Originally a comment by latsot in Miscellany Room.

I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today. There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.

If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.

I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera and I’ll be in a crowd. And The mic isn’t great.

If you don’t know what these events are about, here’s KJK talking about the Newcastle one:

Oh yes about that guy with his dick out:

Victoria Centre statement over pictures of person exposing themselves in House of Fraser

Not themselves, just himself. He’s a guy.

A statement has been issued after photos of a person appearing to indecently expose themselves in a Nottingham designer shop caused rage on social media. The censored pictures have been widely shared on social media, depicting a person seemingly exposing their private parts in public.

What an abominable piece of writing. The photos were of a man apparently flashing in a Nottingham shop.

Users have identified the shop where the pictures were taken, which was in various locations across House of Fraser, in Nottingham’s Victoria Centre. The person seems to pull up their skirt slightly, revealing stockings, while posing at the camera smiling.

The man. His skirt. Also that was only one of the photos; the others were more…er…direct, although I’ve only seen them with an emoji over the actual naughty bits.

pause to rummage through Twitter

Ah yes, this is the one.

Police seize Andrew Tate’s supplementary penises:

Several luxury cars have been seized from British-American influencer Andrew Tate’s property in Bucharest.

British-American for-profit misogynist, they mean.

After the arrests on 29 December, police said they had identified six people who were allegedly “sexually exploited” by what it called an “organised criminal group”.

Six people? Not six women? Were some of them men?

Police alleged the victims were “recruited” by the British citizens, who they said misrepresented their intention to enter into a relationship with the victims – which they called “the loverboy method”.

They were later forced to perform in pornographic content under threat of violence, a statement alleged.

That certainly sounds as if all six were women. Why not say “women” then?

Trans people in the bible! Jesus lifts up gender-queer people as model disciples!!

Also how fast can we talk let’s try to set a record

Is the long arm of the law finally reaching out to grab Trump by the shoulder?

Even as Donald Trump prepares to dial up his campaign to take back the White House, the former US president’s political and personal fate may already have been decided by the secret workings of a grand jury in Georgia.

The 23-member panel, convened to consider whether Trump and others committed crimes in trying to overturn his defeat in Georgia when it appeared the state might decide the outcome of the entire 2020 presidential election, was dissolved on Monday after submitting its conclusions and asking that they be made public.

…

In November, the day before Trump announced he was again running for the White House, the Brookings Institution in Washington published a report that concluded he is “at substantial risk of prosecution” in Georgia including for improperly influencing government officials, forgery and criminal solicitation. The report said Trump may even be vulnerable to charges under anti-racketeering laws written to combat the mafia.

May be, but on the other hand, our apparently infinite capacity for finding reasons not to do anything about Trump may protect him yet again.

Norman Eisen, the lead author of the Brookings report and former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, said he thinks charges against Trump are “highly likely”.

“The evidence is powerful and the law is very favourable to the prosecutors in Georgia,” he said. “I believe the [special grand jury] report very likely calls for the prosecution of Trump and his co-conspirators.”

Here’s hoping – and not just because it’s Trump, either, but also because we shouldn’t have an unwritten but still binding rule that guys like Trump (and Trump himself) can do whatever they want all the time with no consequences just because they are rich or famous or ex-presidents.

Willis launched her investigation into “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results” just weeks after the former president left office. The investigation initially focused on a tape recording of Trump pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to conjure nearly 12,000 votes out of thin air in order to overturn Joe Biden’s win.

Willis expanded the investigation as more evidence emerged of Trump and his allies attempting to manipulate the results, including the appointment of a sham slate of 16 electors to replace the state’s legitimate members of the electoral college. The fake electors included the chair of the Georgia Republican party, David Shafer, and Republican members of the state legislature who have been warned that they are at risk of prosecution.

No biggy, just a known crook doing everything he can think of to steal an election.

Special grand juries are rare in Georgia. Unlike the regular kind, they cannot indict. But they can sit for much longer and have wider powers to subpoena. Willis recognised that if she was to build a case against such a divisive political figure as Trump, and convince a jury in a criminal trial, the evidence would have to be rock solid, and that would take time and depth.

Willis used the grand jury’s powers to good effect. She called a parade of witness, including many of Trump’s closest allies and lawyers. Some fought their subpoenas including Senator Lindsey Graham who went all the way to the US supreme court in a failed attempt to avoid giving evidence.

