It seems the slogan “No LGB without the T” is not as popular as it once was.

Amnesty is Thorry You Were Offen-ded.

Amnesty International has said it “deeply regrets the distress and anger” caused after it alleged that Ukrainian forces were flouting international law by exposing civilians to Russian fire.

We deeply regret your feefees but you’re wrong to have them.

Amnesty sparked outrage in Ukraine with the publication of a report on Thursday that accused the military of endangering civilians by establishing bases in schools and hospitals, and launching counterattacks from heavily populated areas.

The head of Amnesty’s Ukraine office resigned in protest, accusing the rights organisation of parroting Kremlin propaganda.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the group had tried to “shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim”.

We see a lot of that kind of thing these days.

You don’t like the drought? Ok have a flood.

Photographer John Sirlin was in a canyon in the northeast part of Death Valley National Park late Thursday to shoot lightning in an expected thunderstorm.

Then the lightning petered out and the storm became a nonstop torrential downpour that lasted for hours, bringing near-record rainfall to one of the hottest, driest places on Earth.

Which isn’t what you want in drought conditions. You want slow steady non-torrential rain that has time to soak in, not a blast that washes away all the topsoil.

More analysis will be needed to determine whether climate change helped drive the storm’s intensity. But its extreme nature is consistent with what can be expected as global temperatures rise, experts said, drawing parallels with the historic flooding that damaged Yellowstone National Park in June.

You can have drought, or you can have a firehose. Nothing in between. Sorry!

Death Valley has averaged about 1.96 inches of precipitation per year since record keeping began in 1911, according to the Western Regional Climate Center. Nearly 75% of that amount fell in the space of a few hours on Friday.

Every single road in the park was damaged.

Now that Earth has warmed 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial levels, the odds are elevated that when factors known to produce intense storms do align, their effects will be even more extreme, Diffenbaugh said.

“What we’re seeing with climate change consistently is that when the conditions that are well understood to produce intense precipitation do come together, the fact that there’s more moisture in the atmosphere as a result of long-term warming means that those conditions are primed to produce more intense precipitation,” he said.

Although it can seem counterintuitive, he said, the same dynamic — often described as the increasing thirst of the atmosphere — is also contributing to the historic drought, more intense, frequent heat waves and increasingly extreme wildfire behavior that have beset the western United States.

Whatever it is will be bad.

A reporter at Open Democracy sent For Women Scotland a “when did you stop beating your trans people?” set of questions, so For Women Scotland is sharing the obnoxious questions with us.

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your hugely revealing question set about our shadowy operation. I am only amazed that you forgot to ask about the top speed of our broomsticks and whether they were diesel or electric (0-60 in 20 secs), or, indeed, whether we favour Eye of Newt over Fillet of Fenny Snake (personally, I find Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting are best for date night!). I’m afraid that I must be brief as we are off to dance widdershins round a churchyard by moonlight and those hexes won’t cast themselves!

Adam Ramsay is the “reporter.” I hope his face is scarlet.

Read the whole thing.

Anti-Semitic dogwhistle, from a current Senator. Awesome.

Drag doesn’t have to be misogynist or trans or groomerish. Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:

A not-small number of hours in my early 20s were spent attending drag shows in a basement-level gay club in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. What you would do is arrive around midnight when “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé was playing, and by the time you’d heard “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé for the eighth or 40th replay, it was time to go home.

In between were drag performers. Drag kings, mostly (this was ladies’ night), who would dress in fedoras or leather chaps and lip-sync to James Brown or Justin Timberlake. There was a performer who went by Ken Vegas. My friends and I thought Ken Vegas was a bona fide celebrity, and I’ve never really recovered from learning that Ken was just Kendra in daylight hours and worked in graphic design.

It was silly, it was campy — Lord, how many debates we could skirt these days if only every Republican would read and understand Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” — and it made me think in new ways about what it meant to behave as a man, or behave as a woman, to perform masculinity or perform femininity.

It sounds like a lost Utopia, doesn’t it?

But then we move on to the current scene, where we never ask why it’s only Drag Queen Story Hour and never Drag King, or better yet, both at once.

Some conservatives have decided that — forget about childhood poverty, or vaccine paranoia, or lax gun laws — the real threat to our children is when performers in glamorous hair and makeup come to libraries to teach lessons of tolerance and self-acceptance and read books out loud.

