Back in the old days, 40 years ago or so, scientists and journalists were cautious in talking about climate change. Didn’t want to be seen as cranks and alarmists doncha know. Those days are over.

More and more scientists are now admitting publicly that they are scared by the recent climate extremes, such as the floods in Pakistan and west Africa, the droughts and heatwaves in Europe and east Africa, and the rampant ice melt at the poles.

That is not because an increase in extremes was not predicted. It was always high on the list of concerns alongside longer-term issues such as sea level rise. It is the suddenness and ferocity of recent events that is alarming researchers, combined with the ill-defined threat of tipping points, by which aspects of heating would become unstoppable.

For real. It’s not that long ago that the orthodox take was don’t expect big dramatic changes right now, then suddenly the big dramatic changes were all up in our faces.

Climate computer models have typically projected a fairly consistent but smooth rise in temperatures. But recently the climate seems to have gone haywire.

That heat wave in the west last summer wasn’t smooth. The floods in Pakistan aren’t smooth. The drought that dried up Europe’s rivers this past summer wasn’t smooth. The wildfires in Australia and California weren’t smooth. The disappearance of the Colorado river isn’t smooth. The melting of the permafrost, the rapidly shrinking glaciers, the disappearance of the North Pole as a solid object…none of that is smooth.

But it is the threat of unstoppable long-term change that most worries Prof Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey. She has witnessed temperatures in the Antarctic of 40C above the seasonal norm, and 30C above in the Arctic.

Francis was most alarmed by a recent report warning that if the 1.5C threshold were exceeded, seen by most scientists as almost inevitable, it could trigger multiple climate tipping points – abrupt, irreversible and with dangerous impacts.

She said: “It’s really scary. It seems some of [these trends] are already under way.” She said she feared for the permafrost, the Greenland ice sheet, the Arctic sea ice, and Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier and western ice sheet.

The Arctic sea ice used to be a large solid thing that was a kind of continent. Now it isn’t.

Which counts, reality or dogma?

The hearing continues:

MG: In LGBAs own evidence they are forced to push back on othodoxy that they disagree with. We note that CC was satisfied that LGBA was engaged in political purposes but were ancillary. MM do not have to prove that CC was wrong. 

CC view is that more evidence has been made available since decision. It is clear that LGBA has purposes that are political. These are not ancillary. LGBA was established for lobbying and political purposes. They suggested investigation against Stonewall. It is clear beyond doubt that they want to change policies that are relevant to GC beliefs. BJ said in this tribunal that they were building an org that fought against GI beliefs. It was said in the tribunal that self-ID erases same-sex attraction. 

The distinction matters here because whether or not LGBA can be defined as a charity is what the hearing is about, but all the same it never stops being odd that they are having to defend themselves for knowing the difference between women and men. It never stops being odd that all this is about a mass delusion dressed up as a human rights issue. It’s not a view that men are not women, it’s just the reality. Try telling a bull elephant in musth that he’s a cow. (Kidding. Don’t try telling a bull elephant in musth anything. Stay far away.)

LGBA views must be of benefit. We say there is no concensus re this. The law is undergoing an ongoing process and for current purposes the law is not as clear as LGBA says it is. Re EA section 7. Re PC of gender reassignment. Sex isn’t used in exclusively biological sense. 

It’s bizarre to try to alter reality via laws. Theocracies of course do it all the time, but it’s still odd. A gender theocracy is really odd.

In terms of using Equality law, it is not as clear as they say it is. Re education public. LGBA approaches this with one point of view only. KH and BJ said LGBA would educate the public using GC beliefs as facts. BJ said education must be based on facts – shouldn’t say boys can be girls and girls can be boys. We say this is not neutral. On the totality of the evidence LGBA are saying they will be putting forward the GC view as the factual view. The evidence shows they haven’t done much outside the GC side of education.

The GC view is the factual view. People can have fantasies about who and what they are, but the world in general has to keep a grip on what’s fantasy and what’s real. It’s not “factual” that boys can be girls any more than it’s factual that parrots can be mastodons.

Are LGBA views of the consensus? They put forward their GC position and so can’t say that there is a common understanding. This is a paradigm case. We say that the chosen approach of LGBA is fundamentally confrontation[al] and unpleasant. 

The consensus and the common understanding are one kind of thing, and the reality is another. The consensus can be wrong. The common understanding can be wrong. A public opinion poll isn’t a biology textbook.

