Hahahaha yes not unusual at all, very commonplace, you see it all the time.

The Tavistock don’t want no stinkin’ terf parents.

The head of England’s only NHS gender clinic cut ties with some parents of transgender children after claiming they promoted “transphobic” gender-critical views, The Telegraph can reveal.

Is it normal for medical clinics to “cut ties” with the parents of child patients because of the parents’ views? It doesn’t seem normal at all.

Now it has emerged that both the chief executive and chairman of the Trust told a group of parents they were “disappointed” at their gender-critical views – the idea that biological sex is binary and immutable – and cut ties upon learning of this.

What does anyone’s “disappointment” have to do with anything?

Bayswater Support Group, a group of 400 parents many of whom have children being treated by the Tavistock, complained to the Trust last year about “defamatory” comments made about them by a GIDS clinician, who The Telegraph is not naming, on a Facebook group for psychiatrists. They also made another complaint last month following fresh comments alleging the group had “transphobic” links.

That’s some dreadfully clotted writing. Let’s see if I can make it a little clearer. There’s a support group for parents of gender-agitated children who are being treated at the Tavistock. The parents complained to the Tavistock about nasty things a clinician said about them. They complained again recently about accusations of “transphobic” links – meaning internet links, I take it, rather than real world connections, but perhaps I’m wrong. To sum up: a medico at the Tavvy is calling some parents transphobic.

In response, Paul Jenkins, the Trust’s chief executive, threw out the complaint following an investigation because the Trust found that the clinician was commenting in a personal capacity.

So that makes it ok?

Look at it this way: the kids are infected with a socially transmitted idea about their “gender,” and one of the clinicians who is supposed to be helping the kids is calling parents names for not believing the socially transmitted idea is a physical condition. It’s kind of ridiculous, as well as sinister.

However, in an official letter to the parents last May, Mr Jenkins added: “As part of the investigation we were disappointed to see that all the links on your site are to gender-critical sites. We were also very disappointed to see social media activity that demonstrated a clear lack of balance and moderation in how issues were covered.”

What. the. fuck. What right does he have to reproach them for not believing the magical new Gender Dogma? What right does he have to urge “balance”? What if the fad were for kids claiming they are airplanes? Presumably Jenkins wouldn’t expect “balance” between saying that’s nonsense and saying it’s true, would he? Maybe he would.

He said it was “a considerable disappointment, therefore, to see this material which I am afraid will make it difficult for the service to work with you in future”.

You must Believe, or we must part company.

A spokesperson for Bayswater Support Group added: “We are surprised that an NHS clinic refuses to engage with parents on ideological grounds, especially when our concerns are evidence-based and reflect many of the issues raised in the recent Cass Review interim statement.

It’s just nuts. People have lost their damn minds.

Apologies for the intrusion of some tedious Hollywood gossip here but it has to do with the ACLU so I wanna talk about it.

Actor Amber Heard hasn’t fulfilled her pledge to donate $3.5 million to the American Civil Liberties Union, according to testimony in the defamation case filed by Heard’s ex-husband, actor Johnny Depp.

…

The pledge agreement calls for Heard to donate the money over the course of 10 years, starting in August 2016. But she hasn’t made a payment since December 2018, ACLU Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel Terence Dougherty said in recorded video testimony.

Why did she make the pledge? It’s not clear, but it’s hinted.

Dougherty supervises the ACLU finance, legal and other units. In his testimony, he was also asked about the ACLU’s role in the opinion piece that prompted Depp to sue Heard: a 2018 op-ed published by The Washington Post in which Heard called for change in how the U.S. treats abuse survivors and urged support for the Violence Against Women Act.

The ACLU’s role in what that what? Did the ACLU ghost-write an opinion piece for the Washington Post in exchange for a pledge of $3.5 million bucks?

Dougherty described the process that went into crafting the op-ed, which he said was reviewed by lawyers from both the ACLU and Heard’s own legal team. He described email discussions about how closely the piece should mention Depp — with Heard’s attorneys saying that naming him would violate the terms of a non-disclosure agreement in her divorce settlement, and the ACLU’s lawyers saying the piece wouldn’t have as much impact if Depp weren’t mentioned.

