Sonia Sodha continues:

These sweeping powers should concern all democrats. The police are supposed to treat citizens impartially, regardless of their belief. But they have a poor track record, and not just when it comes to republicans.

Take, for example, the egregious way the police have clamped down on the free speech of those who express the “gender critical” belief, protected in equalities law, that sex is binary, immutable and relevant in society. The police should be scrupulously neutral on this. Yet in recent years they have adopted the controversial position of campaigners who believe that gender identity can replace sex altogether – that being a woman is not a biological reality but instead about conforming to feminine stereotypes or a matter of inner identity, and that it is somehow “hateful” to deviate from this view.

That has led them to warn off citizens from making lawful political statements. Former policeman Harry Miller was visited by a police officer as a result of his tweets – mostly “opaque, profane or unsophisticated”, according to a judge, but well within his rights to post. There are plenty of other examples: one woman recorded herself being berated by a police community support officer for having a sticker “trans ideology erases women” in her window. A feminist activist was arrested and detained in custody for 12 hours by Gwent police on suspicion of displaying “threatening or abusive writing” after reports she had put up stickers including slogans such as “no men in women’s prisons” and “humans never change sex”. Police raided her home and, extraordinarily, confiscated a gender critical book, presumably as evidence of “wrongthink”. There are also cases of the police taking to social media to berate people for their gender critical perspectives, such as when Sussex police reprimanded someone on Twitter for saying that a convicted paedophile who identifies as a woman is biologically male, declaring: “Sussex Police do not tolerate any hateful comments towards their gender identity.”

Rape, on the other hand, they tolerate – rape of actual women that is.

The courts ruled in 2021 that both the specific police action against Miller and the College of Policing guidance used to justify it were unlawful.

This guidance tells police forces to record as non-crime hate incidents anything – including social media posts – reported to the police that is perceived by the person reporting to be motivated by hostility, including “unfriendliness”.

It’s not the business of the police to force us to be friendly.

The College of Policing guidance still hasn’t been properly revised. The Home Office released a statutory code of conduct on non-crime hate incidents earlier this year; it makes clear that the police cannot simply rely on the perception of the complainant before recording an incident and includes an example illustrating the police obligation to protect gender-critical free speech. The College of Policing reacted with its own new draft guidance that waters down the Home Office code and takes out the gender-critical example altogether, replacing it with one that includes the police removing undefined “anti-transgender” posters.

Women, meh; trans women, omigod protect them from everything including “unfriendliness” at all costs!!

You have two choices: cheer on the monarchy, or shut up. There is no third option. The anti-monarchy campaign group Republic found out.

Its chief executive and several other protesters were bundled into a police van yesterday after being arrested at a peaceful protest in Trafalgar Square. It followed a letter from the Home Office last week that informed them of new police powers to curb protest and harsher criminal penalties for protesters. “I would be grateful if you could forward this letter to members likely to be affected,” it ominously suggested.

These arrests by the Met took place in the context of new laws ushered in by increasingly authoritarian home secretaries. Priti Patel introduced new measures to give ministers wide powers to define the conditions under which the police can impede protest. Suella Braverman has gone further still: her freshly enacted Public Order Act says the police have the right to impose conditions if anyone is hindered “to more than a minor degree”, to stop and search anyone without suspicion, and imposes what the UN has called “disproportionate” criminal sanctions on peaceful protesters.

…“We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration,” the Met tweeted last week, seemingly unaware that “undermining” royal festivities is not (yet) unlawful.

Rape goes unprosecuted but “undermining” the expensive and pointless display of royal royalityism will be dealt with “robustly.”

These sweeping powers should concern all democrats. The police are supposed to treat citizens impartially, regardless of their belief. But they have a poor track record, and not just when it comes to republicans.

Take, for example, the egregious way the police have clamped down on the free speech of those who express the “gender critical” belief, protected in equalities law, that sex is binary, immutable and relevant in society. The police should be scrupulously neutral on this. Yet in recent years they have adopted the controversial position of campaigners who believe that gender identity can replace sex altogether – that being a woman is not a biological reality but instead about conforming to feminine stereotypes or a matter of inner identity, and that it is somehow “hateful” to deviate from this view.

