Mara Yamauchi in The Guardian a few days ago:

Why does the female category in sport exist? It exists so that those born female – women and girls – can participate, compete and excel in sport that is fair and safe. Without the female category, women and girls would be nowhere in sport because of the massive physical advantages that those born male enjoy.

…

The fact of you reading this article right now is due to the female category existing. Without it, I would be a complete nobody. When I set my personal best, 2:23:12 in 2009, I was ranked second in the world in women’s road running. But 2:23:12 is, being frank, nothing special by male standards. In 2009, at least 1,300 men ran faster. If I had been told to suffer unfair competition against male-born athletes, I would never have become the UK’s joint most successful female marathon runner in the Olympics ever, and a Commonwealth Games medallist. I would have been excluded from things of value such as places on teams, prize money and podium places. That is if I’d persevered in sport at all – probably, I would have quit sport altogether. Why would anyone want to compete in an event that is unfair?

To make the sacrifice for the sake of the men who call themselves women! What greater devotion can there be?

The debate about trans inclusion in sport has focused mostly on the elite level. But the crisis facing women’s sport is just as serious at grassroots level. Male-born people are competing in women’s sport all over the UK. Officials and event organisers, many of them volunteers, are powerless to turn away requests from people born male to compete in the female category. I know, because I hear about examples of this happening frequently.

Well it’s such a good wheeze. Just claim to be trans for a few years, scoop up all the prizes, and then “detransition” when you’ve scooped enough.

The Mail wasn’t wrong about that “we’ll call the cops on you” page at Halifax. Home > Who we are > Inclusion and diversity.

Halifax: What we stand for

Ensuring an inclusive environment

At Halifax, we put our customers and colleagues first. We want to make sure we do all we can to champion every type of person, so we are working hard to create a fully-inclusive environment for our customers and colleagues, one that acknowledges all people and is representative of the communities we serve.

Part of this means we will act if we feel something is wrong. We don’t think it’s enough to simply not be racist. We will be actively anti-racist and stand alongside all of our people as allies.

We stand against discrimination and inappropriate behaviour in all forms, whether racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist, regardless of whether this happens in our branches, offices, over the phone or online on our social media channels. Such action may include account closure or contacting the police if necessary.

We are committed to representing, understanding and championing all types of people. We are on a journey to ensure that everything we do reflects this belief and we are committed to always trying to do more and do better for our colleagues, communities and customers.

It’s funny how this performative, look how awesome we are virtue-signalling is happy to include threats including threats to call the police.

Again: they’re a bank. Not a political party, not a collective of activists, not social media celebrities; they’re a bank.

In case they delete it…

Ooops.

Halifax customers are closing their accounts en masse today after its social media team told them to leave if they don’t like their new pronoun badges for staff in what is being branded one of the biggest PR disasters in British business history.

One account holder told MailOnline they have already pulled out investments and savings worth £450,000 while many more said they are closing ISAs, cutting up credit cards or transferring balances to rivals after they accused the bank of ‘alienating’ them with ‘pathetic virtue signalling’.

It’s Andy M, you see. He told them to close their accounts if they don’t like Halifax’s Pronoun Religion, so they said we’ll do that little thing.

The Mail adds the piquant detail that Halifax “was propped up by the taxpayer to the tune of £30billion as part of a 2008 bailout.” That’s quite a lot of money, really – not pretend money but literal money.

One customer replied: ‘There’s no ambiguity about the name “Gemma”. It’s a female person’s name. In other words, it’s pathetic virtue signalling and is seen as such by almost everyone who has responded to the initial tweet. Why are you trying to alienate people?’ Within 20 minutes a member of the Halifax social media team, calling himself Andy M, replied: ‘If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account’.

Andy M’s response has outraged customers, and seen hundreds claiming they will boycott the bank with many saying they have closed their accounts. Others have cut up their credit cards or getting rid of insurance policies and said the threat was the final straw after it cut 27 branches alone in 2022.

One told MailOnline: ‘My entire family have now transferred their accounts to Nationwide, cards etc. Loss to Halifax is in excess of 450K in investment accounts and savings’. Another said: ‘I closed my credit card account today, after fifteen years of being a customer’, while one exiting customer who is now changing ISAs said: ‘If they politely said try to use the pronouns on the badge – I would have done my best’, but left because he perceived their threat meant ‘there would be hell to pay if I got it wrong’.

I didn’t think it meant that, I just thought it was insulting on top of the standing insult to women.

