Mkay this is scary. Everything is scary these days. This is very scary.

As former Republican senator Rick Santorum addressed Republican lawmakers gathered in San Diego at the American Legislative Exchange Council policy summit, he detailed a plan to fundamentally remake the United States. 

By making a new constitution! A new far-right constitution! Oh boy, kids, won’t that be fun?!

The December 2021 ALEC meeting represents a flashpoint in a movement spearheaded by powerful conservative interests, some of whom are tied to Trumpworld and share many of Trump’s goals, to alter the nation’s bedrock legal text since 1788. It’s an effort that has largely taken place out of public view. 

…

During an extraordinary few weeks in June, the Supreme Court’s three new Trump appointees powered the reversal of Roe v. Wade. They fortified gun rights and bolstered religious freedoms. Future presidents now have less power to confront the climate crisis. Each win is the product of a steady, and in some cases, decades-long quest by conservatives to bend the arc of history rightward. 

Well I guess we can take comfort from the climate change part. Soon we’ll all just be dead or struggling to stay alive and no one will give a rat’s ass about any constitution.

Communalism strikes again.

A private school in Vadodara, which had planned a field trip for kindergarten children to a mosque in the city, called off the visit after protests from Bajrang Dal on Tuesday. Volunteers of the Bajrang Dal, who claimed to have “received complaints” from parents, arrived at the school and threatened the school management with dire consequences if children were taken to the mosque.

I don’t really think schools should be taking students to mosques or temples or churches, but I much more definitely think other people shouldn’t make threats over it.

The Delhi Public School in Kalali in Vadodara, which had earlier also taken children to visit a temple in the city, had planned to take the kindergarten children to a mosque as part of a field visit for value education this week. However, on Tuesday volunteers of the Bajrang Dal arrived on campus and staged a protest, chanting the Ram Dhun. Later, they met with the principal of the school and “warned” of agitation if the field trip to the mosque was not called off.

“Warned” as in “we will get violent if you do this.”

Ahhh what a lovely man – he buried the ex on his golf course because tax break. The sentimental old fool.

When Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, was buried last month near the first hole of Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, few immediately guessed that her grave’s location might also serve her ex-husband’s long-held tax planning purposes.

Well at least near the first hole is special. Could have been the fifth, or behind the pro shop.

Tax code in New Jersey exempts cemetery land from all taxes, rates, and assessments – and her grave, as such, potentially has advantageous tax implications for a Trump family trust that owns the golf business, in a state where property and land taxes are notoriously high.

“Look! We buried Mom here! The whole thing is now a cemetery! Now look over there for a minute while I move my ball out of the sand trap.”

Brooke Harrington, a professor of sociology at Dartmouth college in New Hampshire, tweeted on Saturday that she had looked into claims that Ivana Trump’s resting place might benefit her ex-husband’s tax planning from beyond the grave.

“As a tax researcher, I was skeptical of rumors Trump buried his ex-wife in that sad little plot of dirt on his Bedminster, NJ golf course just for tax breaks. So I checked the NJ tax code & folks…it’s a trifecta of tax avoidance. Property, income & sales tax, all eliminated,” Harrington wrote, after opinions accusing Trump of being primarily motivated by the possibility of a tax break began popping up on social media.

Well, he’s sentimental that way.

Ivana Trump was buried in a plot close to the first tee of the golf course, following her funeral in Manhattan on 20 July. Her resting place is marked with a rudimentary wreath of white flowers and an engraved granite stone.

And it’s near the first tee, so, super classy.

[E]very break counts, and the former president has previously designated the plot as a farm because some trees on the site are turned into mulch used for flower beds, according to the Washington Post.

And that doesn’t make it a farm??

Obviously I had to follow that link.

So let’s read the abstract:

Throughout 2019, retired athletes Martina Navratilova (tennis), Sharron Davies (swimming), Kelly Holmes (athletics) and Paula Radcliffe (marathon) all spoke publically about what they perceive to be the unfairness of trans women competing in women’s elite sport.

What they “perceive to be” the unfairness of men competing in women’s sport (elite or otherwise) – ah yes it’s wholly subjective, and downright whimsical. Why would anyone think it’s unfair for men to compete in women’s sport? Why would anyone think it’s unfair for adults to compete in children’s sport? Why would anyone think it’s unfair for non-disabled people to compete against disabled people? It’s all so silly, isn’t it.

