It turns out that buying children can get expensive.

A heartbroken Dublin dad “cried the whole plane journey home”, after he had to leave his surrogate triplets in Kenya.

His what? What the hell are surrogate triplets?

Edward O’Reilly, who lives in Santry Cross, left the African country with just the birth certificates rather than his three newborn daughters.

His? Isn’t there someone missing from this scenario?

Briella, Camilla, and Renesmee were born almost two months prematurely on September 1. Edward and his partner flew over to collect their children four days later. 

His partner? Their children? The children were born in Kenya while their parents were in Ireland? How does that work?

Also why were they thinking they could just “collect” two months premature triplets as if they were so many grapefruits?

They used a surrogacy service which cost €50,000 and were told all expenses were covered in the initial payment. However, they were asked for a further €16,000 when they arrived.

Ohhhhhhhh you mean they rented a woman to gestate and push out the babies for them. How very elegant.

Then they were asked for another €12,000 in hospital bills for the babies’ medication and food, along with an extra €11,000 to pay the medics. They cannot bring their daughters home until these costs are paid. 

Aw jeez that’s so unfair. You should be able to buy babies cheaply. Also Kenya should pay for their medical needs, obviously.

“It’s like a nightmare. We wanted to be parents and now that we finally are, we’re not allowed to have our babies,” Edward said.

Except they finally aren’t. Someone else did all the work of “being parents” so far, and she hasn’t even rated a mention in this disgusting article. She might as well be a machine.

“From the beginning, we always knew we were going to be a family. We talked about having a kid on our first date and we’re together six years now.

“Last March, we finally started contacting agencies. We thought we could do it and we could afford it. Our family members were willing to help and put a few bob together.”

Agencies. That’s how people have babies, you know: they contact agencies.

great. Everything was going to plan, the clinic was really nice, everything looked perfect.

“We found out that we were pregnant this March. In June we were told it was triplets and we were absolutely ecstatic,” Edward (33) said.

Jesus fucking christ. They weren’t pregnant; a woman in Kenya whom they still haven’t mentioned was pregnant.

“But we also knew there could be health complications during the pregnancy. Through those months we prayed every day for the surrogate and that she’d be okay.”

There it is at last: the first mention of the fully human being – “the surrogate” – who made their baby for them.

The rest of the story is that there were big medical bills, which is not particularly surprising with very premature triplets, and he couldn’t pay them, and here’s his Go Fund Me. What about “the surrogate”? Nothing. Not a word. She’s just a machine.

That was a different person.

A man in Spain who beat his female partner for opposing his transition has avoided charges of gender-based violence by legally changing his identification to “female” and adopting a woman’s name.

Well that seems only fair. Since he now has a woman’s name, he obviously can’t have beaten up his female partner in the past.

Earlier this year, Spain’s Cabinet of Ministers approved a new draft law on gender identity, one which allow anyone over the age of 16 to legally change their name and sex without any medical consultation or intervention. Minors between the ages of 14 and 16 will be allowed to change their name and sex with parental consent, and those as young as 12 can do so with a Judge’s authorization.

All the men will be able to beat up all the women!

“Katy” Montgomerie peddling the usual lie:

Nobody insisted on “cis” anything. A woman stipulated female only care. “Cis” has nothing to do with it.

Another nasty contemptuous hostile dismisser of women.

Karen AND twat – we can tell how that “genderfluid”? “nonbinary”? – person thinks of women. Somehow I suspect that underneath it all J is a man. You can claim to be trans all you like but then when the misogyny comes bubbling out everyone can see the reality.

Why women can’t have nice things.

Yeah let’s really buckle down and get to work punishing women for “misgendering” men. That’ll make the world a better place.

Joan Smith writes:

Sir Keir Starmer strikes again. At the very moment when the government is falling apart, and thousands of women desperately want to vote Labour, he has reminded us that we can’t trust him or his party. It’s not just that he made an appearance last night at an awards ceremony organised by Pink News, an organ despised by many feminists for its relentless promotion of misogynist gender ideology. That was bad enough, but Starmer also took the opportunity to make a series of wild promises to the adoring audience, including one on ‘hate crime’ that constitutes a direct threat to free expression.