But why is it only the ones in glam hair and makeup? Why none in work boots and five o’clock shadow? Is there an extra message beyond the one of tolerance and self-acceptance? And anyway what do we mean by self-acceptance? Some people are all too self-accepting, to the point that they force their self-accepted selves on everyone else, including people who aren’t interested.

And so I’ve been asking myself whether I would have been comfortable with those performers reading a story to my daughter in the children’s section of the library on Tuesday morning. The answer I’ve been able to come up with is, Does anybody have Ken Vegas’s number?

But it isn’t about Ken Vegas. It’s not at all clear that Ken Vegas could get an invitation. Ken Vegas is a woman, and women aren’t cool any more, women are Karens. How about Karen Vegas? Would she do?

I just listened to most of this Radio 4 item on drag queen story hour, in which Jo Bartosch argued against and some young guy who says “like” way too often argued for. The host was, predictably, somewhat flippant about the whole thing, but what really annoys me is that no one at any point stopped to ask why is this only one-way? Why is it monodirectional? Why is there no drag king story hour? Why is it all about men making a joke of women while no one is making a joke of men?

I would really like to know.

They talk about panto, and someone (I think the like-saying guy) mentions Shakespeare, meaning actually theater in general at that time and before: women did not perform on stage, end of story. So ok drag queens have roots in theater history, perhaps. Fine, but this is now. Women are allowed to perform on stage and in films and on television. They can’t get parts written for them, they can’t get producers to hire them, but they are formally permitted to do the work.

This is now. The whole idea of drag queens reading stories to children in high squeaky voices is very now. So why is it all men??? Why do men get to go to libraries and make fun of women and get paid for it, while women don’t get to go to libraries and make fun of men?

I’d like to know.

It’s very odd that no one brought that up, not even Jo (though she did make the necessary point about the fact that drag basically mocks women and that shouldn’t just be ignored). It needs to be brought up more. Drag queens are a thing; drag kings are not (at least not in libraries); why not? What does that tell us?

David Frum on how it could play out:

[S]crape aside the audacity, the self-pity, and the self-aggrandizement, and there was indeed an idea in Donald Trump’s speech at a conference hosted by the America First Policy Institute: a sinister idea, but one to take seriously.

Trump sketched out a vision that a new Republican Congress could enact sweeping new emergency powers for the next Republican president. The president would be empowered to disregard state jurisdiction over criminal law. The president would be allowed to push aside a “weak, foolish, and stupid governor,” and to fire “radical and racist prosecutors”—racist here meaning “anti-white.” The president could federalize state National Guards for law-enforcement duties, stop and frisk suspects for illegal weapons, and impose death sentences on drug dealers after expedited trials.

That may all be just Trump’s Favorite Fantasy, but it’s useful to know what he’s dreaming of.

Trump’s first term was mitigated by his ignorance, indolence, and incompetence. Since the humiliation of his 2020 defeat, however, Trump has been studying how to use a second chance if he gets one. The one abiding interest of his life, revenge, will provide the impetus. Next time, he will have the wholehearted support of a White House staff selected to enable him. Next time, he will have the backing in Congress of a party remade in his own image. Next time, he’ll be acting to ensure that his opponents never again get a “next time” of their own.

We have to hope his head explodes first.

I seized the opportunity presented by No Internet to read some of White Fragility, and found it not as terrible as I expected, but hardly a work of staggering genius. There is this air of unfalsifiability about the whole thing, because she treats any disagreement with her or challenge to anything she says as an example and illustration of WhiteFragility, which amounts to declaring herself always right from the outset. It’s quite like Freud that way. Your resistance simply shows how right I am.

John McWhorter of course makes the same point:

DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward. Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. DiAngelo is less a coach than a proselytizer.

When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times, even though white guilt and politesse have apparently distracted many readers from the book’s numerous obvious flaws.

I love that. When writers who come across as dogmatic and over-confident and smug, it’s exciting when they nevertheless make a compelling case! Hahahaha yes it is.

For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality.

There’s one place where she makes a wild claim about citizenship that gets the history completely wrong.

DiAngelo insinuates that, when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago. But how would she know? Where is the evidence for this presumptuous claim?

It’s in the Karenpedia.

White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.

I have to say, if I were forced to choose between two writers as my only reading from now on, and those two were DiAngelo and McWhorter, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat.