Is it just me or does all this sound quite…sleazy?

The Post piece went through numerous rounds of edits by Heard’s team and the ACLU. In his testimony, Dougherty stated, “Based on my review of prior drafts of the op-ed, I knew that she was referring to Johnny Depp and her marriage.”

Dougherty also said Heard wanted the article to come out around the same time as her 2018 action film Aquaman, to give a publicity boost to the cause for which she was advocating.

Or perhaps to give a publicity post to her new movie.

Tacky? Just me?

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on He has never used the toilets.

I made it just about as far into this, before realizing I hadn’t clipped my fingernails for a while. I just find it odd that the BBC, which has produced some fine skeptical programmng in the past, doesn’t have someone investigate this social phenomenon to explore what it means to experience a mismatch between their gender and their sex at birth. This is an extraordinary claim that is to be taken at face value, and they’ve no mind to say “wait, what does this really mean and how can we know that this is what is really happening?” We can’t even get a grip on how someone can experience a gender identity, let alone one that is counter to a person’s sex.

Okay, we know it’s socially influenced to believe that if a boy is “sugar and spice and everything nice” then he must be a girl, or a girl who is “snakes and snails and puppy dog tails” must be a boy. But, why does the BBC just let this all pass as a valid natural phenomenon that must be acknowledged, recognized, and catered to?

It’s either, or, and, something, as Laurie Penny let slip (again.) It’s fixed enough to castrate and plastically alter a body, to snatch the available supplies of HRT from the chemist’s shelves so that post-menopausal women don’t have access, it’s fixed enough that a woman must accept that her partner is now a woman and accommodate all his demands or be shunned, but then again it’s a floating thing for the genderqueer and they can’t explain how the’re in boy mode today but girl mode tomorrow but you better accommodate it!

This kid is being offered the sun and the moon, but it’s not good enough. Only the 2nd LaGrange point will work, or she’ll wait until she gets home!

The extent to which Fox News PersonAlity Sean Hannity was working for Trump while posing as an employee of a purported news organization keeps being revealed to be even more than we thought. Rival but less deranged news organization CNN reports:

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Fox’s Sean Hannity exchanged more than 80 text messages between Election Day 2020 and Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, communications that show Hannity’s evolution from staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump’s election lies to being “fed up” with the “lunatics” hurting Trump’s cause in the days before January 6.

I couldn’t care less about Hannity’s “evolution.” What I care about is that he was trying to help Trump plot a coup while pretending to be a news presenter or discusser or at least mentioner. He was using a powerful tool to aid Trump while pretending he was just cutting the grass.

Throughout the logs, Hannity both gives advice and asks for direction, blurring the lines between his Fox show, his radio show and the Trump White House.

“Blurring the lines” is way too polite. He was basically playing secret agent, at our expense.

On the afternoon of Election Day, Hannity texted Meadows at 1:36 p.m. to ask about turnout in North Carolina. Two hours later, Meadows responded: “Stress every vote matters. Get out and vote. On radio.”

“Yes sir,” Hannity replied. “On it. Any place in particular we need a push.””Pennsylvania. NC AZ,” Meadows wrote, adding: “Nevada.”

“Got it. Everywhere,” Hannity said.

Like that. That’s not journalism or even Fox News Personalityism, that’s just obedient political hackwork using the tools of a massively popular tv company.

Updating to warn: I got the kid’s sex wrong throughout, as the BBC intended us all to do.

The BBC twists itself into pretzels again to placate the Gender Minotaur.

In the nine months that Felix has attended high school in Fife, he has never used the toilets.

Too much information. Why is a global news organization telling us about the toilet practices of a teenage boy in Scotland?

The 13-year-old is trans and his teachers say he is welcome to use male, female or disabled toilets and changing rooms.

Well that’s no fun. How about a paneled room with armchairs and a fridge full of snacks, just for him?

But like some other trans pupils, Felix would prefer to use unisex facilities.

But like some other trans pupils, Felix would prefer even more anxious attention and placating and special arrangements.

