Times reporter on Magistrates’ Court news:

Ah yes that’s what you want in cops who deal with domestic violence.

I hope he made sure she didn’t identify as a boy.

Janice Turner on the closing down of the Tavistock Gender Identity clinic:

Writing on this topic, I’ve often encountered facts so dangerous and beliefs so bizarre, so beyond science or reason, it’s been hard to convey their existence.

Listen, you say, British doctors are prescribing a drug used to chemically castrate rapists to halt puberty in children as young as 11. The drug isn’t even approved for child gender dysphoria. It reduces growth and bone density, sterilises and kills future libido. And, get this, we don’t know what it does to teenagers’ developing brains, or even if it works and they become happy, fulfilled trans adults. Because there’s no data, no long-term research.

Well when you put it like that…

And not only is that happening; people who say it’s a bad idea are compared to or just outright labeled Nazis.

This week has revealed the power of sunlight when shone into dark places. There would be no Cass report if Keira Bell, who regretted her hasty transition when the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock put her on blockers at 16 after just three appointments, hadn’t launched a judicial review. In the High Court, I heard incredulity in judges’ voices.

Several years of incredulity now.

I still struggle to grasp why GIDS abhors research. If it cared about dysphoric children wouldn’t it want the best outcomes? If it had faith in its medical pathway, surely it wouldn’t mind testing its efficacy? Isn’t free and open discussion among fellow professionals the best way to improve treatment?

Yet GIDS clinicians who worried that hormones were prescribed too quickly, or to kids who’d simply turn out gay, were vilified, accused of transphobia, forced to conduct any thoughtful, gently questioning therapy in secret. Whistleblowers such as Marcus and Susan Evans were discredited, internal reports such as Dr David Bell’s were suppressed, while staff were blocked from contacting Sonia Appleby, the GIDS head of safeguarding, about their concerns for vulnerable patients.

It sounds more like a cult than a medical clinic. But then it always has, hasn’t it – everything about it is more like a cult than anything else. It’s not like politics or social justice or lesbian and gay rights or science or medicine or psychology or anything along those lines – instead it’s like Aum Shinrikyo or Jonestown or witch-hunting cults. Secretive, doctrinaire, authoritarian, arbitrary…everything you don’t want in a putative medical clinic treating unhappy teenagers.

Originally two comments by Bjarte Foshaug on These two loudmouth mammals.

I’m not at all a cult expert, but as an interested lay person who has read both Lifton, Singer, Ross, and Hassan, I think the importance of “saving face” can hardly be overestimated. How cult members respond to a major crisis depends heavily on how easy or difficult it is backpedal without too much public humiliation and loss of face. Those who haven’t made too much of a public commitment tend to just slip away quietly and pretend nothing ever happened. The people you really need to worry about are the ones who have made a strong commitment in public, invested everything they have in the cause, burned all bridges behind them*. These are the people who tend to double and triple down on their commitment and keep fighting to the end. Beyond a certain point even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting you yourself and the world that you weren’t too clever to be taken in by a cult after all, that you have dedicated your life to a lie, that the people you have been attacking and vilifying for opposing the vicious cult you’re in were right all along, that you are the bad guy, that you have gotten your hands irredeemably dirty in service of an unworthy cause etc. etc.

Of course TRAs do not follow a single leader like Jim Jones, nor are they all physically gathered together in one place, which makes a Jonestown-like scenario seem far less likely. Still, I think there is a real danger that single individuals or even small groups of dedicated gender fanatics are going to do something crazy if/when the real world finally starts closing in on them. Still, while I sincerely hope I’m wrong, I’m not as optimistic as many others that the trans craze is going to start dying down any time soon. It reminds me too much of the way people kept predicting that Trump’s followers were going to start abandoning him on mass every time he said or did something outrageous (i.e. every time he said or did anything at all). While Maya’s and Allison’s victories, the closing down of the Tavistock etc. are certainly good news, the institutional capture seems to continue pretty much unabated, and as we all know, all of Trump’s supposedly career-ending scandals didn’t prevent him from gaining votes between 2016 and 2020.