Raffensperger was the star witness. Trump told him to find the votes; he told Trump the votes weren’t there to find.

Trump tried to claim that the vote had been rigged by alleging that ballot boxes were stuffed and other irregularities. Then the president said: “All of this stuff is very dangerous stuff when you talk about no criminality. I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.”

Raffensperger saw that for what it was.

“I felt then – and still believe today – that this was a threat,” he wrote. “Others obviously thought so, too, because some of Trump’s more radical followers have responded as if it was their duty to carry out this threat.”

Raffensperger said he and his wife were subject to death threats.

Trump remains at liberty, free to threaten others.

Giuliani is likely to have been asked about false testimony he gave to Georgia legislators the month after the presidential election, including claims that voting machines were rigged and that thousands of teenagers below the voting age had cast ballots. A New York court suspended his licence to practice law last year over his “demonstrably false and misleading statements regarding the Georgia presidential election results”.

But he too is still at liberty, free to bribe and threaten and lie.

Those who have worked with Willis say she is unlikely to shy from prosecuting Trump if she deems it appropriate. She is known to be a fan of anti-racketeering laws, having used them to prosecute public school teachers who were part of a cheating scandal.

It’s seen as in some sense extreme to prosecute Trump, because he’s a former president, but the fact that he’s a former president is a compelling reason to prosecute him. His crimes are against all of us, on the planet as well as in this one country.

It’s like Nazi Germany. Just like. No difference.

No he doesn’t.

There is no resemblance. None. Pretending there is is a disgusting form of narcissism.

That’s…………..what we’re saying.

That’s the whole point. Gender-neutral awards=women being forgotten. That’s why there have to be awards specifically for women. If the Oscars didn’t have a Best Actress category women would have vastly fewer awards, because most movies have few women and those few women have few lines.

But

I do not care. If people like Emma Corrin and Sam Smith are so determined to present themselves as Special, they can do it at their own expense, not everyone else’s.

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

An NHS Trust taking over care of trans children from the Tavistock clinic is being trained by controversial charity Mermaids, The Telegraph can reveal.

Why go to all the trouble of removing care of trans children from the Tavistock only to get training from Mermaids? Why not find people who aren’t captive to a deranged ideology?

The charity, which is at the centre of a number of safeguarding rows and is currently under investigation by the regulator, will provide sessions for staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) starting this month.

It’s under investigation, but in the meantime – “Keep doing what you’ve been doing!”

Mermaids’ influence on the Tavistock was cited by some whistle-blowers as one of the reasons why it lost its way, with claims that activists put pressure on clinicians to affirm children’s belief that they were trans and to prescribe potentially life-altering drugs.

Ya think?

Medics who blew the whistle on Tavistock said that the trans charity’s involvement with SLaM is a cause for “concern” and that previous training has been “inaccurate and misleading”. They called for a “completely different approach” at the new NHS service.

But but but we don’t want to. We want to go on doing what we were doing.

Sue Evans, a Tavistock nurse who first raised concerns in 2005, told The Telegraph: “My experience was that groups like Mermaids exerted pressure on the clinical service which was not always helpful in terms of thinking about patients holistically.”

Mermaids doesn’t do holistic. Mermaids knows one thing and one thing only.

Mermaids say that its Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training is “tailored to the needs of your organisation, exploring: gender diversity, barriers faced by trans people, transitioning and treatment pathways, and ways to improve your diversity policies and procedures.”

If you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.

Consultant psychotherapist Dr Marcus Evans, who resigned from the Trust over their treatment of whistle-blowers, told The Telegraph “There are a lot of parents who are already worried after Tavistock said it would be involved in advising the new service providers, and now Mermaids is offering training as well.

“The old service system is discredited. We need a completely different approach that avoids preoccupation with gender to the exclusion of all other facets of the family, child and young person’s personality and development.”

But without preoccupation with gender, life has no meaning.

A SLaM spokesman said: “This training is not related to the development of an early adopter service for children and young people experiencing gender incongruence and gender dysphoria.

“We commission as well as directly provide high-quality professional training courses from a wide range of providers as part of our training offer for our staff to further support the provision of personalised, safe and therapeutic care for young people and adults using mental health services.”

But Mermaids isn’t high-quality. It can’t provide high-quality training courses because it’s not high-quality itself. It’s myopic and obsessive; its quality is low.

