Sigh. Gosh, yes, why shouldn’t men be allowed to dress up as parody prostitutes at work?

A minister has told civil servants that they are not allowed to come into work wearing ‘fetish clothing’, after a war erupted over dress code regulations.

Employees in the Department for Work and Pensions are said to have objected to the ‘highly inappropriate’ workwear of a fellow official which prompted a Tory peer to ask the Government about its ‘policy on civil servants wearing fetish clothing in the workplace’.

It is understood that Baroness Jenkin of Kennington tabled the unusual question to reflect her general concerns about the dress code and also in response to the specific issues raised by civil servants about one Whitehall diversity ambassador. 

Ah yes the diversity ambassador…meaning, not working class, not female, not from Jamaica, but a man who dresses up as a parody of women who sell themselves for sex. How diverse.

Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a trans woman who works for the DWP, has previously come under fire for saying that trans children’s demands for puberty blockers should take precedence over their ‘parents’ will’. 

The name is a jokey insult too.

The civil servant, who co-chairs the Civil Service LGBT+ network, has also been criticised for linking women’s rights groups to the far-Right and suggesting they are calling for trans genocide 

And the Mail on Sunday last month revealed Tweedale, 58, is facing controversy in the workplace as fellow staff members say their colleague regularly wears fishnet tights, low-cut black corsets, high heels and a gothic choker with a pentagram to work…

As women don’t.

Last month Tweedale was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Bradford in recognition of a career which has ‘helped people through trade unionism’ and also ‘her diversity and equality work’.

Of course he was.

Speaking of incoherent incontinent babbling…

The words below were taken verbatim  from a campaign speech former President Donald Trump delivered in Potterville, Michigan, Thursday when he was attempting, at least initially, to criticize Kamala Harris’ record in San Francisco, presumably referring to her tenure as district attorney there:

She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?

Wut?

Trump’s deteriorating ability to clearly communicate is a consequential feature of his 2024 candidacy. That deterioration may not have been as salient when Trump, 78, had 81-year-old President Joe Biden as an opponent. But it’s all the more clear as he now faces off against 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Well, yes. This was always going to be the case. Once Harris replaced Biden, it was impossible to ignore the coherence gap between the two candidates.

The incoherence of the Potterville speech is just one of countless examples. During a recent event in Wisconsin, Trump’s response to a question from the audience about reducing inflation entailed darting from his belief that Americans don’t eat bacon anymore to his assertion that wind energy doesn’t work. During remarks this spring, he stumbled from an attack on Biden’s age into a nonsensical reverie about the actor Cary Grant, which then spun off into an anecdote about a conversation he had with Michael Jackson. Compared even to his first term in office, Trump’s inability to focus on one train of thought appears to be growing significantly worse.

…

Trump’s qualities as an entertainer, as an agent of disinformation and as a proud policy illiterate have made it easier for him to mask his apparent decline and to identify its precise significance. 

Yet I’m still obstinate enough to wonder why people want an entertainer and proud policy illiterate as president.

Jaw-dropping – for once not in a bad way.

This bird came back from extinction – now scientists in an aircraft are teaching it to migrate

I could stare at that photo all day.

The northern bald ibis was extinct in central Europe for 300 years. Now, it has returned – and scientist “foster parents” aboard a tiny plane are teaching the birds to fly their long-forgotten migration routes.

Thirty-six of these endangered birds are now following an ultralight aircraft 1,740 miles (2,800km ) from Austria to Spain, on a trip that could take up to 50 days to complete.

During the flight, human foster parents sit on the back of the microlight, waving and shouting encouragement to the birds as they fly. Biologist Johannes Fritz – who came up with the idea – pilots the small aircraft, which has a small fan-like motor on the back and yellow parachute keeping it aloft.

It is the first attempt to reintroduce a migratory species using this technique, said Fritz. “It’s an almost surreal experience, to be up there in the sky with these birds, experiencing them in the air, perfectly shaped for flying. It’s a touching and extraordinary experience.”

