Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Progress has a plan.

Perhaps better history teaching covering the real ugly complexity of the moral struggles of the past should be part of the solution. A good example to start with would the the checkered relationship between the anti-slavery Republican Party of Lincoln and the nativist penumbra adjacent to it which gave rise to a vociferously anti immigrant state government in Massachussets with a sterling record of socially reformist measures. Instead popular culture gives us Gangs of New York.

Around the beginning of the current century the aphorism that Marxism filled a God-shaped hole was succeeded by the wisecrack that European integration filled a Marx-shaped hole. I think that Francis Spufford captured the idea more elegantly at the conclusion of Red Plenty in the rhetorical question “Can it be otherwise?”. It’s because we are human that it can’t be otherwise and equally because we are human that we can’t accept that it can’t be otherwise.

Jolyon must be feeling So Important.

Review dismisses claims youth suicides rose after NHS curbed puberty blockers

A government-ordered review has dismissed claims that suicide rates in young people with gender dysphoria have risen sharply since the NHS restricted access to puberty-blocking drugs.

A report by the government’s adviser on suicide prevention also found that the claims – made by the campaign group the Good Law Project – were not supported by data and could prompt children under the age of 18 to take their own life.

See there? A shoutout to Jolyon and his project – a shoutout saying he was wrong at best and lying at worst, but hey, it’s still a shoutout. He does love attention, that man.

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, last week asked Prof Louis Appleby, a leading authority on mental health at Manchester University, to look at suicide rates among current and former patients of the now-discontinued gender identity development service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust.

He looked, and reported he had found no evidence to back up the claims.

“The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide by young patients attending the gender services at the Tavistock since the High Court ruling in 2020 or after any other recent date,” his analysis concluded. It covered the care received by and outcomes seen among patients of the London-based specialist mental heath trust.

The Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, said in response: “I was not contacted in advance of the statement being released and will obviously need time to respond. I do have difficulties with the figures and analysis and will respond in due course.”

Diddums wasn’t contacted. Diddums is caught saying untrue things about suicide among teenagers and Diddums is annoyed that he wasn’t contacted.

As well as finding no evidence to support the suicide claims, Appleby also highlighted “the way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against [Samaritans] guidance on safe reporting of suicide”.

“The claims that have been placed in the public domain do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence,” he added.

He flagged up the possibility of “already-distressed adolescents hearing the message that ‘people like you, facing similar problems, are killing themselves’, leading to imitative suicide or self-harm”.

Which many people have been pointing out to Maugham all along, and which he has determinedly ignored.

Radio 4 has a thing on…LGBTQ Life in Weimar Germany

There was no such thing. For some reason, Weimar Germany was not 2024 London, so it didn’t have people throwing paint around at the Tate Gallery and it didn’t have LGBTQ life. It was a different place and it was a century ago. Different things are different.

Under the counter hormones for the kids:

The former CEO of trans youth charity Mermaids is launching a private clinic that will “exploit a legal loophole” to bypass the ban on puberty blockers, [i news] can reveal.

Susie Green, who left the controversial charity in 2022, will open Anne Health this weekend to provide a range of medical, pharmaceutical, and psychological support services – including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and counselling – to transgender people of all ages.

But puberty blockers are not “medical services” for transgender people.

But the loopholes that Ms Green’s clinic will use to provide medication to young people raise questions about the effectiveness, scope, and robustness of the government’s ban. i understands that DHSC officials are willing to explore the possibility of criminal sanctions against anyone involved in the supply of puberty blockers.

Maybe science can come up with just plain adulthood blockers, so that people can remain 11 years old for 60 or 70 extra years. No doubt they will have some harsh side effects but it will be worth it.

The clinic will defer to treatment protocols established by WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, she said.

WPATH is not without controversy. It is a membership-funded advisory body that provides guidance on transgender health to a wide range of organisations, but has come under fire recently for using low quality sources. Ms Green co-authored the most recent version of its guidelines.