The Mermaids-LGB Alliance hearing resumed today.

They talk about political versus charitable, and the complexities of distinguishing between them.

MG: LGBA say gender is a construct. One needs to go beyond articles on any footing. What other material is admissable? Who is the audience to whom the article is addressed? [Bev Jackson and Kate Harris] contacted “stroppy” people re formation of LGBA.

GC views – no comprehensive definition but says sex is immutable. So people should be described with ref to their sex so male or male-bodied. Says GI orgs are homophobic. Also a view that LGB rights are not same as GI rights. The effect is to challenge or be against trans rights.

Who is the audience to whom this is addressed? The mission statement was to challenge the notion of gender and unscientific doctrines. [Allison Bailey]’s tweet encapsulates the mission of LGBA “gender extremism is about to meet its match”.

There is no single statement that shows LGBAs views – we can conclude that they go further than sex is immutable. BJ said “The word lesbian is taken”. The phrase TATG is used.

We say the articles should be read against that background. We consider that the articles are incomplete. In light of this, we say you can conclude that GC beliefs (in campaigns etc) want to change the law on policies. This would affect MM and other trans orgs. We don’t want to get into equality legislation. This is a charities case.

We should draw a distinction between what a witness says in court and what was said prior to tribunal. We say that these are expressive of LGBA views – KH speech says “[Stonewall] is at the heart of the lie of GI. We are going to campaign that confirms that there are 2 sexes.” She is talking about political lobbying. Also BJ says: “our 1st priority is to press pause on GRR in Scotland” “Our battle against Stonewall law” 

It’s weird to call it “political lobbying” to say “there are two sexes.” I know why they say it, of course, but it’s weird. It’s worth reminding ourselves of how weird it is.

Erase erase erase, don’t stop until every last trace is gone.

The Midwifery Council of NZ is updating its Midwifery Scope of Practice guidance for midwives to entirely remove the words ‘mother’ and ‘woman’.

So then it will have to be the Midpersonry Council of NZ, yes? No point in deleting “mother” and “woman” but leaving “wife.” Husbandry, like “man” and “father,” will continue as before.

With midwifery arguably the most woman-centred and mother-centred of all health professions, [Dr Sarah] Donovan says clarification is needed on what evidence base and advice underpinned the Midwifery Council’s decision to remove these words entirely. The words ‘wahine’ and ‘māmā’, used almost universally in other maternity care material in New Zealand are also not used anywhere in the English language version of the document. The lack of these words seems conspicuous considering the inclusion of te reo [the language, i.e. Maori] in the English version for other terms.

…

The previous version of the NZ Midwives Scope of Practice document referred to women and mothers throughout.

Not surprisingly, because what else would it do?

What are the nations going to be talking about in Sharm El-Sheikh this week? Payments due.

Last year’s UN climate conference in Glasgow delivered a host of pledges on emissions cuts, finance, net zero, forest protection and more.

Yay pledges! Unless…they haven’t been carried out?

Egypt says their conference will be about implementing these pledges.

What that really means is it will be all about cash, and specifically getting wealthy nations to come good on their promises of finance to help the developing world tackle climate change.

So expect the main battle lines to be between the north and south, between rich and poor nations.

And expect the rich nations to do the least they can possibly get away with. Pledging they can do, action not so much.

Top of Egypt’s “to-do” list is the $100bn (£89bn) a year developed countries promised way back in 2009 to help the developing world cut emissions and adapt to our changing climate.

Listen, the developed countries have been having a hard time, the kids are all in expensive schools, we had to buy them all SUVs, holidays in Venice and the Swiss Alps don’t come cheap, we’re taking a cruise next year – we just don’t have the cash right now. Or ever.

Europe and the US have agreed there should be a formal discussion of the issue but are unlikely to make commitments of cash.

They worry the costs will spiral into trillions of dollars as the impacts of climate change get more severe in years to come.

So what they plan to do instead is nothing, which will make the impacts of climate change pack up and go away.

The second contributor to the Guardian’s civil war in the US roundup is Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist and essayist.

One of the surest markers of incipient civil war in other countries is the legal system devolving from a non-partisan, truly national institution to a spoil of partisan war. That has already happened in the US.

