The Guardian on the Tavistock:

But in recent years, concerns have repeatedly been raised about the service. Inspectors rated it “inadequate” after complaints raised by whistleblowers, patients and families.

The service was criticised for its care of patients both inside and outside the clinic, and it also had record waiting lists. Doctors reported concerns that some patients were referred on to a gender transitioning pathway too quickly.

The waiting lists might be seen as a good thing, given the quality of the “service.”

It followed recommendations from Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading an independent review of gender identity services for children and young people.

She said there was a need to move away from a model of a sole provider, and instead establish regional services to better meet patients’ needs.

In her interim report, released in March, she wrote: “It has become increasingly clear that a single specialist provider model is not a safe or viable long-term option in view of concerns about lack of peer review and the ability to respond to the increasing demand.”

Who needs peer review when you have the power to turn children into mermaids?

Keira Bell, 25, who brought a high court case against the Tavistock clinic challenging its use of puberty blockers, said she was pleased with the decision to shut it. She was prescribed puberty blockers at the age of 16 but later changed her mind over her decision to transition to male. She argued the clinic should have challenged her more over her decision to transition.

“I’m over the moon,” she told BBC Radio 4’s World at One. “Many children will be saved from going down the path that I went down.

“I went through a lot of distress as a teenager. Really I just needed some mental health support and therapy from everything that I’ve been through. There needs to be mental health support first and foremost.”

And that’s not “conversion therapy.”

Graham reminds us of the video that should destroy Mermaids:

Now that the Tavistock is to shut down, at such speed that we can only guess the Cass report is to deliver a ferocious verdict on their operations, it’s time to look again at Mermaids, the organisation that has had such a malign influence over the centre.

Even the Alder Hey organs scandal didn’t lead to the hospital having to close. This is an extraordinary moment.

I believe that Susie Green’s Ted Talk provides all the evidence needed to shut Mermaids down.

“My husband wasn’t happy with our gender nonconforming son. So we put him on hormones and then castrated him. “ Not quite how she phrases it but that’s the basis of her insane speech. I still find it astonishing that she said all of this out loud. The video is publicly available, has presumably had millions of views and yet Green has never had to face the obvious questions that arise from it.

It turns out that trying to turn children into mermaids isn’t such a good idea. Cutting off their legs and giving them a fake fish tail instead makes their lives more difficult than necessary – who knew?!

This is a must-watch – Dennis Kavanagh explaining what the closure of the Tavistock means.

Updating to quote:

Dennis: Mermaids and Co. telling kids they’ve got the wrong bodies and they should hate their bodies – which I consider a cruelty without equal – I don’t know why they’re allowed to maraud around and do that, but they are it would seem – they succeed by pushing lies. You cannot have gender without lies, it needs lies like a fish needs water.

Is that right?

The English courts consider people who know which sex is which comparable to biblical literalists? Really? Can that possibly be true? Wouldn’t it drive a bulldozer through all English law that relates to women and men?

Originally a comment by Seanna Watson on Then whydja do it?

I find the amount of deference granted to Franky (often even by avowed atheists) to be somewhere between inexplicable and infuriating. Despite all the pomp and ceremony of the apologetic visit (costing Canadian taxpayers ~$35 million), there has been precious little actual action taken by the church – in fact there is continuing resistance by the church to pay any sort of compensation.

Case in point: Parishioners in a Catholic church in Ottawa that is being sold had requested to have the proceeds directed toward reconciliation and residential school survivors. This seemed like a just and reasonable request, especially in view of the fact that the construction of the church was originally funded by donations from grass-roots parishioners, and also is standing on unceded Algonquin Anishinābeg territory. However, the request was refused by the archdiocese, who apparently had their own plans for the money.

The Tavistock is shutting down!

The Times reports:

The NHS is shutting down its gender identity clinic for children after a review found that it failed vulnerable under-18s.

The gender identity service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been ordered to close by next spring.

It will be replaced by regional centres at existing children’s hospitals offering more “holistic care” with “strong links to mental health services”.

Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic has been accused of rushing children into life-altering treatment on puberty blockers.

In other words into making changes to their bodies they will be stuck with for life.

The paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading a review of the service, issued a series of recommendations today for a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity.

She found that the Tavistock clinic was “not a safe or viable long-term option” and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised by children referred to the clinic.

And that problem must surely be complicated and amplified by the way being trans is treated as some dazzling new religion plus political stance plus sainted status as opposed to a mental health issue. Mustn’t it? With all these adults telling teenagers that being trans isn’t a problem, isn’t a mental health issue, isn’t a mistake, but on the contrary is the most magical thrilling profound adorable identity one can wrap oneself in?

In other words isn’t it a problem and hasn’t it been a problem all along that there’s been all this massive pressure to say being trans is not a mental health issue but on the contrary a kind of divinity?

Marjorie Taylor Greene is proud to be a Christian nationalist.

Greene was accused on Monday of being a “Nazi” by Twitter users commenting on her defense of Christian nationalism while speaking on Saturday at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida. The Georgia Republican later shared a clip of her speech alongside the comment, “Nationalist isn’t a bad word” because it “means you care about your country.”

No, sport, that would be “patriot.”

“I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I’m a proud Christian Nationalist,” Greene said in a statement sent to Newsweek, which was also shared on Twitter. “These evil people are even calling me a Nazi because I proudly love my country and my God. The left has shown us exactly who they are. They hate America, they hate God, and they hate us.”

Newsflash: Nazism was a form of Christian nationalism, despite Hitler’s personal dislike of the religion.

“When She Is A Nazi is trending, of course it’s about Marjorie Taylor Greene,” writer Paul Rudnick tweeted. “Because that’s how friends signed her yearbook, what her guidance counselor told her parents, and what her kids tell anyone who asks what their Mommy does for a living.”

She has the hat, too.

Greene previously received criticism for praising Christian nationalism during a stream of her MTG:Live web show last month, when she said that Americans should be “most proud of Christianity” and said that those who argue “Christian nationalism is something to be scared of” were “lying to you.”

“Christian Nationalism was THE religion of the Third Reich!” Dr. Leah Schade, the Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary in Lexington, Kentucky, tweeted at the time. “Christian Nationalism is DEFINITELY something to be afraid of!”

Well first you’ll have to fill MTG in on what the Third Reich was.

Originally a comment by learie on Damages, including aggravated damages.

It was so brave of Ms.Bailey to do this, and I’m so glad she’s won.

The Employment Tribunal usually awards a max of 5000 pounds, and they awarded her 22 000, including aggravated damages.

I have already seen TRAs saying it’s not much money, but if Ms.Bailey had wanted money she wouldn’t have done this. The point was to set a precedent and to expose what’s going on with Stonewall- and that’s been done very effectively.

Companies and legal bodies now know Stonewall gives advice that will see you losing at the Employment Tribunal. That is very bad news for an advisory group.

Found it at last – the yes or no one. Glasgow Pride says no drag comment 42:

News outlets so far seem to be ignoring the Allison Bailey win. Personnel Today is understandably interested:

The barrister Allison Bailey has today won her case for discrimination at tribunal after she claimed her employer victimised her for upholding a gender critical belief. 

She had launched claims against Garden Court Chambers and Stonewall after the charity complained to her employer about her involvement in the LGB Alliance Group, of which she is a co-founder. LGB Alliance opposes the view held by Stonewall that transgender women are women in the eyes of the law.

…

The tribunal, which began in April, found that by upholding the complaint against her, GCC had victimised her for a protected act – the fact she had tweeted about the “cotton ceiling”, the idea that men who identify as trans lesbians face difficulties being accepted as lesbians, and her belief that Stonewall was driving a “dangerous” agenda around gender self-identification.

The cotton ceiling refers to the idea that men who identify as trans lesbians face lesbians saying no to sex. Not just general “difficulties being accepted” but specifically difficulties getting lesbians to say yes to the sex.