These successful athletes, all with a history of growing and promoting women’s sport, were simultaneously celebrated for sharing their thoughts on a complex issue, and labelled transphobic for expressing anti-inclusive and transphobic views.

Growing women’s sport? It’s not a tomato. And the issue isn’t complex – it’s quite simple to see why men should not compete in women’s sport. And they may have been celebrated and called terfs at the same time, but it was by different people, so the “simultaneously” is kind of silly. “Both” would have been clearer. The views of course were neither “anti-inclusive” nor “transphobic.”

Navratilova, particularly, despite her long history of fighting for inclusion and to end homophobia in sport, faced a severe backlash for expressing anti-trans rhetoric.

But what kind of “inclusion”? Inclusion of whom? She doesn’t have a long history of fighting for the inclusion of men in women’s sport; why would she, why should she? And she didn’t express “anti-trans” anything and what she said was not mere “rhetoric.” This Sarah Teetzel person is a terrible writer and not much of a thinker.

Ok connectivity issues persist, so I’ll be scarce today and much of tomorrow, SO I thought I would post a kind of miscellany room away from miscellany room, where you can talk about whatever you feel like talking about. Report interesting news or gossip or brawling if you see any.

Kathleen Stock points out a drastic conflict at the Tavistock GIDS between storytelling and actual real world drugs and surgeries.

A crucial yet underappreciated part of the story is the clinic’s strong emphasis on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic approaches to mental health. The founder of the Tavistock, Hugh Crichton-Miller, was explicitly influenced by Freud and Jung. And when Domenico Di Ceglie founded the Gender Identity Service for children in 1989, later commissioned nationally as the only English NHS provider, he too was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic methods.

And the thing about those is, they’re much closer to the storytelling end of the spectrum than they are to the medical end.

In a 2018 article describing his process, Di Ceglie quotes a Jungian perspective approvingly: “the psyche speaks in metaphors, in analogies, in images, that’s its primary language, so why talk differently? We must write in a way that evokes the poetic basis of mind… it’s a sensitivity to language.”

Lalala, it’s all so profound, know what I mean?

This intellectual focus upon the fluidity and construction of meaning, and upon the power of narrative to create more stable personalities, is also heavily present in the published work of Bernadette Wren, Head of Psychology for 25 years at what insiders tweely call the “Tavi”. By her own description, she was “deeply involved” with the GIDS team for much of that time. Alongside psychoanalysis, she adds post-structuralist philosophy to her formative influences, citing figures such as Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault as important in her thinking.

All very well if you’re a lit crit, not so hot if you’re an actual doctor handing out meds.

True to the relativism of these philosophers, in Wren’s intellectual vision there are no objective truths but only a series of subjective narratives. She writes: “If the idea of living in the postmodern era means anything, it is that in all our activity together we are in the business of making meaning.” She continues: “In our time, it is hard to see any knowledge or understanding as ‘mirroring’ nature, or ‘mirroring’ reality.”

Awesome, man. Now about those blockers.

Against this intellectual background, the Tavistock’s flannel about being a thoughtful service sheltering from the storm of our present culture wars starts to make more sense. At least historically, senior clinicians at the Tavistock have never believed there is anything but certain context-bound forms of thought, floating about in a post-modern void. They have assumed meaning is constructed, not found. They have denied that there is any certain or timeless knowledge, but only specific cultural dynamics to navigate in the here and now. Under such an approach, what else could you do but be “thoughtful”?

And creative, and poetic, and fluid.

A recognition of ambiguity within the life of the psyche would be perfectly fine — indeed, I assume, therapeutically helpful — if all that had ever happened at GIDS was that people sat around talking to one other. But the general relativist stance of senior clinicians was made incredibly dangerous for patients by the presence of an additional factor in the therapeutic mix, nestling somewhat anomalously among Di Ceglie’s stated foundational aims for his service. Alongside commonplace psychodynamic goals such as “to ameliorate associated behavioural, emotional and relationship difficulties”, “to allow mourning processes to occur”, “to enable symbol formation and symbolic thinking” and “to sustain hope”, we also find: “to encourage exploration of the mind-body relationship by promoting close collaboration among professionals in different specialities, including paediatric endocrinology.”

