Another woman hauled up before the police for not genuflecting to trans ideology.

Meanwhile the “kill all the terfs” gang continues merrily on its way.

Glasgow Times reports:

Two people who have gone through gender reassignment treatment and later regretted it – sometimes referred to as detransitioners – are due to speak to MSPs at a meeting in the Scottish Parliament.

…

Sinead Watson, a 31-year-old woman from Glasgow, and Ritchie Herron, a 35-year-old man from Newcastle, will share their views on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill.

…

The stage one vote on the Bill led to nine SNP MSPs breaking with the whip to abstain or vote against the legislation, as well as the resignation of minister Ash Regan from the Scottish Government.

The Bill aims to make it easier for transgender people to be legally recognised as their preferred gender.

Which will make it easier for men to push women out of everything. Let’s not do that – let’s go back to not letting men do that.

Opponents have raised concerns about the impact of the legislation on women and girls, while supporters say it will have little impact outside the trans community.

Supporters who say that are telling whoppers.

A brand from the burning:

Shame on everyone who has thrown her to the wolves, she concludes.

NO in thunder.

Well done.

Baroness Nicholson has written a letter about that You are being monitored email. It’s good stuff. I especially like “awash with transgender-dominated staff groupings demanding ‘trans allyship’ in as official a manner as they can manage, while suggesting that anyone who demurs is a bigot or worse.” Exactly so, and it gets more suffocating and nauseating by the day.

Please tackle at your earliest convenience.

How can this circle ever be squared? Are they even trying?

If “trans people are entitled to use single sex facilities in accordance with their gender identity” then everyone else – 99% of people – is not. If men who call themselves trans are using women’s facilities then women can no longer use single sex facilities. Why do people who call themselves trans get more rights than everyone else?

I’ve never seen an answer to that question. I don’t see how an answer is possible.

The guy who stopped the shooter:

Richard M. Fierro said he was at a table in Club Q with his wife, daughter and friends on Saturday, watching a drag show, when the sudden flash of gunfire ripped across the nightclub. His instincts from four combat deployments as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan instantly kicked in. Fight back, he told himself.

In an interview at his house, where his wife and daughter were still recovering from injuries, Mr. Fierro, 45, who left the Army in 2013 as a major, according to military records, described charging through the chaos at the club, tackling the gunman and beating him bloody with the gunman’s own gun.

…

When the shooting started, Mr. Fierro said, he hit the floor, pulling a friend down with him. As bullets sprayed, he saw the gunman move through the bar toward a door leading to a patio where dozens of bar patrons had fled. Mr. Fierro, who served in the Army for 15 years, said he raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him.

“Was he shooting at the time? Was he about to shoot? I don’t know,” Mr. Fierro said. “I just knew I had to take him down.”

He bashed him over the head repeatedly.

As the fight continued, he said, he yelled for other club patrons to help him. A man grabbed the rifle and moved it away to safety. A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels. The whole time, Mr. Fierro said, he kept pummeling the shooter’s head while the two men screamed obscenities at each other.

He had thought he was finished with that kind of thing. He’d wanted to be finished with it.

Mr. Fierro, who owns a local brewery, said that on combat deployments in the Army, he had been shot at and had seen roadside bombs shred trucks in his platoon. His record shows that he was awarded the Bronze Star twice. The experiences of combat still haunt him, he said, and the psychological and physical toll of the deployments were why he left the Army.

He said he never thought he would have to deal with that kind of violence at home.

“I was done with war,” he said.

But this is the United States, where there are more guns than people.

Digging right through the barrel:

But this

never

happens.

The Colorado Sun gives background on Club Q:

Matthew Haynes opened Club Q 21 years ago with the goal of making sure LGBTQ people in Colorado Springs had a long-lasting place to call home.

Except that’s not exactly how Matthew Haynes words it, at least not in this story.

Haynes says Club Q has always been a community center more than anything else.

“There have been so many happy stories from Club Q,” he told The Colorado Sun on Sunday morning. “People meeting and relationships being born. So many celebrations there. We’re a family of people more than a place to have a drink and dance and leave.”

…

Haynes, who is a co-owner of Club Q, said he opened the club because Colorado Springs’ main gay bar at the time, Hide and Seek, appeared on the verge of closing. (The Colorado Springs Independent reports Hide and Seek shut down in 2005. The Gazette reported it opened in 1969.)

“It was clear that the Hide and Seek was in trouble, was failing,” Haynes said. “I bought that real estate (Club Q) intentionally because other gay clubs have come and gone in Colorado Springs. By owning that real estate and making our mark there it was intended to be long term. And it has been. It was literally: There wasn’t any place in Colorado Springs.”