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

Among the comic strips I follow is Heart of the City, a charming strip about a young girl named Heart, her friends, and their lives in Philadelphia. It was created by Mark Tatulli, and he wrote the strip for many years. A few years ago he passed the strip along to Christina “Steenz” Stewart. She is Black, and she made significant changes to the strip over the few years, in addition to having a drastically different art style. Many characters were added, several faded away, the cast became much more racially diverse, and there was a bit more focus on the differences between the life experiences of girls and boys. I was wary at first, change is hard, but I’ve really come to like where Steenz is taking the strip.

Recent outrage over the use of the phrase “people who bleed” reminded me that a current plot line is Heart starting her period. This is the first standard newspaper strip I can recall that has ever touched on that topic. It’s being handled really well.

I looked up information about the strip and about Steenz. She was inspired by seeing an African-American woman cartoonist, which helped her realize she could do this, too.

But she identifies as non-binary and prefers “they”.

So this woman, who writes so well about the experience of being a girl, and who was inspired by another Black woman, has decided she’s not a woman. This makes me sad. She gets a “first” added to her bio, but it’s unfortunate to see her reject such an important aspect of her life and what (not who) she is.

“Inclusive” sport in Ireland:

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never going back.

I have been thinking a lot about intellectually compelling problems vs. emotionally compelling problems lately: Considering that climate change – along with the strongly interlinked problem of ocean acidification, the mass-extinction of species, and the general toll the human economy is taking on ecosystems and the natural world – is the most dire existential emergency our species has ever faced, many have struggled to explain why – despite constant claims of “alarmism” and “hysteria” – there isn’t more alarm and public outrage around the issue.

The most obvious answer, and usually the first one that comes to mind – is that tackling the problem puts you on a direct collision course with powerful vested interests. The fossil fuel industry is the richest, most profitable industry in history, and is thus able to spend practically unlimited resources financing disinformation campaigns, lobbying buying politicians etc. But there’s more to it than that. Even if only a relatively small percentage of the population get their income directly from the fossil fuel industry, we are all invested in the modern, high-tech, consumerist life-style, and while I don’t think there’s much evidence that consumerism ever made us any happier (I’m strongly inclined to suspect the opposite is true!), it’s certainly addictive as hell, very much like heroin or alcohol in this respect. You can learn pretty much everything there is to know about human self-deception, rationalization, compartmentalization etc. by studying addicts alone, and we’re all addicts when it comes to fossil fuel.

Another common explanation is that the issue has become so heavily politicized that many also have an ideological stake in denying the problem, especially in the U.S. where it’s become just another proxy issue in the ongoing Culture War between Democrats and Republicans for the soul of the nation. In reality, of course, neither Democrats nor Republicans have any real interest in doing anything about the problem that has any chance of actually working. But since Democrats at the very least tend to accept the problem as real and pay lip-service to doing something about it, even acknowledging that the problem exists has come to be seen as a “liberal” or “leftist” position and hence a proxy for everything people dislike about taxes and regulations, immigration, abortion, gun control, political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism, secularism etc. Thus rejecting it out of hand becomes about group identity (“My kind of people don’t believe things like that!”), tribal loyalty, rooting for your team, booing the other team, etc. The actual facts of the matter hardly enter into your considerations at all.

But this still doesn’t quite explain why even people who accept all the facts, understand what’s happening on an intellectual level, and are able accurately assess the danger, are mostly not motivated to do anything about it. Of course there is a game-theory aspect to it: Why should I give up the benefit (in the short term) of fossil fuels if others won’t and the world gets screwed anyway? And of course the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies is only too obvious.

But I also think there’s a lot of truth in what people like Daniel Kahneman have said about apathy and indifference to climate change and human psychology. The human brain evolved to react strongly to a sudden danger or threat. It did not evolve to react to a gradual worsening of conditions over time. We’re all familiar with the (probably apocryphal, but never mind) claim about frogs in hot water: If you put a frog directly into scolding hot water, so the story goes, it will instantly jump out and save its own life. If you put the same frog in lukewarm water and gradually heat it to that exact same temperature, it will look in vain for the “line” where the temperature changes from acceptable to unacceptable and hence remain passive and indecisive while it’s slowly boiled to death. The claim doesn’t have to be literally true (after all, the topic at hand wasn’t frogs anyway) to be instructive.