Former Doctor Who scriptwriter Gareth Roberts, a Halifax customer since 1988, told the bank: ‘I’m a homosexual man. I’m appalled by your adoption of this homophobic, woman-hating claptrap, and by your attitude to customers making perfectly reasonable objections to it.’ Company director Anders Jersby ended his Halifax car insurance policy and said he would never deal with Halifax again thanks to ‘their antics with pronouns’.

When the Doctor Who people don’t like you, you’re not as hip as you think you are.

Natwest, Nationwide and HSBC all have optional pronoun policies for badges. HSBC even shared the Halifax post, tweeting its 101,000 followers: ‘We stand with and support any bank or organisation that joins us in taking this positive step forward for equality and inclusion. It’s vital that everyone can be themselves in the workplace’.

Oh ffs. Now banks are “standing with” other banks in solidarity over…pronouns. Right on, brother!

And it’s not just Andy M, either.

On its website, Halifax say any customers they deem to be ‘transphobic’ could have their accounts closed.

Underneath a page titled ‘what we stand for’, they say: ‘We stand against discrimination and inappropriate behaviour in all forms, whether racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist, regardless of whether this happens in our branches, offices, over the phone or online on our social media channels.

‘Such action may include account closure or contacting the police if necessary.’

More standing. Other banks Stand With Halifax, and Halifax Stands Against whatever it decides is transphobic and all the other listed items. They’ll report you to the cops “if necessary” i.e. if they think you deserve it.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Apparently Twitter thinks this is ok.

Updating: Actually I just looked and the account is now gone. Apparently it just took them a couple of weeks.

They just never stop.

Glinner reports a win:

The Information Commissioner has ordered the University of Oxford to disclose the scores and feedback it received from Stonewall as part of the lobby group’s controversial Workplace Equality Index scheme.

Of course their scheme isn’t about equality at all. Saying men are women has nothing to do with equality.

Following a Freedom of Information appeal undertaken as part of the “Don’t Submit to Stonewall” campaign initiated by Legal Feminist and Sex Matters, the Information Commissioner’s Office has written a hard-hitting decision that strikes at the secrecy of the scheme.

Thank you Legal Feminist and Sex Matters!

Stonewall requires organisations to sign a contract forbidding them to reveal either the feedback it gives them, or the actions it recommends they take to win more points. It says revealing such information would undermine its commercial interests.

So it’s all about the money. Good to know.

The Information Commissioner’s Office criticised the secretive scheme, saying that “whilst Stonewall is a charity, it is a charity with an agenda to promote. Whilst many may well agree with that agenda, it is not one that is universally accepted. Moreover, even those organisations which do enjoy broad support should not expect their actions to go free from scrutiny.”

…

“By associating themselves with Stonewall’s brand, employers are bound to chase its approval – if their policies do not match up with Stonewall’s expectations, they will achieve a lower score and hence a lower ranking. That means that Stonewall is able to exercise, through its Index and its Diversity Champions Programme, a significant degree of influence over the policies that participating members operate. Such influence can be used for good and for bad.”

And who made Stonewall the god of all this in the first place?

In particular, it highlighted the requirement to undertake social-media activity promoting Stonewall’s agenda:

“On the face of it, this seems like a fairly benign requirement but, when it is recognised that Stonewall’s definition of ‘LGBT equality’ is not one which is universally accepted, the potential exists for such a provision to be misused. Stonewall has recently clashed with women’s rights groups over the recognition and rights of transgender people – therefore there would be a public interest in knowing whether an organisation simply needs to signal that it is welcoming of members of the LGBTQ+ community or whether it needs to go further and denounce those whose views do not mirror those of Stonewall.”

Yes once you know what Stonewall’s agenda is, such a requirement seems the opposite of benign.

One terrible idea got shot down:

A group of educators in Texas proposed referring to slavery as “involuntary relocation” in second-grade classes — before being rebuffed by the State Board of Education.

The nine educators made up one of many groups tasked with advising the Texas board on changes to the social studies curriculum, which would affect the state’s almost 9,000 public schools.

…

Aicha Davis, a Democrat representing Dallas and Fort Worth, said during the meeting that the wording was not a “fair representation” of the slave trade, according to the Texas Tribune, which first reported the story.

Part of the proposed draft standards for the curriculum, the Tribune reported, directed students to “compare journeys to America, including voluntary Irish immigration and involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times.”