A genius comments on Joan Smith’s The Brits go gender-neutral and women disappear:

This is the real paradox of late stage feminism, by insisting that women can be equal to men in everything and anything they have forced women to compete in spaces and venues where Nature has given men genetic advantages – hence women are pushed down the hierarchy.

Yes indeed, women are genetically inferior to men in the writing novels departments, which is why we’ve never heard of Jane Austen or Emily Bronte or George Eliot or Charlotte Bronte or Edith Wharton or Willa Cather or Mary McCarthy or Margaret Drabble or Margaret Atwood.

Let’s drop the sex categories for the awards, they said! Let’s make the awards gender-neutral, they said! It will be awesome, they said!

Who could possibly have predicted that would happen? The top category in a major music award goes ‘gender-neutral’ — and this year’s nominees are all men. The Brit Awards scrapped the best male and best female categories last year, ignoring warnings that the decision would lead to the exclusion of women. Five male artists, including Stormzy and Harry Styles, are in the running in 2023, with not a woman — or a gender-neutral person — in sight.

Welllllllllll but then obviously that’s because women aren’t as good, isn’t it? Not at all because women just get overlooked and forgotten and discouraged from trying in the first place.

Separate male and female categories are one of the few mechanisms that exist to protect women artists, actors and authors from male-dominated prize lists. The then Orange prize for fiction was created in the 1990s to challenge the absence of widely-admired female authors, such as Angela Carter, from Booker prize shortlists.

Sorry, women just aren’t designed for writing good novels. Their shoulders are too narrow and their hips are too wide.

This is another example of what happens when an organisation decides to address a problem that doesn’t exist; sex is binary and few people genuinely believe that artists who ‘identify’ as gender-neutral are neither male nor female. The comically self-obsessed singer Sam Smith comes to mind — he was excluded from nomination in the best male artist category at the Brit Awards in 2021 after adopting ‘they/them’ pronouns — but it’s hard to see why up-and-coming female musicians should pay the price for his delusions.

It’s because they’re all Karens, every last one of them. All suburban, all white, all Karen.

How to suppress the vote:

When [Ohio] Gov. Mike DeWine last week signed what’s been called the nation’s strictest voter ID law, it raised fears that it would disenfranchise large numbers of voters in poor communities where people are less likely to meet the new requirements.

Why? Because strict ID is not wealth-neutral.

Those fears seem to be supported by a September report that estimates 1 million Ohioans have suspended licenses because of debts from things such as a lack of insurance, unpaid fines, and court costs. That’s in a state with 8 million registered voters.

The analysis, by the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, said the suspensions by far fall most heavily on impoverished urban communities of color. In other words, debt-related suspensions disproportionately affect some of the communities least likely to vote for the Republican officials who passed and signed the voter ID law.

It’s a nice little racket. You want laws that protect rich people at the expense of poor people? Simple: make it harder for poor people to vote.

“There is absolutely no evidence that we need a voter ID law to prevent voter fraud,” said Colin Marozzi, deputy policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which opposes the law.

Even so, the voter ID law, House Bill 458, makes it considerably harder for many of the poorest to vote in Ohio. While voters previously could use documents such as bank statements and utility bills to establish their identity, they now must have a driver’s license, state ID, passport or military ID to cast a vote.

Not education-based ID though. That won’t work.

Perhaps tellingly, college, and university IDs didn’t make the list of acceptable IDs approved by Ohio’s heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature. College students were credited with helping to deliver victories to Democrats in key races around the country in the November election.

Suppress that vote.

This just in –

Originally a comment by Sastra on Damn reaper, the post that reported the bad news that Harriet Hall had died suddenly.

This is very sad news indeed.

I was her official First Fan. I’d somehow come across several of her early essays (including iirc the “Tooth Fairy Science” one) and thought they were wonderful. James Randi’s second The Amazing Meeting was held that year in Vegas and he’d put up the names of all the attendees on a board in the lobby. I was thrilled to see “Harriet Hall” listed and spent the convention looking at the women’s name tags. No luck. Near the end of TAM we went to see Penn & Teller and afterwards a bunch of us decided to walk back to our hotel, which turned out to be further than we expected. My walking companion was a charming, interesting woman who, of course, turned out to be Harriet. She was astonished to hear I’d been looking for her all weekend. “You’re my very first fan!”