Also, while comparisons to People’s Temple – like comparisons to Nazism – should be used with caution, it doesn’t mean that any attempt to extract any lessons from the history of People’s Temple or Nazism that are applicable to current affairs is inherently fallacious in principle. In the case of People’s Temple, they were first and foremost a social justice cult thinly disguised as a Pentecostal Church. As I understand it from reading Tim Reiterman’s The Raven it was pretty much common knowledge within the Temple that Jones’s miraculous healings and psychic readings were simple deceptions** to lure people to the church so they could be exposed to the Temple’s teachings about racial integration and Communism. There are recordings of Jones openly deriding and even stepping on the Bible.

The Temple’s mixed race policies and uncompromising stance on racial integration earned them considerable support from large segments of the political Left including Leftwing media, and one of the main reasons Jones managed to get away with his endless scandals*** for as long as he did, was that the Temple and their apologists were successful in portraying any criticism as part of a racially motivated rightwing conspiracy to discredit the group because of its progressive values. Sounds familiar?

*Of course the Internet has made it a lot harder to pretend you never said what you did or that your words have been misremembered, misinterpreted, misconstrued etc.

** Very much like the ones Peter Popoff was exposed using by James Randi.

*** Considering the obvious self-destructive tendencies of this guy, and his pathological compulsion to get himself into trouble, it’s hardly surprising that his final act would be to take all his followers with him in an act of mass-suicide.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Comparisons are odious.

…more blunt than the Guardian.

The Guardian left that bit out. It’s rather important.

The Guardian left that bit out too.

It’s impossible to view this editorial decision making as anything but ideological. Newspapers aren’t usually in the business of “being kind,” but in this case they’re soft pedaling the story (perhaps for their own sake as much as for anyone else’s). It’s like the unspoken agreement between the press and JFK in regards to his infidelity and womanizing. But this isn’t about turning a blind eye to a politician’s extramarital affairs, it’s a story about the health and safety of children. It’s not just word choice or even a “slant” or “spin,” it’s withholding information. What price “the right side of history?” What do they get out of all of this? What exactly have they bought at the cost of this reputational damage? More and more, it looks like less and less. Their end of the deal is starting to look a lot like a mess of pottage.

Does the Guardian think it can cross its fingers and hope the story goes away quickly and quietly? You chose a side, and that side failed by almost every conceivable professional, moral, and ethical standard. You helped paint critics of that side as heartless bigots. You drove away reporters who didn’t follow what had become the paper’s party line. Even now, you’re still trying to protect that side, your side, and to conceal from your readers the fact that your reporting on this issue, far from journalistic neutral impartiality, was fatally tainted by bias. And it still is.

Now that the Tavistock is being shut down, is it all just so much water under the bridge? Spilt milk? Those are ruined lives and injured people. How many — Hundreds? Thousands? Oh, right. Follow up and outcome studies were a bit lax. Sorry about that, but there’s no time to spare when you’ve got suicides to prevent and teets to yeet. All the children, and adults, who’ve been needlessly medicalized and mutilated still have to live with the consequences of the failure of responsible adults to exercise their duty of care, for the rest of their lives. That part doesn’t go away. It just doesn’t get reported on. (Not by you, anyway.) There’s a difference.

Pink News is eager to see men taking over women’s sports.

A women’s rugby union team has explained why it is passionate about including trans women as the RFU votes on banning them from the sport.

No the RFU doesn’t vote on banning them from the sport. As usual.

The York RI Ladies team took to Twitter ahead of a Rugby Football Union (RFU) vote on an outright ban on trans women and girls, taking place on Friday (29 July).

No it’s not an outright ban on women and girls. That’s the usual lie. It’s a ban on men in women’s rugby.

The RFU, which governs rugby union in England, will vote on a recommendation for a “policy change for contact rugby to only permit plays in the female category whose sex recorded at birth was female”.

See? That’s not a ban. Men can still play in the male category.

The measure will allow trans men to continue to play the sport “if they provide their written consent and a risk assessment is carried out”. 

In the men’s category, I’m guessing, because it wouldn’t be fair to let testosterone-laced women play in the women’s category.

