The four referrals:

Again:

He was stupid enough to incite the insurrection right in front of us, on the big screen, where everyone can see.

Referrals.

Yet another sneaky dishonest bit of word manipulation to deceive the readers or audience: Kezia Dugdale, former Member of the Scottish Parliament in the Times:

There is a rotten irony in the tagline “women won’t wheest.” That line is used by many campaigners against the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which will go through its stage 3 proceedings in the Scottish parliament this week. The phrase implies both that women are united in opposition to this legislation and that they have been somehow silenced during the bill’s passage.

From where I sit, it is the women who support this legislation who find themselves voiceless: women who have watched the colours green, white and purple, the symbols of universal suffrage, be appropriated by a cause they don’t support…

There it is. Yes, the colours green, white and purple are symbols of universal suffrage but not just any old universal suffrage, but specifically women’s suffrage. It’s not a straight-up lie to say the colours are symbols of universal suffrage but it’s highly misleading and incomplete and deceptive. The flag stands for women’s suffrage. Dugdale of course knows this but she pretends not to.

All too typical, isn’t it – take something that’s for women and force it to become more “universal” and thus take it away from women. All Lives Matter.

While I have written previously about what this proposed legislation does and does not do, I have resisted the temptation to enter the debate online or in the media, safe in the knowledge that the bill had a parliamentary majority. It would pass, and so too in time would the fractious debate. But with hours to go, I feel that there is a need to call out the populist tactics at play and to defend the process and indeed the people this bill is really about — the trans community — and their human right to live their lives with dignity and respect.

Anything about women’s right to live their lives with dignity and respect? Nah.

Opponents of this bill fall into two categories: those who want to diminish the universal human rights of trans people because of the actions of predatory men pretending to be something they are not, and those who simply do not believe changing sex is something that is possible.

Wait a second!

Nobody wants to or is trying to “diminish the universal human rights of trans people.” It is not a universal human right to force people to say you are the sex you are not. It never has been. Search the UDHR until there are spots before your eyes, you won’t find it. It’s not a universal human right for men to be able to force women to say the men are women. That doesn’t even resemble a human right.

This bill is one of the most consulted upon in Scottish parliamentary history. Those opposed to it do not want delays to improve it, they want to use them to dilute and defeat it. Each attempt to postpone or weaken the legislation perpetuates the unfounded stereotype of trans women as violent or predatory.

Another lie. That’s at least the third lie in this shambolic editorial. Nobody claims all trans women are violent or predatory; feminists point out that all trans women are men. We point out that just as with other men, we can’t know which ones are violent and predatory in advance, so we need some privacy away from men when we’re vulnerable.

Please, tell us more about “rotten irony.”

More from Jon:

You can see where they’re going with this. We’re familiar with the “argument” – it’s the one that goes “Why don’t you ban very tall [or strong or muscular etc etc etc] women from women’s sports?!”

Just a bit.

The thing about this is, it’s about women’s sport, of course, but it’s also about the bizarre shocking surprising enraging utter indifference to women and our rights that it reveals.

“the athletes that would be most directly” affected by making a subset of men eligible for women’s sports, “namely trans athletes and/or athletes with sex variations.” Not, you see, women. Women aren’t as directly affected by allowing men to be “included” in their sports. Why aren’t they? Because they don’t matter. They’re not really people. They’re sort of quasi-people, fractions of people, lesser people. Inferior, to put it bluntly.

It is quite breathtaking.

The ACLU is a misogynist organization.

Women and girls have a right to equal and fair play. Boys who compete against girls by claiming to be girls do not have a right to destroy the right to equal and fair play of women and girls.

Here I was thinking Forbes was a conservative sedate business magazine but I find it’s running a classic dopy childish “Rowling is the devil” piece:

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has become the most prominent face and voice in the world of anti-trans rhetoric, where she spends all day on Twitter sparring with critics and activists.

No she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. She’s a very busy human. She writes books, lots of them; she writes fast but not that fast – she can’t possibly spend all day on Twitter and also write a long novel every few months. Plus she does other things, like philanthropy. You’d expect that kind of sloppy casual lying in a tweet, but in a Forbes article? They let angry teenagers write their stuff?

Now, she’s gone after a prominent trans gamer for her thoughts on whether or not supporting an upcoming Harry Potter project like Hogwarts Legacy, the sprawling video game, is harmful because of this author’s views.

Has to be an angry teenager – the writing is so bad. Whose thoughts? (A man’s, actually, the man who got a day’s fame because Rowling mentioned him.) Which author?