The two are quite similar, really. Charles imagines he’s special, and men who claim to be trans imagine they are women. For some reason the police are punishing people for refusing to endorse these fantasies.

Shannon Fentiman is a Labor member in the Queensland Legislative Assembly and the current Queensland Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Women, and the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence. She wrote in a public Facebook post three hours ago above a doctored photo of her wearing the “woman adult human female” badge:

Someone did this to my office recently.

I know the sticker doesn’t look like it says much, and most people will be lucky enough to be unaffected by what it says.

But for some people in our community, these stickers represent much more – they represent a movement which discriminates against them and denies their existence.

I want to be very clear – I don’t stand for these sort of views, our community doesn’t stand for these views, and Queenslanders don’t stand for these views.

I’m proud to be working with trans and gender diverse Queenslanders to ensure their lived identity matches their legal identity by reforming our birth certificate laws.

I’m proud that we’re modernising anti-discrimination laws to further protect our LGBTQIA+ community.

I’m proud to be Queensland’s Minister for Women, fighting for the rights of all Queensland women.

The work we’re doing will keep going, regardless of any stickers on my office or hateful comments on my social media.

She’s Queensland’s Minister for Women but she doesn’t know what women are. She’s Queensland’s Minister for Women but she insists that men can be women too, just by saying so. She’s Queensland’s Minister for Women but she goes out of her way to tell us that “adult human female” is not the definition of woman, and that feminist women who remind her it is are hateful and evil.

Yeah let’s get rid of vaccines, and antibiotics, and anesthetics, and medications, and clean water, and sewage processing, and clothes, and food, and oxygen. They’re all a conspiracy.

Steve Kirsch is a tech entrepreneur who made hundreds of millions of dollars after founding an early search engine and helping invent the optical computer mouse.

Recently, he stood before a gathering of more than 250 lawyers in Atlanta while wearing a custom black T-shirt designed like a dictionary entry for the phrase “misinformation superspreader.”

It’s like this, man. He’s a truth-teller, man, but the suits won’t listen, man, they’re too hooked on their mainstream narrative to listen, man.

“Our definition is it’s someone who’s basically pointing out the truth and it just happens to disagree with the mainstream narrative we’re known as misinformation spreaders, because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to control the narrative,” Kirsch told NPR.

By “they,” Kirsch means a network of pharmaceutical companies, governments, doctors and journalists that he argues are covering up a pandemic-driven plot to poison the world for profit.

That would be the Sacklers and opioids. It would not be vaccinations.

In recent years, Kirsch has become an increasingly vocal and generous funder of the anti-vaccine movement. He helped organize and fund the conference to map out strategies for anti-vaccine and COVID-19-focused litigation as the pandemic winds down.

As with the trans ideology, this mystifies me. Why do people do this? Are they nostalgic for polio and whooping cough and tuberculosis?

Jeffrey Morris has tried to engage with Kirsch for years. In his spare time, the professor of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania has gone line by line through some of Kirsch’s claims, providing answers, context and explanations. They once had a long conversation over Zoom.

“And it was an interesting discussion, you know, because he admitted that he was not a scientist and didn’t think like one. And so I was trying to connect with him and help him understand the leaps he was making in his arguments to get him to think more carefully. Because I could tell he was someone with a lot of energy and passion on the issue,” said Morris, who has watched Kirsch pull millions of views on some of his COVID vaccine content.

Which is a bad thing if he’s not willing to do the work. He’s not a scientist and he doesn’t think like one so he should stay out of it, because medicine is an applied science, not a branch of story-telling.

As government cover ups became a regular talking point for Kirsch, the researchers abandoned his early treatment project. Two years and $2 million later, he’s hoping to organize a sustained legal insurgency against public health agencies, drug manufacturers, hospitals and schools.

He’s hoping to cause a lot of extra disease and death.

How do people like him live with themselves?

The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch is popular today.

Is Amnesty UK out of step with Amnesty Ireland?

Ok I won’t let anyone tell me different. You should have a word with Amnesty Ireland.