Fritz was inspired by the 1996 film Fly Away Home in which the main character flies an ultralight plane to show orphaned geese their migratory path. The film was based on the work of “Father Goose” Bill Lishman, a naturalist who taught Canada geese in the same way in 1988.

It would be better if humans hadn’t made this necessary, but read the Guardian piece and gape at the photos anyway.

Tucker Carlson and the Hitler Fanboy:

Tucker Carlson is just asking questions. Questions like: what if Andrew Tate’s camgirl harem is actually the height of masculinity? And: isn’t the Russian grocery equivalent of Aldi absolutely incredible, just as the Moscow train station is perhaps the most beautiful thing mankind has created? And this week: why don’t we fully appreciate the total bind Adolf Hitler was in when he had just so many prisoners of war thanks to German success on the battlefield?

…

Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper, an amateur revisionist historian and podcaster, attempted to rewrite the history of World War Two with Winston Churchill cast as a malevolent villain and Adolf Hitler as a misunderstood man of peace:

“You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re… so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says, “Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”

Got it? It wasn’t a matter of war crimes, and it wasn’t genocide, it was just a big accident. They forgot to get enough groceries to feed all those people so they thought it would be kinder just to kill them all. With ZyklonB.

If you’re going to put people in very tall buildings, you need to make sure those buildings are safe.

A damning report on a deadly London high-rise fire concluded Wednesday that decades of failures by government, regulators and industry turned Grenfell Tower into a “death trap” where 72 people lost their lives.

The public inquiry into the 2017 blaze found no “single cause” of the tragedy, but said a combination of dishonest companies, weak or incompetent regulators and complacent government led the building to be covered in combustible cladding that turned a small apartment fire into the deadliest blaze on British soil since World War II.

…

The search for answers focused on a refurbishment completed in 2016 that covered the 1970s building in aluminum and polyethylene cladding — a layer of foam insulation topped by two sheets of aluminum sandwiched around a layer of polyethylene, a combustible plastic polymer that melts and drips on exposure to heat.

The report was highly critical of companies that made the cladding. It said they engaged in “systematic dishonesty,” manipulating safety tests and misrepresenting the results to claim the material was safe.

It said insulation manufacturer Celotex was unscrupulous, and another insulation firm, Kingspan, “cynically exploited the industry’s lack of detailed knowledge.” Cladding panel maker Arconic “concealed from the market the true extent of the danger,” the report said.

…

The inquiry said the combustible cladding was used because it was cheap and because of “incompetence of the organizations and individuals involved in the refurbishment” -– including architects, engineers and contractors — who all thought safety was someone else’s responsibility.

It concluded the failures multiplied because bodies in charge of enforcing building standards were weak, the local authority was uninterested and the “complacent” U.K. government — led in the seven years before the fire by the Conservative Party — ignored safety warnings because of a commitment to deregulation.

Ah yes good old deregulation – let the market decide! So the market decides that profit on combustible cladding now is the way to go.

The Grenfell tragedy prompted soul-searching about inequality in Britain. Grenfell was a public housing building set in one of London’s richest neighborhoods, near the pricey boutiques and elegant houses of Notting Hill.

Well, between one of London’s richest neighborhoods and some more downmarket ones. Notting Hill itself used to be quite scruffy, and Ladbroke Grove is far from elegant. Notting Hill isn’t Kensington or Chelsea, let alone Belgravia or Mayfair.

The victims, largely people of color, came from 23 countries and included taxi drivers and architects, a poet, an acclaimed young artist, retirees and 18 children.

The acclaimed young artist had just won a prize for her work.

The ruined tower, which stood for months after the fire like a black tombstone on the west London skyline, still stands, covered in white sheeting. A green heart and the words “Grenfell forever in our hearts” are emblazoned at the top.

