothing position on anything, you will definitely find comrades, you will easily find a community. ‘I’ve sworn allegiance to this one simple idea.’

“What I’ve tried to show in the Potter books, and what I feel strongly myself, is that we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain.”

This is a good sign.

The Guardian has a piece about JK Rowling’s life with her abusive first husband, and to make up for such a twanzphobic act, goes on to abuse her. Part One: here’s how bad it was; Part Two: here’s how bad she is. The two takes don’t mesh very well – the transition is awkward.

The Harry Potter author JK Rowling has spoken about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her former husband, saying he tried to lock away the unpublished manuscript of the series’ first book to stop her leaving him.

Speaking on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling, a podcast series released on Tuesday, the author described her relationship with Jorge Arantes as violent and controlling, saying she had to sneak pages of the work away in small batches to photocopy in case he burned them.

…

“That manuscript still meant so much to me. That was the thing that I actually prioritised for saving. The only thing I prioritised beyond that, obviously, was my daughter, but at that point she’s still inside me, so she’s as safe as can be in that situation.”

End of Part One. Transition to Part Two:

Rowling was speaking to Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church, which is known for its hateful views and frequent protests against the LGBT community and other marginalised communities.

Subtle, but not all that subtle. An oddly conspicuous nudge to remember that Rowling too has “hateful views” according to the new law of nature that lesbians and gay men are in a “community” with people who think they’re the other sex. Rowling of course is not a member of a marginalised community. Women are not marginalised, or oppressed or excluded or bullied or harassed or assaulted or raped or murdered.

Also “known for its hateful views” is a weirdly childish phrase for an adult newspaper, and “other marginalised communities” isn’t much better.

The reporter, Kevin Rawlinson, gives himself the snide last word.

Among those to criticise her take on gender identity are the stars of the Harry Potter film franchise Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint.

Some critics have accused Rowling of stirring transphobia, including through her mocking interventions on social media.

Rowling said she had received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them”.

The Guardian is pathetic.

The Telegraph is paying attention.

A council is facing a backlash after agreeing to allow a trans cartoonist with a “kink” for nappy fetish art to speak to children at a library.

It’s ok. He could explain them about what a nappy fetish is, and they could tell him about their nappies.

Ms Labelle, who identifies as a woman, has spoken publicly about her nappy fetish art, known as “diaperfur art”. It has been defined as images related to someone with an interest in anthropomorphic animal characters and an interest in wearing diapers, typically as part of a baby roleplay.

Sheds a whole new light on Winnie the Pooh, wot wot?

Is that really what happened????

Many people doubt it.

If they really think Wisey the Pretty is all he claims to be and nothing besides what he claims to be, would they have done this?

I don’t think so.

About that Georgia grand jury…

A special grand jury that investigated election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia recommended indictments of multiple people on a range of charges in its report, most of which remains sealed, the forewoman of the jury said in an interview today.

…

A focal point of the Atlanta inquiry is a call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” 11,780 votes, or enough to overturn his loss in the state.

“We definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger that was so publicized,” said Ms. Kohrs, whom The Associated Press first named and spoke with on Tuesday about the election meddling investigation.

“I will tell you that if the judge releases the recommendations, it is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”

I think we get the idea.

Good grief.

Men are in their prime forever, women only for a few years. You don’t like it? Talk to the science.

The CNN anchor Don Lemon will return to his regular morning-show role on Wednesday, the network announced late Monday night, after an uproar over a series of comments he made on the air last week about women and aging.

Women do it earlier and worse. That’s just how it is; look it up!

Mr. Lemon will be absent from Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” where he last appeared on Thursday, shortly after asserting on the air that Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate, “isn’t in her prime, sorry.” He went on to say that “a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”

“Prime” meaning what? Clearly fuckability, but presidential candidates aren’t candidates for fucking, they’re candidates for political office.

After his co-anchor Poppy Harlow pushed back, Mr. Lemon responded, “I’m just saying what the facts are,” and urged her to “Google it.”

Ah yes the facts – the facts that men don’t want to fuck women over 39. What else do you need to know?

Kenan Malik has a review in the Guardian of a book about colonialism – the “hey it wasn’t that bad” kind of book about colonialism.

