Alex Massie in The Times:

In the spring of 2018, Katie Dolatowski, then aged 18, sexually assaulted a ten-year-old girl in a supermarket lavatory in Kirkcaldy. A month earlier, Dolatowski had been apprehended filming a 12-year-old girl in another supermarket toilet. She — for although Dolatowski was born male, convention now decrees that she be referred to by her preferred pronouns — received a three-year community payback order and was banned from engaging with, or otherwise contacting, children.

A few weeks ago he was found living in a women’s refuge in Leeds. He was arrested for not alerting the police to his change of address.

Last week, Falkirk sheriff court heard Dolatowski admit to attacking another inmate at Polmont Young Offenders’ Institution while serving a previous sentence for another assault. Though a biological male, she has now been transferred to Cornton Vale women’s prison.

It is worth mentioning all of this because Dolatowski’s story is precisely the kind of thing we are repeatedly told just will not happen. 

Why will it not happen? Why would it not happen? Even if you’re a trans ally or trans – why would it not happen? It’s not a rejection or expression of hatred of trans people to say it will happen, because the men who will do it don’t have to be trans. This is something your ordinary humdrum not-trans men can do because it is something they can do – it’s an opportunity. It’s like opening the bank vault and saying you’ll be back in a week or so. Of course it will happen.

But it is shockingly, irresponsibly delusional to think that predatory males will not take advantage of any openings offered them. That is their entire modus operandi.

Because why wouldn’t they?

Victoria Smith, as usual, zooms right in on the matter.

And those some people are…you know who.

He said it starting at 10 minutes:

Hide all the women.

The word “woman” could be erased from specialist NHS clinics dealing with female health issues under proposed new transgender inclusivity rules.

Weird how “transgender inclusivity” always means erasing women. Never men.

A report proposing new NHS treatment guidelines in Scotland suggests “a general move away from gendered healthcare” and warns that trans people are put off attending services if they are targeted at a certain sex.

If that’s true then trans people need to grow the fuck up.

It also calls for laboratories to “decouple” reference ranges in test results from “gender markers”. Men and women have different healthy ranges on a series of criteria, for example in blood tests.

The report claims ranges should instead be “relevant to the individual.” The suggestion was branded a denial of reality by doctors.

Denial of medical reality is not a very brilliant idea.

“It seems that the Scottish NHS is in the grip of a science-denying cult,” Susan Smith, a director at the For Women Scotland campaign group, said.

“Gender, including non binary identities, are an irrelevance in medicine, but sex matters. This move will, almost inevitably, rebound on women.

“Progress to improve standards in women’s healthcare has been hard won – this will set the clock back on those gains by decades.”

But it’s only women, so it doesn’t matter.

Louise Irvine, a retired GP who is co-chairman of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, raised concerns at repeated references to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in the report.

She said the association’s guidelines were “very poor” and potentially harmful for patients and questioned why the advice of respected Scottish experts had not been preferred.

“Proposals to change whole systems of IT, language and clinics is timorous, unhelpful and potentially dangerous,” Dr Irvine said.

Also insulting to women.

“You can’t move entirely away from sexed healthcare, because everyone has a biological sex, even if they take additional hormones to affirm or appear differently.

“To interpret test results safely you need to know a person’s sex, as well as their age, conditions and drugs. To suggest otherwise simply denies reality.”

Denying reality seems to be the whole point.

Stephen Fry is anxious about his trans friends. (Does he have a lot of them? It seems unlikely. There aren’t many trans people, and most of them are very young.)

Stephen Fry has urged calm in the debate over transgender issues, but said he has many trans and intersex friends who are “deeply upset” by JK Rowling.

Many? Come on.

“I know that JK Rowling doesn’t want to see trans people bullied, alienated, shut out of society, made to feel ashamed, guilty, laughed at, all those things.

“But I also know that there are people who believe that safe feminine spaces and the idea of difference between sex and gender is very important, and that they repudiate with all their strength the Judith Butler – the idea of created gender and so on.”

Aha, so he does get it. That’s way more than most fans of the trans ideology will admit to knowing.

He does get it, but he wants us to just get over it.

“It is not an argument I want to get involved in because it is upsetting to both sides and I would wish them both to retreat and to consider that is possible for trans people to live full, accepted lives according to their terms in society, and for women to have all the rights and dignities they demand.”

