So it’s done.

Seven US Western states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River have failed to reach an agreement on cutting water consumption.

California, the largest user, did not join a water cut proposal put forward by six others by a federally requested 31 January deadline.

…

The government had asked for a plan to reduce water use from the Colorado River basin by two to four million acre-feet, or one-third of the river’s yearly average flow.

Six of the states agreed on a plan that would bring it down by two million acre-feet of water. Under that plan, California – the state with the largest water consumption rate – would need to cut more than one million acre-feet.

California had previously offered to reduce their consumption by just 400,000 acre-feet.

The Chair of the Colorado River Board of California told the Associated Press that the state “remains focused on practical solutions that can be implemented now to protect volumes of water in storage without driving conflict and litigation”, and that it plans to submit its own plan.

Again we see that humans are smart enough to create technologies that break the planet but not smart enough to stop using them.

Victoria Smith has a brilliant piece about male anger and how women experience it.

Years ago, I lived with a man who hit me, though not most of the time. Sometimes he would only shout at me, but again, not most of the time. I couldn’t predict when things would go wrong, though I tried to work out a pattern. One day, you’d say something and it would be fine; the next, you could say the same thing and you’d know, instantly, that you’d ruined everything. 

…

Sometimes it would end in physical violence; sometimes it would not. This made little difference to the initial terror because, of course, you didn’t know. Afterwards, if no blows had actually been struck, it would be decreed that “nothing happened”.

I think a lot of women live with “nothing happening” an awful lot of the time. A man does not have to hit you more than once for all the occasions upon which he could have hit you to have the required effect. He might not have to hit you at all. One of the reasons why it has been so important for feminists to promote awareness of coercive control is that physical violence is not the only means by which men terrorise women. There are women who live in constant fear of men who can justifiably say, “I never even touched her.”

And, I think, there are women who live in something much less acute than constant fear, but still more than nothing. An aversion to male rage, if nothing else. I’ve mentioned a few times that I experienced very occasional male rage growing up (and after growing up), not the physical kind, only the shouty kind, but the shouty part alone was terrifying to me. It seems to me that men should know better than to do that. We can’t know ahead of time that the shouting isn’t going to proceed to violence, even if it never has in the past. It feels pre-violent.

Whilst very few men might risk treating a woman in public the way an abuser would treat her in private, there are buttons they can press, ways of occupying space that show an awareness of who has the upper hand. There can be an expectation of deference, and a belief that it is acceptable to treat insufficiently deferential — that is, insufficiently fearful — women as aggressors. 

…

An example of this would be the recent behaviour of Labour MPs Ben Bradshaw and Lloyd Russell-Moyle towards female MPs speaking about Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill. To many women, myself included, the shouting and bullying felt disturbingly familiar. 

Yes. Yes yes yes fucking yes. That contorted face on Russell-Moyle – how dare he?

The sense of moral superiority expressed by Russell-Moyle in the aftermath, claiming that his “passion” led him to adopt the wrong “tone”, was utterly predictable. She, Miriam Cates, made him do it. Anyone with principles would have done the same. Who could call that abusive? 

I know I am not the only woman who saw this and felt genuine dismay. This behaviour should have no place in public life. It should have been condemned by Keir Starmer rather than airily written off with platitudes about “respect”. Starmer claims to care about violence against women and girls but seems oblivious to the broader dynamics that underpin it. If nothing happened in the House of Commons, then nothing is happening in most abusive households either, until something does happen and we all have to pretend that nobody could have foreseen it. 

Afuckingmen.

I do not like feeling the things I do when I see men shouting at women in ways I know they would never dare shout at men (no matter how “passionate” they are feeling). I would rather not make the connections I do. It is not opportunism. It is not a weapon I like to wield. In many ways I would rather un-feel all this, but I can’t. As long as I can’t, it enrages me that men who exploit the fear of women — who have enough insight into male dominance to exercise it, but not enough to acknowledge it — still have the nerve to tell women which men we “really” need to worry about. 

Along with everything else they feel like telling us.

I am quite aware that, just as I never found a way of backing out of a confrontation in the past, there is no way of expressing this persuasively to men who like yelling at women. To them, I am weaponising trauma. I am whiny and manipulative. I am playing the victim. I am seeing threats of violence everywhere. 

They will say “nothing happened”, and on a basic level they will be right. I think that “nothing” matters, though. I think that “nothing” deserves to be named. 

