Florida judge got creative:

Former Hillsborough county circuit judge Jared Smith denied a 17-year-old girl access to an abortion in January, citing her low school grades as justification for his ruling that she lacked the maturity to make the decision for herself.

So she’s not mature enough to decide to have an abortion but she is mature enough to push out a baby??? And then raise it?

It’s a massive catch-22, isn’t it. You’re too young and clueless to decide not to have a baby, so you have to have a baby you don’t want to have, which will obviously go very well for the baby and the mother and anyone who may be around to pick up the pieces.

There is adoption of course but surely judges aren’t ruling on abortion cases while assuming the unwilling girls and women condemned to have babies they don’t want will all have the babies adopted? Surely?

They probably are, which reduces the female people they condemn to unwanted childbirth to machines for the production of infants for other people.

Non-binary government boffin Sam Brinton got lucky with that second stolen bag:

The nonbinary Biden administration official facing up to five years in prison for allegedly stealing luggage in Minnesota now faces up to 10 years in prison for stealing another bag in Nevada, according to a police report obtained by Fox News Digital.

Samuel Brinton — who has served as the Energy Department’s (DOE) deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition since June — allegedly stole a suitcase with a total estimate worth of $3,670 on July 6 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, according to a declaration filed by a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) detective on Wednesday. The bag contained jewelry valued at $1,700, clothing worth $850 and makeup valued at $500.

(Makeup worth $500???? What do people do, put diamond dust on their faces?)

Living the nonbinary dream:

Thanks to latsot we can have hours of fun picking apart Stanford’s ElimiNation of HarmFul LangUage InItIaTive, which is “a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford.” I guess all the other bits of Stanford will go right on having harmful language.

It’s not that I don’t think there is such a thing as harmful language (although I wouldn’t use the word “harmful” to characterize it). It’s that…oh well, you’ll see.

At the end of the intro to the thingy on harmful language there’s a WARNING all in bold that the language ahead is…harmful. Or offensive. It fails to warn that some of it could be both. Proceed at your own pace, it says. Race ya!

So. Clearly it’s alphabetical. It starts with Ableist. I know, I know, I’m not supposed to call stupid ideologies “stupid.” But the EHLI has a whole long list of words; we could spend days just on that. Everything Not Permitted Is Forbidden. Make a note of it.

It’s in three columns: instead of; consider using; context.

Item one: instead of “addict” consider using “person with a substance use disorder”. Context (by which they apparently mean “why,” or “why the fuck”): “Using person-first language helps to not define people by just one of their characteristics.”

Why that’s not at all bureaucratic or obscurantist.

I get what they’re trying for, I think. Calling people drunks or junkies or addicts is dismissive. On the other hand, “addicts” is a good deal more neutral and clinical than junkies or drunks, and a blathery circumlocution might not be an ideal substitute. It’s also way more blunt, and sometimes bluntness is exactly what an addict needs. Addiction goes hand in hand with denial, so periphrasis is not always helpful.

Then we can’t use “addicted” figuratively because that trivializes blah blah blah.

But fortunately with the next one they lighten the mood.

Instead of “basket case” consider using “nervous” because “Originally referred to one who has lost all four limbs and therefore needed to be carried around in a basket.”

How is that a reason to use “nervous” instead?!?!

This is going to be hours and hours and hours of fun.

The BBC starts with a man who says he is a woman.

The diamond grass of Cathkin Park is glinting in the winter sun as Ellie Gomersall reflects on something intensely personal – her identity. It is a bitterly beautiful December day on the south side of Glasgow and Ms Gomersall, 23, is telling us about “coming out” as a woman.

You can’t “come out” as a woman. Coming out is a lesbian/gay thing, and that in turn is because being lesbian or gay has not always been socially acceptable, to put it mildly. It’s also, I suppose, because the majority is straight, so the working assumption about people is generally that they’re straight, so “coming out” is making it clear to that majority that the person doing the out-coming is in the not-straight minority. Other categories of people don’t have to come out because their category is obvious, written on their bodies.

But of course the priests of trans ideology like to call it coming out because that assumes it’s real. “Here is the hidden truth about me, that you didn’t know because I give every appearance of being a man. I’m not a man, I’m a magic special unicorny WOMAN. There, now I’ve come out.”

Ms Gomersall is currently president of the National Union of Students Scotland, although she is speaking to BBC News in a personal capacity.

But the fact that he is currently president of the National Union of Students Scotland is probably why the BBC chose him to talk to. What they talk to him about is how hard it is to get a gender recognition certificate.

The Scottish government – led by the Scottish National Party but also including ministers from the Scottish Green Party, of which Ms Gomersall is a member – wants to remove some of those hurdles, making the process quicker and easier.

The process, that is, of making it official and a matter of law that this man is a woman.

Ms Gomersall is a strong supporter of the legislation, which she says would make her life easier and more dignified.

But it would make the lives of countess women harder and less dignified, but Gomersall cares about Gomersall, not all those stupid pesky women.

She argues that gender identity should not be a matter for the state.

“I think ultimately the only person who can really describe my own identity, my own gender is me,” she insists.

