Continuing the theme, Jacky Davis in the Observer on Saturday:

he British Medical Association is both a trade union and a professional organisation. Professional activities such as its successful campaigns around seatbelt legislation and smoking have added weight to its standing as a union. It is not noted for drama and histrionics.

So there was significant surprise when its governing body, the BMA council, recently voted to reject the recommendations of the Cass review…

BMA members were genuinely outraged. Letters to the BMJ accused the council of bringing “the BMA and the medical profession into disrepute”. One correspondent said they were “more shocked than anything I can think of in 40 years of practising medicine”. Some members, aghast at the BMA adopting such an irrational policy, resigned after decades of union membership. A letter accusing the BMA of being secretive and opaque, and of going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and ethical practice, quickly attracted 1,500 signatures, 1,000 of whom are BMA members. The signatories include many high-profile names in the profession, people not normally inclined to sign protest letters.

So what’s the deal? How did this happen?

How did the BMA end up so completely out of touch with its members? In brief, the union is the victim of entryism, a political strategy whereby members of an organisation join a larger organisation in order to influence and change its policies. Resident (previously known as junior) doctors were angry about the sharp fall in their pay since 2008 and organised a group called DoctorsVote to campaign for full pay restoration. Part of the group’s strategy was to get its members on to the BMA council, which they did with great success, taking almost half the voting seats in 2022.

So far, so reasonable: the BMA is a trade union and its core role is to improve the working conditions of doctors.

But, of course, the BMA council didn’t stop there.

DoctorsVote is disciplined when it comes to pursuing its agenda (which turned out to go beyond full pay restoration to include entrenched opinions on the transgender debate), and in voting group members on to BMA committees.

And of course the entrenched opinions on the transgender debate aren’t medical, in fact they’re more the opposite of medical. The opinions are religious rather than medical.

So why did the BMA, which is not a scientific body such as Nice, feel it could criticise and undermine Cass’s work? The BMA has allowed itself to get into a position whereby a vocal minority of council members with an anti-Cass agenda have engineered policy that the membership have not been consulted on and do not agree with. While they are sincere in their beliefs, these council members have no hard evidence for their opposition, and good intentions aren’t enough to guide medical practice. It must be underpinned by evidence.

And this is especially important when the contested policy is very bad for people. It’s not a good idea to help patients ruin their bodies on the basis of a political belief that contradicts medical realities.

When doctors clash:

The British Medical Association has threatened the reputation of all UK doctors by rejecting the findings of the landmark Cass review of transgender healthcare, a leading member of the BMA has told the Observer.

Dr Jacky Davis claims that the doctors’ union’s stance on the Cass review is “irrational”, has created a “fracture” between its leadership and the grassroots doctors it represents, and left the medical profession “in an uproar”.

What is that stance? Fingers in the ears shouting NONONONONO

The BMA refused to endorse the findings of Dr Hilary Cass, whose review was published in April and was widely welcomed. It claimed the review contained “unsubstantiated recommendations” and its council called on members to “publicly critique” it.

Yeah and draw moustaches on it and call it names and say nobody wants to go out with it. Nyah.

The BMA is the only medical organisation in Britain to not accept and to find fault with Cass’s findings, which were accepted by the last government and its Labour successor. It has said that it wants to carry out its own evaluation.

By which it means it wants to continue to call it names and shout at it until everyone just gives up.

Doctors on the BMA’s ruling council who have dared to challenge its criticism of the Cass review have been subject to “abuse” and its decision-making body is now shrouded in “a climate of fear and intimidation”, Davis claims.

It’s all so…Pharyngula-like. So bizarrely childish and dogmatic and religionish. So political where it should be technical and abusive where it should be…not abusive.

The union has adopted its position on Cass because a campaign group called DoctorsVote, which has led the junior doctors’ pay strikes, has used political “entryism” to gain a significant influence over the BMA and dictate its policy, Davis alleges.

Ah, that’s their Pharyngula then. The hell with technical medical knowledge, let’s just make it all political all the time, with you being the evil right-wing demons and us being the always correct glorious left-wing angels.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Labour brushes off women yet again:

The Government will not carry forward plans to rewrite the Equality Act 2010 that were aimed at protecting single-sex spaces, the Minister for Women and Equalities has confirmed.

Anneliese Dodds said there were no plans to update the existing legislation, which the Conservatives had promised to reform ahead of the general election.

Because women don’t matter. Men matter, and men who pretend to be women really matter, but women are so much lint on the sweater of life.