He says he feels uncomfortable having to select between options that were not designed with trans people in mind.

Well we can’t have Felix feeling uncomfortable, can we. We can’t have Felix thinking he doesn’t get special arrangements, because what would that say about Felix? That he’s not magic! Felix must be helped to think he’s magic! At all times! Hop to it, please!

“I’ve told my guidance teacher but she said that there’s not much we can really do about it because we can’t change the walls in the school or anything. I feel like I am just going to have to deal with it.”

They can’t change the walls just for Felix??? How outrageous is that?

The BBC then takes us back to the beginning to explain.

People who are transgender experience a mismatch between their gender and the sex on their birth certificate.

Or, that is, people who say they are transgender have been trained to say “I feel a mismatch between my gender and the sex on my birth certificate.” They’ve been taught the jargon. The fact that it doesn’t mean very much is beside the point. The fact that a lot of kids find puberty weird and alienating and then get used to it is beside the point. Everything must be dropped to rush to the assistance of any kid who claims to feel that precious mismatch.

The article goes on and on after that point but I’ve had enough nonsense for one day.

This is amusing/horrifying a lot of people right now.

(I told her that’s a contradiction, but…)

On second thought, I’ll update to include the preceding exchange.

An interesting bit of the Allison Bailey tribunal:

Good grief. I don’t know who JR is but…oy. It wasn’t called “gender critical,” obviously, but that’s because there weren’t men running around saying they were women. But yes it was all about women as opposed to men, which necessarily means it was about women as women, women of the female sex, women not men.

How did we get to this place?

Criminalizing poverty is the hot new thing, which is especially fun at a time when wages at least in the US have been deliberately held down while housing costs skyrocket. A town near Kansas City has just voted to make it illegal to share housing.

On Monday, a Johnson County city unanimously voted to ban a living arrangement aimed at helping tenants decrease the amount of rent they pay.

The Shawnee City Council voted 8-0 to ban co-living, becoming among the first Kansas City area municipalities to prevent the practice, which has gained popularity in recent years as rent and home prices have soared.

The new ordinance defines a co-living group as a group of at least four unrelated adults living together in a dwelling unit. The ordinance stated that if one adult is unrelated to another adult, then the entire group will be classified as unrelated.

In other words a roommate/housemate type situation – a shared apartment or house. No no, you can’t do that, you have to rent your own apartment, which costs more money than you earn. Good luck!

Remind us what the US minimum wage is? $7.25 an hour. When was it last raised? July 2009. What have housing costs done since then? Gone straight up like the Saturn 5.

Kansas City is probably cheaper than Seattle, but that’s not saying much. Renting an apartment on the minimum wage isn’t going to leave much for the other minor details of life such as eating food.

The practice, which includes things like sharing a kitchen, living room and community areas, started to gain popularity as rental and housing prices continued to increase across the United States.

While wages stagnated. Don’t forget that part. At least at the bottom end they did. I don’t know, maybe the tech lords pay their people better, but Amazon warehouse workers don’t make the big bucks.

“Co-living has become increasingly popular because of its cost effectiveness and greater flexibility in cities where rents are high for young professionals,” The Washington Post wrote in 2019.

Hi, guess what, it’s not just the “young professionals,” it’s also and much more the non-professionals of all ages.

The City Council’s vote came despite a presentation from a Johnson County organization where a housing study showed that the average home price in the county rose 37% from 2017-2021, climbing from $324,393 to $443,700. The study also showed that wages did not rise at that same rate.

To put it mildly.

Apparently William Barr now understands that Trump should not be the US president.

William Barr, Donald Trump’s former attorney general, said in an interview on Thursday that it would be a “big mistake” for the Republican party to nominate Trump for president in 2024.

Appearing on the Newsmax television channel, Barr said Trump, who has hinted that he will run again, would not be a sound choice.

…

In Barr’s book, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, he wrote that Trump had “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed”.

No shit, Sherlock. He showed that long before he got elected, and throughout his time as president, including before you accepted the job as Attorney General. He’s a worthless, evil, destructive man and everybody already knew that.

Molly McElwee at the Telegraph mourns the fact that a guy who wants to swim with the women isn’t always welcomed.