The overturning of Roe v Wade, in June, was both a symptom of the new American divisiveness and a cause of its spread. The Dobbs decision (in which the supreme court held that the US constitution does not confer the right to abortion) took the status of women in the US and dropped it like a plate-glass window from a great height. It will take a generation or more to sweep up the shards. What women are or are not allowed to do with their bodies – abortions, IVF procedures, birth control, maintaining the privacy of their menstrual cycles, crossing state lines – now depends on the state and county lines in which their bodies happen to reside. The legal reality of American women is no longer national in nature. When a woman travels from Illinois to Ohio, she becomes a different entity, with different rights and duties.

Because of the lawless refusal to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

The supreme court feels illegitimate because it is illegitimate. The Dobbs decision does not reflect the will of the American people because the supreme court does not reflect the will of the American people.

I’d add a second illegitimate move to Marche’s: the lies and maneuvers of the Kavanagh hearing, especially the bit where it was paused for a few days so that the FBI could “investigate” further, when it was insultingly obvious that the FBI did no such thing.

Elections have consequences, right up until the point when they don’t. On a superficial level, the 2022 midterms couldn’t matter more; American democracy itself is at stake. On a deeper level, the 2022 midterms don’t matter all that much; they will inform us, if anything, of the schedule and the manner of the fall of the republic.

I wish I could say oh things aren’t that bad.

In the Guardian three scholars tell us how a civil war could unfold in the US. The first is Barbara F. Walter, political scientist and author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. She starts by pointing out that a second civil war here won’t resemble the first.

If a second civil war breaks out in the US, it will be a guerrilla war fought by multiple small militias spread around the country. Their targets will be civilians – mainly minority groups, opposition leaders and federal employees. Judges will be assassinated, Democrats and moderate Republicans will be jailed on bogus charges, black churches and synagogues bombed, pedestrians picked off by snipers in city streets, and federal agents threatened with death should they enforce federal law. The goal will be to reduce the strength of the federal government and those who support it, while also intimidating minority groups and political opponents into submission.

Some of that is already happening. It’s unpleasantly undifficult to imagine more of it happening until the fascists win.

We know this because far-right groups such as the Proud Boys have told us how they plan to execute a civil war. They call this type of war “leaderless resistance” and are influenced by a plan in The Turner Diaries (1978), a fictitious account of a future US civil war. Written by William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, it offers a playbook for how a group of fringe activists can use mass terror attacks to “awaken” other white people to their cause, eventually destroying the federal government. The book advocates attacking the Capitol building, setting up a gallows to hang politicians, lawyers, newscasters and teachers who are so-called “race traitors”, and bombing FBI headquarters.

It sounds like a video game. It sounds like “fun” if you like that kind of thing. I can easily imagine a lot of people joining in not on ideological grounds but just because they like that kind of “fun.”

I found this pretty exhilarating. (Too exhilarating: I couldn’t sleep afterwards.) It’s streaming until December 2.

They are if they say they are. No really.

A notorious transgender pedophile in Scotland was forced out of his house on October 19 following a citizen’s protest against his presence in a public housing complex in which many children resided.

Katie Dolatowski, 22, a trans-identified male, appeared in Kirkcaldy Sheriff’s Court on October 18 after breaching a probation condition which required Dolatowski [to] inform police of his address changes. Dolatowski is a registered sex offender, and his conditions stem from two incidents involving young girls.

On February 8th, 2018, Dolatowski was caught filming a 12-year-old girl in a women’s bathroom at an Asda supermarket in Fife, Scotland. Dolatowski was with a care aide using the women’s restroom and as the pair left, he doubled back alone to film the young girl who was within a cubicle in a state of undress by holding his phone over the cubical wall.  After noticing she was being filmed, the girl screamed for help and Dolatowski ran away. He was later identified on the supermarket’s CCTV and 12 seconds of film of the girl were found on his mobile phone and iPad.

About a month later, at another supermarket women’s restroom, he grabbed a 10-year-old girl by the face, pushed her into a cubicle, and told her to get naked below the waist. Fortunately she punched him and got away.

You’d think this would be one category where even the most ardent True Believers in the gender religion would rule out self-identifying into the female sex. If you’re a male predator who goes around attempting rape in women’s toilets then the state really should not be helping you to pretend to be a woman.

Despite his two attacks on children, Dolatowski avoided jail for the incidents, and was instead handed a three-year community order. He was also banned from having contact with children, placed on the sex offenders registry, and ordered to complete community service.

So what did he do? Amble off to live in a women’s hostel. What could go wrong?