In 1857, in the wake of the Indian mutiny, a British officer, Lt George Cracklow, described in a letter home what happened to captured rebels. “The prisoners were marched up to the guns… and lashed to the muzzles,” he wrote. “The guns exploded… I could hardly see for the smoke for about 2 seconds when down came something with a thud about 5 yards from me. This was the head and neck of one of the men… On each side of the guns, about 10 yards, lay the arms torn out at the shoulders.”

Nigel Biggar, in his new history of British colonialism, acknowledges the brutality of Britain’s response to the mutiny but argues that the use of violence is “essential” to any state, as is “the deterrence of others through fear”. He adds: “Whatever one thinks of ‘blowing from a gun’ as a method of execution, it was not indiscriminate, insofar as the victim had been judged guilty of some crime.”

Cool cool cool. Torture people to death for jaywalking as long as the people have been judged guilty of jaywalking.

The director of Oxford University’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, Biggar has caused waves in recent years with his call for a moral reappraisal of colonialism. Contemporary historians, he believes, have made us feel too guilty about Britain’s colonial past. We need to recognise not just the bad but also the good of empire. Colonialism is his attempt to create such a moral balance sheet.

If the sentence quoted is typical, he’s going about it the wrong way!

Biggar’s response to the treatment of Indian rebels exemplifies his approach. One might have thought that a professor of theology would have paused before attempting to find moral exculpation for such savage punishment. Biggar’s approach, however, is wherever possible to find good motives behind every colonial act – he portrays racial segregation, for example, as the product not of racism but of the desire “to protect native peoples from harmful encounters with settlers”. And where it proves impossible to locate a nugget of good, he seeks instead to find exonerating circumstances for the bad.

That kind of thing is a useful exercise in legal training, philosophy, and the like, but it has its problems.

Biggar claims that the empire wasn’t racist, and Kenan provides examples illustrating how absurd that is.

The Liberal politician Charles Wentworth Dilke’s claim that “nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labour of eastern peoples” was far closer to the reality of British perceptions than Biggar’s wishful account. As one-time prime minister Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, asked: “What is empire but the predominance of race?”

…

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Colonialism is that, for all the claims to be a “moral reckoning”, moral questions are rarely taken seriously. Consider the discussion of Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1834, for which slave owners received total compensation of £20m (about £16bn today).

The slaves, however, received total compensation of £0.

Biggar seems not to recognise as a moral issue the fact that while slave owners received reparations, slaves themselves did not. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, Biggar imagines that freed slaves continued working on the old plantations not out of economic necessity, having been deprived of all resources, but because of the generosity of former masters in providing housing and food.

That’s exactly how it played out in the US after the Civil War, too.

They translate.

It’s not just the “reactionary” bit that’s a translation – look at what else Caro S. translated. Kenan’s “a group of black lesbian militants” becomes “Black queer feminist socialist[s].” “Lesbian” is whisked out of sight to be replaced with the vastly more progressive and enlightened “queer”…

Republican Representative from Georgia.

A national divorce is it. Like the one Georgia and South Carolina attempted in 1860? That went well.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Hoo yoo aw.

It’s turning into a vicious cycle. Children who identify as trans are encouraged to violate boundaries and use the bathrooms, showers, sports teams, etc that they feel “comfortable” in. There are then people (including other children) who resist this and some of them do so violently, say by beating up a “trans girl” in the girls’ locker room. It’s safe to say that in that particular situation the catalyst wasn’t that a boy was behaving in an effeminate manner, but that a trans-identified male was in the girls’ locker room. They were attacked “for being trans.”

Yet they wouldn’t have been attacked if they hadn’t been where they shouldn’t. This recognition of truth sounds like victim-blaming and an excuse for violence. It’s not. They shouldn’t have been attacked regardless. But here we have adults who have created a situation which involves passive aggression by the future victim of active aggression. Denying that the first part is aggression is part of the setup. The children are being used in a rescue drama.

Again with the childish bee whoo yoo ahhh.

In what sense does everybody “deserves to feel safe to be themselves”?

Does Andrew Tate deserve to feel safe to be himself, including threatening and assaulting women?

Does Wayne Couzens deserve to feel safe to be himself, including falsely arresting a woman, raping her, and murdering her?

Does Donald Trump deserve to feel safe (including from arrest, trial, sentencing) to be himself, including sedition, treason, corruption, sadism, fraud, lies, bullying, theft, revenge, xenophobia, incompetence, dereliction of duty?

The slogan sounds nice, but then if you think about it for even a second it becomes apparent how stupid it is.