Women aren’t listening.

Emboldened since the women-led protests that broke out last fall, which turned into nationwide demonstrations against the Islamic Republic, growing numbers of Iranian women have started going around without head scarves and wearing Western-style clothes.

The government told a cafe owner named Mohammad to force his women customers to wear hijab, but he just put a sign on the wall saying wearhijab and left it at that.

In Iran, Mohammad said, forcing women to wear the hijab is a lost cause.

“In all honesty, we didn’t get upset when they shut down our cafe,” said Mohammad, who asked to be identified only by his first name to avoid further legal repercussions. “In fact, we felt good about it, because this is really good P.R. for us and our business.”

Good PR plus a little vacation! Win win!

His nonchalance suggested the depth and speed of change in Iran, where the theocratic government considers the dress code a matter of existential importance.

How pathetic is that? A government that considers forcing women to wear bags over their heads a matter of existential importance – it’s laughable in one way, but completely understandable in another. Women are these terrifying stealth weapons who can trick a man into wasting his resources on some other man’s child, so they must be controlled and bullied and above all concealed.

When officers came to shut down Mohammad’s cafe, he said, he pointed at a table where two women were sitting, one unveiled and the other wearing the conservative, full-length and all-black veil known as the chador.

“I told him, ‘Eventually you have to accept this. I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure what you’re doing has almost no effect,’” Mohammad said.

It’s a matter of principle.

Kate heaps opprobrium on the coronation, and very good opprobrium it is, too.

…at the very top of those organizations, there are these special people who are appointed at special ceremonies, with all sorts of weird robes and weird things, not entirely dissimilar to what happens at a coronation – and we call them bishops. And we sit twenty four of them in the House of Lords, and they have genuine power over the legislation that affects all of us in our everyday lives.

The PostMillenial tells us:

A 2021 study of military youth has revealed that not only were minors with severe mental illness allowed to embark upon experimental medical sex changes, but also that prescriptions for anti-psychotic drugs actually increased after hormonal interventions were initiated, reports Fox News.

The study, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, examined the Department of Defense (DoD) medical records of 3,754 trans-identified adolescents and 6,603 siblings who did not identify as transgender. The findings reveal no improvement in mental health after commencing hormone interventions and an increase in prescriptions for psychotropic medication.

Ok but at least they’ve ruined their bodies, so…

Many proponents of adolescent sex changes argue that the high rates of coexisting mental health issues observed in youth who identify as transgender are the result of the pain of being trapped in the wrong body. The solution, they believe, is to alter the body, then all preexisting mental health issues will disappear.

An alternative theory is that when distressed youth with serious mental health issues come across the concept of gender online or at school, they latch onto the idea that they could be transgender and see a medical sex change as the answer to all their woes.

Plus the idea that being transgender will get them an avalanche of attention and flattery and claims of love and compassion. One minute you’re a lonely nerd, the next you’re the center of attention.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on On top of the roller coaster.

I just bought the idea that trans people were “born that way” as in intersex, but that there were men with AGP who used that in order to play out their fantasies with everyone playing along. Then Josh sent a link to me that explained it clearly and I went “OH! those bastards!”

I had so many friends (now distant acquaintances, or not friends at all) who were very nitpicky and skeptical about everything they dd and thought who would make sure they would check all angles before accepting the truth of anything who were very supportive of trans issues. And I had some internal conflict when they attacked you, Ophelia, not because I doubted your skepticism, but because I had to face the fact that these friends of mine were not being honest about their skepticism. And when there is conflict between people I respect over an issue that can be resolved with critical thinking, but those on one side of the issue start yelling “BIGOT BIGOT HATE BIGOT SHUT UP!” instead of defending their case, then it’s very hard to accept that they are applying critical thought.

One of the difficult issues with peaking is that most of us have a natural empathy towards the kids we remember being bullied for not meeting the standards of their sex in either masculinity or femininity. It’s a very confusing topic, and our instincts to defend those kids is directed towards whatever the doctors say will fix them. So, that’s why I think may liberals have been taken in by it.