Thud. Lalala, look at the pretty birdies, lalala here comes Fotherington-Tomas, lalala hello sun hello sky hello grass hello…paediatric endocrinology?

I don’t know about you, but when I read this, the birds — or rather the mermaids, perhaps — stop singing.

Same. There’s exploration, and then there’s medication and surgery.

For it’s at this point that it becomes clear to the percipient reader that these people think it a reasonable goal to alter a child’s healthy bodily tissue in order to accommodate a mind which is, by their own admission, constantly developing. It’s true they don’t think medicalisation is inevitable for every particular child, and it’s also true that they admit lots of uncertainty and liminality. But still, this option is on the table at GIDS, courtesy of friendly endocrinologist colleagues and their injections.

If they admit lots of uncertainty and liminality, why aren’t they more cautious? A lot more cautious?

Worse, with the availability of a medicalised option, there seems to have been little real recognition among managers that its presence put the remit of the service on an entirely new footing — one that absolutely required stringent standards of truth and falsity, and a thoroughly old-fashioned belief in the existence of prior standards of right and wrong. Talking to children about their identity issues and co-creating meaning with them may be an art, but giving them gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues (GnRHa) is still very much a science — or at least it should be.

It’s so obvious when she spells it out, isn’t it. I’d love to know why it wasn’t obvious to the people at GIDS.

During GIDS’s experiment in administering these unlicensed drugs, doubts were already emerging about the poor quality of the evidence base, and about the potentially negative effects of GnRHa on brain maturation, bone density, kidneys, height, sexual function, and mature genitalia formation.

Trivial stuff like that.

Yet the Patient Information Sheet offered to patients and their parents by clinicians minimised the then-suspected risks. And though the process was widely advertised as a harmless “pause” on puberty, of the initial 44 children in their initial cohort for the treatment, almost all went on to cross-sex hormones, raising the question of what made this treatment a meaningful pause for reflection in any real sense.

Storytelling gone desperately wrong.

Climate change in action:

Wildfires in California and Montana exploded in size amid windy, hot conditions, forcing evacuation orders as they quickly encroached on neighborhoods.

In California’s Klamath national forest, the fast-moving McKinney fire, which started Friday, went from charring just over 1 sq mile (1 sq km) to scorching as much as 62 sq miles (160 sqkm) by Saturday in a largely rural area near the Oregon state line, according to fire officials.

Meanwhile in Montana, the Elmo wildfire nearly tripled in size to more than 11 sq miles within a few miles of the town of Elmo. And roughly 200 miles to the south, Idaho residents remained under evacuation orders as the Moose fire in the Salmon-Challis national forest charred more than 67.5 sq miles in timbered land near the town of Salmon. It was 17% contained.

This will go on for months, until the rains start.

Meanwhile, crews made significant progress in battling another major blaze in California that forced evacuations of thousands of people near Yosemite national park earlier this month. The Oak fire was 52% contained by Saturday, according to a Cal Fire incident update. But amid scorching temperatures the danger wasn’t entirely over, with structures and homes at risk until the blaze has been completely extinguished.

The fires come as scorching temperatures bake the Pacific north-west, the west remains parched in record drought, and severe storms sent flash floods surging across several states. In Kentucky, flash floods have claimed the lives of at least 25 people in what experts have called a 1-in-1,000 year rain event.

This isn’t the dress rehearsal, this is the play.

Oh so Keir Starmer isn’t terminally confused about what women are? Whaddyaknow.

In case like me you haven’t been following – Carrie Dunn at the Guardian reports:

Sarina Wiegman’s team have done just what Gareth Southgate’s men did last summer – they’ve captured the imagination of the entire country with their determination, happiness and outrageous skill. Not only that, they went one better – although they went to extra time, Chloe Kelly scored to make England the champions of Europe.

This has been the most-watched Women’s Euros in history. It broke the previous record for Women’s Euros in-person attendance way back in the group stages, when a cumulative total of 248,075 fans had already been through the turnstiles after just a few games. To top it off, the 87,192 fans at Wembley on Sunday meant that England v Germany had the highest attendance of any European Championship final – men’s or women’s.