CNN on Musk’s lying and bullying:

On Monday, Musk posted an AI-generated image on his social media platform that depicted Harris as a communist, wearing a red uniform complete with hammer and sickle emblazoned hat.

Musk, who has endorsed former President Donald Trump for president and poured millions into a super PAC supporting the Republican, captioned the image with the false assertion, “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?”

The image, which appeared to violate X’s policy on manipulated content, resembled an AI-generated image posted by Trump last month during the Democratic National Convention, envisioning Harris addressing a crowd under communist symbols.

Musk’s post came a day after he shared another post with a screenshot suggesting that only “high status males” should be able to participate in government because women (and men with “low testosterone”) are not capable of critical thought. Musk posted it to his 196 million followers with the comment, “interesting observation.”

The sexist screed appears to have originated on 4Chan, the notorious hate-filled website that has been linked to mass-shootings.

By choosing to amplify disinformation and misogynist views, Musk, a South African billionaire who is both the owner of X and the most-followed account on the platform, is promoting radical content to the masses that might otherwise languish in the darkest corners of the internet.

Not so much “radical” as “evil.”

Multiple tiers. Joan Smith writes:

A childminder is facing a prison sentence for threatening asylum seekers in a social media post. Lucy Connolly, 41, who pleaded guilty to stirring up racial hatred, has been remanded in custody and told to expect a “substantial custodial sentence” when she next appears in court.

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care […] if that makes me racist, so be it,” she wrote.

A horrible thing to say, no question, but she deleted it and apologized – Joan says “quickly” but we don’t know if that means in seconds or minutes or hours.

On the other hand, violent assault is not ambiguous.

[A] man called Muhammad Hassan, who had previously abused three Asian women because he didn’t like how they were dressed, appeared in court last week. Hassan was charged with assaulting the women when they stopped for petrol at a service station in Bradford. He berated them as “prostitutes”, seizing the driver’s head and slamming it into the dashboard. Then he grabbed the second woman and punched her in the head, before hitting the third woman as well.

He couldn’t delete that, now could he. The women he punched could not delete it either. But he hasn’t been threatened with any substantial custodial sentence.

The attacks were described by the judge as “an extremely abusive, controlling and violent incident”. But Hassan didn’t end up in prison. He was sentenced to six months, suspended for two years…[H]e is merely required to do 180 hours of unpaid work and wear an electronic tag for four months, while his victims live in fear of running into him again.

Heads men win, tails women lose. Again.

Without brazen lies, where would this “movement” be?

“Tearful transgender athlete Valentina Petrillo unrepentant amid Paralympics scandal”

What would “she” have to be repentant for, asks “Zinnia.” Disingenuous question. For being a man cheating a woman by competing in a women’s race, as he knows perfectly well.

Nobody is expecting him to apologize for existing. Lying about what sex you are is not a synonym for “existing.” Lying about what sex you are is lying about what sex you are.

Nobody is expecting him to apologize for participating in society, either. Of course he can participate in society. What he can’t reasonably or fairly do is participate in society as a woman.

And in conclusion, calling him unapologetic is just an observation. We don’t want him to apologize, we want him to stop.

Same goes for Zinners of course. We want him to stop bullying women and telling stupid lies about what we’re saying.

Here we go again. We’re not allowed to have opinions because opinions interfere with communninny coheesion. The only way to have communninny coheesion is for everyone to agree on everything all the time.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has said the Government is “actively considering” its approach to islamophobia in devising a full definition following far-right riots.

Ms Rayner, also the Communities Secretary, criticised the previous government for “stoking division” as she pledged to address issues of community cohesion.

I hate to tell her but Rayner is stoking division by trying to tell people what they’re allowed to say and think and dislike.

In 2019, the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on British Muslims devised a definition of islamophobia as “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

Hooboy, that’s seriously stupid. One, Muslim is not a race; two, religions have to be open to criticism and dispute and flat rejection, because they have massive ambitions to tell us what we’re allowed to do and say and think. It’s not racism to reject Islam.