When Haynes is directly quoted he calls it a gay club like other gay clubs. It appears to be the reporters who call it LGBTQ+.

Colorado Springs, which is home to Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian organization, has grown more friendly to the LGBTQ community, as has the rest of the country.

“Twenty-one years ago, we didn’t have marriage,” Haynes said. “Twenty-one years ago you got kicked out of the military if they found out you were gay. You couldn’t go sit in a restaurant next to your partner. Club Q was that safe place for people to come and feel and understand that they are normal — that the way they feel is normal and there are people just like them.”

Haynes talks about one community, the reporters talk about a different one.

(Also, though, is it true that two men or two women couldn’t go sit in a restaurant? That doesn’t sound right. I can believe they felt constrained to pretend to be Just Friends, but not able to go at all seems unlikely.)

Alycia Erickson, a pastor at Pikes Peak Metropolitan Church, which was founded in 1979 by members of the LGBTQ community, knows many people who patronize Club Q and and called it a refuge for them.

But there was no “LGBTQ community” in 1979. Nobody called it that then. There can’t have been members of a “community” that didn’t exist.

“Club Q has been an important part of this community for many years,” Erickson said. “We are not welcome in so many places, and we can’t be ourself. Gay bars have been a sanctuary of a different kind.”

Again the interviewee says gay and the reporters change it to LGBTQ.

Kelsey Fauser, pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Colorado Springs, described Club Q as a place “for safety, love and security,” and where people in the LGBTQ community could celebrate themselves and “just be.”

We can’t be confident that that bit outside the quotation marks is what Fauser said.

“It’s hard when you hear about news like this because it isn’t just some distant place or a news headline, but rather you know the color of the walls,” said Fauser, who is part of a LGBTQ league with drag queens and kings who perform at the nightclub.

Drag queens and kings. That’s not the same as trans.

The horror of what happened at Club Q is of course much bigger than the question of how Club Q is described, but all the same, the words do matter. It matters how women are described in reporting on violence against them, it matters how black people are described in reporting on violence against them, and the reporting on Club Q matters too.

Here’s a strange thing: Club Q in Colorado Springs describes itself as a gay or gay and lesbian adult bar, yet most of the headlines call it LGBTQ+. When did adding the TQ+ become absolutely mandatory with no exceptions? Why can’t lesbians and gay men organize and talk and agitate as lesbians and gay men? Why are they being forced to add trans people, when being trans is not the same thing as being lesbian or gay?

CNN: What we know about the suspect in the Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub shooting

NBC News: Live updates: Colorado LGBTQ nightclub shooting victims mourned as community pushes for answers

Washington Post: Shooting at popular LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs leave at least 5 dead

ABC News: Colorado club shooting updates: Suspect named after 5 dead, dozens injured at LGBTQ nightclub

Reuters: Colorado Springs police probe motive in LGBTQ nightclub

Thanks to all this forced teaming we get bullying crap like this from relentless bully Billy the bully Bragg:

They specifically excluded plumbers, ballet dancers, miners, academics, astronauts, poets, too; so what? What law is it that says an alliance of lesbians, gays and bisexuals has to name-check trans people?

Trade union catastrophizing:

“It’s great to be able to be loud and proud – and I will continue to be loud and proud against homophobia and loud and very proud to be a trans ally, and I will ensure that UNISON always remains the best trade union for LGBT+ workers.”

That was the pledge from UNISON general secretary Christina McAnea this morning, when she addressed the union’s LGBT+ conference in Edinburgh, as she applauded the fact that being “loud and proud” was the event’s central theme.

Proud to be against homophobia and very proud to be a trans ally – there’s always that little extra that signals the category “trans” is the most urgent, the most in need of allyship and love and concern and endless encouragement.

UNISON, she continued, had “always strongly advocated for trans rights.” The union’s “brilliant” trans equality campaign helps “give our activists the tools to combat the divisive political weaponising of trans issues,” which is damaging to trans people , but also to the “whole of society”.

What “weaponising” exactly? Mention of the conflict with women’s rights? Is that the weapon?

The past year had seen over 400 members trained on how to be a good trans ally, while there’s also been a “bump in members taking part in UNISON’s trans caucus.”

But Ms McAnea was clear that such things were needed precisely because anti-trans discrimination is “not going away and we have to be ever more vigilant.”

Ever more. Ever more and more and more and more. It will never end.