The tribunal agreed on the complaint raised by Bailey that as a consequence of being a gender critical feminist, she was discriminated against and victimised by her colleagues.

It did not find that the complaint against Stonewall had satisfied the legal test of “instructing, causing or influencing” the discrimination she experienced.

Bailey added that she was “disappointed” not to have succeeded in this element of the claim.

“It never occurred to me as I was building my career that the organisation which would prove my biggest obstacle would be a charity set up ostensibly to protect people like me. Stonewall declared there were ‘good lesbians’ and ‘bad lesbians’, the latter including any lesbian that dared to hold that sex is real and immutable and the crucial criteria for being same-sex attracted,” she said.

It really is extraordinary, you know – the chief organization for lesbians and gays trying to bully lesbians and gays into having heterosexual sex on the grounds that people are whatever sex they say they are.

Two more rescued:

The Nigerian army says it has found two more of the female students abducted by Boko Haram militants from a secondary school more than eight years ago.

There was global outrage when Islamists seized nearly 300 girls in Nigeria’s north-eastern town of Chibok in 2014. Most of the victims have either been freed or escaped since then, but dozens remain unaccounted for.

It appears the two hostages gave birth while in captivity, as the army said they were both found with children.

Naturally. That’s what they’re for.

In total, 276 girls seized were from their school dormitory in the middle of the night on 14 April 2014. Within hours of their kidnapping, 57 managed to escape mostly by jumping off the lorries and running off into the bushes.

Around 100 are still missing.

Many other schools and universities in the region were attacked in the years following the 2014 Chibok kidnapping. Some of the assaults have been by jihadists – but more frequently by criminal groups known locally as “bandits”, who engage in mass abduction for ransom.

While the Nigerian government has reportedly paid Boko Haram some $3.3m (£2.4m) as ransom for Chibok girls freed in negotiations, recent school kidnappings have seen little government involvement. Instead, parents and relatives have been left to pay the amounts demanded by the bandits for their children’s release.

Private enterprise.

Allison won!!!

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The moment when we stop.

Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different types of “belief”:

1. You can believe in the actual descriptive content of a proposition, e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning (as seen from my frame of reference).

2. You can believe in whatever a proposition happens to mean, e.g. I believe that E = mc².

The first kind of belief requires you to actually understand the proposition in question (you cannot believe in the content without knowing what the content is), whereas the latter does not*. I have a vague, general notion what “E = mc²” means, but nothing that merits the label “understanding”. I simply trust that physicists know what they’re talking about. Dennett made the point that most religious “beliefs” seem to be of the latter kind, i.e. even the believers themselves don’t have any clear idea of what it actually is they believe in except that “whatever it happens to be” is called “God” etc. I think the same goes for the “beliefs” required by gender ideology which is why even asking TRAs to define what they mean by words like “woman”, “gender”, “trans”, “cis”, “(non-)binary” etc. is now considered a “transphobic dog-whistle” etc.

* In fact there doesn’t even have to be anything to understand. E.g. it’s perfectly possible to “believe” that “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe” even if there is no content to believe in.

More absurd than ever.

He was “made aware of an incident on Sunday where officers visited an address to provide words of advice to a resident after they had published a video blog online which may have caused offence or distress.”

Where to begin. The officers didn’t “visit an address,” they went to Kellie-Jay Keen’s address to scold her. They didn’t go there “to provide words of advice,” they went there to accuse and scold her. They weren’t the ones who published the video, she was. What made them think her video “may have caused offence or distress?” More to the point, do the police go bang on men’s doors to give them “words of advice” about misogynist sexist threatening insulting venomous videos and tweets and blog posts? EVER??? Not that I’ve ever heard of. That kind of thing is just normal, but skepticism about men who say they are women merits a visit from the plods.

It’s ridiculous, and worse than ridiculous.

The pope has said sorry about those residential schools.

Pope Francis issued a historic apology Monday for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations in ways still being felt today.

“I am sorry,” Francis said, to applause from school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered at a former residential school south of Edmonton, Alberta, the first event of Francis’ weeklong “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada.