Yeeeeah that’s a very euphemistic way to name it, no matter what the surrounding subject matter is. Violent abduction into enslavement would be more realistic.

In a statement posted on Twitter on Thursday, the Texas Education Agency responded to the backlash the proposal had created.

“As documented in the meeting minutes, the SBOE provided feedback in the meeting indicating that the working group needed to change the language related to ‘involuntary relocation,’ ” it said.“Any assertion that the SBOE is considering downplaying the role of slavery in American history is completely inaccurate.”

Good. Now about systemic racism…

Last year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill prohibiting K-12 public schools from teaching critical race theory — an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not limited to individual prejudices, that conservatives have used as a label for any discussion of race in schools.

If schools can’t teach about systemic racism…that’s a problem. Of course racism is systemic. One word: redlining. That’s just a starting point but it’s a useful one, because its effects are in everything.

Rhys McKinnon talking to Trevor Noah part 2:

Noah asks if trans women couldn’t compete against men instead of women.

So, like I said, this boils down to, are trans women really women [pumping fists up and down], are they really female. Because if you think yes, then we belong competing with other women. So it’s an extreme indignity to say, “I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.” Right? So you can’t single out one of the most important facets of our society, we are obsessed with sport, athletes are some of the most highly praised highly paid people on the planet, so you can’t say that like I believe you and I support you but not for this one really big thing that society really cares about.

Noah asks if we don’t know yet whether trans women have an advantage [we do know, but anyway] why not wait until we do know? McKinnon answers:

Because that’s not how human rights work. So the way human rights work, is that the default is inclusion, and the burden of proof is on people seeking to exclude.

And there’s a little flutter of applause at that.

I call bullshit. “Exclude” is a morally loaded word, and in this context it’s a highly manipulative word. We don’t have cheetahs competing against humans in races either, but we don’t call that “exclusion.” Sports used to be for men only, and then women started to organize their own sports. That wasn’t “exclusion,” it was inclusion of women in the category “sport.” And McKinnon himself doesn’t want to “include” all men in women’s sport, because he wants to win, and he’s not very good.

And that’s where they end it.

Et tu Trevor Noah?

I’m going to have to watch all 13.37 minutes of misery.

Noah starts with oh oh it’s so hard to talk about trans issues, people tense up, that’s why it’s good you’re here: we can talk about it.

Well, yes, they can talk about it, but here’s why its bad that Rhys McKinnon is on The Daily Show: it’s because he’s a cold-blooded ruthless liar and a bully who cheats women in cycling.

McKinnon starts with the Olympics motto that sport is a human right, then says people say it’s complicated, it’s a complicated issue, but he thinks it’s not.

It all boils down to do you think trans women and intersex women are really female, or not. And if you do, it’s really simple: just stop policing who counts as a real woman.

Ah. Well yes, that is really simple, and it’s also really stupid. That would mean throwing the women’s category open to everyone, which would mean women would be forced out entirely. So much for “sport is a human right.” Also it’s not really “policing” to notice that Rhys the Hulk McKinnon is a man.

Because this has had history of racism built into it over the years, it’s not an accident that the intersex athletes who get singled out are women of color from the Global South

All one of them, he means. Powerful statistic.

because who gets singled out for scrutiny is based on white women’s conception of femininity.

Says the hulking white man who stole medals from women.

And that’s being weaponized against trans people too. So it’s a fear of [air quotes] protecting the fragile cis white woman from the rest of us.

Meaning himself and Trevor Noah, a person of color from the Global South. They’re the same! They’re victims of racism buddies! There’s a smattering of applause for this disgustingly cynical move.

Noah then does point out, with much hemming and hawing and “it’s complicated” and “some would say,” that Rhys has an advantage over women and that makes the sport unfair and how would you respond to that?

Yeah there’s lots of ways to respond to that. So the first is, the very language of [looking imploringly at the ceiling] you are born and I’m not biological somehow, like I don’t think I’m a cyborg, so, like this idea that like oh you’re not a biological woman, well I am a woman, that’s a fact, I am female, so all my identity records, my racing license, my medical records all say female, right, and I’m pretty sure [waving his hands up and down in front of his abdomen] I’m made of biological stuff, so I’m a biological female as well, so [gazing wildly at the ceiling again] this question of do trans women have an advantage over

Ok I have to interrupt here – he never comes to a complete stop in all that and still hasn’t, so I’m interrupting to address that “argument.” It’s pathetic. “Look it says right here: I’m a woman!!” Yes, we know, because there’s been an intense campaign to allow people who say they are trans to change their records, and the record-keepers have bowed to the pressure. That’s all that is. It’s not an argument nor is it evidence that Rhys McKinnon is in fact a woman. It’s a ridiculous attempt at an argument, especially from a former academic philosopher.

this question of do trans women have an advantage over cis women – we don’t know.