Cool, so she’s promising to defer to her own guidelines. How very responsible of her.

Oh hey, it turns out Mridul Wadhwa is on involuntary leave. At long last. Now they need to make it permanent.

Mridul Wadhwa, a man who identifies as a woman, was sent home in May by the board of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) after being identified as the “invisible hand” behind a “heresy hunt” designed to force out Roz Adams, a counsellor with gender-critical views.

The outcry over Wadhwa’s behaviour intensified following the sentencing this week of Cameron Downing, a coercive and manipulative male sex offender, who identified as non-binary and claimed to have received extensive support from ERCC.

It’s almost as if trans ideology/activism attracts poisonous people, isn’t it.

Downing, 24, was sentenced to six years in prison after he was convicted of ten charges including assault, sexual assault and domestic abuse. He falsely accused a male partner of rape and then blackmailed him into carrying out sexual acts. He was also convicted of sexual assault against three women and another man.

Before his arrest, Downing said ERCC was the reason he was “able to keep going” and he “cannot put into words how much they’ve helped me”.

ERCC helped him do all that? So it’s not so much a rape crisis centre as a rape encouragement centre?

It has now emerged that Wadhwa was suspended when a tribunal concluded nine weeks ago. “Mridul is not on leave voluntarily; she has been put on leave,” a source said.

Wadhwa was found to have orchestrated a campaign against Adams after the counsellor had expressed sympathy with a victim’s wish to have only a female counsellor.

He’s a truly poisonous man. Running a rape crisis centre. Now will they believe this ideology isn’t the latest best most compassionate thing?

My god, I had no idea! Jolyon Maugham is facing down Trump AND Putin AND Murdoch AND the billionaires AND the Rothermeres. That is one hell of a lot of heroic facing down. I wonder, has it made any difference yet?

Well well well. Welcome aboard The Staggers.

24 Hour Fitness has a corporate policy on locker rooms. You can guess what it is without breaking a sweat.

RESTROOM AND LOCKER ROOM ACCESSIBILITY-TRANSGENDER EQUAL OPPORTUNITY POLICY

As set forth in 24 Hour’s Equal Opportunity Policy, all members shall have full and equal access to the club facility. Consistent with this Policy, all members shall have access to the restroom and locker room facilities that correspond to the member’s gender identity, regardless of the member’s sex assigned at birth. For example, transgender women (who were born male but identify as female) are permitted to use the women’s facilities, and vice versa for transgender men. Each member should determine the most appropriate option for her/him/themself. Any member who has a need or desire for increased privacy, regardless of the reason, will be provided access to a single-person facility, when available. No member, however, shall be required to use such a facility.

That’s interesting because it’s a contradiction. Women can’t actually have full and equal access to the club facility given the fact that men are allowed to use the women’s locker room.

Illustration of how this is so:

That’s not equal access.

Top front page news – drag queens and the cost of living.

Women, of course, have no concerns about the pinch of rising costs. All women are rich as well as cis. How hateful and privileged they are.

The stupid it burns.

One of the biggest challenges, particularly in this country right now to trans people are feminists who feel that trans women are not women.

Other way around, sport. We don’t “feel” that, we know it, we realize it, we’re aware of it. The people doing the feeling instead of knowing here are the people who “feel” that men are women if they say so. In short we’re not the ones who have our facts wrong.

They believe that trans women are actually just men

No, again, that’s not what we “believe”; it’s just reality. You’re the one doing the counterfactual “believing” here.

The thing that gets me the most about that argument is that you should see you’re on the same side

No, again, we’re not the ones who need to fix what we’re seeing here. Also, we’re not on the same side. Men who claim to be us are not on our side. If someone claimed to be Jodi Picoult and demanded all her royalties, would Jodi Picoult be on the same side as pretend-Jodi Picoult?

The rest of the clip is about having body-failure in common. Nope.

Quack doctor vows to continue harming children.