We ending up going out to dinner later —and then either lunch or dinner for all the subsequent TAMs. I looked forward to it every year.

I regularly read her webpage. I miss her already.

It’s been pouring rain all day and still is raining, though not quite so hard – but all the same there’s someone with a snarling backpack blower out there, the one who generally takes an hour or more to shift every leaf on the large property across the alley. I hate the sound noise of blowers even more than I hate the noise of mowers, weedeaters, hedgeclippers, edgers, and all the rest of the box of tricks.

I’m not the only one who hates the damn things.

It’s almost impossible to enjoy a quiet moment in many of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods without hearing leaf blowers. The engines alternate between bone-shaking rumbles and high-pitched whines that assault our ears.

It’s a snarl rather than a whine – at any rate it’s a peculiarly grating, distracting, irritating, blood pressure-raising noise. All for the sake of moving every last blade of grass and speck of dust, as if that were important, or worth doing at all.

But these machines are far worse than an annoyance. Gas-powered leaf blowers are dangerous to our neighbors, the workers who use them, and the planet. City Council and the Mayor’s Office must ban them.

Other cities and states have already recognized and addressed this problem. Starting in 2024, California will ban the sale of new gas leaf blowers as an effort to stem their negative impact on the environment and human health. The volunteer-led nonprofit organization Quiet Clean D.C. led a successful campaign to ban gas leaf blowers in Washington, which took effect on Jan. 1. Seattle’s City Council voted to phase out gas-powered blowers for city departments and contractors by 2025, and for businesses and residents by 2027.

2027. Groan. Four more years.

The danger of gas leaf blowers has been well documented. According to James Fallows, a former writer for the Atlantic who was born in Philadelphia, gas leaf blowers are “vastly the dirtiest and most polluting kind of machinery still in legal use.” He adds that the engine is powered by “a slosh of oil and gas that spews up to one-third of its fuels as unburned aerosols into the environment.”

All to create a blast of air to move leaves around. It’s too stupid.

Another “progressive” man trashing women via the Karen trope.

Oh damn, bad news.

The CBC on the suppression of Robert Wintemute’s talk at McGill:

Trans rights advocates stormed into a talk Tuesday afternoon at McGill University led by a speaker associated with a group they say is “notoriously transphobic and trans-exclusionary.”

Not a great lede. “Trans rights” always need to be specified, because most readers will think just “human rights for trans people” when in fact what’s meant is a set of novel “rights” that are incompatible with other people’s rights. The people storming the talk weren’t so much “advocates” as an angry shouty mob who physically prevented people from going in. The way they libel the speaker shouldn’t be just slapped down there in the first sentence as if it were true or at least reasonable.

“The T (trans) is so much more vulnerable than the rest of LGB. I think there’s tons of scientific evidence speaking to that,” said Celeste Trianon, a trans activist who led the protest against the event.

Who led the mob that prevented the event from continuing. Also this “trans activist” is a guy, shutting down a talk that is of particular relevance to women’s rights. This conflict has everything to do with women and our rights and the way purported “trans rights” are eroding ours. News outlets should make that very clear instead of muffling it in vagueness.

[Wintemute] says he has a 37 years experience defending LGB human rights and he would never associate with any group that “promotes hate.” He said he came to McGill to promote the message that women have human rights too, but they feel intimidated by the trans rights movement.

“So I have to thank the protesters for giving me first-hand experience of that intimidation,” said Wintemute after the event. “Probably the majority of women in this country disagree with some of transgender demands but they refuse to say so because they will be seen as intolerant.”

And shouted at and bullied and pushed out of things.

Any discussion or criticism is seen as “hate speech,” he said. The protesters held signs saying “no debate,” he noted, “and many women around the world disagree.” The idea that his seminar would lead to genocide of trans people is “absolutely absurd,” he said.

That kind of dishonest hyperbole is pervasive in trans ideology and “activism.” It is in fact one of the (several) signs that it’s not a healthy or progressive or liberal-minded movement. The lies, the screaming, the self-pity, the bullying – they don’t add up to another rung on the ladder to human betterment, do they.

Wintemute’s work inspired the foundation of the LGB Alliance, a British group that advocates against transgender rights in the United Kingdom.

No it does not – that’s an appalling claim for the CBC to make. It resists the creation of new, warped imitations of rights that are just for trans people, like the “right” to be treated as what one is not. It does not advocate for trans people to lose the human rights we all have.