The ACLU is still beating the silly drum.

Imagine being a kid and watching adults in positions of power attack your right to be who you are and threaten your family, health, safety, and life.

Imagine being the ACLU and wording your calls for support in such a sloppy deceptive way. Nobody is attacking “trans kids'” right to be who they are. Some people are resisting the ideology that tells trans kids to alter their bodies in an effort to be who they are not. Men can’t become women any more than humans can become dolphins. Nobody is threatening the family, health, safety, and life of “trans kids.” Some people are trying to rescue them from this poisonous destructive ideology.

What is “TRANS YOUTH BELONG” supposed to mean? Nobody is trying to exile them or shun them. Some of us question some of their claims about themselves, that’s all. If ACLU staff claimed to be dolphins we would question them too, but that’s not the same thing as trying to exile or shun them.

The trans cult has made the ACLU so childish. It’s cringey.

An open letter from Dr Neil MacFarlane BA MBBS MA MRCPsych to the police harassing Kellie-Jay Keene:

I write to express my concern at what appears to be the oppressive pursuit of Ms Keen by Sussex Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, aided by yourselves. If Ms Keen is charged with any offence it is my intention to offer to provide a supportive pro bono expert witness statement, and to give evidence in person at any trial. I will also offer to provide similar support for any complaint that Ms Keen makes against Police and/or the CPS.

I have been a GMC registered medical practitioner since 1986, and a registered specialist in psychiatry since 2002. I have been an NHS consultant and worked in private practice. I have specialist training and experience in developmental psychiatry, which is directly relevant to Ms Keen’s campaigning against poorly evidenced “transgender” medical interventions. I also have experience in working with personality disordered and offender patients (including sex offenders for whom I was clinically responsible), and was an approved specialist under the Mental Health Act: that experience is relevant to Ms Keen’s campaigning for women’s dignity and safety.

I represent (because I was elected to a position within the Royal College of Psychiatrists on an election statement critical of transgenderism) the substantial number of psychiatrists who dissent from the official “transgender” policy of our professional body.

I have followed Ms Keen’s campaigning and studied several hours of her Youtube videos, including footage of what I understand to be her words spoken in Brighton last September, which have attracted complaints. I have had dialogues with individuals who have worked with her, and I have studied the objections of her critics.

In my opinion Ms Keen’s views and opinions have a strong basis in fact, and are substantially based on her own direct experience of interactions with trans identified people, particularly men. Her views are also informed by the opinions of respected professionals and academics such as the pioneering Canadian psychologist Ray Blanchard.

Ms Keen’s campaigning is reasonable and responsible, and it has been a substantial part of and influence on wider “gender-critical” campaigning of recent years, which has led to a major government review on “gender dysphoria” services for children and young people (and the closure of the leading NHS clinic), as well as the recent changes in prison policy in Scotland. Her use of language such as “men in dresses” and “fetishists” has been a proportionate means to create public interest in these issues. She does not “hate” trans-identified people: she believes their lives would be better if they desisted from such behaviours. I and many other mental health professionals substantially agree. I also agree that she is right to be concerned about links between transgenderism and child abuse.

In the context of the Wayne Couzens and David Carrick cases, the oppressive pursuit of Ms Keen risks further undermining trust in the police and the CPS, especially among women. Put simply, some of the decisions taken in her case may have been motivated by misogyny. In my opinion the belief, widespread among gender-critical campaigners, that Stonewall and many of its key supporters are substantially motivated by misogyny, is well founded. It seems very likely that Stonewall and related groups have played a key role in bringing forward the complaints against her.

This letter will be openly published. I intend to be part of the supportive protest outside Trowbridge Police Station, planned for 23^rd February.

Yours sincerely

Dr Neil MacFarlane

There.

J.A. alerted us to a back and forth between a philosopher and a biologist a few days ago. Here’s how it ended on day one:

Here’s how a new chapter started yesterday:

Earth. How about the earth – it definitely predates societies, because otherwise where would the societies have been? No earth, no societies, yeah? Ok, so the earth. Right. Is the earth a social construct? Hell yes! Look at globes! And photos in National Geographic. Therefore, trans women are women. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Bogardus continues:

By the way, it doesn’t have to be Saturn’s rings. Or the earth.

It’s just more grabby if you replace “something” (or the ever-popular X) with planetary rings, or the earth.