Victoria Smith nails everything, as she always does.

ERCC’s former chief executive officer, Mridul Wadhwa, has now resigned after being accused of “not understand[ing] the limits of her role” and “fail[ing] to set professional standards of behaviour”.

That is putting it mildly. The problem here is not one of disorganisation or managerial overreach. As anyone who followed the tribunal of former ERCC caseworker Roz Adams will know, it is one of deliberate sabotage. It is not that the need for women-only spaces somehow fell off Wadhwa’s radar. It’s more that Wadhwa — a trans-identified male who does not have a Gender Recognition Certificate — did not approve of the kind of survivor who requests them.

…

There is nothing about the damage Wadhwa has done to ERCC that could not have been predicted several years ago. The tragedy is that plenty of those who enabled the sabotage still claim to be feminists. For women such as Nicola Sturgeon, Mhairi Black and Shona Robison, trans activism’s infiltration of the women’s movement provided the ideal way to prove how forward-thinking and progressive they were.  There is, after all, more status in claiming to be a trans ally than in aligning yourself with the women of the past, those drudges who built up the very things that you are now free to trash.

Feminism – the real kind – is so last year, last decade, last century. It’s boring. It’s respectable. It’s old. Where’s the fun in that? And if feminism isn’t fun, well, it can go fuck itself. It becomes just another tedious whiny clueless mommy-figure telling you to clean up your room.

For this is a story of letting a thing be wrecked because you think so little of those who created it. Reading the past few years’ discourse on female-only spaces and inclusion, one could be forgiven for thinking women were handed rape crisis centres as part of some luxury “cis privilege” benefits package. The truth is that they fought for them. It is shameful that such a small thing — not the end of rape, nor even a meaningful reduction in rape, merely the resources to support women in its aftermath — should have had to be fought for at all. 

Well when you put it that way, yes, so…erm…let’s not put it that way. Let’s just keep saying women are boring.

So much dirty laundry getting thrown into the tub today.

FINALLY.

Notice that the BBC carefully conceals the “gender” of the subject in the headline.

Rape crisis centre CEO stands down after report into failings

Also uses a very deceptive photo of said CEO. He looks very womany.

And then there’s the crappy confusing lede:

The chief executive of a sexual assault support service has stood down after a review found it failed to protect women-only spaces.

What is “it”? The chief executive? The review? The service? Which? This is what happens when you try to obfuscate the core fact in the story: your reporting becomes opaque.

The male CEO of a rape crisis center has resigned after a review found that the center under his leadership failed to protect rape victims.

Mridul Wadhwa – a trans woman – resigned after a Rape Crisis Scotland report found she failed to behave professionally while head of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC).

HE. He, damn you. He he he. He should never have applied for the job in the first place. He. Stop lying to us about this campaign to steal everything from women. STOP. IT.

The investigation, carried out by an independent consultant, also found Ms Wadhwa “did not understand the limits of her authority” and the needs of survivors were not prioritised.

In a statement, the ERCC board said it was implementing recommendations from the review, but felt the “time was right for a change of leadership”.

Ya think?

Don’t hire a man this time. Or any time. Seriously.

For Women Scotland – which has campaigned against changes to transgender rights – accused the board of “ignoring its own culpability”.

For Women Scotland has campaigned against the hostile takeover of women’s rights by men who call themselves women. What the Beeb so cautiously and squeamishly and hostile to womenly calls “changes to transgender rights” are/is in fact a protracted ongoing determined effort to take rights away from women and hand them over to men in lipstick.

In a statement posted on X, they said: “This is the very least that they can do. It seems the board are intent on ignoring their own culpability.

And the BBC is intent on helping them do it.

Good old Twitter.

“Visibility limited: this Post may violate X’s rules against Hateful Conduct.”

Ok where’s the hateful conduct?

The tweet is in response to this one:

The debate as a test of cognitive fitness:

A 90-minute debate that involves unknown questions and unanticipated rebuttals requires candidates to think on their feet. It is a much more demanding and representative test of cognitive health than a simple mental-status exam you take in a doctor’s office. Specifically, the debate serves as an evaluation of the candidates’ mental flexibility under pressure—their capacity to deal with uncertainty and the unforeseen…Donald Trump’s expressions of those tendencies were alarming. He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.

I don’t suppose that will come as a surprise to anyone. He’s always been stupid, but not this stupid.