The General Medical Council has revoked the licence to practise of a controversial British doctor whose offshore clinic treats transgender children.

Dr Helen Webberley, 55, will lose her licence in Britain from Friday but will remain on the GMC’s register, following the decision by the medical regulator.

She lost it because she failed to re-validate it.

Webberley runs GenderGP, an online company registered in Singapore, which facilitates access to puberty blockers and hormones for adults and children.

She promises to keep doing what she’s doing, license or no license. Mess up those kids no matter what!

She says she was offered the chance to take an exam in order to revalidate her licence, but declined because they “don’t have one for doctors working in transgender medicine”.

Ah. Could that be because there’s no such thing as “transgender medicine”? Because it’s quackery all the way down?

The Good Law Project shares a thinkpiece by someone who transed her child.

On 4 July, the safety and wellbeing of our child was hanging in the balance. No child should lie awake on election night fearing for their future and their right to exist, as our child did. She is simply living her truth, and no attempt to eradicate trans identity or remove her rights will change this.

That’s a good start. Yes, the election was going to determine whether her child had a right to exist or not. Genocide: yes or no; that was definitely on the ballot.

Our daughter has no recollection of living as male, as this has not reflected her lived reality for the last 10 years, since age four.

Ok stop right there. These lunatics transed their kid at age four???

I have a big advantage in this discussion because I myself was once four, so I know what it’s like.

Oh wait, so does every other adult on the planet. Most of them don’t trans their toddlers.

How did this kid know he “wasn’t a boy” but was actually “a girl in a boy’s body”?

He didn’t, because he wasn’t. He probably freaked out his parents by being more interested in girl characters in tv shows and books and by wanting to dress and look like them.

It is not a reality we, or she, would have chosen, but it is one we have come to accept and defend, because the alternative would have undoubtedly caused her harm.

Ah no, that’s where you go so wrong. It’s not “undoubtedly” at all. It’s very doubtedly indeed.

We have watched our daughter develop and thrive, through the acceptance and support of family and wider community. And, we have watched our child become increasingly anxious and fearful for her safety under Tory governance, with violence and discrimination towards trans people legitimised

Wait, what? Where is violence towards trans people legitimized? Please explain. But of course she doesn’t, she just says it and then rattles on as if it were self-evident.

The Good Law Project is not good.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Becoming aware.

There seems to be this assumption that “the kids” are like prophets. Whatever they do is a sign of where History is headed. It is, in short, glorious and by-definition-good “Progress”. Why they do anything doesn’t matter, only that they do it. Progress has a plan, and Progress moves in mysterious ways.

If it’s got a rainbow or pastel flag, any change in its direction is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Why a change occurs is almost irrelevant from the perspective of those devoted to Progress, because action that brings the utopia nearer is good by definition. Such action is itself Progress, and Progress must be supported. If something happens as a result of Progress, then that, too, is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Is Genderism illogical and irrational? Does it demand the unethical? Leap past your concerns and doubts. Leave them behind, for Progress doesn’t require justification. Everything else must wait, because Progress demands your support, and Progress must be supported.

Kierkegaard wrote of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in Fear and Trembling to describe Abraham’s submission to God’s demand for the sacrifice of Isaac. God’s design, the telos that He impressed upon all of Creation, supersedes everything else. All ethical reasoning is suspended in submission to the divine will. Suspending ethical reasoning in this way is illogical and irrational, however, because the suspension itself can be analyzed in ethical terms. Getting past this metaphorical gap requires a mental leap away from logic and rationality. (One could even argue that such a gap is itself evidence of the divine.)

Now, I happen to think Kierkegaard was actually a literary troll doing performance art to mock the obscurantist mysticism of Continental philosophy, but this explicitly nonsensical idea of a teleological suspension of the ethical does seem like a decent account of how otherwise moral people can support monstrosity. They willingly suspend their normal ethical processing, and everything represented by the divine, or the ideology, or the party, or whatever becomes a self-justified good. Taken as a description of how people do behave rather than of how they should, it’s somewhat compelling. And horrifying.