Victoria Smith is a stone cold genius.

Can’t anybody get it right? Not even firefighters? The people who rescue us from burning buildings and smashed cars?

A fire chief has promised a full independent inquiry into claims firefighters took photos of car crash victims and shared them on WhatsApp.

Male firefighters at Dorset and Wiltshire Fire Service (DWFS) are alleged to have made degrading comments about the women in a group chat.

A female firefighter told ITV news she had heard comments about the type of underwear women had been wearing.

Had been wearing before they were killed in a crash.

Why would anyone do that? Whence comes the impulse to mock dead women for their underwear? There’s no tangible payoff the way there is with rape or robbery, there’s just random sneering at freshly dead women. I can’t see the fun in it.

Dorset Police said it would lead inquiries into the allegations, after consulting Wiltshire Police.

A spokesperson added the details in the ITV report were of a “very concerning nature” which “understandably caused concern amongst the public and especially families of victims”.

Yes you don’t really want to hear about firefighters taking postmortem photos of your daughters’ or sisters’ underwear.

Oh really?

A school district in Virginia said it received a peculiar report last week from one of its junior varsity girls’ basketball games: An assistant coach for the Churchland High School Truckers had stepped on the court on Jan. 21, and played against teenagers.

The assistant coach and the head coach are no longer working at the school, the Times tactfully adds.

Details of how exactly an adult coaching staff member had managed to put on a jersey and play alongside the teenage athletes in their game against Nansemond River High School were still unclear on Tuesday as the district continued its investigation.

Yes you’d think it would be kind of obvious, wouldn’t you, and yet…

Churchland High School is not the only school to have dealt with adults posing as teenagers in games in recent years, possibly using experience and size to their competitive advantage.

Possibly? What mean, possibly? Typo for “obviously”?

In Dallas, a 25-year-old man posed as a 17-year-old student and played in a high school basketball team, becoming a star player before he was arrested in 2018 and charged with tampering with government records, The Dallas Morning News reported. He was sentenced to six years probation in 2019, the newspaper reported.

And in Memphis, in 2013, a 22-year-old man was accused of faking transcripts in order to join a high school basketball team, according to Fox 2, a local television station.

And that’s not ok?

No, of course it’s not ok. So why is it ok for men to do it to women???

H/t Sackbut

Alex Massie in the Times on Sturgeon and TWAW:

The first minister’s shock at discovering that her own government’s prison policy allowed male rapists to be incarcerated in a woman’s prison is transparently convenient, self-serving and bogus. Once you swallow the mantra “trans women are women” no different to any others, there is nowhere to go. Self-ID is an all or nothing proposition but if not everyone claiming to be a woman should be treated as one, the policy collapses in a heap of its own contradictions. This is the point we have now reached even if the first minister does not appear to realise it.

Exactly. He’s talking about that exasperated “Well yes.” Those two little words knocked the support beams out from under the whole ludicrous fantasy.

As recently as 100 hours ago the Scottish government argued it was ridiculous to suppose people might take advantage of the opportunities afforded by its gender reforms. Bad people need no fresh licence, we were told. Now we see — and the government appears to agree — that they had ample licence anyway but the Scottish government thinks the answer to this is to expand that licence tenfold. 

While admitting “Well yes.”

Cultural appropriation stunning and brave.

The BBC solemnly tells us what to think about Sam Smith and his new video – well no they tell us what to think about “their” new video, but you know how it is, it’s hard to remember to use the “correct” i.e. incorrect hence hard to remember ProNouns.

And with their latest video, Sam Smith has certainly caused a bit of stir.

If you haven’t watched it, the singer spends most of it wearing a corset and nipple tassels while performing some spicy moves with backing dancers.

Is this the BBC or Pink News?

One scene in particular has upset some people – it shows Sam in that corset and nipple tassel look, posing suggestively while being showered with jets of water.

…

Youtube’s restricted mode blocks the video. But fans say it’s no worse than others released by artists, many of them female, containing suggestive imagery.

Songs like Anaconda by Nicki Minaj, S&M by Rihanna or even Call On Me by Eric Prydz all capitalise on it.

Therefore a pudgy guy is every bit as hot doing the same thing.

Except that it doesn’t work that way. What people find sexy isn’t really a matter for political agitation. It is a matter for political agitation when being sexy, especially being sexy to men, is made a criterion in realms where being sexy is completely beside the point. Women are more than familiar with that warped arrangement, and analyzing it and resisting it has been a big part of feminism for decades. It doesn’t follow that a pudgy guy who wants to be another Rihanna is doing something progressive or liberatory.