In women’s sport the phrase “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it” is widely acknowledged, but the reverse has rung true for trans women, according to swimmer Eden Elgeti. The more visible trans women in elite sport have become, the less inclusive the space at grass roots has felt.

Elgeti took up recreational swimming at a local lido when she began her transition in 2017. Within a few years she started wild swimming at local rivers and ponds, and founded an inclusive swimming club, while Swim England appointed her as an ambassador. The sport became her outlet for physical and mental well-being, and a huge part of her social life.

It’s interesting how evasively stated it is already. We’re told Elgeti is a swimmer but not what sex Elgeti is. How are we to understand “when she began her transition”? Transition from what to what? It seems, in light of what we know about how this subject is framed, that Elgeti is a man who now calls himself a woman, but how odd that the reporter doesn’t make that crystal clear from the beginning. How odd that the reporter seems to be carefully avoiding making it clear.

But all that has changed, with the response to high-profile stories of trans women competing in elite sport, such as cyclist Emily Bridges and swimmer Lia Thomas. While the science plays catch up and sports governing bodies grapple with landing on a fair and equitable solution, the fallout has hit grass-roots and community sport. For Elgeti, the increasingly charged conversation has threatened to rip apart her sporting oasis.

What does that mean? How does a conversation rip apart an oasis? The reporter never says – it’s all conditional tense and metaphorical verbs.

“Probably for the last six months, it’s been really difficult to push myself to go and swim with my friends or even with my partner because I don’t feel comfortable,” Elgeti, 27, says. “I’ve been confronted, people who say ‘you shouldn’t be getting changed in here’ or ‘you shouldn’t be at this session’…”

Now it’s Elgeti who’s evasive. He doesn’t mean “people,” does he, he means specifically women, women who don’t want him in their changing room. It’s interesting how mournful he is about not feeling comfortable himself while not pausing to think about the comfort of the women he’s forcing himself on. It’s not new or unusual of course, but still interesting. The manipulation and careful omission of it all is just fascinating, every time. He’s uncomfortable, boo hoo, but what about people who aren’t Elgeti? Is his the only consciousness in the universe? What if the women never wanted him there but didn’t feel able to say so until recently? Why is his discomfort important while theirs isn’t even worth mentioning?

Originally a comment by Michael Haubrich on From kulaks to Mariupol.

I watched a program in the nineties about the economic struggles in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that Yeltsin was the mayor of Moscow at the time, and the government was in flux. Many people welcomed the freedoms that they had under Glasnost that they had not had under the Soviets. Recall that art exhibits in the public square, up until very recently, could be bulldozed by the Ministry for Culture if they included any Modern Art. I was surprised at how many of the older Russians longed for the days of Stalin. They said they knew exactly where they stood, and that the rules were clear. Under Yeltsin and Gorbachev, they had suffered too much anomie in the post-Soviet era. The lingering effects of a lifetime of propaganda in place of news had served to imprint on them, perhaps until the end of their lives, that the Soviet government really was serving everyone’s best interest. There really are people who feel safer when freedom from thought is valued over freedom of thought.

As a budding leftist, I was never under the illusion that the Soviet Union was a happy place for anyone with independent thought. I had been reading Solzhenitzyn before I read Lord of the Rings, believe it or not. If you don’t take the time to read The Gulag Archipelago, at least pick up One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I read what I could by Russians, as well as Americans who visited the Soviet Union. The reason that I don’t think we should fall into the trap of thinking of “left v right” in politics is that what we often think of being as leftist is actually something different. Stalinism was a way for the apparatchik to gain wealth by the use of slave labor, and in the Worker’s Paradise, unions were under the control of the government. It always surprised me to find how much of the American left was participating in the propaganda that the Soviet Union was building a happy place; ignoring the suppression of science, ignoring the rampant rise in alcoholism, the five year plans that continued to fail, the continuation of the persecution of the Jews, industrializing the Siberian wilderness, polluting the Arctic, and on and on.