Interesting. It seems that anti-abortion states have crap healthcare for pregnant women. Keep your damn baby but you’re on your own, bitch.

The chances that a woman can see a doctor while pregnant — or during a time when she might become pregnant — have fallen significantly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to a new report released Thursday.

The findings, from The Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan health care research foundation, show that women living in states with a history of health disparities — often in the Southeast — are affected the most. They are not only less likely to be able to afford a doctor’s appointment; they’re less likely to be able to find an OB/GYN in their area.

That “often in the Southeast” is interesting. The Southeast=the former slave states. The South (as it’s more usually called) is notoriously impoverished, illiberal, and reactionary. It’s almost as if there’s a connection.

The report looked at more than a dozen measures of women’s health care, including maternal mortality, preterm birth and postpartum depression, in all 50 states in 2022, the year of the Dobbs ruling.

That single action “significantly altered both access to reproductive health care services and how providers are able to treat pregnancy complications in the 21 states that ban or restrict abortion access,” the authors wrote.

States with the most restrictive abortion policies, including Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia, scored lowest in the new report. States that protected abortion care, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey, ranked highest.

Women must be forced to keep pregnancies they don’t want, but as for helping them have healthy pregnancies, well shoot, that would be socialism.

Ok yes sure that makes a whole lot of sense.

Republicans welcomed JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate on the same night devoted to blasting President Joe Biden’s leadership on the world stage.

Vance, the 39-year-old Ohio senator, offered his life story as a son of Appalachia to reaffirm Trump’s connections to Americans who feel alienated socially, economically and politically.

Oh those connections, right. Trump’s connections to Murkans who feel economically alienated – Trump with his palace in Miami and his palace overlooking Central Park and his satellite palaces in New Jersey and Scotland. I can totally see the connection, can’t we all?

Socially, well, sure, that’s a different story. Trump is “socially alienated” in the sense that he alienates people who prefer decent people to sadistic monsters, thoughtful people to bellowing idiots, generous people to greedy corrupt thieving cheats.

Politically is basically just socially all over again. Trump isn’t really political except in the sense that he wants to do whatever will piss off people who aim at fairness.

Tatchell does actually say that.

The Herald Scotland on Cameron Downing and his funny ways:

A former SNP equalities officer who sexually assaulted six young adults has been jailed for six years. 

Cameron Downing, 24, was also convicted of physically assaulting two women.

It’s so impressive when the lede is “former equalities officer sexually assaulted six people.” Much equalities!

Sentencing him on Tuesday, Judge Alison Stirling told Downing he had “the capacity to cause physical and sexual harm as well as psychological distress”.

She said: “You have distorted views regarding intimate partner violence, and you have shown no remorse or insight into how your actions may have affected your victim.”

The judge added: “Your offences are likely to have caused significant psychological and physical harm to all of your victims, and their psychological recovery from your actions could be prolonged.”

And yet he was an equalities officer!

Maybe there’s a downside to all this fervent promotion of people who claim to be the opposite sex. Trans ideology often overlaps with other brands of sexual non-conformity, not all of which are automatically benign.

She said Downing showed a “hostility towards women, lack of concern for others, sexual preoccupation and deviant sexual preference”, and that he was at high risk of reoffending.

That’s part of what I’m getting at. Trans ideology often goes with hostility towards women and lack of concern for others, just for a start.

In 2022, it emerged that Downing had tweeted that he wanted to “beat the fuck out of some terfs and transphobes”. He also tweeted: “I fucking hate terfs and transphobes with such a passion.”

The tweets caused Harry Potter author JK Rowling to tweet: “Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland: A place where an equalities officer feels free to declare in public how much he wants to beat up non-compliant women.”

Exactly so.

Easy for him to say.