The Tories planned to rewrite the Act in order to make it clear that “sex” in the legislation means “biological sex” instead of the gender with which a person identifies.

This would have allowed public bodies to stop transgender women entering women’s lavatories or changing rooms, as well as preventing them joining all-female sports teams.

And probably many of the other intrusions and grabbings and exploitings transgender “women” have been relishing for so long. Naturally Labour can’t let that happen.

Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Vice n virtue.

Certainty of paternity may be the ultimate material basis of the imperative for sexual control, but it does not account for religious taboos on non-procreative sexual acts. Possibly they are Gouldian spandrels emerging from cross firing of the supposed exchange instinct asserted to be disclosed by evolutionary psychologists’ study of Wason test experiments. Once humans have acquired the intellectual sophistication to recognise sexual pleasure as an inducement to reproduction, non-reproductive sex becomes a potential trgger for guilt/shame at cheating nature or Nature personified as a god. Religion as an institution then seizes on that guilt as a means of social control and incorporates it into a meme matrix. This appears still more plausible if you recall the prevalence of the cliched campaign trail barb “If he cheats on his wife, he’ll cheat on the country”.

IIRC it was Stephen Budiansky who attributed many religious impulses to a human instinct to bargain even if there is no counterparty with whom to strike a deal (fasting, human sacrifice, …) just as a beaver will attempt to build a dam in response to the mere sound of running water.

Saeedullah Safi in the Irish Times on the demolition of women’s rights in Afghanistan:

“My voice is now a crime,” says Mariam, a teacher from Kabul province. Speaking over a shaky WhatsApp connection, Mariam (whose name has been changed for her safety) describes her life as a woman under new Taliban rules. “I am terrified to leave my house,” she says. “Not because I fear the violence in the streets, but because I fear my own voice might betray me.”

Last week, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, approved new “vice and virtue” laws, which include a total ban on women’s voices in public and further restrictions on their presence outside the home.

Because, you see, if a man hears a woman’s voice it makes him think about fucking, while if he doesn’t hear a woman’s voice he will be able to keep his thoughts fixed on The Prophet. Or cricket. Or something that’s not fucking.

Women are no longer allowed to work in most sectors, attend secondary school, or visit public parks. Following the new decrees, they are now also forbidden from showing their faces or being heard in public. The Taliban’s justification: women’s voices and faces are potential instruments of vice, leading men into temptation.

Because women’s voices make men think about fucking. What’s so hard to understand?

This silence is not just a metaphorical one. The Taliban have made it literal, with new rules that ban women from singing, reading aloud or even speaking in their own homes if their voices can be heard by men outside. The consequences for disobedience are severe – women who violate these rules can be detained and punished at the discretion of Taliban officials.

It has to be this way, because women make men think about fucking.

Speaking up for the women of Afghanistan.

Wow, what a funny joke.

Trump issues threats:

Former President Donald Trump, who makes frequent false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through rampant fraud, warned Saturday that he would attempt to imprison anyone who engages in “unscrupulous behavior” during the 2024 race results.

No he didn’t threaten to attempt to imprison, he said he would imprison. Trump never tempers what he says with an awareness of limitations on his power, he just issues the threatyest threats he can come up with.

The threat was issued in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing Democrats of “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.”

“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote.

See? Nothing about attempting there, just will be prosecuted. Pure strongman.

He continued, “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Will be will be will be, because he will be will be will be the dictator who will order it to happen.

Also note the idiotic “unfortunately” placed, as always, in the wrong place so that the meaning is rendered ambiguous. He always does that. Why is it unfortunate that such “levels” have never been seen before in “our Country”?

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump began making baseless warnings of election interference that grew louder after he lost and culminated in a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s election. He’s begun making similar statements ahead of the 2024 election.

Because he intends to steal it and he’s laying the groundwork. Subtle he’s not.

How sweet.

Notice anyone missing?

Urrgghh I did not know this – Trump has been campaigning in sundown towns.

Howell, Michigan. LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Mosinee, Wisconsin.

These relatively small cities — spread across midwestern swing states and far from dense metropolitan areas — all have one thing in common: They are former “sundown” towns, where threats of Jim Crow-era violence enforced racial segregation.

After a series of rallies in major cities to kick off his general election campaign, the Republican presidential candidate zeroed in on a handful of cities with familiar pasts.

That’s really really really disgusting.