That’s interesting.

Although there is clearly brilliant talent already in the game – Williamson’s and Wiegman’s Lionesses are proof of that – this tournament must be the starting point of even greater progress. There has already been plenty of discussion about the need to draw from a more diverse talent pool, with question-marks around whether the setup over the past decade has marginalised some groups who haven’t been able to access the limited training facilities for reasons of time, travel or money. The FA has announced the launch of 60 emerging talent centres across England, which should go some way to addressing that.

It’s so pleasant to see them just letting women get on with it.

Sorry sorry sorry!

I was worried that y’all might worry, because when I know I won’t be posting I let you know.

The internet in the big house went out (and mine is parasitic on it so mine went out too). This was yesterday morning, and as soon as it was almost 10 I hustled over to the library so that I could at least say why I was silent, but oh ha guess what, it was CLOSED because of the heat. Old Carnegie branch, you see, very elegant but no AC. Closed until Monday.

Sorry!

That’s not representation.

Representation of women is so important, especially, one would hope, if you’re the National Organization for Women.

The reporting on this is so moronic, and so dishonest, it doesn’t qualify as reporting at all – it’s more like lying to the readers. The Post drivels like any barely adult “trans ally” squealing about pronouns.

In 2017, former journalist Danica Roem made history when she was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, making her the first out transgender state legislator in the United States. 

A man was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. Where’s the history?

This is where the “trans” label comes in so handy, of course, but at the price of sounding like (and being) a complete idiot. First out transgender state legislator, but not first man. He’s a man, so he can’t “make history” by being the first man elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. How sad. What do do? Call yourself trans! Suddenly you’re a first, and an embattled minority, and a fighter of Karens.

As of July, the Victory Fund reports that 55 trans candidates are running for office, alongside 20 gender nonconforming candidates, 18 nonbinary candidates and four Two-Spirit candidates.

Notice that you can’t tell if there are any women at all. That’s not an accident. Also notice how stupid and childish it sounds. That probably is an accident but by god they’re stuck with it.

The Washington Post spoke to three trans and nonbinary candidates about why they’re running — and why it matters.

No. The Post spoke to two trans and one nonbinary. They’re not all three both trans and nonbinary.

For Zooey Zephyr of Missoula, Mont., the tipping point came in 2021 — the year the state legislature passed three anti-LGBTQ bills in a single week. Those laws included one that explicitly bans trans girls from competing on female sports teams and another that prevents trans people from updating their birth certificates if they have not undergone gender-affirming surgery.

The bills are not anti-LGBTQ. Even if you think they’re anti-trans, they’re not anti-LGB. Q doesn’t mean anything. Journalists just will not report this crap accurately.

“I remember thinking, if I were in that room, I could have changed that heart. I could have been the difference there,” said Zephyr, a 33-year-old trans woman who manages the curriculum and program review process at the University of Montana.

Ok so there’s one of the three: a man. The Post is doing somersaults because a man is running for office. Golly-gee.

Next up:

Tucked into Oklahoma state Rep. Mauree Turner’s backpack is a copy of one of the first pieces of legislation they drafted. According to Turner, when they presented the bill to one of their colleagues in the statehouse, he returned it to Turner with “some suggestions.”

…

The last two years in the Oklahoma Capitol have been a “wild ride” for Turner, a Democratic state representative who made history on multiple counts when they were elected in 2020: They were the first Muslim elected to state office and the first out nonbinary legislator in the entire country.

I haven’t been able to find what sex Turner is. The Post doesn’t say and Google was coy about it too. Could be an actual woman then.

What difference does it make that Turner is “non-binary”? Why is it exciting that Turner is a first? Would it be exciting to be the first candidate with red hair? What does calling oneself “non-binary” have to do with anything?

The slogan for Turner’s 2022 campaign is a phrase popularized by disability activists: “Nothing about us without us,” which speaks to the idea that policy should be decided by the people most affected by it. It’s the kind of community-focused approach to government that Turner believes will lead to real change.

But what does that mean? Turner will be deciding on policy that affects non-binary people? But what policy would that be? When non-binary doesn’t mean anything?