Endless relentless nagging:

Staff at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have been told they should not use the terms “gender critical” and “protecting women and girls” in order to be trans allies, The Telegraph can disclose.

But what if they want to be allies to women? What if they are women? What if they think being an ally to women – half of humanity – is vastly more urgent than being ally to a tiny minority of humanity in thrall to a delusion?

Thousands of officials were emailed for “transgender awareness week” and told it was “vital that we keep scaremongering and misinformation at bay”, with trans hate crimes up 56 per cent in a year.

“It is vital that we scaremonger and misinform about scaremongering and misinformation.”

Civil servants are warned in an introduction to the glossary: “It is important to recognise these words and phrases, understand their context and educate those you hear using them about the reasons why their use can be deemed offensive or upsetting, as people may have unknowingly used a term without being familiar with its meaning.

“Whilst passing uses of these phrases might not be considered misconduct, the importance of challenging their use cannot be overstated.”

“You must obsess about trans people all the time, every minute of every day, and you must police the language and thoughts of everyone you know or bump into in the corridor.”

Hmmm.

Politico a month ago:

Now, despite the setbacks Russia has suffered on the battlefield, [Fiona] Hill thinks Putin is undaunted. She sees him adapting to new conditions, not giving up. And she sees him trying to get the West to accede to his aims by using messengers like billionaire Elon Musk to propose arrangements that would end the conflict on his terms.

“Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin,” Hill says.

And then they buy Twitter to be even more dedicated messengers for Putin.

Reynolds: We’ve recently had Elon Musk step into this conflict trying to promote discussion of peace settlements. What do you make of the role that he’s playing?

Hill: It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and the suggestion that the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia should be up for negotiation, because there should be guaranteed water supplies to Crimea. He made this suggestion before Putin’s annexation of those two territories on September 30. It was a very specific reference. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia essentially control all the water supplies to Crimea. Crimea is a dry peninsula. It has aquifers, but it doesn’t have rivers. It’s dependent on water from the Dnipro River that flows through a canal from Kherson. It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin.

…

This is a classic Putin play. It’s just fascinating, of course, that it’s Elon Musk in this instance, because obviously Elon Musk has a huge Twitter following. He’s got a longstanding reputation in Russia through Tesla, the SpaceX space programs and also through Starlink. He’s one of the most popular men in opinion polls in Russia. At the same time, he’s played a very important part in supporting Ukraine by providing Starlink internet systems to Ukraine, and kept telecommunications going in Ukraine, paid for in part by the U.S. government. Elon Musk has enormous leverage as well as incredible prominence. Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.

And now he owns Twitter.

Health Education England is some sort of government body, described slightly differently by each source I saw, and it came up with this new and exciting version of the usual sludge:

Health Education England statement of intent, publicly committing to trans inclusion and equality in support of the trans and non-binary community.

What is “trans equality”? What is the absence of “trans equality”? What are they talking about? In what way are trans people not already “equal”?

As for “inclusion,” we know what that means, and that’s the problem. It means men being “included” with women and (much less urgently and insistently) women being “included” with men. That’s a stupid idea of “inclusion.” We don’t have to “include” lawyers with doctors or doctors with lawyers; we don’t have to “include” students with teacher or teachers with students; we don’t have to “include” toddlers with adults or adults with toddlers; the list goes on. We don’t have to be “inclusive” of everything and everyone at all times and everywhere. We don’t have to “include” men with women, and we refuse to, and we’re not going to do it. Also we’re a “community” too, so how about being “inclusive” of us for a change?

And that’s just the title.

Dr Navina Evans, Chief Executive, Health Education England commits Health Education England to the below statement of intent:

All human rights are compromised if any one group is excluded. We are at our best when we stand together, and we all have a role in ensuring our NHS is a place where all our citizens are treated with respect, dignity, and compassion.   

Excluded from what though? Excluded from what??

In recent months, the public debate around trans and non-binary rights has intensified. As HEE’s leadership, we have growing concerns about the hostility that trans and non-binary staff & patients are experiencing.    

But those are two different things. Discussion of what “trans and non-binary rights” might be is not the same thing as hostility to trans and non-binary people. If the discussion of rights were more honest and less hostile to women, maybe the hostility that trans and non-binary staff and patients are said to be experiencing would cease to exist.

A fundamental promise of the NHS is that we exist for all and we have a duty of care to all. It is crucial that everyone, including trans and non-binary people, feel respected, safe and receive an equal level of care.

What about women? If men who claim to be trans are allowed to force themselves on women in wards then how can women feel respected and safe? What about them?