That’s the ideology, but it’s bullshit. One, it’s a Cheats’ Charter; two, it’s not true – people are not always right about themselves.

It’s unfortunate that this fad is so narcissism-friendly. All it has, literally, is this bone-headed clueless idea that people are infallible about their own “identities” and self-awareness. We’re not! We can’t be, because we can’t see ourselves except through our own eyes. That’s a bias. We favor ourselves because we are ourselves. We can’t help it, although we can try to correct for it, mitigate it and so on. Pro-self bias is absolutely built in, so the fatuous claim that “ultimately the only person who can really describe my own identity, my own gender is me” is the opposite of the truth. Ultimately you are the last person who can be trusted to give an honest account of yourself; we all are.

Word it carefully now. Very very carefully. Take instructions from the BBC:

MSPs are debating final changes to controversial gender recognition reforms. The Scottish government legislation is aimed at simplifying and speeding up the process for trans people to change their legally recognised gender.

See how it’s done? The Beeb just assumes, with “the legislation is aimed at simplifying and speeding up the process,” that the “process” of declaring yourself the other sex should be simplified and sped up. Why? When declaring yourself the other sex is nonsensical, and when we’ve had years to expose all the ways this sort of declaring impinges on the rights of other people, especially women – why breezily assume that it needs simplifying and speeding up?

Because that’s the Approved View now, and the Beeb trots along with it like the dearest pony you ever saw. It also of course assumes that there is such a thing as “changing one’s legally recognized gender” [with gender meaning sex as well as gender-the-social category]. There isn’t, but it’s the done thing now to say there is, and rearrange one’s vocabulary to reflect that silly belief.

Supporters say the reforms will make the process less intrusive, bureaucratic and medicalised.

But what if the process is a bad thing in the first place? Why should we want it less intrusive, bureaucratic and medicalised? Let’s turn around and go the other way: make it impossible. Live and dress and lisp however you want, but don’t try to make the state put an official stamp on it.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The symbols of what did you say?

From where I sit, it is the women who support this legislation who find themselves voiceless:…

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You must be sitting somewhere with your head up your ass because I can see FROM A WHOLE FUCKING OCEAN AWAY that women who have tried to question or slow down this fait accomplit have been demonized, vilified, threatened and, yes, silenced.

safe in the knowledge that the bill had a parliamentary majority. It would pass, and so too in time would the fractious debate.

What fractious debate? Your side was all “NO DEBATE!” You couldn’t afford full and open discussion. Trans activism never can. If you think the “fractious debate” is going to end with the passage of this bill, I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment. Disagreement and resistance will only intensify as its enforcement takes a greater toll on more women and girls. I get the feeling that you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

…I feel that there is a need to call out the populist tactics…

Way to simultaneously poison the well and step around the fact that, if described in plain, honest language, most people would likely oppose this bill.

…because of the actions of predatory men pretending to be something they are not…

Well the supposedly “non-predatory men”, TiMs, are also pretending to be something they’re not. They’re all lying about who they are, so how can any of them be trusted with their intentions? Short answer, they can’t. Refusal to swallow the fundamental untruth of “gender identity” makes it impossible to go along with any of this. You’re not going to change many minds, so you’ll be forced to steamroll over any resistance. And resistance there will be. You’ll be seeing more channeling of Sufragette Power than you’ve ever seen before. See point above about the end of “fracious debate.”

This bill is one of the most consulted upon in Scottish parliamentary history.

The amount of consultation says nothing about its quality or breadth. For a movement banging on continuously about “inclusion,” It’s funny how many women’s voices were excluded.

Those opposed to it do not want delays to improve it, they want to use them to dilute and defeat it.

Only if the dilution were to a homeopathic level of non-existence. Defeat is the only rational choice for a bill that cotravenes reality. You cannot legislate the impossible; the attempt itself is dangerously corrosive to the legitimacy, authority, and respect of any institution that dares try.

Jeremy Clarkson broke a record:

Jeremy Clarkson’s Sun newspaper column, in which he said he “hated” the Duchess of Sussex, has become the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s most complained about article, the regulator has said.

Ipso said the piece, which was removed from the Sun’s website on Monday at Clarkson’s request, had received more than 17,500 complaints as of 9am on Tuesday.

…

The number surpassed the total number of complaints the media regulator received in 2021, 14,355.

A whole year’s worth of complaints. That’s impressive.

More than 60 cross-party MPs have written to the Sun’s editor, Victoria Newton, to demand an apology and “action taken” against Clarkson for the column where he said Meghan should be paraded through the streets naked.

People are so politically correct these days. If an angry bullying man can’t take to the newspapers to say a woman should be dragged through the streets naked and pelted with shit, what are we coming to?

In their letter, they said Meghan had received credible threats to her life and that columns such as Clarkson’s contributed to an “unacceptable climate of hatred and violence”.

The letter, coordinated by the Conservative chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes, was signed by Tory, Labour, Lib Dem, Green and SNP MPs, including the Conservative chair of the Treasury select committee, Harriett Baldwin, Labour’s Harriet Harman and Caroline Lucas of the Green party.