It irritates me no end when Bernie and AOC talk about socialism, because they really don’t mean that the Central government should control the means of production. They mean that they want to institute programs that provide government support to the people who are left behind by capitalism. Roosevelt and Johnson instituted their programs not to move us along the road to communism, but at least in Roosevelt’s case prevent the working class from rising up and starting a communist revolution. Roosevelt was protecting capitalism. But when the American left talk about socialism, they invoke the images of the Soviet Union bulldozing art exhibits and make it easy for the conservatives to ridicule their ideas, which may be sensible other than by their labels.

I think I need to go back and read Das Kapital because I was entirely too young when I did. But if memory serves, Marx was not saying that Communism could be forced by a revolution, he was saying that it is a stage of evolution in societies. Leninism and Stalinism always held out Communism as an ideal and that socialism was a means to get there, and it served to sway their masses in their favor like a carrot on a stick that the horse can never reach.

And don’t get me started on the Chinese. They call themselves Communist, but they are very much capitalist. The one thing they have retained is their authoritarianism.

I think that what we lack in modern politics is a real understanding of basic concepts, and so we have devolved in to a Red v Blue mindset, and a belief that if my side is right on one issue, then we are right on every issue. Which also leads to if they are wrong on this one issue that is important to me, then they are suddenly losers who are wrong on everything. We’ve tossed all our fine-tipped brushes and replaced them with broad ones. If I think that one of the purposes of government should be to mediate power so that the oligarchy doesn’t take over everything, I don’t mean to imply that I think that all corporations are evil money-grubbing bastards who don’t care if they kill all the bambis in the forest. I do think we need to make widgets the best we can while not doing too much damage to the water we rely on, etc. And I think that the goverment should step in and reduce the power of monopolists.

So, enough rambling. My original point is that the Soviet Union was effective at Propaganda and American leftists were fooled, but not me, and we need to be able to recognize authoritarianism whether it is from the left side or the right side.

It just gets better and better.

Note that “another minority woman.” Joss Prior is neither a woman nor a minority. He’s a vicious toad of a white guy. “Trans”activism should just change its name to vicious toad activism.

This guy was actually an MP for two years.

A Tory MP at that, but he changes the wording just as obstinately as the “activists” do.

So maddening. The issue is excluding men from women’s sports. It is not excluding men from society. If a former MP doesn’t know the difference, or pretends not to know the difference to make a rhetorical point…it’s yet another bit of evidence that this “activism” relies on lies and distortions to get its way.

Hoo boy – as if it weren’t terrifying enough already. Climate change–>more pandemics:

There will be at least 15,000 instances of viruses leaping between species over the next 50 years, with the climate crisis helping fuel a “potentially devastating” spread of disease that will imperil animals and people and risk further pandemics, researchers have warned.

As the planet heats up, many animal species will be forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions. They will bring their parasites and pathogens with them, causing them to spread between species that haven’t interacted before. This will heighten the risk of what is called “zoonotic spillover”, where viruses transfer from animals to people, potentially triggering another pandemic of the magnitude of Covid-19.

And this will be in a world that’s already struggling with rising sea levels, failing crops, wildfires, mass migrations, lethal heatwaves, disappearing marine life…

“As the world changes, the face of disease will change too,” said Gregory Albery, an expert in disease ecology at Georgetown University and co-author of the paper, published in Nature. “This work provides more incontrovertible evidence that the coming decades will not only be hotter, but sicker.” …

Albery said that climate change is “shaking ecosystems to their core” and causing interactions between species that are already likely to be spreading viruses. He said that even drastic action to address global heating now won’t be enough to halt the risk of spillover events.

“This is happening, it’s not preventable even in the best case climate change scenarios and we need to put measures in place to build health infrastructure to protect animal and human populations,” he said.

We need to do so many things that we’re not doing.

H/t Mike Haubrich

Temperatures are rising in India.

Millions of Indians are experiencing a brutal heatwave that is throwing lives and livelihoods out of gear – and there is no relief in sight.

…

While heatwaves are common in India, especially in May and June, summer began early this year with high temperatures from March itself – average maximum temperatures in the month were the highest in 122 years. Heatwaves also began setting in during the month.