Those who think Sam has been singled out have a theory.

In 2019, the singer came out as non-binary and asked to be described with they/them pronouns. Their new album, Gloria, fully embraces LGBT culture.

There’s no such thing as LGBT culture. Sam Smith is not a lesbian. It doesn’t really mean anything to “come out as non-binary,” for the simple reason that “non-binary” doesn’t mean much. All this solemn hand-wringing is just silly, and makes the BBC look fatuous.

“If a female artist had done that exact same video, worn the exact same outfits, no one would bat an eyelid,” says drag queen Pixie Polite. “I think the outcry just smacks of this sort of homophobia, queer phobia and transphobia.”

Don’t forget non-binary phobia. The more phobias you can list the more prizes you get.

Sure, it’s true that a woman doing that stuff wouldn’t get people batting their eyelids, but that’s because men have been sexualizing women that way since forever. That doesn’t mean it’s transferable to pudgy guys in corsets and nipple tassels.

Kenny Ethan Jones, a trans advocate and writer from London, agrees that Sam is entering an era of “embracing their queerness”.

“It’s really nice to see Sam really step into themselves,” says Kenny.

Bahahahahahaha thanks for that.

There’s more but ça suffit maintenant as my French teacher used to say.

Also running out…

The seven states that rely on water from the shrinking Colorado River are unlikely to agree to voluntarily make deep reductions in their water use, negotiators say, which would force the federal government to impose cuts for the first time in the water supply for 40 million Americans.

If you kids can’t stop fighting over the cookies/toys/puppy/front seat/ice cream Mommy and Daddy will just have to take it all away.

The Interior Department had asked the states to voluntarily come up with a plan by Jan. 31 to collectively cut the amount of water they draw from the Colorado. The demand for those cuts, on a scale without parallel in American history, was prompted by precipitous declines in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which provide water and electricity for Arizona, Nevada and Southern California. Drought, climate change and population growth have caused water levels in the lakes to plummet.

Pretty basic. “You have to come up with a plan because the water is not there. We’re not being big meanies, we’re not doing this for fun, the water is gone.”

Negotiators say the odds of a voluntary agreement appear slim. It would be the second time in six months that the Colorado River states, which also include Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, have missed a deadline for consensus on cuts sought by the Biden administration to avoid a catastrophic failure of the river system.

The high desert states, that are useless for farming because they are so arid.

Without a deal, the Interior Department, which manages flows on the river, must impose the cuts. That would break from the century-long tradition of states determining how to share the river’s water. And it would all but ensure that the administration’s increasingly urgent efforts to save the Colorado get caught up in lengthy legal challenges.

During which, no doubt, the states will continue to use more water than they have until every last drop is gone. What a clever species we are.

Maggie Haberman reports that Trump is running out of tricks in his battles with the legal system.

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida wrote this month in fining the former president and one of his lawyers nearly $1 million for filing a frivolous civil suit against Hillary Clinton and F.B.I. officials.

Trump promptly dropped his similar suit against New York AG Letitia James. Tick tick tick…

The Manhattan district attorney’s office began presenting evidence on Monday to a grand jury about his role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign — the latest in a series of investigations and legal proceedings that are grinding on despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to block or undercut them.

That’s three.

The Justice Department is investigating his handling of classified documents and his role in the efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, and he is facing a potential indictment from the prosecutor in Fulton County, Ga., in connection with his efforts to remain in power after his election loss.

Four, five.

Two suits against Mr. Trump brought by E. Jean Carroll, a New York-based writer who has accused him of raping her in the 1990s in a department store dressing room, are moving ahead despite his threats to sue her.

Six, seven.

Maybe it will help if he tries to sue someone else…

On Monday, Mr. Trump filed suit against the journalist Bob Woodward, saying that Mr. Woodward had released recordings of interviews with him as an audiobook without his permission. Mr. Woodward and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, called the suit, which seeks $49 million in damages, “without merit.”

Suing is one thing and prosecution is another.

“You can wear down a private party if they do not have the same resources as you, or you can settle a civil case and make it go away, but criminal cases are not about money,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney and F.B.I. official. “Criminal cases are about liberty and justice, and it is really rather difficult — if not impossible — to wear down federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. and make them go away.”