While I would be stopped dead in my tracks by someone telling me that puberty blockers are safe, and want to research it before I would accept it, there are so many institutions spreading this lie that we are conditioned to accept it. There was a science writer who commented in one of Shermer’s threads yesterday that he would trust the hundreds of doctors who were prescribing over a single famous skeptic’s word. This was a science writer, Their job depends on reviewing the science articles. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that as awful as puberty is, it is necessary for development, but hey, “if some doctors think they’re good then I accept the argument from authority.”

Supporters do that because they believe the suicide lie and don’t want “Blood on their hands.” Because they remember the kids with the bloody noses who were called names, and surrounded by bullies with no one to help them. Or, perhaps they were the kids with the bloody noses who thought about killing themselves because they weren’t normal. Perhaps they were the bullies and this is how they deal with their guilt. I think it fits along all of these lines, and then they shut their minds off and accept that anyone who doesn’t buy into the magical transformation of transgender is mean and bigoted towards those kids.

It was a nurse who was an escort volunteer with me at Planned Parenthood who first explained how great it is that there are drugs that can pause puberty for gender confused kids. I was floored, but before asking her how that could possibly be a good idea I wanted to check into what they were doing to kids. I had already peaked, but this seemed completely over the top. How can anyone be mature enough to make a distinction about gender if their development at the crucial stage of adolescence was arrested? I didn’t think that Piaget was that far off or that there was new science that had disproved his theories on the stages of development.

Anyway, I would think that skeptics would take a step back and look at all of this and say “I think there is something a bit off about this. I should look into it.” It’s very weird that they can turn on friends on a dime as soon as we express doubt. I don’t like to name names, but man, there are some people who really surprised me by assuming that I’m a hateful bastard after knowing me for years. It’s like all these people walked through a brainwave interrupter on this subject. I lost some “friends” over the fact that I didn’t hate Monsanto enough to declare all GMO’s poison, but that’s quite a different thing. This is astonishing.

Oh, and I think it’s hilarious when a transgenderist tells me I’m confusing sex and gender but doesn’t expand on it.

Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on Top of the roller coaster.

there are, of course, zero trans people who think, “people are or can be the other sex”

I have in fact seen trans-identified people claiming just that. But it’s a motte-and-bailey: argue trans activists and their allies into a corner and then OF COURSE, nobody is claiming that trans people really are the other sex! They know very well they’re not!–

–and then we’re lectured endlessly about intersex conditions, which supposedly support the TRA claim that Sex Is Not Binary. We’re told that sex is assigned at birth–yes, sometimes the word used is “gender”, but there’s also “assigned male at birth” and “assigned female at birth.” (AMAB and AFAB.) Sophie LaBelle’s comic about a little trans girl who talks like a twenty year old college activist is titled “Assigned Male.”

I have a screenshot of the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, tweeting that

“Biological sex” is not a fixed scientific concept but an ideological one….We are assigned sex at birth….Our bodies are bodies, not male bodies or female bodies

And in the Washington Post, just a few days ago, Jennifer Finney Boylan assured us that:

All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.

But nobody is saying “people are or can be the other sex.” Nobody. Zero. Nope. Nada.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on They are pretending they have the right to be certain.

I’d like to offer at least a partial concession to Silent Bob’s argument about gender being “assigned at birth.”

If we take gender to broadly mean the sets of customs and behaviours that are expected of us based on how we’re perceived sexually, then in most other cultures, people really are assigned a gender at birth — they’re assigned a very specific cultural role in their community. Elsewhere in the world, your observed sex at birth will determine which gender role you are assigned, and this will determine which clothing and jewellery you can and cannot wear, which hairstyles you can and cannot adopt, what kinds of work you can and cannot do, which sexual partners you can and cannot have, and what rights you do and do not have.

The thing is, the more a culture loosens the rules about what men and women can and can’t do, the less the idea of “gender roles” makes sense. If it’s no longer illegal or taboo for a man to wear a dress and grow his hair long and have sex with men, there’s no need for such men to deny that they’re men.