Remember Dr Carol Hay? The philosophy academic who mourned the tragic plight of trans women in Ukraine while cheerfully calling actual women “terfs”? She’s still busy living her definition of feminism as a movement for men who call themselves women.

“Feminist professor of philosophy” her Twitter bio calls her. Yes it’s so feminist to welcome men into feminism, to center men in feminism, and to call feminist women who object rude names.

So according to “intersectional feminism” Donald Trump is a woman and a feminist if he says he is. Elon Musk is. Alex Jones is. Boris Johnson is. All they have to do is say so.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Smirky little goon.

What they owe her is the courtesy of actually understanding her stance before going public about her.

It is a sign of the times that the trans activists could simply say “transphobe” and have so many people turn on someone, even in many cases, someone they’ve felt respect for, they liked, they spent time with.

It’s the casual betrayal of someone you’ve been close with (to some degree) for years that really gets me. They don’t want to be linked to the pariah. Not because she actually is one, but because everyone else says she is. Radcliffe, Watson and Grint would have had better access than most to talk to her privately if they felt so inclined. I’m thinking none of them did. If they had, they could claim to have talked with her personally to no avail, and thus acquire even higher trans cred. Seeing how low they’ve already stooped, I doubt they’d have had any qualms about betraying the contents of any such private conversations, had they occurred.

None of these people ready to pillory Rowling for her public statements seem to understand that the rest of us can read what she actually said, and see there was nothing “hateful” or “transphobic” in them. It puts people like Radcliffe at an extreme disadvantage to have to rely on the hearsay of others’ distorted takes on them when confronted by people who have read her words for themselves. We know better. It didn’t have to be that way; they knew her.

Another individual who has tried to save his ass in all this is screenwriter (now producer) Steve Kloves. In writing the screenplays of most of the Harry Potter films, and producing the Fantastic Beasts series, he has worked alongside Rowling for the better part of twenty years. You’d think that if he’d been that close to her for that long, something would have come up. I would think he would be better placed than most to know what she thinks on any number of subjects. If anything had come up in the course of their working relationship, he could have commented on it. But what is he reacting to? Activist-led fallout from Rowling’s public statements. Not the statements themselves, not any interactions they might have had in the time of their collaboration, but the perception that whatever it was she said is “transphobic.” Did he say, “yes, I felt she was transphobic when I was working with her,” offering proof and corroboration to the charges leveled against her? No. He’s just riffing on “trans rights” in conjunction with the baseless smear campaign that failed to address or quote (or sometimes even link to) what she actually said that was transphobic. If he had any additional ammunition to bring to the fight, he would have. But he didn’t. So his lofty “statement” in “solidarity” is just another opportunistic joyride on the libelous bandwagon.

Contrast this to what happened with the accusations against Cosby and Weinstein. Once the lid was off, others came forward with their own stories of abuse suffered at the hands of these two predators. The personal testimonies of those who came forward added details and showed what appeared to be a pattern of behaviour that extended over many years. They were their own accounts, in their own words. It wasn’t the tired repetition of anodyne, boilerplate statements of “solidarity” that added nothing to the substance and detail of the accusations. Had there been a similar outpouring of previously hidden Rowling statements and actions, detailed by people who were in a position to know what Rowling “really believed,” and who were now speaking out with evidence of actual hatred of trans identifying people, then that might have been a clue. If there was more to point at than the careful, malicious, misrepresentation of her public statements, then we would have heard about that. It would have blown up all over trans twitter. Trans activists would not have hesitated to use the most powerful evidence and arguments at their disposal: instead, they were forced to make shit up, because they had to. If any such actual evidence had come up, there would be some reason to suspect that Rowling harboured some pre-existing animosity towards trans people. (That she might now feel some amount of dislike or distaste at trans activists would hardly be surprising, given the treatment she’s received at their hands. Not everyone is as eager as Mike Pence is to lick the hand that’s struck you.)

Rowling’s greatest sin was to expose the lie of “no conflict” between trans “rights” and women’s rights. What little she said about trans identified males was actually very tolerant and compassionate (more so than I would be inclined to be). Most of her statements have been about protecting the rights, safety and dignity of girls and women. Her need to voice her concern showed that she believed that trans demands were a danger to girls and women. She was right to so believe. It is instructive that this was reflexively understood by trans activists as being “anti-trans.” The careful failure to quote exactly what was transphobic about what she actually said is also telling. It would have exposed the fact that what Rowling was saying was reasonable and correct. Better to hide her actual words under your own preferred spin than to give wider exposure to her completely logical, pro-woman position. To rephrase Lewis’s Law, the response to any statement in support of protecting women’s rights against trans demands demonstrates the very need for those rights.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on A set of enduring core principles.