Although he certainly managed to hold them off while he was in office.

The Tongass National Forest in Alaska is protected again.

Trump rescinded a measure blocking logging and road-building on nine million acres of land in the Tongass in 2020.

…

The decision follows a years-long conflict between Alaskan Republican officials – who have argued the rule has slowed economic development and that renewing it will hamper efforts to connect remote communities by road, among other concerns – and conservationists, indigenous groups and others who say the measure is key to protecting the environment.

Spanning nearly 17 million acres – an area slightly larger than the state of West Virginia – the Tongass stores 44% of all the carbon dioxide contained in national forests across the country, according to the Alaska Conservation Foundation.

One small win for the long term over the short term.

Journalist Jean Calder dared to see a film.

The other day I attended a screening in Brighton of the critically acclaimed film Adult Human Female. It explores the challenges posed to women’s rights by sexist trans activism, including the way that gender “self-identification” can be used by abusive males to target women and children.

…

Women in this city, as elsewhere in the UK, have for several years been unable to freely discuss this issue without fear of sanction, harassment and threats. Elsewhere in the country, screenings of this film have regularly been sabotaged.

I did attend but not without hindrance because of the security measures in place. Every person who booked tickets had to be checked and the secret venue was only revealed an hour or so before the event to prevent attempts by misogynist trans activists to close it down.

There were ID checks and people gathered a good hour before the film began. The police had been alerted. The film went ahead and trans activists, who gathered elsewhere, never discovered where it was. However, there was an unacceptable cost in terms of time, expense and anxiety.

You shouldn’t have to feel like a member of the Resistance in Vichy France to see a feminist movie.

The women are not violent and have threatened nobody. Yet all too often they have been treated as aggressors by local police, who have explained their shameful failure to protect them from hate-fuelled attacks by describing their role as to “keep the sides apart”, cynically suggesting equality of violence and threatening behaviour.

…

As local women wearily point out, men who challenge “gender ideology” are rarely attacked or threatened. Women are the target.

Almost as if trans ideology is misogynist to the core.

A friend of hers received an anonymous threatening letter about the film because he works in a building.

The letter, apparently widely distributed to possible venues across the city to try to prevent the screening, alleges that the film is “transphobic” (it isn’t), names the Brighton Women’s Liberation Collective, then accuses groups showing the film of “calling for violence against the trans community” (something of which I saw no evidence).

It states that any venue showing the film will be “complicit in this violence” which, it says, is “real and widespread” against “trans women especially” (the film offers evidence to challenge this emotive and often-repeated assertion).

The letter concludes: “Should you choose to go ahead with the screening, be assured that we will make it known far and wide that your venue has knowingly helped to promote transphobic ideas and therefore been complicit in violence against the LGBT community.

“In a place like Brighton I’m sure you can imagine this will not go down well. We hope that you take this strongly into account and that no further action is required.” (my emphasis)

How do you take something “strongly” into account? It’s Trumpspeak with extra added menaces.

Earlier this month, Conservative MP Miriam Cates and Labour’s Rosie Duffield and Karin Smyth spoke out in Parliament against the Scottish Nationalist Party and Green Party’s controversial proposals to legally mandate self-identification in Scotland. This would have removed women’s right to female-only spaces, such as toilets, refuges and hospital wards.

Unlike male colleagues making similar objections, the women MPs were met by barracking and aggression, in particular from Brighton Kemptown’s enraged Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who shouted them down, jabbing his finger and actually crossing the floor to glare at and physically intimidate Miriam Cates. Both she and Rosie Duffield are survivors of abuse.

Despite general outrage and the expressed unease of Labour women, such as MP Jess Phillips, Russell-Moyle has faced no censure from Keir Starmer and explained his actions by reference to a “failure to control” his “passion”.

They always explain their actions that way.

Since then, Rosie Duffield has published an article, The Labour Party Has a Woman Problem, which has been widely praised and discussed. Regrettably, there has been no comment at all from our local politicians.

This conspiracy of silence cannot be allowed to continue. Women and girls make up half the population and, however much Brighton and Hove chooses to forget it, sex remains a protected characteristic enshrined in equalities legislation.

Oh well, it’s only women.

Sturgeon really does give the whole game away here.

Journalist: Are all trans women women?