In Samoa, for example, which maintains extremely strict and segregated masculine and feminine gender roles, it’s a man’s job to cut open a coconut. I saw a video of a butch lesbian in Samoa, defiantly cutting open coconuts, to show that she has a mascuine gender. She recognizes that she’s female, but because she’s butch (and gay) in a culture where these attributes break the rules that apply to women, she perceives herself as inhabiting a masculine gender — fa’afatana, in the way of a man, akin to a “trans man”, or perhaps more closely to a “nonbinary” female. She’s well aware that she’s female, but she doesn’t see herself as a woman, because to her, woman is a gender role.

But in the US and Canada we don’t prohibit women from cutting open coconuts. She’d have no need to identify as anything but a woman here. Because gender roles are gone, at least in law, and the only thing left that the words “man” and “woman” refer to is our sex.

So why has the idea that everybody needs a “gender role” come roaring back with a vengeance since social media came along? It’s probably partly to do with increased pressure to conform to stereotypes. It may be legal for a woman to open a coconut here, but if her social media feed has nothing but images of Kardashian clones she may develop a sense that she’s alienated from “woman” as a category of person and seek to find a label that doesn’t make her feel bad.

But there’s a far, far bigger factor at play. Man and woman may not denote “gender roles” in our culture anymore, but they still denote sex categories. Sexuality, not “gender roles”, is the primary reason men claim to be women in the Euro-American world today. To put it bluntly: when gay men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to straight men, and when straight men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to themselves. And when women pretend to be men, it’s often because they’re trying to get away from male sexual attention.

You can see this in the different ways men and women endorse gender identity ideology: many women mistakenly think it’s about liberating people from sex-based oppression: they think females who identify as male or nonbinary are freeing themselves from the threat of male sexual assault, and they think the same of men who identify as trans. But men like Silent Bob don’t see it as freedom from danger but an expansion of choice. To men, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because more choice. To the women who believe in gender ideology, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because less danger.

It’s the total conquest of straight men’s rights over feminism and gay rights, masquerading as liberation.

I hope Silent Bob reads this and has a think.

The poor flustered monarchists are trying to put a cuddly spin on this whole “swear allegiance” idea. Can’t be done, chaps. It is what it is.

The King would find the idea of people paying homage to him during his Coronation “abhorrent”, the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby believes.

For the first time, the public are being given an active role in the ceremony as they are invited to swear allegiance to the King.

But Dimbleby, a close friend of the King, told BBC R4’s Today programme he has “never wanted to be revered”.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has previously said the oath is voluntary.

Yes but Arch, such an oath is itself…well it’s an oath. That’s the point of swearing it, and calling it an oath. You can’t do both – you can’t suggest swearing an oath and claim it’s all terribly egalitarian and free and choicey. One or the other, Arch, one or the other.

Also it’s faintly amusing that Choss disavows homage (if it’s true that he does) but doesn’t disavow all the lovely lovely cash. And that he rebuffed all suggestions of a slimmed-down coronation, demanding the full ride at other people’s expense.

A spokesperson for Lambeth Palace said it hoped people would say the homage out loud and there would be a “sense of a great cry around the nation and around the world of support for the King”.

But why should we support the king? He’s got all that money, and armies of people doing things for him, famously including putting the fucking toothpaste on his fucking toothbrush. The king could support everyone else for a change.

They’re all embarrassed now, and trying to pretend someone else said it.

It is unclear who came up with the idea, but it is “pretty inconceivable” that Buckingham Palace was not aware of the homage element or the entire order of service before it was announced, the BBC’s Religion Editor Aleem Maqbool told the Today programme.

Earlier this week, the archbishop said it was fine if people did not want to join in the voluntary oath.

Asked about some newspaper reports suggesting he had gone “rogue”, he insisted the service had been a “huge, collaborative [with Buckingham Palace and the Cabinet Office] and very lovely process”.

“There’s no individual who can claim the credit for this service,” he added.

Translation: “I never said it, gov!”

There is one lighter moment though.

The royal couple have recorded an announcement reminding train passengers to “mind the gap” – which will be played at every railway station across the UK and all London Underground stations between Friday and Monday.

Ok. They can have that one. I do love “mind the gap.”