Viral criticism across social media has argued that Trump’s latest campaign stretch isn’t a coincidence but a “dogwhistle” to racist supporters. Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign accused the former president of deliberately campaigning in the former “KKK capital of Michigan.”

His campaign denies it, but then why did they go to obscure backwater cities instead of the big obvious ones?

The town of Howell has long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Michigan, thanks to the state’s former “Grand Dragon” Robert Miles, who recruited auto workers into the KKK and staged hate rallies and cross burnings in the majority-white county.

“This is where Donald Trump is choosing to hold his rallies,” said a TikTok user whose video linking the former president’s “troubling pattern” of campaign rally sites to “sundown” histories has been shared widely across social media.

“You got a presidential candidate for the GOP doing a sundown town tour around the country, not looking for political gain,” he added. “He’s fucking rallying the troops.”

Oliver Brown being sly in the Telegraph:

Valentina Petrillo, the Italian father-of-two who qualified on Friday for a second semi-final of these Paris Paralympics in women’s sprinting, has hit back at being called an “out-and-proud cheat” by author JK Rowling, saying: “I’ve never even read Harry Potter.”

Nicely done. The father-of-two in women’s sprinting, who retorts to criticism with a fatuous irrelevance.

Despite the backlash, Petrillo claimed: “There is so much transphobia in all this. The most important word in Olympic and Paralympic sports is inclusion.”

No it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. How could it be? Sports are about competition, which means there are losers along with winners, and in fact there are far more losers than winners. At any rate what he means by “inclusion” is, of course, allowing men like him to compete against women…but only one or two at a time. He doesn’t want inclusion of all the men, of course, because then he would lose. He wants “inclusion” of a very small number of cheaters like him so that he can win. For now, he’s getting exactly what he wants, to the dismay and disgust of people who have any sense.

Trump zeroes in on the real cheating in elections.

He’s tall. That definitely means he should win.

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on The most important word.

Two incidents from last week at the Paralympics.

Partially-sighted Australian runner, Jaryd Clifford, accidentally let go of the tether linking him to his guide 4998 metres into the 5000 metres final. He was the only runner in that race to use guides, i.e. the ‘most’ blind runner in the field, finished in third place but was disqualified from recieving the bronze. Essentially, letting go of the tether at any point in the race, whether intentionally or not, suggests that the guide isn’t really needed and therefore the runner is gaining an unfair advantage. Clifford was disqualified because he broke the rules, and cheats don’t deserve medals, right?

Polish athlete, Roza Kozakowska, who competes in the class for the most severely disabled in her category, made a world record hammer throw, tearing her shoulder so severely in doing so that she had to withdraw from further attempts. Still, it was a gold-winning throw…until she was disqualified because the neck support pillow on her wheelchair was slightly above regulation size. Granted, it was a matter of just a few millimeters, but it gave her neck a tiny amount of extra support that her similarly-disabled rivals didn’t have. Apparently, when you lack the ability to properly coordinate your muscles over your entire body, a couple of millimeters extra support makes a difference. Kozakowska was disqualified for breaking the rules, and cheats don’t deserve medals, right?

And yet the very people who disqualified two genuine competitors from medal-winning positions for very minor and almost certainly inadvertent breaches of the regulations are cheering on a man who is openly, nay, proudly cheating his way through the competition. It’s utterly fucking insane.

The march of stupidity continues.

A Victorian breastfeeding expert is facing legal action over a series of social media posts denying that transgender women can breastfeed.

Jasmine Sussex is being taken to Queensland’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal by a trans mother after labelling attempts by transwomen to breastfeed their children “experimental’’ and calling it a “dangerous fetish”.

Ms Sussex raised concerns about Queensland trans mother Jennifer Buckley – who was born male but later transitioned into a woman – taking hormones to grow breasts and induce lactation to breastfeed her newborn baby.

No he didn’t “transition into a woman” – there is no such thing. He later started to pretend to be a woman.

The Victorian woman is preparing to be called before the Tribunal after Ms Buckley alleged that she had vilified her online, calling her statements “hurtful”.

Hurtful shmurtful. Try thinking about the wellbeing of the baby instead of your revolting fetish, dude.

Ms Buckley said she had begun transitioning but was able to conceive using IVF, meaning she is the biological father.

Imagine being a journalist and writing that ridiculous sentence.

She began taking hormones to stimulate milk production as her wife prepared to give birth because she wanted to breastfeed as well.

“For the past 6 weeks I have been taking a drug called domperidone to increase prolactin in an attempt to be able to produce breast milk so that I can have the experience of breastfeeding,” she wrote in a Facebook post. The drug domperidone is traditionally an anti-nausea medication.