He replied to a question about the attempted coup:

I have said “blood bash—bath.” It was a different term, and it was a term that related to energy, because they have destroyed our energy business. That was where bloodbath was. Also, on Charlottesville, that story has been, as you would say, debunked. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse—all of these people, they covered it. If they go an extra sentence, they will see it was perfect. It was debunked in almost every newspaper. But they still bring it up, just like they bring 2025 up. They bring all of this stuff up. I ask you this: You talk about the Capitol. Why are we allowing these millions of people to come through on the southern border? How come she’s not doing anything—and I’ll tell you what I would do. And I would be very proud to do it.

Mmm yes. It leaps from fragment of a thought to fragment of a thought, making no sense of any kind.

Eleven days before the debate, at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, Trump responded to criticism of his rambling speech by claiming that it is part of a deliberate strategy to frustrate his opponents. “I do the weave,” he told the audience. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like—and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

No they don’t. No they don’t. He doesn’t have any English professor friends, but even if he did, they wouldn’t say that. Even if they were fans they wouldn’t say that. They would change the subject to batteries or MIT or Laura and Sean and Jesse. Also no they don’t come back brilliantly together. They remain random idiotic splinters of half-formed pseudo-thoughts.

He can vomit words for hours, but he can’t do no weave.

Trump in Tucson:

Trump stood before a backdrop etched with his campaign promises of “make housing affordable again” and “no tax on tips” – a signal that the speech would focus heavily on amplifying his economic platform. But instead, the former president used much of his time to reframe his debate performance – which even Trump’s own aides have admitted will not win him new voters – by casting it in a far more favorable light.

(Far more favorable than what? We’re not told.)

Despite the advertised theme of the event, Trump did not spend much of the roughly hour-and-a-half speech sharing details of his economic plans. Instead, the Republican candidate dedicated the bulk of his time pandering to his base with meandering anecdotes, insulting his opponents, and reiterating many of his baseless talking points, including claims he won the last election.

Well, that’s Trump, isn’t it. That’s what we’re in for if he wins.

He also focused heavily on immigration, a typical target for his rallies, stoking fears about waves of criminals crossing into the country and again accusing Haitian immigrants of eating animals in Springfield, Ohio.

“They take in the geese … and even walk off with their pets”, Trump said, repeating the unfounded and racist smear that has been challenged by the town’s officials and has inflamed tensions and attacks against members of the Haitian community.

Well, as a member of the German community, he has a proud heritage of racist bullshit to uphold.

The Trump campaign was required to pay a $145,222.70 deposit for use of the auditorium and local police who would perform security duties at the event, a policy that was set by the city after the former president failed to settle an $80,000 bill for a rally held there in 2016.

“We learned our lesson,” Tucson city councilman Kevin Dahl told the Arizona Daily Star, adding that the city wrote off the debt.

I hope Tucson kept every penny of that $145,222.70 deposit.

Ahhhhh fuck it all – you try to read a scathing piece on Trump v abortion rights but then you bump up against the determined omission of women from the subject of abortion rights and yet again you give up.

No matter what Trump serves up on abortion, the fact is the conservative legal movement remains hell-bent on enacting some kind of national abortion ban, whether via legislation or simple, draconian enforcement of the Comstock Act. Their “leave abortion to the states” talking point never mentions how in 2024, for example, four states introduced legislation that criminalizes non-parent adults who support minors’ out-of-state travel for abortion care—and Tennessee enacted its law. Conservatives certainly don’t highlight the fact that they are champing at the bit to prosecute patients for accessing care in addition to the providers and aid organizations facilitating it.

And they’re definitely not talking about how their plans for enshrining fetal “personhood” into law would eliminate access to in vitro fertilization, threaten contraception access, and drastically expand the criminal surveillance of people who can get pregnant.

Minors; patients; people who can get pregnant. At that point it’s ahhhhhhhhhhhhfuckyou and not reading more. Disappearing women from the discussion is not the way to keep Trump from winning another term.

Lawyers, eh?

“No factual or legal support, just a bare assertion.”

And a very fatuous assertion at that. No, everyone does not have a core sense of belonging to a particular gender. What we have is a history of being told we’re one or the other, and a history of encountering other people who are one or the other, and a history of seeing movies and tv shows full of other people who are one or the other. Some of us may have a history of thinking and/or feeling that we should be grouped with the Other, while most of us assume we’re stuck with the “assignment” and get on with life. Calling that “gender identity” and saying we all have it is several steps too many.

A visit to the Gender Quislings.

Sandy Brindley is the Chief Executive of Rape Crisis Scotland.

At least there’s no palaver about who’s a woman and who’s a man when we’re talking about the Tate brothers.

Two women who say they were raped and strangled by the controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate have spoken to the BBC about their experiences. Another woman has alleged, for the first time, she was raped by Mr Tate’s younger brother, Tristan – also an influencer with millions of followers.