Sturgeon: That’s not the point we’re dealing with here, trans women are women but in the present context, there is no automatic right for a trans woman –

[Journalist cuts her off, which he shouldn’t have; we needed the rest of that sentence.] There are contexts where a trans woman is not –

Sturgeon: No there is [frustrated half-laugh] circumstances where a trans woman will be held in the male prison estate.

There. She gave the whole thing away. That’s what all the sane people have been telling her all this time. Yes, exactly, there are circumstances where trans women can’t be in the female estate. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT WOMEN. Duh. That’s what we said.

Then he asks her if there are situations in which women born women will be housed in the male estate. She doesn’t think there are circumstances [inaudible] – he says “Different for trans women.” She replies, with exasperation, “Well yes.”

Well yes. Well yes.

But when we say it it’s a crime.

But now she’s said it.

She gave it all away, just like that.

Oh my – Sturgeon admits it. At 34 seconds she says an emphatic “Well yes” – and of course rightly so, but it’s what she’s been denying and ignoring and acting as if No all this time.

Another woman loses a place* to…

*See first comment

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Calling all bullies.

To use my go-to example I see “god(s)” exactly the same way I (and practically everyone else) see the Midgard Serpent.

I don’t call myself an “amidgardserpentist”, so why should I call myself an “atheist”? If anyone honestly wants to know what I think, they’re going to have to stick around for the actual content. And if they don’t have time for that, then no real understanding is going to be conveyed by me giving them a label. This is also part of the reason* I no longer call myself a “feminist”. Julie Bindel and Laurie Penny are not different kinds of “feminists” any more than Kate Smurthwaite and Eddie Izzard are different kinds of “women”, or fruit bats and baseball bats are different kinds of “bats”. These are homonyms, not subsets of the same larger set. Saying that “feminism” is, say, “a movement that fights the oppression of women” doesn’t really tell us anything when we can’t even even agree on the meaning of “woman” or “oppression”.

A label can be a convenient description or an indication of affiliation

I think most people – including self-described “atheists” and “skeptics”** – naturally gravitate toward the latter interpretation. Taking a stand based on ideas, values, principles etc. requires a lot of tedious thinking and will not always align neatly with the views of your “friends” and “allies” (as someone once put it, where everyone is thinking the same, no one is doing much thinking at all). Going with whatever passes for the official “atheist™”, “feminist™”, “leftist™”, “progressive™” etc. position requires zero thinking and automatically puts you on the “right” side of every issue even if the “right” side today (“Four legs good, two legs better!”) is the polar opposite of what it was just yesterday (“Four legs good, two legs bad!”).

* Besides not wanting to come across as claiming to speak for women.

** As became abundantly clear during the Deep Rifts.

Pompeo has written a book.

It’s a master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics.

Mike Pompeo is a smart man — first in his class at West Point, Harvard Law Review — with a sharp tongue. In March 2016, as a four-term tea party congressman from Kansas, he warned that Donald Trump, if elected, would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.” 

And he was absolutely right, and he was part of the authoritarian’s administration. Why is that? It has to be because he’s an immoral man doing what’s useful for him as opposed to what’s good for everyone else. A smart man and a very bad one.

Pompeo disdained America’s career diplomats. He describes them, by turns, as un-American, deceitful denizens of the “deep state,” and “overwhelmingly hard left.” Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton, is a scheming leaker who “should be in jail,” he writes. Barack Obama’s foreign policies, in Pompeo’s view, made him all but a terrorist fellow traveler. Heportrays Obama’s spy chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper as masters of disinformation and the chief perpetrators of the “Russia Hoax” — the crime of reporting, first to president-elect Trump and then to the American people, the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin monkey-wrenched the 2016 election for its chosen candidate.

In other words not a hoax. Like Trump, Pompeo lies that other people are lying. Double bluff type of thing.

After the killing [of Khashoggi] sparked outrage, Trump sent Pompeo to reassure the crown prince of America’s support — and to give “the middle finger to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other bed-wetters who didn’t have a grip on reality.” As you may have guessed, Pompeo hates reporters: They are, in his words, “wolves” and “hyenas,” and their work of encouraging leaks, he says flatly, “is illicit.”

Says the guy who worked for Trump. Nearly everything Trump does is illicit.

The NY Times has an opinion piece on demographics and shrinking populations.

China, the most populous country on the planet for centuries, this month reported its first population decline in six decades, a trend that is almost certainly irreversible. By the end of the century China may have only around half of the 1.41 billion people it has now, according to U.N. projections, and may already have been overtaken by India.