…

The effects are visible. Farmers say the unexpected temperature spikes have affected their wheat harvest, a development that could potentially have global consequences given supply disruptions due to the Ukraine war.

We’re told to remember that weather is different from climate, and not to attribute all extreme weather to climate change, but that said, the matter of wheat harvests and global consequences is one of the reasons climate change is so lethal. You may be comfortable in an air-conditioned office or a swimming pool, but when the crops start to fail…

The heat has also triggered an increase in power demand, leading to outages in many states and fears of a coal shortage.

Loop, innit. Heat—>more power demand—>more heat—>more power demand—>ad infinitum.

Russia has things back to front here.

Sending heavy weapons and other arms to Ukraine is dangerous for European security, the Kremlin has warned Western nations.

Sure, and if I set fire to a neighbor’s house it’s dangerous for the neighbor to summon the fire trucks.

What’s really dangerous for European security is this whole thing of Putin trying to smash Ukraine back into being a branch of Mother Russia. You broke it you pay for it.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responding to a speech by UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss urging Kyiv’s allies to “ramp up” military production to help Ukraine.

Western allies have maintained their support does not amount to a military confrontation between Moscow and Nato.

But Peskov told reporters: “The tendency to pump weapons, including heavy weapons into Ukraine, these are the actions that threaten the security of the continent, provoke instability.”

Like the old joke about a sign (probably apocryphal but I don’t know) at a French zoo that said this animal is wicked, if attacked it defends itself*. It’s not the “tendency” to help Ukraine defend itself that provokes instability, it’s the unprovoked attack on Ukraine that provokes instability. You the provoker, Vlad, not that other guy.

*Cet animal est très méchant,
Quand on l’attaque il se défend.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on From kulaks to Mariupol.

Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation. […] Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies—rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised.

According to Jung Chang the same was true in China during the so called Great Leap Forward. There were villages where there was no bark left on the trees because the starving peasants had nothing else to eat after everything else had been taken from them and sold abroad in order to finance the nuclear weapons program. This very deliberate and cynical policy was justified by re-labeling the victims as “land owners” (and hence part of the oppressor class). Meanwhile fat Chairman Mao was portrayed as the true voice of the workers, the peasants, the poor, the oppressed while living like an emperor. Even after most leftists in the west had realized that Stalin was a monster, many continued to see Mao as this selfless idealist and explain away things like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution as idealistic projects gone wrong (despite the Chairman’s good intentions) or entirely the fault of self-serving underlings. Indeed I can’t remember ever meeting a self-professed Stalinist, but I have personally known several Maoists in my lifetime.

When I lived in Germany (from about 1995 until 1999-ish), the weekly papers published detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht in WWII on that particular day that the Sunday paper was published. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Not only were the Germans reminding themselves, everyone else was, too: I would go to Italy, and see the same thing (“This week in Nazi Atrocities”) printed in Italian newspapers. Germany and Germans have been paying penance for their sins for decades, and very publicly at that.

That’s very much my experience as well. As someone who studied German, speaks the language (or at least used to…), and even lived in Leipzig for a short while, I have been to lots of German museums that deal with the Nazi era, the Second World War, the Holocaust etc., and in my experience the main focus is always on how monstrously evil the German regime was and the unspeakable atrocities of the Nazis. The one jarring note when I visited Japan back in 2016 was going to the Edo Tokyo Museum (a fantastic museum in every other way – including the building itself!) and noticing the glaring contrast. As I remember, all the horrible war crimes of the Japanese regime were compressed into a couple of vague references to “regrettable instances” (or something along those lines) while the focus otherwise was almost entirely on the (admittedly real and very traumatic!) suffering of the Japanese people. Shortly before I went Emperor Akihito had caused a bit of a stir by expressing (from memory) “deep remorse” for the atrocities of the Japanese army while then prime minister Abe was criticized for doing the politician thing, talking about “looking forward” and not dwelling on the past etc.

We are much worried about Allison Bailey. (Who’s we? Her admirers, friends, colleagues, comrades, fans.) She’s in the hospital and there is no news.

The majority view is yes, it was a deliberate troll by Stonewall.

Also this:

H/t Holms