Reform UK MP Lee Anderson (Ashfield) asked what the Government’s definition of islamophobia is.

Ms Rayner replied: “A new definition must be given careful consideration so that it comprehensively reflects multiple perspectives and considers potential implications for different communities. And we’re actively considering our approach to Islamophobia, including definitions, and we’ll provide further updates on this in due course.”

Erm, shouldn’t they have done that before rather than after calling for new rules against “Islamophobia”? If they don’t know what it is, what are they even talking about?

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Backing the bullies.

@C… – tell me you’re a RWNJ without telling me you’re a RWNJ.

Is it red or blue states in the USA banning books? Interfering with elections? Purging voter rolls on spurious grounds?

Which nation has greater freedom of speech – UK or Turkey?

Which nation treats its citizens more equally – France or Iran?

Which nation is more likely to invade a neighbor – Russia or Germany?

Almost every advance in human rights has come about by the hard work and unrelenting focus on our shared humanity by those on the Left. The Right has fought us every step of the way, gassed us, bashed us, murdered us, simply for believing we can create a better world. And we did.

And I for one am not prepared to stand by while you cheer on Musk, Trump, et al who will grab everything for themselves and leave you with nothing but rags and a sense of shame that you could be so stupid as to fall for their grift. And then, when you are cold, tired, and hungry, it won’t be a Billionaire who bathes your wounds and brings you sustenance; it will be one of us, on the Left, that you so despise.

Trump and Musk v the working class:

Since the tech billionaire endorsed Trump on July 13, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly attacked Musk for his anti-worker stances. The campaign has called Musk and Trump “self-obsessed rich guys” and reposted audio from an event on Musk’s social media app, X, in which the two laugh together about firing striking workers. 

Then there was the live one-on-one discussion on X, which Trump’s campaign billed as “the interview of the century.” Partway through the two-hour event, Trump brought up how much he admires Musk’s handling of labor unions. 

“I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’” Trump said while laughing. 

“Yeah,” Musk broke in, also laughing. 

“They go on strike,” Trump continued. “I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone, so every one of you is gone.’ And you are the greatest.” 

Hur hur hur. There is a law against that though.

The episode snowballed. The United Auto Workers union filed unfair labor practice charges against Musk and Trump, alleging they interfered with workers who may want to exercise their labor rights. The UAW’s Fain pressed the issue in media interviews. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su said at an event at the Democratic National Convention: “You can’t be pro-Elon Musk and pro-worker.” 

Sean O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, slammed Trump and Musk’s comments as “economic terrorism.” 

American workers’ right to strike is guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. 

And you know what happened after that? The whole damn auto industry unionized (and the Reuther brothers invented the sitdown strike). It was unionized labor that made all those thousands of planes and tanks and ships that turned the tide against the Nazis.

Labor union leaders have been harshly critical of Trump’s time in office, citing his appointment of conservatives to the NLRB and the federal courts. At the same time, Trump has sought to maintain some ties to organized labor, inviting some union leaders to the White House while he was president and continuing to court the Teamsters. 

Yeah well inviting some union heads to the White House is hardly the same thing as being a friend to union labor. Not even close.

Gee yes why would I not think Elon Musk is an admirable guy despite our different political orientations?

The “outfit” is of course fake.

Cheered me up for the moment.

Why are men?

A man has gone on trial in France for repeatedly drugging and raping his wife as well as arranging for dozens of other men to rape her. The defendant, named as 71-year-old Dominique P, is accused of recruiting strangers online to come to his home and sexually assault the victim for over a decade.

…

Police identified at least 92 rapes committed by 72 men. Fifty were identified and charged and are standing trial alongside the husband.

The victim, now 72, only learnt of the abuse in 2020 after being informed by police. The trial will be “a horrible ordeal” for her, said her lawyer Antoine Camus, as it will be the first time she sees video evidence of the abuse. “For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP news agency.