The news has been met with gloom and doom, often framed as the start of China’s inexorable decline and, more broadly, the harbinger of a demographic and economic “time bomb” that will strain the world’s capacity to support aging populations.

There is no doubt that a shrinking global population — a trend expected to set in by the end of this century — poses unprecedented challenges for humanity. China is only the latest and largest major country to join a club that already includes Japan, South Korea, Russia, Italy and others.

And so on. The weird thing is that the sociologist who wrote it, Wang Feng, never mentions the climate issue. How can it make sense to talk about population decline or growth without mentioning what’s happening to the planet this “shrinking global population” lives on? It’s like being on a train approaching a collapsed bridge and talking about service in the dining car.

But the alarmist warnings are often simplistic and premature. The glass is at least half full. Shrinking populations are usually part of a natural, inevitable process, and rather than focus excessively on concerns like labor shortages and pension support, we need to look at the brighter spots for our world.

But the trouble is, labor shortages and pension support are going to look like luxury issues as the climate spirals out of control.

Compared to a half-century ago, people in many countries are richer, healthier and better educated and women are more empowered. China’s population, for example, is shrinking and aging, but its people are more educated and have a longer life expectancy than at any time in the country’s history. 

Yes but. There’s that bridge up ahead.

Men brag in public of taking a baby away from her mother as if she were a jacket or an umbrella.

Men using women to gestate babies for them has nothing whatever to do with either democracy or equality.

MPs are afraid to talk about it at all.

In the privacy of a committee room on the parliamentary estate, Labour MPs gather for “top-secret” meetings to discuss the erosion of sex-based rights — and their numbers are growing.

They are part of a cross-party group of “gender-critical” MPs and peers often too frightened to express their views on trans matters publicly for fear of a backlash.

So that’s healthy. Trans ideology is making life steadily worse for women, and the people in charge are afraid even to talk about it.

One MP who attends regularly said the meetings “have to be top-secret or no one would come”. They added: “It’s a way of bringing women and men across the House together to meet secretly to talk about these issues, because they can’t speak out publicly.”

…

[Rosie Duffield] was also briefed against by Matthew Doyle, director of communications for Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, who described the situation with Duffield as “irritating” but insisted it does not do the party “any actual damage”.

In an audio clip released by Guido Fawkes, the right-wing political gossip blog, Doyle, who previously worked for Sir Tony Blair, accused her of doing “incredibly disingenuous things”, adding: “There are people in Canterbury who say it would be nice [for her] to spend a bit more time actually in Canterbury rather than hanging out with JK Rowling.”

Bros before hos, yet again.

So charged is the debate that not one of the dozen Labour MPs I have spoken to this week would go on the record to express their concerns about the party’s equivocal position on the trans and gender issue — not even Harriet Harman, the architect of the Equality Act, which outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation.

All said the issue was “toxic” and that wading into the debate always opened up a “world of pain.” They are also concerned about exposing divisions within Labour amid fears it could hurt the party at the next election. One moderate Labour MP told me that whenever she talked about the need for safe spaces for women, she got online abuse and was told she was an extremist.

Does this sound like a normal healthy situation? Is it a coincidence that the people being harmed by it are women?

Baroness Hayter said it was easier for Labour peers to speak out because they do not have a constituency party to answer to. She said Labour MPs were often worried about the abuse they and, particularly, their staff, would be subjected to.

“I’m afraid I see this as being a bit like antisemitism when it was first called out in the party and people were saying it was all being exaggerated and overblown and with this issue it is the same thing,” she said. “They are trying to squash us and stop us from raising it. Jewish groups were told to be quiet about antisemitism and now women are being told to shut up too. But this is misogyny. This is men telling women to get back in their box.”

And telling them with venom and visible, red-faced rage and hatred. It’s a disgusting situation.

Another peer said: “The treatment of Rosie and Miriam has actually attracted a lot more people to our side of the argument because they have finally seen the bullying and misogynistic behaviour for what it is. This is women being aggressively silenced by men, so it has been very graphic. Combine that with the issues around Scotland and self-identification and you start to see the reality of the threat to sex-based rights very visually.”

You’re goddam right. Thanks Lloyd! Thanks for being such a horrible piggy person right out in the open where everyone can see.

[The Labour Women’s Declaration working group] has been dismayed to discover that it has been banned from having a stall at this weekend’s regional Labour conference in London. The decision to ban the group from having a stall at last year’s annual conference in Liverpool led to a letter of protest signed by Labour MPs and peers.