The morning after he arrived in the country, Francis traveled to the lands of four Cree nations to pray at a cemetery. Four chiefs then escorted the pontiff in his wheelchair to powwow ceremonial grounds where he delivered the long-sought apology and was given a feathered headdress.

All very nice, no doubt, but what I want to know is, how does he explain this to himself? And then to Catholics in general? And then to the rest of us?

The church is the church. It tells us what to do, not the other way around. It’s supposed to be holy, and good, and right about everything. It’s not supposed to be blundering around making horrible mistakes like the rest of us.

So how did it get this so hideously wrong? Why did its people treat those children so cruelly? And while we’re on the subject how did it get the Magdalen laundries so wrong? And the Irish industrial schools and mother and baby homes? Why were nuns and priests so notoriously cruel to children and women and poor people? Why did the church protect rapey child-abusing priests decade after decade? And why, in light of all that, is Francis pope? Why does he stick with the evil institution? What does he even mean by apologizing?

None of it makes any kind of sense.

An exchange on Twitter has got me thinking about belief in the trans ideology, and whether I ever had any. I don’t think I did. From what I can remember, I didn’t believe in it, but I tried to prevent myself from really grasping how thoroughly I didn’t believe it. But maybe that’s not quite right – maybe I did grasp it but just pretended I didn’t. Basically, I lied about it, but what I’m not sure of is how aware of the lying I was.

The exchange:

My reply to that was “I didn’t so much accept it as do my best to steer around it. Until that day when it had grown too big to steer around.” Which I think is accurate as far as it goes, but what I’m not sure about now is how far I admitted to myself I was steering around it.

I do remember a few incidents of inner eye-rolling, of wanting to say something in dissent but not doing it, but what I don’t remember is how much that bothered me. I don’t remember if I thought I should challenge this bullshit because it is such bullshit, or repressed that thought instead.

That’s not interesting in itself (except maybe to me), but it is interesting in relation to the whole question of how do people who seem otherwise rational swallow this blatant fantasy-mongering? The fact that I steered around it for several years means I have some idea why other people don’t go all gender critical, but at the same time, the fact that there came a point where the steering terminally broke down makes me wonder who the hell engineered these people’s steering.

What broke my steering was whichever pharyngulite goon it was who told me to stop talking about abortion as a women’s issue. I remember the smoke coming out of my ears. I remember the crunch-snap when the steering mechanism broke right off. I said no and a mob of goons yelled at me and I sort of partly backed down, cowardly idiot that I was, but the “do you believe, yes or no?” followed swiftly (in hours? days? I don’t remember) and that was the end.

But the end should have been earlier. I should have stopped steering around it sooner. I don’t really remember the mental state that prevented me.

Oh how interesting.

How The CEO Of A Leading LGBTQ Rights Group Played A Role During The Opioid Crisis

By “played a role” they mean “helped make it worse.”

Amit Paley, CEO of The Trevor Project, was part of a team advising Purdue Pharma on how to boost sales of opioids during his time at McKinsey & Co., according to a trove of documents reviewed by HuffPost.

How to boost sales of opioids aka how to get more people addicted to opioids.

It’s all about the getting people to buy more and more and more drugs. $$$

In the summer of 2016, America’s opioid epidemic was raging, and Purdue Pharma, one of the drug manufacturers at the center of the maelstrom, was seeking outside help to manage its collapsing reputation.

In the summer of 2016, America’s opioid epidemic was raging, and Purdue Pharma, one of the drug manufacturers at the center of the maelstrom, was seeking outside help to manage its collapsing reputation.

For Amit Paley, a rising associate partner at the global consulting giant McKinsey & Co., it was an opportunity.

What’s a consulting giant? What is “consulting”? It’s a very nebulous term, and it seems to be something people can claim to do without having to show any credentials or source of expertise.

He had worked closely with Purdue before and seemed eager to do so again. So, on a Friday evening in June, Paley scrambled to come up with a list of past examples of how companies selling dangerous products had reduced risk in order to avoid liability and salvaged their reputations with an outraged public.