Finally he ends the sentence.

Yes we do know. Of course we do.

Um in fact there’s basically no published research on this question

That will come as quite a surprise to some researchers I know of.

however there’s good reason to think that there isn’t – but I think it’s irrelevant because we allow all kinds of competitive advantages within women’s sports.

Therefore we have to allow men to compete against women…but of course only some men, not all men, because if all men did it, where would McKinnon be?

He cites a high jump in which one of the women was taller than one of the other women, therefore trans women don’t have an unfair advantage. Trevor Noah goes “uh huh” encouragingly at intervals.

So if there’s an advantage, and I’m not saying there is, it’s not an unfair advantage.

Also, he whines, we’ve been competing for ages and we’ve hardly won anything. Trevor Noah does more uh-huh-ing.

So this idea that trans women are suddenly gonna take over women’s sport is an irrational fear of trans women, which is the dictionary definition of transphobia.

Full stop at last. There’s a tepid smattering of applause, at which McKinnon smirks.

That’s the first 5 minutes. Taking a break from the torture.

The mobster vibe continues.

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson received at least one message tacitly warning her not to cooperate with the House January 6 select committee from an associate of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

…

“[A person] let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. He wants me to let you know that he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal, and you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition,” read the message. The redaction was Meadows, the sources said.

The message was presented during closing remarks at the special hearing with Hutchinson by the panel’s vice-chair, Liz Cheney, who characterized the missive as improper pressure on a crucial witness that could extend to illegal witness tampering or intimidation.

Of course it’s improper pressure.

These guys have seen The Godfather just as the rest of us have, you know. They’re not from Planet Zebulon, they’re from here, and they know what a mobster threat is supposed to look like. Add pop culture to innate piggyness and there’s your “veiled” threat.

The other message was also directed at Hutchinson, the sources said; the quote displayed on the slide was one of several calls from Trump allies that Hutchinson recounted to House investigators.

“What they said to me is, as long as I continue to be a team player, they know that I’m on the team, I’m doing the right thing, I’m protecting who I need to protect, you know, I’ll continue to stay in the good graces in Trump World,” the slide read.

“And they reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts and just to keep that in mind as I proceeded through my depositions and interviews with the committee.”

All of which seems quite silly. She worked for the monster herself, she knows what a vindictive mob boss he is, there’s really no need to nudge her with it. Maybe they just felt obliged to live up to their roles.

Oh you thought men had been banned from competing against women in cycling? Hahahaha no there’s a clause that gets around that, which you can find in the archives in the filing cabinet in the basement behind the boxes of old tank parts.

The Telegraph has taken up the Wings Over Scotland story.

Women who question transgender ideology have been branded ‘farts’ as part of equalities training offered to civil servants in Nicola Sturgeon’s Government, it has emerged.

Doesn’t sound great, put that way, does it.

Workers who attended a workplace “trans 101” course were told the term was an acronym for “feminism appropriating ridiculous transphobe” and that women who oppose inclusivity measures were part of a “trans hate group”.

Staff who attended the training session, run by the Scottish Government’s taxpayer-funded LGBTI+ internal staff network, were also urged to study claims that biological sex is a “falsehood” invented by the medical profession to “reinforce white supremacy and gender oppression”.

The whole thing is just riddled with stupidity and venom, as we saw a few hours ago.

The email including a link to a dictionary of terms called a “trans language primer” was sent to staff by a senior official from the Scottish Digital Academy, a Scottish Government body which delivers training across the public sector.

Really? A grown-up sent it? That’s hard to understand.

Susan Smith, a director at the For Women Scotland campaign group, said it was “shocking” to see a member of the organisation “promoting highly political and discriminatory material which flies in the face of UK law”.

…

Other claims set out in the document are that “all research” shows there is “virtually no difference” between sporting performance of transgender women and natural women, which is inaccurate.