The problem is that the Founders were so terrified of democracy that they installed a system with so many “checks and balances” that it’s a recipe for gridlock and lack of accountability. Recent custom has only made this worse through things like requiring 60 votes in the Senate to pass most measures.

In other countries, one party (or a coalition of parties) wins an election, and has more or less free reign to govern as they see fit, subject to some broad restrictions. Then after however many years they have to return to the voters and be judged on their governance. But in the U.S., what are voters deciding this midterm election on? Democrats haven’t been able to do much of what they’d like because they weren’t able to get 60 votes in the Senate, or because Manchin or Sinema wouldn’t supply the 50th vote, or because the Supreme Court intervened. And it’s even worse when there’s divided government. Assuming the GOP takes at least one house of Congress, governance in 2023-24 is going to consist of whatever Biden can do through executive power alone, plus the bare minimum that can actually be agreed upon to keep the government funded and the debt ceiling raised. Will voters in 2024 blame Biden for not getting more done, or blame the GOP for obstructionism? Who knows? We’re lucky if the average voter knows who controls either house of Congress at any given point in time, they sure as hell don’t know what a cloture vote is.

Since most voters don’t know who to praise or blame for what they like or don’t like about the state of the country, there’s no real accountability. As a result, we’re seeing more and more “Constitutional hardball.” Not enough voters give a shit about things like democratic norms, so the GOP seeks to grab power by whatever means are technically available or at least give the appearance of being available.

Some Americans are so used to Constitutional hardball that they’re befuddled that other countries don’t play it. Many of them can’t grasp the idea that the sovereign of the United Kingdom “reigns but does not rule.” (Note: I’m not referring to Americans who dislike the idea of monarchy or have objections to it. I’m just talking about the jokers who think that there’s a real danger that Charles is going to, I don’t know, outlaw certain types of architecture he doesn’t like.)

The Canadian constitution allows federal and provincial legislatures to override the constitutional Charter of Rights, via something called the “notwithstanding clause.” It gets used occasionally, but mostly to prohibit strikes by certain unions (Ontario is considering that now, I believe), or by Quebec to enforce some of its language laws. There’s also a power of disallowance whereby the federal Cabinet — it doesn’t even require a vote of Parliament — can veto a provincial legislature’s passage of a bill. That power hasn’t been used since 1943. I can only imagine the shitshow that would result if American states could override the Bill of Rights, or if a President could invalidate state laws.

A new literature review is published, experts in the field say it’s terrible.

Other than that…

Trans “woman” mocks woman for…having short hair. Progress!

Is constitutional originalism even possible? Does it even mean anything?

Advanced most influentially by Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, two law professors turned judges, originalism contends that the Constitution should be interpreted and enforced on the basis of its “original meaning,” namely what it meant when it was adopted.

But how do we know what it meant when it was adopted? How do we find out what it meant then?

There is a certain appeal to originalism. At a time when the world seems increasingly complicated, originalism, like other forms of fundamentalism, promises simple answers. At a time when distrust of institutions, including courts, is high, originalism purports to tie judges’ hands. And in a divided nation that no longer seems to have shared values, originalism directs courts to enforce the understandings of a presumably more cohesive past.

Presumably indeed; it was “cohesive” in the sense that most people had no voice, which does simplify things a lot but doesn’t demonstrate that everyone agrees with the few voices that do get heard.

But the simplicity and objectivity that originalism promises are a charade. In Worse Than Nothing, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars, offers a concise, point-by-point refutation of the theory. He argues that it cannot deliver what it promises—and if it could, no one would want what it is selling.

…

Originalists must first decide which historical evidence counts, and as every historian knows, that requires a great deal of judgment. Early versions of originalism referred to the “original intent” of the framers, but little evidence of their intent exists.

Well it’s like God’s intent. There is no evidence, but we know it when we see it.

After years of criticism along these lines, scholars advocating originalism conceded the difficulty with discerning “original intent.” So the revised version of originalism directs judges instead to the “original meaning” of the Constitution, that is, what its words meant to the public when they were adopted.

And to discover that all we have to do is ask said public. Simple.