Oh that’s the kind of work he does. I see. He works for the branch of capitalism that protects people who harm others for $$$. What a noble calling! Corporations foul your water supply, call a consultant. Corporations sell cigarettes in the full knowledge that they’re addictive and poisonous? Call a consultant. Corporations sell highly addictive drugs as the death toll climbs? Call a consultant. Corporations sell puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to people who think they’re the opposite sex? Call a consultant.

Today, Paley has a new job: executive director and CEO of the country’s largest LGBTQ crisis hotline, The Trevor Project, which he has led since 2017.

…

The Trevor Project is also among the countless nonprofits now grappling with the fallout of the opioid crisis: A report the group put out in January said the misuse of prescription drugs was associated with a threefold increase in suicide attempts by LGBTQ people.

And then there are the blockers and cross-sex hormones…

Besides helping McKinsey compete for Purdue’s crisis response business, Paley collaborated with Purdue executives over a period of four or five weeks on a strategic 10-year plan to boost the sales of opioids and other Purdue products. Later, as McKinsey competed to handle data analysis for Purdue, his team suggested ways to use data to support Purdue’s sales goals and undermine its critics.

“Seven years ago, when I was a consultant at McKinsey, I was assigned to a project for Purdue,” Paley said as part of a statement to HuffPost. “If I [had known] then what I know now, I would not have agreed to do any consulting for that company, and I regret that I did.”

Now he’s a pillar of a form of activism that urges people (including children and toddlers) to be drug-dependent in an exciting new way.

His role came to light thanks to McKinsey’s $573 million settlement with a coalition of 47 state attorneys general over the firm’s role in driving the opioid crisis. For more than a decade, McKinsey provided Purdue with detailed advice on how to maximize sales of its blockbuster opioid, OxyContin. The settlement terms allowed McKinsey to avoid any admission of wrongdoing, but required it to make public more than 100,000 emails, presentations, and other internal documents from the years it spent advising several of the nation’s leading opioid makers.

…

Big data could even help discredit negative press, [McKinsey] said in its pitch: Weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times dropped a damning report on how Purdue had marketed OxyContin as offering 12 hours of pain relief despite knowing that the effects often wore off sooner — “the perfect recipe for addiction,” in the words of a leading researcher. The story relied partly on research performed by Purdue itself. McKinsey nevertheless claimed it could produce data to counter the Times’ “anecdotal” reporting.

For the purpose of persuading people to go on taking OxyContin despite all the bad news. $$$

“The Trevor Project CEO search was a thorough and robust process which resulted in hiring the most qualified candidate in Amit Paley,” Gina Muñoz, the chair of the board of directors, said in a statement. “The Board of Directors remains steadfast in our choice of CEO and we are proud of the transformational growth and expansion of life-saving programming at The Trevor Project that Amit has led since the start of his tenure.”

What life-saving programming is that? Does it have anything to do with taking puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones?

Paley’s team leaders at McKinsey seemed acutely aware that their work could be reputationally toxic. In May 2017, Moran, his supervisor on several projects, told another consultant, Arnab Ghatak, that she planned to give Purdue print copies of a presentation rather than a digital version. “These guys will be deposed,” she reasoned. “Best our emails are not sucked into it.”

Whoops. She shouldn’t have said that in a digital version either.

Stonewall thinks two-year-olds can be trans.

Ok let’s read their statement.

On Friday we put out a tweet that was unclear, relating to gender stereotypes and nursery age children, leading some supporters to ask us what we meant.

And others to say they’re dangerous loonies.

We were commenting on an article written by a parent reflecting on how their child was being cared for at nursery. The parent was worried that their child was being pressured to fit in with stereotypes about boys and girls. While we don’t actively work on nursery education, we believe that young children should be able to play, explore and learn about who they are, and the world around them, without having adults’ ideas imposed upon them.

Any adults’ ideas? How can they learn about the world around them without asking adults questions and listening to the answers? That’s an incredibly stupid thing for Stonewall to say, and tells me they’re not thinking at all, just shaking the box of slogans and tweeting whatever is on top.