It goes on to state the idea that men and women have “inherent, unique and natural” distinct attributes based in biology is an “outdated understanding of sex”. It calls on non-trans people to acknowledge their “cisgender privilege”, asserts that trans people’s biology and genetics match their gender identity, and says people should ask for a person’s pronouns in “everyday conversations” as it is “impossible to know a person’s gender just by looking at them”.

Childish nonsense throughout, in short, yet a senior official sent it along.

The email directing staff members to the trans language dictionary was leaked to an online Scottish nationalist blog which was once supportive of the SNP, but is now hostile to the party under Ms Sturgeon’s leadership.

I saw it via Glinner. I hope everyone sees it.

Wings Over Scotland shares an item via a training course civil servants are being sent on by the Scottish Government. The obedient civil servants who attended got a followup “thank you and here is a long list of further reading” from one Jonah Coman; the item Wings shares is on that long list of further reading.

As you can see, one of the sites that staff are directed to is something called The Trans Language Primer. We thought you should see some of its content.

So Wings shares a lot of that content. It is, of course, grotesque. The grotesquery is amping up all the time, I guess because it has to. The demands and instructions have to keep getting more outrageous or all the fun goes out of it. The “primer” is a list of obnoxious and calculatedly offensive vocabulary items. It’s funny in the usual way, but also this is Scotland, where women are told to wheesht or else.

Here’s one:

It’s one brazen lie after another. We were not “using” TERF for ourselves except ironically, we’ve called ourselves feminists all along. We’re not organized into a trans hate group, loosely or otherwise. We consider the ideology of trans-ism – the ideology that leaps off the page of this “primer” by the way – to be wrong and destructive; that’s not the same as hating trans people. Most of us don’t ally with the religious right, although some do. We of course don’t do anything that even resembles “putting forth” legislation, or seeking or urging legislation, that bars trans people from public and private life. What an idiotic claim. How would we even start? How would we word it?

We don’t “hate all trans people.” We don’t “attack trans women,” especially aggressively or even gently. We don’t object to men who identify as trans forcing themselves on women’s sports because they “challenge our view of biological essentialism around the indenniny and experience of womanhood. We object to men who identify as trans forcing themselves on women’s sports because women’s sports are for women, not men who identify as trans, and because men have large physical advantages over women. It’s simple, it’s clear, it’s easy to understand, and it’s true. The garbage about our malign secret motives is just that: garbage.

And so on – and this is just one item from that “primer.”

Good enough for government work?

Oh and also let’s all just jump off a tall building.

The Supreme Court on Thursday curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, one of the most important environmental decisions in years.

That’s great. Global warming is spreading across the global sky like the eruption of Vesuvius as seen from Pompeii, and the Supreme Court says yeah let’s have more of that.

I wonder if any of them are at all bothered by thoughts of their children and grandchildren.

In a setback for the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change, the court said in a 6-3 ruling the EPA does not have broad authority to shift the nation’s energy production away from coal-burning power plants toward cleaner sources, including solar and wind power. 

…

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court’s ruling “strips the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’”

Kagan, who was joined in her dissent by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the limits the majority of the court imposed on the EPA’s authority “fly in the face of the statute Congress wrote. The majority says it is simply ‘not plausible’ that Congress enabled EPA to regulate power plants’ emissions through generation shifting. But that is just what Congress did when it broadly authorized EPA in Section 111 to select the ‘best system of emission reduction’ for power plants.” 

Well yeah but it’s not plausible that they actually meant it. It’s more plausible that they were being sarcastic, or ironic, or surrealist.

The Times drags Halifax:

Halifax has suggested that customers close their accounts if they oppose a policy allowing staff to display their personal pronouns on name tags.

Or, more accurately, if they oppose the absurd ideology behind posturing about “displaying” “personal” “pronouns.” We don’t actually care what banks allow employees to put on their name tags, but we do care about the idiotic truth claims such banks make in bragging about their Name Tag Pronouns Policy.

The bank tweeted a picture of a name badge with the pronouns she/her/hers and the caption: “Pronouns matter.” In response to complaints the social media team said that Halifax wanted to “open the conversation around gender identity. We care about our customers and colleagues’ individual preferences. For us, it’s a very simple solution to accidental misgendering.”

That’s what I mean. We don’t need banks “opening conversations” around “gender identity.” We don’t need their “solutions” to an absurd non-event like “accidental misgendering.” We see how stupid it is, and we mock.

The bank told two vociferous critics: “We strive for inclusion, equality and, quite simply, in doing what’s right. If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account.” When users purporting to be customers said they would cancel their accounts the administrator supplied details of how to do so.