Original meaning is guided by dictionaries of the time, as well as contemporaneous usage and practice. But dictionaries often provide multiple definitions for a given term, legal meanings can differ from ordinary meanings, and contemporaneous practices often varied greatly, even assuming that the Constitution was meant to codify some of them. Thus, Chemerinsky argues, “for most constitutional provisions, there is no ‘original meaning’ to be discovered. Instead, there is a range of possibilities that allows for exactly the judicial discretion that originalism seeks to eliminate.”

But but but how can that be? How can it be complicated? Surely the further back in time we go the simpler everything gets!

Even when the Constitution contains relevant text, its meaning is often ambiguous. Many books have been written explicating the meaning of “equal protection” and “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment; a dictionary from 1868 or a review of contemporaneous laws and practices will generate multiple possible definitions, thus vesting the originalist with plenty of discretion about which to choose.

It’s ok for the originalists to have discretion, but those pesky liberals can’t be trusted with it.

More significantly, does the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibit racial segregation? If one reads the term “equal protection” in light of contemporaneous practices in 1868, one would conclude that segregation was permissible—as seven of eight Supreme Court justices did in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). To hold that segregation is prohibited, one must read the guarantee of equal protection at a higher level of generality and apply its principle of equality in a way that the ratifying generation would not have. The same is true for whether the clause prohibits sex discrimination. In 1868, women lacked the vote and were excluded from many professions, including the practice of law. And the immediate aim of the amendment was to protect newly freed slaves, not women. It wasn’t until the 1970s, in the midst of the women’s rights movement, that the Supreme Court interpreted it to presumptively prohibit sex discrimination.

Higher level of generality=something like: no discrimination on arbitrary grounds that keep some groups of people powerless and marginal. It’s a very important higher level of generality, one that was apparently so high that almost no one could even see it until relatively recently.

Perhaps most fatally, originalism fails its own test. There simply is no evidence that the Constitution’s original meaning was that it should be interpreted according to its original meaning. There is substantial reason to believe the contrary. The fact that the framers used general terms, such as “liberty,” “due process,” “equal protection,” and “cruel and unusual punishment,” strongly suggests that they understood they were drafting a charter meant to long outlive them, one that could guide unforeseeable resolutions to unforeseen problems. If you want to bind people to your specific intentions, you write with specificity. The framers chose not a stringent straitjacket but a set of enduring core principles whose meaning and applicability would unfold over time to meet the evolving needs of a growing nation.

Evolving needs: who could possibly have foreseen such a thing?

Philadelphia Magazine has a list of top influential people in that city. Coming in at number 27 is the ever-popular William “Lia” Thomas, celebrated cheat.

In a profile of Thomas last winter, Sports Illustrated called the elite swimmer “the most controversial athlete in America.” It’s not a title the recent Penn grad ever set out to hold. When Thomas decided to begin her gender transition process in 2019, her aim, she told ESPN, was simply “to be happy, to be true to myself.”

Well he would say that, wouldn’t he. He wasn’t going to say it was in order to take all the prizes.

NCAA rules allowed Thomas, who’d spent three years on Penn’s men’s team, to compete with the women after undergoing transformative hormone therapy. So she did. Next came intense public scrutiny, an NCAA championship title (the first for a transgender swimmer), and an all-out culture war. And while it’s true that Thomas’s story brought no shortage of big questions to the fore — about trans rights, women’s sports, fairness, feminism, equity, gender, biology — one thing is undebatable: Far more seasoned athletes than Thomas have buckled under far less pressure. And less vitriol.

Ah that’s nice, isn’t it – they admit, in a veiled sort of way, that he’s an affront to fairness and to women, but go on to flatter him anyway. Thanks, Philadelphia Magazine.

Thomas, who has only rarely spoken with journalists, has remained outwardly stoic, steadfast, the picture of perseverance — likely the same traits that helped her excel in the sport to begin with.

Erm, no. He didn’t excel in the sport before he cheated. He was more like average. He didn’t “excel” until he gave himself a massive advantage by competing against people inherently smaller and less muscular than he is. No doubt being callous and obstinate helped him do that, but it’s a funny thing to praise.

(They’re also traits that will come in handy in law school, where Thomas has said she intends to study civil rights and public interest law. She’s grown passionate about “fighting for trans rights and trans equality,” she told ESPN.)

He’s passionate about fighting women’s rights, that’s what he’s passionate about.