Third and final “first”:

Leigh Finke, 41, had already decided to run for office when she heard about the baseless claims coming from some Minnesota Republicans this past April.

“She heard” – so we’re talking about a man, right?

Finke, a multimedia storyteller with the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, is running to represent District 66A in the Minnesota House of Representatives. If elected, she would be the first out trans state legislator in Minnesota, a state widely considered among the most LGBTQ-friendly in the Midwest. In 1993, it was the first state to enact a law banning discrimination against trans people.

A man.

So the Washington Post is pissing itself with excitement that two men and a possible woman who calls herself [or himself] “non-binary” are running for office, and the National Organization for WOMEN is joining in.

I’m not seeing what’s so exciting.

Times reporter on Magistrates’ Court news:

Ah yes that’s what you want in cops who deal with domestic violence.

I hope he made sure she didn’t identify as a boy.

Janice Turner on the closing down of the Tavistock Gender Identity clinic:

Writing on this topic, I’ve often encountered facts so dangerous and beliefs so bizarre, so beyond science or reason, it’s been hard to convey their existence.

Listen, you say, British doctors are prescribing a drug used to chemically castrate rapists to halt puberty in children as young as 11. The drug isn’t even approved for child gender dysphoria. It reduces growth and bone density, sterilises and kills future libido. And, get this, we don’t know what it does to teenagers’ developing brains, or even if it works and they become happy, fulfilled trans adults. Because there’s no data, no long-term research.

Well when you put it like that…

And not only is that happening; people who say it’s a bad idea are compared to or just outright labeled Nazis.

This week has revealed the power of sunlight when shone into dark places. There would be no Cass report if Keira Bell, who regretted her hasty transition when the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock put her on blockers at 16 after just three appointments, hadn’t launched a judicial review. In the High Court, I heard incredulity in judges’ voices.

Several years of incredulity now.

I still struggle to grasp why GIDS abhors research. If it cared about dysphoric children wouldn’t it want the best outcomes? If it had faith in its medical pathway, surely it wouldn’t mind testing its efficacy? Isn’t free and open discussion among fellow professionals the best way to improve treatment?

Yet GIDS clinicians who worried that hormones were prescribed too quickly, or to kids who’d simply turn out gay, were vilified, accused of transphobia, forced to conduct any thoughtful, gently questioning therapy in secret. Whistleblowers such as Marcus and Susan Evans were discredited, internal reports such as Dr David Bell’s were suppressed, while staff were blocked from contacting Sonia Appleby, the GIDS head of safeguarding, about their concerns for vulnerable patients.

It sounds more like a cult than a medical clinic. But then it always has, hasn’t it – everything about it is more like a cult than anything else. It’s not like politics or social justice or lesbian and gay rights or science or medicine or psychology or anything along those lines – instead it’s like Aum Shinrikyo or Jonestown or witch-hunting cults. Secretive, doctrinaire, authoritarian, arbitrary…everything you don’t want in a putative medical clinic treating unhappy teenagers.

Originally two comments by Bjarte Foshaug on These two loudmouth mammals.

I’m not at all a cult expert, but as an interested lay person who has read both Lifton, Singer, Ross, and Hassan, I think the importance of “saving face” can hardly be overestimated. How cult members respond to a major crisis depends heavily on how easy or difficult it is backpedal without too much public humiliation and loss of face. Those who haven’t made too much of a public commitment tend to just slip away quietly and pretend nothing ever happened. The people you really need to worry about are the ones who have made a strong commitment in public, invested everything they have in the cause, burned all bridges behind them*. These are the people who tend to double and triple down on their commitment and keep fighting to the end. Beyond a certain point even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting you yourself and the world that you weren’t too clever to be taken in by a cult after all, that you have dedicated your life to a lie, that the people you have been attacking and vilifying for opposing the vicious cult you’re in were right all along, that you are the bad guy, that you have gotten your hands irredeemably dirty in service of an unworthy cause etc. etc.