As a healthcare organisation we want to reiterate our commitment to implementing the spirit and the letter of the Equality Act – by striving to create an NHS that is fair and truly inclusive.

But if the NHS is “truly inclusive” of for instance men on women’s wards then it’s not truly inclusive of women. What about that?

Now, more than ever, is the time to educate ourselves and others to become active trans and non-binary allies. Within HEE, we have been making consistent efforts to understand and appreciate the experience of our trans and non-binary colleagues. We are having conversations, developing our own understanding, and continuing our learning. We have made progress, but we have a long way to go on our journey. We are confident that this is the only right way forward that reflects our values and the values of the wider NHS.

We stand with the trans and non-binary community.    

There’s no mention of women on the entire page. Not one. The word “trans” appears 11 times.

NHS Scotland wants to do more of it, faster.

Scotland’s NHS is planning to fast-track irreversible surgeries for transgender patients, documents seen by The Telegraph reveal.

Quick, before someone stops us.

An NHS Scotland report, suggesting new transgender treatment rules, calls for “barriers” to gender reassignment surgery to be removed and proposes radical measures to make operations more widely available.

These include allowing GPs, rather than specialists, to send patients for procedures and that a “single opinion” is enough to refer for surgery in most cases.

Let’s err on the side of reckless haste, because why not?

The report goes on to call for an “affirming” model of non-surgical care to still be delivered to children, despite an expert review for NHS England, conducted by the esteemed paediatrician Hilary Cass, raising concerns about the approach.

I wonder if, ten or twenty years down the line, NHS Scotland will be calling for an “affirming” model of care for children who identify as tigers or eagles or pythons.

David Bell, the consultant psychiatrist and Tavistock Clinic whistleblower, said it was “very troubling indeed” to see the Scottish NHS treat WPATH as an “authority” on matters of trans health, something he said was a “complete fiction”.

He also claimed that contrary to the document, clinicians had a responsibility to fully examine a patient’s mental health and background before referring them for irreversible surgeries which they may later come to regret.

Irreversible and very drastic.

“It’s a very disturbing situation,” Dr Bell said. “The attention of ministers seems to be more captured by groups representing an ideological movement, than those that represent an objective scientific approach to these matters, such as NHS England and the Cass Review.

“It is never a doctor’s job to affirm or not affirm, it is a doctor’s job to understand. That means understanding the narrative of a patient’s life, their childhood, how they developed particularly in terms of sexuality and gender, and how they’ve come to be the person they are.

“We have an ethical duty towards young people and adults not to treat things at face value. That is something that is completely incompatible with a proper clinical approach.”

But treating things at face value is portrayed as absolutely mandatory, on pain of ostracism and abuse, by the very ideology that’s capturing the attention of ministers and speeding up this already speeding train.

Uh…whut?

Of all the campaign groups in all the world you’d think this would be the least relevant to the trans ideology.

Endofuckingmetriosis??? Are you serious?!

Blah blah blah grovel grovel grovel trans trans trans. Meanwhile Sadiq Khan still has not explained why he dumped Joan Smith from her role as head of the Mayor’s Council for Women, or even had the minimal courtesy to tell her why, despite her repeated requests for an explanation.

Soppy gloppy blobby nonsense, issued by a parliament, an actual real world governing body.

What on earth do they think they mean, “everyone deserves the right to be exactly who they are”? People don’t need a right to be exactly who they are, they just are who they are, exactly or otherwise. What they mean, of course, but are too dim or too evasive to say, is that they want people to have a “right” to force everyone else to agree they are exactly who they are not.

It’s sanctimonious gibberish and it’s a campaign to force the entire world to lie about who is what sex. The hell with it.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The feminists seem to, as it were.

…he has many trans and intersex* friends who are “deeply upset” by JK Rowling.

Then their “upset” is not in good faith, and not based on facts. If trans activists and their allies can’t be bothered actually reading what Rowling actually wrote, but condemn her out of hand on the sayso of trans “thought leaders,” then their “upsetedness” is not worth paying attention to, or taking seriously.

In his dangerously honest and conciliatory understanding of Rowling’s position, Fry has unwittingly outed himself as a heretic. As Ophelia has noted, in trying to place himself in the “reasonable” middle ground, or above the pettiness of it all, he has found himself without any feminist equivalent to the trans’ TERF-shouting. It must be there somewhere, seemingly, as it were. Otherwise, he can’t be in the middle.