No, it isn’t possible. It absolutely isn’t. What it means for “trans people to live full, accepted lives according to their terms in society” includes allowing men to intrude on anything and everything that is for women, thus ruining it for women, endangering women, displacing women, taking prizes and jobs and medals that were intended for women.

“But it isn’t possible if each side looks on the other as an enemy and the trans people just shout ‘terf’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and the feminists seem to, as it were, undermine the dignity and rights of the trans community, if I can use the word community – it is a bit of a greasy word, but there you go.”

How fascinating that he knows very well what the trans people shout at women but can’t come up with an insult from us. The “as it were” is rather telling, too, especially right next to “seem to.” Do we really seem to as it were, undermine the dignity and rights of the trans community? Or is that just a formulaic accusation with no referent? There is no “right” for men to take women’s promotions and prizes and spaces.

The NY Times four days ago:

Elon Musk continued cutting Twitter’s work force in his third week of owning the social media company, firing employees who had criticized him and eliminating contractors.

So his filter for employees is personal vanity as opposed to skills. How might that go wrong?

Early on Tuesday, Mr. Musk’s team ordered nearly two dozen Twitter employees who had pushed back publicly and privately against him to be fired, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The billionaire, who completed a $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last month, later confirmed the exits on the platform and mocked the former employees.

Thus no doubt inspiring remaining employees to think very highly of him.

Mr. Musk’s team was asked to comb through messages in Twitter’s internal chat platform and make a list of employees who were insubordinate, people briefed on the plan said. They also sorted through employees’ tweets, looking for criticism. Those deemed rule breakers received emails around 1:30 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, notifying them that they were fired, according to emails viewed by The Times.

Mustn’t have criticism. Must have nothing but flattery at all times. Infallible recipe for success.

Several Twitter employees who shared news of Mr. Frohnhoefer’s firing in internal chats were cut, said six people familiar with events. They were told that they had been terminated for “violating company policy,” according to emails seen by The Times.

The brand new company policy that no one knew about, the one that mandates nothing but flattery of Musk at all times.

“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” Mr. Musk tweeted sarcastically on Tuesday. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.” In another tweet, he mocked a former employee, suggesting the person’s Twitter posts about him were caused by “a tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s.”

I’m not sure I think Mr Musk is a very admirable person.

Anything to win:

Washington’s Seattle Academy High School girls’ cross-country team qualified for the state championship thanks to trans student, Aspen Hoffman. 

Last year, Hoffman was a mediocre cross-country runner on Seattle Academy’s boys’ team. During freshman year, Aspen Hoffman competed as a boy and finished 72nd in the League finals. Now, as a sophomore competing as a girl, Hoffman broke Seattle Academy’s school record in the girls’ 5000-meter category and ranks 1st in League.

Seattle Academy competes in the Emerald Sound Conference which is comprised of 14 schools. Libs of TikTok spoke with a coach in the conference who told us, “allowing [Hoffman] to compete against biological girls deprives other girls’ teams of the chance to compete at State (which is a big deal).  If [Hoffman] competed in the boys’ division, [Hoffman] would place 56th on the boys’ team.” 

Since this is a team, he gives his team an advantage. It’s the other teams that are being cheated, as opposed to individuals as with “Lia” Thomas. Still cheating.

Parents are terrified to even raise concerns about Hoffman’s presence on the girls’ team. Another parent noted, “parents are upset but they know it has to go to the state committee, which isn’t politics, it’s the state high school board, and unless there’s any kind of pressure put on them to change the rule nothing’s going to happen.” 

Well if all the other teams just replace one girl with a boy it will all be fair again.

This is a long thread, and very disturbing. I didn’t read all of it. The Dr Gallagher is Sidhbh Gallagher, of yeet the teets.

Many horrifying tweets later:

Rylan is still vehemently pro the ideology though, still eager to call doubters terfs.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Dr Brat.

I’m under no illusion that free speech in any way guarantees that the best evidence and the strongest arguments will rise to the top in the “marketplace of ideas”. Despite what Movement Skeptics™ might like to think, judging evidence and arguments on their merits is not a straightforward matter, but something that requires a great deal of experience and accumulated pre-knowledge in its own right.