Of course TRAs do not follow a single leader like Jim Jones, nor are they all physically gathered together in one place, which makes a Jonestown-like scenario seem far less likely. Still, I think there is a real danger that single individuals or even small groups of dedicated gender fanatics are going to do something crazy if/when the real world finally starts closing in on them. Still, while I sincerely hope I’m wrong, I’m not as optimistic as many others that the trans craze is going to start dying down any time soon. It reminds me too much of the way people kept predicting that Trump’s followers were going to start abandoning him on mass every time he said or did something outrageous (i.e. every time he said or did anything at all). While Maya’s and Allison’s victories, the closing down of the Tavistock etc. are certainly good news, the institutional capture seems to continue pretty much unabated, and as we all know, all of Trump’s supposedly career-ending scandals didn’t prevent him from gaining votes between 2016 and 2020.

Also, while comparisons to People’s Temple – like comparisons to Nazism – should be used with caution, it doesn’t mean that any attempt to extract any lessons from the history of People’s Temple or Nazism that are applicable to current affairs is inherently fallacious in principle. In the case of People’s Temple, they were first and foremost a social justice cult thinly disguised as a Pentecostal Church. As I understand it from reading Tim Reiterman’s The Raven it was pretty much common knowledge within the Temple that Jones’s miraculous healings and psychic readings were simple deceptions** to lure people to the church so they could be exposed to the Temple’s teachings about racial integration and Communism. There are recordings of Jones openly deriding and even stepping on the Bible.

The Temple’s mixed race policies and uncompromising stance on racial integration earned them considerable support from large segments of the political Left including Leftwing media, and one of the main reasons Jones managed to get away with his endless scandals*** for as long as he did, was that the Temple and their apologists were successful in portraying any criticism as part of a racially motivated rightwing conspiracy to discredit the group because of its progressive values. Sounds familiar?

*Of course the Internet has made it a lot harder to pretend you never said what you did or that your words have been misremembered, misinterpreted, misconstrued etc.

** Very much like the ones Peter Popoff was exposed using by James Randi.

*** Considering the obvious self-destructive tendencies of this guy, and his pathological compulsion to get himself into trouble, it’s hardly surprising that his final act would be to take all his followers with him in an act of mass-suicide.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Comparisons are odious.

…more blunt than the Guardian.

The Guardian left that bit out. It’s rather important.

The Guardian left that bit out too.

It’s impossible to view this editorial decision making as anything but ideological. Newspapers aren’t usually in the business of “being kind,” but in this case they’re soft pedaling the story (perhaps for their own sake as much as for anyone else’s). It’s like the unspoken agreement between the press and JFK in regards to his infidelity and womanizing. But this isn’t about turning a blind eye to a politician’s extramarital affairs, it’s a story about the health and safety of children. It’s not just word choice or even a “slant” or “spin,” it’s withholding information. What price “the right side of history?” What do they get out of all of this? What exactly have they bought at the cost of this reputational damage? More and more, it looks like less and less. Their end of the deal is starting to look a lot like a mess of pottage.

Does the Guardian think it can cross its fingers and hope the story goes away quickly and quietly? You chose a side, and that side failed by almost every conceivable professional, moral, and ethical standard. You helped paint critics of that side as heartless bigots. You drove away reporters who didn’t follow what had become the paper’s party line. Even now, you’re still trying to protect that side, your side, and to conceal from your readers the fact that your reporting on this issue, far from journalistic neutral impartiality, was fatally tainted by bias. And it still is.

Now that the Tavistock is being shut down, is it all just so much water under the bridge? Spilt milk? Those are ruined lives and injured people. How many — Hundreds? Thousands? Oh, right. Follow up and outcome studies were a bit lax. Sorry about that, but there’s no time to spare when you’ve got suicides to prevent and teets to yeet. All the children, and adults, who’ve been needlessly medicalized and mutilated still have to live with the consequences of the failure of responsible adults to exercise their duty of care, for the rest of their lives. That part doesn’t go away. It just doesn’t get reported on. (Not by you, anyway.) There’s a difference.

Pink News is eager to see men taking over women’s sports.

A women’s rugby union team has explained why it is passionate about including trans women as the RFU votes on banning them from the sport.

No the RFU doesn’t vote on banning them from the sport. As usual.

The York RI Ladies team took to Twitter ahead of a Rugby Football Union (RFU) vote on an outright ban on trans women and girls, taking place on Friday (29 July).