Which is funny, in a way, because I’m hearing from friends that their service is terrible.

Women at Lloyds Banking Group, Halifax’s parent company, earn 66p for every pound earned by men when comparing median salary. Across the financial sector it is 76p, according to analysis of official data by Capital Monitor.

Those women need to start identifying as men at once.

The author of that revolting piece in the Independent about the chop shop in the woods was written by Io Dodds, who is – can you guess? – a man who says he’s a woman.

We’ve met him once before, a few months ago, when he wrote another piece for the Indy, this one explaining why it’s perfectly fine for Lia Thomas to cheat women out of prizes.

Where the hell have all the adults gone? Isn’t it supposed to be adults running institutions like universities and health services and councils and newspapers? Not reckless moody children?

ExCUSE me??? “Legendary”? A “legendary” “underground” “surgical clinic” where they mutilated people’s genitals? Which The Independent is flattering in public? Are they drunk?

Where are the adults?

But don’t try to tell these sadists that there’s no way to know who is a predatory male and who is a man who wants to live as if he were a woman.

It makes her angry, more angry than she can say, that a woman who is a rape victim wants a women-only support group.

Yes that’s nice but explain to us how you know that the man in question is not a predator. Saying “she is a trans woman” does not count as such an explanation.

Always put the men first.

Can women have anything for women? No.

A woman who is suing a rape crisis charity says she felt unable to speak at a support group after a transgender woman began attending the same meeting.

“Sarah”, who says she was raped in her 20s, stopped going to the sessions, saying she became uncomfortable sharing details of her past with the group.

She says the centre could have offered separate groups, telling the BBC: “I think my case is about women’s rights.”

The charity, Survivors’ Network says it plans to vigorously defend the claim.

It says male victims of sexual violence are referred to neighbouring services, but trans women “are welcome into all of our women-only spaces”.

They shouldn’t be. Trans women are men, and women who are rape victims should be able to have support groups that don’t have any men in them.

However, Sarah’s lawyers claim that by adopting a trans-inclusive approach – and not providing a session for women who were born female – the charity, in Brighton, failed to meet the needs of all sexual violence victims.

But in adopting a “trans-inclusive” approach they adopted a “force women who are rape victims to be in the presence of men at their meetings” approach. Never mind about trans, just don’t force women to be around men when they’re there because they were raped.

She told the BBC she had been groomed and sexually abused when she was a child and later, in her 20s, a man she knew raped her. She did not go to the police.

Last year, she knew she was going to have to come into contact with the man who attacked her. “I was finding it really hard to cope and I was having increased anxiety attacks,” she says. “So I decided to approach Survivors’ Network for help.”

She found the group sessions very helpful.

She added: “We spoke a lot about how we were manipulated and coerced by men. I can’t tell you how much it helped me mentally.”

Sarah says a new person attended a session, whom she understood to be a trans woman. She said the person presented as typically male, wearing male clothing. “I was a bit taken aback. I decided I wasn’t going to speak that week because I wasn’t comfortable.”

“I don’t trust men because I have been raped by a man. I’ve been sexually abused by men. And I just don’t necessarily trust that men are always who they say they are,” she said.

She wouldn’t, would she. She was groomed and abused as a child – she has every reason not to trust that men are always who they say they are. How is she supposed to know that the man who attended the session was what he said he was? Seriously: how is she supposed to know? How is anyone? What is to stop predatory men saying they’re trans so that they can go to rape counselling sessions and terrorize the women there? How does anyone know this is not happening routinely all over the UK? How can anyone know? All that’s required is the man’s assertion.

This isn’t even about “transphobia” or “being against trans rights,” it’s about “how the fuck do you think you know?” Maybe exactly zero of the men who do this are genuinely trans, maybe every single one of them is simply taking advantage of this grotesque policy.

Meanwhile, Survivors’ Network, which is funded by a number of bodies, including the Ministry of Justice and the NHS, said in a statement: “Continuing to deliver our services supporting survivors of sexual violence and abuse is of paramount importance and we want to reassure all our current survivors and anyone seeking support that we are still here for them.”

But they’re not. They refuse to provide women-only services, so they’re not still here for them.

Also Renato Mariotti:

The thing about the “they’re not here to hurt me” admission that I hadn’t fully taken in is that it implies “they are here to hurt other people.” It’s not “they’re not here to hurt me” but “they’re not here to hurt me.”