Then the hapless teenager lets slip that he missed Rowling’s sarcasm.

Earl’s argument was actually that no you don’t need to burn the books or movies you already own, that may have comforted you long before Rowling’s recent turn, but now, buying something new like Hogwarts Legacy is knowingly supporting her directly

Yes she knows, that was her point; she’s making fun of Jessie Gender’s hand-wringing advice that it’s ok to keep the contaminating JKR books on your shelves under a few stringent conditions. It’s called sarcasm. Too sophisticated for Forbes?

JKR had a little fun with an Twitter ActiVist yesterday.

He won’t begrudge anyone. Isn’t that sweet? So compassionate, so caring, so broad-minded.

Of course he’s milking it for all he’s worth.

She didn’t retweet him with a “nonsensical argument,” she retweeted him with mockery.

He even did a video about it! Dude knows how to milk.

Community, solidarity, and caring, but not for women.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Far from being deprived of a chance.

As far as I know, when black athletes were allowed in the mainstream sports teams & leagues, the argument was about fairness and wasn’t followed up with “it won’t be that many and they won’t be that good.” When gay marriage passed into law nobody was reassuring people to “relax, there won’t be a lot of same-sex marriages.” That’s because if it’s fair, it shouldn’t make a difference whether there are a lot of them or whether they win all the prizes or not.

And since they’re now arguing that it’s “fair” to let trans-identified males into women’s sports, I give absolutely no weight to the argument “it’s fair because there aren’t that many and they’re not that good.” BS. If every women’s sport team were 90% male and 90% of the records were held by the trans-identified, there’d be no “oops, we were wrong, let’s fix this.” If a TRA isn’t prepared to celebrate that and raise their chin with a so-what attitude, then they’re showing they don’t believe TWAW and didn’t believe it before, either. The depths of their not caring about “Cis” females cannot be overestimated.

Hmmmm. Who has a cringeworthy desperation to be edgy? Who wants to be considered dangerous, rebellious and exciting? As opposed to self-involved, dim, and pseudo-radical?

I really don’t think it’s feminist women who refuse to agree that men are women if they say they are.

Originally a comment by Harald Hanche-Olsen on No tell us what you really think.

This is a bit of an aside from the main story, but since monarchy was discussed, I dare say that Norway has the best functioning constitutional monarchy in the world. The royal family demands tremendous respect, and much of it is well deserved.

When the union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved in 1905 and king Oscar of Sweden could no longer be king of Norway, prince Carl of Denmark (full name Christian Frederik Carl Georg Valdemar Axel, how is that for a mouthful?) was offered the throne. Many Norwegians were in favour of a republic instead, so prince Carl demanded a referendum to decide between the alternatives, republic or constitutional monarchy. The monarchy side won by a good margin, and he accepted the throne, taking the name Haakon.

In 1928, the Labour Party won the election for parliament. Conservatives were alarmed at this, as the Labour Party was more of a revolutionary party in those days. But Haakon, determined to stay within his constitutional role, asked a representative of the Labour Party to form a government. “I am also the communists’ king” he said – a statement well remembered.

Then, when Nazi Germany attacked in April 1940, the occupiers demanded that the King appoint one Vidkun Quisling – yes, that Quisling – as prime minister. At that point, Parliament had dissolved itself, giving over all its powers to the King and government for the duration of the war. The government was undecided, but King Haakon refused to yield, saying he would rather abdicate. So in the end, he escaped to England with the government and stayed there for the rest of the war.

These two events go a long way to explain the popularity of the royal family to this day. One more story, from more recent days:

After the July 22 terror, a nearby hotel was converted to a center for taking care of the survivors and their families. At one point, two girls walked through the lobby, both crying. There they walked into the arms of an elderly man, and after sobbing into his chest for a while, one of them looked up and discovered they were being hugged by the king.

I am still tearing up just writing this, and that helps explain why, though I am a republican in theory, I am sort of a monarchist in practice. I think many Norwegians share the sentiment. So long as the royal family keeps living up to the high standards they have set for themselves, I am willing to put my republican impulses on the back burner.

The public shaming of women is nothing new, just as lynching is nothing new, torture is nothing new, misogyny is nothing new, brutality and sadism are nothing new. We know that already. We don’t need the Jeremy Clarksons of the world to remind us, let alone instruct us.