The Tate brothers, aged 37 and 36, currently face charges in Romania of human trafficking and forming an organised group to sexually exploit women. Andrew Tate is also charged with rape. If found guilty, the two men could be jailed for more than 10 years. They strongly deny the charges against them.

Oh, strongly – that makes a big difference.

Andrew Tate is currently under house arrest in Romania. In addition to the charges he already faces, prosecutors are considering new allegations against him, including having sex with a minor and trafficking underage persons. Both brothers are also being investigated for trafficking 34 more women.

Now, in a new BBC Panorama programme, two British women not involved with the Romanian case against the Tate brothers, have given detailed first-hand accounts of alleged rape and sexual violence by Andrew Tate. The allegations date back at least 10 years, to when Mr Tate was living in Luton.

Look, it’s their lifestyle, ok?

In 2014, Anna told Bedfordshire Police about the alleged attack. Two other women made similar allegations, and the investigation was taken over by Hertfordshire Police.

In 2019, a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, but it was decided there was not enough evidence to bring charges.

As usual. Rape is seldom reported; when it is reported it’s seldom sent to the CPS; when it is sent to the CPS it’s seldom prosecuted; when it is prosecuted it’s seldom convicted. Four filters; the end product is tiny. Rape is all but legal.

In the second half of the last decade, Andrew Tate began his rise to online fame. The self-proclaimed misogynist’s videos on YouTube and TikTok, and posts on Twitter, gained him millions of followers and a worldwide profile.

He preached a message aimed at boys and young men that women should be dominated. In one video, he said women were “intrinsically lazy” and added: “There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist.”

Meh. It’s just women. The real victims here are the trans women.

The BBC manages to say it at last:

Rape crisis centre failed to protect women-only spaces

But don’t get too excited, there’s still plenty of confusion and obfuscation and avoidance.

Rape survivors are no longer being referred to a support service in Edinburgh after a review found it failed to protect women-only spaces. The reviewer’s report said that Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had not put survivors first or adhered to national service standards.

The report also stated that the CEO of the centre – a transwomen [sic] – failed to behave professionally and did not understand the limits of her authority.

We’re still stuck in the same mud of confusion. The CEO of the centre is a man, and he abused his authority. I don’t think the two reporters on this story – Mary McCool and Lorna Gordon – actually know that Wadhwa didn’t understand the limits of his authority, I think they just wanted to give him as much cover as they could get away with. The whole story reeks of avoidance and distraction. Not least, how could Wadwha not have understood when there were furious women yelling about it for months?

Rape Crisis Scotland said it was “extremely concerned” that the centre had not provided dedicated women-only spaces for 16 months, and as a result had paused new referrals to it.

The national charity, which sets standards for member centres, commissioned the investigation after an employment tribunal found the Edinburgh facility had unfairly dismissed a councillor with gender critical views.

That is, the Edinburgh facility run by a man had unfairly fired a councillor who knows that men are not women and cannot magically become women.

The review concluded that Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had experienced a number of difficulties…

This included a strategy “which did not put survivors first” and a failure to protect women-only spaces.

There. At least the BBC finally admits that much.

The review also pointed out that the chief executive officer who was appointed in 2021 – Mridul Wadhwa – “did not understand the limits on her role’s authority, when to refer decisions to trustees and failed to set professional standards of behaviour”.

HIS role’s authority. His. He’s a man. The whole point is that he’s a man. He’s not courteous to us; why is the BBC being so “courteous” to him that most readers will continue to be misled into thinking he’s a woman?

In its recommendations, the review said the Edinburgh centre should take advice from Rape Crisis Scotland on the definition of “woman” and publicise this within the service. Women only spaces and times “must be protected and clearly publicised”, it said.

And by “women” it means women. Not men who pretend to be women, not including men who pretend to be women, but just women, actual women.

It said: “The needs of survivors should be listened to and respected when they come to any Rape Crisis Centre. It is important that survivors can make informed choices about the services they access at Rape Crisis Centres, and we recognise that for some survivors this includes the choice of a single sex service.”

For some survivors? Seriously? Do the people who wrote the review seriously think it’s only some women who don’t want to deal with men at a rape crisis center?

There’s still a long way to go.

Will Ferrell has regrets.

Will also said he’s “sure” he probably regrets “a fair amount” of his comedy choices. Namely, his impersonation of former United States Attorney General Janet Reno, which the interviewer said “hits a false note now.”

If you’re unfamiliar, Will would dress up as a woman and impersonate Reno as part of a regular SNL skit called “Janet Reno’s Dance Party.” 