Especially disobedient women’s free expression.

Hate crime legislation is already a problem, allowing individuals to make complaints to the police about things that aren’t even crimes — being ‘misgendered’, for instance. The fastest-growing area of complaints is ‘transgender identity’, which rose by 56% in the year to March 2022. There is ample reason to worry about how the existing law is being used but Starmer wants to double down, saying “it’s time for tougher hate crime laws so every LGBT+ crime is treated as an aggravated offence.” It went down a storm with his audience, but raises the prospect of law-abiding people facing an aggravated sentence for a social media post that uses the ‘wrong’ pronouns.

Also I wonder if Starmer has ever urged making every misogynist crime an aggravated offense. I have to say I doubt it. I don’t think misogyny is on his radar, just as it’s not on that of Pink News, or Peter Tatchell, or Owen Jones, or Jolyon Maugham, or Billy Bragg, or Philip Pullman.

At the same time, Starmer threw a sop to women, saying he would “uphold the Equality Act,” including its provision for single-sex spaces. Though some Labour supporters have welcomed this part of his speech, they’re clutching at straws. You can’t uphold the right to single-sex spaces while also allowing any sexual predator to acquire a legal document that says he must be treated as a woman, even though he has a male body. Refuges and services that refuse access to trans women might win a case in court, but the prospect of fighting a costly legal action will make it easier to just give in.

Which will make it easier for women to just give up.

Trump testified under oath yesterday. It seems highly unlikely he told the truth throughout. I wonder if the opposing lawyers can demonstrate that he lied.

Former President Trump answered questions under oath Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a magazine columnist who says he raped her in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room.

The deposition gave Carroll’s lawyers a chance to interrogate Trump about the assault allegations, as well as statements he made in 2019 when she told her story publicly for the first time.

You remember those statements. They weren’t along the lines of “I would never rape anyone!!” but rather “She’s not my type.” Such a nice man.

His legal team worked for years to delay his deposition in the lawsuit, which was filed when the Republican was still president. A federal judge last week rejected Trump’s request for another delay, saying he couldn’t “run the clock out on plaintiff’s attempt to gain a remedy for what allegedly was a serious wrong.”

You can’t blame a guy for trying.

Wait, yes you can.

On the case:

She is. She’s been sending out letters.

The CBC reports on trans issues as if the trans ideology were just obviously and unmistakably the latest in a long line of progressive movements, entirely comparable to unionization and civil rights and feminism and lesbian/gay rights. It’s not. It’s a cuckoo in the nest.

In school board elections across Ontario this Monday, dozens of candidates are running on promises to roll back protections for transgender students, part of a concerted effort by conservative lobby groups to undo policies aimed at addressing systemic discrimination.

But those “protections” often destroy protections for female students. It’s not only conservative lobby groups who object to the destruction of women’s rights or protections.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a non-profit that monitors extremism, recently posted that two candidates in Manitoba’s school board elections later this month who have expressed anti-LGBTQ views. 

But are the views “anti-LGBTQ” or are they anti trans ideology? We can’t tell, because the CBC disguises them under the meaningless catchall “LGBTQ.” This not only puts a heavy thumb on the scale, it also makes it impossible to tell what they’re even talking about.

For weeks, some candidates in Ottawa, Waterloo, Hamilton, among other places in Ontario, have been using transphobic rhetoric in public, portraying gender-inclusive sex education as an attempt to indoctrinate their children.

Ok wait a minute. There’s something specific we can address. Treating gender ideology as simple obvious fact is a form of indoctrination. It’s not a simple obvious fact that some – indeed many – people have an interior “gender” that doesn’t match their external sex. Teaching children that that’s a thing is indeed indoctrination. It’s a new, and quite drastic, and absurd belief. How is that not a doctrine? How is teaching it not indoctrination?

An investigation by CBC News found that at least 20 candidates for trustee positions in Ontario had either used discriminatory terms in interviews, aligned themselves with transphobic lobby groups or used their social media accounts to amplify transphobic content.