French women after the liberation for example:

The victims were among the most vulnerable members of the community: Women. Accused of “horizontal collaboration” — sleeping with the enemy — they were targeted by vigilantes and publicly humiliated. Their heads were shaved, they were stripped half-naked, smeared with tar, paraded through towns and taunted, stoned, kicked, beaten, spat upon and sometimes even killed.

Women in Aceh under sharia:

No doubt he’s relishing the attention.

A Jeremy Clarkson column in the Sun about the Duchess of Sussex has provoked outcry online, with social media users labelling it “vile”, “horrific” and “abusive”.

…

The comments have drawn widespread condemnation. The comedian John Bishop tweeted that the remarks were a “blatant appeal to incite humiliation and violence on a woman” and the actor Kathy Burke called Clarkson a “colossal cunt”.

How stupid is that? Horrible man says horrible things about a woman, a different woman angrily calls him a woman’s genitalia. A cunt never raped anyone; dicks on the other hand…

The 5 Live presenter Rachel Burden tweeted: “So … there’s Jeremy Clarkson writing what he did. And then the editor deciding to publish it.”

That. The Sun didn’t spike it.

I wonder if Spiked will defend it.

Scottish Human Rights Blog at Amnesty International UK assured us a couple of weeks ago that men taking everything that belongs to women is fine fine fine not a problem at all.

Women’s and human rights organisations in Scotland, including Amnesty, have written to the UN Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women and Girls restating their support for Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

The organisations – many of whom provide services for women and girls – wrote to Ms Alsalem detailing why they do not share concerns she expressed about the Bill. 

To refresh our memories on those concerns she shared last month:

The Scottish government’s proposals to reform gender recognition laws could allow violent males to “abuse” the system, a UN expert claims.

The organisation’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls said the legislation could increase potential safety risks.

But Amnesty and an unspecified number of other “women’s and human rights organisations” are confident enough to reply that no it could not increase potential safety risks. That’s a lot of confidence, to deny even the possibility.

In the letter they state:

“We see the paths to equality and the realisation of human rights for women and trans people as being deeply interconnected and dependant on shared efforts to dismantle systems of discrimination.”

Why? Why do they see them that way? That’s a stupid way to see them. Women and “trans people” have very different needs and demands. Bundling them is a crude and dumb mistake.

But oh well, Amnesty Scotland is down with the kids.

Oh the joys of privatization.

Dozens of people have been evacuated from their flooded homes and thousands have been left without water after two water mains burst in north London.

And not just any North London.

About 60 firefighters were called to Belsize Road in Camden at about 02:50 GMT when homes were deluged with about 50cm (1.6ft) of water.

Belsize Road in Camden=Belsize Road in Hampstead, one of the very poshest and most desirable areas of London.

London Fire Brigade (LFB) said 24 people were led to safety and a hub was set up at Swiss Cottage Library.

Thames Water apologised after multiple postcodes were left without water.

The bitter joke is Thames Water is private, aka a profit-making corporation. It was part of Thatcher’s wave of privatization that also ruined London Transport. I’m seeing many bitter tweets about the huge profits Thames Water made last year at the expense of little things like checking the god damn water mains.

Originally a comment by Holms at Miscellany Room.

Connecticut rule allowing transgender athletes in girls’ school sports upheld

The usual lie is packaged in the article heading – the issue is male athletes in girls’ sports. Par for the course.

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged a Connecticut policy allowing transgender students to compete in girls’ high school sports.

The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims by four cisgender female students that the policy deprived them of wins and athletic opportunities by requiring them to compete with two transgender sprinters.

They had sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), which oversees scholastic sports in Connecticut, saying its policy violated Title IX, a law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics.

I’ll take correction from a lawyer, but the argument that a right has been breached seems strange to me. As we’ve said in response to Veronica Ivy’s claim ‘access to sports is a right’, no, at least not as an individually stated thing. This seems to me more like a breach of promise undertaken by the athletics association of that (and other) states, as they fail to provide a fair competition despite claiming so.

I suspect this different framing makes the burden on the moving party lighter, as breach of rights often requires stringent judicial tests.

I also take issue with the reasoning supplied in the verdict:

But U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, writing for a three-judge panel, said that far from being deprived of a “chance to be champions,” the four plaintiffs all regularly competed in state track championships and on numerous occasions came in first.

This is an argument with diminishing returns. It is only true so long as there are other competitions in which female participants can find a fair field, meaning the argument cannot be applied to every competition available – once the last competition succumbs, the premise of the argument – that there are other avenues available to women – is no longer true. And if an argument cannot be applied generally, then it seems it is not generally valid but relies on externalities to mitigate the impact its own successes.