This is not just snide, it’s stupid and wrong.

JoAnne Harris is a novelist and the Chair of the Society of Authors. Some members of that society think it’s crappy that such a snide cheerleader for trans ideology is in that role.

As for the substance of her comment: nobody is claiming Rowling gave Daniel Radcliffe a job or that he has to share her beliefs out of gratitude. The point is that he would be a nobody if it were not for Rowling: her Potter books and the cult around them are why the films were made. The point is not that he has to agree with her but that he could just shut up about her. It’s not a general rule, it’s certainly not a law, it’s just a feeling that in the circumstances it’s ugly and kind of misogynist for him to keep trash-talking about her. If she were a Nazi or a Trump supporter I wouldn’t say that, but the hysterical martyrdom frenzy over trans women is a very different kind of controversy, and I think he could just figure that out and then button his lip.

David Bell replied to Bernadette Wren’s LRB piece; he paints a drastically different picture of GIDS from the conscientious, thoughtful, torn in many directions one that Wren painted.

As the author of the ‘damning internal report’ referred to by Bernadette Wren, I was one of several people to draw attention to concerns about the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (LRB, 2 December [2021]). In 2018, between a quarter and a third of the staff working in GIDS sought me out in my role as academic and clinical staff representative on the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s council of governors.

They didn’t seek him out to ask about his holiday snaps, they sought him out because they were alarmed.

Wren writes that any ‘genuine disquiet’ about failings at GIDS should have been reported ‘through the institutional channels that exist to oversee and regulate clinical work’. But it was. And there’s no question that it was ‘genuine’. Before members of GIDS staff approached me, they had already raised their concerns with their managers; with the trust’s Speak Up guardian; with Sonia Appleby, the trust’s child safeguarding lead; with the trust’s medical director and with the CEO. It was clear that they had been intimidated and sometimes threatened and were anxious about the repercussions of approaching their staff representative.

Funny, Wren didn’t say anything about intimidation and threats in her piece.

Intimidation at GIDS was confirmed by the findings of an employment tribunal in September, which awarded Appleby £20,000 and criticised the trust for mishandling the issues she raised, including the active encouragement of young children to transition ‘without effective scrutiny of their circumstances’. For the record, the trust also tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent my report going before the governors and initiated disciplinary proceedings against me.

Wren made the trust sound so anguished and dedicated…not secretive and belligerent.

It keeps reminding me of Jonestown – not of the mass murder but of the groupthink, the discipline, the bullying, the secrecy, the absolute impermissibility of any dissent or questioning.

Many CYP [children and young people] who came to GIDS were gender non-conforming gay or lesbian children. For a number of reasons, including pressure from family and peers, they could not accept their sexuality and developed an internalised homophobia, manifested as hatred or rejection of their sexual bodies – a devastating condition, including for the clinician faced with it. Yet sexuality and sexual orientation were largely under-discussed in the service, having been displaced by an overriding preoccupation with gender.

Why that sounds like the rest of the world – where gender is The Hot New Thing while sexual orientation is old news [yawn].

Wren alludes to ‘subsequent feelings of regret’ on the part of patients who have transitioned. Detransitioners are a rapidly growing group, many of them young lesbians and gays, who now ‘regret’ the irreversible damage to their bodies, as in the case of Keira Bell (no relation, contrary to rumour), and the consequences of assessments which affirmed, rather than explored, the nature of their gender dysphoria.

“Affirmation” is not always the best medicine.

Michael Biggs responded to Bernadette Wren’s long piece in the LRB defending the GIDS.

Richard Rorty is a favourite philosopher of Bernadette Wren, and her Diary (‘Epistemic Injustice’, London Review of Books, 2 December 2021) brings to mind his definition of truth as ‘what your contemporaries let you get away with saying’.

Wren blames the disarray in her Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) on the increasing number of referrals starting in 2016. She must know that a whistle-blower, Sue Evans, had already raised concerns over a decade before. The ensuing internal review in 2006 highlighted all the problems that have become familiar: the failure to collect basic data on patients (the unit did not bother to count the number of adolescents subjected to endocrinological intervention); the inability to understand informed consent; and the pressure from patients influenced by lobbying organizations. The review was buried, of course, until the Information Commissioner’s Office forced its release last year.