For example, Mark Paralovos, a trustee candidate in Guelph, Ont., has repeatedly taken to social media to deny the existence of trans and non-binary genders.

“There are men. There are women. That’s it,” he tweeted earlier this month.

Oh the horror.

It’s “transphobic content” to say that humans are either men or women. Now, if you say a parallel thing about horses, or orangutans, or whales, you’re just stating a fact, but if you say it about humans you’re “denying the existence” of special magical people who are special and magical.

Terry Rekar, running for a trustee position in Peterborough, Ont., boasts of leading a chapter of Action4Canada, a conspiracy-minded far-right group that also denies the existence of gender minorities and describes gender-affirming surgery as “child abuse.”

Cutting off healthy breasts or penises at the behest of a new and warped ideology? That’s not child abuse?

Another candidate, Shannon Boschy, said Ontario’s sex-education curriculum was partly to blame for the rise in transgender and non-binary identifying students.

In an interview with CBC News, Boschy said this amounted to a “social contagion.” (According to Statistics Canada, fewer than one per cent of Canadians born between 1997 and 2006 identify as transgender or non-binary.) 

(Note that the parenthesis simply states a percentage, it doesn’t compare it to anything, so it doesn’t establish that there has been no rise in transgender and non-binary identifying students.)

Boschy, the trustee candidate in Ottawa, said he wanted to repeal a policy that gives students final say about whether parents are informed if they identify as a different gender at school.

His opposition is based, in part, on how his own child transitioned genders. Boschy said the school didn’t inform him and that contributed to a rift with his child. “I lost my relationship with my child,” he said.

But for trans advocates, such privacy policies are vital for keeping gender and sexual minority students safe. 

Transgender students are best placed to determine how and when they come out, said Fae Johnstone, a trans advocate who runs a consulting firm based in Ottawa that specializes in gender justice.

Are they? Always? In every single case? Including when they go on to transition and then regret it a few years later?

This is a crappy, reckless, tendentious piece of reporting.

It’s that day again.

DSB is District School Board. Tremble is a trustee of Waterloo Region DSB.

Interesting. Trump appears to have lied in some court documents.

Former President Donald Trump signed legal documents describing evidence of election fraud that he knew were false, a federal judge indicated on Wednesday.

Tssssss naughty.

U.S. District Court Judge David Carter wrote in an 18-page opinion that emails from attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election, needed to be turned over to the Jan. 6 select committee. Those emails, Carter wrote, “show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public.”

I think we can guess what their defense will be. Trump can’t really be said to know anything, because he just says what he wants to say without ever even thinking about whether it’s true or not. Therefore it’s not lying, it’s just Trump saying what he wants to say.

The emails are among the files that Eastman had been declining to turn over to the committee, citing attorney-client privilege. While Carter concluded that some of the materials fell under that privilege, he ruled that Eastman must disclose four emails to congressional investigators because they are evidence of a likely crime.

“The Court finds that these four documents are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of the obstruction crime,” wrote Carter, who is based in California.

According to Carter, Trump and his attorneys alleged in a Dec. 4 filing in Georgia state court that Fulton County had improperly counted more than 10,000 votes of dead people, felons and unregistered voters. They then moved that proceeding to federal court and discussed whether to use the same statistics in that filing. In private correspondence, Trump’s lawyers noted that the then-president had resisted signing documents containing “specific numbers.” On Dec. 31, Eastman emailed other Trump lawyers that the numbers filed in state court were not accurate.

“Although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate,” Eastman wrote in an email to colleagues. “For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.”

Oh dear. How sad for the “He didn’t know” excuse. His own lawyer said he was made to know. I suppose they could still say that even when he’s been “made aware” he still doesn’t “know” because that’s how stupid he is, but I think legally speaking that doesn’t fly.

“President Trump, moreover, signed a verification swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers ‘are true and correct’ or ‘believed to be true and correct’ to the best of his knowledge and belief,” added Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. “The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public. The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

There’s that thing where Trump explains his magic phrase that makes all his lies become truths – he’ll be trotting that out.

