How about if you take off your hats and sign the letter with your first names? Will that do it?

Helen Joyce replies to Pipps and Andy:

Dear Pippa and Andrew (if I may),

Well they did say their poison letter was from Pippa and Andrew, so I think we all may, and especially Helen may, being as how she is the target of their venom.

I’m writing to respond to your ignorant and insulting characterisation of me to Caius students and academics, which you must have known would be shared more widely and then become public. [The text of that email is appended to this post.]

I am of course sadly used to people who should know better—people with high-profile posts in great academic institutions—making a show of defending free speech, open debate and academic standards out of one side of their mouths, even as they say “however” out of the other. I am also sadly used to being casually defamed: such is the fate of everyone who, like me, refuses to be frightened off talking about the baleful impacts of gender-identity ideology on vulnerable groups, including women, children and same-sex attracted people.

Why are we so used to it, she asks? Because of people like Pipps and Andy, including Pipps and Andy.

You said in your email to Caius students and fellows that my views are “offensive, insulting and hateful”. Caius, you said, “should be a place for the highest quality of research to be produced and discussed, rather than polemics”. What “highest quality of research” on gender-identity issues have you or Caius produced or discussed? What about my work is polemical? Have you even read my book?

How offensive insulting and hateful is it for Pipps and Andy to make such a claim? Pretty god damn offensive insulting and hateful, I’d say.

You also say that you both work hard to make Caius an “inclusive, diverse and welcoming home for our students, staff and Fellows”, and that my event “will not contribute to this aim”. How inclusive and welcoming do you think this sort of shunning makes your college feel to students, staff and Fellows who care about sex-based rights? To those who want to attend my talk, but are frightened that there will be protests, enabled by your unwillingness to give unqualified support for free speech? To women who understand their identities as based on biology, not tired sexist stereotypes? To the people—and some do still exist in Cambridge; even if you don’t hear from them, I do—who still care about the highest ideals of academia, and watch despairingly as it is shredded?

The word “inclusive” has shifted meaning over the past decade or so: it now applies solely to people who claim to be the other sex (and mostly to the male people in that category).

You tell the little totalitarians of Caius College that you will not be attending the event on Tuesday. Why not? If you truly thought I, and what I say, are so awful, surely you’d like to point out my errors and show me up? Why not come and tell me to my face that I’m offensive, insulting and hateful? Why not critique my book and tell the world what I have got wrong?

Seriously. Why don’t they tell Helen that to her face?

I mean, it’s not difficult to think of people who really would merit such a face to face telling. Trump leaps to mind of course, and there’s Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Rudy Giuliani – they’re all writers and polemicists as well as “activists,” and we really could back up the telling with evidence. But Helen?

If you don’t have the decency to come to the event on Tuesday, let’s meet up on another occasion. I’d like to hear from you directly, in person, why you thought it was all right to characterise me as bigoted to an entire academic community, without so much as getting in touch first to find out more about me or my work. Please suggest a few days and times.

Come on, Pipps and Andy. Either accept the request or withdraw the venomous lies about Helen and apologize. Abjectly.

Ewan Somerville at the Telegraph takes a cold hard look at that letter from “Pippa and Andrew”:

A Cambridge college master is engulfed in a transgender row with professors after boycotting a “hateful” gender-critical speaker.

It’s about the letter rather than the boycott. No one would have cared if Pipps and Andy had just stayed away.

Gonville and Caius College, the university’s fourth oldest, is hosting a talk on Tuesday by Helen Joyce, an author and former journalist at The Economist, about cancel culture.

And as we all know, her views are Unacceptable, Unapproved, Unendorsed. Her views are, in short, evil, the most evil views anyone has ever had, views that make Hitler and Putin look like Cookie Monster.

Tutors are even opening a “safe space” welfare tearoom for students during the talk, blaming “understandable hurt and anger for many students, staff and fellows at Caius” caused by the invitation.

Understandable? Go soak your heads, all of you. No it’s not understandable. Helen Joyce doesn’t advocate genocide or forced pregnancy or stoning women for not wearing bags over their heads. Helen Joyce simply doesn’t buy into the new and stupid ideology of magic gender, and she explains why you shouldn’t buy into it either. That’s all. The most you can say about her views is that people who have adopted the trans ideology feel angry about them, and that is nowhere near enough to justify fatuous driveling claims about students needing a “safe space welfare tea room” for fuck’s sake.

Now, in an unprecedented intervention, the college’s master Prof Pippa Rogerson – the most senior position – has emailed all students rebuking her own staff for hosting it. 