The governing body says it has considered “peer reviewed research” which claimed there are “physical differences between those people whose sex was assigned as male and those as female at birth, and advantages in strength, stamina and physique brought about by male puberty are significant and retained even after testosterone suppression”. 

Gee, how silly, right? When we all know there are no such advantages whatsoever at all?

Meanwhile it’s just totally up in the air whether or not men have any physical advantages over women when playing rugby.

But they’re York RI LADIES so presumably they’re not also York RI Gentlemen, or they would call themselves York RI Ladies and Gentlemen. So even though they’re grassroots sports they still have a women’s team, which can’t be both a women’s team and “for everyone.” So…what’s their point? Other than a mindless invocation of warm fuzzies about including EVERYONE? If sports include everyone there’s no room left for the sports part – there would just be a big crowd of people milling around.

But the way to get more British women doing physical activity isn’t to include more men in women’s sports. I think the problem is clear enough? Men aren’t women, so adding men to your women’s sport will be a dead loss in terms of upping the numbers of women doing physical activity.

The jargon always distorts the “journalism.” Haroon Siddique at the Guardian doing a legal analysis of the Allison Bailey ruling:

The most significant ruling came in the Forstater case when, in June last year a panel led by the president of the employment appeal tribunal (EAT) held that gender-critical views were a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act.

The decision paved the way not just for Forstater winning her case, which was then sent back to an employment tribunal to be heard in full, but also Bailey’s victory against her chambers, Garden Court.

Lucy Lewis, employment partner at Lewis Silkin, said: “If you want to engage in public debate, if you are clear you are doing that in your personal capacity, then I think that there is now much stronger protection as a result of these two cases in your ability to do that.”

Bosses at Garden Court Chambers (GCC) argued that Bailey’s tweets, one of which spoke of “intimidation, fear & coercion that are driving the @stonewalluk trans self-id agenda” went beyond her beliefs, which the Forstater case had established were protected, but this was rejected by the tribunal.

How could that statement “go beyond” Bailey’s beliefs? Is it because the claim is so obviously factual that it doesn’t count as a belief? Is it only beliefs that have no factual basis that are protected? Because that would be weird.

Lewis said as a result of the Forstater case “the bar is high” as views have to be “objectively offensive” but what the cases – both unusually involving high-profile individuals on social media, each with more than 50,000 Twitter followers – had left unanswered was how to deal with such a conflict of views in the actual workplace, for example directed towards a colleague.

She said the only case to address this to date was when a doctor, David Mackereth, who insisted on misgendering trans people while assessing benefit claimants lost a claim against the government that he was discriminated against on the basis of his religious beliefs, in another decision published earlier this month.

Ok stop right there. What is “misgendering”?

How have so many otherwise reasonable adult people become convinced that there’s such a thing as “misgendering” and that it’s a social crime? How and why did we get so entrenched in such a silly counter-reality ideology that people can be punished for the made-up faux pas of “misgendering”?

That was in line with the EAT’s decision in the Forstater case which it said “does not mean that those with gender-critical beliefs can ‘misgender’ trans persons with impunity”.

But we don’t accept the claim that we are “misgendering.” We don’t agree that there is such a thing. We think we’re absolutely allowed to know who is what sex, for our own safety among other reasons, and that that should not cannot must not be made a crime or a workplace no-no. It’s idiotic to accuse a doctor of “misgendering” people when all that means is that the doctor got their sex right. You don’t want doctors getting people’s sex wrong!

Getting people’s sex right is far more important than coddling the fantasies of a small number of people who have been mentally captured by a fiction.

The NY Times tries hard to minimize the bad news:

The National Health Service in England announced on Thursday that it was shutting down the country’s only youth gender clinic in favor of a more distributed and comprehensive network of medical care for adolescents seeking hormones and other gender treatments.

“Seeking hormones” as they might seek a new phone or beans on toast. Hormones aren’t like vitamins, you don’t seek them as if they were harmless and benign. People don’t seek diabetes medication or cancer drugs, they get prescribed them if they have diabetes or cancer.

The closure followed an external review of the Tavistock clinic in London, which has served thousands of transgender patients since the 1990s. The review, which is ongoing, has raised several concerns, including about long wait times, insufficient mental health support and the surging number of young people seeking gender treatments.