Originally a comment by latsot on At a women’s shelter.

I raise money for nia (donate!) largely because of this sort of thing. nia is run and staffed entirely by women and provides female-only crisis and other care.

I’m told constantly that I’m transphobic for doing this. There are lies circulating all the time that I’m stealing from the charity or that I’m not really doing the half marathons. I’ve had people impersonating me to dissuade others from donating. I’ve had death threats because of it.

And then, of course, the inevitable happens again and rather than pausing for thought, trans activists double down. We know why: it’s an area in which it’s so patently obvious that single-sex spaces and services are needed that it drives a wedge into those other areas that might seem – without much examination – to be more fuzzy.

Once again, incoherent, inconsistent ideology trumps the suffering of women precisely because it’s incoherent and inconsistent.

On a brighter note, though, there are still a lot of people who are a) incredibly generous and b) not fooled. I managed to raise around £3000 for nia this year despite the economic difficulties and the fact that I only really spread the word on Twitter. I don’t have a huge number of followers, so people have been amazingly generous in support of a good cause. I’m doing more wheelcahair half marathons next year (haven’t fully decided which yet) and will be advertising more aggressively. It’s going to be a tough year for charities but I’ll see if I can beat that total.

Unbelievable.

“Freedom of expression is a fundamental principle which we wholeheartedly support

…

…

HOWEVER”

It’s as if stupidity is an erupting volcano, and the lava is slowly but steadily swallowing everything. Every single last thing.

[Caius by the way is pronounced Keys]

This is the really breathtaking bit – the brand new CEO of the hospital telling the patient “we don’t share your beliefs so we’ve decided not to do your surgery.”

I think she might very well get fired for that, and perhaps more than fired.

It’s a quite incredible thing to say – to put in writing. I think it screams lawsuit.

Of course Raw Story can’t report it honestly.

A North Carolina school district has decided to halt all future competition with one of its school’s female volleyball teams after a trans player allegedly injured a player on an opposing team, The National Desk reports.

A male player injured a female player.

A trans player on the Highlands School volleyball team reportedly spike the ball hard at a girl on the opposing team, hitting her in the face and giving her “severe head and neck injuries, resulting in long-term concussion symptoms,” according to the Education First Alliance.

A male player did that. The issue isn’t that he’s trans, it’s that he’s male. Trans is the reason he was allowed to do that, but male is the reason he was able to.

It’s public information who the CEO of Princess Grace Hospital is.

HCA Healthcare UK has appointed Maxine Estop Green (pictured) as [CEO] of The Princess Grace Hospital, with effect from 3 October.

She’s a brand new CEO and one of the first things she does is tell a critically ill patient “we don’t like your values so we’re not going to do your necessary surgery.”

Estop Green’s 22-year career in the private healthcare sector began at the turn of the century in finance management at Ramsay Healthcare.

Cool cool cool. All about the money; not about the patients. Awesome.

Estop Green added she was “beyond excited“ to step into the role of CEO at The Princess Grace Hospital and said she looked forward to supporting and guiding the hospital.

By canceling urgent surgery for a woman patient at the last minute, on the grounds that “we don’t share your values.”

It is just beyond belief.

ripX4nutmeg at Glinner update reports on a hospital nightmare:

In one of the most shocking stories yet, a London hospital has cancelled a woman’s life-saving operation at the last minute because it doesn’t ‘share her values’. That ‘value’ she had was that she wanted the aftercare nurses to be female.

Former solicitor Teresa needs urgent, rare and highly complex, colorectal surgery. She selected the private Princess Grace Hospital, which specialises in women’s healthcare, for it specifically because she didn’t want to be in a mixed-sex facility.

A victim of sexual assaults, Teresa made it clear to the hospital how important this issue was to her, by both requesting a single-sex room and bathroom, and stating she would only answer questions on forms about her sex, not her ‘gender identity’.