And it’s just a brilliant idea to feed a baby superfluous medications so that its selfish piggy father can pretend to be a mommy.

Ms Buckley, who described herself as a “loving mother of a beautiful little boy”, told the Saturday Herald Sun her wife had encouraged her to try breastfeeding following advice from her endocrinologist. She said she was told it was “no different to inducing lactation in non-pregnant mothers or those mothers who are not producing enough milk”.

The people who told him that are insane. Of course it’s different from inducing lactation in women. Women can lactate; men cannot lactate. Inducing artificial “lactation” passes the artifice on to the baby, which is not a good idea. Primum non nocere, remember?

They’ve all lost their damn minds.

The Irish Times:

A transgender woman, who was referred for gender-affirmation surgery in Germany, says she was unable to receive “basic healthcare” on her return to a Dublin hospital.

It wasn’t “basic” healthcare though. It was very specialized.

Paige Behan (26) from Ballyfermot, Dublin, felt “humiliated” and “devastated” when neither the urology, gynaecology nor plastics teams would treat her at St James’s Hospital – the largest acute academic teaching hospital in the State – last month, despite her being referred by her GP for a worsening wound infection at the site of her surgery.

What was his surgery? A “neo-vagina” – which is not basic healthcare, and is arguably not healthcare at all.

Instead she was advised to travel late at night, while distressed and bleeding, to the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) at Holles Street, which St James’s Hospital said was “more equipped to deal with neo-vaginal complaints”.

Which seems surprising for a maternity hospital.

Ms Behan says she knew she was female since she was 12. From age 18 she was prescribed hormone therapy though she felt despair at being unable to access timely gender-affirmation surgery. She was hospitalised for several suicide attempts.

She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria following psychiatric evaluations that she found gruelling. Last year she was referred for “life-saving” surgery at the Rotkreuzklinikum München hospital in Munich, by the HSE at St Colmcille’s Hospital, Loughlinstown. This surgery is not available in Ireland.

Surgery to create a vagina was performed by plastic surgeons at the Munich hospital on July 14th. A hospital-contracted infection delayed her return home and she travelled back on August 9th.

There’s no such thing as “surgery to create a vagina.” The surgery creates an imitation vagina, which is not the same thing. At all.

Anyway, he got his name in the papers.

Janice Turner on the Taliban’s gender apartheid:

The Afghan men’s cricket team is one of 12 Test match sides. The limited-overs team competed in last year’s World Cup — with prestigious victories over Pakistan and England — and on Monday in India the Test side will play New Zealand. Why? The only possible answer is that the international community cares not a damn for Afghan women.

Why isn’t there a global boycott?

The Taliban is certainly thorough. First it stopped girls attending school and university, removed women from most jobs and demanded they cover themselves in chadors head to toe. Then it pondered other female pleasures, barring women from gyms, beauty salons, hairdressers and public parks, and making shopping trips, eating out, even buying a coffee illegal without a male chaperone. But a few chinks of happiness remained, so last month it banned the female voice from singing, reciting and speaking in public.

…

Later this month, in the UAE, the Afghan men’s cricket team will play South Africa. A bitter irony. Throughout the apartheid years, sporting boycotts were used to pressure Pretoria to end violent white supremacist rule and to punish its bar on black cricketers. The world took a moral stand: we refused to fill stadiums with cheering fans for a racist state.

Without wishing to diminish that evil regime, the Taliban is a far more meticulous oppressor. Black children received an inferior education but could still attend school. Black people were barred from many jobs and received pitiful pay yet could still earn a living. Those corralled into black townships kept the most basic human freedoms: to play music and sport, to dance, sing, laugh and chat with friends, or simply feel the breeze in their hair.

…

Campaigners are enraged to hear that female advances in every sphere of life, from law to sport, were a mere blip. They say the Taliban’s edicts are neither social “norms” nor Islamic law but mechanisms of social control (and of men, too, who are brutally punished for not keeping “wayward” womenfolk in check). What they endure needs a name and in October the UN legal committee will debate codifying a new crime against humanity into international law: gender apartheid. Existing laws address abuse of women but campaigners, from Nobel laureates to Amnesty, believe none fully capture the codified, systemic abuse of Afghan women.

…

Like many women observing an unfolding dystopia that exceeds even the The Handmaid’s Tale, I’ve despaired that there is anything we can do for Afghan women. But there is: it starts with regarding their human rights as no more negotiable than those of black South Africans and treating the Taliban as what it is, the ruler of an apartheid state.