Uh yes, that will be a horrible ordeal.

Dominique P was investigated by police after an incident in September 2020, when a security guard caught him secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.

He seems like a really good guy.

Interesting in what sense, creepy guy?

Onlee hi stattus men kno how to think good.

Such an interesting observation.

Musk is more evil and alarming than I had realized.

Elon Musk is rapidly transforming his enormous wealth – he’s the richest person in the world – into a huge source of unaccountable political power that’s now backing Trump and other authoritarians around the world.

Musk owns X, formerly known as Twitter. He publicly endorsed Donald Trump last month. Before that, Musk helped form a pro-Trump super political action committee. Meanwhile, the former US president has revived his presence on the X platform.

Musk just hired a Republican operative with expertise in field organizing to help with get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of Trump.

…

At least eight times in the past 10 months, Musk has prophesied a future civil war related to immigration. When anti-immigration street riots occurred across Britain, he wrote: “civil war is inevitable.”

The European Union commissioner Thierry Breton sent Musk an open letter reminding him of EU laws against amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation” and warning that the EU “will be extremely vigilant” about protecting “EU citizens from serious harm”.

Musk’s response was a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!”

Elon Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist” but has accepted over 80% of censorship requests from authoritarian governments. Two days before the Turkish elections, he blocked accounts critical of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

And his friendly relations with authoritarians often seem to coincide with beneficial treatment of his businesses; shortly after Musk suggested handing Taiwan over to the Chinese government, Tesla got a tax break from the Chinese government.

None of this seems particularly benign.

Oliver Brown is icily clear:

“This was a dream,” says Valentina Petrillo, who today became a Paralympic sprinter at the age of 51, “that I had since I was a little girl.” Except this is an athlete who was never a little girl in the first place. The Italian is a father-of-two who was still competing at 45 as a male, who won national titles in men’s track and field, and whose self-portrayal in 2021 was of a “tough guy who would speak dismissively of women, who would have given you the idea he was sexist”. And yet on Monday morning at the Stade de France, Petrillo, courtesy of institutional cowardice at every level, lined up in the visually-impaired classification of the 400 metres as a woman.

There is no biological ambiguity about Petrillo. Here is a figure who, in a documentary aired this summer, announced to the interviewer: “You can see I’m a man.” Here is somebody who accepts that women are entitled to feel “astonishment, confusion and doubt” about this indefensible state of affairs, acknowledging: “These doubts and questions are legitimate.”

But he does it anyway, because he wants to and the god damn women-hating fools let him do it.

How is it that all the putative “progressives” who cheer this on are not perturbed by the glaringly obvious fact that the people harmed by it are women and women only? This is an entirely one-way injustice, that allows men to cheat women, because only men can cheat in this particular way. Why does the ever-expanding list of women cheated out of wins and prizes and places on the podium and scholarships and careers and all the rest of it not bother them? They can’t be stupid enough to miss the structural injustice, the fact that men can do this to women while women cannot do it to men, so how do they manage to be so happy with it?

If you know the answer, let us all know.

What magnifies women’s anger is the fact that the Petrillo affair at the Paralympics was easily avoidable. Last March, World Athletics acted on multiple scientific studies by restricting international women’s competition exclusively to those born female. But the policy offered by World Para Athletics (WPA) is nothing like so stringent. In reply to questions from Telegraph Sport, a spokesman for the governing body gave no reason for the divergence, claiming that they could not comment on the rules of others.

Meaning, of course, that they don’t want to. Shut up and take it, bitches.

Another one from the “let’s build a house in an area prone to drought/tornadoes/earthquakes/wildfire and have a blissful life forever after” file.

Perched atop a majestic cliff, Rancho Palos Verdes is a stunning city by the sea. Those who live here do so for the grand views of the ocean, the lush valleys, the breeze that sweeps away the heat of the sun.