That’s good. It’s good that they all get it.

The Sun has since withdrawn the column at the request of Clarkson, but a statement from him promising to be more careful in future has been criticised for not including an apology.

Also what about the Sun? It published that disgusting outburst instead of spiking it and firing Clarkson.

In their letter, Nokes and the other MPs tell Newton they “condemn in the strongest possible terms the violent misogynist language … This sort of language has no place in our country and it is unacceptable it was allowed to be published in a mainstream newspaper.”

What I’m saying. Bad that Clarkson wrote it and bad that the Sun published it.

After widespread outcry over the weekend, Clarkson issued a statement on Monday, saying: “Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.”

Ohhhhhh fuck off. Cowardly weasel. He didn’t “rather put his foot in it old bean.” This isn’t fucking Jeeves and Wooster. Isn’t it interesting that he doesn’t actually admit what he did, just burbles about “a clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones.” He’s a sadistic bully and he’s a coward. Nice brew.

Nokes said it was “not an apology” and tweeting the letter said: “I welcome Jeremy Clarkson’s acknowledgment that he has caused hurt … but an editorial process allowed his column to be printed unchallenged.”

That. Let’s have the Sun’s apology, eh?

They’re fighting amongst themselves.

Sometimes I get the feeling we live in parallel worlds.

The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill sits on the edge of passing through the Scottish Parliament this week – and all it took was six years of undelivered manifesto commitments, two public consultations and one online apology for failing to deal with transphobia in the SNP from the First Minister herself. Not that it changed anything.

Oh no not public consultations! Obviously laws that contradict reality should be passed instantly with no public consultation at all.

Six VERY long years, where Britain’s chattering class lost its collective mind in service to a relentless campaign of anti-trans misinformation; a conspiratorial crusade that falsely claimed, among many other things, that child murderer Ian Huntley was actually transgender, and that Scotland’s LGBTQ+ community was trying to lower the age of consent.

Says a columnist for The National. If that’s not chattering class what is?

But more to the point, “a relentless campaign of anti-trans misinformation” is debatable at best. At worst it’s just a casual lie, which reflects how easy and automatic it’s become to call lucid feminist women rude names and accuse them of bad behavior.

For our queer and feminist communities, it has felt closer to an eternity.

And feminist?

Trans ideology is profoundly anti-feminist. This piece itself illustrates how, with its bullying and lies and taking it for granted that feminism is for everyone but women.

Having wasted no time in perpetually branding the legislation as “controversial” until it inevitably became so…

Read your own writing, pal.

The conclusion of the bill in the Scottish Parliament, whatever the outcome, will at the very least provide a degree of breathing space from the keyboard warriors and sock accounts that have made obsessive discussion of the lives of trans people an all-consuming hobby. Once they’ve tuckered themselves out anyway.

No. Wrong again. We really don’t care about the lives of trans people (more than anyone else’s life), we care about what trans ideology is doing to women and children and adolescents. The issue isn’t how anyone lives, the issue is law and policy and rights and telling the truth.

Throughout the process of bringing this bill through Parliament, the so-called gender-critical movement has been given near everything they wanted, with the exception of throwing the legislation out entirely.

…

Harmful opposition flourished in the space left by the Scottish Government’s inaction – and having pushed a vulnerable community onto the stage, the SNP made a quick exit and left us under the fire of a wealthy cohort of middle-class reactionaries who wanted to cosplay the rebel faction.

There it is. There’s that unabashed hatred of women. “Mummy said no!!”

It’s for that reason that any victory on Wednesday will be a bittersweet one indeed. The hurt caused by the cowardice of the Scottish Government won’t be made wholly right by the passing of this bill, nor will it bring back those lost to the violent rhetoric left to spread unchecked in the promise left behind.

Those lost? Who would that be? Name one.

Mike Pence tries to split the difference:

Former Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday that he hoped the Department of Justice would not bring charges against Donald J. Trump, calling the former president ’s conduct “reckless” but not criminal.

It’s not criminal to try to overturn an election in order to steal a second term? It’s not criminal to incite a mob to attack the legislature and then watch them do it on tv for hours before gently urging them to back off for now?

I kind of think Pence might be wrong about that.

Asked about facing potential criminal indictments that could stem from the House investigation into the Capitol riot, Donald J. Trump suggested he had little to fear because of a social media message he posted hours later urging the mob to stop the violence and return home.

His problem is that it’s well known via multiple witnesses what he was doing during those hours. He wasn’t doing his job, he wasn’t reading vital reports, he wasn’t packing his bags, he wasn’t even stealing more classified documents to take to Marlago – he was watching his fans smash up the Capitol on tv.

In a radio interview on Monday, Mr. Trump said that House investigators skimmed past his “fantastic” Twitter post, and also failed to consider why thousands had attended his speech just before the riot.

Ooh ooh I know this one – it’s because he told them to, and because they wanted to help him steal the election by doing an insurrection. I think the House investigators did consider that, quite intensely.

Aha. Levine is glad he transitioned late, because otherwise he wouldn’t have his children.

So……….

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.