Looking back, Will said: “That’s something I wouldn’t choose to do now.”

Why? Oh not because it’s insulting to women. Hahahahahahahahaha god no of course not. Insulting women doesn’t matter. No, because it’s insulting to trans women, of course.

“I had met trans people, but I didn’t have anyone personally in my life,” he said. “So this was all new territory for me, which is why I think this film is so exciting for us to kind of put out there in the world.”

“It’s a chance [for] all of us in the cis community to be able to ask questions and also just to listen and be there as a friend to discuss this journey,” he continued, echoed by Harper, who said the documentary “tells the story of a cis friend of a trans person who has to transition himself.”

It’s about a guy and a guy who pretends to be a woman. What could be more exciting to put out there in the world? Not a movie about a woman or two women, certainly. Yawwwwwwwwn.

Ah well he didn’t kill them so that’s nice, right? Look on the bright side.

It has been revealed that, while the police have already identified and detained 50 of the men whose images appeared on Dominique Pelicot’s hard drive, another 30 suspects – as yet unnamed and untraced – remain at large.

“So, we know 30 out of 80 still haven’t been caught. There are tensions here because people don’t know if they can trust their neighbours. You ask yourself – is he one of the 30? What is your neighbour getting up to behind closed doors?” said Isabelle Liversain in a voice sharp with frustration.

But Mazan’s 74-year-old mayor, Louis Bonnet, sought to play down those tensions, arguing that most of the alleged rapists came from other villages and seeking to frame the Pelicots as outsiders who hadn’t lived there long.

…

In his interview with us, Bonnet talked about the case itself, and in doing so veered towards the sort of attitudes that have already sparked fury in France as well as deep admiration for Gisèle Pelicot’s courage in confronting them.

“People here say ‘no one was killed’. It would have been much worse if [Pelicot] had killed his wife. But that didn’t happen in this case,” Bonnet said.

So sweet of him not to. Mind you, if he’d killed her he wouldn’t have been able to have more random men come to his house and rape her, so there’s that.

In all its dummitude

Notice at about 20 seconds when he says “They’re eating the cats” Harris simply bursts out laughing, which enrages Trump such that he amps up the scowl and the snarl and the ragey shouting, which makes Harris laugh even harder for a second or two.

Then the news guy breaks in to say we talked to the city manager and he said there have been no specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant communniny and Trump squawks “Wull I’ve seen people on television!” He actually does actually say that.

It’s as if someone discovered a way to inflate a toddler to the size of a very large man and that toddler somehow got nominated for president.

“The people on television say ‘my dog was taken and used for food’ so maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager but The People On Television say their dog was eaten by…the people that went there.” He said that. With his own mouth. He has the brain of a five-year-old in a huge angry body.

Dahlia Lithwick has a nice summing-up:

The contrast was underscored by perhaps the most arresting moment of the debate. In the closing statements, Harris offered up a philosophy of leadership for Americans trying to get a handle on who she is for the first time: “I started my career as a prosecutor. I was a DA. I was an attorney general. A United States senator. And now vice president. I’ve only had one client. The people. And I’ll tell you, as a prosecutor I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I ever asked them: ‘Are you OK?’ ”

Donald Trump doesn’t care if you are OK, because he only cares that he is OK. He is not capable of imagining a world outside his own weird, smoky, pet-munching interior hellscape. He never could. On Tuesday, Harris told millions of American women who have been serially insulted by Samuel Alito and their state legislators, and then not even deemed worthy of being addressed with a “you” statement in Trump’s staged answer, that they were seen and that their experiences count for something. Harris looked at the camera and said simply that it is not enough to be handed off to a different Big Daddy when your needs and demands and basic human rights are exigent and life-altering. And that moment won the debate.

It’s true. Nothing outside Donald Trump is real to Donald Trump.

Now for the most literal form of misogyny:

I have been following Siro’s story for 30 years, ever since I went to interview her and four other rural midwives in India’s Bihar state in 1996.

They had been identified by a non-governmental organisation as being behind the murder of baby girls in the district of Katihar where, under pressure from the newborns’ parents, they were killing them by feeding them chemicals or simply wringing their necks.

Hakiya Devi, the eldest of the midwives I interviewed, told me at the time she had killed 12 or 13 babies. Another midwife, Dharmi Devi, admitted to killing more – at least 15-20.

It is impossible to ascertain the exact number of babies they may have killed, given the way the data was gathered.

But they featured in a report published in 1995 by an NGO, based on interviews with them and 30 other midwives. If the report’s estimates are accurate, more than 1,000 baby girls were being murdered every year in one district, by just 35 midwives. According to the report, Bihar at the time had more than half a million midwives. And infanticide was not limited to Bihar.