Wren talked about how they thought about treatment for gender misery, but she didn’t talk about collecting basic data or counting the number of adolescents subjected to endocrinological intervention. She touched on informed consent in general but not the inability to understand it, if I remember correctly. Her leaning was all in the other direction, toward doing away with this antiquated idea that very young people are too young to make informed decisions about things like endocrinological intervention.

As Wren notes, the National Institute for Health and Care Evidence found no evidence to justify puberty suppression as a treatment for gender dysphoria. (The drugs have never been licensed for this condition, in the United Kingdom or anywhere else.) What she does not acknowledge is the responsibility of the GIDS for this lack of evidence. For over thirty years it has refused to collect data on long-term outcomes, conveniently losing track of patients when they turn 18. Indeed, it only published the short-term results of its initial experiment with puberty blockers after a protracted campaign by Stephanie Davies Arai and me.

I wonder why she doesn’t explain any of that in the LRB piece.

Was it a coincidence that clinicians started taking consent from patients exactly when the legal challenge to GIDS was launched in January 2020?

Central to that legal challenge was Keira Bell. Her absence haunts Wren’s Diary, which cites the eponymous legal judgment but never refers to her as an individual person, let alone a woman with the courage to speak honestly about her treatment. Wren continues to deny the harms inflicted on vulnerable patients like Keira Bell—say her name!—by clinicians who pursued what Wren grandiloquently calls a ‘justice project’ rather than practicing evidence-based medicine. As the former Head of Psychology at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the Associate Director of the GIDS, she should not be allowed to get away with it.

One person’s justice is another person’s trashed body.

I’m reading a 5k word piece by Bernadette Wren in the LRB last year. In the first part, at least, she comes across as highly aware of the questionable nature of and risks attached to the gender ideology. Around halfway she gets to the controversies.

I will offer only a few brief reflections on some of the issues over which GIDS has been most vociferously attacked. The first contention is that there wasn’t enough research evidence to enable GIDS to offer medical therapies to young people with confidence. This is an important challenge, but it relies on an idealised conception of medicine as offering effective and safe interventions, based on a wide range of randomised-control studies with extended evaluation. The problem with this view is that many paediatric medical interventions are not backed up by such studies, but depend on confidence in the existing, broader knowledge base (often from studies on adults) and are justified by the concern to relieve suffering.

But is trying to swap a person’s “gender” actually a medical intervention at all? Is it medical at all?

 Very many mental health treatments (medical and psychological) are poorly evidenced by these standards, including those routinely offered at the Tavistock to both children and adults. But compassion demands that we provide forms of treatment that are grounded in theory and in the experience of well-trained and accredited professionals, and which correspond to the values of the patient. Put simply, many questions around treatment are not settled by science alone, because scientific knowledge is itself social knowledge. When we devise treatment plans, we inevitably work within what society considers a just response to suffering; our research is based on culturally derived ideals about what constitutes a worthwhile life; treatment decisions reflect prevalent notions of self-determination, including of the rights of minors.

But is trying to change someone’s “gender” really a treatment? Or is it something else? I think I get what she’s talking about, but I also think “gender” swapping is snake oil, and very damaging snake oil at that.

A second point of attack is that the service was in the grip of an ideology, one that has taken hold in government, academia, medicine and the law. I disagree. GIDS’s patchwork of pragmatic, values-based commitments, its agnosticism about causality and its hesitancy over the absolute normalisation of gender transition in young people, strike me as far from ideological.

Well, she knows it from the inside and I don’t, but there is for instance Keira Bell, so…

What is true – and perhaps the ideology attack is trying to get at this – is that GIDS, from its modest start, was a justice project as well as a therapeutic project. By justice, I mean it aspired to widen the circle of people whose experience of the self is listened to with respect. This meant not automatically deeming a child’s atypical gender identification problematic, and not striving to modify that identity in the direction of a more orthodox body/mind relationship. It also meant not evading the fact that trans, non-binary and queer people have been (and often still are) dismissed as knowledge holders within healthcare systems; that they are subject to ‘epistemic injustice’, since society as a whole lacks an adequate interpretative framework to understand their experiences.

Ah. Perhaps this is where the problem resides. The thing is, there are good and compelling reasons not to take “a child’s atypical gender identification” at face value, or to “affirm” it, or to amplify it with hormones or blockers or both. There are good and compelling reasons not to take a child’s experience of the self at face value. Children are children. Their brains are still developing. There’s a lot they don’t know, and a lot they don’t understand. A justice project that overlooks that or pretends it’s not true is going to make mistakes.