Why do women keep banging on about misogyny, eh? I just can’t figure it out.

I don’t have a settled opinion about Meghan Markle. There are too many conflicting accounts, and I’m not interested enough to delve into them all. But I very definitely do have a settled opinion about men writing in widely-read newspapers about wanting to see a particular woman dragged naked through the streets while people throw shit at her. Yes I do indeed. In fact his writing this has helped me out a good deal with the conflicting accounts: if people think stuff like this about her, and the Sun is happy to publish it, then maybe she and Harry haven’t been exaggerating all that much.

This is related to that thing I was saying the other day about gut-level fear around angry men. If this is how they talk about us in public…yeah that’s scary shit.

“Activism” in Brussels:

A mysterious “Ursula collective” violently tried to prevent the holding of a conference by Céline Masson and Caroline Eliacheff on the excesses of the trans movement, at the Café Laïque in Brussels.

It’s a machine translation so excuse the stiltedness. Café Laïque=Secular Café.

The subject was appropriate: while two French speakers were invited Thursday evening to the Café Laïque in Brussels to discuss the ” excesses of the transgender movement “, around twenty young activists came to walk the talk and concretely illustrate the intolerance that is sometimes blamed on their cause.

And in came some men to throw shit at women. How illustrative.

The associative café received child psychiatrist Caroline Eliacheff and Professor Céline Masson about their latest essay, La Fabrique de l’enfant transgenre (Observatory editions) which warns about the psychological conditioning of minors confronted with the obsession of certain caregivers around “gender dysphoria”. A commitment that earned them to be regularly taken to task by activists of the transgender movement, for whom the two French intellectuals are “transphobic“. 

The organizers were told to cancel the event or face consequences.

After half an hour of conference, and taking advantage of the fact that the door of the establishment, locked as a precaution, was reopened by a person out to telephone in the street, they signaled to about twenty individuals hooded men who violently engulfed themselves in the cafe. The small group of activists then threw terracotta pots containing litter and excrement at the public, which numbered around twenty-five people, while shouting slogans hostile to the association “The Little Mermaid”, founded by Céline Masson and Caroline Eliacheff.

Men throwing shit at women. Plus ça change eh?

“After the throwing of fecal matter, they overturned the chairs, jostled everyone and tried to approach the back of the room, before people intervened to prevent them from attacking the speakers”, Florence Bergeaud-Blackler tells Le Figaro, who says she is “shocked” by this unprecedented attack against her associative establishment.

They’re always the ones engaging in violence – jostling, shoving, throwing, grabbing, punching, kicking, smashing, ripping, stomping. Wouldn’t you think eventually they would notice the pattern and wonder if they’re really the good guys here?

Oh. my. god. It’s an actual video. He did an actual video to peddle it.

The CRINGE.

The Beeb tells us:

A top UN official has backed the Scottish government’s plan to reform gender recognition laws. Ministers want to make it easier for trans people to change their gender.

The UN high commissioner for human rights said the Scottish bill is a “significant step forward”.

For women it’s a disastrous leap backward. UN high commissioner for human rights doesn’t care. Women don’t matter.

Last month, a UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, warned the Scottish bill could endanger women.

Because of course it could, but way too many people are determined to pretend otherwise.

Reem Alsalem said it “would potentially open the door for violent males who identify as men to abuse the process of acquiring a gender certificate and the rights that are associated with it”.

This was disputed by a separate independent UN expert on gender identity, who said the legislation would bring Scotland in line with international human right standards.

But saying the legislation would bring Scotland in line with international human right standards has nothing to do with whether or not easy gender certificates will open the door for violent males. Those are two separate claims.

SNP MP and lawyer Joanna Cherry challenged claims the legislation would bring Scotland into line with international human rights standards.

Ms Cherry, who has been critical of the Scottish government’s plans, argued self-identification was not required to comply with international human rights standards.

Responding to Mr Madrigal-Borloz, she tweeted: “This ‘legal opinion’ contains no analysis of the potential conflict between the proposed system of self-identification and the Equality Act and, in particular, of how self-ID could undermine the sex based rights of women & same sex attracted people.”

All it contains is blithe indifference to the needs and rights of female people.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said that some people have “genuinely held concerns” about the plans but argued that others have latched onto the issue to spread transphobia.

Does she have a divining rod to tell which is which?