The human brain also evolved to react strongly to a threat from a clearly identifiable and hostile external agent (a predator, a rivaling tribe etc.). Climate change offers none of these psychological triggers. The problem is incremental rather than binary (i.e. all or nothing), and while wildfires and extreme weather events can be both sudden and dramatic when they occur, it’s not like they never happened in the past. Rather than a sharp line we’re once again looking at a gradual increase in the statistical frequency and intensity of such events. Nor is there a clearly identifiable external enemy. Blaming politicians or even the fossil fuel industry doesn’t quite do it justice since ultimately we’re the ones who keep electing those politicians and paying those companies to fuel our cars, heat our homes etc. As someone once put it, the elephant in the room is all of us. And so even if you understand the problem on an intellectual level, it doesn’t trigger the kind of instinctive, visceral fear reaction required to motivate action. In other words, it may be an intellectually compelling problem but it’s not an emotionally compelling problem, and only emotions can generate motivation.

Compare it to, say, the threat of Islamist terrorism. If you’re an average citizen in the West and you look at the most statistically probable causes of death for people within your demographic, Islamist terrorism should rank very low on your list of concerns – certainly orders of magnitude lower than climate change. But here we have almost the opposite dynamic going on: It may not be an intellectually compelling problem, but it sure is emotionally compelling. Terrorist attacks are usually sudden and dramatic when they occur and conjure up images of dangerous fanatics shouting violent slogans who hate us and want to destroy us. It ticks all the right boxes and pushes all the right buttons.

Bottom line, visceral fear – and hence motivation to act – often has very little to do with any objective assessment of risk, and so people burn enormous amounts of calories worrying about vanishingly improbable dangers and act accordingly while the greatest existential threat to our collective survival is treated with about as much urgency as a bad haircut. Well… Not quite that much…

The Guardian does a long conversation with athlete and “LGBTQ+” activist Tom Daley:

Isn’t part of the problem that the LGBTQ+ community is at war with itself over trans rights? The level of fury between trans rights activists and gender-critical feminists astonishes me, I say. Daley nods, and says it’s dangerous. “The LGBT community is so fractured right now over certain issues. And that’s when the right are going to get us. They’re going to try to break us down. And if you think they’re just going to take away trans people’s rights, you’re wrong. It’s going to go much further than that, and we have to stick together as an LGBTQIA+ community to stop that happening.”

But it isn’t a community. The T part is a different subject, a different category, a different issue. Mashing them together is very useful for the T but very the opposite of useful for the L and the G. The G are being very slow to figure that out, probably because they’re not the ones who have to deal with the men invading women’s sports and women’s rape shelters and women’s changing rooms.

Daley goes on to perform this very “not my problem” blindness:

Daley has 2.2m followers on Twitter. In June, speaking at the British LGBT awards, where he was named Sports Personality of the Year, he condemned the decision of Fina (the administrative body for international water sport) to ban trans athletes who have been through any part of male puberty from elite women’s competition. Daley said when he heard the ruling, “I was furious. Anyone that’s told that they can’t compete or can’t do something they love just because of who they are, it’s not on. It’s something I feel really strongly about – giving trans people the chance to share their side.”

He feels very strongly about letting men ruin women’s sport. How women will feel about that simply doesn’t impinge on his awareness at all. Women, meh, who cares, they need to shut up and take it.

For so long, Daley has been regarded as a national treasure. But as he takes a more active role in the charged debate about trans athletes, it is inevitable that opinions about him will become divided. In an interview with GB News, former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies responded to Daley’s speech by suggesting that as a male athlete he doesn’t have any skin in the game: “Tom is male and this does not affect him in the slightest … I think we have to listen to the women, and Fina were the first governing body since 2015 to actually poll their female athletes and listen to their coaches.”

That’s not suggesting, it’s pointing out, and rightly so. Of course he fucking doesn’t have any skin in the game. He’s a man. I am so sick of watching men blithely ignoring women’s rights in favor of the made-up “rights” of men to “do something they love” even when that means women don’t get to do the same something they love.

Does he think that ultimately inclusion trumps fairness? “No, of course not. But, as human beings, we have to be a little bit more thoughtful before banning people completely from something. If kids are doomed to never be able to do what they love, they may well just give up.”

That applies to female kids too, you stupid prick. What about the female kids who just give up???

The issue of trans women even became the battleground for the Tory leadership election. Penny Mordaunt, a contestant on Daley’s ITV celebrity diving show Splash! in 2014, was accused by rivals of being a “woke warrior” for her previous support of trans women. Mordaunt desperately tried to distance herself, insisting she had never claimed “trans women are women”.