No it’s not an outright ban on women and girls. That’s the usual lie. It’s a ban on men in women’s rugby.

The RFU, which governs rugby union in England, will vote on a recommendation for a “policy change for contact rugby to only permit plays in the female category whose sex recorded at birth was female”.

See? That’s not a ban. Men can still play in the male category.

The measure will allow trans men to continue to play the sport “if they provide their written consent and a risk assessment is carried out”. 

In the men’s category, I’m guessing, because it wouldn’t be fair to let testosterone-laced women play in the women’s category.

The governing body says it has considered “peer reviewed research” which claimed there are “physical differences between those people whose sex was assigned as male and those as female at birth, and advantages in strength, stamina and physique brought about by male puberty are significant and retained even after testosterone suppression”. 

Gee, how silly, right? When we all know there are no such advantages whatsoever at all?

Meanwhile it’s just totally up in the air whether or not men have any physical advantages over women when playing rugby.

But they’re York RI LADIES so presumably they’re not also York RI Gentlemen, or they would call themselves York RI Ladies and Gentlemen. So even though they’re grassroots sports they still have a women’s team, which can’t be both a women’s team and “for everyone.” So…what’s their point? Other than a mindless invocation of warm fuzzies about including EVERYONE? If sports include everyone there’s no room left for the sports part – there would just be a big crowd of people milling around.

But the way to get more British women doing physical activity isn’t to include more men in women’s sports. I think the problem is clear enough? Men aren’t women, so adding men to your women’s sport will be a dead loss in terms of upping the numbers of women doing physical activity.

The jargon always distorts the “journalism.” Haroon Siddique at the Guardian doing a legal analysis of the Allison Bailey ruling:

The most significant ruling came in the Forstater case when, in June last year a panel led by the president of the employment appeal tribunal (EAT) held that gender-critical views were a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act.

The decision paved the way not just for Forstater winning her case, which was then sent back to an employment tribunal to be heard in full, but also Bailey’s victory against her chambers, Garden Court.

Lucy Lewis, employment partner at Lewis Silkin, said: “If you want to engage in public debate, if you are clear you are doing that in your personal capacity, then I think that there is now much stronger protection as a result of these two cases in your ability to do that.”

Bosses at Garden Court Chambers (GCC) argued that Bailey’s tweets, one of which spoke of “intimidation, fear & coercion that are driving the @stonewalluk trans self-id agenda” went beyond her beliefs, which the Forstater case had established were protected, but this was rejected by the tribunal.

How could that statement “go beyond” Bailey’s beliefs? Is it because the claim is so obviously factual that it doesn’t count as a belief? Is it only beliefs that have no factual basis that are protected? Because that would be weird.

Lewis said as a result of the Forstater case “the bar is high” as views have to be “objectively offensive” but what the cases – both unusually involving high-profile individuals on social media, each with more than 50,000 Twitter followers – had left unanswered was how to deal with such a conflict of views in the actual workplace, for example directed towards a colleague.

She said the only case to address this to date was when a doctor, David Mackereth, who insisted on misgendering trans people while assessing benefit claimants lost a claim against the government that he was discriminated against on the basis of his religious beliefs, in another decision published earlier this month.

Ok stop right there. What is “misgendering”?

How have so many otherwise reasonable adult people become convinced that there’s such a thing as “misgendering” and that it’s a social crime? How and why did we get so entrenched in such a silly counter-reality ideology that people can be punished for the made-up faux pas of “misgendering”?

That was in line with the EAT’s decision in the Forstater case which it said “does not mean that those with gender-critical beliefs can ‘misgender’ trans persons with impunity”.

But we don’t accept the claim that we are “misgendering.” We don’t agree that there is such a thing. We think we’re absolutely allowed to know who is what sex, for our own safety among other reasons, and that that should not cannot must not be made a crime or a workplace no-no. It’s idiotic to accuse a doctor of “misgendering” people when all that means is that the doctor got their sex right. You don’t want doctors getting people’s sex wrong!

Getting people’s sex right is far more important than coddling the fantasies of a small number of people who have been mentally captured by a fiction.

The NY Times tries hard to minimize the bad news:

The National Health Service in England announced on Thursday that it was shutting down the country’s only youth gender clinic in favor of a more distributed and comprehensive network of medical care for adolescents seeking hormones and other gender treatments.