A spokeswoman for the group said: “This refusal unfortunately builds on the party’s decision not to allow us a conference stand at last year’s national conference in Liverpool. This position clearly has to change. We have productive private conversations and have given detailed briefings to many Labour politicians, including Keir Starmer and Anneliese Dodds. But banning us from Labour events like this makes the party look ridiculous.

“Keir will regain the respect of so many women if he shows leadership right now and makes good his words about our rights to be heard. This entails giving both Labour Women’s Declaration and Lesbian Labour the right, just like other campaign groups, to run stalls at conferences, and to engage in respectful conversations within the party.”

Or he can just stick with bros before hos.

Bro journalist at the Herald talks to celebrity bro-woman India Willoughby. First sentence:

INDIA Willoughby is sitting at her kitchen table in Newcastle wearing the Versace top she bought as a treat after appearing on Celebrity Big Brother.

The scene is set! This is a woman he’s talking to. Womany womany womany woman. No self-respecting man wears a “top.” That’s laydee territory. No man buys himself a “top” as a “treat” – that’s a totally effeminate girly womany female feminine womany womany thing to do. ARE WE CLEAR???

Willoughby says he gets threats.

“Somebody will get killed. That’s where the rhetoric is going. Words kill, we know that. People are using their words and platforms to make people angry. If anyone is killed it will be a trans person. If that becomes Britain’s sobering moment then that’s tragic for this country, awful.”

I wonder how he thinks he knows that if anyone is killed it will be a trans person. It’s not as if women don’t get threats too.

Willoughby says trans people feel politically isolated, apart from Scotland’s SNP/Green government. “When it comes to the bigots, the scary thing is that for trans people nobody is coming to our rescue apart from Nicola Sturgeon.”

What rescue though? What rescue does he want? What more are people supposed to do?

I’m sure being trans is fraught with difficulty, but that’s mostly because of what it is, rather than opposition to the ideology’s takeover.

“The underlying narrative,” she adds, “is that trans people are frauds, out to trick you. That idea is really dangerous. The one dilemma all trans people face is telling prospective partners that you’re trans. It’s a minefield. It can be very dangerous. So creating this mood music that we’re frauds green-lights to some that we deserve a beating.”

Or, it’s the other way around. The underlying issue is that people are mostly not particularly eager to have a “prospective partner” who is the non-chosen sex, if you see what I mean. Straight people want partners of the opposite sex, lesbians and gays want partners of the same sex. That “dilemma” isn’t put there by “terfs” or women in general or feminists in general, it’s there already. It’s not our fault that 1. men aren’t going to be fooled by Willoughby and 2. straight men aren’t going to want Willoughby for a partner. I repeat: that’s not our fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.

Maybe that’s the whole of the secret sauce here. Trans people have made their romantic/sexual/marital lives vastly more difficult by being trans, and that’s not anyone’s fault. What to do? Where to direct all that energy when there’s no perpetrator? Onto women who say no, of course. Now there’s someone to fight with!

But something was changing in 2017, Willoughby believes. She noticed attitudes to trans people hardening when she appeared on Women’s Hour. “I expected a chat about being the first trans Loose Woman but as soon as I got there it was clear that this was me in the dock. Not long afterwards, this movement of just horrible people started to coalesce.”

Just horrible people are we? While Willoughby is the nicest warmest most generous loving person you’d ever want to meet?

She believes if trans rights are eroded, then gay and lesbian rights will be next, and eventually women’s rights. America’s “extremist” Christian lobby has already eroded women’s abortion rights, she adds. Trans people are “the gateway, the same people coming for us will eventually come for gays, lesbians and women”.

No, bub, you’re already coming for women, with a lot of success.

Willoughby says the rhetoric on both sides needs to calm down before someone gets hurt. She denounced any trans campaigner carrying placards like ‘Decapitate terfs’. “They shouldn’t be there. They’re helping nobody, certainly not trans people.” Willoughby has, and does use the word ‘terf’, though, defending the use of the term as it was originally coined by ‘radical feminists’. She would refrain from using it to any woman who said she found it offensive.

The generosity of the man! He knows we do “find it offensive” but he’ll keep on calling us unless we tell him personally that we “find it offensive.”

Neal Mackay posted 23 tweets promoting this interview. Seems like a lot.