Girls. Murdered because they’re girls.

Reports of infanticide are now relatively rare, but sex-selective abortion remains common, despite being illegal since 1994.

If one listens to the traditional folk songs sung during childbirth, known as Sohar, in parts of north India, joy is reserved for the birth of a male child. Even in 2024, it is an effort to get local singers to change the lyrics so that the song celebrates the birth of a girl.

While we were filming our documentary, two baby girls were discovered abandoned in Katihar – one in bushes, another at the roadside, just a few hours old. One later died. The other was put up for adoption.

They don’t get the chance to identify as not girls.

But our trans siblings don’t get special treatment, no no no no no, quite the contrary, they’re tormented and tortured and deprived at every turn.

Oh I get it. It’s a break for everyone else. “Thank you baby Jesus, we get a month free of them interrupting us to talk about their gender every five minutes.”

Trump translates the fact that he had a lot of his “facts” checked into a claim that he was persecuted.

Former President Donald Trump laid into ABC News on Wednesday morning after his rocky debate performance, stating the network should have its broadcast license revoked.

“They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” Trump said of the news organization.

ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact-checked Trump throughout Tuesday night’s presidential debate, quickly correcting the record for millions watching at home after the Republican pushed falsehoods on abortion, migrants and the 2020 election.

That’s…it’s…they…it’s not fair to correct the record, he should be free to claim anything he wants, this is a contest, not a news report.

“It was a rigged deal as I assumed it would be because when you looked the fact they were correcting everything and not correcting with her,” Trump said Wednesday.

To sum up, Trump lies every time he opens his mouth and Harris does not, therefore, Harris is cheating and the news moderators are helping her do it. It’s flawless Trumpian logic and it could work.

You will say you believe in the mandatory mythology or you will be out.

The Green Party of England and Wales has suspended its health spokesperson on the eve its largest-ever conference for calling reports of rising LGBT+ hate crimes “mischievous”.

At a general election hustings in June, Pallavi Devulapalli said she had “yet to meet anyone” who denied a person’s right to “dress” and “be addressed as they please”. Ms Devulapalli told the BBC “there is no trans-hate in society in general”.

The BBC then snidely cites a statistic about an “increase in reported hate crimes” – without explaining how it knows the increase isn’t due to a fashion for seeing putative hate crimes against Our Trans Siblings everywhere.

The Greens suspended Ms Devulapalli two days before the party’s conference got under way in Manchester on Friday. The party has not given any explanation. A spokesperson said it “does not comment on individual disciplinary cases”. But the BBC has obtained party documents showing Ms Devulapalli was placed on an emergency suspension pending a code of conduct investigation.

It’s interesting that the Greens apparently have no qualms about kicking out a member with a noticeably non-Anglo-Saxon name. It’s interesting that the Greens apparently see Our Trans Siblings as more important and/or deserving of protection than boring old persons of color.

Speaking to the BBC, Ms Devulapalli claimed her comments reflected her thoughts that hate crime against LGBT+ people was “being politicised” and “most people weren’t aware of the issue”.

There it is again, another snide nudge to view her as the Greens view her. She didn’t say her comments reflected her thoughts, she “claimed” they did. The BBC is so ridiculous.

Cade Hatton, co-chair of the LGBTQIA+ Greens group, said Ms Devulapalli’s comments at the hustings were “just the most recent thing in a long list of things that have made people uncomfortable”. Mr Hatton said he believed Ms Devulapalli was trying to have a debate about trans rights but had “not gone about it in the right way”. He added that Ms Devulapalli’s suspension was an example of the Green Party’s disciplinary system “working a little more efficiently”.

The party’s rights and responsibilities policy states “trans men are men, trans women are women, and that non-binary identities exist and are valid”.

Then the party’s policy is full of shit, because trans women are by definition not women, ditto trans men, and non-binawee idennninneez are childish bullshit. Gwow up, Gweens.

I’ve been re-reading The Turn of the Screw, and I’m reminded of why I so dislike Henry James’s Late Style. I’ll give you a sample of why.

It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!

This is supposed to be not an impersonal narrative voice, not Henry James, not a novelist, but a governess.

A few (long) sentences later:

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain—which was so much to the good—that I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind—I scarce know what to call it—to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion—for the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help—I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I recollect saying; “no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But if I did, you know, there’s a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend for him that he had not literally ever been ‘bad’? He has not literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?”

Said no one to anyone ever.

It makes me feel like Kingsley Amis writing to Philip Larkin – “No she didn’t, no he didn’t, no they didn’t.”