In a 2021 interview with Spectrum News, [J.D.] Vance was asked if he believes a woman should be forced to carry a baby to term after she has been a victim of rape or incest.

The Ohio Republican suggested the framing of the question was flawed.

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance said. “The question really, to me, is about the baby.”

But of course it is whether a woman should be forced to bring a pregnancy to term, because that’s the very thing being talked about. It can’t be “about the baby” and nothing else, because without the woman, there is no baby and never was any baby. This isn’t some baby lying on a park bench waiting to be adopted, this is a process inside the body of a woman, a process that ends with squeezing a baby’s head through a hole in her body that is too small for the job. It’s the woman’s body, not anyone else’s.

Vance’s contempt for women is evident in that casual “the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient” – somehow, as if he wouldn’t find it inconvenient to have an ever larger heavier body growing in his abdomen that he then had to push out through his dick.

Cathy Young on which twin indulges in the most violent rhetoric:

FOLLOWING THE JULY 13 ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION of Donald Trump, his supporters—and many anti-anti-Trump commentators—have been wringing their hands about the supposed rhetorical extremism of Democrats and other Trump foes. It’s all a bit rich, though, given that violent, fearmongering, and dehumanizing rhetoric has been Trump’s stock in trade over the past decade.

And before. Remember that full page ad demanding the death penalty for the Central Park 5, who…had not done the crime.

So, bearing in mind that nothing Trump has said or done excuses or mitigates the horrific acts of his would-be assassin, here’s a list of instances of Trump normalizing, endorsing, promoting, or winking at political and other violence.

In a Fox News interview, Trump defends the actions of his supporters who were caught on video shoving, punching, and kicking a protester at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama after the man interrupted the rally by shouting, “Black lives matter!” According to Trump: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”

You know who is an even more obnoxious guy?

February 22, 2016

Trump reacts to a nonviolent heckler in Las Vegas, Nevada with nostalgia for more violent times: “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. . . . I’d like to punch him in the face, I tell you.”

…

October 30–November 1, 2020

After a Biden campaign bus on a tour in Texas is harassed on the interstate highway by a caravan of forty-some Trump flag-sporting trucks—causing a minor collision, endangering nearby traffic, and forcing the Biden campaign to cancel several events due to safety concerns—Trump tweets a video of the highway “Trump Train” with the comment, “I LOVE TEXAS!” The next day, he tweets, “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” and slams the FBI’s San Antonio office for investigating the case.

She lists many more examples. We’ve all seen and heard Trump encouraging violence against people he dislikes.

The NIH censors gender-atheists.

About 20 minutes into Dr. Tucker Pyle’s session titled “Sex and Gender in the Clinic,” a window popped up stating, “The host has removed you from the webinar.”

When I tried to rejoin the webinar, I was told I could not rejoin.

According to the event description, this is a “public two-day National Institutes of Health (NIH) symposium” that “brings together experts from the biological and social sciences to clarify and contextualize – but not resolve – the complexities around sex, gender, and genomics by considering them in their scientific, ethical, and historical contexts.”

I was not disruptive and could not have been, even if I had wanted to, because the webinar was view-only. I did not submit any questions in the Q&A chat window either. I was just quietly watching. I signed up for the webinar because, as a scientist involved in influencing policy on sex and gender, I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how these concepts are being applied in medicine and genomics. If anyone should be attending this event, it’s me. The event claims to be an “interdisciplinary conversation,” yet the speaker lineup consists entirely of ideologically aligned sex and gender activists who promote radical and pseudoscientific views of sex and gender. Additionally,

@TomasBogardus, an academic who has also voiced dissent from activist orthodoxy on sex and gender issues, was removed from the event around the same time I was. This is completely unacceptable. I demand that Eric D. Green (@NHGRI_Director), the director of the @genome_gov at the @NIH, who gave the opening remarks, explain why Dr. Bogardus and I were kicked out of the event.

This is a government event. What right do they have to kick people out because they don’t obey the current ideology?