Unprecedented. Nobody did this for workers, or women, or Jews, or immigrants, or any other neglected and despised set of people, but somehow pampered middle class people who think they’re the other sex merit all this screaming and tearing of hair and welfare tea rooms when anyone disbelieves their fantasies. The more trivial the cause the louder the wailing has to be, is that it? Compensation? “Well guys, this is really a pretty stupid banner to carry, so we’re gonna have to really ham it up to get anywhere. Let’s pretend opposition makes us disintegrate into tiny pieces before their very eyes.”

Prof Rogerson, writing alongside Dr Andrew Spencer, the college’s senior tutor, said that while freedom of speech is “a fundamental principle… on some issues which affect our community we cannot stay neutral”.

It’s a fundamental principle which we are going to ignore because otherwise trans people will disintegrate into tiny pieces before our very eyes.

Their letter, seen by The Telegraph, adds: “We do not condone or endorse views that Helen Joyce has expressed on transgender people, which we consider offensive, insulting and hateful to members of our community who live and work here.”

So what? Who cares? What’s their point? They don’t have to condone endorse views that other people speak aloud in talks at Cambridge. That’s not a criterion or filter for such talks. Their feverish emotions have nothing to do with Helen Joyce or her talk.

Ms Joyce, the author of best-seller Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, added: “When I was a student at Cambridge I would have been disgusted and embarrassed to receive a communication like that; Pippa and Andrew sound like CBeebies presenters.

“Why are they staying away? If they think I’m that much of a bigot they should turn up, hear what I have to say and tell me I’m wrong. A pair of intellectual cowards who do not deserve to be in two of the best jobs in all the world’s universities.”

Seriously. They sound like absolute chumps.

Celebrating Salman:

Writers including Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes and Nigella Lawson will gather this week at an event to celebrate Salman Rushdie.

An Evening for Salman Rushdie will be held at the British Library in London on 13 October, with members of the public invited to take part by attending in person or watching a live stream.

So we missed it, sorry, but it’s good to know it happened.

Others taking part by sharing readings or reflections include Mona Arshi, Melvyn Bragg, Mariella Frostrup, Meena Kandasamy, Kathy Lette, Pauline Melville, Margie Orford, Philippe Sands, Burhan Sönmez and Alan Yentob.

…

The British Library event on Thursday is being described as a gathering to celebrate Rushdie’s “strength and dedication as a writer, activist, and a champion of free expression”.

You’re damn right. He stood up for Charlie Hebdo when way too many Manhattan trendies called them “Islamophobic.”

Jesus & idenniny.

It’s a nice elbow in the ribs to The Atheist Communinny and the Skeptic Communinny, because it is indeed true that way too many members of said communninnies laugh other absurd claims out of court but when it’s a man who idennifies as a woman suddenly they can’t recognize an absurd claim any more.

The Patreon is here.

Steve Bannon sentenced to not nearly enough time in prison:

Donald Trump’s top former strategist Steve Bannon was sentenced Friday to four months in federal prison and $6,500 in fines after he was convicted with criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply last year with a subpoena issued by the House January 6 select committee.

The punishment – suspended pending appeal – makes Bannon the first person to be incarcerated for contempt of Congress in more than half a century and sets a stringent standard for future contempt cases referred to the justice department by the select committee investigating the Capitol attack.

Bannon wanted favors.

Bannon, 68, had asked the court for leniency and requested in court filings for his sentence to either be halted pending the appeal his lawyers filed briefs with the DC circuit court on Thursday or otherwise have the jail term reduced to home-confinement.

But Nichols denied Bannon’s requests, saying he agreed with the justice department about the seriousness of his offense and noting that he had failed to show any remorse and was yet to demonstrate that he had any intention to comply with the subpoena.

Sometimes there’s a price to pay for being an unrepentant asshole.

Judge nails DeSantis’s bullshit:

A Florida judge has rebuked Ron DeSantis’s much publicized “office of elections integrity” and dismissed charges against one of the defendants the Republican governor insisted would “pay the price” for criminal election fraud.

DeSantis staged a media event in August announcing what he said was an “opening salvo” in his administration’s efforts to crack down on election fraud, namely the arrest of 20 felons he said had illegally voted.

But it soon emerged that most had been sent voter registration cards by authorities and accordingly believed they were eligible to vote. And earlier this week, footage emerged of the bewilderment and confusion of law enforcement officers and those being arrested.

Bewilderment and shock horror despair of those being arrested. This isn’t a game. DeSantis is a sadist.

On Friday, Miami judge Milton Hirsh dismissed charges against Robert Lee Wood, 56, who was facing up to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines for voting in the 2020 election.

DeSantis’s office of the statewide prosecutor (OSP) had no authority to be bringing such a case, Hirsh ruled. Any such crime must have taken place in two or more judicial circuits, or be an organized criminal conspiracy, neither of which occurred in Wood’s case, he said, according to the Sun-Sentinel.

There’s a stench of Jim Crow around DeSantis’s actions.

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.