The Washington Post:

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

And when Republican activists do things about voting rights, they’re not working to expand or protect them.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conwaythat he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012.

All in secret.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

An ideological ally and a secret source of large amounts of $$$. Peak squalor.

The Guardian makes a point of insulting women some more.

Not everyone in the US can afford period products: an estimated 16.9 million menstruators live in poverty, sometimes having to choose between buying food and pads. Those who can may still be using the first type of pad or tampon they ever bought.

In the 2010s, there was some innovation marketed to millennials who craved a more comfortable way to deal with menstruation. Period underwear brands led by Thinx  cropped up, often using suggestive advertising like yonic-looking fruit to hawk the panties. (Knix, Aisle and Bambody are other popular labels.) Suddenly, menstruators had a bit more choice, though many still felt that their best choices were uncomfortable tampons or bulky pads.

On the one hand “menstruators”; on the other hand the annoying diminutive “panties.” The people who menstruate are women, and women wear underpants. Don’t erase us and don’t belittle us. Really don’t do both in the same damn paragraph.

“What someone uses for menstruation gets decided early on, and people typically stick to one brand, or product,” said Ida Tin, the co-founder of Clue, a period tracking app. “But what you need when you’re 12 is not the same as what you need just after you gave birth. Or what you want on a camping trip is different than what you use when you’re at home.”

What “someone” uses – gee, I wonder who.

According to Candice Matthews, who invests in the period care brand Femi Secrets, the average woman will only switch menstrual products four times at most in her life. “If that’s the case, a brand has got her for 10 years,” she said.

Such devotion may be why people feel so emotionally connected to whatever they use. In January, Thinx settled a class-action suit with customers regarding its supposedly “organic, sustainable, and non-toxic” panties.

You almost had it! The average woman – but aw damn you lost it again, back to people feeling emotional about what they use. And the god damn “panties” again. Women are now the People who wear Panties.

Activists say that the stigma around periods, and the idea that a woman’s cycle should be a hidden, discreet experience, means that people are not conditioned to take a closer look at what’s inside their products.

Is this how the author – Alaina Demopoulos – decided to work it? One “woman” balanced by one “people” per mention?

No, she’s fine with omitting “woman” altogether.

Okamoto initially thought she would sell menstrual cups or period underwear. But then she started talking to people about their menstruation.

“Ninety-nine per cent of people were only interested in tampons and pads,” Okamoto said. “They cared about sustainability, but they were like, ‘I don’t want to use anything that requires me to touch my period blood. Some of my most progressive, feminist friends think that reusing any item for their period will cause a disease or illness.”

“Feminist” sneaks in there at the end, but, you know, they could be feminist men.

The director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project (they have such a project??) wrote a piece a few weeks ago titled Trans Rights Are Women’s Rights. It’s subtitled “Here’s why the rights of trans people are at the heart of gender justice for all” and illustrated with this adorable photo:

Hur hur, cis-ters, what a hilarious pun, and how impressive for a grown-up, can tie its own shoes organization like the ACLU to use it.

March is Women’s History Month, which means I’m often asked to name the most pressing issue facing women in America. Answers spring to mind, sometimes faster than I can form the words.

She says there are a lot of them, and lists some.

None of these ills, however, is the subject of so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” laws being introduced in a growing list of states including Kansas, Arizona, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Montana. Instead, this legislation would create a legal definition of womanhood based on the capacity to produce ova, or human eggs. This definition of “woman,” which is gerrymandered to exclude trans women and girls, would then apply throughout state law — and could make it impossible for trans people to live openly at work, at school, or anywhere in the states they call home.

It’s not gerrymandering to exclude male people from a definition of women. I too don’t much want Republican legislatures defining women, but I don’t want the ACLU doing it either. That’s where we are now.

The “Women’s Bill of Rights” is only a sliver of the cruel campaign to deny basic rights to trans people currently underway across the country.

What basic rights? It’s not a right to define yourself as something you’re not and force everyone else to agree or at least shut up about disagreeing. That can’t be a right, because you can’t generalize it.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Ria Mar doesn’t bother to specify what she means by “basic rights” – which is quite a bizarre omission for a rights organization. What basic rights are being denied to trans people? Please inform.