Since he now has nothing to lose, Fry should sit all these friends of his down, read Rowling’s words to them, and then ask them which parts are “hateful,” “hurtful,” or “transphobic.” If they are objecting to plain statements of reality (sex is real, binary, immutable, and determined at conception), or her defence of the legally protected characteristic of sex, then it’s not Rowling they have a problem with. It’s reality and the law that they’re objecting to. Hating on Rowling conveniently helps to conceal this fact. If she didn’t exist, they’d have had to invent her, or find someone else to vilify. Without their effigy to burn, they would have to rail against Reality itself.

A wider public understanding of this would likely lose them support, as their goals are unreasonable and unjust. That’s a much harder sell than fighting against vague, better-left-unspecified “transphobia,” perpetrated by “bigots.” Institutional capture has helped them avoid the public discussions that would normally surround the sorts of policy changes that trans activism has managed to engineer in secret. The press now treats it as a “fact” that Rowling is “transphobic,” and uses language that deliberately obscures reality (calling male offenders and athletes “she,” translating measures to protect female only facilities and positions as being “anti-trans” rather than male-excluding). This collaboration with trans activism does immeasurable heavy lifting for a movement that would otherwise fail.

It is ironic that transactivism has chosen to turn Rowling into its Emmanuel Goldstein. In scapegoating her, in trying to turn her into an example to warn others, they have failed spectacularly. To be sure, in the short term, to the extent that people believe the lies and smears they broadcast, they’ve won a tactical victory. But they did not count on her character. Certainly her wealth has offered Rowling some measure of protection, and made her Uncancelable, but there’s more to it than that. There are plenty of indviduals and institutions which fell at the first hurdle, surrendering their moral judgement to the frothing hatred of the liars and bullies. Unlike so many others, who have been subjected to little more than schoolyard taunts, she has not backed down. She has not kept quiet. She is the nail that refuses to be driven flat. She has stood firm and become a lightning rod, continuing to speak out when others could not, would not, or feared to do so.

Though they tried to burn Rowling as a witch, she has taken this fire and become a beacon. She did not have to do this. But remarkably, she did, and continues to do so. She could have stayed quiet and comfortable. She could have mouthed the platitudes. She could have used her fame and celebrity to jump on the trans bandwagon, joining in on the attack against women defending their rights (Hello Billy Bragg!). But she didn’t. She stood up and spoke the truth. She defended women when many others who should have did not. Good on her. Shame on them.

* I actually doubt this. As far as I know, their preferred terminolgy is not “intersex” but DSD. I’ve seen a number of DSD people (or at least people claiming to be DSD), ask that their condition not be used as a transactivist talking point or gotcha. They are all still male or female, not evidence that sex is not real, or a spectrum, or that there are any more sexes than just the two. So just as Ophelia doubts that he has many “trans friends,” I doubt that he has many “intersex” ones. And what has Rowling ever said about them? Here I think Fry has fallen for the forced teaming. I suppose we should be happy he hasn’t lumped in the (presumably much larger number of) LGB friends he probably has.

The Times also reported on the Cambridge debate on the right to offend:

Noisy protests were held outside a Cambridge Union debate as an academic abused for her views on gender told students they were terrified of causing offence.

Some kinds of offence. They’re not a bit worried about causing offence to feminist women.

Students angered by the presence of Professor Kathleen Stock banged drums and chanted slogans outside the chamber during the event, even though the philosophy professor was not speaking about transgender rights.

Never you mind what she was speaking about, she’s a contaminant. She could be speaking about lilacs and roses and she’d still be a contaminant.

One of the students due to speak in favour of the motion instead argued at length that Stock should not have been invited. Kass Caldicott from Trinity College said: “The environment for trans people in particular in the UK at present, is abhorrent and the hatred perpetuated by certain people in this room should be a damning indictment.”

What environment? From what I can tell the environment for trans people is downright obsequious.

Stock, who won the debate, said during her speech that she was not going to address personal accusations by previous speakers.

She said society had progressed because of the right to cause offence by overthrowing prevailing beliefs: “The right to offend is good, because every single moral improvement towards a just society has involved massive amounts of offence, and if we restrict offence, we effectively constrain the ways in which society can get more progressive.”

A lot of moral disimprovements towards a just society have also involved lots of offence – look at Trump! – but that’s a subject for another day, or at least another post.

Stock and Professor Arif Ahmed, a philosophy professor who also spoke at last night’s debate, were invited by Lara Brown, president of the union. Prof Ahmed said: “The opposition has spent a lot of time arguing against things that nobody defended and have made up some sort of fairytale castle which they then proceeded to demolish.”

And all the witches and goblins came running out and did a dance on the rubble.