Insufficient mental health support for what? For autism, for depression, for anxiety, for the mental health issues that adolescence can trigger. Instead of mental health support they get dropped onto the gender conveyor belt.

The overhaul of services for transgender young people in England is part of a notable shift in medical practice across some European countries with nationalized health care systems. Some doctors there are concerned about the increase in numbers as well as the dearth of data on long-term safety and outcomes of medical transitions.

In the United States, doctors specializing in gender care for adolescents have mixed feelings about the reforms in Europe.

What have feelings got to do with it? The issue is reality, and the well-being of children and teenagers, and the dangers of stuffing children with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. It’s about evidence, not feelings.

Although many agree that more comprehensive health care for transgender youth is badly needed, as are more studies of the treatments, they worry that the changes will fuel the growing political movement in some states to ban such care entirely.

“How do we draw the line so that we keep care individualized while maintaining safety standards for everyone? That’s what we’re trying to sort out,” said Dr. Marci Bowers, a plastic surgeon and the incoming president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, who is transgender.

Well thank goodness they talked to someone with no vested interests to protect.

There are “critically important unanswered questions” about the use of puberty blockers, wrote Dr. Hilary Cass, head of the external review of the country’s youth gender identity services, in a letter to the head of N.H.S. England last week.

Puberty blockers, which are largely reversible, are intended to buy younger patients time to make weighty decisions about permanent medical changes. 

BZZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong! They are not reversible.

“We are optimistic, cautiously optimistic, about the news,” said Susie Green, chief executive of Mermaids, an advocacy group for transgender and gender-diverse youth. “There is a two-and-a-half-year waiting list to be seen for your first appointment. We’ve seen the distress caused to young people because of that.”

Another source totally free of any vested interest! Brilliant job NYT!

Some American doctors worried that the changing standards in Europe would bolster the notion that gender treatments are dangerous for young people.

“My fear is that this is going to be interpreted as another notch against providing gender-affirming care for kids,” said Dr. Angela Goepferd, medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota hospital. More services are needed, they said, not less. “That’s our challenge here.”

And that’s the last word.

Crap journalism.

Dennis raises an interesting point at about 29 minutes into The Mess We’re In: he says he used to do some family law work and that meant some work with Munchausen’s parents. Funny thing about that: it seems to have dried up. He asked someone else who said Oh yes that’s all gone.

Hmmmm.

Parents who like the limelight just a little too much, he said.

H/t Mike Haubrich

The Telegraph is, to the surprise of no one, more blunt than the Guardian.

The Tavistock transgender clinic is to be shut down by the NHS after a review found it is “not safe” for children.

NHS England will move young people who believe that they are trans into regional centres which will take a more “holistic” approach to treatment and look at other mental health or medical issues they may have.

Emphasis mine. The Guardian of course wouldn’t dream of putting it that way. Yet.

The decision is a response to the interim Cass Review, which warned that medics in the Tavistock had felt “under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach” to gender identity rather than going through the normal process of clinic assessment with young people.

The Guardian left that bit out. It’s rather important.

NHS England have also committed to follow Dr Cass’s recommendation that they carry out “rapid” research on the use of puberty blockers by young people after it was noted there is currently “insufficient evidence” on their impact.

I can almost hear them. “Oh research! Now there’s an idea. Thanks for suggesting it, we’ll get right on that.”

The Cass review was commissioned by NHS England in 2020 amid concerns that there was “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision making” which saw children as young as 10 given puberty blockers.

…

It was amid fears that doctors were too quick to affirm a child’s new identity, without looking at other mental health or medical issues, that Dr Cass recommended moving away from a single provider model.

The Guardian left that bit out too.

The Guardian on the Tavistock:

But in recent years, concerns have repeatedly been raised about the service. Inspectors rated it “inadequate” after complaints raised by whistleblowers, patients and families.

The service was criticised for its care of patients both inside and outside the clinic, and it also had record waiting lists. Doctors reported concerns that some patients were referred on to a gender transitioning pathway too quickly.

The waiting lists might be seen as a good thing, given the quality of the “service.”

It followed recommendations from Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading an independent review of gender identity services for children and young people.