Also, the strongest indicators of truth vs. falsehood objectively speaking rarely coincide with what seems most subjectively persuasive to a lay audience. Playing by the rules of science, critical thinking, and intellectual honesty is nothing if not limiting while the peddlers of nonsense are free to say whatever it takes to impress people. In the absence of the necessary pre-knowledge, critical thinking skills etc. all your average lay person can be expected to get out of the kind of “rational debate” that believers in the “marketplace of ideas” like to imagine, is that one side comes across as far more confident and assertive, more aggressive etc. while the other side is forced to use conservative language (“seems to indicate”), talk about statistical probability and error bars, acknowledge doubt and uncertainty, and introduce caveats, conditions, and qualifiers at every turn. No need to specify which side is the scientific one, and no need to specify which side your average lay person is going to find most persuasive.

Still, while free speech may not guarantee that the truth prevails, at least it guarantees that it gets a fighting chance. As I’m sure many of us still remember the late great Christopher Hitchens explicitly invoked Holocaust denial as an example of the kind of thing that has to be allowed if free speech is to mean anything at all, precisely because it’s the kind of thing most of us would like to silence. If anything I think old Hitch’s question “Who gets to decide?” is even more pressing today. After seeing how easily institutions like courts, the mainstream media, and even universities can be captured by agenda-pushers of various kinds, it’s unfathomable to me how people can still trust anyone else to decide for us what we’re allowed to read or hear.

Movement or just more delay?

Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel on Friday to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into the presence of classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

The presence of classified documents=Trump’s theft of classified documents.

Though the appointment installs a new supervisor atop the probes — both of which are expected to accelerate now that the midterm elections are over — the special counsel will still report to Garland, who has ultimate say of whether to bring charges.

The role will be filled by Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s public integrity section in Washington and who later served as the acting chief federal prosecutor in Nashville, Tennessee, during the Obama administration. More recently, he has been the chief prosecutor for the special court in the Hague that is tasked with investigating international war crimes.

But law people are saying this is just another unnecessary extra step. Never mind yet more investigating whether to charge him, just charge him already!

Always remember kids – knowing that men are not women is bigotry. The right, moral, just, decent, humane view is that men are women if they say they are. Knowing that mere saying isn’t magic, and that while declaration can change some kinds of reality, it can’t change all of them, is evil, shameful, malevolent, deserving of every kind of hostility and ostracism.

Aw yeah.

The Telegraph reports:

The Society of Authors has been “lost” to cancel culture, members fear, after free speech rebels failed to oust the current chairman in a row over gender ideology.

It can be confusing trying to pick out who is for free speech and who is for cancel culture in this dispute. Joanne Harris was exercising her free speech when she used the violent attack on Salman Rushdie to sneer at JK Rowling, but critics see her sneering as an abuse of her role as chairman.

The UK’s largest writers’ union has faced an internal revolt over claims it has not properly defended gender-critical authors from being “cancelled” if they do not agree with prevailing opinions.

…

Writers including Julie Bindel and Amanda Craig brought a motion at its annual general meeting on Thursday night, which sought to have Harris removed as president. They brought another that aimed to introduce “robust” measures to protect free speech.

Both were voted down. The smelly little orthodoxy won big.

I can’t help finding the Elon Musk car crash funny. Dude bounces in shouting threats and insults at his employees and guess what, most of them quit.

Twitter has told employees that the company’s office buildings will be temporarily closed, with immediate effect. In a message seen by the BBC, workers were told that the offices would reopen on Monday 21 November. It did not give a reason for the move.

The announcement comes amid reports that large numbers of staff were quitting after new owner Elon Musk called on them to sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave.

And they said “We’re already working long hours at high intensity so fuck you, we’re out.” Musk’s only option was to scream “Fine, then I’m closing the building!!”

Ain’t capitalism great?

Well that’s one way to get away with murder: become a Head of State.

The US has determined that Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader – Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – has immunity from a lawsuit filed by murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancé.

…

[I]n court filings, the US State department said he has immunity due to his new role as Saudi prime minister.

So if you’re a murderer the thing to do is get a new role as prime minister.

It was always highly unlikely that the US, as Saudi Arabia’s strategic partner and arms supplier, was ever going to facilitate the arrest of MBS. But granting him immunity in this way will cause some relief in the Saudi royal court and has provoked a storm of protest from human rights groups as well as Mr Khashoggi’s fiancée.

And disgust in anyone paying attention.

Mr Biden declined to talk to Mohammed bin Salman when he first became president.

But over the summer, President Biden said he wanted to “reorient” relations, ahead of a visit to Saudi Arabia in July.