The group has opposed progressive gender affirmation bills in the U.K., like the Scottish Gender Recognition Act, which improves the system by which transgender people can apply for legal recognition.

But who says they are progressive? What if they’re not? What if they’re the opposite of progressive?

The LGB Alliance denies being transphobic or hateful.

The CBC sneers.

An open letter signed by McGill students, professors, alumni and others from the Montreal LGBTQ+ community says trans rights are not at odds with the rights of others.

They can say whatever they like, but they’re wrong. Some purported trans rights very much are at odds with the rights of women…and, ironically, lesbians and gays, despite all the brandishing of LGBTQMNOP.

“Undermining the human rights of trans people does not benefit any member of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, nor the feminist movement,” it says.

Yeah? What about the ZRPMWIF-x/ community?

Though Canada and Quebec have remained “mostly sheltered” from transphobic rhetoric, those ideas have gained momentum in the U.S. and the U.K. and could easily spread here, said Trianon.

She pointed to the multiple instances of drag queen story hours being attacked by anti-LGBT activists over the summer in Montreal.

“This plays into the transfeminine predator stereotype. It’s very much a debunkable thing,” said Trianon.

Except that there are predators who pretend to be trans women, stereotype or no stereotype.

What. the. hell.

I magnified to read the sign between the two so that you wouldn’t have to: it says “The nearest female WC is on the other side of the floor.”

PS fuck you and have a nice day.

Why do they do this? How can they not see how insulting and unfair and grotesque it is? How can they think it’s ok to give men toilets just for men while opening women’s toilets to anyone who feels like dropping in?

They promoted the “protest” on Facebook:

Also shared photos:

Small space filled with people; event cancelled; success!!

The dishonest reporting files:

Truthout:

Students at McGill University in Montreal Protest Anti-Trans Speaker

The speaker, Robert Wintemute, is a member of the anti-trans hate group LGB Alliance.

The students did more than “protest” and the speaker is not “anti-trans” and the LGB Alliance is not anti-trans and not a hate group. That’s a lot of lies for just the headline and subhead.

The story seems to have been written before the “protest” happened.

Lawyer Robert Wintemute is giving a speech at the university entitled “The Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate In the United Kingdom and the Divorce of LGB from T.” Wintemute is a member of the United Kingdom-based LGB Alliance, which claims to advocate for lesbian, gay and bisexual causes but which activists at McGill have pointed out is actually part of a “Christian right-supported campaign to ‘divide and conquer’ the LGBT community.”

Activists at McGill haven’t “pointed out,” which implies accuracy. They’ve said, or claimed, or lied.

There is no “LGBT community.” Beware of that word “community,” which all too often is a disguise for forced teaming. Lesbians and men who call themselves lesbians are not a “community.” Feminists and trans activists are not a “community.” People allergic to bullshit and trans activists are not a “community.”

LGB Alliance, which is listed on the website of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism as an extremist hate group, espouses anti-transgender views under the guise of being pro-gay and pro-women.

Oh well then there’s no more to be said. If this one group is listed on this one website, we know all there is to know.

This is the corner where all the crashes occur. That’s because “transgender views” are riddled with nonsense and wishful thinking and domineering assertion. We oppose the “views” not because we’re evil and akin to racists but because the views are bad and stupid. The “views” tell us that huge abusive men are women just as we are provided only that they say so. We have a problem with that. Lying about us isn’t going to make that problem go away.

Further, the group has actively worked against the interests of people it supposedly seeks to protect — it has endorsed conversion therapy for gay and lesbian people, for example…

Has it? First I’ve heard of it. Given the wild detours around the truth in this piece, I don’t believe it.

The group’s charitable status was challenged last year when LGBTQ advocates noted that it doesn’t actually work to help lesbian, gay or bisexual people.

Again. There are no “LGBTQ” advocates. The LG is not the same as the T or the Q, let alone both mashed together. The “advocates” in question are Mermaids, all T and no LG.

By granting LGB Alliance members a platform to share their transphobic views, McGill University is “actively contributing to the genocide of trans people across the world,” student organizers wrote in an open letter challenging Wintemute’s presence on campus.

And what a ludicrous thing to write it is, but Truthout presents it as meaningful and damning.

That’s how this whole conversation is conducted. It’s an embarrassment.