She said there was a need to move away from a model of a sole provider, and instead establish regional services to better meet patients’ needs.

In her interim report, released in March, she wrote: “It has become increasingly clear that a single specialist provider model is not a safe or viable long-term option in view of concerns about lack of peer review and the ability to respond to the increasing demand.”

Who needs peer review when you have the power to turn children into mermaids?

Keira Bell, 25, who brought a high court case against the Tavistock clinic challenging its use of puberty blockers, said she was pleased with the decision to shut it. She was prescribed puberty blockers at the age of 16 but later changed her mind over her decision to transition to male. She argued the clinic should have challenged her more over her decision to transition.

“I’m over the moon,” she told BBC Radio 4’s World at One. “Many children will be saved from going down the path that I went down.

“I went through a lot of distress as a teenager. Really I just needed some mental health support and therapy from everything that I’ve been through. There needs to be mental health support first and foremost.”

And that’s not “conversion therapy.”

Graham reminds us of the video that should destroy Mermaids:

Now that the Tavistock is to shut down, at such speed that we can only guess the Cass report is to deliver a ferocious verdict on their operations, it’s time to look again at Mermaids, the organisation that has had such a malign influence over the centre.

Even the Alder Hey organs scandal didn’t lead to the hospital having to close. This is an extraordinary moment.

I believe that Susie Green’s Ted Talk provides all the evidence needed to shut Mermaids down.

“My husband wasn’t happy with our gender nonconforming son. So we put him on hormones and then castrated him. “ Not quite how she phrases it but that’s the basis of her insane speech. I still find it astonishing that she said all of this out loud. The video is publicly available, has presumably had millions of views and yet Green has never had to face the obvious questions that arise from it.

It turns out that trying to turn children into mermaids isn’t such a good idea. Cutting off their legs and giving them a fake fish tail instead makes their lives more difficult than necessary – who knew?!

This is a must-watch – Dennis Kavanagh explaining what the closure of the Tavistock means.

Updating to quote:

Dennis: Mermaids and Co. telling kids they’ve got the wrong bodies and they should hate their bodies – which I consider a cruelty without equal – I don’t know why they’re allowed to maraud around and do that, but they are it would seem – they succeed by pushing lies. You cannot have gender without lies, it needs lies like a fish needs water.

Is that right?

The English courts consider people who know which sex is which comparable to biblical literalists? Really? Can that possibly be true? Wouldn’t it drive a bulldozer through all English law that relates to women and men?

Originally a comment by Seanna Watson on Then whydja do it?

I find the amount of deference granted to Franky (often even by avowed atheists) to be somewhere between inexplicable and infuriating. Despite all the pomp and ceremony of the apologetic visit (costing Canadian taxpayers ~$35 million), there has been precious little actual action taken by the church – in fact there is continuing resistance by the church to pay any sort of compensation.

Case in point: Parishioners in a Catholic church in Ottawa that is being sold had requested to have the proceeds directed toward reconciliation and residential school survivors. This seemed like a just and reasonable request, especially in view of the fact that the construction of the church was originally funded by donations from grass-roots parishioners, and also is standing on unceded Algonquin Anishinābeg territory. However, the request was refused by the archdiocese, who apparently had their own plans for the money.

The Tavistock is shutting down!

The Times reports:

The NHS is shutting down its gender identity clinic for children after a review found that it failed vulnerable under-18s.

The gender identity service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been ordered to close by next spring.

It will be replaced by regional centres at existing children’s hospitals offering more “holistic care” with “strong links to mental health services”.

Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic has been accused of rushing children into life-altering treatment on puberty blockers.

In other words into making changes to their bodies they will be stuck with for life.

The paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading a review of the service, issued a series of recommendations today for a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity.

She found that the Tavistock clinic was “not a safe or viable long-term option” and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised by children referred to the clinic.

And that problem must surely be complicated and amplified by the way being trans is treated as some dazzling new religion plus political stance plus sainted status as opposed to a mental health issue. Mustn’t it? With all these adults telling teenagers that being trans isn’t a problem, isn’t a mental health issue, isn’t a mistake, but on the contrary is the most magical thrilling profound adorable identity one can wrap oneself in?