Right, because Saudi Arabia is such an important “ally.”

His visit – in which he was pictured fist-bumping the crown prince – was criticised as validating the Saudi government following Mr Khashoggi’s murder.

Because it did.

Amnesty’s Agnes Callamard wrote on Twitter: “This is a deep betrayal. Another one. First disregarded by Pres. Trump. Then Pres. Biden’s fist bump… At all points, they had other choices.”

And Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the Biden administration had “sold Jamal Kashoggi’s blood for Saudi oil”.

Those SUVs don’t run on pixie dust you know.

Joanne Harris remains.

The novelist Joanne Harris has seen off an attempt to remove her from a leading position at the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, after members comprehensively backed her in a vote.

…

In a vote of its members at its AGM, held online, a resolution to unseat Harris as chair of the Society of Authors management committee fell by 608 votes to 143. It represented 81% of voters backing her.

Too bad. She seems very unpleasant to me – bratty, sneery, flippant, and a bully.

The move to oust Harris followed a row earlier this year over her response to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie in New York state. The Booker prize-winning author lost sight in one eye and the use of a hand in the onstage knife attack.

Harris was criticised for launching a Twitter poll in the wake of the attack and after a death threat to the Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who had expressed solidarity with Rushdie.

Harris asked authors if they had ever received a death threat, offering a choice of answers: “Yes”, “Hell, yes”, “No, never” and “Show me, dammit”.

In other words it was snide mockery of JK Rowling, because all the cool kids think she’s a “transphobe.” But apparently the members like that kind of thing so whatever.

Billy Bragg says those evil women caused harassment of trans people to increase, doubters asked for evidence, he produced “people said.”

Several students said. Hearsay Your Honour. Also what was the baseline? Also, we know from long irritating experience that many trans activists call any kind of disagreement or skepticism “harassment,” so no, “several trans students have reported” doesn’t add up to evidence. At all.

The vacuous smug bullies are out in force today.

Only Kathleen didn’t say anything about being “offended.”

Condescending shits like Billy Bragg probably.

Amanda Brunton calls Stock names and urges people to go protest her talk, then whines about people talking back. Solidarity forever wot wot?

The people they hire at Cambridge these days. Good grief.

Childish as well as censorious.

It’s right there on the sign – votes for WOMEN.

Today in women’s prison news:

A prisoner who identifies as a woman – despite having the physicality of a tall man – battered a fellow inmate in the male wing of a Scottish jail after being made the subject of “comments” by other lags, a court heard on Wednesday.

Having the physicality of a tall man=being a man. He has the physicality of a tall man because he is one.

Katie Dolatowski, 22, a convicted paedophile who sexually assaulted a 10 year old girl in a Fife supermarket, was serving a sentence in Polmont Young Offenders’ Institution for physical assault.

Let’s pause to notice this. He’s a tall man who assaulted a ten year old girl. He’s not a good person. He’s pretty much the worst kind of person – one who uses superior strength to harm and injure and terrorize people who aren’t as tall and strong as he is, for his own jollies. He’s a very bad man, yet here’s a newspaper bowing and scraping to his “marginalized idennniny” as if he were a fragile delicate flower brutalized by society.

Falkirk Sheriff Court was told she had been placed in male accommodation in the prison “notwithstanding” her identifying as a woman.

As he should have been. Men who assault women, let alone little girls, should never be placed in female accommodation. Neither should any other men, but especially the rapists and batterers should not.

Appearing in the dock at Falkirk Sheriff Court flanked by security guards, Dolatowski, whose last address was given on court papers as Dunfermline, Fife, pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr Patterson by punching him repeatedly on the head and body.

Not something a woman would be able to do.

Solicitor Kelly Howe, defending, said: “She identifies as female, but, notwithstanding that, she had been placed in the male prison population at Polmont, and the court can probably anticipate the difficulties that caused her.

Can anyone imagine the difficulties that his being placed in the female prison population would cause the women in that prison population? Can anyone manage to care?

In March 2018, Dolatowski sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in the toilet of Morrisons supermarket in Kirkcaldy. The terrified youngster was grabbed by the face, shoved into the cubicle, and ordered to remove her trousers.

The attack came a month after Dolatowski had filmed a 12-year-old girl on the toilet in another supermarket in the Fife town. For the sex offences, she was placed on a three year community payback order and banned from having contact with children.

#Not Our Crimes