During a pre-operation intimate procedure, a male member of staff, wearing a blonde wig and bright lipstick, opened the door uninvited, and peered in. He made eye contact with her, before leaving. Teresa wondered if she was being targeted due to her requests.

She wrote them a letter/email expanding on her concerns, which is included in the post at Glinnerland.

She then had to go home for three days to prepare for the operation, in which pre-op medication was to be couriered to her. Nothing arrived. She called the hospital and was told the operation had been cancelled, with no explanation given why.

She then found an email had been sent to her by the CEO of the hospital saying the operation, which was due the next working day, had been cancelled due to a ‘lack of shared values’ and to ‘protect staff from unacceptable distress’

It does actually say that. It’s quite breathtaking. “We do not share your beliefs and are not able to adhere to your requests and we have therefore decided we will not proceed with your surgery.” Bam, just like that. “We don’t like your beliefs therefore we won’t do your surgery so fuck you.”

There’s a lot more. It’s all breathtaking.

H/t Sackbut

A thing that calls itself a rape and sexual abuse counselling centre changes the subject to…pronouns. I guess rape and sexual abuse are so trivial that something more serious was needed?

Replies are closed. Retweets are hostile.

Oh yay, we’ve got some of the world’s worst air quality today. Go Seattle!

As the days of smoke-filled air from ongoing wildfires in the Cascades continue, air quality in Seattle remains an issue.

It’s been unremittingly bad for two weeks now. Today it’s worse.

The city ranked fifth worldwide for poor [bad] air quality and pollution as of Wednesday morning, according to IQAir, a Swiss air-quality technology company that also operates a real-time air-quality information platform. Portland and Vancouver, B.C., also ranked in the Top 10, along with cities in China, India and Pakistan.

Where oh where oh where are the adults? Where did they all go? What are they doing? Why are they hiding? When will they get a fucking grip?

First the boring obvious for the millionth time: there’s no such thing as “people’s chosen pronouns” because people don’t get to “choose” special personal meanings for public language.

Much more to the point, humoring people about “their pronouns” absolutely does not affirm human dignity, it treats people as if they were toddlers. There is no dignity in playing let’s pretend in public forever. Trying to impose one’s personal fantasies about one’s personal self is just about the most embarrassingly childish thing one can do and get praised for it.

How does it foster inclusivity? Do people want more and more friends with special pronouns they have to memorize? More and more friends insisting on playing out their fantasies in real life? More and more friends pretending they have no idea what female and male bodies are?

How does it foster respect? Isn’t it far more likely to foster anxiously concealed contempt?

Where are the adults??

Billy Bragg writes in the New Statesman about how “reactionary” people have to be accountable, apparently to people like for instance Billy Bragg.

When pressed on whether his idea of accountability included the abuse suffered by JK Rowling following her statements on trans women, [Graham] Norton suggested that it might be more illuminating to talk to trans children and their parents, rather than merely amplifying the opinions of a celebrity or author – even a very good one. 

Says a celebrity writing in the New Statesman, which he probably wouldn’t be able to do if he weren’t a celebrity.

But more to the point: what are “trans children”?

What if there are no “trans children,” but only children swept up in a fad for pretending that people can be “in the wrong body” and can know that from earliest childhood? What if “talking to trans children” simply means talking to children who have been misled by their gullible parents and teachers? What if children are better off not being told that if they don’t conform to gender norms they are actually the other sex? What then?

I have long believed that what right-wing media call “cancel culture” is nothing more than the tendency of reactionaries to cry wolf when caught conducting a rearguard action against the progress made by minorities over the past half-century. 

But what if we’re not the “reactionaries”? What if it’s not actually reactionary to say that children should be free to ignore the stupid gender norms instead of making permanent drastic changes to their bodies? What if the fans of gender ideology are actually not on the same team as the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement? What then?

Rowling retorted, Bragg didn’t like that, Norton suspended his Twitter account.

I believe that freedom of expression gives us the right to offend, provided that our statements are generalised rather than directed at an individual, but those who offend should expect to be held accountable for their behaviour – and celebrity confers no protection.

Then why did Norton hide when he was held to account?

He doesn’t say.