But the scene on this peninsula 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles comes with a caveat. Underneath the multimillion-dollar homes is a large complex of landslides. Every day, the ground moves.

That’s some “caveat.” The earth under your house is constantly sliding – no big deal.

For a long time, that movement was so glacial — about an inch a year — it was accepted simply as a quirk of the region. Now, for some residents, it has become catastrophic. Across a span of one square mile, the pace has quickened to nearly four feet a month.

Homes have been yanked apart at the seams, and some have collapsed altogether, their sunken roofs and splintered walls swallowed halfway into the earth. The gas was shut off more than a month ago to a swath of residents. They have since been hunkering down, relying on electric hot plates or propane, scrambling for answers before their life savings cave in around them, too.

It’s ok, because what landslides like to see is grit and determination, so if the residents just hunker down no matter what, the landslides will decide to stop.

While outsiders question why locals stay, residents say it would be inconceivable to just walk away from their nest eggs, given that home insurance policies generally exclude land movement.

For them, living on a landslide is no different than living in a region prone to tornadoes or hurricanes or flooding: It is not a problem until it is, and then you find ways to carry on.

Unless, of course, you don’t. Unless the roof falls on your head, or your house slides into the Pacific taking you with it, or you spend your last penny trying to shore up your house and no one will bankroll you any longer.

The BBC somehow manages to talk about it while not talking about it.

Mariuccia Quilleri, a lawyer and athlete who has represented a number of fellow athletes who opposed Petrillo’s participation in women’s races, said inclusion had been chosen over fairness and “there is not much more we can do”.

Tokyo 2020 silver medallist Ukraine Oksana Boturchuk, who is racing in the semi-final heats, said: “I find this not fair, in my opinion. I am not against transgenders in general but in this situation I do not understand and don’t support it.”

Inclusion of what? Fairness to whom? What are “transgenders in general”?

It’s not an accident, this constant lack of specificity. They do it on purpose because they do not want to spell out that these are male “transgender” people cheating female people in sports.

Venezuela’s Paralympic Committee (VPC) has called it a “a terrible inequality that puts female athletes (born female) at a great disadvantage”.

General secretary Johan Marin told BBC Sport: “We are completely against discrimination, inequality and/or exclusion of any person or group in any social sphere. Therefore, respect for individual rights, inclusion and equality must always prevail.”

The BBC has so muddied the waters that I thought at first he was another defender of men’s right to invade women’s sports, but he’s saying the opposite.

So let’s take a look at this “Valentina” Petrillo issue.

The Guardian of course does the usual –

Transgender sprinter Valentina Petrillo reaches 400m semi-finals on Paralympic debut

Tactfully concealing the relevant fact: he’s a man in the women’s semi-finals.

• Italian sprinter qualifies for T12 400m semi-finals
• ‘For me, it’s the realisation of history’

For women, it’s the realisation of being cheated.

The Italian transgender sprinter Valentina Petrillo said that her debut at the Paralympic Games was “the realisation of history” after she qualified for the semi-finals of the T12 400m on Monday.

Petrillo, 51, finished second in her heat at the Stade de France, but qualified for the semi-finals as one of the four fastest runners-up. She said that her success should be seen as a moment to raise awareness of discrimination against transgender people.

The women he cheated probably think his “success” should be seen as cheating women, because that’s what it is. He’s a man. He shouldn’t compete against women. It’s very simple.

The Guardian does finally admit there’s an issue.

The Italian has found herself at the centre of a debate over inclusion within parasport after World Para Athletics set rules that allowed for transgender athletes to compete in women’s competition if they are “recognised as female in law”.

This is an approach contrary to that set by World Athletics, which determines criteria for entry into the Olympics. Lord Coe, the president of World Athletics, had said the policy was arrived at in order to “maintain fairness for female athletes above all other consideration”.

Which seems only right since it’s the female category we’re talking about.