This has to happen.

Liz Cheney endorsed Harris for president the other day. She also had some thoughts on the other candidate.

The former Republican Wyoming representative spoke with Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich in Texas on Friday, following her endorsement of Harris for president this week. In her conversation, she shared words of wisdom for Harris—and a brutally honest condemnation of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

Well there’s no point in being gently dishonest about those two, is there. They want to destroy everything. They’re bad men. They have to be stopped.

When asked how Harris should approach Tuesday’s presidential debate against Trump, Cheney responded by saying that Harris should relish the fact that this is an “opportunity [where] Donald Trump gets to show the American people who he is.” And who he is, in her words, is a “misogynistic pig.”

“This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs,” Cheney said, speaking of Vance and Trump as the audience erupted in applause. “I think that will become clear.”

She’s not wrong.

Trump is throwing hissy fits.

Former President Donald Trump, frustrated by the state of the race and his continued legal troubles, on Friday sought to claim the spotlight for himself.

Wedging a hastily called press conference into an otherwise packed day of campaign events and court-related issues, he angrily complained to reporters inside the lobby of Trump Tower about his appeal in a sex abuse and defamation case. He criticized his legal team’s performance. Trump accused the moderators of the upcoming ABC debate of being unfair — and slammed Harris for not addressing reporters as often as he has.

In other words, wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

Very edifying.

“This is a disgraceful case and disgraceful, in particular, because it is about a former president of the United States who is now leading in the polls to be the president again,” Trump said, before proceeding to voluntarily rehash salacious details of the sexual assault allegations he has denied.

He isn’t leading in the polls. Also, he shouldn’t be a former president of the US because he should never have been president of the US. He’s not competent and he’s a terrible human being.

After saying he would be discussing Friday’s jobs report, which was weaker than expected, Trump only briefly mentioned the topic after speaking for 45 minutes, then quickly touching on migration and migrant crime before ending his remarks. Most of his comments centered on the civil and criminal cases against him. 

In other words he’s only interested in himself. He doesn’t care about “migration” or “migrant crime” except as a pretext to bully people who aren’t Donald Trump.

Trump’s 50-minute, often rambling speech — billed as a “press conference,” though he took no questions from reporters — was the latest of several media events he has held in recent weeks as he has worked to reclaim his lead in the race, and to steal the spotlight back from Harris. The vice president has enjoyed favorable polling, a fundraising windfall and large, energetic crowds even as she has largely avoided speaking to the news media.

He’s not going to be able to steal the spotlight back. He’ll still get some spotlight, but he won’t get it by subtracting from hers. He’s going to get more and more furious…and this time, thankyoubabyjesus, he can’t do much with his fury other than wave his tiny fists around.

It turns out you have to have expertise in “gender” to be able to say that men are not women.

It’s a very complicated, difficult, technical subject. You can’t just rock up and say that man is not a woman. You need to have, at least, read a book by Sally Hines first.

Vance thinks mass shootings are just a fact of life, like the weather. Nothing we can do about it, folks!

Vance’s comments – in the wake of the latest deadly shooting, at Apalachee High School in Georgia – ignited a political row after Democrats depicted them as evidence of a lack of empathy while Republicans claimed the remarks had been taken out of context.

Vance called for more security measures in schools without mentioning gun control, while Democrats including Kamala Harris and the US president, Joe Biden, want a ban on assault-style rifles, more background checks, and other gun safety action.

Asked about the Georgia shooting while speaking at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday evening, Vance said: “I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realise that our schools are soft targets.”

Well it’s not a “fact of life” that any damn fool can go into a gun shop and come out armed as if for war. It’s a decision, an insistence, that it’s a human right to stroll around in public with an assault rifle.

Vance continued: “We’ve got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … and wants to kill a bunch of children – they’re not able to. As a parent, do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

The remarks, which were prefaced by an attack on the pro-gun control stance of Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election, were immediately seized on by the Harris campaign.

Yeah gee why would we not want to turn schools into armed camps rather than having laws against weapons of mass murder?

Trump, responding to a question on the Georgia shootings at a Fox News town hall meeting from the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday, said: “It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons and we’re going to make it better, and we’re going to heal our world.”

Is there anyone less likely to make the world less sick and angry than Donald Trump? He feeds on sick anger, he fosters sick anger, he whips up sick anger, he loves sick anger as long as it’s not directed at him.