As feminists, we reject efforts to appropriate the rhetoric of “women’s rights” to inflict life-threatening harm on trans people, men or women.

They’re not feminists. They embrace the rhetoric of “threatening harm” and “deny basic rights” to knock huge holes in women’s existing rights.

Attacking trans people does nothing to address the real problems women face. 

It’s not “attacking trans people” to refuse to agree that men are literally women. One of the real problems women face is indeed the ever-growing pattern of men taking prizes and jobs and organizations for women. That’s a real problem. It’s a violation of women’s rights.

To the contrary, limiting freedom for trans people worsens conditions for all women by re-entrenching the very gender stereotypes that have underpinned centuries of women’s oppression and that the ACLU Women’s Rights Project has worked for more than half a century to dismantle. After all, the very notion that a person should identify with the sex they were assigned at birth for their entire life is a stereotype, as the more than 1.5 million trans people living in the United States attest to every day.

Wut? Can she really believe that? Is Chase Strangio standing over her as she types?

She goes on to pretend that stereotypes about women are the same thing as facts about women.

It’s embarrassing.

Joan Smith on the SNP’s free speech problem:

The silence speaks volumes. Where are the politicians showing solidarity with a colleague who has been no-platformed by a leading Edinburgh venue? Joanna Cherry is an Edinburgh MP, a human rights lawyer and a powerful voice for women’s rights. It’s another example of the demonising of women who hold perfectly legitimate views, allowing them to be picked off and isolated from mainstream politics. 

Anyone who claims to believe in basic freedoms should be horrified. So where is Humza Yousaf, leader of the SNP and Cherry’s long-standing colleague? Where is Stephen Flynn, the party leader at Westminster, where Cherry is an MP?

…

[L]eading lawyers have spoken out about the decision to cancel her appearance at The Stand. Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, wrote on Twitter the decision was “plainly unlawful”. Michael Foran, lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow, agreed that it was “unlawful discrimination”. 

…

Every time this happens, the objections are based on things the victims of no-platforming have not said. None of the individuals who have been targeted, who include poets and authors as well as politicians, have called for legal rights to be removed from transgender people. They have not demanded that trans people should lose their jobs, be prevented from holding meetings or stopped from carrying out academic research. They are simply upholding the rights of another group, women and especially lesbians, to whom all these things are being done in the name of “trans rights”. 

This is what I keep saying. We don’t oppose the human rights of trans people; of course we don’t. We oppose new made-up rights that aren’t rights at all, and that destroy the rights of other people, especially the people formerly known as “women.”

The framing is deliberate because the reality — forcing women to accept biological males in women’s sports, refuges, changing rooms, toilets and prisons — doesn’t sound so appealing. At protests organised by trans activists, we don’t see placards demanding “let men use women’s toilets now” or “make women share cells with rapists”. Instead, we see banners claiming that feminists are calling for “genocide” and comparing a belief in biological sex to Nazi eugenics. 

And it goes on and on and on and on…………………

Brendan O’Neill on the Scottish Inquisition:

Imagine a country where every time women tried to speak up about their rights they were insulted and abused by mobs of men. A country where women were continually prevented by gangs of misogynists from showing a film about womanhood. A country where women who express their political views run the risk of being branded old hags and even threatened with death. A country where members of the ruling party can be seen standing next to placards calling for women to be beheaded. A country where lesbians can be censored for daring to say women are real. A country where even wearing the Suffragette colours is a risky business.

In other words Imagine Scotland; boom.

It used to be the Bible-bashing Christian right that was made ‘uncomfortable’ by outspoken lesbians – now it’s Guardian-reading young people. The old blue-rinse lobby that viewed the likes of [Joanna] Cherry as an abomination against God have been replaced by blue-haired art kids who see her as an abomination against their self-esteem.

The Fringe is fast becoming a no-go zone for outrageous women who refuse to daintily bow down to the gender cult. Cherry’s card was marked a couple of months back when trans comedian Bethany Black withdrew from a performance at The Stand over its repulsive moral error of giving Cherry a platform. Black is a biological male who identifies as a transsexual lesbian. Imagine going back in time and trying to explain to someone that in the future men who claim to be lesbians will be complaining about the presence in public life of an actual lesbian, and that they’ll be applauded for doing so. You’d be packed off to an asylum.