But wait, it turns out they don’t mean that at all – at least, they immediately say the exact opposite.

We support existing provisions to ensure primary and secondary school pupils learn about LGBTQ+ identities in an age-appropriate and timely manner.

So they do need to have adults’ ideas imposed on them, provided those ideas are the ones approved by Stonewall, like for instance that a boy is a girl if he says he is.

This is vital for making sure that today’s children do not grow up living with the stigma of being LGBTQ+.

So they won’t grow up to be L or G or T? Stonewall must have meant something like “This is vital for making sure that today’s children grow up in a world where being LGBT is not stigmatized.” You’d think they’d know how to say that clearly after all this time.

For primary school aged children, this might mean, for example, learning that some children have two mummies, some have two daddies. It might mean not forcing children to conform to stereotypes, and it might mean challenging bullying that relates to perceived difference.

What about children who have two man-mummies or woman-daddies? Or a man-mummy and a woman-mummy, or a woman-daddy or a man-daddy. I wonder why they left that bit out.

Whatever. The kids should just ignore everything the adults say, and they’ll be fine.

The left is split over sophie graces, the right is split over trump: hero or tyrant?

The Jan. 6 House select committee’s revelations have grown so overwhelmingly powerful that even some right-wing media figures have begun acknowledging their seriousness. This is fracturing conservative media: A few high-profile personalities and institutions are admitting the obvious, while many other outlets continue running outright propaganda on Trump’s behalf.

That’s been true all along, what with The Lincoln Project and George Conway and similar. But now some of the more rabid trumpies are wobbling.

This split became more visible over the weekend when Fox News anchor Bret Baier — unlike most Fox personalities — sharply denounced Trump over new revelations that Trump deliberately allowed the mob rampage to continue on Jan. 6, 2021.

…

He criticized Trump over the 187 minutes that passed before he finally called on the rioters to stand down. Trump’s own advisers strongly suggested in testimony that he deliberately refrained, apparently to keep pressure on his vice president, Mike Pence, to disrupt the electoral count in service of Trump’s coup scheme.

I thought it was more general than that – he deliberately refrained in hopes that the attack would succeed, enemy senators and representatives would be killed, Trump would be declared god-emperor.

That 187 minutes was also too much for several right-leaning editorial boards. A Wall Street Journal editorial slammed Trump for violating his oath of office and duty to the country, declaring that he “has shown not an iota of regret.”

To the surprise of no one.

Julian expands on his brief interview with “Sophie Grace” Chappell:

The published profile is short and allows Chappell to speak for herself with no criticism and minimal eyebrow-raising from me. The source interview, however, left me worried that mutual comprehension between the main actors this fight (for that is what is has become) is now almost impossible. (Supporters can listen to the entire interview here.) 

Mutual comprehension is indeed very difficult. I for one find it impossible to understand how so many otherwise reasonable people can believe (or at least constantly repeat) the core claim.

Listening to Chappell, you would think that the gender critical feminists – derogatorily called TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminist) – are almost always malign, denigrating and misrepresenting trans people, while their opponents are overwhelmingly reasonable and moderate. So if you’ve been told trans activists are pushing for anything silly or extreme, that’s just misinformation. 

Like a man running the Edinburgh rape crisis centre for instance? Like Lia Thomas competing against women? Like Lia Thomas being nominated Woman of the Year? Like the National Women’s History Museum featuring a page of three men who identify as women? Like removing the words “women” and “mother” from discussion of abortion rights? None of that is silly or extreme?

For example, Chappell argues that trans activism is not captured by any ideology. She said that she didn’t even have a gender theory or ideology and that neither is central to the fight for trans rights.

No theory? Then what makes him think he’s a woman? How did he ever get there? If there’s no theory how does he not just know he’s a man the way other men just know they’re men? How are the facts of his body not enough to convince him he’s a man, in the absence of a theory that explains how people can be women despite having male bodies? PLEASE EXPLAIN.