Is this what he means by LGBT issues being hijacked? He nods. “Think of the tiny percentage of trans people in the population, and prospective Tory leaders are using that to win votes. I don’t understand why people think they have to be less woke in order to lead a country. “How can understanding people’s feelings be a bad thing?” He trails off, lost for words.

Again. Listen carefully. Women have feelings too. Women. have. feelings. too.

aley has always been one of life’s planners. I met him again in 2015 when he’d just turned 21 and was living with Black, a prominent campaigner in the fight for US marriage equality. Daley was mapping out his future – a gold medal at Rio, a career in television after diving, marriage and kids at some point. He said he knew he’d be the disciplinarian because he was tougher than Black, despite the fact that his partner was 20 years older. Two years later he and Black married, and in 2018 Robbie was born with the help of an egg donor and a surrogate.

You know – some woman and some other woman. A couple of women. Bitches. Karens. People who don’t matter. Trivial worthless people without feelings or ambitions or goals who just happen to have the eggs we want and the ability to gestate the baby we want. Technology, basically.

He’s planning to order a second baby. Yet more Karens to deal with.

Fun and games in Ireland:

An Irish “LGBTQ+ Inclusive” football team beat out the female competition in the 2022 Junior J Shield Final, claiming a significant margin of victory in every placing that many attribute to the fact a biological male was on the team.

For “many” read “all,” even if some of them wouldn’t admit it. Yes, Virginia, teams that are “inclusive” of males are going to beat the female competition.

Na Gaeil Aeracha, which bills itself as Ireland’s “first explicitly LGBTQ+ inclusive” football club was forced to lock down its social media accounts following backlash as sport fans noticed one of the players appeared to be an older man.

All “LGBTQ+ inclusive” means in this context is “mixed-sex.” A mixed-sex team played against an all-female team and won: surprise surprise. It’s dishonest for mixed-sex teams to label themselves “LGBTQ+ inclusive” because that makes the team sound progressive and virtuous when in fact it’s exploiting its advantage over the all-female team. This ploy is ridiculous and everyone should stop humoring it.

Giulia Valentino, a male who identifies as a transgender woman, was playing against young women and girls in the Ladies Gaelic Football Junior J Shield tournament on July 27 and August 3 on behalf of Na Gaeil Aeracha. Photos from the event began to circulate on social media after sport writer Ewan MacKenna called attention to the results.

MacKenna posted a screenshot of Na Gaeil Aeracha’s policy on inclusivity from their now-private Instagram page in which the team reiterated that its players “may play at training or in a match for the team they best identify with, without restriction.” Another policy posted by the football club explicitly states that medical transitioning is not necessary.

Naturally. They want to maximize their advantage, don’t they.

Originally a comment by Laurent on Scoop: more men running for office!

We’re all non-binary.

I keep struggling with gender stereotypes themselves, and the whole issue clearly doesn’t clarify at all.

I really wonder what are the keystone gender norms that apply to the binary as a general inalienable truth, that almost everyone would acknowledge is actually what historically defines gender at core and still applies mostwhere, if possible independently of secondary cultural norms.

What I get is that it is not about lifestyle at all.

Men -. I was about to write down “none”, but admittedly there is one norm that became quite exceptional but may make an unexpected come-back in the future: obligation to go to war and serve the country.

Women:

– shut up, smile, be nice

– much less safety outside of home

– have kids (and take charge) (husband is a special kid with special needs)

– housekeeping & home management

– paygap, way fewer career opportunities, way fewer opportunities at large

Claiming non-binarity is not doing anything to change that.

Disclaimer: I am not claiming exhaustivity, I was aiming for defining core. Does not imply feeling fine about it neither.

In Alex Jones news: $45.2 million in punitive damages.

Jones spent years telling his audience that one of the worst school shootings in American history was a hoax. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, who brought the charges against Jones, told the court how he made their lives a “living hell” after Jesse, their 6-year-old son, was gunned down in the attack.

“I can’t even describe the last nine-and-a-half years,” Heslin said. “The living hell that I and others have had to endure because of the recklessness and negligence of Alex Jones.”

Not to mention the brutality and cruelty and total lack of empathy.