…

Is Scotland the most misogynistic country in Europe? It’s worth considering. It’s certainly hard to think of any other European country where there have been so many instances recently of women’s rights to gather, to speak and to associate with one another being so unceremoniously thwarted by angry activists.

This is the country where MPs for the ruling party – the Scottish National Party – were photographed at a trans rally next to a man holding a placard saying, ‘Decapitate TERFs’. In short, behead women who believe in biology; garotte those harridans. Imagine if a Tory MP attended a demonstration where there were banners saying ‘Behead Muslims’ or ‘Kill blacks’.

…

So let Scotland be a lesson to the world. The farther you go down the road of gender delusion, the more you will unleash a simmering hate for women and a twisted intolerance of women’s rights. Nations of the world, take note.

I wish I could say he’s wrong.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Top of the roller coaster.

Silent Bob #21 wrote:

And what has it got to do with “pretending” anything? Trans people are people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies. What does this have to do with any pretence? What pretence? I

Are we assigned “gender” at birth? I thought we were supposed to be assigned sex. Gender involves masculinity and femininity. Assigning gender at birth would be putting pink frilly bonnets on girl babies and calling them “quite the little princess” or shoving a male infant into a miniature Green Bay Packers onesie. Which, admittedly, we do.

In which case, if trans people are really just “people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies” they’d be saying “I’m a feminine man” or, perhaps, “I’m a feminine man who wants to pretend I’m a feminine woman and hope others will do so, too.” Which isn’t what they’re saying. There’s no pretense in saying “I want to pretend.”

But I think there is pretense when people say “I know WHAT (not “who”) I am.” Or “TW ARE Women.” They’re pretending that they not only experience the same internal mental state as the opposite sex (no, not “gender”) but can know that. It’s not a matter of whether they’re sincere. I can grant they’re honest in that respect just as readily as I can grant that the religious are sincerely certain they have experienced God. Self-deception occurs when the interpretation of what we experience is considered the gold standard of reliability, without the honest recognition that it has been filtered through a plausible prior narrative or strong personal desire to believe. They are pretending they have the right to be certain.

Cycling news tells us in the headline:

‘It is incredibly painful to be othered’ – Austin Killips on division, debate and building dialogue

Gee, you know what else is incredibly painful? To lose a race to Austin Killips. If you lose a race to Austin Killips you’re a woman, because that’s where he races: in the women’s races. This means that you’ve lost a women’s race to a man who claims to be a woman. Painful? I’d say so. It’s also painful when he assaults you during the race.

Here’s an interesting fact. There are clips of Killips assaulting a woman during a race but Google images pretends there are none. I just tried to search and all I get is Killips In Triumph. I think Google images is hiding them.

Back to Cycling News.

Austin Killips’ overall victory at the long-time American professional cycling stage race Tour of the Gila in Silver City, New Mexico, on Sunday, was met with another wave of controversy surrounding a nearly polarised discussion about transgender rights in both sporting and political arenas.

No, not “transgender rights.” Men ruining women’s sports. Trans people, including men, can perfectly well have rights without ruining everything that belongs to women. Too many choose not to.

Killips credited her victory to the preparation, training and support from the Amy D Foundation that went into her performance.

No, dude, it’s because you have a male body, which is a huge advantage in a women’s race.

“Existing publicly as an athlete has been new for me over the last couple of years. It is incredibly painful to be othered – queer, trans, non-binary athletes who feel inspired to survive, race and pursue the sport in every way. I’m grateful to have those connections and to meet riders at events, like at cyclocross nationals this year, where they have the non-binary category again. I’m close with a lot of riders, and we feel a sense of solidarity and camaraderie. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t divorce myself from the reality that I’m sharing the world with other queer and trans folks who see what I’m doing, and it has an impact,” said Killips, who aspires to compete on the Women’s WorldTour.

Of course he does. He’ll have that massive advantage.