In other words isn’t it a problem and hasn’t it been a problem all along that there’s been all this massive pressure to say being trans is not a mental health issue but on the contrary a kind of divinity?

Marjorie Taylor Greene is proud to be a Christian nationalist.

Greene was accused on Monday of being a “Nazi” by Twitter users commenting on her defense of Christian nationalism while speaking on Saturday at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida. The Georgia Republican later shared a clip of her speech alongside the comment, “Nationalist isn’t a bad word” because it “means you care about your country.”

No, sport, that would be “patriot.”

“I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I’m a proud Christian Nationalist,” Greene said in a statement sent to Newsweek, which was also shared on Twitter. “These evil people are even calling me a Nazi because I proudly love my country and my God. The left has shown us exactly who they are. They hate America, they hate God, and they hate us.”

Newsflash: Nazism was a form of Christian nationalism, despite Hitler’s personal dislike of the religion.

“When She Is A Nazi is trending, of course it’s about Marjorie Taylor Greene,” writer Paul Rudnick tweeted. “Because that’s how friends signed her yearbook, what her guidance counselor told her parents, and what her kids tell anyone who asks what their Mommy does for a living.”

She has the hat, too.

Greene previously received criticism for praising Christian nationalism during a stream of her MTG:Live web show last month, when she said that Americans should be “most proud of Christianity” and said that those who argue “Christian nationalism is something to be scared of” were “lying to you.”

“Christian Nationalism was THE religion of the Third Reich!” Dr. Leah Schade, the Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary in Lexington, Kentucky, tweeted at the time. “Christian Nationalism is DEFINITELY something to be afraid of!”

Well first you’ll have to fill MTG in on what the Third Reich was.

Originally a comment by learie on Damages, including aggravated damages.

It was so brave of Ms.Bailey to do this, and I’m so glad she’s won.

The Employment Tribunal usually awards a max of 5000 pounds, and they awarded her 22 000, including aggravated damages.

I have already seen TRAs saying it’s not much money, but if Ms.Bailey had wanted money she wouldn’t have done this. The point was to set a precedent and to expose what’s going on with Stonewall- and that’s been done very effectively.

Companies and legal bodies now know Stonewall gives advice that will see you losing at the Employment Tribunal. That is very bad news for an advisory group.

Found it at last – the yes or no one. Glasgow Pride says no drag comment 42:

News outlets so far seem to be ignoring the Allison Bailey win. Personnel Today is understandably interested:

The barrister Allison Bailey has today won her case for discrimination at tribunal after she claimed her employer victimised her for upholding a gender critical belief. 

She had launched claims against Garden Court Chambers and Stonewall after the charity complained to her employer about her involvement in the LGB Alliance Group, of which she is a co-founder. LGB Alliance opposes the view held by Stonewall that transgender women are women in the eyes of the law.

…

The tribunal, which began in April, found that by upholding the complaint against her, GCC had victimised her for a protected act – the fact she had tweeted about the “cotton ceiling”, the idea that men who identify as trans lesbians face difficulties being accepted as lesbians, and her belief that Stonewall was driving a “dangerous” agenda around gender self-identification.

The cotton ceiling refers to the idea that men who identify as trans lesbians face lesbians saying no to sex. Not just general “difficulties being accepted” but specifically difficulties getting lesbians to say yes to the sex.

The tribunal agreed on the complaint raised by Bailey that as a consequence of being a gender critical feminist, she was discriminated against and victimised by her colleagues.

It did not find that the complaint against Stonewall had satisfied the legal test of “instructing, causing or influencing” the discrimination she experienced.

Bailey added that she was “disappointed” not to have succeeded in this element of the claim.

“It never occurred to me as I was building my career that the organisation which would prove my biggest obstacle would be a charity set up ostensibly to protect people like me. Stonewall declared there were ‘good lesbians’ and ‘bad lesbians’, the latter including any lesbian that dared to hold that sex is real and immutable and the crucial criteria for being same-sex attracted,” she said.

It really is extraordinary, you know – the chief organization for lesbians and gays trying to bully lesbians and gays into having heterosexual sex on the grounds that people are whatever sex they say they are.