“Seeking hormones” as they might seek a new phone or beans on toast. Hormones aren’t like vitamins, you don’t seek them as if they were harmless and benign. People don’t seek diabetes medication or cancer drugs, they get prescribed them if they have diabetes or cancer.

The closure followed an external review of the Tavistock clinic in London, which has served thousands of transgender patients since the 1990s. The review, which is ongoing, has raised several concerns, including about long wait times, insufficient mental health support and the surging number of young people seeking gender treatments.

Insufficient mental health support for what? For autism, for depression, for anxiety, for the mental health issues that adolescence can trigger. Instead of mental health support they get dropped onto the gender conveyor belt.

The overhaul of services for transgender young people in England is part of a notable shift in medical practice across some European countries with nationalized health care systems. Some doctors there are concerned about the increase in numbers as well as the dearth of data on long-term safety and outcomes of medical transitions.

In the United States, doctors specializing in gender care for adolescents have mixed feelings about the reforms in Europe.

What have feelings got to do with it? The issue is reality, and the well-being of children and teenagers, and the dangers of stuffing children with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. It’s about evidence, not feelings.

Although many agree that more comprehensive health care for transgender youth is badly needed, as are more studies of the treatments, they worry that the changes will fuel the growing political movement in some states to ban such care entirely.

“How do we draw the line so that we keep care individualized while maintaining safety standards for everyone? That’s what we’re trying to sort out,” said Dr. Marci Bowers, a plastic surgeon and the incoming president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, who is transgender.

Well thank goodness they talked to someone with no vested interests to protect.

There are “critically important unanswered questions” about the use of puberty blockers, wrote Dr. Hilary Cass, head of the external review of the country’s youth gender identity services, in a letter to the head of N.H.S. England last week.

Puberty blockers, which are largely reversible, are intended to buy younger patients time to make weighty decisions about permanent medical changes. 

BZZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong! They are not reversible.

“We are optimistic, cautiously optimistic, about the news,” said Susie Green, chief executive of Mermaids, an advocacy group for transgender and gender-diverse youth. “There is a two-and-a-half-year waiting list to be seen for your first appointment. We’ve seen the distress caused to young people because of that.”

Another source totally free of any vested interest! Brilliant job NYT!

Some American doctors worried that the changing standards in Europe would bolster the notion that gender treatments are dangerous for young people.

“My fear is that this is going to be interpreted as another notch against providing gender-affirming care for kids,” said Dr. Angela Goepferd, medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota hospital. More services are needed, they said, not less. “That’s our challenge here.”

And that’s the last word.

Crap journalism.

Dennis raises an interesting point at about 29 minutes into The Mess We’re In: he says he used to do some family law work and that meant some work with Munchausen’s parents. Funny thing about that: it seems to have dried up. He asked someone else who said Oh yes that’s all gone.

Hmmmm.

Parents who like the limelight just a little too much, he said.

H/t Mike Haubrich

The Telegraph is, to the surprise of no one, more blunt than the Guardian.

The Tavistock transgender clinic is to be shut down by the NHS after a review found it is “not safe” for children.

NHS England will move young people who believe that they are trans into regional centres which will take a more “holistic” approach to treatment and look at other mental health or medical issues they may have.

Emphasis mine. The Guardian of course wouldn’t dream of putting it that way. Yet.

The decision is a response to the interim Cass Review, which warned that medics in the Tavistock had felt “under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach” to gender identity rather than going through the normal process of clinic assessment with young people.

The Guardian left that bit out. It’s rather important.

NHS England have also committed to follow Dr Cass’s recommendation that they carry out “rapid” research on the use of puberty blockers by young people after it was noted there is currently “insufficient evidence” on their impact.

I can almost hear them. “Oh research! Now there’s an idea. Thanks for suggesting it, we’ll get right on that.”

The Cass review was commissioned by NHS England in 2020 amid concerns that there was “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision making” which saw children as young as 10 given puberty blockers.

…

It was amid fears that doctors were too quick to affirm a child’s new identity, without looking at other mental health or medical issues, that Dr Cass recommended moving away from a single provider model.

The Guardian left that bit out too.