Hoo-boy…“unethical” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

FPFW:

There are a couple of studies being done in British universities in an attempt to prove that “transition” from male to female reduces the male performance advantage enough to make it fair for those post-pubertal adult males to play and compete in women’s sport. It’s known that testosterone suppression reduces oxygen-carrying capacity, which reduces athletic performance a bit, though it’s obvious that most of the effects of male puberty are irreversible. Nonetheless, Loughborough and Brighton Universities are both hosting PhD studies led by trans-identifying males who wish to prove their own eligibility for female sport.

I’ll just say that again. Loughborough and Brighton Universities are both hosting PhD studies led by trans-identifying males who wish to prove their own eligibility for female sport.

That’s not a study, that’s not academic work, that’s not research – that’s men using a veneer of pretend-research to enable their theft of women’s places in women’s sport.

At Loughborough, Joanna Harper is trying to back up the anecdotal evidence provided to the IOC in 2015, on which their testosterone suppression policy, since dropped, was based. We wrote about the problems of study design and the conflicts of interest for the study leader and for the participants. It is hopelessly compromised.

Now the leader of the Brighton study, Blair Hamilton, has confirmed this. In calling for trans athletes who feel their potential exclusion from female categories is unfair to participate in their study, Hamilton is actively recruiting participants who want to demonstrate their loss of performance. As we’ve written before, we can be certain they’ll succeed.

Not exactly the right way to recruit participants for a research study.

Fun at the swimming pool:

A senior woman who expressed discomfort regarding a trans-identified male in the women’s changing room at her local pool has been banned from using the facilities she frequented for over three decades. Julie Jaman, 80, had been a guest at the YMCA-run Mountain View community pool in her small town of Port Townsend, Washington for over 35 years.

Interrupting for a moment to say I know that small town. It’s on the Olympic Peninsula, the remainder of the state west of Seattle and Puget Sound; it’s on a bluff overlooking the water and features a lot of gorgeous Queen Anne-style Victorian houses. It’s a lovely place.

Speaking to Reduxx, Jaman revealed that on July 26, she witnessed a trans-identified male using the female locker rooms at the pool, and became concerned due to the fact he appeared to be watching the little girls as they changed out of their bathing suits.

“I was showering [after a swim] and I heard a man’s voice … it was quite deep,” Jaman told Reduxx, “So I looked through the shower curtain. There was a man in a women’s bathing suit, and he was near four or five little girls who were taking off their bathing suits. He was standing there watching them.”

Jaman observed the male through the opening in the shower curtain for a moment. Shocked by his presence and becoming increasingly distressed about his proximity to the children, she quietly asked: “Do you have a penis?” The male refused to answer, prompting Jaman to demand he leave the locker room.

Rowen DeLuna, the pool’s aquatics manager, was in the area at the time, and when Jaman appealed to her to remove the male from the restroom, DeLuna told her she was being “discriminatory” and threatened to call the police.

“She said, ‘you are being discriminatory, you are banned from the pool, and I am calling the police.’”

Calling the police, because a woman told a man to get out of the women’s changing room. You couldn’t make it up.

Read the rest.

U wot?

Young people who bleed across Wales? What do they do, open a vein in Fishguard and march bleeding all the way to Abergavenny?

Haha, silly me, no, they mean “people” all over Wales who shed their uterine linings once a month.

Our aim is to break the taboo around periods by encouraging conversation on one of the most normal, natural topics that half the world’s population experience.

Which half? Which half which half which half which half which half which half?

Of course they don’t say. Funny that they want to break one taboo by instituting another.

We’re immensely proud that Bloody Brilliant was created for the young people of Wales by the young people of Wales. 

Following research with young people across the country, we got to the heart of their challenges when talking about and experiencing periods. From this, we uncovered key insights and Bloody Brilliant was born. Working with an incredible bunch of young people, we used co-creation workshops to shape the brand and information you’ll see on this website. And we can’t forget to give a massive shout out to the top team of experts and influencers across the period health field who helped us out throughout our journey.

What a pity the experts and influencers forgot to tell the young people which half.

Social Change UK created Bloody Brilliant on behalf of NHS Wales and the Welsh Government. Their combined aim is to open up the conversation and provide information on period health, so generations of young people don’t suffer in silence through fear of speaking out or lack of understanding around what’s normal when it comes to periods.

That’s great but which half?

Let’s see…off the top of my head rather than looking in a dictionary…

-fer

-late

-ition

-parent (that pun is the title of a Netflix show of course)

-cendent

-itory

Quite a few words to render meaningless.

H/t soogeeoh